Once a bastion of free speech, the ACLU faces an identity crisis

If only that. The younger lawyers would attack (sometimes physically, like with Molotov cocktails, as in the case of Urooj Rahman and Colinford Mattis) those they find detestable, and anybody in the law profession that dares to provide them with any service. Which once was considered a basic human right, but not anymore - now, if you defend the deplorables, you become unperson yourself.

Per the article, the old policy defending Free Speech was ...

> "we are committed to represent those whose views we regard as repugnant"

Whereas the new policy says...

> "lawyers should balance taking a free speech case representing right-wing groups whose “values are contrary to our values” against the potential such a case might give “offense to marginalized groups.” "

It's actually really sad. They've even explicitly paid for campaign ads for Democratic political candidates...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0aqKS3ihVM

It's really just the ACLU in name only. They've done what so many organizations have done, and sacrificed their principles to take sides in the GOP vs Dem battle. Shortsighted.

1. Everyone is conservative about what they know best

2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing

3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies

https://www.aclu.org/blog/civil-liberties/mobilization/aclus...

As I support their efforts generally. I find picking and choosing seems counter to the what protecting our civil liberties means in a whole.

More seriously, the ACLU has always faced an identity crisis and a consequent PR problem.

If the ACLU embraced all civil liberties, wouldn't you expect more Bill-Of-Rights-T-Shirt wearers to be more supportive?

First step of the free speech agenda: Breathe.

It's short term vs long term thinking and clearly they know way more about the Constitution and law than I do to identify major threats to liberty. It's pretty normal for both lay people and professionals to disagree with that strategy, as there are often disagreements in the law. And while I think having this discussion is important, framing it as an existential crisis for the organization is a bit fatalistic.

It's my opinion, and people are welcome to disagree (that's OK), that much of the angst directed towards the ACLU in this thread is more appropriate and effective if directed at the government bodies suppressing free speech, instead.

This is why it is encoded as an absolute, so that one’s perspective on what is reasonable or not is irrelevant. If speech causes harm that person can be sued for harm in a civil case. But the government shall not make any law infringing on the right to free speech.

> "Any government regulation of speech or published material is destructive to free society."

Things go off the rails right off the bat by conflating the First Amendment with freedom of speech, which almost always bodes ill for the remainder of the arguments presented. Anyway, the 1st Amendment is a subset of the general principle of freedom of speech that happens to bind the government. The formulation in Article 19 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights is a bit clearer about what freedom of speech is:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers"

This encompasses individuals, organizations, businesses, and, yes, governments. This is why the deplatforming of Parler (which in some sense was a happy thing) is still a freedom of speech issue despite not being a First Amendment issue or illegal; third parties stepped in to interfere with those who wanted to impart legal (albeit deplorable) speech and those who wanted to receive legal (ditto) speech. What can be done to one set of people can be done to any other, bad or good, and that's a hazard.

> "Hopefully you immediately think of exceptions..."

Sets up the unfortunately all too common "speech that causes clear and immediate harm is illegal so you don't _actually_ believe in freedom of speech" argument which, much like attacking a point nobody was trying to defend, is neither interesting nor persuasive. Such speech is seldom the core issue of the controversial freedom of speech cases we're discussing in the first place. For example, neither the ACLU's Skokie or even Charlottesville freedom of speech cases had known expectation of immediate harm to others, despite the odious nature of who they were defending.

> "The grey area is why people who are knowledgeable are unsure and people who know nothing are confident. One sees complexities, the other is blind to them."

A pleasant appeal to HN's collective intellectual vanity. Let's see where it takes us.

> "Every person on the planet being able to publish a message that can be read by every human (twitter) is something the human race has never had to face before. Facebook can choose to promote hateful speech with algorithms and incite hatred through doing so, gaining them engagement (addiction) in the process. Is that healthy for society? Is fox news healthy? On the other side is CNN (fake news?) healthy? Should China/Russia be able to purchase American airtime? Should American celebrities and businesses be protected from having their speech coerced by foreign powers?"

Let's substitute for your final paragraphs, a statement I feel is equivalent (please let me know if you think it's an unfair characterization):

"The knowledgeable know better than the ignorant so it's justifiable for the knowledgeable to protect them from themselves by limiting fake news/hateful speech from what they see, with the understanding that what constitutes fake news/hateful speech is decided on by the knowledgeable."

While seductive to a certain type of mindset, the paternalistic and ripe for abuse nature of this idea should be self-evident. It is the progressive equivalent of Kipling's (deeply racist and colonialist) "The White Man's Burden", only here the it is the progressive who are being exhorted to bring enlightenment to the benighted ignorant.

But let's go further and suppose that it were justified somehow, we'd still be faced with the problem that we not know the truth now and, even worse, we don't know what the future will determine the truth to be. Permitting suppression of "hateful speech" would have suppressed the civil rights movement (immensely unpopular in its time), LGBT rights movement (same), and other social movements now deemed important steps in improving human civil rights.

So, in the end, there is nothing new, insightful, nor persuasive to be found here.

(I await the inevitable reply where I'm accused of being a conservative.)

>> Referring to free speech in indirect terms creates a problem, because it denies the grey. Free speech arguments are all about determining the correct gradient of grey for society. Being able to identify and understand grey area is a strong signal of being informed. The grey area is why people who are knowledgeable are unsure and people who know nothing are confident. One sees complexities, the other is blind to them.

"Free speech is table stakes for a free society" is not code for "I believe every entity should have the inviolable right to say whatever they want whenever they want." – I interpret it to mean "A society can't be free unless one of its founding principles is freedom of expression." Another sentiment it expresses is, "we should start from the position that what happens to be expressed is allowable unless it falls under a category where we deem it to be curtailed – versus – speech is strictly regulated, it's a privilege rather than a right, we need to explicitly enumerate the areas where it is unregulated". You're not interpreting what they said charitably in my opinion. And saying "You know things aren't black or white, they're grey" is rather pointless a lot of the time in because you can just counter the supposed argument without the additional lecturing meta-observation which to be honest comes across as kind of condescending to my ears.

Lastly – it's not some massive revelation that there are limitations to freedom of expression:

“Freedom of speech is not regarded as absolute by some with most legal systems generally setting limits on the freedom of speech, particularly when freedom of speech conflicts with other rights and protections, such as in the cases of libel, slander, pornography, obscenity, fighting words, and intellectual property.

Some limitations to freedom of speech may occur through legal sanction, and others may occur through social disapprobation.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Limitation

This precise thing is why it's baffling that people can suggest cancel culture is only something to complain about if you've done / said something wrong. What is considered wrong does not always age well. Sometimes we ourselves are the baddies.

GOA and SAF (Second Amendment Foundation) are far far better when it comes to actual legal challenges to laws that infringe the 2nd Amendment

[1] https://i.imgur.com/TO8BGgw.png

I feel there's merit to a singleness-of-purpose within an organization, and ACLU's attempt to juggle "12 or 15 different values" detracts from its effectiveness.

Universities are hardly right-wing institutions that fire academics for left-wing research, quite to the contrary "academics" too often engage in indoctrination instead of teaching students to engage a subject to mastery. We are at such a bad point that even harvard is so stooped in dialectic that it argue 2+2 is not always 4, something an elementary kid knows is bullshit.

Maybe you should re-read your comment a few times and think critically about it.

It seems they also edited their comment to include a link - seems pretty reasonable to me.

Those people were clearly in the wrong though. After all, why join a civil liberties union if your support for said liberties is conditional on your whims?

I see this all the time in the so-called "paradox of tolerance", which is of course only a paradox if you assume a consequentialist framework as unstated background assumption.

Personally, I feel asking people to make personal consequentialist decisions gives them far too much leeway to bring personal bias in, so I'm in favor of deontological freedom of speech - on consequentialist grounds.

I can see why this discussion's turned ugly, but it can't NOT be ugly. None of this is hypothetical. It's blown up because the aforementioned Nazis worked out that they could compel the ACLU to effectively become a Nazi ally and devote their forces to the cause of terrorism. Under the ground rules of what the ACLU is, if properly managed, the organization can be used to clear the way for violence and actions that are not on brand for the ACLU, and not what it thinks of as 'civil liberty'.

This is a clever sort of meta-gaming thing, but it's also an obvious existential crisis for the ACLU to the extent that the ACLU cares at all about terrorism. I think there's an assumption that we can define some things with a bright line never to be infringed upon, and that there will never be exploits to undermine our assumptions.

And I mean, that's not even true for mathematical proof, much less free-speech liberalism.

It's never a mistake to get rid of hereditary monarchs.

Which, yeah, sucks but I'm a sufficiently intense competition and all that..

But it's very, very consistent. The "Outrage you so you give us money" letters in these surveys don't leave any whitespace on the last page.

On the other hand, there are some groups I support who will send something along the lines of a 10 page, single sided, properly written letter (no random *BOLD* italic and the ever-popular "ink pen looking circles to draw your attention to the outrage of the day") explaining in competent written English what they've been doing, where they'd like to expand, and what they need to accomplish this. I'm far, far more likely to support those groups (though I generally just give locally, I've less interest in what's going on in Washington than in our local town and region).

I am old enough to remember times where at least some individual rights - speech, association, honest elections, equality in the eyes of the law for all people regardless of their identity, due process - were the causes that most of the left would support. There were people on the left that genuinely supported Civil Rights movement because they believed all people should have equal rights. Now equality is offensive for them, and so are due process, free speech and other values their previous generation wrote on their banners.

Some of the group's members might actually be pluralist civil libertarians at heart.

But this news demonstrates that the vast majority are not. They were authoritarians in libertarians' clothing, and today's political environment is woke enough for them to swap out their duds.

Yet somehow it's not a "tangible threat to safety" while a bunch of wackos fantasizing on the internet how Trump is about to be revealed as the Messiah is. Sorry, it's very hard to treat such "safety" concerns as genuine while keeping ignoring the real safety threats. It's more like a pampered $100K-per-year college student cries that she feels "unsafe" going to their college campus because somewhere there on campus there is a professor who once said something that puts him slightly on the right of AOC. It's not what people mean by "safety", it's weaponizing "safety" for political reasons.

The question facing the ACLU is should they be partisan (fight for the rights of just one side) or merely political (fight for all side’s rights, even the sides that you disagree with).

(Decided it was unfair to throw a large org under the bus without being able spend a few hours to defend the claim.)

It seems inherent to the different aims of charities and businesses. Nucor Corporation has a nominal lineage from "Nuclear Corporation of America Inc." incorporated in the 1950s. But its actual business has had nothing to do with nuclear technology in 50+ years; it found more success in the steel business. Shareholders aren't mad that the company isn't following its original nuclear technology mission since it found a better business. There's nothing to "corrupt" when a business goes after different markets.

But some donors will be upset if a charity focused on one mission broadens or deviates from its original mission. Some people may also be happy with these sorts of change, of course, but mission changes tend to be more controversial with charities than with for-profit companies.

I agree that free speech is essential -- I imagine that they asked for money because I gave them money in the past. Can you agree that the starving, homeless, and sick might have difficulty exercising their right to free speech even if the ACLU protects it in court?

The various police forces during the capital seige - in January, remember how that was this year - said they used less force because the participants were armed and knew they could shoot back

Their whole thing is that they will make the state think twice, whereas the peaceful and unarmed protestors get knocked around with no recourse

Without examples, its easy to think they are advocating for actually killing government officials with their guns in order to get their way, but after a year of examples I can at least say I have experienced competing and conflicting ideas in action

If individuals aren't allowed to own and practice with weapons normally, then when it's needed the Militia will not be "well-regulated", as in well-armed or trained.

The 2nd amendment is really very important to all civil liberties, since otherwise there is nothing to stop a repressive government from taking control.