As someone who has gone from an annual contributor to the ACLU to someone who rather dislikes if not despises the group for its overall aid in bringing us to the age of the dictatorship they claim to oppose, I will note that it is reported that even in the higher escalons of that group even some of its former heads realize their "evenhanded" promotion of "equal rights" for such as Nazis, the KKK, the Phelps Phuxs Phlan has endangered the rights of those their clients want to destroy.
Their answer, I believe after the scumbag Wendy Kaminer jeered in Wall Street Journal about a "retreat" by them, seems to be the typical dishonest framing of the problem. On their website it would seem to not be a problem of the fact that many of those they get Supreme Court issued "right" to organize, propagandize, metastasize and, going beyond their permission slip as they always said they were going to, put their hate into practice, it's that such groups are merely promoting "unpopular" opinions.
The ACLU has often been at the center of controversy for defending the free speech rights of groups that spew hate, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis. But if only popular ideas were protected, we wouldn't need a First Amendment. History teaches that the first target of government repression is never the last. If we do not come to the defense of the free speech rights of the most unpopular among us, even if their views are antithetical to the very freedom the First Amendment stands for, then no one's liberty will be secure. In that sense, all First Amendment rights are "indivisible."
You see in this is the ass-covering claim that it is, you see, a popularity contest not a contest in which the violent and even murderous intent of their clients are the problem, the problem is that people who they would seek to victimize and others who are not sympathetic to the Nazis and the Klan, rather understandably, don't like those ideas.
In this and the unstated, though ubiquitous claim that the law, highly trained lawyers, judges, "justices" who can understand the most intricate of issues in contract and business law - where the issue is money, not lives and equal rights - somehow immediately turn retarded when it comes to telling the difference between the Nazis and innocuous groups who want equality, democracy and a peaceful, safe life for everyone.
History does not teach us that "the first target of government repression is never the last" it teaches us that there's all the difference in the world between Nazis and Klansmen who are terrorists and a United States Government which is supposed to be kept out of their hands so they can't totally obliterate the rights of entire races, ethnic groups, gender identity communities, religions, etc.
History has also taught us that minority groups that depend on the ACLU to support them can expect what they give with one hand, they will in the longer term hand to those who want to destroy them by way of free representation and amicus briefs to allow them to try to get hold of the government in order to destroy them. The ACLU was heavily involved in the line of Supreme Court decisions that handed our elections to the billionaires foreign and domestic, in court decisions crushing just about every attempt to rescue American elections from the kind of corruption that have given us Donald Trump and the gang of goons the Republican-fascists are putting on the courts to obliterate any of the less stupid work the ACLU has done in the past.
That the ACLU has, for its entire history pretended that judges and justices are either too stupid or too corrupt to trust to suppress hate groups and hate talk on behalf of peaceful life under egalitarian democracy is, to put it mildly, odd. Considering the role they have played in creating the current practice of Constitutionalizing every issue before the Supreme Court. Though I'll admit placing your confidence in the honesty or wisdom of that unelected body of largely Ivy grads is far stupider than placing it in the congress that you can get rid of every two years. The Warren Court was where that seed germinated and was nurtured with the best of intentions but with quite mixed results. And the Warren Court was probably the high point of that approach having, perhaps, a small margin of the good over the terrible. Most Supreme Courts in the history of that body have been the stalwart empowerers and enablers of the wealthy, the anti-democratic, the racist and bigoted and, yes, the oligarchic.
Perhaps they are right that such judges and justices are not to be trusted to make the right decision, but if that is the case their powers are what needs to be reduced. If that's the case trusting them to make the right decision in allowing the Nazis to terrorize survivors of the Shoah and other Jews in Skokie is about as preeningly irresponsible a choice as could be made. The Skokie decision which, all over their website, the ACLU calls one of its finest hours certainly has not led to the opponents of Nazism winning over them, certainly not the Black, Latino, Muslim and not even the Jewish targets of Nazis. It was one of the early victories of the current resurgence of Nazism, whether explicitly called that or under the various other names that it goes by as "white supremacy". The ACLU aided and abetted that resurgence all along the way.
The ACLU is too stupid to support, I don't trust their motives, they never learn anything as they. like lawyers who get murderers and oppressors of the powerless off, go back to their upper middle class or affluent lives. They walk away from the results of their work. The ones who are the victims of their clients don't have that luxury. It does that while saying, well, what their clients will do with the enhanced powers they win them in court will be illegal.
At the same time, freedom of speech does not prevent punishing conduct that intimidates, harasses, or threatens another person, even if words are used. Threatening phone calls, for example, are not constitutionally protected.
This is like a disclaimer on a badly tested drug, designed not to prevent someone taking it who shouldn't getting harmed or killed by it, it's lawyerly ass covering. Only not to protect their clients, to give the ACLU a pose of plausible deniability when what they played such an important part in bringing about - which was the intention of the people they enabled - are the results of their representation and amicus briefs.
The ACLU is, at its base, a manifestation of that idiotic insouciant refusal to make the necessary choices to support, protect and defend egalitarian democracy, pretending that you can best do that by supporting the ability of its enemies to destroy it. I'm not buying it anymore.
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