Nat Hentoff is Still a Fierce Libertarian

Libertarian music critic Nat Hentoff, one of the foremost authorities on the First Amendment, has joined the Cato Institute as a senior fellow.

In a press release issued by the conservative think tank, Ed Crane, the group’s founder and president said, “The core of libertarianism is a defense of free speech. No American in recent history has done more in defense of free speech and the First Amendment than the great civil libertarian, Nat Hentoff.”

Hentoff, born in 1925, “left the Village Voice in December, where he had been a columnist for 50 years. Hentoff’s column, Sweet Land of Liberty, has been distributed by the United Feature Syndicate since 1992,” according to Cato. Hentoff was formerly a columnist for JazzTimes, Legal Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Progressive, Editor & Publisher and Free Inquiry. He was a staff writer for The New Yorker, and his writing has also been published in The New York Times, Jewish World Review, The Atlantic, The New Republic and Commonweal. Hentoff is also a well-known jazz critic and writes about music for The Wall Street Journal.