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Comment by eltondegeneres | Hacker News Reader

FIRE has historically been associated with conservatives, but I don't know if that's changed in recent years.

Looking through their website, it doesn't look right-leaning (to someone unfamiliar with FIRE before just now).

They recently started organizing against Florida's "Stop WOKE Act": https://www.thefire.org/fire-calls-on-florida-institutions-a...

If you go to their college free speech rankings page [0] most of the comments are about how conservative students don't feel comfortable on colleges and universities (private and public, to my slight surprise).

I can see how someone might make take that as conservative friendly since they are mostly featuring conservative students expressing fear about talking about conservative ideas.

I'm not making a judgement on any of that.

[0] https://rankings.thefire.org/

Disclaimer, I have no context about FIRE. But, I feel there are a few possible reasons for this:

If the culture on a college campus has little-to-no bias towards sharing or suppressing conservative ideas, them singling out conservative ideas being suppressed would give you enough of a signal that they are conservative leaning.

If the culture on a college campus biases towards sharing conservative ideas, them singling out conservative ideas being suppressed would give you enough of a signal that they are conservative leaning.

If the culture on a college campus biases towards suppressing conservative ideas, them singling out conservative ideas being suppressed wouldn't generate enough of a signal to justify calling them conservative leaning.

TL;DR: whether or not you consider their stance as conservative leaning will be strongly influenced by how you perceive discourse on a college campus.

That's just due to the nature of who finds themselves on the wrong side of college administrations. They are non-partisan though, see some of the sources posted in this thread.

College administrators themselves, are typically hostage to the views of students/donors/board of directors/governors, etc. these days- otherwise they don't last too long. They walk a fine line.

FIRE absolutely does speak up for liberals, as seen e.g. here:

https://reason.com/volokh/2022/03/16/oklahoma-christian-univ...

Yeah. If ACLU is too biased for someone, I really can't see FIRE being much better.

But the EFF is excellent in my experience. They're probably most known for Certbot / Let's Encrypt

EFFs mission is very limited which is a good thing given whatever it is that Mozilla Foundation keeps doing

The ACLU has historically been associated with nazis :^)

the ACLU has been historically associated with nazis and terrorists. FIRE, to my knowledge has not discriminated in their advocacy for the plaintiffs in title ix disputes which is one of their primary areas of focus so it seems like a reach to call them a conservative-aligned organization

The litmus test for that would be if they're defending Palestinians.

Nice

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