Why I Will Not Be Sending Money To The ACLU In Their Own Words

The ACLU is mounting one of their high profile campaigns to raise money, taking advantage of the Trump regime's outrageous discrimination against Muslims.  But, I'm sorry, the ACLU doing that is less effective than the little boy who stuck his finger in the dyke to hold back the ocean.  In fact, the ACLU doing that is like a little boy who sticks his finger in a hole in the dyke  as he drills more holes in the very same dyke.  The relevant activities of the ACLU have been in filing cases and amicus briefs in some of the worst rulings of the Supreme Court in the past century, cases like Sullivan v New York Times, Buckely v Valeo and Citizens United.

Donald Trump and his fascist, in my opinion fairly described as even crypto-Nazi regime came to power thorough the freely expressed lies he and others told in the freest of all free presses in our history, a free and freely lying press, free to follow its own profits and the will of its owners through the past actions of the ACLU and its buddies in the "free-speech-free-press" industry.   They've done so, quite often, with the patronage and financial support of the very owners of the media who benefited mightily from carrying those lies without having to worry about being sued by those they lied about.

The ACLU is among the foremost groups which have facilitated and protected the ability of those lies to become the dominant force in our politics.  They are the part of the media's protection racket that has made those lies safely told, their relationship to the Trump regime's attack on the very notion of the truth being real as opposed to "alternative facts" or, rather lies couldn't be more plain.

To make matters worse, the ACLU has had a huge hand in thwarting efforts made by politicians, Democrats and, amazingly enough, Republicans of the past to try to get the blatant influence peddling and extortion of big money out of our politics.  The ACLU, on the one hand the champion of minorities and those whose advocacy of equality and justice made them targets of illegal actions by the goverment, is also one of the greatest forces in ensuring the corruption of our politics and the descent into the fascism we are now in and which they, in their weird two-step, are also fighting.  That part of it is so obvious and so dangerous that even some of the foremost members and former leaders of the ACLU have publicly disagreed with it.  In an article in The Nation,  Burt Neuborne ACLU legal staff member for eleven years, and it's former national legal director from 1981 to 1986 said:

I’ve marched proudly behind the ACLU’s First Amendment flag for almost fifty years. On campaign finance reform, however, I believe the ACLU’s adamant opposition to limits on massive campaign spending by the superrich gets the constitutional issues wrong. Limiting the power of a few individuals and corporations that exercise disproportionate political influence solely because of their enormous wealth has nothing to do with censoring a speaker’s message; it is desperately needed to preserve the integrity of the egalitarian democracy the First Amendment was designed to protect. 

The campaign finance mess rests on three erroneous arguments the ACLU advanced in the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo case before the Supreme Court: (1) that spending unlimited amounts of money in an electoral campaign is “pure” speech entitled to the highest level of First Amendment protection; (2) that any attempt to equalize political power by limiting massive electoral spending by the superrich is flatly unconstitutional; and (3) that “independent” expenditures on behalf of a candidate (as opposed to contributions to the candidate) are incapable of corrupting the democratic process. In 2010, in Citizens United, five Supreme Court justices made the Buckley system even worse by ruling that corporations have the same electoral free-speech rights as individuals, which unleashed a torrent of electoral spending by corporations seeking a financial return on their political investments.

I confess to having supported the ACLU position in Buckley. As the corrosive effects on democracy of uncontrolled campaign spending became increasingly clear, however, I joined several former ACLU leaders—Norman Dorsen, Aryeh Neier, John Shattuck and Mort Halperin—in opposing the organization’s campaign finance position. We have argued, before the Supreme Court and the ACLU board, that spending massive amounts of money during an election campaign is not “pure” speech when the spending level is so high that it drowns out competing voices by repeating the same message over and over at higher decibel levels; that a compelling interest in equality justifies preventing wealthy speakers from buying up an unfair proportion of the speech in settings like courtrooms, classrooms, town meetings, presidential debates and elections; that massive campaign spending by “independent” entities poses a serious risk of postelection corruption; and that corporations lack the attributes of conscience and human dignity that justify free-speech protection.

The ACLU has been an integral and important part in the corruption of our politics, the media that has mis-informed a decisive margin of voters, the very idea that there is a real and effective and vital difference between the truth and lies, between the truth and salacious libel against liberal politicians and others.  Its entire theory of the First Amendment has been adopted by the very enemies of egalitarian democracy, the actual fascists who now hold the White House as their means of gaining and, they hope, keeping power.  That theory that refuses to accept that it is possible to make the kinds of distinctions between truth and lies, between egalitarian democrats and fascists, Marxists and neo-Nazis, between those who favor equal justice and those who attack it in favor of the privileged who want an ever increasing inequality that favors them is and will always be a clear and present danger to egalitarian democracy.

Do read the article linked to.  I don't agree with everything said in it or think it goes nearly far enough, but it does show that there is a huge problem with the organization as it exists now.   Supporting them while they participate in actively creating the very legal problems that resulted in Trump is a waste of your money.  There are other groups that support the legal rights of beleaguered minorities without doing the bidding of the lying corporate media, the likes of James Buckley and David Bossie and the very fascists who the ACLU and those other groups now have to fight with such unequal resources.