The progressives’ delegitimization game is old, familiar, and tedious: Forcing children to parrot ideological bromides as an educational requirement is not indoctrination but “cultural competence”; climate policy is not a matter of political, social, and economic tradeoffs but a question that can be answered empirically via science, and, hence, opposition to the progressive climate-policy agenda is anti-science; criticizing that climate agenda is not political activism but somehow is securities fraud; talking to unhappy people experiencing gender dysphoria is forbidden “conversion therapy” that stands criminally in the way of the obvious medical necessity of ritual mutilation and genital amputation. Etc.
And, of course, helping women with crisis pregnancies to understand that abortion is not their only option — that they do in fact have a choice, as they say, and that if their choice is not abortion then there are many kinds of help available to them — isn’t help or counseling or outreach, but “fake medicine” happening at “fake clinics.”
There is power in information, and progressives seek to use their political advantage in states such as New York and California to lean on technology firms to impose an Orwellian blackout on wrongthink — removing unpopular voices and views from social media, cutting off verboten institutions and communications from the digital infrastructure, and, if it comes to it, manipulating GPS services to simply erase unwelcome charities and businesses. If you ever were bewildered by the old Stalinist practice of airbrushing photos to remove figures who have fallen into disfavor, this is the same sensibility at work.
There is one slice of life in these United States in which it is very common to use GPS mapping to oversee and control the choices people make: parole. That bears meditating upon.
It is the power of the parole officer that progressives dream of lording over their fellow citizens — the power to set boundaries to govern the lives of everyone else and, especially, of those who attempt to escape that power. We hear it from the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and we hear it in Elizabeth Warren’s “you didn’t build that” nonsense: the idea that we live and work and prosper only at the sufferance of the state and its progressive masters, that we require permission to enjoy our freedom and our prosperity — and that this permission is liable to be revoked for infractions against the progressive sensibility.
We right-wingers are a paranoid bunch, but, sometimes, I wonder: Are we paranoid enough?
. . .
The Internet was supposed to be a decentralizing power, but, in many cases, the rise of ubiquitous information technology has had a centralizing effect that must be guarded against and, where possible, counteracted — because it is liable to be exploited by those who believe that justice requires that their fellow citizens be something other than free.
Freedom irritates progressives. In late June, Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick published a story decrying recent Supreme Court decisions, juxtaposing the Dobbs abortion decision with the right-to-pray decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton. As the headline put it, the issue is “the story this court is telling about who deserves rights,” and the ghastly outcome that “men are free to pray everywhere.”
Heavens to Betsy.
Of course Americans are free to pray everywhere, free to exercise their religion — that was kind of the main idea from the very beginning.
Forward!