George Clooney, Mark Ruffalo, and the Free Speech Straw Man

George Clooney supports Mark Ruffalo’s constitutional right “to speak freely”: “George Clooney, Mark Ruffalo, and the Free Speech Straw Man: How Cowardice Sanitizes Hate,” by Erez Levin, Algemeiner, September 4, 2026:

“We’re not going to ban speech,” George Clooney declared at the Venice Film Festival, casually swatting away questions about Mark Ruffalo. “I believe in free speech even when I completely disagree with it … I will always support Mark Ruffalo’s ability to speak freely. I like him. He’s a good man.”

Clooney can support Ruffalo’s right “to speak freely” — no one was questioning that — but he also has a moral duty, given that everyone in Hollywood has by now staked out a position on Ruffalo’s remarks, to condemn his comments as antisemitism. And this Clooney failed to do. He added, gratuitously, that he liked Ruffalo, whom he characterized as a “good man.” But Ruffalo’s antisemitic outburst was crude and cruel; I allow myself to believe that few would now agree with Clooney that Mark Ruffalo is a “good man.”

It was a masterclass in moral evasion masquerading as high-minded principle. Notice the rhetorical conjuring trick: Clooney didn’t actually condemn or even name what Ruffalo said. He merely offered an abstract platitude about defending speech he supposedly disagrees with, reducing a toxic boundary violation to a benign difference of opinion.

Nobody asked Clooney if Ruffalo should be jailed, silenced by statute, or stripped of his constitutional rights. The state was not knocking at the door. The controversy had nothing to do with whether Ruffalo has the legal right to speak; it was about whether what he said was conspiratorial, bigoted, and fundamentally unacceptable.

For years, Ruffalo has treated Israel not with standard policy criticism, but with a singular, context-stripping obsession. His latest crusade — targeting the proposed Paramount–Skydance merger by singling out the Ellison family and board member Safra Catz, tying corporate transactions directly to alleged Israeli war crimes — crossed cleanly from legitimate geopolitical debate into ancient tropes of sinister, shadowy control.

By retreating to the truism of the First Amendment, Clooney pulled off a cheap deflection. He took an urgent question of moral accountability — Do you repudiate this rhetoric? — and swapped it for a trivial legal distraction: Is he legally allowed to utter it?

This is the free speech straw man, and it has become the default sanctuary for cultural and political elites terrified of policing their own side.

No one, pace Clooney, had been claiming that Ruffalo had “no right” to speak. What they were insisting is what Ruffalo did speak was antisemitism in its purest form, and ought to be denounced.

Free speech absolutism is vital when restraining state power. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) does essential work shielding citizens and scholars from administrative censorship. But prominent civil libertarians, including their CEO Greg Lukianoff, make a grave mistake when they stretch that legal shield into social life, reflexively branding any organized reputational consequence or social shunning as “cancel culture.” Organizing to hold someone morally and reputationally accountable is not censorship; it is the fundamental exercise of free association and free speech.

When the ACLU defended the right of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie in 1977, they upheld a vital constitutional boundary against municipal tyranny. Crucially, they didn’t brush off the marchers by calling them “good men” or treat swastikas as an intellectual puzzle to be politely debated. They recognized that while the state could not ban the assembly, civil society retained the inescapable duty to denounce, shame, and isolate the hate itself. Legal tolerance was matched by unequivocal cultural repudiation.

The ACLU defended the constitutional right of the neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, but it did not approve of their views or their deliberately cruel choosing to march through Skokie, a city with a large number of Holocaust survivors.

A toxic confusion takes over when First Amendment doctrine is treated as social immunity. The Constitution guarantees that you will not go to prison for what you say; it does not guarantee you an audience, a pass from your peers, or insulation from disgust.

The distinction, that Clooney did not make, is between a constitutional right to free speech, and the right of any and all of to criticize that speech and the man who made it.

Let’s repeat the essence of Erez Levin’s eloquent piece: there is a constitutional right to antisemitic speech, of the kind Ruffalo delivered in his remarks about sinister Jewish forces at work behind a proposed merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers. It seems that Oracle’s owner, Larry Ellison, and his son David control Paramount, and they not only support Israel, but have supplied Oracle products to the IDF.

Denounce Israel for its “genocide,” Mark Ruffalo, all you want, and mutter darkly about Jews connected to that “genocide” who are pushing a business merger to increase their power in the American media. No one will deny you the right to do so. But you should not be surprised if people — not only, or even mainly, Jews — then denounce your moral imbecility. As for those who, like George Clooney, conflate a constitutional right of free speech with the nonexistent right for that speech to be exempt from criticism, I don’t think we need listen to them anymore. They are blind guides.