In May 2022, roughly a year before he was removed from the board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, Michael Barfield saw what was coming. For years, Barfield had been resisting what he describes as mission drift: a retreat by the nation’s premier free-speech organization from the viewpoint-neutral defense of civil liberties, which had long been its core mission, in favor of social-justice initiatives and an anti-Trump agenda. The group’s new direction became unmistakable at the ACLU Biennial Leadership Conference in Los Angeles, where, according to Barfield, Anthony Romero, the longtime head of the organization, gave a State of the Union–style address. “Anthony was talking about how marvelous things were,” said Barfield, “and he stops at one point during this and says something like, ‘Some of you here in this room will remember a time when there were some within this organization who opposed my vision, who opposed my views and my goals of moving this organization forward. And I want you to look around the room. Because you won’t see any of them here. “And there was a standing ovation,” continued Barfield, who counted himself among those who opposed Romero’s vision. “I was stunned at the ego, by the raw claim of power. I didn’t stand up and applaud. In fact, I was disgusted.” (While the ACLU did engage me on questions surrounding the organization’s mission, it declined to respond to any specific findings. “Given the challenges the nation will confront with a second Trump administration, we can’t afford to spend further bandwidth on efforts to rehash inaccurate characterizations of the ACLU,” said a spokesperson.)

Barfield is among a small group of people formerly aligned with the ACLU — generally left-leaning individuals committed to the causes of civil liberties and civil rights — who say the organization lost its way in recent years and who are urging a return to the former philosophy on protecting free speech and civil rights, which was famously blind to the speaker’s ideology or politics. Barfield and those of similar mind think that retreat is shortsighted and, ultimately, dangerous. The change didn’t go unnoticed. Floyd Abrams, arguably the nation’s leading First Amendment attorney, told the New York Times in 2021, “The last thing they should be thinking about in a case is which ideological side profits. The ACLU that used to exist would have said exactly the opposite.” In 2022, Lara Bazelon, the celebrated lawyer and criminal-justice reformer, wrote in The Atlantic, “The ACLU now seems largely unable or unwilling to uphold its core values.” And recently, Ira Glasser, the leader of the ACLU from 1978 to 2001, told me that the new case-selection guidelines were “the most fundamental departure from ACLU founding principles you could possibly have.” “Free-speech restrictions are like poison gas,” said Glasser when we first spoke last winter, arguing that the ACLU’s failure to take a free-speech case is tantamount to approval of the restriction in the first place. “They seem like a terrific weapon when you’ve got the gas in your hands and you’ve got your particular target in sight. But the wind has a way of shifting, and when it does, it blows the restrictions back on you. That’s why the progressives have their heads up their asses. I know they’re freaked out about the strength of the right wing these days.

I know they’re freaked out about Trump. I’m freaked out, too. It started, they said, on the morning after Election Day 2016, when the ACLU posted a simple graphic on its home page: a picture of Trump with the words “We’ll see you in court.” This was followed by an open letter written by Romero himself, warning the new president-elect that if he followed through on many of his campaign promises, he would “have to contend with the full firepower of the ACLU at every step.” Money came pouring in, crashing the organization’s donation website. By the Thursday morning after Election Day, the ACLU had raised $2.4 million from nearly 40,000 contributions. Trump’s Muslim ban in the first month of his presidency set off another fundraising bonanza: The ACLU raised $24 million from more than 350,000 online donors in just two days. By comparison, in all of 2015, the ACLU raised roughly $3.5 million in online donations. Barfield began taking his concerns to the ACLU’s national leadership, including with Romero. He warned of mission drift and informed national that its People Power program in Florida was in direct violation of the state affiliate’s bylaws and policies. According to Barfield, Romero responded, “‘Get onboard or get out of the way. This is not your grandfather’s ACLU.’ That’s exactly what he told me one time.” The irony, according to Ira Glasser, is that in his day, the primary cause for expulsion from the ACLU would be an abdication of its core mission of viewpoint-neutral defense of civil liberties. “If the allegations in Florida are true,” said Glasser, “then it’s a fundamental departure from core ACLU principles.” Since the new case-selection guidelines — which Cole himself authored — were created, the ACLU has defended the NRA, Christian fundamentalists, the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, and even Donald Trump, in relation to a judge’s gag order against him in the January 6 case.

As recently as May of last year, the ACLU filed an amicus brief with the New Hampshire Supreme Court in support of a white-supremacist group that affixed a “Keep New England White” banner to a public-highway overpass. When I asked this former staffer if they thought today’s ACLU would still defend the right of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, the landmark ACLU case of 1977, they said “yes” but with a caveat: “When I was at the ACLU, sometimes people took it as a point of pride that the ACLU lost something like 25 percent of its membership in the wake of Skokie. And I think that what some people in the organization are saying is it’s not that we should not have represented the Nazis in Skokie; it’s that we need to figure out a way to provide people with the protection of the rights they’re entitled to — and doing it in a way where we’re preparing our people, preparing our supporters, contextualizing it so that we don’t lose 25 percent of our members. Because if you do, then you can’t continue doing the other critical civil-liberties work that the organization does.”

One of the clearest indicators that something substantive did, indeed, change at the ACLU is the rise of a direct competitor. At the same time Anthony Romero was giving his 2022 speech in Los Angeles, effectively claiming victory over the old guard of the ACLU, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, was gearing up for its June 2022 rebrand as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. After more than 20 years focused on academic freedom, the name change signaled FIRE’s plan to expand its free-speech mission beyond college campuses. At the time of the announcement, Glasser was quick to make the connection, stating in a Politico article that the ACLU’s partisan turn toward social justice had “created a vacuum in the viewpoint-neutral defense of free speech, which FIRE has filled.” FIRE’s intention is to be completely nonpartisan. There are some signs of success on that front: A survey of FIRE’s email subscribers found 28 percent identify as left-leaning, 32 percent as right-leaning, and the rest as “other.” But FIRE is dogged by a sense on the left that it is suspiciously too friendly to conservatives. When you ask FIRE leadership, the majority of whom are left-leaning, where that perception comes from, they say it’s the result of having worked exclusively in the domain of the college campus from 1999 to 2022. With higher education dominated by progressives, FIRE’s clients have generally been conservative or heterodox professors and students who say their academic-freedom and free-speech rights have been denied.

When I spoke to Glasser after the November election, he said, “Whether you’re the ACLU or FIRE, if you’re going to hold Trump accountable when he exceeds the limits of his power, you cannot be in a position of being seen as anti-Trump or of having campaigned against him politically. Otherwise, you will have no credibility, and you will not be effective.”