The lesson was obvious: either do exactly as the kids with the torches and pitchforks demand, or you’re a heretic. And when you’re a heretic, there’s only one thing to do with you.

The ACLU, flush with cash and its own self-importance, thought it could survive with a foot in both worlds, being woke to the transient feelz of social justice while maintaining a distant finger on what was once its mission, civil rights.

So silly.

Students affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement crashed an event at the College of William & Mary, rushed the stage, and prevented the invited guest—the American Civil Liberties Union’s Claire Gastañaga, a W & M alum—from speaking.

Ironically, Gastañaga had intended to speak on the subject, “Students and the First Amendment.”

Milo. Ben Shapiro. Charles Murray and Christina Hoff Summers. The ACLU?

The disruption was livestreamed on BLM at W&M’s Facebook page. Students took to the stage just a few moments after Gastañaga began her remarks. At first, she attempted to spin the demonstration as a welcome example of the kind of thing she had come to campus to discuss, commenting “Good, I like this,” as they lined up and raised their signs. “I’m going to talk to you about knowing your rights, and protests and demonstrations, which this illustrates very well. Then I’m going to respond to questions from the moderators, and then questions from the audience.”

It was the last remark she was able to make before protesters drowned her out with cries of, “ACLU, you protect Hitler, too.”

And then there was none. The administration issued press release number 6 in response.

Silencing certain voices in order to advance the cause of others is not acceptable in our community. This stifles debate and prevents those who’ve come to hear a speaker, our students in particular, from asking questions, often hard questions, and from engaging in debate where the strength of ideas, not the power of shouting, is the currency. William & Mary must be a campus that welcomes difficult conversations, honest debate and civil dialogue.

And everyone went home for dinner, having silenced the Naxos-supporting ACLU with no more than the usual tepid rhetoric. Curiously, this would be the same press release the admin would have issued had this been Milo rather than the ACLU’s Claire Gastañaga.

Having forfeited its legitimacy as an organization doing the hard, and often unpleasant, work of defending the Constitution for all by branching out to many “emanations and penumbras” favored by social justice warriors and the unduly passionate, while keeping its pinky (since the rest of its outstretched hand was too busy with non-constitutional causes) on free speech when it wasn’t in direct conflict with its political agenda, the ACLU expected that the love and goodwill it acquired fighting Trump’s immigrant ban would insulate it from the fury of the crowd.

For all the ACLU has done to pander to the misguided politics of social justice, it gets no pass on the First Amendment. I could have told it that this would be the outcome, that once they abandoned principle for the cash and adoration of the kidz, there was no going back.