Free Speech, Responsibility, and a Caution

 

I take potshots at VP JD Vance, as is my right as an American, and I do so only with a little guilt that he's a barrel of fish--a target-rich environment. All the same, something about him irritates me right in the patriotism.  I have described him as being if chewing on tin foil with a mouthful of fillings was a person, and I am not backing down from that. 

Take today as an example--he weighed in on Margaret Brennan asking Secretary of State Marco Rubio (a man chained in a dungeon of his own making, performing Trump's foreign policy while I guarantee you knowing better at any instance) if there was anything amiss in Vance's Munich speech regarding the "enemy within" and meeting with AfD where "free speech" led to the Holocaust. 

I' m going to help everyone out by stipulating that the Nazis were not big fans of free speech. They banned books, you know. "Un-German" books regarding different races, people who were considered deviant, people who were liberal or Communist. They would have really hated DEI. 

But the question of "free speech" also has to do with who has the license to speak. For example--is it right for someone to demonize or dehumanize other people by talking about them as "vermin"? 

It seems like JD Vance once knew that Trump spoke like Hitler and scared people he cared about. Now, he pretends he does not know this--who pruned this Tree of Knowledge? Did he blind his own mind's eye for the sake of belonging to the tribe of "just this side of Nazi?"

I view Vance almost as a cousin. His eyes are as blue as mine, and my redneck ancestors like his escaped the fate of Carrie Buck. White folks can also be what the Nazis called "asocial" or "workshy". To "unperson" anyone, all you need is the right megaphone. It's so easy to do, Vance himself "told stories" about Haitian immigrants to catapult himself to where he is--dehumanizing them. 

You tell stories about Jews. (For centuries, many blood libels against Jews in Europe, so easy to get the ball rolling.) You tell stories about the Tutsi on the radio in Rwanda. You excoriate the Bosnians. You look at the Black Wall Street and calumniate against it. 

It starts with shit-talking. 

Wouldn't it have to?

Blood-libels and constant reinforcement of who is the good tribe and who is the bad? 

It starts with not "free speech" but a well-paid microphone--a platform where hate can be spread irresponsibly. (But "freedom of speech" is the little plot of standing the haters use for their irresponsibility, their recklessness, their destruction.) 

JD Vance wants to say "It could never be me, fam."

It is you, buddy. All day, every day. You made your bed and history will understand how you LIE in it. 

And lied and lied and lied. 

And out there in the rust belt or in the hill country or even in the deep south, where Trump used to pretend he cared about you folks-- your hospitals are disappearing, your VA funds are getting cut, they don't care about your addictions or chronic illnesses and he's talking about not having FEMA when there's flood or hurricanes or tornadoes or any of that. He is about cutting SNAP and WIC for everyone's' kids. He don't care about your maternal mortality--whether your mamas and babies live. 

You can have a healthcare desert with no hospitals in fifty miles as far as he cares. 

You are poor, and he never gave a shit about you, and he swans about NASCAR and all that like a King and he will abandon your ass at the first opportunity, I swear.  And JD Vance is going to celebrate him for it because he supports fucking up your too broke to live life. Because he despises the folks he came from. And he'd drop you just like the US can drop Ukraine or any other free country in Europe--because you are like strangers to the people he supports.

And with a word of entire free speech, he can justify it by "telling stories". And he's backed by millionaires and billionaires and that is exactly how folks dying for stupid reasons always works. 

I don't know if you trust me to tell you to organize, but I want you all to live. The "free speech" of TrumpWorld is costing you and everyone else plenty.