The head of the ACLU’s free speech, privacy, and technology project recently excused the group’s shift toward advocating for progressive causes over free speech by saying that the First Amendment is just one of the group’s “12 or 15 different values.”
The comments by the ACLU’s Ben Wizner came during an interview with the New York Times, in which he noted that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) had taken a strong lead in defending free speech on college campuses.
“FIRE does not have the same tensions,” Wizner said. “At the ACLU, free speech is one of 12 or 15 different values.”
The report recounts incidents in which the ACLU seemingly took the side of progressive values over free speech on campus, including in 2015 when activists and a journalism professor physically blocked a student journalist at the University of Missouri from taking photos and talking to demonstrators at a protest against racism on campus.
Two national ACLU officials applauded the “courageous” leadership of student activists and faculty members but made no mention of First Amendment rights.
The ACLU responded similarly after an incident at the University of Connecticut in 2019 in which two white students, walking home late at night, loudly repeated a racial slur and were arrested by university police and charged with ridicule on account of race. The ACLU of Connecticut demanded that the university hire ten black faculty and staff members and require a freshman course on ending racism on campus.
However, the group did not mention the First Amendment implications of arresting students for speech and instead asserted only that the police force is “an inherently white supremacist institution.”
The group’s move away from being a nonpartisan defender of free speech to an advocate for progressive values has drawn criticism from many, including David Goldberger, a lawyer who argued one of the group’s most famous cases defending the free speech rights of Nazis in the 1970s to march in Skokie, Ill.
He told the New York Times that during a 2017 luncheon he “got the sense it was more important for ACLU staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand on principle.”
At the event, a law professor claimed that the free speech rights of the far-right were not worthy of the group’s defense and that black people experienced offensive speech more viscerally than white allies, according to the report. An ACLU official also argued it was legitimate for his lawyers to decline to defend hate speech.
“Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind,” Goldberger said.
Where the group once defended the free speech rights of everyone from civil rights activists to the Ku Klux Klan, it instead spent much of the Trump administration more focused on leading the resistance against the 45th president. Its annual reports from 2016 to 2018 do not include any mention of the “First Amendment,” “free speech,” or college campuses anywhere.
While the ACLU’s budget has nearly tripled to more than $300 million and doubled its corps of lawyers since Trump was elected, the group still has just four lawyers specializing in free speech — the same number as a decade ago.
“Am I sorry I leaned into our opposition to Trump? Hell no,” said ACLU executive director Anthony Romero. “I’m asked, ‘Are we a free speech or racial justice organization?’ and I answer, ‘Yes.’ We are a domestic human rights organization.”