Janine Jackson interviewed Defending Rights & Dissent’s Chip Gibbons about the right to protest for the January 5, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

This week on CounterSpin: It was a big deal when Jewish Americans who oppose US support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza filled New York’s Grand Central Terminal. But not big enough to make the front page of the local paper, the New York Times. US journalists invoke the First Amendment a lot, but not so much when it extends to regular folks using their individual voices, sometimes at significant personal risk, to say NO to something the US government is doing in their name.

Some listeners may remember marching with thousands of others in advance of the US war on Iraq, only to come home and find the paper or TV station ignored them utterly, or distorted their effort and their message—as when NBC’s Tom Brokaw reported a Washington, DC, anti-war march of at least 100,000 people, met with a couple hundred pro-war counter-protesters, as: “Opponents and supporters of the war marched in cities across the nation on Saturday.”

“Protest is the voice of the people,” our guest’s organization states. Defending Rights & Dissent aims to invigorate the Bill of Rights and, crucially, to protect our right to political expression. We talk with Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, this week on CounterSpin.

Janine Jackson: The last several years have provided ample reason for public protest, and many people have been doing just that, including some who never had before. This country has a much-vaunted history of vocal public dissent, but we know that that is intertwined with a sadder history of efforts by the powerful to silence those voices.

As we move into 2024, and reasons to speak up and out go unabated, what should we know about our right to protest? What should concern us, or give us hope?

Chip Gibbons is a journalist, researcher and activist, and policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chip Gibbons.

Chip Gibbons: Well, thank you for having me back, and I can think of no better way to start the new year than with CounterSpin. Obviously, not a day goes by that I’m not thankful for independent media, but the last few months, I think, have stressed the importance of programs like yours, given the low-quality reporting coming out of the corporate media at a time when courageous journalism is most needed.

JJ: Absolutely. Well, thank you very much, and I absolutely concur.

I wanted to ask you about the landscape in general, but first maybe a little basic education. On RightsAndDissent.org, folks can find a kind of guide on challenges to protest, and also the importance of protest. Because sometimes you do still hear people say that people marching or boycotting should just “use proper channels,” that society has mechanisms to resolve every conflict within the rules that protest seems to break. Can you talk about the rights that we do have to public protest, and why those rights are so important?

CG: Sure. So at Defending Rights & Dissent, we like to say that we defend your right to know and your freedom to act. We oppose government secrecy and the government attempts to hide its own crimes, and we also defend the rights of the people to take to the streets, to call their members of Congress, to engage in dissent.

Dissent is vital to our democracy, and, I believe I’ve commented in the past, protest is the tool by which we realize our democracy, that we realize the democratic ambitions of our country. The right to protest is both a fundamental right, and it is a core tool for achieving other fundamental rights. Without the right to protest, we wouldn’t have made as much progress as we have on civil rights (and I know there’s a lot more progress to be made); we wouldn’t have made as much progress on women’s rights, on LGBTQ rights, on peace and disarmament (although that cause feels very far from being realized these days).

But what progress we have made has been through grassroots, from-the-bottom social movement, not from benevolent elites being, like, well, let’s grant the people their rights today.

JJ: It’s interesting, the view towards protest—not just among the public, but also in news media—where once a protest is 10 or 20 years in the past, it can become acceptable, but the protests that are going on today are somehow categorically different, and we should be challenging them. And then of course, it matters very much who’s doing the protesting and why.

CG: The civil rights movement is the quintessential example of that. You look at the media coverage of Martin Luther King and his protests during his lifetime, I mean, they accused him of inciting violence, they accused him of rioting. All the things they say about protestors today, you heard the same claims about, “Why are you disrupting things, why are you alienating people?”

And at the end of his life, he was an extremely unpopular person, including with many Black Americans. He did not have high approval ratings. And now we have a Martin Luther King holiday, rightfully so. We have a Martin Luther King memorial.

People who are trying to shut down protests or advance racism cite him, as well as people who are doing the opposite. He has entered the lexicon of great historical figures that everybody, no matter how comical what they’re doing is, cites. So I think that’s a really great example.

Look at the Iraq War. John Pilger died recently, and I was watching some of the interviews he did with journalists in the run-up to the war, and the way they’re attacking him. And 20 years later, they’d like to pretend that they were doing what he was doing.

JJ: And all is perspective.

We’ve sort of transitioned, I guess, into the challenges, because anyone who has been on a march calling for ceasefire, end of occupation in Gaza; calling for voting rights, women’s rights, LBGTQ; people have been in the street, just in this past year, quite a lot.

It’s often very transformative, and it makes you feel good, and you see your community.

But there also can be an element of fear involved, when you see just lines and lines of police, armed police, that are kind of girding you in, or when you’re being shoved around by law enforcement, and you can stand there, but you can’t stand here. Protest is not without some elements of fear and of difficulty.

And we see that there are legislators who like it that way. And that’s part of where the fight is, too. It’s not just in the street, but it’s also in the courtrooms and the capitals, as you say.

CG: Absolutely. And I did want to comment that I do believe in the transformative power of protests. I remember the first protest I ever went to, in 2005, against the Iraq War, and just showing up at the New Carrollton Metro station on a Saturday, and having to park in the overflow lot, and wait in this long line of people with anti-war signs. And you remember, if you were opposed to the Iraq War, they made you feel demonized and isolated. And to see 300,000 to 600,000 people who believed the same thing I believed about the war was really, really powerful, and really inspiring.

And I also think that politicians, when they see—they’ll never admit this—tens or hundreds of thousands of people taking the streets, it scares them.

I mean, look at US support for Israel. For decades, it’s been entirely unchallenged. Everyone goes along with it, or they get kicked out of public life. And you’ve had protests before; I’ve been to many protests against massacres in Gaza over the last 15 years.

But now you have these huge protests, very youthful in many cases, very vibrant, very disruptive. And I think it’s very challenging to people who have been in Washington for 30 or 40 years, and every year rubber-stamp the sending of aid to Israel.

And I think it’s hard to talk about the future of dissent in this country this year without talking about what’s happening in Gaza, because that looms over everything. And we’re seeing a real outburst of protest around the ceasefire, around the occupation, around apartheid. And we’re also seeing a real heavy-handed attempt to demonize and repress these movements.

There’s always been what’s called a Palestine exception to free speech. Palestine supporters have been censored, jailed, spied on for decades. So this isn’t entirely new, but the level of public vitriol, where you have Congress passing resolutions condemning student groups, Congress passing resolutions that condemn university presidents, Congress calling on the FBI (this isn’t a resolution, these are just letters from individual members of the Congress) to investigate media outlets for these conspiracy theories that they had freelancers who—and mainstream ones, like New York Times; they’re not talking about small left-wing publications—were somehow involved in October 7.

It’s a really dark time, and I know a lot of people I talk to feel very strongly that the repression will backfire, because the movement is so strong, and people are so disgusted by what our government is complicit in. And I think that’s potentially true.

But I do have to caution: Before World War I, the left was very powerful in this country. The Socialist Party had members of Congress, they had mayors. And the repression of that war completely decimated them.

In the run-up to the Cold War, the FBI had all these internal files about how powerful they think the Communist Party is, that people are taking them seriously, that liberals work with them, that the 1930s were a pink decade or a red decade, and the FBI security apparatus is going to be like penicillin to the spread of the pink decade.

So a lot of the periods of repression have followed the left when it was at its strongest, not when it was at its weakest. And I’m not saying we’re going to be decimated, like we were during World War I or during McCarthyism, but I do think we should be cautious, that repression does have an impact, and it does follow popular movement successes.

And I do think part of the reason why we see this unhinged level of repression around the Gaza War—if you want to call it war; it’s more of a genocide—is because the atrocities that are being committed are so horrifying that even if you’re someone who doesn’t think Israel’s an apartheid state, even if you’re a centrist, it’s hard to watch and hear about hospitals being targeted, to hear about refugee camps being blown up, and not be morally repulsed by what you’re seeing.

And I do think that people know that, and that’s why they’re escalating the ratcheting up of oppression around the ceasefire protest. Because there’s no defense of bombing a refugee camp. There’s no defense of having snipers outside a Catholic church and shooting church women who are going to use the restroom. There’s not really a strong defense of this. You can either deny it, or try to shut everyone up.

JJ: And I think you’re right to point out that, “well, we’ll all get through it because everyone’s feeling so strongly about it”—we do have to count up the losses.

And not everything is legislation. We had these business leaders saying, “I want a list of all of the student activists, so that I can make sure that no one ever hires them.” These are follow-on impacts that will absolutely affect some people’s lives. I agree that that’s important to keep in mind, and to be mindful of.

I’m going to switch you just a little bit, because I know it is something that you want to talk about. One of the tools of political imprisonment and silencing is forgetfulness: out of sight, out of mind. We have a deep problem in this country of once someone is behind bars, in one way or another, we don’t hear from them. Just materially, it’s difficult to get access to people. And then, also, there is kind of an acceptance that they must be guilty of something if they’re in prison, even if it is a political imprisonment.

And of course I’m talking about Julian Assange, and I know that many people think, oh, he’s not the only political prisoner, there’s a lot of other things going on. But there’s a reason that the Assange case is so important for people who are journalists, or people who care about journalism, as well as people who care about the public’s right to know. It’s not just any old case.

So let me ask you for a little update, because it seems like, oddly, things seem to be shifting, at least in terms of congressional support, maybe, for Assange’s case. What’s going on right now with him?

CG: So last year we saw the first congressional letter calling for the charges to be dropped against Julian Assange. It was led by Rashida Tlaib, and the entire expanded Squad signed on to it. It went to Merrick Garland. It was the first of its kind.

Later that year, a number of Australian parliamentarians visited the US, a real interesting cross section of the Australian political system, who had very different reasons for supporting freeing Assange–everything from, they felt like he was a political prisoner, to we work with the US national security state and our people are really angry about Assange, and you’re going to make it impossible for us to continue to help you. Full range of opinions.

And that spawned a second letter, a bipartisan letter, a bicameral letter, with both Republicans and Democrats on it, led by Thomas Massie and Jim McGovern. And that letter went to Biden, and there were both Republicans and Democrats on that one. All of the signatories of the original letter were on it. And you had a senator, Rand Paul, on it. And it’s really an interesting coalition, because there are libertarians I respect who have been very good on this issue. There are progressives who should be good on this issue and are getting better. And then there’s some of the MAGA people, who I don’t terribly care for, even a little bit, but they’re on the letters too.

So it’s a strange bedfellows moment, but it has really been pushed by the fact that you have every single civil liberties and press freedom group and major newspaper being like, “This is an existential threat to the future of press freedom.”

And you have to keep going to these offices and telling them, you, Mr. Progressive, you care so much about press freedom. You hate the threat to democracy Donald Trump was. Here’s what the New York Times and Reporters Without Borders say about what we’re doing to Julian Assange. How can you have any credibility on those other issues when you ignore this horrifying assault on the First Amendment?

And, again, it is an existential issue to press freedom. And it’s particularly troubling right now because, remember, Assange is going to be on trial for exposing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Look at the war crimes that are taking place in Gaza. And, of course, Assange was the last one they went for, the journalist, the publisher, and that was crossing a Rubicon. But they went after the whistleblowers and the sources first. They went after Chelsea Manning, Daniel Hale—the drone whistleblower is still in prison.

So I would say this has even greater urgency, because you have people in the government right now who are dissenting about the Gaza War. You have people in the press who I think want to challenge some of these narratives. And then you have, at the same time, a government whistleblower in prison for exposing lies about the US drone programs, and a publisher they’re trying to extradite for exposing lies to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

We’ve always talked about the chilling effect these types of policies have, these types of persecutions have—I’m not going to call them prosecutions; they’re persecutions. And in a moment where we have an outbreak of dissent within the public, within the government, about this horrible war our government is part of, similar to what happened with Dan Ellsberg around Vietnam, similar to what happened to the War on Terror and people like Snowden and John Kiriakou and Thomas Drake. And we are going to London, the US is, in February to try Julian Assange’s final appeal, to try to bring him here. And Daniel Hale is still being held in the communications management unit.

What message does it send to the whistleblowers of today? And if WikiLeaks hadn’t been so repressed, what role would they be playing right now in this Gaza War?

JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, I’m reading through the stuff on Assange. Of course the Espionage Act comes up a lot. Are there changes, policy changes or legal changes, that could prevent future cases like we saw?

CG: Absolutely. And we’ve worked with a number of offices over the years, including Tulsi Gabbard, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Cori Bush (a range of offices, I know) around what we think is the best proposal to reforming the Espionage Act, was supported by the late Dan Ellsberg, who we lost and—

JJ: Much missed.

CG: I miss his counsel on this issue. That would raise the burden for what the government has to prove to get an Espionage Act conviction, as well as make sure the jury can hear about why the whistleblower or journalist did what they did, as well as allow a public interest defense, as well as limit the Espionage Act to people with a duty to protect classified information.

So as the Espionage Act is written, if I read in the Washington Post that there’s classified documents that indicate Ukraine was involved in the Nord Stream Pipeline bombing, and I say, “Hey Janine, did you see that Washington Post article?”—I’ve technically broken the letter of the Espionage Act. Obviously, it would never be applied that way, but [the proposal would be] limiting it so it does not apply to journalists, publishers, members of the general public. And in those cases where it can be applied, it could only be applied to those who are engaged in harming the US deliberately, not whistleblowing.

And I don’t want to be counting my chickens before they hatch, but I do think it’s very likely—especially with Dan’s passing, and people wanting to commemorate that—we will see something put forward in the Congress this year that is similar to what has been proposed by Tlaib and Omar and Bush as amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act. Probably shouldn’t have said that, but I guess I did.

JJ: It’s out there now. Well, and then—I said finally, but finally finally—what about just fortifying the right to protest generally? We’re seeing the efforts to criminalize protest of various sorts, from boycotting to marching in particular places. There are efforts, though, to shore up that fundamental right as well. I mean, we can do it, I think, by protesting, first of all. But are there efforts going on to support us in that fundamental right to speak up?

CG: It’s really difficult, because so many of the efforts are reactionary, in that people put forward bad proposals and we fight them. For years, Defending Rights & Dissent has tried to put forward proactive legislation enshrining the right to protest. But that gets kind of complicated, because we don’t want this to be the limit. We don’t want to inadvertently give the police like, “Whoa, this wasn’t in the bill. You can’t do this.” And, also, people are more motivated to defend a right that’s being lost than to affirmatively protect it.

JJ:  I understand.

CG: But we have proposals at Rights & Dissent that you could pass in your local community, that would help to affirm the right to protest. It’s just, everyone is so focused on the defense, including us, that it’s difficult to be proactive. But if anyone is interested in that, get on the RightsAndDissent.org website and contact us.

JJ: Absolutely. And it’s at least a conversation. Part of the freedom just comes from the ability to talk about it, and to talk about what we want to do and what we should be able to do, and how we support one another in the various protests and dissenting actions that we’re taking, that we stay in communication with one another.

CG: Absolutely.

JJ: All right, any final thoughts, Chip Gibbons, as we go forward, bravely as we can muster, into 2024, asserting our right to protest and to dissent?

CG: Don’t be silent. Don’t let them intimidate you. Don’t be silenced. The First Amendment gives you the right to speak and act for your conscience. It gives you the right to come together with other Americans to collectively work to change the world, and make this a country that reflects our values. And we should never voluntarily surrender those rights.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent. They’re online at RightsAndDissent.org. Chip Gibbons, thank you, as always, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

CG: Thank you for having me.

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