The ACLU Goes SJW

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A few days ago, I came across an article from reason.com entitled “Leaked Internal Memo Reveals the ACLU Is Wavering on Free Speech [2].” It decries something that most on the Dissident Right are already quite aware of: that the ACLU is a Leftist organization which is now struggling to integrate its pro-civil liberties, pro-First Amendment mission with an illiberal, social justice agenda. 

Apparently, the ACLU brass had recently distributed to board members a secret memo marked “CONFIDENTIAL ATTORNEY CLIENT WORK PRODUCT,” which outlined the organization’s new case-selection guidelines. This memo was leaked to former board member Wendy Kaminer, who then wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal [3].

From Reason:

The American Civil Liberties Union will weigh its interest in protecting the First Amendment against its other commitments to social justice, racial equality, and women’s rights, given the possibility that offensive speech might undermine ACLU goals.

“Our defense of speech may have a greater or lesser harmful impact on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed,” wrote ACLU staffers in a confidential memo [4] obtained by former board member Wendy Kaminer.

Vox Day’s take [5] was spot on (emphasis mine):

This is why even left-wing luminaries like Jordan Peterson are beginning to be concerned about SJWs. It’s not that they are on our side, not in the slightest. They simply don’t want to be subsumed and devoured, but they will be, because nothing short of the confident right-wing nationalism they also reject is capable of resisting those who can play the equality card with more credibility than traditional liberals, let alone cucks and conservatives.

So yes, only “right-wing nationalism,” specifically, Right-wing ethno-nationalism, is the antidote for this particular brand of Left-wing poison. Vox’s “cucks and conservatives” can complain all they want about the Left, but if they also reject the one tried-and-true method of beating the Left then they really amount to nothing more than a class of bloviators willing to get comfortable in second place in exchange for an ideological consistency which only they care about. And we all know the reason for the conservative rejection of President Trump and everyone to the Right of him: people still known as ‘conservatives’ today are the remains of the Buckley conservatives and neocons of the 1980s and 1990s, a constituency consisting mainly of Jews and philo-Semitic, race-blind white gentiles. Anyone not in this mold (Joe Sobran, Pat Buchanan, Peter Brimelow, Steve Sailer, John Derbyshire, et al.) got drummed out of the movement. By 2015, those who remained became frightened by the surging, Trump-inspired ethnonationalism of white people and began to rethink and retool their so-called conservatism. By 2018, this amounted to much of the conservative political and intellectual classes rejecting the most conservative president we’ve had at least since Ronald Reagan.

They say they’re conservatives, but really they’re just liberals who like to chat about how well they understand economics. And when the real enemy rears its ugly head (i.e., race-conscious white identitarians like you and me, dear reader), well, you know in which direction they’re going to flee . . . and it ain’t to the Right.

Well, several versts ahead of them on this leftward trek back through our institutions is the ACLU. They are making a similar about-face as the conservatives, and, like the conservatives, are revealing that they really aren’t who they’ve been saying they were for the last century. Yes, a strong case can be made that the ACLU has always been a pro-communist [6], anti-American [7], anti-Christian [8] political advocacy group [9]. After all, it was a heavy hitter in the efforts to ban school prayer and public religious displays—and it was traditionalist Christians who suffered the most as a result. The ACLU also enthusiastically promotes unconstitutional abortion rights while being reluctant to support perfectly constitutional gun rights. A few years back it pressured a private country club to accept female members [10], which resulted in serious damages for the club [11]. More recently, the ACLU has been on the cutting edge of the knife forcing Christian bakers to bake cakes for gay weddings [12] and forcing normal citizens to share public restrooms with transgender people of the opposite sex [13].

But at least in the past they had taken stabs at impartiality, even if only to avoid embarrassment or opprobrium. For example, in 1969 the ACLU famously defended the right of the Ku Klux Klan to hold rallies [14], and in 1978 defended the right of American Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois [15] (something that was spoofed in the movie The Blues Brothers a few years later). They will also come to the defense of Christians or conservatives from time to time (even famous ones, like Rush Limbaugh [16]). It should also be remembered that the ACLU sided with the government’s handling of the Rosenberg trial back in 1953.

So despite its obvious Left-wing leanings, the ACLU had at least made a show of maintaining objective standards throughout its first century of existence. And who knows? Maybe among all the communists and America-haters there were a few true believers as well. This leaked memo however has changed all that. There will be no more play acting. The US Constitution will no longer serve as the benchmark for ACLU decision making. There is simply no other way to interpret its putting into writing that it will weigh freedom of speech, which is in the Constitution, against their desired goals of equality and justice, which aren’t. Keep in mind that this was a secret memo which was “distributed to select ACLU officials and board members, who were instructed not to share it,” according to Kaminer. The ACLU knew it was doing something wrong and went ahead with it anyway.

One can speculate that this change was the result of last summer’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA. The ACLU performed a similar flip flop there too. Initially, the ACLU of Virginia had supported the rally organizers’ right to hold their event and pressured [17] the city of Charlottesville to respect these rights. After the violence which occurred at the rally, however, the ACLU dropped the case [18], leaving Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler to fend for himself. Since then, the ACLU has gone through some soul-searching [19] to determine if white identitarians even deserve its services at all. The ACLU’s solution [20]? To no longer support ‘hate groups’ that protest while armed. Of course, this would mean the ACLU was wrong in the past to defend the Black Panthers and other militant non-white groups. Perhaps this new approach will prevent them from defending such odious groups in the future?

Then again, the ACLU’s problem is with ‘hate groups’ more than it is with guns. Perhaps it would defend rallies of armed blacks but not rallies of armed whites because they consider the latter a hate group and the former not. That would be a nice loophole, wouldn’t it? This is what worries me. The memo clearly states that the ACLU will weigh First Amendment rights against its commitments to social justice and racial equality. So if blacks and whites have unequal outcomes in America with whites on top, then blacks rallying against this inequality, even when armed, would be working in tandem with the ACLU’s now-stated goals. How could the ACLU not defend such a rally? How could the ACLU possibly smear their own allies as hate groups? Answer: they wouldn’t.

Whenever people talk about achieving ‘social justice’ or ‘racial equality’ what they’re really talking about is reducing the wealth, freedom, and influence of white people. That’s it. Whites do not look to blacks or any other group for ‘justice’ or ‘equality’. This SJW business only goes in one direction. So now that the ACLU has inadvertently tipped its (left) hand, perhaps we can zoom out a bit and rethink what the ACLU has been up to all these years.

What if, on top of (or instead of) being inherently anti-Christian or anti-American, the ACLU were inherently anti-white? What if racism against white people had been one of the organization’s primary motivating factors all along? Better yet, what if we take an evolutionary approach as Kevin MacDonald did in Culture of Critique and view the ACLU as a weapon one group of people have used to compete with another. Of course, we all know to whom I am referring here. Jews have always been overrepresented in the ACLU. They make up a disproportionate amount of its membership, donors, and leadership. They always have. Further, it stands to reason that the gentiles with whom they share the organization are as philo-Semitic as they are. Indeed, while the ACLU may have defended anti-Semites in the past, have there ever been examples of intra-organizational anti-Semitism at the ACLU? For example, have ACLU board members ever adopted a no-Jews policy or excluded Jewish members from positions of power or influence because they are Jewish? The only thing I can think of would fall under what MacDonald calls “crypsis,” i.e., making a Jewish organization appear less Jewish to avoid anti-Semitism. According to Benjamin Ginsburg in his excellent The Fatal Embrace, the American Jewish Committee pressured the ACLU in the early 1950s to deliberately discriminate against Jews in the ACLU by using a gentile plaintiff and attorney in its successful case against a New York state law which allowed for students to be released from school for religious instruction.

(As an amusing aside, the two gentiles they picked in this case were named Tessim Zorach and Kenneth Greenawalt. So one has to wonder how good these particular Jews really were at this crypsis thing back in 1952 when the Zorach v. Clausen case happened.)

The point here is that the ACLU is and has always been a safe place for Jews. And if, according to our evolutionary analysis, the Jews were using the ACLU to gain an evolutionary advantage over white gentiles, then does it not follow that their white gentile colleagues who were in the thrall of Jews were doing so as well? The near-suicidal antipathy between educated and working-class whites is certainly a common and well-documented thing. In his chapter dealing with Paul Elmer More in The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk writes:

Like a great old tree, our society has been dying at the top. The educated classes are in danger of turning traitors to the civilization which sustains them—deluded by humanitarianism, perhaps ignorant of their own proper duties.

Couldn’t one describe white gentiles in the ACLU in the same way? They either completely lack ethnocentrism (or are filled with ethno-masochism) and so join in when alien ethnocentrists attack their own kind. They are “traitors,” you see. That is what traitors do.

I understand that this evolutionary hypothesis is both impossible to prove and impossible to disprove. Who knows exactly how true it is? I’m sure one can find plenty of counter-examples throughout the century-long history of the ACLU, but it is hard to argue that on the whole the ACLU has been good for white Americans during this time. Through its unending litigation, the ACLU has pushed the central white religions out of mainstream culture; it has promoted racist policies which benefit non-whites at the expense of whites; it has made it more difficult for white Americans to have access to firearms; it has led the cheers over the right for white women to abort their children; it celebrates and defends the rights of gays and trans people who are the least biologically successful elements of the white population; and it advocates on behalf of non-white illegal immigrants in America. And ever since Charlottesville it shuns white people who identify as white, while not shunning other races for doing the same thing.

It seems that the ACLU opposes whatever is evolutionarily good for whites and supports whatever is evolutionarily bad for whites. How could anyone look at the history of the ACLU and conclude that whites in America have benefited from it? How could anyone look at the history of the ACLU and conclude that Jews and other non-whites in America haven’t benefited from it?

Thus, whether it’s true or not, the evolutionary approach becomes historiographically useful since it explains the past pretty consistently. But can it explain the future? What’s its predictive power? Well, not to be cute or anything, but it is too soon to tell. Regardless, here’s my prediction:

Barring another civil war or formation of a bona fide white ethnostate on the North American continent, the ACLU will slowly ascribe greater importance to social justice and racial equality as the white demographic majority in the United States continues to dwindle. Then, around the time that majority is broken, it will announce that social justice and racial equality have become more important than civil liberties. At that point, they will not defend any group of white people assembling for any reason, armed or not, because they will view any group of whites which excludes nonwhites as a potential threat to their precious social justice and racial equality. These, of course, will outweigh a white person’s right to peaceful assembly or free speech (let alone to bear arms). And as the various non-white populations gain demographic control over the United States and strip more and more rights away from whites, the ACLU will not lift a finger to stop it.

Then, once whites have been finished off as a relevant cultural force in a dying America, it will occur to the ACLU to change its name to what it should have been all along: the American Social Justice Union. They will become the ASJU.

Only then, after achieving complete victory over whites, will the ACLU finally have the luxury of being honest.