Unfortunately so. It didn't use to be that way - the ACLU used to be so principled that they would defend literal Nazis' rights. But they've fallen a long way since then.
You seem to be confused between principally defending everyone having the same rights vs defending everything anyone can do.
The ACLU defends Nazi’s rights because they believe Nazis should have the same rights as everyone else irrespective of who they are.
That doesn’t mean they defend every possible action that can be considered a civil liberty.
Eliminating traffic laws would make individuals more free in a literal sense, but those rules also make it so people can get from place to place quickly and safely. The liberty interpretation is that what people actually want is to travel, not to drive however they like. So you trade a freedom most people don't miss to enable another.
Vaccine mandates are a great example of this contention where under normal circumstances nobody cares about having to get vaccinated but they do care about not getting polio. Covid was strange in that the number of people opposed was significantly larger than I think anyone expected.
It always seemed to me that the US was fuzzy when the very clear text of the Constitution rubbed up against the realities of a complex State. For example,
- the 1st Amendment doesnt say the speech can be overridden by a compelling national security interest, which is the argument here. But the US has security services, and legitimately there are cases where to allow speech does harm. But if you are going to be honest, shouldnt there be an amendment giving the State an override of 1A?
- 2A is infamous, of course, and for the love of $deity lets not discuss it here, but why does "not abridged" get overriden by bans in, say, machine guns, which have been on the books since the Chicago gangster era? Either you abridge or not. Or at least be honest about it .
- Some speakers in the covid era made a very strong appeal to personal bodily autonomy when it came to vaccine mandates. Ok, let's follow that. Does it not then also follow that a woman cannot be forced to carry a baby to term? That would seem logical, but the connection is not made. Conversely there is no "commonweal" override written into the Constitution and we are left with random SCOTUS decisions over the last 240 years.
No it isn't. The argument here is that it isn't a restriction on speech at all.
An amendment process that in practice is impossible to exercise is just as good as having no amendment process at all.
No, and no one is saying they can. The law says American companies can't do business with a certain foreign-owned company.
It is beyond settled in law that this is something that the US government can do.
Sure, the government can do that, and when doing so infringes on Americans’ speech or access to information, it introduces First Amendment questions that must be addressed.
“The government says CNN can’t post stories from BBC” isn’t immediately resolved by “it’s a foreign company.”
But this doesn't do that. Everything that Americans could post or watch on TikTok, they're still allowed to post or watch anywhere else.
Is the government allowed to shut down Harvard because the same classes can be taken at ASU?
The courts have various categories for how important something needs to be to allow certain levels of unconstitutionality, eg suppose I have "legally" built the nuclear device featured in a recent kurgesatz video with enough kiloton to start by itself a nuclear winter kill every person on the planet... I seriously suspect SCOTUS will be ok with the state taking the ignition keys away from me
Neo-Nazis are a subset of Nazis though, no?
In the context of "literal Nazis" the ACLU had argued for the rights of - like the German American Bund, which contained actual members of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, not exactly.