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ACLU is dead. Long live The FIRE.


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2022 Jun 6, 5:01pm   1,007 views  9 comments

by EBGuy   ➕follow (0)   💰tip   ignore  

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is renaming itself the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and keeping the “FIRE” acronym as it launches a drive to promote greater acceptance of a diversity of views in the workplace, pop culture and elsewhere. Part of the push may challenge the American Civil Liberties Union’s primacy as a defender of free speech.
...
FIRE’s new expansion is also a challenge of sorts to the ACLU, which has faced criticism in recent years for drifting from its unapologetically pro-free-speech roots and taking a more direct role in partisan political fights.
Many of FIRE’s founders and backers are former leaders of the ACLU who have grown disillusioned with the group under its current executive director, Anthony Romero, who left the Ford Foundation to take over the storied civil liberties organization in 2001.
In 2020, FIRE released “Mighty Ira,” a laudatory documentary film about Romero’s predecessor, Ira Glasser, focusing on the ACLU’s work from the 1970s through the 1990s.
Glasser, who serves on a FIRE advisory board, said in an interview that he “strongly encouraged” FIRE to broaden its free-speech work in part because the ACLU seems to be abdicating that role.
“Once the ACLU backs off its traditional role, who else is there?” Glasser asked. “It’s great to have the ACLU fighting for racial and reproductive justice and gay rights. …The notion that you have to reduce your vigor with which you defend First Amendment rights or you will damage the strength of your advocacy for equal rights for women, gays, and Blacks, et cetera is just demonstrably not true and, yet, they’ve done that. It has created a vacuum in the viewpoint-neutral defense of free speech, which FIRE has filled.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/06/free-speech-group-first-amendment-00037320

Comments 1 - 9 of 9        Search these comments

1   Patrick   2022 Jun 6, 6:11pm  

Thanks @EBGuy

I think it's this group:

https://www.thefire.org/

Looks good to me.
2   AmericanKulak   2022 Jun 6, 6:58pm  

Fire is hot, they do good work.

All the way back in the "You bunch of screaming water buffalo" days.

https://www.thefire.org/philadelphia-magazine-on-20-years-of-political-correctness-and-unlearning-liberty/
3   Patrick   2022 Jun 8, 9:54am  

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/the-man-taking-on-the-anti-free-speech-left/


Meet the man taking on the anti-free-speech left
Greg Lukianoff and FIRE are fighting back against censorship

For the anti-free-speech left, the most dangerous man in America today is Greg Lukianoff. The president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for the past 16 years, the free-speech attorney has now decided to guide the organization, previously focused on free-speech battles within academia, into the broader territory of free-speech battles across the nation. FIRE has been rebranded as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and Lukianoff intends to take it into space once occupied by free-speech stalwarts like the ACLU. He has a massive new investment from supporters to the tune of $75 million. ...

This degradation of free speech in America, thanks to the pandemic and the increasing power of bureaucratic actors, led FIRE to adopt an approach that no longer pretends the anti-speech efforts of the college kangaroo court system are confined to the campus. ...

“Major parts of the left don’t understand that without free speech, the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the gay rights movement, would all be a bird without wings,” Lukianoff said. He intends to remind them.


The left is extremely two-faced about the issue of free speech.
4   Patrick   2022 Jul 11, 7:50am  

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/stands-free-speech-cem-joad/


The American Civil Liberties Union, once a bastion of free-speech defense, is now more focused on drafting defamatory op-eds for actresses of middling talent. Even its own former leaders decry the ACLU as thoroughly captured by woke leftist authoritarians who seek to use the power of government to silence their political opponents.
5   Patrick   2022 Aug 4, 2:49pm  

https://notthebee.com/article/the-aclu-has-become-the-thing-they-swore-to-destroy


The ACLU has become the very thing it swore to destroy







Now, the organization is out here fighting for the right for colleges to exclude qualified white and Asian students based solely on the color of their skin.

It says this is needed because everyone knows "structural racial inequality" is occurring against black students despite entire oceans of proof to the contrary.



6   AmericanKulak   2022 Aug 4, 11:19pm  

Comprehensive List by Zimmerman of Behind the Black:

As I have been chronicling the left’s shameless effort to blacklist, blackball, censor, and destroy its opposition during the past year and a half, I have also begun to assembly a list of non-profit law firms that are dedicated to fight this oppression, and have been increasingly successfully in winning their cases.

It seems appropriate therefore to provide that list to the public. Several blacklisted readers of these columns have noted in comments that they wish to also sue, and I would like to help them do so in every way possible. The following list, though obviously not all inclusive, describes what appear to be the most active and successful non-profit law firms presently winning first amendment cases nationwide. (Note too that the ACLU is not on the list, as that organization a long time ago abandoned its foundational goal of protecting free speech and has instead become an agent acting to increase the left’s power over ordinary citizens.)

In choosing among these law firms, make sure you review their entire website and the many cases they are handling. Some firms might be less appropriate for your situation, and it is necessary on your part to do the due diligence to figure this out.


https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/where-to-get-legal-help-if-you-have-been-blacklisted-by-todays-control-freaks/#more-87043
9   Patrick   2023 Dec 17, 4:10pm  

https://tobyrogers.substack.com/p/the-horrordumbor


Vaccine mandates are an egregious transgression of the human body that violate the most basic norms of a civilized society. Yet the American Civil Liberties Union that strives “to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States” not only failed to challenge mandates, they actively supported them.

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