Author: Nat Hentoff

As a reporter, historian, critic and columnist for more than 60 years, I’ve never wanted to write just for the choir—readers who always agree with me. The wider and more combative the audience, the better. So I was eager when HUSTLER Magazine not only published my article “The War on Free Speech” in October 2007...

Back in the 1950s and ’60s, when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was convinced that a huge number of citizens were engaging in “un-American” activities, free-thinking friends of mine became very careful of what they said on the phone. Some even tried to disguise the titles of books and publications they bought. In my book...

The National Security Agency’s voracious surveillance of Americans shows what the federal government thinks of privacy. But local law-enforcement agencies and school administrators nationwide are also destroying We the People’s Constitutional rights with impunity. In his TomDispatch.com blog “The Over-Policing of America,” lawyer Chase Madar details how oppressive our country has become: “There is the...