Jane Fonda is joining forces with more than 500 celebrities and Hollywood heavyweights to defend free speech.

The membership roll already includes scores of famous actors like Jamie Lee Curtis, Viola Davis, Whoopi Goldberg, Pedro Pascal, Natalie Portman and Michael Keaton. Successful directors like Spike Lee and Ben Stiller have signed on, along with singer and actress Barbra Streisand and pop star and songwriter Billie Eilish.

Fonda, a star who has championed progressive causes since the 1970s, explained when she announced the group’s new edition on Oct. 1, 2025, that the effort isn’t really new. Instead, it marks the relaunch of the Committee for the First Amendment, an organization her father, actor Henry Fonda, had belonged to.

The original Committee for the First Amendment was formed in October 1947 at a time when the U.S. government worried that there were communists in Hollywood who were putting left-wing propaganda into the movies.

The attack on Hollywood started when a bipartisan congressional committee held a series of highly publicized hearings in 1947 on what it said was the “communist infiltration of the motion picture industry.”

The House Un-American Activities Committee, known as HUAC, invited 23 “friendly” anti-communist witnesses to testify.

Ayn Rand, a Russian-born novelist and screenwriter who hated communism, was one of the witnesses. She testified that the 1944 MGM movie “Song of Russia” showed clean, well-dressed, happy peasants, which she said was a sanitized, propagandized version of life in the USSR.

Another movie that came under suspicion was “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The FBI complained that the 1946 blockbuster, which starred Jimmy Stewart as a broken man who learns the true value of his life, “deliberately maligned the upper classes” with its negative portrayal of Mr. Potter, the town’s richest man.

The HUAC hearings continued for a decade and divided Hollywood. The committee’s interrogators demanded that people turn on each other and “name names.” Due to these hearings, as well as an anti-communist publication called

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