The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

Any time a politician spouts off about what you shouldn't be able to do, listen carefully, because he is telling you how he is going to abridge your rights.

Our political class has been undermining our rights since...oh...The Whiskey Rebellion in 1791, and a better student of American history can probably think of an earlier case.

They have taxed us in a wildly unfair manner.
They restrict our right to keep and bear arms.
They tell us how we must run our private businesses.
They take our private information and make it public.
They force us, on pain of losing our livelihoods, to take medications.

And every time they did this they told us what was going to happen.

Ace wrote about this yesterday, and I was struck by one of the quotations.

Extremists Threaten to Throw Bricks at Cafe Owner ID'd in Alleged Freedom Convoy Hack

Gerald Butts, a former top advisor to Prime Minister Trudeau who resigned amid a corruption scandal in 2019, quote-tweeted one of the accounts spreading the donor information, writing, "Quite the list of #GiveSendGo donors from Toronto. A Ford Government staffer and a bunch of @UofT faculty & students jump out."

"If you donate to a political campaign in Canada, your name and donation are published, by law. But these guys think you should be able to donate to an insurrection anonymously? Give me a break," Butts later stated after being confronted by another user.[emphasis mine]

Luckily in the United States we have the Constitution to protect us (don't laugh!), and even a Supreme Court case...McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission...that defends anonymity of political speech.

Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.

The feds would mobilize their pets in the vast social media apparatus to find out exactly who was involved and who was helping them; they would doxx them; they would harass them, they would contact their employers; they would find some pretext (unpaid parking tickets are a threat to a civil society!) for a 3:00am visit from one of the many SWAT teams at their disposal; and eventually they would use violence to protect their power.

Because that is the only goal...the preservation of their power over us.

posted by CBD at 11:00 AM

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