<< Only, of course, it was intellectuals in the Progressive Era who were largely indifferent to the right of free speech. It was the ultra-scruffy IWW who championed it. >>
Not for their class enemies. They drowned them out and chased them off the streets. Not a dime of workers' defense money paid for support of fascists.
Nor did abolitionists erect platforms for slavery's advocates.
During the post-World War II era, the heavily radical ACLU in the South supported both legislation to restrict the Ku Klux Klan's "rights" (for example, to forbid wearing masks at public gatherings) and mass confrontations against them.
By the 1970s, the liberal Mississippi ACLU defended the right of middle-class children to wear their hair long in the public schools, called for legalization of marijuana, and defended the KKK's "speech" as it attempted to resegregate a public school, but declined a request for legal support from the Republic of New Africa, whose jailed survivors had defended themselves with arms against a dawn military attack by the police and FBI. Thus anyone who thinks that compromising with liberals in their propensity to aid Nazis and Klansmen will bring them to our side in times of need is out of touch with reality.
<< Using the state to suppress fascism is like using broad spectrum antibiotics to suppress livestock diseases >>
That might be a valid position when people are debating which among a choice of alternative tactics to employ in the anti-Nazi struggle. Most times, people in life-and-death struggles employ every weapon and tactic at their disposal, including whatever they can compel the state to do on their behalf. That is the nature of struggle.
Oops, sorry. That's my fourth today I think.
Ken Lawrence