This was after left wingers stopped pretending that they believed in free speech; they hate free speech and take over many institutions. Book bans and violating due process are good when they push the left wing agenda.
The Charlottesville mention is ironic, given what we now know about the SPLC.
From 2021:
Once a Bastion of Free Speech, the A.C.L.U. Faces an Identity Crisis - The New York Times
"It was supposed to be the celebration of a grand career, as the American Civil Liberties Union presented a prestigious award to the longtime lawyer David Goldberger. He had argued one of its most famous cases, defending the free speech rights of Nazis in the 1970s to march in Skokie, Ill., home to many Holocaust survivors.
Mr. Goldberger, now 79, adored the A.C.L.U. But at his celebratory luncheon in 2017, he listened to one speaker after another and felt a growing unease.
A law professor argued that the free speech rights of the far right were not worthy of defense by the A.C.L.U. and that Black people experienced offensive speech far more viscerally than white allies. In the hallway outside, an A.C.L.U. official argued it was perfectly legitimate for his lawyers to decline to defend hate speech.
Mr. Goldberger, a Jew who defended the free speech of those whose views he found repugnant, felt profoundly discouraged.
“I got the sense it was more important for A.C.L.U. staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand on principle,” he said in a recent interview. “Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind.”...
The organization, said its former director Ira Glasser, risks surrendering its original and unique mission in pursuit of progressive glory.
“There are a lot of organizations fighting eloquently for racial justice and immigrant rights,” Mr. Glasser said. “But there’s only one A.C.L.U. that is a content-neutral defender of free speech. I fear we’re in danger of losing that.”
Founded a century ago, the A.C.L.U. took root in the defense of conscientious objectors to World War I and Americans accused of Communist sympathies after the Russian Revolution. Its lawyers made their bones by defending the free speech rights of labor organizers and civil rights activists, the Nation of Islam and the Ku Klux Klan. Their willingness to advocate for speech no matter how offensive was central to their shared identity.
One hears markedly less from the A.C.L.U. about free speech nowadays. Its annual reports from 2017 to 2019 highlight its role as a leader in the resistance against President Donald J. Trump. But the words “First Amendment” or “free speech” cannot be found. Nor do those reports mention colleges and universities, where the most volatile speech battles often play out.
Since Mr. Trump’s election, the A.C.L.U. budget has nearly tripled to more than $300 million as its corps of lawyers doubled. The same number of lawyers — four — specialize in free speech as a decade ago.
Some A.C.L.U. lawyers and staff members argue that the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and the press — as well as freedom of religion, assembly and petitioning the government — is more often a tool of the powerful than the oppressed.
“First Amendment protections are disproportionately enjoyed by people of power and privilege,” said Dennis Parker, who directed the organization’s Racial Justice Program until he left in late 2018.
To which David Cole, the national legal director of the A.C.L.U., rejoined in an interview: “Everything that Black Lives Matter does is possible because of the First Amendment.”
A tragedy also haunts the A.C.L.U.’s wrenching debates over free speech.
In August 2017, officials in Charlottesville, Va., rescinded a permit for far-right groups to rally downtown in support of a statue to the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Officials instead relocated the demonstration to outside the city’s core...
The A.C.L.U. unfurled new guidelines that suggested lawyers should balance taking a free speech case representing right-wing groups whose “values are contrary to our values” against the potential such a case might give “offense to marginalized groups.”
A.C.L.U. leaders asserted that nothing substantive had changed. “We should recognize the cost to our allies but we are committed to represent those whose views we regard as repugnant,” Mr. Cole said in an interview with The New York Times.
But longtime free speech advocates like Floyd Abrams, perhaps the nation’s leading private First Amendment lawyer, disagreed. The new guidelines left him aghast.
“The last thing they should be thinking about in a case is which ideological side profits,” he said. “The A.C.L.U. that used to exist would have said exactly the opposite.”
The 2016 election blew like a hurricane over the A.C.L.U. Lawyers texted one another in disbelief; a deputy director broke into sobs as he told his 4-year-old that Mr. Trump had won; some staff members spoke of a nation irredeemably racist.
Mr. Romero, who is Latino and the organization’s first nonwhite executive director, arrived at the office just past dawn the next day. He crafted a letter to Mr. Trump and ran it as a full-page ad in The Times, attacking the president-elect on such issues as immigration and abortion rights. “If you do not reverse course and instead endeavor to make these campaign promises a reality,” he warned, “you will have to contend with the full firepower of the A.C.L.U.”
The A.C.L.U. became an embodiment of anti-Trump resistance. More than $1 million in donations sluiced into its coffers within 24 hours and tens of millions of dollars followed in 2017, making the organization better funded than ever before. Salaries reflected that — Mr. Romero now makes $650,000 and some lawyers in senior management $400,000. Its 2017 annual report came with “RESIST” superimposed on an image of the Statue of Liberty.
When Brett M. Kavanaugh was nominated for the Supreme Court, the A.C.L.U. surprised longtime supporters by entering the fray, broadcasting a commercial that strongly suggested the judge was guilty of sexual assault. When a book argued that the increase in the number of teenage girls identifying as transgender was a “craze” caused by social contagion, a transgender A.C.L.U. lawyer sent a tweet that startled traditional backers, who remembered its many fights against book censorship and banning: “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”
The A.C.L.U. embraced dormitories set aside for Black and Latino students and argued that police forces were inherently white supremacist. “We need to defund the budgets,” Mr. Romero said last year. “It’s the only way we’re going to take power back.”...
The A.C.L.U. in 2018 poured $800,000 into what looked like a campaign ad for Stacey Abrams during her bid for governor of Georgia — a questionable move for a nonprofit organization that calls itself nonpartisan...
The $1 million anti-Kavanaugh ad campaign, which compared his denial of a sexual assault accusation to Bill Cosby’s incredulity at mounting allegations and Bill Clinton’s lie about an affair, left some longtime lawyers inside the A.C.L.U. uncomfortable. No organization aside from the U.S. government argues more cases before the Supreme Court, and A.C.L.U. amicus briefs have drawn praise from even the strictly conservative justice Clarence Thomas.
“I share the discomfort with the A.C.L.U.’s engaging in partisan-looking activity; it risks taking luster off our reputation as straight shooters,” noted Ben Wizner, the longtime head of the A.C.L.U.’s free speech, privacy and technology project.
The money that flooded into the A.C.L.U. after Mr. Trump’s election allowed Mr. Romero to flex the organization’s progressive muscles and greatly increase the size of its staff. Many of the new employees, however, were not nearly as supportive of the A.C.L.U.’s traditional civil liberties work. They worked inside their policy silos, focused on issues like immigration, transgender rights and racial justice.
Some fired off tweets like bottle rockets, causing headaches and confusion...
Those who control the official A.C.L.U. Twitter account can prove erratic, at the national and state levels. In 2018, the Trump administration proposed revamping Obama-era regulations on Title IX, which sets guidelines for investigations of sexual harassment and assault on campuses. It strengthened protections for the accused.
The A.C.L.U. tweet in response to the news was scathing: This “promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused.”
Because the A.C.L.U. has championed the due process rights of the accused for 100 years, the tweet came as a surprise. It turned out a staff member at the A.C.L.U.’s women’s rights project had typed and clicked “send.”...
In another case, a police officer in Columbus, Ohio, fatally shot 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant as she tried to plunge a knife into a young woman. The A.C.L.U. of Ohio tweeted, “@ColumbusPolice murdered a 15 year old Black girl.
Here too was another example — in this case an A.C.L.U. affiliate — of seemingly overriding its traditional insistence on the presumption of innocence. Video shows that the officer made a split-second decision. And murder is determined in a court...
Several younger lawyers suggested a toll taken. Their generational cohort, they said, placed less value on free speech, making it uncomfortable for them to express views internally that diverged from progressive orthodoxy...
After Charlottesville, Mr. Cole wrote an essay in The New York Review of Books that defended the decision. “We protect the First Amendment not only because it is the lifeblood of democracy and an indispensable element of freedom, but because it is the guarantor of civil society itself,” he wrote.
That ignited anger among some 200 staff members, who signed a letter stating the essay was “oblivious” to the A.C.L.U.’s institutional racism. The A.C.L.U.’s upper ranks are diverse; 12 of the top 21 leaders are either Black, Latino or Asian. Fourteen are women...
Two decades ago, as free speech battles erupted on college campuses, a new civil liberties group took shape to vigorously advocate for First Amendment principles. Called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the organization was purposely nonideological and nonpartisan. A founder, Harvey Silverglate, had served on the board of the A.C.L.U. of Massachusetts and considers it an ally even as he sees its limits...
“FIRE does not have the same tensions,” Mr. Wizner said. “At the A.C.L.U., free speech is one of 12 or 15 different values.”...
In 2015, University of Missouri students protested racism and established an encampment in a campus quad. When a student journalist tried to take photos and talk to protesters, students and a communications professor physically blocked the reporter from doing so. The A.C.L.U. of Missouri applauded the “courageous” leadership of student activists and faculty members, and two national A.C.L.U. officials wrote columns about the protests. They did not mention First Amendment rights.
Four years later at the University of Connecticut, two white students walking home late at night loudly repeated a racial slur. In the ensuing uproar, the university police arrested and charged the students with ridicule on account of race.
The A.C.L.U. of Connecticut demanded that the university hire 10 Black faculty and staff members and require a freshman course on ending racism on campus. It made no mention of the arrests, other than to opine that the police force is “an inherently white supremacist institution.”
Two days later, Mr. Cole issued a corrective: The students’ conduct “is not criminal,” he stated. “The First Amendment protects even offensive and hateful speech.”
Even the New York Civil Liberties Union, traditionally an independent-minded A.C.L.U. affiliate that has produced several national executive directors and stood at the forefront in defending free speech cases, did not want to talk about those issues. A spokeswoman for its executive director, Donna Lieberman, said, “We don’t feel we’ll have anything to add.”
Such reticence sounded like terra incognita to Norman Siegel, who led the New York group when Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani tried to block the Ku Klux Klan from rallying downtown in 1999.
The Klan was anathema to Mr. Siegel, but he fought like a cornered cat for its First Amendment rights. “Did I give anyone else a veto? No way,” he said. “I would have compromised my integrity.”
Mr. Siegel, who is white, drew support from the Black publisher of The Amsterdam News and from the Rev. Al Sharpton, a Black activist, who filed suit in support of the N.Y.C.L.U. Mr. Siegel recalled receiving a standing ovation from a Black audience.
“A woman came up and said: ‘You did the right thing. If Giuliani could shut down the Klan, he would do it to us,’” he recalled."
