The Misguided Attacks on ACLU | Hacker News Reader

The Misguided Attacks on ACLU

theintercept.com

55 pointskushti54 comments

I had almost entirely forgotten about shanley, who's been on a one-sided jihad against HN since time immemorial. But apparently she chimed in with the thoughtful tweet:

>FUCK THE ACLU

>ACLU CELEBRATES CAUSING DEATH TO ANTI-FASCISTS AT THE HANDS OF NAZI AND KKK

>"FREE SPEECH" IS FASCISM

> >"FREE SPEECH" IS FASCISM

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength

The thing about this assembly is that if Antifa hadn't shown up, and it was just the southern nationalists, National Socialists, white ethnonationalists, Alt-Righters, Proud Boys, and Oathkeepers[0] who planned the assembly, and the members of the peaceful counter-assembly, no fights would have broken out, and some people would walk away just looking very misguided.

Instead somebody, unclear who (Edit: now clear who, see replies), rammed a car into a woman who is now dead; and there was enough ruckus to activate the National Guard.

The clear problem here is precisely that speech is being equated to violence, and folks take that to imply that unsavoury speech warrants a violent response.

[0]: https://twitter.com/UR_Ninja/status/896146435850108928

> Instead somebody, unclear who, rammed a car into a woman who is now dead

"A man accused of plowing a car into a crowd of activists here — killing one person and injuring 19 — long sympathized with Nazi views and had stood with a group of white supremacists hours before Saturday’s bloody crash." (Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/one-dead-as-car-strikes...)

New information to me, thanks for adding instead of insinuating.

It's not "unclear who": It's James Alex Fields, Jr., a registered Republican from Ohio who owned the car doing the ramming, who told his mother he was going to a rally for Trump, and was photographed in the line of unite-the-right protestors carrying a shield with a well-known fascist symbol on it. All this was known and undisputed 24 hours ago. Police have arrested him and charged him with 2nd degree murder.

And it's not just "into a woman", it was into a densely packed crowd of counter-protestors. 1 woman, Heather Heyer, was killed, and 19 were injured.

How do you know that the vehicular homicide would not have happened had Antifa not shown up? What evidence do you have to indicate this?

I suppose because the event received so much attention the whole "it never happened/fake news" trick from the playbook doesn't work, so it's time to blame the victim and insinuate that it was a false flag event.

I don’t blame the protesters for standing up, shouting, and using other tactics of dissent against the white supremacists. This was the third time this has happened in Charlottesville this summer. Richard Spencer’s torches in May, KKK in July, and this mess yesterday. Ignoring them didn’t work.

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.

I would be careful of assigning false equivalency considering a domestic terrorist act occurred against the counter-protesters.

Was Reginald Denny’s attack during the LA riots considered a terrorist act? How about the Baltimore riots? We are really quick to label “domestic terror” when it suits our politics but rarely is it used to describe events such as the Baltimore riots or the Michael Brown riots. There is a double standard and I think that double standard is why we get a president like Trump. People are sick of being labeled racists, bigots or “extremists” because they don’t agree with left wing politics.

No excuse for white supremists of course, but there ought not be an excuse for anti-white rhetoric either. The very term “White privilege” is racist to the core. Ideas like “black lives matter” or “La Raza” are racist by definition.

Intentionally driving a several thousand pound death machine into a group of people with the intent to harm, murder, and frighten them doesn't deserve any other label.

I can't make any comment on the Baltimore or LA riots - I don't know enough.

Terrorism is "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims".

It doesn't have any specific ethnic label attached to it.

An idea like "black lives matter" is obviously not racist by definition.

No, sorry, there is really no equivalence between the two groups. The right wing marchers weren't rammed repeatedly by a speeding muscle car. They didn't suffer death or critical injury at the hands of their opposition. The counter-protestors did.

The counter-protestors didn't surround anyone and beat them with flaming torches. The counter-protestors didn't gang up on a bystander to beat hil with metal poles, presumably for no reason other than that he was black. A few punches were thrown and a few white supremacists got pepper sprayed.

The black man who was beaten had allegedly first punched a Nazi according to news reports. While I would never begrudge him his motivation, it seems there may have been some provocation on both sides.

The real problem was there weren't enough police and they weren't effective enough at preventing the violence. The nutcase terrorist who used his car as a murder weapon probably never could have been stopped, but the many other inciting incidents and attacks could have been shut down with quick arrests.

Observing and noting key similarities between two different sets is not equivalent to saying the two sets are equivalent.

Rhetoric doesn't help anyone. I've seen the video of the incident you are referencing with the black man being attacked. We don't see any part of what caused that incident. Why didn't they attack the hundreds of other blacks they passed by? Probably because that's not the reason he was attacked.

The counter protestors did start fights and threw a rock at the car – which provoked the ramming. No excuse for the reaction, but let’s not pretend the counter protestors were peaceful. They were inciting with equal fervor.

Protestors on either side have zero right to violence, regardless of provocation.

Freedom of speech isn’t just freedom of speech with which we agree and violence is violence regardless of the perpetrators.

The available evidence strongly suggests this is false, and that the car attack was pre-planned. Further, no video evidence I've seen corroborates the notion that the driver faced any violence before driving into the crowd.

If you're going to promote ideas like this, I think you have an obligation to include your sourcing, with links. A false rumor gets 3/4 of the way around the world before the truth can get its socks on.

> The counter protestors did start fights and threw a rock at the car – which provoked the ramming.

The ACLU of Virginia tweeted that a witness told them this, but this was (to my knowledge) not supported by any other witness testimony, and they later apologized for the tweet. Do you have an actual source for this?

Also, the tweet did not say that it provoked the ramming, just that someone threw a rock at the car before the driver started ramming people. (Even if it happened, it could have been in self-defense, for instance.)

The video of the start of the incident does not show any rocks being thrown. That happened after he'd driven into a crowd of people. As the car in question isn't a DeLorean I don't think he had a time machine, so your version of the story is wrong.

There's now video from behind showing someone hitting the car with a baseball bat before the ramming occurred. No idea how authentic it is.

http://www.departmentofmemes.com/article/protesters-attacked...

That video is as he's driving by, doing the ramming.

When Greenwald is right, he's dead-on. The ACLU is one of things about my country that I'm very proud of, and happy to support.

It might be just me, but after a point it looks like most movements become a mirror image of what they oppose, so anything in the middle ground like the ACLU gets flak from both sides...

He who fights monsters, etc.

Is anyone prominent attacking the ACLU on this? All the article cites is a bunch of twitter users. I tried to Google and I couldn't find anything except neutral reporting and this article, no major left wing sources who are arguing that what the ACLU is doing is wrong.

This is a bad article. A general principle in debate is to attack the strongest arguments from the opposing side, not the weakest ones. Yes, dragging Shanley for her low-context low-nuance tweets is easy. (I suspect she enjoys seeing people fall into that trap.) The article completely dismisses a well-reasoned critique of the ACLU by a former-as-of-yesterday ACLU of Virginia board member who was directly involved in the Charlottesville legal proceedings until the ACLU showed up to oppose him:

https://twitter.com/waldojaquith/status/896512190563454977 (thread)

https://twitter.com/waldojaquith/status/896566113974317058 (thread)

All they say about this is "One board member of the ACLU of Virginia, Waldo Jaquith, waited until the violence erupted to announce on Twitter that he was resigning in protest of the ACLU’s representation of the protesters – as though he was unaware when he joined the Board that the ACLU has been representing the free speech rights of neo-Nazis and other white supremacist groups (along with Communists, Muslims, war protesters and the full spectrum of marginalized minorities and leftists) for many decades."

Of course he knows that and knew that. Greenwald would do well to debate his actual points.

In particular, the ACLU was not defending the right of the neo-Nazis to assemble, but the right of the neo-Nazis to assemble in a crowded park that was too small for effective logistics. (Greenwald half-mentions this in a parenthetical, without context.) Jason Kessler and Emily Gorcenski agree on approximately nothing, but they both have criticized the inability of the city to keep order during yesterday's events, which appears to be the direct cause of the life lost yesterday: the road that James Alan Fields drove his car down was not a protest location but was between two of the parks, and the counter-protesters believed that it was supposed to be closed to vehicular traffic.

The city was not trying to prevent the neo-Nazis from speaking. They were merely trying to move them to a larger, easier-to-secure area to prevent exactly the thing that happened yesterday. The ACLU defended the right of the neo-Nazis to protest in the smaller park simply because they claimed it was their free speech right to assemble next to the statue of Robert E. Lee, instead of somewhere that the city could ensure a safe event.

It also gives no serious response to this critique of the ACLU by a current ACLU lawyer:

https://twitter.com/chasestrangio/status/895351745693585419

and completely ignores this information, which utterly wipes out Greenwald's non-serious response to Strangio, from an attorney with the Asian Law Caucus:

https://twitter.com/anoop_alc/status/896468870764011522

"I asked the ACLU for help defending a Muslim immigrant being deported for protected speech. They declined. They CHOOSE to protect the KKK."

Your objections are weak and poorly thought out.

1) An ACLU member who spent thousands of dollars and their free time trying to suppress free speech rights shouldn't have been in the ACLU to begin with.

Free speech didn't cause this violence, a terrorist and assorted thugs and instigators did. Banning free speech doesn't heal those people's brains of the ill they carry.

2) If Strangio can't support free speech for everyone, including people he finds despicable, he doesn't support free speech at all. Who decides which opinions and people are "despicable"? Sooner or later we all risk being viewed as despicable by someone in power, free societies have always degenerated into tyranny over time. Let's not hurry the process in the U.S.

Again, Strangio should resign from the ACLU.

3) And what is the point of the last tweet? The ACLU doesn't have the resources to take every case and fight every battle. Are you arguing they should pick the ones that are less contentious? Or involve less despicable people?

How about they pick the ones that have the most importance in our society?

You rebut your own points.

> An ACLU member who spent thousands of dollars and their free time trying to suppress free speech rights ... Free speech didn't cause this violence

That's exactly the point: he was not trying to suppress free speech rights, and conversely, the ACLU was not defending free speech. They thought they were. For good reasons. Nobody, including Jaquith, is questioning their good intentions. But they were wrong.

He was an ACLU member because he valued free speech, and he took an action that he believed was likely to prevent violence without risking free speech. The ACLU disagreed. He decided to continue being a member of the board of the ACLU of Virginia because he respected that he could have been wrong and the ACLU could have been right.

It turned out the ACLU was wrong.

Are we now to believe that the ACLU is infallible, that anything they call free speech is in fact free speech, and that even anyone involved with the ACLU who disagrees with the organization's decisions is to be excommunicated?

> If Strangio can't support free speech for everyone, including people he finds despicable

Again, he's supporting free speech for everyone, as far as that goal is possible. He believes that the ACLU's case is not in fact advancing the cause of free speech for everyone.

And, in any case, let us suppose that Strangio should resign from the ACLU and that Jaquith should never have joined. Even so, they have points worth debating honestly. Greenwald isn't doing that. Perhaps "free speech for everyone" is a self-contradictory goal, or a goal that simply serves as cover for "continued free speech for the powerful", and they can't honestly support that goal. That just means the ACLU is worth criticizing, and they're the people who would know the most about what the ACLU is doing wrong!

> How about they pick the ones that have the most importance in our society?

That is exactly what I'm proposing.

Milo Yiannopoulos is in no danger of not having his ideas heard by society, of people not knowing that he exists, of people not knowing what he believes. Neither were any of the folks at yesterday's rally. Their message was clear months in advance: they believe we should keep the statue of Robert E. Lee because it symbolizes a history worth remembering.

Milo is no minority viewpoint, nor is the alt-right. (Greenwald gets this wrong too, by pretending that the "mainstream" and the majority are the same, and everything opinion outside the mainstream/majority is equally marginalized.) His right to speak is important. But it is not significantly at risk, and as a result, defending his right is far from the most important thing in our society. The neo-Nazis were going to march in Charlottesville anyway; the ACLU picked a case that gave them the right to march in the park they wanted instead of the park they didn't want. I really do not understand the argument that anyone (neo-Nazis, antifa, the Papal Guard, whoever) being able to march in the right park is the most important issue in our society.

We don't even know who the person the ACLU didn't represent was going to say. We don't know who they were. And not only were they silenced, they are now gone from America.

I don't really agree with the thrust of this comment but I will readily admit it's comprised of strong, thoughtful arguments.

In particular: it is not the ACLU's role to determine the reasonable time, place, and manner for the march. They're the legal advocates for the "speech" side of the controversy. Like all lawyers, their first loyalty is with their own clients.

It's the job of the city and state governments to argue the other side, that the specific parks selected for the march are inappropriate.

It's the job of the courts to sort through those arguments.

In a similar sense, virtually every pro-bono lawyer appealing death sentences must know that their clients are guilty for horrible crimes. But it is absolutely not their job to submit measured, fair briefs. Rather, it's to throw every procedural and factual doubt at the wall in the hopes that something, anything will save their clients from being killed by the state.

Hopefully, we see these people as heroes, despite the fact that they're arguing on behalf of heinous criminals and in many cases against the victims of those crimes.

Who is attacking the ACLU?

There is a segment of America that wants to prohibit speech that is "bad." In this case, the rhetoric of the alt-right and other racist fear mongers. This is speech that incites riots.

I'm glad the ACLU is there fighting this fight. Lest we forget that at one time unpopular speech was women's rights.

Should there perhaps be some limits, though?

For some reason, I can't imagine that advocating genocide should ever be considered legitimate free speech. I can understand political ideologies, even authoritarianism being protected - but advocation of genocide?

Why do we refuse to draw lines?

We draw the line where reprehensible speech turns into actual reprehensible actions. "I hate <ethnic group> and wish they were all dead" is far different from "There are <ethnic group> living a 333 Evergreen Terrace, please join me at 7 pm so we can kill them".

The problem is I'm pretty sure the only illegal thing in that is giving away private information, if that.

If you ban the advocates of genocide speaking publicly they will simply speak underground. If they do it in the open you'll at least know who they are.

>We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

-Dr. King, Letter From a Birmingham Jail

Forgive me if I'm being dense here, but how is genocide a form of speech? Genocide is a form of killing.

In Rwanda, there was a radio station literally advocating genocide and organizing slaughters. It played a major role in inflaming tensions that were already really high. You can reasonably see it as an exercise in free speech, but it was also very much an active participant of the genocide.

Needless to say, the USA is not 90's Rwanda.

Advocation thereof

Identifying with those who advocate for violence is not equivalent to advocating for violence.

Not saying it is, I'm not making any comments on the protest itself or the lawsuits for/against it.

Reasonable. In the US, the limit where speech stops being constitutionally protected seems to be incitement to imminent lawless action. See https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/395/444/case.htm..., and a later clarification in https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/414/105/.

By genocide do you mean mass abortion? Should we ban pro-choice speech?

care to tell us how foetus or whatever stage of development they are is a national, ethnic or religious group ?

There are limits. You can't incite violence or shout fire in a crowded theater or plenty of other reasons.

Funny story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

> The phrase is a paraphrasing of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s opinion in the United States Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States in 1919, which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

There are tweets quoted in the article.

I understand the mission of the ACLU, including their representation of people I agree with / don't agree with.

But, I'm not quite sure why they are representing Milo... mostly because he can afford and their resources are better spent on cases where people can't. If they just filled a Amicus brief in his defense, i'd be perfectly fine.

They are not specifically representing milo.

> The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are ideologically diverse: the ACLU itself, an abortion provider, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and alt-right-Internet-troll-to-the-point-Twitter-actually-banned-him Milo Yiannopoulos.

It's a parade showing that the whole spectrum objects to this policy.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/dcs-transit-agen...

He's like the worse kind of person to stick on your campaign. The fact he's fleeced his followers on the Privilege Grant shows the kind of person he is (as in he's a con artist). The other people in the case are better picks for your "controversial but right" poster child whereas Milo is the "I'm a jerk that wants attention, money, and cocaine so I'm going to defraud you to get it" poster child.

Based on this article, it sounds like they're taking every opportunity they can get to fight this law (I'm assuming to establish the case law they want) rather than specifically choosing Milo.

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