Christine Blasey Ford and the ACLU: Now accusations count more than evidence.

By Rubashov

Once upon a time, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) could be relied upon to follow its core beliefs to their logical conclusions. Freedom of Speech was Freedom of Speech – even if it meant defending the right of American National Socialists to conduct a public demonstration in a town where a large community of Holocaust survivors resided.

While the ACLU’s defense of the Nazis was in poor taste, it was in keeping with their purist – admirably so, many would argue – view of the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights, that gift from all the Americans who have gone before us. That is who the ACLU was, with a stated mission "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States".

But no longer. The ACLU has “jumped the shark” as is said. We cannot tell if this is due to a growing presence of a new generation, unhistorical, overloaded on so much information from today that no room remains for all that came before; or if it is due simply to the whims of those who underwrite the ACLU – its contributors and benefactors. We cannot tell. We can only observe what they have done.

Those funding an organization inevitably call its tune. Today, there are many more groups asking for money than there were back in 1920, when the ACLU was formed. And an annual budget of more than $230 million is a big nut. One can only imagine the arguments between the group’s purists and those whose concerns focus more on fundraising.

And then there is the ever present pressure of political correctness, illustrating that America has never really moved on from its puritan roots. The need to shun, to censure, to shame remains within our DNA. Only the subject changes. If a company like Chick-fil-A can be brought to heel from the outside, how much easier for an organization like the ACLU, from within?

And so, this past weekend, the ACLU presented an award to an accuser whose accusations could not be substantiated and whose own supporters later doubted her account. An accuser who made her accusation in 2018 – about something that she said happened in 1982 (Yes, wouldn’t we all wish to live under a tyranny in which government investigators could conjure an accusation from our long past that could be made fresh to destroy us? Wouldn’t we all wish to apply such to our own lives?) In presenting an award for “courage” to this accuser, the ACLU made clear that innocent until proven guilty no longer matters.

The accuser is Christine Blasey Ford. The accused, one Brett Kavanaugh. Of course they did. What else matters?

The accuser is painting herself as a victim of a crime and the ACLU is accepting this. And yet no crime had been adjudicated. So we say again, the principle that the accused is innocent until proven guilty no longer matters.

This is quite a turnabout for the ACLU. Most everyone has heard of the Miranda case and that the police, when arresting someone, must “Mirandize” them or read them their Miranda rights. This came out of a 1963 case in which the accused was arrested for the kidnapping and rape of an 18-year-old girl. The accused admitted to the rape and confessed to police. The accused was convicted at trial of kidnapping and rape. Later, it was found that the police had neglected to inform the accused of his right to counsel, so the ACLU and others successfully argued for his release. It led to the famous decision by the United States Supreme Court, in favor of the accused – who had been convicted of kidnapping and rape.

Ernesto Miranda went to trial again in 1967. Witnesses testified that Miranda himself had bragged about the rape at the time of the offense. He was convicted in 1967 and sentenced to serve 20 to 30 years in prison. However, this was before the Reagan/Clinton era of tough-on-crime mandatory sentencing laws and such, so he was released in 1972. Miranda was stabbed to death in a bar fight in 1976.

(NOTE: America is now in the process of regressing to the past – of going back to those halcyon days when a man convicted of kidnapping and rape was back on the streets in five years. The victim, in this case, was just 27 years old when the man convicted of kidnapping and raping her was released. Hopefully, she moved so she didn’t have to look at him. Remember this well, because this is where we are going – here and to the great re-learning that will of necessity follow. Look forward to a new wave of mandatory sentencing laws in the 2030’s and 2040’s.)

This was who the ACLU was back when it believed that the accused was innocent until proven guilty – back when the ACLU would take on the case of a convicted rapist and kidnapper and insist that – no matter the public outcry, no matter how loud this mob or that howled – the rules had to be adhered to. How you played the game mattered to the ACLU. Then. Not now.

Now the howls of the mob are all that matters. And the money. Bet the fundraising is going great!

The Left in America (and throughout the West) has embraced a kind of Modernist justice that leaves it “free” from empirical evidence and facts. Going forward, they tell us, “justice” will be based on “imagination” and “feeling” – whether of the individual or of the mob (be it in body or on social media). Of course, even the most ardent Modernists had to later admit that the “oakness” of the truncheons did intrude on the mind’s abstractions. Then, when the darkness fell, and “justice” became whatever the government, with its men with guns, said it was.

Let us mourn the passing of the old ACLU. Too bad, it almost made a hundred.