The 2019 American Renaissance conference will be held at our usual venue — the beautiful Montgomery Bell State Park near Nashville, TN — from May 17 to 19. We have a terrific line up of speaker for what is sure to be a first-rate conference. Yet more speakers will be announced soon. To find out more about the conference and to register, click here.
This will be the eighth straight year we have met in Montgomery Bell State Park, but the conference almost did not happen. This year, for the first time, the park tried to make us sign a contract to pay potentially unlimited security fees because of the presence of antifa and other threatening demonstrators. This would have amounted to at least $30,000 and possibly several times that much. It would have meant we could not hold the conference.
We sued the state of Tennessee in federal court. Judge Aleta Trauger issued a preliminary injunction in our favor, ruling that to charge us crushing security fees because of outside threats would be a classic case of the “heckler’s veto,” or letting critics deny us our free-speech rights. The state of Tennessee fought us for more than four months, and only today sent us a duly counter-signed contract with language we can live with. With any more delay, we might have had to scrap the conference or move it to a less satisfactory date in the fall.
We fought hard for this conference, and are grateful to every one of you who helped make this conference possible by contributing to our legal expenses.