Remember how outrageously offensive the "free speech zones" were during the George W. Bush administration about 20 years ago? Remote areas were cordoned off, and protesters were corralled behind the fences out of sight and out of mind. Dissent could not be permitted anywhere close to any official event. It had to be kept as quiet as possible without completely cutting it off.
The left at the time properly denounced this as a violation of free speech hidden behind a mask of promoting it with a designated place. Even when I still thought there was hope of someone in the Republican party actually acting on their rhetoric of free markets and individual liberty outside state scrutiny, I found those antics downright repulsive. However, the left wing always struck me as fair-weather friends. I also saw them shouting down anyone they didn't like at universities around the country. Even then, when I was attending a community college, there was a disingenuous pretense of free speech with barely-disguised contempt for anything that could be labeled "conservative," whether libertarian or neo-con. As time went on, anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton was painted as basically a Nazi, and since Nazis are bad, they couldn't be allowed to speak.
I know my recent posts have been harsh toward the left, but while I oppose almost everything the Trump administration and his MAGA adherents do, I can't feel confident in aligning with the partisan opposition, either. Setting aside their flavor of nanny state authoritarianism in general, there is also the specific problem of the attitude that their speech should not be silenced, but other people are just hatemongers to be silenced at all costs. It doesn't seem to be about principle so much as maintaining an ideological monopoly.
The social media celebrations of Charlie Kirk's assassination reminded me again how little the left in America really cares about dialogue and disagreement. Anyone not with them is against them. Dissent is only allowed when Republicans are in charge, apparently.
I am a Christian Anarchist. I say there is no king but Jesus, and men who claim rulership are usurpers who would claim God's authority to appease their own greed and vanity. The Left just held a massive "No Kings" nationwide protest, but I can't shake the feeling they just want their preferred rulers, not no rulers.
I saw how they demanded obedience during COVID when any questions about public health policy were conflated with denying viruses exist. Time after time, people asked perfectly reasonable questions, got called names, and had their social media accounts blacklisted only for the government to acknowledge their questions were valid a few months later.
We also saw a stark difference in the response to Black Lives Matter protests, where arson and assault were hand-waived away as virtuous activism, yet somehow Republican protesters on January 6th who walked in through wide-open doors were called "insurrectionists." Demonstrations against the Democratic victory were treated as high treason, and there were calls for severe penalties. Democrats are a police state party pretending to care about freethinkers, the poor and downtrodden, but if you fall out of line, you must be crushed.
All of this might suggest I side with the GOP, but the Republicans are a police state party masquerading as free market libertarians on the campaign trail. Social media accounts and phone apps tracking ICE operations have been locked down at the behest if bureaucracy. Masked paramilitary police and army national guard are marching in the streets. The police state is expanding while Republicans talk about "small government" and "free markets" yet again, just like after 9/11. And of course there's the pearl-clutching censorship campaigns in libraries across the country, too.
Both parties absolutely mean to use jack-booted thugs to impose their vision of society upon everyone, and I'm not sure which is more hypocritical. Do we really think voting in new authoritarian liars will fix the problem? I hope you're not that gullible. Those who want power sell you a counterfeit, a facsimile, of freedom. They demand we beg permission and purchase licenses to pretend to be free, while selling us promises they cannot or will not fulfill.
We need to build alternative media, alternative communities, and even alternative money to escape their censorship and control, without permission. Corporations are intertwined with the State, but HIVE remains an example of decentralized, resilient free speech with its own independent economy. It is one of many paths out of Babylon. It's not immune to the surveillance state panopticon, but it's still a way we can speak freely in spite of censorship. Even if a whale downvotes an account, the content is still there to be seen. The necessary witness collusion to truly delete something from the blockchain would require something so egregious that they could build a consensus, and if someone were to seize enough power to alter the blockchain like we saw on Steemit, we have the power of forks and backups.
Liberty is always under attack, but the iron fist of the State cannot crush us all. We have no kings and we have free speech, the ambitions of politicians be damned. Peaceful action, not marching in the streets begging for permission, or rioting, or gathering in designated "free speech zones," is our path. Will you follow it?
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
So what have the National Guard been doing in the cities they've been deployed in? In Washington DC I heard there were doing non-enforcement tasks like directing traffic freeing up police officers to actually pursue criminals. If that is all they are doing, I don't think the accusation of "police state" is really apt. The exceedingly high crime rate in some of these cities argues just the opposite. However, I haven't heard as much about what they have been doing in other cities.
I'm not fond of either party I hate the hypocrisy though. Like the left complaining about Trump prosecuting political enemies when they just spent years doing the same to Trump.
There mere presence of the military is dangerous because it creates a precedent. These precedents will me abused, perhaps not by Trump, but someone will push the boundary further. The "slippery slope fallacy" isn't a fallacy when it comes to power base don precedent.
The urban crime rates are in large part an unintended consequence of the war on drugs creating an environment where black markets and violence thrive. Additionally, the regulatory system enforced by police reduces economic opportunity with red tape and artificial financial obstacles. The police have created the problem they say they can't police.
Democrat complaints about politically-motivated prosecutions certainly do ring hollow.
Deploying the national guard in U.S. cities, even because of high crime rates, is hardly precedent setting. The same thing was done in 2006-2008 and at other times. I guess it's a reasonable question to ask, how bad does crime have to be before it crosses the line into unrest (which is where historically the National Guard has come into play)? 1 murder a day? 10? 100? 1000?
The war on drugs may be part of the problem but I don't think that's the whole story. Especially since that once you get to drugs harder than marijuana (heroin, fentanyl, crack, etc.), I don't think relaxing enforcement (at least in terms of dealers) would be a net benefit to society. Besides, I don't think the war on drugs, which started in the 1980s, is responsible for recent crime increases. On the other hand, Trumps national guard deployments don't match exactly where crime has been increasing in all cases (I'm thinking specifically of Chicago where crime, while high, has generally been on the downtrend for a while). However, Memphis and Washington D.C. where the National Guard was deployed are cities where crime was already high and in recent years gotten worse.