Daniel Greenfield
September 14, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog
Six years ago, the ACLU challenged a school vaccine mandate bill in California.
COVID-19
was only a gleam in the eye of some Wuhan University of Virology lab
workers, if even that, and the vaccines in question were the more
ordinary kind most children have.
Even so, the ACLU
argued that
children have a right to a public education and can't be barred from
school based on whether they're vaccinated or not. The civil rights
groups also questioned the idea that the state has a "compelling
interest" in requiring vaccinations.
America has changed since and so has the ACLU.
In a New York Times
op-ed,
the ACLU's national legal director and the director of its religious
freedom program falsely claim that, "far from compromising civil
liberties, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties".
Arguing
that taking away some people’s civil liberties protects everyone’s
rights isn’t a new argument. It’s just the argument that the ACLU spent
its entire history militantly opposing.
The ACLU tries to
disguise its radical shift by wrapping it in identity politics and
contending that forcing people to get vaccinated protects "the most
vulnerable among us, including people with disabilities and fragile
immune systems, children too young to be vaccinated and communities of
color hit hard by the disease."
But young black men, the group
that the ACLU had claimed to be advocating for last year, are the most
likely to be fired or segregated due to vaccine mandates.
The ACLU wants to protect black people by taking away their civil rights.
But the ACLU isn’t just turning civil liberties on its head, it’s contradicting its own positions.
In
2002, the ACLU had opposed mandatory smallpox vaccinations of first
responders during a pandemic. It further warned that employees who
refuse to be vaccinated should be protected from retaliation.
"Smallpox
vaccine has risks and getting vaccinated is not a choice to be made
lightly -- but in America, it should certainly be a choice," the ACLU's
Technology and Liberty director had argued.
Choice. In America. Go figure.
The ACLU had even produced an entire Pandemic Preparedness pamphlet
which
warned against a public health model that “assumes that we must trade
liberty for security” resulting in “pandemic prevention” that takes
“aggressive, coercive actions against those who are sick.”
The
pamphlet further warned that “the CDC’s plan would have set us back even
further. It applied its penalties to people who did not have any
contagious disease and to people who would never expose anyone else to
disease. Moreover, it included provisions to make all public health
personnel, and those acting under their orders, immune from liability
for any injury—even if forced vaccination or other mandated treatments
killed the patient.” Who would have thought?
After a long history
of opposing forced treatment and coercive medical measures, including
mandatory swine flu vaccines for health care workers in New York, and
flu shots and HPV vaccines for children in Rhode Island, the ACLU is
completely on board with vaccine mandates.
Having turned civil
liberties on its head, the ACLU now argues that, “The real threat to
civil liberties comes from states banning vaccine and mask mandates.”
And, indeed, the ACLU is suing states who ban schools from forcing children to wear masks.
The
real threat from civil liberties now comes from championing civil
liberties. The old ACLU is a threat to the new ACLU which redefines
civil liberties as the deprivation of civil liberties.
There is a
surreal hypocrisy in the ACLU abandoning all its old beliefs to argue
that "rights are not absolute" and that there are "justifiable
intrusion(s) on autonomy and bodily integrity" for the public good.
The ACLU hasn’t discovered some exciting new legal principle to justify its switch.
It
was fighting the threat of possible smallpox vaccine mandates under the
Bush administration because, as everyone at the ACLU understood at the
time, Bush was the new Hitler. It fought childhood vaccine mandates
because many of the concerned mothers were ACLU liberals.
But
beyond the political shifts, the ACLU has largely discarded any interest
in civil rights as a legal theory to become another interchangeable
leftist pressure group with lawyers. The New York Times op-ed is the
work of people who can’t even be bothered to define civil rights, but
who understand that their donor base is currently agitated about
pandemic identity politics.
And the ACLU has to show that it’s fighting their cultural enemies and destroying them.
The
old ACLU won respect because it stuck to its principles, defending
Nazis and other evil people to show that a free society could work as
long as civil liberties were protected. All of that has long since gone
out the window and the ACLU’s endorsement of vaccine mandates is long
overdue as part of its shift from principled liberalism to unprincipled
lawfare culture wars.
If it doesn’t fundraise off forcing
children to wear masks and young black men to get vaccinated, the ACLU’s
leadership understands that some other leftist organization will beat
it to the punch.
It’s hard to have legal principles when you have no principles of any other kind.
And
yet the old ACLU’s arguments about the dangers of criminalizing disease
made a good deal of sense. That was the same organization that wisely
warned against making people, instead of the disease, into the enemy.
That is exactly what leftists have done, dividing Americans, instead of uniting them.
But
the ACLU knows quite well that there’s a lot more money to be made on
division than there is on arguing for general principles and rights that
apply to everyone across the board.
President Trump’s victory led to a massive
surge
in online donations to the former civil rights group. In the weeks
after he won, over $15 million in online donations rolled in. In one
weekend after he took office, the ACLU gasped as $24 million in cash
showered into its coffers.
That was six times its annual donation total.
The
ACLU looked at that river of resistance cash, dived in like a petty
criminal who suddenly realizes that he could be raking in millions
instead of thousands, and never looked back.
“To some degree,
civil rights and civil liberties is a cyclical business,” the ACLU’s
national legal director who authored the pro-vaccine mandate op-ed,
argued. “We need to convince people that is a long-term business.”
There
was a time when the ACLU wasn’t any kind of business. Now, like the
Southern Poverty Law Center, it’s in the civil rights business and
that’s the business of selling out rights for cash.
The ACLU
didn’t just abandon its opposition to vaccine mandates. It’s largely
jettisoned its interest in civil rights. Instead, it’s reinventing
opposition to civil rights as the new civil rights.
Before it defended vaccine mandates as taking away civil liberties from some to protect others, it was
defending speech bans that would protect “marginalized groups”.
Within
a few years, the ACLU had gone from championing free speech to
balancing the “impact of the proposed speech and the impact of its
suppression.”
After an entire history of arguing that larger
problems don’t justify the abolition of individual civil liberties, the
ACLU now contends that abolishing the liberties of individuals actually
protects collective welfare when there is some sort of general crisis
like a pandemic or hurt feelings.
These days the ACLU argues that
not only must liberty be traded for security, but that security is
liberty. And that depriving people of liberty for security is actually a
defense of liberty.
Except it doesn’t like the word, “liberty”,
it prefers the ambiguity of “rights” which can be things that the
government and corporations seek to protect you from for your own good.
Orwellian arguments are on point for a civil rights organization co-founded by a
Communist sympathizer
who had argued that "If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech" it
was only to create a Communist dictatorship and when that dictatorship
is "achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for
maintaining it by any means whatever." And after a long career of civil
liberties, the ACLU has come around to the position of “maintaining it
by any means whatever."
And it also gets to pig out on the much larger sums of money from the “maintainers” of tyranny.
But
there isn’t even the pretense anymore that the resistance is to
President Trump or to some authority. Even the ACLU’s mask mandates were
disguised as attacks on Republican governors. But arguing for a vaccine
mandate isn’t a resistance to authority, it’s authority.
The
ACLU has become the authoritarians it always claimed to be fighting
against. After generations of fighting for civil rights, it discovered
that fighting against civil rights pays better.
Tags:
ACLU,
Coronavirus,
Freedom,
recent
About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and
the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center
“I think a lot of people don’t question this law, because they
think that it makes perfect sense — that a parent would want to be
involved in their child’s abortion decision,” claimed Jo Becker,
advocacy director of the children’s rights division at Human Rights
Watch.
