The latest assault on America from the GOP assshole-in-chief:
Thought number one, this memo undoes the basic tradition of American liberty and law, which is individuality. The premise in our tradition is that we are individuals to be judged on the basis
of what we do as such. This memo, quite to the contrary, begins from the premise that the world is governed by mysterious, invisible entities to which individuals can be arbitrarily associated by the power of the government, thereby making those individuals guilty and subject to prosecution and punishment.
Second problem. not only is responsibility collective,
we are being associated with something that does not exist, with a phantom. There is no large underlying mysterious left-wing organization that is responsible for everything, all evil in the world. It doesn't exist. But what we know from history is that The use of non-existent organizations allows governments to target everybody. It means that the prosecution can be limitless.
There's no defined boundary. it means that interrogation can go on and on, because since the thing doesn't exist in the real world, it can only be brought into being by interrogation protocols. And the memo, by no accident, is quite eloquent about the need for extensive interrogation of suspects.
Third thought.
The memo is based on a reversal of reality. It asks us to believe that individual acts of political violence are all the result of this non-existent but left-wing political organization. It's the left-wing part that I want to focus on. In reality, roughly 70% of the acts of political violence that are politically motivated in the
US come from the far right. This is documented by the federal government as well as by independent organizations. It's noteworthy that the FBI just dropped these statistics from its website. Nevertheless, they are facts. We are being asked to believe the opposite, and we are being told that if we criticize the far right,
if we note factual matters about the far right, that could lead to us being associated with activities that the government regards as criminal. But there's something even worse than this in the reversal of reality. The groups that will be targeted And of course, they're not, in fact, invisible, all-powerful, far-left conspiratorial actors.
The groups that will actually be targeted will be groups that are concerned with things like counting the votes, human rights, freedom of speech, and the rule of law. Those are the groups that will actually be targeted, will be targeted, already are being targeted. So, All this runs against basic American constitutional tradition.
All this, this reversal of reality, this targeting of a phantom amounts to a big lie. And all of this also amounts to a cliche. This is familiar. This has been done before and it doesn't have to work. The cliche is that This is an emergency. That's what they always say.
The cliche is that the other side are terrorists. That's what they always say. The cliche is that there's a mysterious, bottomless organization that we have to chase to the ends of the earth and break all the rules to find. That's what they always say. We know this from the 21st century, the 20th and 19th.
The founders warned us of this, that precisely it would be on an imagined emergency that our republic could fall.
So, Most of this is outrageous. Much of it is clearly illegal. Congress has a role. It can pass laws to prevent these specific things from being done. The courts have a role. They can rule things illegal,
and they can listen to cases of people who have been persecuted under this. Commentators have a role to clearly describe what is going on. Citizens have a role, and that is to say that they don't want to be subject to an imagined emergency based on a big lie that does away with the essence
of American liberty and law. We all have a role. This has been done before. It can be stopped. Thank you.
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