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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

As an EFF supporter I'm a little worried about this phenomenon where nonprofits sprawl out into many unrelated areas. The ACLU, for example, started off very focused on civil liberties but in the Trump era it seemed to generalize into opposing everything Trump did.

Which, I mean, I don't support the average thing that Trump did, but it started to feel like donating money to the ACLU was just the same as donating it to the Democratic Party. And isn't someone else going to be better at spending that money effectively, if your area of expertise is "everything"?

Similarly, here in the Oakland area I was looking for food banks to donate to, but there seems to be no organization that simply provides food to needy people. Everything I could find was like, well the name of our organization is the Oakland Blah Blah Food Bank, but in practice we regrant donor money to many other causes, we do many other things, we don't really just provide food to people.

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The EFF has always been deeply interested in the intersection of privacy and the digital world. That has oftentimes manifested as privacy in the digital world, but not always. This is one of those examples. The EFF is saying "privacy and this digital service cannot coexist; the digital service must therefore lose, and we know what we're talking about because we are well-versed in this policy area."

Also, a lot of not-for-profit entities intentionally branch out because such is the nature of helping the group of people they want to help. The term for it is intersectionality. That not-for-profits are heavily siloed is less a matter of intent and more a matter of history. If you are a food bank, you recognize that your intended client base needs food. But, second-order to that, why do they need to come to you? Is it because they need a job? Well, they're already here, so why not engage in skills enhancement and training? And since you'll be at the city council anyway doing advocacy for access to food, why not also advocate for more housing? If those continue to be siloed, you wind up with three separate groups, working at separate-but-related aims, each with their own overhead and inefficiencies.

It's vertical integration, in the not-for-profit advocacy space.

It opposed everything trump did because Trump is a vile person who doesn't want equal civil rights for everyone, thus his clashes with the ACLU. He is a racist psychopath who needed to be fought on every front. ACLU is closely aligned with democrats because it supports civil rights and equality unlike the current iteration of the republican party (at least most of it, I know a few libertarian types who respect civil and personal rights as well)

The only reasonable conclusion: They don't want your money.

Point of order: Is it not possible that Trump in particular just stood in opposition to the ACLU's worldview/mission statement? For that matter, they're not really keen on some of Biden's immigration policies either.

A large chunk of the visible mainstream Republican platform is not very civil liberty friendly at this point, and the Dems have not been let entirely off the hook.

From the ACLU:

"The American Civil Liberties Union is our nation's guardian of liberty, working daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country."

That sounds a lot like the position of the Republican Liberty Caucus. https://rlc.org/statement-of-principles-positions/

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