The free speech you disagree with

Thomas Paine said, "He who would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." 

This principle -- espoused by many leaders of the Enlightenment -- was famously summarized by historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall as "I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto death your right to say it."  It's a central founding tenet of democracy.  We all have voices, and are allowed (within certain well-demarcated boundaries, including prohibitions against threats, hate speech, and fraudulent claims) to use them to voice our own views.

That right has been steadily eroding under the Trump regime.

The situation got markedly worse following the assassination of right-wing agitator Charlie Kirk last week.  First, allow me to state up front that I am in no way celebrating Kirk's death.  No one deserves to be murdered, period, end of story.

But.  The fact remains that Kirk was a thoroughly horrible human being, and his violent death doesn't cleanse him of the odium of things he himself said.  Here's a small sampler:

• "[The biblical injunction to stone gay people to death] is God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters."
• "[Black people] are coming out, and they're saying, 'I'm only here because of affirmative action.' Yeah, we know.  You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.  You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously."
• "We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s."
• "I can't stand the word empathy, actually.  I think empathy is a made up new age term that does a lot of damage."
• "[Transgender people] are an abomination to God."

But like -- we'd hope -- anyone else in the United States, Kirk had the right to say all those things, just as I have the right to vehemently, and vocally, disagree with them.

Then he was murdered.  And the people on the right immediately assumed that the killer was a leftist.  Or transgender.  Or an immigrant.  Or Black.  Or maybe a Black immigrant transgender leftist.  Before a scrap of information was known about the actual killer, self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" (and, judging by the extent to which he controls content on X/Twitter, actual complete hypocrite) Elon Musk stated, "The Left is the party of murder."  I saw more than one person on social media post a horrified, "They killed Charlie Kirk" -- and you know who "they" is.  

Then a 22-year-old man was arrested for the murder, and it turns out he's a white Mormon conservative whose family his own grandmother described as "one hundred percent MAGA."  Well, can't have that spoiling the narrative -- so immediately the Right started casting about for reasons that the alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, can't have been what he seemed.  A good example is this one, from Dinesh D'Souza Distort D'Newsa:

Never mind that Robinson attended college for exactly one semester, with the notoriously left-wing major of... engineering?  Not only that, it was during the COVID lockdown and contained only virtual classes, and he dropped out afterward -- to attend trade school.  

Man, those sly, scheming leftist professors work fast.

At present, the alleged killer's motives are unclear, as he's "not talking with investigators," but it's been credibly claimed that Robinson was a follower of people like Laura Loomer and Nick Fuentes, who criticized Kirk for not being far right enough.  (Interestingly, shortly after Kirk's death, Loomer deleted all her tweets that had been critical of Kirk, and Fuentes posted a message to his "Groyper Army" on X/Twitter, saying, "If you take up arms, I disavow you.  I disown you in the strongest possible terms."  More than a little suspicious, that.)

In all of this, what's certain is that Robinson is not anything close to a "leftist."

But none of that matters.  Trump has called for a crackdown on anyone vocally on the left, and especially anyone who is publicly critical of Charlie Kirk, often merely for repeating what Kirk himself said.  Just a couple of days ago, ABC terminated talk show host Jimmy Kimmel for saying, "The MAGA gang is desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it," which is nothing more than the honest truth.

And it's also true that currently the "MAGA gang" has a stranglehold on the media.  The United States is not as bad as North Korea yet -- where anything even remotely critical of Dear Leader can get you killed -- but it's rapidly heading that direction.  Forty percent of the news entering American households is controlled by stations owned by the strongly conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group, which includes the majority of not only Fox-affiliated stations but the majority of those connected to CBS, NBC, and ABC.  The idea of independent, unbiased news media in the United States is very much a thing of the past.  If you think they don't screen every last news story presented, and make sure anything even mildly critical of the current regime is expunged, you're fooling yourself.

The fact that people like Kimmel and Stephen Colbert got away with it for a while is actually surprising -- but now even they've been silenced.

I had virtually convinced myself not to write about Kirk's death and the fallout afterward.  Tempers are running high on both sides, and my own distaste for everything Kirk stood for makes it too easy for anyone who leans right to dismiss me as "just another radical leftist."  As I said in the beginning, no one deserves to be murdered for their beliefs, and that includes people I vehemently disagree with.  (And contrary to what a lot of MAGA types want you to believe, the vast majority of people on the left have been saying exactly that; the number of people I've seen "celebrating" Kirk's death is extremely small.)

But the idea that Trump and his cronies are coldly, callously using this violent act as an incentive for cracking down on dissent is somewhere beyond reprehensible.  It is also not without precedent.  The MAGA playbook owes much to the strategies of Joseph Goebbels, who used just such an incident -- the murder of Nazi party member Horst Wessel -- to crack down on the communists.  When Wessel was shot to death by a communist, he was elevated to martyr status, statues of him erected in public places, and a song about his heroism composed.  (In another parallel that would be comical if all this wasn't so deadly serious, Adolf Hitler didn't bother to go to Wessel's funeral, just as Trump didn't go to Kirk's -- Trump was too busy playing golf to honor the man he called "a true American hero.")

In any case, I decided I couldn't stay silent.  I'm not sure what this'll accomplish, besides probably losing me some followers.  At this point, there aren't many people who are still undecided, and the impossibly annoying backfire effect makes it likely that anyone who disagrees with me and reads this will come away disagreeing with me even more stridently.

But you know what?  That is your right.  I will keep speaking up, and I hope you do, too.  I can't do much to stop the degradation of human rights that is currently happening in this country, except for continuing to voice my beliefs as long as I am able.

The bottom line is that everyone supports the free speech they agree with.  The sticking point comes with supporting the free speech you disagree with.  And -- this is the critical thing -- screaming like hell when anyone tries to take away that right from anyone.  Because you know what?  Once the fascists start curtailing the rights to free speech, they don't stop.  You might want to reread Martin Niemöller's famous poem that begins "First they came for the socialists."  Yeah, perhaps right now you're safe, but if things keep going the way they're going, you can't count on staying that way.

Just remember -- that poem is all too short.  And it doesn't end well.

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Resistance is... imperative.

I should know better by now.  Whenever I post something that has the subtext, "Isn't this ridiculous?  I mean, really.  Can you think of anything more idiotic than this?" -- as I did in yesterday's post, wherein I described an ultrareligious website's claim that the Rapture has actually already happened -- it just acts as an impetus for someone in my readership to send me something even stupider.

So when I got an email from a loyal reader that said, "First the Rapture, and now this," I paused for a moment before clicking the link.

I should have paused for a lot longer.  And gotten myself a glass of scotch.  Because the link was to a story about an evangelical pastor and a talk-radio host...

... who think that the gays are forming an army of super-soldiers.

*brief pause to allow you to go get something to fortify yourself with before reading on*

I wish I was kidding about this, I really do.  But according to an article over at Raw Story, Reverend Jeff Allen of Indiana was interviewed a couple of days ago by TruNews radio host and fundamentalist wingnut Rick Wiles, and they were in total agreement that the gays are trying to create a master race of super soldiers.

Fig. 1: Super Soldier.  Not sure if he's gay, but we should assume the worst.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Wiles and Allen ignore, of course, the fact that being gay, the super soldiers will have a little trouble reproducing their Master Race unless they enlist some help.  But as I mentioned yesterday, facts seem to be very much beside the point with this crowd.

"Hitler was trying to create a race of super gay male soldiers," Wiles said.  "It’s not an exaggeration to say ‘homofascist,’ because the German Nazi Party was homosexual.  Hitler was a homosexual.  The top Nazi leadership, all of them were homosexuals."

Which would have undoubtedly come as a surprise to Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda, who had six children; Joachim von Ribbentrop and his wife Anna, who had five children; Ernst Kaltenbrunner and his wife Elisabeth, who had three children; etc.  Not to mention the thousands of homosexuals who were rounded up during the Holocaust and sent to concentration camps, where many lost their lives.

Oh, but do go on, Mr. Wiles, don't let me distract you with actual facts.

"They were creating a homosexual special race," Wiles continued.  "That’s what it was all about.  It wasn’t this thing about an Aryan race of white people, blue-eyed, blonde-haired, white people, Hitler was trying to create a race of super gay male soldiers.  If it’s not stopped, it will end up in America just like it was in Germany but it won’t be the Jews that will be slaughtered, it will be the Christians."

Then Reverend Allen chimed in, but not with what any sane person would have said, which would have been, "Are you fucking crazy?"  No, Allen acted as if what Wiles was saying made perfect sense.

"Right," he said, his voice carrying that intensity that you only hear in people who have utterly and completely lost their minds.  "We haven’t gotten, fortunately, to the slaughtering part, but we’re getting to the point of the marginalizing part.  Marginalized, get us to the edge, remove us from any influence in society."

Marginalized even though Christians still account for nearly three-quarters of the population in the United States.  Righty-o.

But never mind that, Allen said.  "Gays are Nazi thought police and they’re going to be the worst kind of tyrants we’ve ever seen.  They’re going to hunt you down and they’re going to persecute you.  That is the spirit that is alive in this country right now and is being embraced by political leaders in both parties, it is the new Nazism."

And if that isn't enough, add it to what appeared on Herman Cain's website a few days ago -- an article written by Dan Calabrese, editor-in-chief of The Best of Cain, who compared gays to the Borg on Star Trek.  "This movement is evil," Calabrese writes, "not because homosexuality is a 'worse sin' than other sins, but because its champions are trying to not only silence but in many cases destroy those who disagree with them.  The gay movement understands something.  They understand that in order for their movement to ultimately succeed, they need to turn the entire culture into a mindless army of obedient adherents like the Borg on Star Trek.  You will be assimilated.  Resistance is futile."

You know, the only hopeful thing I can see in all of this is that the lengths to which some people are going to deny LGBT individuals the right to marry -- and, honestly, the right to have a voice, to stand up and be counted, to be who they are without fear of repercussions or violence -- may be an indication that the bigots realize that they're losing.  LGBT individuals and their allies won't be silenced, just as in an earlier generation the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement refused to give up.  Christians themselves are beginning to repudiate people like Allen, Wiles, and Calabrese, recognizing that the teachings of Jesus had way more to do with "do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you" than they did with "make sure that an entire segment of society is discriminated against, even if it means telling blatant lies to do so."  Because the truth is, the bigots have no better arguments; denying LGBT individuals the rights that heterosexuals have always enjoyed cannot be defended logically (can someone please explain to me why allowing two gay men to marry would have any impact on my marriage at all?), so off into the stratosphere they go with ridiculous talk of gay super soldiers and Borg drones.

And, you know, narrow-minded loons like Wiles and Allen and Calabrese will end up on the wrong side of history, just as George Wallace and Eugene "Bull" Connor did a generation ago.  It's only a matter of time.  

So maybe there's something to what Calabrese said, after all, only not the way he meant it.  If your position is ethically right, and the opposition is making a last-ditch crazy stand, maybe it's time to push even harder, and topple the bigots from their positions of power once and for all.

In the case of LGBT people and their allies, resistance isn't futile; resistance may well be a moral imperative.