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.