The injunction is made, who cares where it comes down,
“That's not my department,” says the ACLU
after Tom Lehrer
The habit of non-thought on the left that holds the ACLU is beyond any kind of criticism is really stupid in so far as they have been instrumental in a list of things which have made things worse. They, in their "free speech" absolutist purity have:
- Supported Supreme Court rulings which have led to the most effective means of propaganda, the mass media, to lie with impunity about liberal politicians. The corporate networks who control what most people hear as something like news is certainly not in control of liberals and they have used their impune "free speech" to tell the most outrageous lies about such politicians as the Kennedys, the Clintons, and a steady stream of Democratic challengers to Republicans. The ruling of 1964 allowing the media to lie has had the effect of steadily driving American politics to the right, putting ever more right-wing people on the Supreme Court, forcing even liberal politicians into governing ever farther to the right.
- Supported the rights of fascists, Nazis, white supremacists to rally and organize even as those groups and their propaganda corrupt people into opposing equality and democracy and target entire races and ethnicities, LGBT people, and, of course, Jews, with messages up to and including incitement to murder.
From the real life results of that, its impact in the lives of real people, in our politics, in the damage it has done to egalitarian democracy, I've concluded:
- Anyone who claims that a book, such as the Turner Diaries, which was written by the Nazi, William L. Pierce to foment the murders of those it targets, is not identified as such, beyond any rational doubt and which has, in fact, inspired fascists and Nazis and white supremacists to murder people and, so dangerous speech which any rationally governed democracy would rightly suppress, must not be because a bunch of white slave owners in the 1780s wrote the First Amendment in ridiculously vague and inspecific language have forfeited their right to be taken seriously or to have their opinions on such matters respected by reasoning people of good will.
- Any group which made the various and shifting stands on the rallies in Charlottesville, both the one last weekend and the earlier one in July, talking out of both sides of its mouth to enable the KKK and Nazis, minimizing the potential for people to get killed in the way the ACLU of Virginia did, is a group which has forfeited all of the trust that people have put in it through the ACLU's successful propagandizing of the left which it has played such a role in harming.
The repute the ACLU is held in is based on some idiotic game of calling its refusal to responsibly admit that there are ideas which are dangerous to egalitarian democracy and that enabling those ideas, especially those which tell lies that end up in getting people killed is some kind of perverted idea of a virtue.
You can only take that as a virtue if you are part of a group, mostly rich, white, mostly male mostly lawyers who are generally not the kind of people targeted by Nazis, fascists, white supremacists, the KKK, etc. and, what do you know, the members of the legal profession, the judicial class, comprise mostly those kinds of people. The members of the Supreme Court have been, by an overwhelming majority, NOT the kinds of people targeted by violent hate groups. The mostly straight, white, male, upper-middle class to affluent members of the Supreme Court, listening to lawyers who are mostly the same, reading past members of courts and law scholars, mostly the same, are the ones who strike the poses and make the rulings that constitute the legal tradition in this country. I think we have reached the point where the Supreme Court poses the greatest threat to egalitarian democracy. That was on display in the court decision allowing the Nazis to rally in accordance with their preference over the demonstrable threat to public safety that posed, on the basis of the similar event in July.
I am sure, based on that long tradition that such lawyers and such judges, feel some frisson of virtuousness when they advocate that position and hand down such rulings, buoyed by the language of Holmes and others. I even think they might feel some perverse satisfaction in having committed that action most bizarrely held as a virtue, permitted the most dangerous and potentially murderous speech by people who held the most murderously anti-democratic of insane ideas. I can only imagine such a crazy idea being considered a virtue by people who didn't have any reason to suspect they would be the ones targeted by such people, no sane person who had that expectation would hold it to be any kind of good or necessary thing. Anyone who is the target of such speech would have to rationally consider it a clear and present danger to their lives and rights and freedom.. And any rational person would consider a judge or Justice who permitted that, any lawyer who advocated them endangering them and their loved one evil and ready to sacrifice them on their altar of First Amendment purity.
The pose that judges can't determine those obvious things, that they can't judge the character of those things and their dangers is ridiculous, as that is something they do in far harder cases whenever large amounts of money are contested on highly technical issues. The case of the Nazis, the KKK, fascists, white supremacists and others such as now have a place in the White House, and those they intend to deprive of their rights, even those enumerated in the Constitution, even of their right as full citizens of the United states, even their lives is not a hard one. It is only when the rights and lives of minority groups is targeted that the courts and lawyers play so dumb as to claim that it is dangerous for their judgement to be trusted.
What I think we need, if they are so stupid, so incapable of giving us and our rights safety is a new set of laws with lawyers and judges who aren't so stupid and incapable of putting today's egalitarian democracy, the equal rights of living people above their long standing pretenses and traditions and the words of 18th century rich, white, male, slave holders. Obviously the ones ruling us into violence and fascism aren't up to that job.
The left needs alternative representation, the left needs to dump the ACLU.
Update: Way, way too little, way, way too late. In the wake of Charlottesville, the ACLU has decided it won't advocate for the Nazis and KKK if they don't promise on their Hitler Junger honor to leave their guns home. Gee, you wonder why it took them that long to take that ineffective baby step.
Dump the ACLU, its basic ideology is never going to change and it will always damage egalitarian democracy because that's not what they really care about.
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