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Notes -
The most interesting thing about this case (and the similar ACLU dustup with the NLRB) to me is what it says about the current state of liberal non-profits. They're being eaten alive by the extreme and conflicting demands of their staffs. The inmates have taken over the asylum, and now the managers have suddenly realized that the massive regulatory state they spent their whole lives supporting makes it impossible to do anything about it. You know things must be bad internally for these organizations to be doing the Conservative Legal Movement's work for them free of charge.
The "inmates taking over the asylum" theory is that junior staffers at lefty orgs are pushing wokestupid at the expense of the mission of the org, and management are unable to stop them. The ACLU case is the opposite. A manger fired a staffer for what they claimed to be wokestupid reasons, but was probably actually just powertripping management, and the ACLU doubled down because the manager was black. Unless you think the black first-line manager counts as an inmate taking over the asylum, this is a wokestupid vs free speech type case. The Audobon case is nothing to do with wokestupid - the underlying labour law case is a highly technical issue about information exchange in union contract negotiations.
In both cases, I think management hired outside counsel and told them to put anything in that looked like a winning argument, which is standard practice in cases where the stakes are high enough. And given the Jarkesy situation I discuss further down, these things are potentially winning arguments. I doubt either the ACLU or Audobon leadership read the briefs being submitted on their behalf, although their in-house lawyers should have done and should have spotted and escalated this kind of thing. I work in a bank and one of the subjects of the fun, fun, mandatory online trainings we do every quarter is that it is everyone's job to stop and escalate if they see something that could be an utter public humiliation (or reputational risk, as the corporate types call it).
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