Once billed as the premier defender of free speech, the American Civil Liberties Union is now… targeting whistleblowers?
It’s a spectacular fall from grace for the ACLU, which now seems less interested in defending free speech than promoting its own progressive agenda.
Earlier this month, the organization subpoenaed the private communications of Jamie Reed, a former case manager at St. Louis Children’s Hospital gender clinic, who alleged in a sworn affidavit that vulnerable kids are being “automatically issued puberty blockers.”
Reed, who self-identifies as queer and progressive, recalled a patient who had a double mastectomy and later asked for her breasts to be “put back on,” as well as children identifying as mushrooms, rocks and helicopters being given gender-affirming medication.
Her bombshell testimony partially inspired a Missouri law that took effect in August, banning gender-affirming medical treatments for minors.
In July, the ACLU filed a suit challenging the law, representing families of transgender youth, LGBT groups and doctors providing gender affirming care. It’s now been revealed that the group also hit Reed — who isn’t involved in the case — with a subpoena.
According to documents posted by reporter Jesse Singal, Reed’s communications with patients, journalists, politicians, legal groups, the Missouri attorney general and law enforcement were all requested by the plaintiffs’ attorneys, five of whom are affiliated with the ACLU.
Lawyers from the ACLU also specifically asked for “all communications” between Reed and Singal concerning the gender clinic. That request was only retracted after Singal reached out to the ACLU; he tweeted that a staffer told him it had been a mistake.
“I was disappointed and alarmed to see the ACLU, of all organizations, trying to get into my in-box,” Singal told The Post. “I know they said it was some sort of accident, but clearly someone put my name in there, and fairly high up [in the document], so I’d be very curious to get the full story of what happened.”
The ACLU did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Attempting to intrude into the communications of a whistleblower and a journalist is a shocking move — especially for a group that purports to support whistleblowers and their free speech rights.
On their website, the group says whistleblowers should have “a reasonable expectation of privacy in their communications” and warns that targeting them can “chill disclosures to the media.”
And yet, it appears that’s exactly what the ACLU attempted to do here. It’s just the latest incident of the once-acclaimed institution putting activism over principles.
In 2020, Chase Strangio, a staff attorney and deputy director for Trans Justice with the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project, openly advocated for banning Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage: The transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.”
“Abigail Shrier’s book is a dangerous polemic with a goal of making people not trans,” Strangio wrote on X. “We have to fight these ideas which are leading to the criminalization of trans life again. Also stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”
This is a dedicated defender of free speech?
Strangio is also among the ACLU attorneys who have sided with transgender athletes seeking to compete in girls’ and women’s sports. On the organization’s website, Strangio described challenges to trans athletes as “a dangerous distortion of both law and science” and “an assault on the basic dignity and humanity of transgender people.”
The ACLU was also dragged for amending a Ruth Bader Ginsberg quote about abortion posted to its Twitter after her 2021 death — replacing the justice’s use of the words “she,” “her” and “women” with the gender neutral “they,” “their,” and “people.”
We’re witnessing the activist takeover of a once non-partisan beacon of American principles.
It’s a story that’s been unfolding since 2018, when a leaked internal memo showed ACLU staffers felt their progressive values were in tension with free, unfettered speech.
The memo advised weighing factors when determining whether to take on a case, such as the speech’s “effect on marginalized communities,” whether it might “assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values,” and how it could perpetuate “structural and power inequalities.”
“As an organization equally committed to free speech and equality, we should make every effort to consider the consequences of our actions,” employees wrote.
That’s a real 180 from the ACLU of decades past — which, in 1977, even sent Jewish lawyers to defend the free speech rights of uniformed neo-Nazis marching through Skokie, Illinois.
It didn’t matter to those First Amendment attorneys that neo-Nazi speech was “contrary to our values” — what mattered was that everyone has the right to speak their minds, even if what comes out is reprehensible.
“Most of the speech we defended didn’t reflect our values. That’s the point,” Ira Glasser, who served as director of the ACLU from 1978 to 2001, told Bill Maher in a 2022 interview.
The First Amendment rights of individuals across the political spectrum are constantly violated. Watchdog groups, beholden only to the principle of free speech, are critical to maintaining expressive freedom.
For decades, the ACLU did just that.
But, in recent years, it has elected to selectively defend speech its representatives agree with — while allowing a sideshow of whistleblower targeting and book-banning advocacy to nuke the group’s credibility.
There’s nothing bold or brave about defending the free speech of your allies. Everyone believes those who they agree with should have the right to speak their minds.
The ACLU has stooped to the classic “free speech for me but not for thee” schtick.
