Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution

by Tucker Carlson

American Civil Liberties Union was formed in 1920 in part as a reaction to his case and others like it. For decades after its founding, the ACLU took an absolutist position on the First Amendment: ACLU lawyers defended free speech in all cases, and with particular vigor when that speech was unpopular or outright despised. It sometimes seemed like there wasn’t a villain or miscreant the ACLU wasn’t eager to represent. Klansmen, communists, anti-Semites, pornographers—all got free legal counsel when the ACLU determined their right to speak was under attack. When a Denver theater owner was arrested for screening D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (a local ordinance banned movies that incited “race hatred”), the ACLU defended him. When the U.S. Post Office burned copies of James Joyce’s unreadable modernist novel Ulysses on obscenity grounds, the ACLU took the case to court. Militant atheists got help from the ACLU. So did any number of draft dodgers, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused to salute the flag.