Last week, the Trump Administration created an executive order, that, on the face of it, banned burning the American flag. The executive order does not actually ban flag burning; Rather, the EO targets individuals who burn flags at a riot for prosecution. This was done clearly as an attempt to anger those on the political left, as they are likely the people who are going to burn American flags.
However, I’m not writing this musing to talk about one political bloc trolling another political bloc.
What really surprised me was that the political right is perfectly ok with legislating speech they do not like. Chttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGh0_sMahXI&pp=0gcJCcYJAYcqIYzvommentators like [Ben Shaprio] or various personalities such as Jack Prosobic on Tim Pool’s podcast (among others), stated with joy that Trump was not going far enough with punishing the speech of those they disagree with. An oddly totalitarian movement is beginning to manifest in the right, something I’ll discuss in another musing. However, this totalitarian right is beginning to go after the very foundations of liberty and freedom. Which is ironic, as during covid, when they weren’t in power, and were being abused by the left, or even earlier, during the progressive ascendance during the Obama Administration, right wingers were punished legally and socially for their speech.
I feel like a broken record at this point, but when will people learn that you cannot use the instruments of evil against others, and not expect them to use it against you? Prosobic and Shaprio are fools for believing that they can build their own guillotine, and believe that their own heads will not get chopped off.
One statement during the Prosobic led Tim Pool podcast that especially irked me, was an exchange between Prosobic and Phillip Labonte (who also hosts the podcast), about whether the “1st Amendment protects freedom of expression”. It absolutely does in the exact same way that the 2nd Amendment protects firearm ownership. There is no one who can read the 1st amendment, and not come away with the idea that it honestly means anything other than the right to protect what you say, and how you say it. This is no different from the 2nd Amendment protecting the individuals right to own a gun by using the broadest term possible, arms. Speech in the 1st Amendment means how you express what you’re trying to say just as much as what you are actually saying.
What’s even crazier is that the founding fathers, many of whom ran their own newspapers, literally wanted the 1st Amendment included in the Bill of Rights because the British quite literally shut their newspapers down on the justification of the newspapers were spreading “Mutiny, sabotage, and treason”, despite the fact that the majority of them were simply airing legitimate grievances about the taxes being levied on the colonies. It’s honestly insane to think that an American who supposedly knows history like Prosobic claims to could even arrive at that conclusion.
To end this rambling, I find myself swinging from left to right, and right to left from time to time. When I was a kid, I began to swing left due to my fairly conservative family. However, from high school, through college, I found myself turn rightward. I now see myself as beginning to swing back to the left due to asinine opinions like these.