Score another one for President Trump.
The man who has done so much to reveal the puppet strings dangling above so many of our once-unassailable public figures and organizations has captured another bunch of frothing activists-in-hiding in his skunk trap. From media outlets to judges to deep state officials in the FBI and other government entities, Trump Derangement Syndrome is exposing more people than a nudist parade through Times Square.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is the latest organization to be fully outed as a shill organization. No one is deceived by its use of terms like "rare" or "extraordinary" to describe its politically motivated decision to oppose Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court. Yet this tired band of hypocrites still attempts to clothe itself in the garments of an unbiased group dedicated solely to the constitutional rights of Americans.
Drive to Irrelevancy
But it is with respect to the illegal alien flood into our country that the ACLU has starkly shown that left-wing activism comes before any false concern for the welfare of the American people. Eager to paint the Trump administration as a modern totalitarian regime abusing harmless "undocumented dreamers," the group has instead wholly removed itself from the world of rational citizens who demand a secure border.
Take its pressure campaign against Greyhound Bus Lines. The Northern California chapter of the ACLU notes that 10 affiliates of the organization have urged Greyhound to refuse to allow Border Patrol agents on their buses:
In our letter, we documented the experiences of Greyhound riders in Vermont, California, Washington, Arizona, and Michigan who had all experienced CBP (Customs and Border Protection) boardings. The common thread in the reports was that CBP agents tended to single out people of color on the buses and did not provide reasons for their boarding and questioning.
Actually, the common thread in all those reports is that the states in which the boardings take place are all within 100 air miles of an external U.S. border. Border Patrol officers have been granted the explicit legal right to search public transportation vehicles within this 100-mile area since the 1950s. The ACLU knows this, and that is why it is pressuring a private company to not cooperate with border enforcement officials.
This is what activists, and not impartial referees of constitutional law, do.
That none of this has anything to do with the well-being of Americans is scarily demonstrated by an incident that happened on a Greyhound bus just a few weeks before the Northern California ACLU released its bloviating statement. In August, a Mexican national aboard a Greyhound bus in Colorado heading to Denver pulled a knife and tried to attack the driver, grabbed the steering wheel and intentionally crashed the bus.
Every single person on that bus easily could have been killed. Zach Thaxton, a KOAA in Colorado reporter, tweeted just how close a call it was:
And yet the ACLU chooses to play the race card. It portrays illegal aliens pulled off of public buses as "customers [who] continue to be unconstitutionally harassed and profiled based on how they look or speak" instead of focusing on the deeply dangerous threat these criminals (entering the country illegally is a crime) pose to actual American citizens.
The group pursues this loaded political agenda at a time when Americans are outraged by the senseless murders of young Americans like Kate Steinle and Mollie Tibbetts at the hands of illegal aliens. In so doing, the organization is making a deal with the Devil.
Blind to Consequences
Abandoning any shred of above-the-fray neutrality and effectively joining the "Resistance" to the hated Trump administration, the ACLU has seen its fundraising coffers swell. In a little more than a year after Trump's election, the ACLU saw its membership rise from 400,000 to 1.84 million, The New York Times reports. Online donations had been in the $3 to $5 million annual range before the coming of Trump. With him in office, that number has risen to $120 million.
This new injection of members and money may seem like a new lease of life to the 98-year-old organization, but it comes at a steep price. The group must become just another activist branch of the hysterical opposition to Trump and his Make America Great Again movement.
And so we see the ACLU engage in overtly political reactions like their response to the president's State of the Union address in January: Decrying "a harmful border wall and an even larger mass deportation force," and standing up against "the president’s deeply destructive ideas fomented by his nativist allies and divisive rhetoric."
None of these things have the slightest bit to do with civil liberties in any honest sense of the term. The ACLU, of course, has long been able to get away with a dishonest appropriation of the civil liberties mantle. It has served them far too well for far too long. That is, unfortunately, what made them most effective as an organization.
All that is gone now. Blinded by dazzling fundraising success and the thrills of in-the-moment political grandstanding, the ACLU cannot see that the seeds of its demise are already firmly taking root.
So many people and organizations are sacrificing any and all credibility for cheap political expediency as they furiously lash out against the Trump era; they seem unable to control themselves. As with all the other deranged partisans, the ACLU will pay a steep price for its shortsighted abandonment of any semblance of principle.
Exposing these long-time frauds is yet another valuable service President Trump is performing for our nation.
