It seems incredible. After more than 400 lawsuits against his policies, countless full-page ads in national dailies attacking him, and fundraising over $300 million off this activity, the American Civil Liberties Union has come down on the side of Donald Trump, for once. Yesterday, its executive director, Anthony Romero, joined in support of Elon Musk’s announcement that Trump would be unbanned from Twitter. “Like it or not, President Trump is one of the most important political figures in this country, and the public has a strong interest in hearing his speech,” he said.
What a relief. The ACLU supports free speech, again. As the name suggests, its raison d’être of defending “civil liberties” should absolutely include the First Amendment. Indeed, that’s what made its name. For over a hundred years, the organization worked as a defender of free speech — even speech most of us would find highly offensive — and was part of virtually every major First Amendment legal case since 1920, irrespective of the ideological bent.
In the ’50s, its victories torpedoed the Smith Act, used to imprison communists under McCarthyism. In ’68, two of its black attorneys defended segregationist Governor George Wallace’s right to speak at Shea Stadium in New York City. In ’77, two of its Jewish attorneys, David Goldberger and Alan Dershowitz, defended neo-Nazis marching through Skokie, Ill., where Holocaust survivors lived. Its other clients over the years have included the Nation of Islam, the Ku Klux Klan, and the anti-American Westboro Baptist Church, among other such outfits. Even as late as 2010, it filed briefs supporting Citizens United in the eponymous Supreme Court case that recognized corporations’ rights to free speech. The sole guiding principle, in all cases, was the First Amendment. For a long time, it made the group, per the New York Times’ Michael Powell, “America’s high temple of free speech and civil liberties.”
Yet, that storied tower has come tumbling down over the last six years, as the ACLU detoured from the high road to the gutters of wokery. It was a familiar pattern, one that’s had corporate America kowtowing to the Left: Under pressure from Gen Z junior staffers, progressive activists, and donors, the ACLU changed its tune. It released new guidelines directing attorneys to consider whether speech harms “marginalized communities” or “advances the goals of white supremacists” before they take a case. Other attorneys, meanwhile, openly called for banning books that questioned transgender ideology.
That’s to say nothing of its other excesses: supporting the neo-segregation of white and black/Latino students in college dormitories, backing the defunding of police, and opposing the presumption of innocence in college sexual-assault investigations. It even spent $1 million opposing Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Many of its veteran attorneys have come out against the group for its betrayal of free-speech principles. “We’re in danger of losing [the ACLU],” said Ira Glasser, its former director, echoing comments from ACLU heavyweights Goldberger, Dershowitz, and Floyd Abrams, among others.
There’s an old Dutch proverb: “Trust comes on foot and leaves on horseback.” After six years of its galloping the other way, many no longer trust the ACLU to defend free speech. I certainly don’t. Still, it’s nice to see it, for the moment, return to principles. Two cheers for them.