Alan Dershowitz slams the ACLU as 'enemy of liberty,' encourages donations to FIRE

Alan Dershowitz has had enough with the American Civil Liberties Union. He's taking his money elsewhere, and he hopes you will too.

During a recent appearance on the Just the News, Not Noise television show, the professor emeritus of Harvard law school and longtime First Amendment defender made clear that his support of the ACLU has come to an end.

On Thursday, Dershowitz told co-hosts John Solomon and Amanda Head that nothing former President Donald Trump said on January 6 rose to the level of incitement of a mob – a charge for which Trump was impeached for the second time.

The only people, Dershowitz said, who would argue that Trump's language on January 6, 2021 could be exclusionary under the First Amendment are "what used to be called the ACLU."

Then he dug in.

The American Civil Liberties Union, an organization of which Dershowitz was formerly a national board member, "has become the enemy of liberty, the enemy of free speech," he charged.

During his time with the organization, Dershowitz said he defended "dissidents of every kind," from Nazis to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Now, however, he says the organization has become nothing more than an "adjunct of the hard left." He noted that staff of the organization recently attempted to ban a book ("Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters" by Abigail Shrier) that takes a stance on transgenderism many progressives find to be offensive. 

The retired law professor says that, despite supporting the organization for many years, he no longer donates at all to the ACLU, and encouraged those watching to instead donate to an organization he believes has "risen to fill the gap" – FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression). 

FIRE, according to Dershowitz, embodies the genuinely neutral, nonpartisan stance toward the protection of American civil rights that the ACLU once held.

This is not the first time Dershowitz has publicly criticized the ACLU. In 2018, he wrote an op-ed arguing that the disintegration of the organization's neutrality was due to an increasingly polarized political landscape.

"The ACLU’s move from the neutral protector of civil liberties to a partisan advocate of hard-left politics is both a symptom and consequence of this change," he wrote.