Why Things Are The Way They Are

from the can-we-un-fuck-a-nation dept

Right up front, I want to state that this is a very personal post. While it obviously draws from my many years of writing for Techdirt, I want to make it perfectly clear that I am expressing my own opinions about everything discussed below.

I’m not immune to reading the comments. In fact, I actually enjoy reading them here. We have a great collection of daily readers. Even the daily critics manage to raise a good point now and then.

But I do wonder why we still see people asking why we don’t cover more “tech” issues or (often disingenuously) claim they came to this site to read about “tech,” even though our coverage has expanded to cover lots of ancillary (and important!) subject matter. (The commenters who complain about this site being “too political,” however, are only arguing in bad faith, willfully ignoring the years of criticism directed towards Barack Obama, etc.)

As for myself, this is how that breaks down. I was plucked from the comment threads to contribute to this site, an anomaly for which I will be forever grateful. On top of that, Mike Masnick allowed me to branch out to subject matter not normally covered here, ranging from police accountability to what now appears to be my primary focus: the Trump administration’s war on migrants.

Even given my purview, I’ve asked myself the same question. I frequently come across court decisions handling issues I would have put front and center. For instance, more courts are ruling that the most frequent enabler of warrantless searches (“odor of marijuana“) is no longer an acceptable excuse in states where marijuana possession is legal (which is most of them).

It’s an important issue and it serves the greater purpose of limiting rights abuses by law enforcement. So, why am I not covering more of these?

The answer — at least subjectively — is a bit harrowing. It’s one thing to cover incremental changes in Fourth Amendment law when everything is operating normally. This means things are getting better for citizens and decreases the potential for abuse by the government.

But in this administration, it seems a bit weird to draw attention to incremental wins for constitutional rights when it seems most of those rights won’t survive the GOP assault on the nation — at least not in any recognizable form.

We’ve already seen the First Amendment converted into a vehicle for punishment. For Trump and his supporters, the First Amendment only protects their speech. They’ll be the first to point out there’s no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment while simultaneously asserting that anyone who takes the side of Palestine via protests or public statements is providing “material support for terrorism.”

The rest of our rights are considered equally discretionary by this administration. While it will never do anything to alter the contours of an amendment that’s always been considered expansive enough to cover even the broadest definitions made by people operating with the least amount of good faith (that would be the Second Amendment), it seems like it’s more than willing to destroy the rest of them, especially those that put anyone that’s not white or male on (more or less) equal footing with the white males they (mostly) are.

So, while the Second Amendment will continue to be proclaimed as the right that protects the rest of the rights (by people who only started saying this after Obama was elected), the rest of our rights are up for grabs. And while the Founding Fathers may have firmly stated these right were inalienable, the current administration only cares for originalism when it’s being used to strip rights from people they think should never have had access to them (Blacks, women, LGBTQ+ people, accused criminals, pretty much any non-white person, etc.).

Mike has almost always made a point to focus on the positive with his New Year’s posts. And I’m glad he does. No one wants to read the collective output of a bunch of bitter pessimists. But it’s hard to retain hope when everything appears to be sliding from “slightly fucked” to “irrevocably fucked” on a daily basis.

The people we hoped would right this ship — political leaders, legislators, the US press, etc. — have failed us. Some have done it because their heart was never in it. Some have done it because it’s easier than walking directly into this administration’s fire hose. And some have done it because they, too, have lost hope.

I think we can still turn this around. I don’t know how, but I do know better than to forfeit the game. I don’t harbor any illusions that my writing is changing minds or speaking truth to power. I mean, I hope it’s doing the former and convinced it’s doing the latter. But the more time I spend interacting with people who think everything will be fine (or worse, think this administration is actually making America great) leads me to believe this nation is filled with people who are incapable of actually considering a competing point of view.

As for the latter, speaking truth to power only seems to work when someone in power is willing to honestly engage with criticism. The Democratic party has pretty much given up on doing anything that matters. Those who are still putting their hearts into this tend to be ridiculed by Trump supporters and Democratic voters alike as embarrassing aberrations. And the Republican party treats even mild criticism as an attack on America itself, responding with threats or belittlement but never with anything that might indicate the GOP contains anyone with any humanity.

The state of the nation is in flux. What we’ll look like on the other side of this — if there’s even an “other side” to reach — is unknown. But the way it looks now is that we’re engaged in the fight of our lives if we want to see anything resembling the America we’ve lived in and loved (albeit conditionally) for the past 250 years. It will take an organized effort to survive an administration that wants to convert the Land of the Free into a White Christian Nationalist paradise that will also welcome Jews who engage in genocide, but not the rest of them (George Soros, space lasers, etc.).

And while this top-down oppression generally won’t have the day-to-day effect on the everyday life of average Americans the way a court decision preventing “odor of marijuana” searches will, I can’t seem to find the latter compelling enough in the grand scheme of things to bring it to anyone’s attention.

It’s exhausting keeping up with this administration. But it’s worth doing. No one doing this sort of thing to the United States should be ignored just because their acts are normally part of this site’s subject matter. There’s a nation being destroyed in front of our eyes. The least I can do is make sure you see it.

Filed Under: censorship, dhs, doj, evil, fascism, martial law, mass deportation, rights violations, trump administration