The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU, founded in 1920, is one of the biggest and most influential human rights organizations in history. Their accomplishments in advancing the rights and freedoms of people, especially in the United States, have been extraordinarily significant and life-changing.
The ACLU was one of the principal actors in ending racial discrimination in universities, and the main actor in advancing the concept and principles of free speech there. (In fact, it was the ACLU that successfully eradicated the oxymoronic concept of "free speech zone" in universities across the country, making the entire campus a "free speech zone".)
In fact, for the longest time the ACLU was what you could call an extremist free speech absolutist organization. They upheld people's right to free speech to the absolute extremes.
Perhaps one of the most notorious examples of this was when one of their lawyers, a Jewish man, successfully defended in the 1970's the free speech rights of a group of neonazis who were protesting some kind of Holocaust memorial demonstration. The principle of this lawyer, which he still holds to this day, was (paraphrasing) "I absolutely abhor what these people believe and what they stand for, but they have the exact same right to free speech as me, which is why I'm defending them and their rights."
(I can only imagine what those neonazis thought when a Jew got them out of legal trouble.)
The ACLU still held these principles well into the 2000's.
However, in the last 10 or so years, their policies have changed completely. They have been completely overtaken by social justice ideologues, and they have completely reversed many of their most fundamental principles.
Rather than defend everybody's free speech, they now oppose the freedom of speech of "wrongthinkers". Nowadays they support the silencing of the "wrong" opinions. Unlike in the 1970's (and for several decades after), they are now saying that neonazis do not have the same right to free speech as everybody else. Rather than fight to the death against racial discrimination (eg. in admissions) and racial segregation at universities, for many years they have now fully endorsed it. They also support censoring and banning of people in social media and online in general. And they are so obsessed with "trans rights" that their social media feed has become absolutely ridiculous and childish.
The ACLU has stopped being a civil liberties union, and has become a far-leftist neomarxist social justice activist organization.
Because this is what always happens. The social justice ideologues invade and destroy everything.
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