Freedom Index
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“Become ungovernable” is a phrase that has traveled around the world and morphed in meaning over time, but in the last few years has basically become an internet culture joke meme, with vaguely anarchist seasoning.
But, now, in the Trump administration, it has apparently taken on a Schrodinger-esque meaning as either… a slogan for libertarian-leaning MAGA folks… or proof that someone is antifa. Or we just live in a dumb stupid world where nothing matters anymore.
As you may have heard, last week Donald Trump hosted the first-ever GOP “midterms” convention, a desperate ploy to get people excited about the midterm elections as Trump’s approval ratings hit such horrifying lows that even some Republicans are trying to distance themselves. Trump doesn’t have anything productive or helpful he can do to stop the slide caused almost entirely by his own terrible decision-making, and thus he falls back on the only thing he knows how to do: hold rallies to pretend that everyone loves him.
It was apparently difficult to find willing speakers (many top Republican officials came up with excuses to skip the shindig), but he did get Ross Ulbricht to speak. As someone who covered much of the Ross Ulbricht saga — from his arrest for operating the Silk Road Tor marketplace, to the stories of him attempting to hire hitmen to kill off various people, to his “maybe someone else did it!” legal arguments, to his eventual pardon from Trump — I’d say the pardon was a near-perfect encapsulation of Trump 2.0’s transactional corruption.
There were some parts of the Ulbricht prosecution that seemed problematic, and the lifetime sentence was arguably excessive given the evidence, but the attempted murder claims were a pretty big deal. And while some of Ulbricht’s defenders argued he was just a platform operator who shouldn’t be liable for what users did — an argument we’re usually quite sympathetic to — Section 230 never applied to federal criminal charges anyway. And remember: Trump has regularly campaigned on throwing drug dealers in jail, if not executing them outright.
But, freeing Ulbricht became a kind of Libertarian Party cause célèbre, and Trump was desperate for votes in 2024, so to try to bring over some of the increasingly authoritarian wing of the Libertarian Party (as oxymoronic as that may sound) he promised to pardon Ulbricht. Free the guy who set up a giant illegal drugs and weaponry marketplace, in exchange for some votes. Trumpism in a nutshell.
Notably, when Trump spoke in front of the Libertarian Party convention to make this promise, he did so in front of a “Become Ungovernable” banner.
Last week, when Ulbricht spoke at Trump’s midterms rally, he spoke in front of the same banner:
Ulbricht didn’t have anything interesting to say, just misleadingly claiming that he and Trump were both the “target of a weaponized government,” which only makes sense if you haven’t actually looked at the evidence against Ulbricht. It’s not a “weaponized” government when you actually engaged in criminal activity, dude.
But that banner background really caught my eye, because just a few months ago, with Trump’s DOJ trying to cook up charges against the mythical “antifa” cells that MAGA keeps insisting exist, the DOJ claimed that it had found and indicted an antifa cell in Minnesota. And a key part of the evidence? One of the people had posted to Facebook “become ungovernable.”
With these new charges, Rosen said, “the evidence will prove it all out”.
Rosen showed social media posts and videos of a couple of the people indicted to underscore the allegations that they intended to impede law enforcement. In one video, a man declares he is antifa and discusses bringing guns to a demonstration. He showed another post of a defendant saying people needed to “become ungovernable”.
Literally, the US Attorney highlighted the “become ungovernable” Facebook post in his press conference explaining why those charged were “antifa.”
You could argue that the 2024 Trump appearance in front of the banner doesn’t count. It wasn’t Trump’s convention, he had no say in the backdrop, and it happened two years before his DOJ decided that the phrase was crucial evidence of antifa conspiracy membership. Sure. Fine.
But here we are now, just a few months after one of Trump’s own handpicked prosecutors stood at a press conference and declared that “become ungovernable” was evidence of antifa membership, Trump’s own MAGA convention has plastered that same phrase across the main stage — behind the guy who ran an illegal drugs market and tried to hire assassins to take out his enemies.
It’s almost like nothing actually matters any more, other than whether you’re loyal to Trump or not. And thus, I guess, the only thing one can possible do is… ahem… become ungovernable.
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