The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) staged a major event on March 11 at the University of Miami’s basketball arena during which ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero kicked off the organization’s “People Power” project. Romero, who worked for both the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation before assuming his position at the ACLU, told those assembled in the arena that the event was aimed at capitalizing on numerous demonstrations since Donald Trump’s election as president and to make sure people know their rights to protest. Other goals that Romero outlined as priority issues are immigration, First Amendment free speech and religious freedom rights, civil and reproductive rights, and rights of gay, lesbian, and transgender people, ABC News reported.
“We will bring all the lawsuits necessary to defend these rights. We’ll do the work in the courts. You do the work in the streets. People are motivated. They want to be engaged.”
The Washington Post reported on March 12 that the ACLU (which is known for engaging in lawsuits to accomplish its objectives) is spending millions of dollars to enter grassroots politics by launching its “People Power” campaign. The Post reported:
People Power debuted this weekend in South Florida and, by the organization’s estimate, at thousands of weekend house parties nationwide. Everyone who showed up received a nine-point plan to turn blue America into a network of “freedom cities” by defying the president’s executive orders, his health-care agenda and his Justice Department. Anyone who missed it could visit PeoplePower.org, the latest catchall website to find actions that would get results.
The key to the effort: targeting Trump’s policies, rather than the man or his words. If 2016 taught Democrats anything, it’s that attacking Trump isn’t enough.
“We’ve seen this exponential growth in people becoming card-carrying members of the ACLU,” the Post quoted from Romero’s interview after his Florida speech. “They’re younger. They’re in every state around the country. The biggest danger was in not doing something like this, where people get apathetic and they fall asleep.”
The Post report went on to describe other organizations besides the ACLU that are promoting similar activist protest movements. After accurately describing such groups as the “biggest organizations on the left,” the report noted that The Center for American Progress “is planning a grass–roots conference for ‘rising’ activist groups in California next month.” (Emphasis added.)
Describing anything that The Center for American Progress (CAP) is engaged in as “grassroots,” however, is nothing short of ludicrous. A summary of the CAPS’s financial sources in a Wikipedia report noted:
In 2013, CAP received $42 million from a variety of sources, including individuals, foundations, labor unions, and corporations…. From 2003 to 2007, CAP received about $15 million in grants from 58 foundations…. Major individual donors include George Soros, Peter Lewis, Steve Bing, and Herb and Marion Sandler….
In 2015, CAP released a partial list of its donors, which included 28 anonymous donors accounting for at least $5 million in contributions. Named donors included the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates, which each gave between $500,000 and $999,999. CAP’s top donors include Walmart and Citigroup, each of which have given between $100,000 and $499,000.
In addition to those mentioned above, CAP also received more than $1 million from the Ford Foundation. Hardly “grassroots.”
The Post went on to identify Faiz Shakir, the ACLU’s new political director, as the key point man in the People Power project. A profile of Shakir on the ACLU website explains that as national political director, he oversees the ACLU’s National Political Advocacy Department, which houses the organization’s Washington Legislative Office and State Advocacy and Policy departments. Prior to taking on that position, Shakir served as an advisor to both Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, where he helped “wage key fights on behalf of the LGBT and Muslim American communities.” This latter description is nothing if not humorous, considering that, with few exceptions, practically all scholars of Sharia, or Islamic law, interpret homosexual activity as a punishable offence as well as a sin.
The Post quoted Shakir’s explanation of the ACLU involvement in the judicial ruling that stopped Trump’s January 27 executive order restricting travel to the United States from seven Muslim-majority nations where terrorism was widespread. (On January 28, U.S. District Court Judge Ann Donnelly, a U.S. District judge of the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn, ruled in favor of a petition filed by ACLU on behalf of two Iraqi men who were detained at John F. Kennedy International Airport the previous day under the executive order.)
In an interview following the March 11 event, Shakir said there was a connection between the widespread protests against the executive order and the way the judge ruled. “It was clear that mass mobilization really changed the way that judges viewed that,” Shakir said. “I saw that as the beginning. Mass mobilization has the ability not only to shape how judges see the law, but mayors, governors, school boards, sheriff departments.”
Several articles posted by The New American have noted that the ACLU’s litigation has challenged long-accepted traditional American values. For example, an April 2015 article reported that the ACLU was suing the federal government in an effort to force religious organizations to provide abortions and contraception to illegal immigrants.
Another article in February noted that the ACLU of Washington had joined Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson and two homosexual men in suing a florist who refused to provide flowers for their same-sex “wedding” because it violated her Christian religious principles. (A Superior Court ordered her to pay a $1,000 penalty to the state and $1 in costs and fees.)
An April 2016 article was posted by The New American by a writer who had received a fundraising letter from the ACLU that revealed the group’s anti-Christian bias. It asked the recipient to prioritize the ACLU’s efforts “Protecting women from employers using religious beliefs to justify denying women access to contraceptive coverage,” and “Protect[ing] LGBT people from the use of religion by businesses to justify denial of services based on sexual orientation.”
The writer noted that since the 1960s, “The ACLU has been involved in the Supreme Court decisions which outlawed mandated school prayer, observation of religious holidays, and Bible reading in the public schools.”
Such actions by the ACLU are hardly departures from the organization’s historic mandate, however. In an article posted by WorldNetDaily in 2005, Alan Sears, former CEO of the Alliance Defending Freedom and once the staff executive director of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography (popularly known as the “Meese Commission”) took apart the commonly held belief that the ACLU “was an organization that had a noble beginning, but somehow strayed off course.” Sears wrote:
That myth is untrue. The ACLU set a course to destroy America — her freedom and her values — right from the start.
From its very beginning, the ACLU had strong socialist and communist ties. As early as 1931, the U.S. Congress was alarmed by the ACLU’s devotion to communism. A report by the Special House Committee to Investigate Communist Activities stated:
The American Civil Liberties Union is closely affiliated with the communist movement in the United States, and fully 90 percent of its efforts are on behalf of communists who have come into conflict with the law. It claims to stand for free speech, free press and free assembly, but it is quite apparent that the main function of the ACLU is an attempt to protect the communists.
Sears continued by noting that 15 years after the founding of the ACLU in 1920, its co-founder, Roger Baldwin wrote:
I am for Socialism, disarmament and ultimately, for the abolishing of the State itself.… I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class and sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal.
Sears noted that after Earl Browder, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States, admitted that the ACLU served as a “transmission belt” for the party, Baldwin agreed, claiming, “I don’t regret being a part of the communist tactic which increased the effectiveness of a good cause.”
Sears concluded his article by observing:
While many accept the ACLU as a mainstream organization, their history tells a drastically different story. Organizations such as the Alliance Defense Fund are dedicated to exposing the myth that the ACLU is working hard for the First Amendment rights of Americans. Instead of being an organization that simply took a “wrong turn,” the ACLU has devoted itself from the very beginning to the devastation of America’s most cherished traditions, values, and laws.
Related articles:
ACLU Survey/Fundraising Letter Confirms Its Anti-Christian Bias
ACLU Insists Catholic Groups Should Fund Illegals’ Abortions
