Conservatives’ view of what freedoms Americans should enjoy is often limited to their own. They’ll be devout supporters of the 2nd Amendment until Black men in large numbers begin arming themselves with AR-15s and .50 caliber sniper rifles.
Rights in conservative parlance are only absolute when they are theirs. For all others they are contingent.
Keith Olbermann in 2006 snarkily assessed that the Bush II administration had gutted the Bill of Rights except for the prohibition in Amendment 3 against “forced sleepovers at your house by soldiers.” The rest were abridgable whenever it pleased Republicans. That was 15 years ago.
Amanda Marcotte on Monday looked at Republicans’ selective protection of freedom of speech. Essentially, rule of law for thee but not for MAGA-me. Donald Trump’s new web service terms tells the tale. Pay close attention to what they perceive as freedom:
The national war on what has been misleadingly described as “critical race theory” in public schools is, in reality, of course, a right-wing attempt to censor any discussion of racism, historical or otherwise. This has been perfectly illustrated in the Virginia governor’s race, in which the GOP candidate, Glenn Youngkin, has been running ads calling for schools to censor materials that tell the historical truth about slavery. The ad, which features a woman telling a maudlin story about her son having “night terrors” from an assigned high school reading, is oblique about what book, exactly, Youngkin thinks should be censored. Of course, Youngkin is embarrassed to admit it because the answer is “Beloved,” a canonical novel by Nobel prize winner Toni Morrison. It’s not a mystery why conservatives want to censor this classic novel about the evils of racism. It’s for the same reason that Texas Republicans are circulating lists of other books to censor, the vast majority of which are about racism being bad or LGBTQ people being normal. As I noted in last week’s newsletter, this is the same fascist urge to suppress free thought that led to the Nazi book burnings, and there’s no reason to sugarcoat it or play the “can’t happen here” games. It can happen here, and is happening, as evidenced by a Republican running for statewide office on a pro-censorship platform in Virginia.
Thus, freedom of speech acquires an even more contingent meaning than in Olbermann’s satire.
Just weeks ago, I referenced Christian Dominionists’ appropriation of patriot-adjacent words like liberty to mask a very different understanding from definitions in common use:
[Rachel] Tabachnick emphasized that when they use the word liberty, for example, they don’t use it in the Jeffersonian sense. Their concept is (in my crude understanding) liberty lies in following Jesus, Dominionist-style. Don’t be fooled by patriotic affectations. They mean to rule for Jesus while wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.
Marcotte provides more recent examples of Republicans’ selective defense of the 1st Amendment from Florida, from Texas, and from the many red states that “have basically legalized the use of cars as weapons for conservatives who wish to violently attack protesters, especially Black Lives Matter protesters.”
It’s freedom of speech for me but not for thee.
This week, the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse also begins. Rittenhouse is alleged to have shot three Black Lives Matter protesters last year, killing two. His case has become a cause célèbre on the right. Not that conservatives think Rittenhouse is innocent, really. It’s quite clear that he loaded up with bullets and went out to the protest looking for trouble. No, the situation — as with the laws legalizing car attacks on protesters — is quite clearly about reinforcing this authoritarian view that progressive speech should be suppressed, by any means necessary.
Sure, “overeager leftists” sometimes harrass their own over “perceived and often inconsequential heresies,” Marcotte writes, but right-wing tumult over “cancel culture,” as Michael Hobbes argues, isn’t about real censorship as much as “exaggerated anxieties of older centrists who don’t like being yelled at by young people on Twitter.” The left is not censoring libraries or banning books or attempting to rewrite history or teach a false one.
“Mean tweets are but a faint shadow of the overt threat of censorship coming from the increasingly fascist right.”
Don’t mistake the American flags and patriot cosplay for sincerity. Or as David Bromberg sings, “Don’t let the glasses fool you.”
That I’m a demon in disguise
You’re just a little bit behind all the rest somehow
I mean you miss all the hints that show the truth to the wise