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ACLU warns new House bill would give Trump ‘dangerous’ tool to stifle free speech and target political enemies
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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seriously it's exhausting, seeing so many people talk about "he can't do that! it's illegal" as if he faced a single fucking consequence for illegal shit before fascism
It's not even consequences any more. That ship has sailed.
People simply are not grasping the fact that (assuming they even care) if it's not legal, Congress can just make it legal. And if it's unconstitutional, the Supreme Court is there to declare it constitutional. The guardrails are off. Anybody not fully aboard the Trump train has been purged. He has control of every branch of government, and over half of the state governments. He can literally do what he wants because not only did the Supreme Court explicitly tell him so, but also because everybody with any kind of power, influence, or resources to stand in his way have been successfully removed. The only people left are people that will gladly allow him to step all over them so he doesn't get his shoes dirty while walking. Remember, the Supreme Court explicitly gave Trump the right to Seal-Team-Six somebody with absolute impunity. They literally asked Trump's team if immunity meant that he could Seal-Team-Six someone and not be prosecuted for it, Trump's lawyer explicitly said yes, and the Supreme Court voted in his favor. So even on the off chance you do stand up to Trump and become enough of a nuisance, he can legally just have you killed because fuck you that's why.
There is absolutely nothing, nothing that stops Trump from invalidating freedom of the press, on the absurdly flimsy premise of "fake news is not protected by the First Amendment". And since he gets to decide what is and isn't "fake news", this means he would literally get to decide what media outlets continue operating, and which ones see their CEOs jailed for "first amendment violations."
If Trump says that, and Congress passes a bill that says he can do that, and the Supreme Court says that banning "fake news" is "constitutional", and incoming AG puppet Matt Gaetz is willing to pursue charges against CNN and MSNBC on Trump's orders, there goes freedom of the press. Full stop. Sure, it'll still technically exist. But freedom of religion is also enshrined in North Korea's constitution. Go over there with a Bible and let me know how that works out for you. The same thing would apply here. Laws and protections that the government is no longer willing to uphold or enforce may as well not exist.
The Supreme Court has already invalidated parts of the 14th amendment for being "too vague" and therefore unenforceable. The second the Supreme Court did that, the Constitution immediately stopped being the Sacred Law of the land and became simply a really old piece of paper with some guidelines that can be ignored when they become politically inconvenient. They are already talking about doing the same with the 22nd amendment. What's to stop them from doing it to the 19th? Or the 13th? Or just all of them? What's to stop them from just saying "The Constitution as a whole was written over 200 years ago and is no longer suitable for use as the basis of our legal framework in modern times" and just suspend the whole thing? They already invalidated parts of it because they felt like it, and the citizens did nothing. They're talking about invalidating another part of it, and citizens are doing nothing. What's to stop them from just saying "fuck it" and invalidating the whole damn thing? It seems to be the endgame anyway.
The chances of this happening are significantly above zero. We will be coronating a king in every way possible without actually using the word "king."
agreed. people are in denial and/or lack the awareness of any of these things to even be a blip on the horizon of their consciousness. it's exhausting being surrounded by otherwise intelligent and reasonable people still going about their day as if literally nothing just happened. every day gets worse