As I wrote almost two years ago,
The ACLU of old is, alas, no more. Gone is the organization so passionately devoted to civil liberties that it paid for a team of Jewish lawyers to defend literal Nazis’ right to free speech; in its place is an organ of the Democratic party whose main concern is keeping its cash flow as high as possible by parroting its primary donors’ beliefs (often in childish tweets repeating some a priori statement in all caps, over and over, without a word of justification), and never ever ever challenging those beliefs, no matter how anti-civil-rights and factually wrong they may be…
Unsurprisingly, free speech is the area in which ACLU’s position has degenerated most shamefully, because it’s no longer popular with their “progressive” authoritarian base. But fortunately, there’s a younger civil rights organization which is now expanding its remit to take up the ball ACLU has not merely dropped, but actively cast aside…and it’s doing so to the plaudits of former ACLU heavweights:
…The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is renaming itself the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and keeping the “FIRE” acronym as it launches a drive to promote greater acceptance of a diversity of views in the workplace, pop culture and elsewhere…the group’s president, Greg Lukianoff, said…FIRE has raised $28.5 million for a planned three-year, $75 million litigation, opinion research and public education campaign aimed at boosting and solidifying support for free-speech values…FIRE’s new expansion is…a challenge of sorts to the ACLU, which has faced criticism in recent years for drifting from its unapologetically pro-free-speech roots and taking a more direct…partisan [role]…Many of FIRE’s founders and backers are former leaders of the ACLU who have grown disillusioned with the group under its current executive director, Anthony Romero, who left the Ford Foundation to take over the storied civil liberties organization in 2001. In 2020, FIRE released Mighty Ira, a laudatory documentary film about Romero’s predecessor, Ira Glasser, focusing on the ACLU’s work from the 1970s through the 1990s. Glasser, who serves on a FIRE advisory board, said in an interview that he “strongly encouraged” FIRE to broaden its free-speech work in part because the ACLU seems to be abdicating that role…
I hope FIRE remains true to the ideals of free speech. Many of us gave up on the ACLU for filling that role long ago. It is essential to have groups capable of standing up to those whose mission it is to squelch any speech that disagrees with their partisan and ideological views.
As Alfred North Whitehead in his “Aims of Education” postulated many decades ago, what is needed is not revolution, which just eventually returns things to where they started, but a state of continual revolt. Hopefully FIRE and others committed to free speech are part of that continual revolt and stay in as long as they can, before they, too, in time, fall into the same dismal morass as the ACLU.
Partisanism is the norm these days; some idiot tried to post a comment about FIRE having “ties to dangerous far-right groups” because their defense of free speech is content-neutral, as any ethical civil rights group must be. Needless to say I deleted it in moderation; some people apparently haven’t got the message that I don’t allow schoolyard “culture war” propaganda here.
Accusations of “ties to dangerous far-right groups” bears substantual similarity to the accusations against the ACLU after it defended the Nazis marching in Skokie.
In my view, the ACLU’s defense of free speech in the Skokie case was its finest hour: the issue for the ACLU was free speech, not political ideology.
For years after that I continued my contributions to the ACLU.
Unfortunately the Skokie case was also the high water mark in the ACLU’s adherence to its mission to defend free speech.
Slowly the ACLU was taken over by “progressives” (or adherents to somesuch soi-disant ideology) who eventually changed the ACLU mission from litigation in defense of free speech to litigation for particular political ideologies.
Eventually I stopped contributing.
I haven’t yet seen the documentary Mighty Ira, but I expect it will be consistent with my recollections of the ACLU’s slow deterioration.
I wish FIRE the best!