Ah, another self-identified conservative standing up for the civil-liberties principles of the ACLU! As a longstanding ACLU member myself, I always find that heartwarming. How long have you been a member, Shodan?
I wonder how many of the non-liberals who loudly claim to be so outraged about some liberals’ questioning the ACLU’s defense of First Amendment rights for hate groups have ever given even one thin dime to the ACLU to support our work, or voted for a legislative reform measure that we advocated.
Liberals who occasionally disagree with us about free speech but support us in general are still way better allies than conservatives who snarl and thump their chests about the importance of preserving free-speech rights for hate groups but don’t do jack-shit to assist our defense of civil liberties in any other way.
Okay, let me put it another way. Let’s say we have an unfair fight. Do you really think that getting rid of your main advantage - that those with the power of purse, polity, and pulpit cannot use those powers to silence you regardless of how right or wrong they think your ideas are - is going to help you? Or do you think that, to the Trump administration, “hate speech” just means “Jews will not replace us” and not “Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon”? Why don’t you order that list I posed a few posts ago from most to least likely to be censored under the current administration if we weaken free speech rights?
In reality, if we limit “racist” to “people who actually believe black people should have fewer rights” or "people who and not “people who voted for Donald Trump for literally any reason” or “people who (wrongly) think the police aren’t biased against black people”, do you seriously think that the racists have the majority of the power, be it purse, polity, or pulpit? I mean, really? Being a white supremacist is something that gets you doxxed and blacklisted, in the same way being gay used to. Admit publicly to being racist and most people stop associating with you. Yeah, there are notable exceptions, and yeah, racism is still a problem, but you’re winning this fight, and you’re winning it because you’re right, and because in a free speech environment, ideas that are right win.
We’re playing fast and loose with a bunch of super unclear, poorly-defined concepts. What even is racism? This sounds like a stupid question, but it really isn’t. Similarly: what is discrimination? Probably not this:
I don’t know what your definition of “discrimination” is, but based on this I think it’s probably nonsense. How are words discrimination?
That is, I think free speech is worth protecting, and I think the ACLU does a bang-up job protecting free speech. BUt I don’t think it’s self-evidently worth protecting, and this isn’t one of those issues where the opposing viewpoint is obviously unreasonable. I’ll come down on the side of free speech, but I don’t mind folks disagreeing and don’t think it’s a sign of stupidity to disagree.
For some reason, today when I logged onto the board, I got the feeling hard-core NRA types must have. Except instead of “You’ll pry my guns from my cold dead hands!” it’s “My words!”
I hate Illinois Nazis, but I defend their right to speech, because I think people have a right to be verbally awful human beings. I don’t defend their right to plow cars into crowds or beat people with pipes, but I’m pretty sure the ACLU wasn’t working to defend their ‘right’ to that, just to hold their nasty hate gathering. I hate to say it, but there are a lot of white supremacist gatherings where nobody is killed or assaulted, just people holding an asshole parade.
If we outlaw “hate speech,” then it’s a slippery slope (oh lord, I am becoming an NRA member) to speech being declared “hate speech” because it’s politically expedient. Since the concept is so nebulous, it just seems too easy to abuse. I’d rather let some moron Nazi let the whole world know he’s a moron who owns a tiki torch than lose the right to protest on subjects that are important to me, subjects which others might find offensive, such as gay rights or the right of reproductive choice.
Irrelevant -we’re not talking about what the government chooses to censor, but what the ACLU chooses to defend.
Definitely. My evidence: the decidedly race-skewed statistics for things like imprisonment, arrests, police shootings, etc…
This a relatively recent phenomenon, and it wasn’t because of the ACLU, it was because of BLM and subsequent movements.
Right…and
when you’re winning is the best time to quit, right?
No, that very much is *not *true. Just the loudest/most popular/best-funded ideas.
Oh, “racism” isn’t a bright-line clear-cut term, hence we can’t ever discuss it or object to cases that aren’t in any way unclear? Fuck that noise!?
I disagree
I should give a fuck what you think because…?
Hate speech is a form of discrimination. And if you think “hate speech” doesn’t exist, you’re either too dumb or too in denial to be worth talking to, after all.
Because “hate speech” is a catch-all term under which just about anything can be wedged - all depending on who is in power at the moment.
You don’t think that many people on the political right would consider Black Lives Matter, feminists, Bernie Bros, gun-control lobbyists, etc. to be “hate groups” or promoting “hate speech?”
Well, I think what I said was that the cost of free-speech absolutism is disproportionately borne by the disadvantaged. As in, being really hard-core about free speech for everybody tends to impact disadvantaged groups more than others, because protected hate speech against disadvantaged groups can have very negative consequences.
However, I think you’re overlooking the extent to which the net effect of freedom of speech is more of a benefit to disadvantaged groups than a burden. I think the “balance” that our First Amendment discussion really needs is between the comparatively tiny efforts to support free speech in particular cases involving hate groups, and the vast majority of ACLU’s First Amendment activities to support free speech in general.
I am not convinced this distinction will stand up if the ACLU embraces a policy of selectively choosing what kinds of free speech to defend. Many anti-hate-speech activists seem to share this apparent belief that the effective protections on free speech remain the same for everybody else whether or not the ACLU decides to file briefs supporting the free-speech rights of hate groups.
But why should we think this will be the case? IANAL, but I do know that courts can evaluate the validity of a plaintiff’s or defendant’s claims based partly on what they’ve said in other contexts. (For example, the courts are skeptical of arguments that the Trump Administration “travel ban” is not religious discrimination, partly because of remarks made previously by Trump about the need for a “Muslim ban”.)
So if the ACLU agrees that free-speech rights can be applied selectively to exclude certain groups, ISTM that that could have consequences for its credibility in arguing for free-speech rights for other groups. As the national legal director of the ACLU pointed out in a September 28 article,
Overall, the big winners in this controversy are anti-civil-liberties conservatives. They promote and amplify the “liberal infighting” meme, they boost the signal on the “free speech for Nazis” message, while not doing a damn thing to support civil liberties in any other respect. And then they sit back and laugh when many pro-equality liberals turn away from the ACLU as “enablers of hate speech”, and consequently civil liberties in general (especially for disadvantaged groups) are disastrously weakened as a result of diminished support for their defense.
“We” have had gun control discussions within the NRA, and among 2nd Amendment supports. You object to people reaching their own conclusions, or to people rejecting your position. Best of luck with that position.
It appears that one of the foremost organizations supporting free speech, the ACLU, is under attack from within. It seems that social justice whiners have infiltrated the organization. The older generations, those who believe that the best defense against unwanted free speech is more free speech, will be retired/pushed aside, and a new generation of biased/prejudiced/politically-motivated progressives will take over the ACLU’s leadership.
If you can’t rely on rights when it comes to defending them for people you don’t like, you cannot rely on rights. The whole point of the ACLU is that it defends the right to free speech. And people who aren’t unpopular generally don’t need too much defending of their rights. By all means, pick your battles, but that doesn’t seem to be what most people here are advocating.
Since you declined to define “racism” and “discrimination”, let alone “racist” (is the guy saying “I notice and am working to address my reflexive anti-black bias” racist?), it’s really hard to actually talk about these things. I’m kind of at a loss as to how this is evidence that racists hold most of the power in this country. It’s like saying, “I’m wet, therefore it must be raining” - that, or you’re just standing in a river. These are complicated issues that don’t have easy answers like “most of the country is racist”. How complicated? Scott Alexander spent some 4,500 words examining the best available evidence and came away with this conclusion:
There seems to be a strong racial bias in capital punishment and a moderate racial bias in sentence length and decision to jail.
There is ambiguity over the level of racial bias, depending on whose studies you want to believe and how strictly you define “racial bias”, in police stops, police shootings in certain jurisdictions, and arrests for minor drug offenses.
There seems to be little or no racial bias in arrests for serious violent crime, police shootings in most jurisdictions, prosecutions, or convictions.
Now, leaving aside for the moment whether or not you agree with that. Read that article. Have you put that degree of thought into this issue? Have you spent that much time researching this?
There are plenty of reasons - other than people believing in white supremacy or wanting black people to have less rights right now - why black people get fucked by the justice system. Bullshit sentencing laws passed down decades ago. Black poverty leading to more black people being forced into plea bargains to avoid lengthy stays that they could avoid with bail. This is not even good evidence of the racists winning specifically within the justice system, let alone in society at large.
Right. This is why white supremacy has gone from a fact of life supported by basically everyone of any influence, power, or wealth, to the kind of thing that gets you removed from any position of social or moral authority.
I mean, we’re probably in agreement that Breitbart is pretty fucking racist, right? But it’s all dog whistles. It’s all “look at what this black person did today” and “look at the fake hate crimes”. How many times have they publicly espoused their white nationalist stance? I count… zero. Now how do you think it would go for them if they came right out and said, “We at Breitbart believe that the white man is superior to the negro”? I think it would go pretty fucking poorly for them. I think they’d instantly lose any financial support, most of their readership, and a solid portion of their staff.
This is also why Christianity, an extremely loud, popular, well-funded idea, has constantly been ceding ground to skeptical atheism (a small, weak, not-well-funded movement) all over the west. That’s where I first heard this idea - the internet is where religions come to die, precisely because of free speech.
Sometimes bad ideas succeed - for a while. But if you want a bad idea to die, there is no better way than exposing it to a free-speech environment. And if you want a bad idea to fester, there’s no better way than restricting free speech.
Is the entire US justice system racist? Is that “clear-cut”? What, in this context, does “racist” even mean? Seriously. These are not easy questions (well, okay, the second one is pretty easy, the answer is "no it is not clear-cut and depends heavily on definitions), no matter how much you wish they were.
That’s not a relevant distinction - the ACLU purports to be defending people’s rights against government incursion. That’s why they intervened when the city tried to deny the Nazis a permit to protest, and also why the head of the Virginia ACLU complained when the cops ignored violence (allegedly against the Nazis) so as to get an excuse to declare it an illegal assembly. Then the Nazis showed up the next night, better armed so as to be better prepared to engage in violence, and things went as they did.
No, it is much older than that. It dates AFAICT back to the 1960s, when white supremacists were widely discredited and the FBI wrecked the Klan. Or even earlier than that, when Superman took them on.
It’s interesting that you don’t think anti-racism is winning because it is the best idea, but only because it is louder and has more money.
Stealing this from reddit, because it’s a great take. With regards to the activists’ statements about racial justice being undermined:
I don’t believe this is a tenable standard to hold the organization to. I don’t want to resort to facile quips, but it is called the American Civil Liberties Union, not the American Social, Racial, and Economic Equality Union. Not every social issue exists on a “blue tribe” and “red tribe” spectrum (and those that do are very rarely split so conveniently). It is clear that a lot of people are frustrated that things are not so binary, and here we see that there are a lot of people that seem to want to impose this very literal “either you are with us 100% on board with is in every way or you are against us” absolutism on the world around them. Even if you are very firmly in “Blue Tribe” ideologically, securing Civil Liberties is in no way the whole of what is necessary to bring about real societal change. I do understand the desire to cling to a single organization that you believe will fulfill the dream of having a more just and equitable society, but that is naive, destructively so for reasons others here have articulated quite well already.
When the ACLU defends the rights of the Religious to protest against abortions, yea, it empowers those people disproportionately. When the ACLU defends the rights of children to not be censured by their school? No, sadly it does not really broadly empower minorities to overcome racial boundaries in their careers. When the ACLU defends the rights of white nationalists who are peacefully assembling in protest? Yes, unfortunately, it does empower white nationalists, and quite likely to the detriment of broad progressive sensibilities in the short term. When Fred Phelps shows up across the street from a soldiers funeral, I would be skeptical that this level of speech is even plausibly “beneficial” to anyone whatsoever.
But that doesn’t matter, because rights are fundamentally not a weapon for groups of people to beat each other with by quibbling over whose speech rights it is fashionable to protect. No, our society isn’t a level playing field and that is an issue in our society (arguments there may be over to what degree, and to what end). There are plenty of other tools at society’s disposal to combat white nationalism, but denying them their rights absolutely should not be one of them.
Policy should not appear one-sided. There are legitimate downsides to free speech. But the downsides to reduced free speech are far, far worse.
This is nonsense. The powerful and the privileged don’t need their rights protected by law. Without the protection of free speech, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Betty Friedan, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Erin Brockovich and many others wouldn’t have been able to get their message out. Many would have ended up in prison if they’d tried, as happens routinely in countries that have no such protection.
No, it’s not nonsense, and I say this as a diehard free speech defender.
You’re mixing up “the cost of freedom of speech is disproportionately laid on the disadvantaged”, which is a valid argument for the reasons outlined below, with “freedom of speech is ultimately more costly than beneficial for the disadvantaged”, which is an argument that AFAICT nobody here is making.
Yes, free speech does have a cost that’s ultimately borne primarily by disadvantaged groups, because speech against disadvantaged groups tends to have the most harmful consequences. Anti-black, anti-woman, anti-LGBQT rhetoric frequently leads to real live people getting beat up, for example, or even murdered.
We need to make the case for free speech as an overall net positive for everybody without shutting our eyes to the fact that specific instances of free speech often have very negative consequences in the short term, and that those negative consequences are worst for members of disadvantaged groups. Principled defense of civil liberties does not require us to piss on people’s legs and tell them it’s raining.
Free speech may or may not be a fundamental right, but it is the fundamental purpose of the ACLU. It’s the obligation they have taken upon themselves, and I respect that immensely. Personally, I believe that Nazis should not be allowed free speech, but I’m glad that something like the ACLU is there to oppose people who think like me.