The ACLU of Virginia did defend the rights of white supremacists to organize in Charlottesville in 2017. I believe the resulting violence triggered some aclu soul searching and I’m not sure where the organization landed on defending the free speech of nazis and the like. Speaking for myself, I hope they keep to their principles.
I've been a long time supporter of the ACLU. While they're being politicized right now as being anti-Trump, the thing I admire most about them is their consistency in fighting for the rights of everyone. They stick to their principles of free speech and human equality no matter how unpopular the issue or unsavory their client.
A good example is back in the 1930s when the ACLU simultaneously defended the rights of blacks on behalf of the NAACP at the same time as they were fighting for the rights of the Klu Klux Klan to hold rallies calling for the abolition of those rights.
The strength of your convictions are only tested at the extremes. Do you still believe in free speech when it's coming from neo-Nazis? The ACLU do and I deeply respect them for that.
I'm deeply disappointed with the decision by the Virginia ACLU to legitimize the rally in Charlottesville in the name of free speech. The ACLU is not naive. They must know that many white supremacists are domestic terrorists. Why do they mindlessly support their "right to assemble"?
ACLU position on this is also interesting. They actually fought in court for the permit for the rally.
"The First Amendment is a critical part of our democracy, and it protects vile, hateful, and ignorant speech. For this reason, the ACLU of Virginia defended the white supremacists’ right to march. But we will not be silent in the face of white supremacy. Those who do stand silent enable it. That includes our president."
> The backlash has already spurred other ACLU chapters to declare that they don’t believe free-speech protections apply to events like the one in Charlottesville, and led the ACLU’s national director, Anthony Romero, to declare the group will no longer defend the right to protest when the protesters want to carry guns.
> “Until now,” lawyer and blogger Scott Greenfield wrote, the ACLU has “never quite come out and announced that they will refuse to defend a constitutional right. This announcement says that when someone seeks to exercise two rights at the same time, the ACLU is outta there.”
And their internal policy document listing out things that might stay their hand in an otherwise vigourous defense of free speech:
> * Whether the speaker seeks to engage in or promote violence
> * Whether the speakers seek to carry weapons
> * The impact of the proposed speech and the impact of its suppression
> * The extent to which we are able to make clear that even as we defend a speaker’s right to say what they want, we reserve our right to condemn the views themselves
> * The extent to which we are able to mitigate any harm to our mission, values, priorities, and/or relationships
I live in Charlottesville and the ACLU caught a lot of flak for supporting the KKK in a rally earlier that summer before the August 12 Unite the Right rally. When they backed down was the first time I started to pay attention that maybe some of the criticism against the left's assault on speech was legitimate.
(For the record, I am very far left, but from a time when true free speech was a sacred left value.)
The ACLU always gets attacked when they defend reprehensible free speech. The trouble with free speech of course is that it doesn't need defending when it's popular and accepted. So naturally they're going to take some heat for this.
Charlottesville was a bloody mess and mix-up of different factors though. Some were nut jobs who were exercising their right to free speech. Some were violent and inciting riots. The exact same applies to the counter-protestors. Groups of people in public are always messy amalgams that usually don't have one clear goal and message, so you'll always be able to paint the best of them with the actions of the worst of them. It works that way on both sides.
The ACLU? The group that sued the city of Charlottesville so that the fascist "Unite the Right" rally could happen in a place that the city said would be hard to maintain order/peace instead of in a nearby park where the city had already issued a permit, as a result of which, the fascists killed someone?
Again, I have thought and reflected and dug. I donated to the ACLU for many years. I used to believe that they engaged in a noble cause of protecting the right of people with unpopular opinions to express their unpopular opinions. I used to believe that protecting the rights of the Nazis in Skokie protected all our rights. I now believe that it primarily protects the rights of the alt-right in Charlottesville to demonstrate and to kill, and I now believe that the ACLU's free speech advocacy, however well-intentioned, isn't good for society and leaves us all less free. And the last time they called me to ask if I'd "resume" my membership, I told them they have blood on their hands.
If the lawsuit the ACLU filed (Kessler v. Charlottesvile) hadn't happened, the fascists would still have been equally able to express their opinions. The city just wanted the rally in a different spot to reduce the risk of violence. In retrospect, the city was right, the ACLU was wrong, and Kessler got the violence he wanted.
I don't think there is any genuine danger (especially thanks to modern communications technology) to the ability of fascists to advocate for fascism, to make sure that the policy proposals of fascism remain known to the general public. What remains is a genuine danger to the ability of fascists to actually engage in fascism, which they call "exercising free speech," and they dupe organizations like the ACLU into helping them with it.
(Note I'm not claiming the ACLU is intentionally fascist. Outside of free speech advocacy, they do a lot of effective work to oppose fascism. But on this particular issue, their effect, regardless of intent, is to support fascism, and their notable work is supporting fascists who think their right of "free speech" has been violated.)
I intentionally keep my filter bubble quite broad. I read far-right forums and they love free speech. I read centrists and they think free speech is a great idea and will some day defend the. And I see far-left activists who gain nothing from the concept.
If you have an example of the font of free speech actually serving to protect any rights beyond the right to enact fascism, I'd be very curious. My position could certainly evolve further, but this is where it is now.
(BTW, it took me a long time to reply because HN blocked me with the "You're posting too fast. Please slow down." message, because I got downvoted too much in the last few minutes. If you think free speech is a virtue, please email the moderators and tell them that they should remove that feature and also stop greying out downvoted comments - downvoting for disagreement is explicitly permitted on HN, and the last thing an advocate of free speech would want is unpopular ideas to be literally unreadable! But the fact remains that HN is a better forum than e.g. 4chan because of its censorship mechanisms, and that's in fact one of the things that makes me believe free speech is not a virtue - even though I'm frequently one of the targets of that censorship because I frequently post unpopular ideas. I genuinely believe this community's ability to censor me makes it better.)
In particular, it's worth remembering the ACLU was backing the protestors at Charlottesville when it happened. They felt like they had blood on their hands.
I think hyperpartisans overstates the case with the ACLU. Partisans might be fairer. The ACLU has historically defended everybody, including literal Nazis. They decided to exercise judgement in deciding who to support because someone died who might not have if not for their action[1].
[1]: The chain of causation is that Charlottesville wants to unconstitutionally limit the Unite the Right protest, ACLU threatens litigation, protest goes ahead, protest supporter kills protest opponent. Obviously the ACLU isn't the main one responsible, but I don't think it was crazy for this to prompt reevaluation.
They sure did, but they've changed. They helped obtain permits for the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, which devolved into a MAGA riot that ended with a white supremacist murdering one protestor and injuring 35 others. Since then the ACLU has become far more squeamish about their clients and has been willing to compromise on their historical principles.
All the way back in “the 1930s, the ACLU started to engage in work combating police misconduct and supporting Native American rights.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Liberties_Union So it’s been about far more than free speech for the vast majority of it’s history. And it still defends such causes, one example is even in the article:
“In August 2017, officials in Charlottesville, Va., rescinded a permit for far-right groups to rally downtown in support of a statue to the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Officials instead relocated the demonstration to outside the city’s core.
The A.C.L.U. of Virginia argued that this violated the free speech rights of the far-right groups and won, preserving the right for the group to parade downtown.“
So while it’s scope has increased over time which has created increased internal tension, that’s always been the case. “The A.C.L.U. has in fact often gloried in its internal contentions. It split over decisions to represent the Nazis in the 1930s, the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s, and the Nazis in the 1970s.”
Frankly the organization has never been filled 100% with defenders of free speech the Twitter age combined with a wider scope has brought this internal tension to the general public. The important work they do is generally in the courtroom which is far more focused.
Again - I disagree with the view that they "gave up" their values, and I don't want to live in a world where every political ideology needs its own non-profit, either. I think the ACLU can and should be an organization that defends the right to freedom of speech of everyone regardless of political affiliation.
I'm arguing that their lawsuit in Charlottesville didn't actually serve the goals of protecting civil rights or defending principles which are important to protect other people's civil rights. I'm arguing that the Charlottesville case was different from the Illinois Nazis case - Unite the Right wasn't primarily about speech, it was about violence, and the speech acts that Kessler et al. wanted to do would have worked just fine in the other park, which would have been logistically easier from a public safety perspective. I'm arguing that if Charlottesville's original decision had stood and established precedent that somehow later applied to a "good guy" protest, that would be okay, because of the specific facts of the Charlottesville case.
I'm arguing that the ACLU was right to take on the Illinois Nazis case, and would be right to take it on again today. You don't need to convince me of that. (If the ACLU has somehow managed to get itself into a position where it's not willing to do that anymore and it hasn't convinced people like me that it's learned its lesson from Unite the Right, then they're truly incompetent.)
It is of course a little difficult to separate the idea of protecting civil rights from political ideology: the idea that civil rights are worth protecting is a political ideology itself! But I think the broader point, which I agree with, is that you should be willing to protect the civil rights of people who do not think that civil rights are worth protecting.
I think this is an important point. I found the Intercept's article[1] about the ACLU defending Charlottesville protesters' free speech right pretty interesting in that regard: Some people insult and blame the ACLU for defending free speech rights of even the most infamous people, but as the article points out, people fail to understand that if a precedent is set on them, it's diminishing everyone's rights.
The ACLU understands this, which is why they defend such people.
I'm a long time ACLU supporter and don't think it lost its way at all. A key turning point was the Charlottesville protests in 2017, where the ACLU worked to support the neo-Nazis to march. It ended up being a violent fascist demonstration, not a polite and legal exercise of free speech. The neo-Nazis killed a person and assaulted many others. In response a bunch of ACLU folks reasonably decided that maybe neo-Nazis were the larger threat to free expression and my main reaction was "good, about time".
The specific incident was the Charlottesville protests and consequent murders by white supremacists. They had stepped in to defend Jason Kessler's argument against moving the protest (where the city wanted to move the protest because they correctly identified the violence that would occur) and made a ton of PR gaffes during this time. As a result the ACLU ended up losing a ton of support both externally and internally because they had played a part in an event that was obviously going to turn violent.
> In 1978, the ACLU succcessfully [sic] defended the right of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, a community populated by Holocaust survivors. But in 2018, following the ACLU’s successful litigation to obtain a permit for white supremacists to march in Charlottesville, Virginia, which ended in death and disaster, the ACLU issued new guidelines. Citing concerns about “limited resources” and “the potential effect on marginalized groups,” the organization cautioned its lawyers to take special care when considering whether to represent groups whose “values are contrary to our values.”
First off. A professor writes a mere 1,000 word article for a major publication and it has typos. Yikes.
Second, the author points to action the ACLU took to defend the right of white supremacists to march in Charlottesville in 2018 and then tries to say they've changed position but doesn't demonstrate that with any proof of similar action or inaction -- just words. IMO actions are more important than words and if the ACLU's actions are still in line with the mission you say you agree with, this is much ado about nada.
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