War & Peace Quote by Craig Bruce

The line works like a bait-and-switch: it flatters civil-liberties nostalgia, then cashes that goodwill into a permission slip for vengeance. By praising the ACLU in the 1960s, Bruce invokes an era that reads, in hindsight, as morally uncomplicated - free speech battles, segregation, Vietnam-era dissent. The compliment isn t really about the ACLU; it s about the speaker positioning himself as someone who approves of rights when they feel clean, heroic, and safely historical.

Then comes the pivot: nowadays they ve run out of useful things to do. That s a familiar cultural move, treating institutions built for principled, repetitive work as if they should retire once the big victories are won. The subtext is that civil liberties are a finite project, not a perpetual constraint on state power. It also implies that contemporary abuses are either exaggerated or deserved.

The phrase scum of the Earth is doing the heavy lifting. It collapses due process into a gut-level taxonomy: real people versus contaminants. Once someone is labeled scum, defending their rights becomes not just misguided but obscene, a kind of betrayal of decent society. The kicker - what they rightly deserve - smuggles in a fantasy of moral clarity: punishment as a self-evident outcome rather than a legal process with safeguards precisely because we are worst at fairness when we are most certain.

Contextually, this reads like post-60s backlash logic: rights-talk is admirable until it interferes with the public s appetite for order. The quote isn t arguing against the ACLU s mission; it s arguing against the discomfort that mission creates.