Time to go to work for “civil rights” and against America.
Remember when the ACLU actually defended civil rights instead of shilling for leftist totalitarians, some nostalgically minded folks say.
Except, the ACLU was always shilling for leftist totalitarians.
In 1934, Roger Nash Baldwin, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the ACLU, wrote an article for “Soviet Russia”, in which he quite clearly explained why he was fighting for civil liberties.
I believe in non-violent methods of struggle as most effective in the long run for building up successful working class power. Where they cannot be followed or where they are not even permitted by the ruling class, obviously only violent tactics remain. I champion civil liberty as the best of the non-violent means of building the power on which worker’s rule must be based. If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties. The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental. When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever.”
If you doubt that, go read Baldwin’s “Liberty Under the Soviets” where he claimed that the Soviet press was “on the whole lively, interesting, well-written—like the better European papers and quite unlike American papers padded with features and advertising.”
The ACLU founder argued that the Soviet secret police “does not get out of hand, as do the secret services in some other countries—as, for instance, in the United States.”
Has the ACLU changed? Nah. It just stopped pretending to care about free speech because the “dictatorship of the proles” it believes is on the verge of being achieved in the United States.
There’s no Soviet Union, but there is a People’s Republic of China. Time to go to work for “civil rights” and against America.
That’s what the ACLU has always done best.
A group of Chinese citizens who live, work, study, and raise families in Florida, as well as a real estate brokerage firm in Florida that primarily serves clients of Chinese descent, are filing a lawsuit to combat Florida’s discriminatory property law, SB 264. Signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, the legislation unfairly restricts most Chinese citizens — and most citizens of Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Russia, and North Korea — from purchasing homes in the state. Unless the courts act, the law will take effect on July 1, 2023.
The plaintiffs are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Florida, DeHeng Law Offices PC, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), in coordination with the Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance (CALDA).
CALDA is a mostly Chinese language organization formed to fight the ban on WeChat under the Trump administration. Biden dropped efforts to ban WeChat and TikTok.
A number of CALDA lawyers are involved in import-export businesses.
One of the founders of CALDA, Keliang Zhu of DeHeng Law claims to be “the organizer and one of the lead counsel in a historic lawsuit that sued President Trump and successfully stopped his WeChat ban in 2020”. His Chinese bio, as opposed to his English bio, appears to read that he had “served as a senior legal adviser to international institutions such as the World Bank. China Daily, China Economic Review”.
China Daily is a “daily newspaper owned by the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party.”
“Political democracy is useful only as a tool of peaceful change,” Baldwin wrote.
The ACLU and the PRC differ only in that belief, that political democracy or peaceful change are needed and in no other beliefs.
When you understand that, you understand the Left.
Article posted with permission from Daniel Greenfield
