ACLU, Silent on Cancel Culture, Ready to Fight for China’s TikTok

Some pop culture memories refuse to go away.

As a 13 year old I remember watching “Skokie,” a TV movie about the ACLU defending the very worst kind of speech possible. Think Nazi propaganda, not the pseudo white supremacy rhetoric liberal pundits shriek about today.

The fact-based film starred Danny Kaye as a Holocaust survivor whose Chicago suburb is set to host a Nazi rally. The community’s Jewish population, many of whom had similarly spent time in concentration camps, were divided on the best way to deal with the rally.

Meanwhile, lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) argued on behalf of the National Socialist Party of America. Protecting free speech, they cried, means defending the very worst kind of speech to have any weight.

That was then.

Today, the ACLU is sitting on the sidelines as Cancel Culture tears a hole in our cultural fabric. The organization spends more time now insisting we use the proper pronouns and attacking President Donald Trump in every way possible. Consider the new indie documentary “The Fight” as exhibit A.

Big tech censorship runs roughshod over both conservatives and atypical voices, and the ACLU can’t raise a hand in objection. This reporter reached out to the ACLU’s press division a few weeks ago for comment on a related story tied to free speech.

The group’s press arm didn’t respond to the query. And let’s not forget the battle conservative college students are facing on universities nationwide … just for embracing smaller government.

Free speech is on the ACLU’s back burner in the Age of Trump … until now.

Banning an app like TikTok, which millions of Americans use to communicate with each other, is a danger to free expression and technologically impractical. https://t.co/ZbN7f2TOwF

— ACLU (@ACLU) August 1, 2020

The ACLU sent out that stern tweet after President Trump threatened to shut the social media platform known as TikTok down. The Trump administration fears the company’s Chinese roots represent a serious threat on several levels.

The Spectator helps spell it out while admonishing incurious journalists too eager to smite Trump to do any digging on the matter. The article cites a developer who “reverse engineered” the app to learn just what it’s doing stateside. Here’s what TikTok can do if unchecked:

• Hijacks a user’s phone hardware (CPU type, number of course, hardware ids, screen dimensions, DPI, memory usage and disk space)
• Accesses ‘everything network related…a user’s IP, local IP, router mac, the user’s mac and WiFi access point name’
• Sets up a local proxy server on a user’s device for ‘transcoding media’ with zero authentication. Meaning it can read every piece of data and action on a user’s other apps 

The issue remains complex, and a possible solution may be Microsoft taking over TikTok and, hopefully, being more protective of users’ privacy.

It’s certainly a subject square in the ACLU’s wheelhouse. Now, can the august group dust itself off and start fighting for free speech that doesn’t involve President Trump? Even PEN America rose up recently, if only to back far-left filmmaker Michael Moore from his own bout with big tech censorship.

Google censors conservatives: ACLU silent

Twitter censors conservatives: ACLU silent

FB censors conservatives: ACLU silent

But they spring to the defense of app owned by Chinese Communists.

Makes you wonder whose side the ACLU is really on. 🤔 https://t.co/JzC4vtkYGa

— Chris Buskirk (@thechrisbuskirk) August 1, 2020

Photo by Ivan Pergasi on Unsplash