After Facebook announced that it was reinstating Donald Trump’s Facebook privileges this week (following over two years of blocking him, beginning while he was still President of the United States, the American Civil Liberties Union suddenly decided that a major source of public discourse and opinion in this alleged democracy was right to let a major political leader and former POTUS have the same privileges as anyone else, like, say, Democrats and progressives.

“This is the right call. Like it or not, President Trump is one of the country’s leading political figures and the public has a strong interest in hearing his speech,” the ACLU tweeted. In another statement, ACLU’s executive director Anthony Romero said,

“Indeed, some of Trump’s most offensive social media posts ended up being critical evidence in lawsuits filed against him and his administration. And we should know—we filed over 400 legal actions against him. While the government cannot force platforms to carry certain speech, that doesn’t mean the largest platforms should engage in political censorship. The biggest social media companies are central actors when it comes to our collective ability to speak—and hear the speech of others—online. They should err on the side of allowing a wide range of political speech, even when it offends.”

Observations:

• Gee, the ACLU must be getting flack—and losing contributions—from true liberal supporters who are noticing that the organization has become another Democratic Party ally, and that protecting individual rights when conservatives are being the ones whose rights are abused never seems to be a priority any more. When Trump was banned, all the organization did was express “concern”…

“For months, President Trump has been using social media platforms to seed doubt about the results of the election and to undermine the will of voters. We understand the desire to permanently suspend him now, but it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions – especially when political realities make those decisions easier,”

Yet it didn’t “concern” the ACLU sufficiently to say the censorship was wrong, nor did the ACLU raise the ban again until last week.

• Tellingly, the group covered itself with the Trump Deranged—a substantial segment of its supporters—by saying the Trump having free speech privileges on Facebook will help the ACLU to bring him down.
• The ACLU, if it still cared about its traditional mission, would be leading the protests against the government using corporations in social media, Big Tech, journalism and other sectors to restrain free speech by proxy. It has been as silent on the frightening revelations of coordinated government censorship via Twitter as the mainstream media. Why? Because the organization has the same biases and objectives as the mainstream media.