“I got the sense it was more important for A.C.L.U. staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand on principle,” he [The Nazi's Skokie Case Lawyer David Goldberger] said in a recent interview. “Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind.”
The New York Times, The ACLU Faces An Identity Crisis; June 7, 2021
IN THE TYPICAL WAY OF "CIVIL LIBERTIES" lawyers, he essentially holds, screw the victims of hate speech and the hate actions those incite, we don't care about that, we care about a friggin' phrase adopted by the slave-owners, financiers and other members of the First Congress, not one of them put in office by members of the minority groups the ACLU has been ready to screw on such "principle" for its entire existence as they pretended to champion their rights. And the Supreme Court has seldom done anything to but screw them, this present Court getting ready to take its place beside the worst of those.
The lawyerly pretense that "identifying with clients and progressive causes" is what lawyers who don't want to enable Nazis, fascists, white supremacists (a tautology in the American context) are guilty of the sin of "identifying with clients" and "progressive causes" THAT CAUSE BEING NOT ENABLING NAZIS, ETC. TO GAIN POWER AND DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN! invite any rational person to say, well, a David Goldberger is either guilty of that same sin of identification with those he represents OR THE SIN OF BEING INDIFFERENT TO THE POSSIBLE, NOW, WE KNOW NOT AT ALL IMPOSSIBLE ACTIONS OF THOSE HE ENABLES AND THOSE THEY INFLUENCE. The cases they argue remove any possible excuse that they are ignorant of the intent of those they enable.
Really, David Goldberger is a preening asshole who anyone who the Nazis he lawyered for target for everything bad up to and including murder has every right to figure couldn't give less of a fuck about as he preens in his and the old ACLU's amber-tinted cinematically august higher romance even as it dives into the sewer to enable those who would murder them. As a gay man and an equality absolutist, I am one of those who his clients would murder if they gain the power there is now no denying they possibly could. They and the present Supreme Court he rests his faith in are certainly on the road to reimpose discrimination and denial of rights to LGBTQ as we as that long list of those who are the targets of his clients and the clients of his ilk. If it happened once in history, it can again. The actual Jim Crow, American-apartheid system is being reconstructed even as we are alive and living under the First Amendment as the Supreme Court and the ACLU have made it real, a status quo which this asshole apparently favors over the actual lives and rights of their victims.
Anyone who wants to pretend he does care about the People his clients openly intend to victimize can explain why Black People, Jews, Latinos, Native Americans, LGBTQ, etc. should be counted among those who don't in any way really care a thing about them in reality as opposed to pretense and theory. Theory is, so often, a cover for such pretense. That includes the entire list of current donors to the ACLU. No rational person can both aid Nazis, fascists, white supremacists, etc. and be allowed to pretend they care about the rights and lives of those their money is helping to attack. The ACLU of Virginia aided the attacks of the Nazis etc. their actions got the permission to hold the infamous hate rally that resulted in attacks, injuries, maiming and death. There is no lawyerly lying that can change that fact, anyone who pretends the opposite is lying. Any Supreme Court or other Court which enables that, does so as an official government action. The entire legal-judicial system that allows Nazis and Klansmen to try again is complicit, knowingly complicit and enthusiastically complicit in what those they benefit do. To pretend that they could not distinguish between those genocidal thugs and Martin Luther King's various demonstrations is to claim on an opportunistic basis that they are addled in the head. Our legal system is now based on that dishonest game of opportunistic, pretended judicial and lawyerly-liarly stupidity.
I don't pretend that anymore. No "principle" is any higher than the results it brings in real life. Anyone who believes they can be more important than their results in reality when they are allowed to poison the minds of the susceptible is corrupt and cynical and very possibly too stupid to understand the meaning of their own words. NOT THAT MANY LAWYERS REALLY DO CARE ABOUT THE ACTUAL MEANING OF THE WORDS THEY USE. As I said, listening to the lawyers as opposed to the diplomats and military officers, etc. who testified in the first hearings leading to the first Trump impeachment, the lawyers covering their asses and that of their "institutions" while the diplomats and officers sacrificed themselves for the common good and morality was a real revelation as to the corrupt state of the legal system.
To hell with any "First Amendment" that demands we give Nazis another bite at the apple when their body count is many millions now, already. And which has given our indigenous form of that, white supremacy, the upper hand for our entire history with the slightest of partial intermissions for a very few years right after the Civil War and during the all too brief period when the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act were actually being enforced. That's less than four decades out of about two-hundred twenty years, by my estimate, and those decades are not concurrent. Not a single generation of Americans lived their entire lives under both that First Amendment and laws requiring actual legal equality in this country. The ACLU can go fuck itself as it's fucked those it pretends to champion.
No more after Skokie is how I used to put it and that was a long time ago now, not since, no more again, never.
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