Four Arrested for Speech Crime in Kentucky

Zman has a really appalling story, demonstrating just how far down the road to PC totalitarianism things have gone in this country, even in basicaly rural red states like Kentucky.

This story [is] from Kentucky, of all places… Two children and two adults have been arrested for racism. That’s not the specific charge. Instead the state has invented a novel new crime called “harassing communication” which means it is against the law to upset the wrong people with your public utterances. Since there’s not official list of people one must avoid upsetting, the state is free to arrest anyone for their speech on the claim that someone may be upset by it.

At this point, it is tempting to make a comparison to the Stasi or maybe Stalin’s KGB, but that would be a slander against the communists. They were always quite clear about who you could never criticize and what you must never dispute. When Stalin’s boys dragged you from your home, you knew exactly why you were being hauled away by the police. Every man in the gulag knew why he was there. The novelty of liberal democracy is in keeping everyone in the dark about these things.

Another novelty is that in communism, everyone also knew to avoid taking the side of the accused and they knew why to avoid it. That was another thing Westerners would brag about during the Cold War. In America, when someone was bullied by the state, lawyers would volunteer to defend the accused. A common phrase used by Progressive civil and political rights activists back then was “I may disagree with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it.”

It turns out to have been a complete lie. Not only will no one fight to the death to defend speech, the great and the good line up to condemn anyone for speaking out. Where is the ACLU in these cases? Certainly not rushing to defend children against the crime of saying mean things. No, the ACLU is too busy ratting out heretics and blasphemers, who dare question the liberal democratic ideology. In one of life’s great ironies, all of the civil rights groups now work to limit your civil rights.

Notice also how the concept of rights has changed. Thirty years ago, even left-wing political actors accepted the old definition of rights, as limits on the state. Your right to speak out against the government was really a hard limit on the state to police the speech of the citizens. Today, rights are just demands from an increasingly minoritized population for things to which no one can have a right. In this Kentucky case, they demand the community celebrate their mating decisions.

That should be the story here. This family moves to the community and begins making demands on the community. The white mother and her mulatto daughter start harassing the school about the racial complexion of the curriculum. The father demands the teachers change their classrooms to satisfy the demands of his children. This mixed-race family instantly became a cancer on the community, by making an increasingly narrow set of demands in the name of their rights.

This is one of the new realities of liberal democracy. Instead of people fearing the secret police and their many spies, the people fear the civil rights activists and their auxiliary army of novel weirdos. A mixed-race couple of trannies moves into the neighborhood and everyone is gripped with fear. It not only means everyone has to play make-believe with the lunatics, but must live in fear of upsetting them in some way. The agent of terror is the bespoke weirdo and its crazy demands for acceptance.

RTWT

When exactly did Americans citizens acquire a right to never be called bad names? When did American voters concede to our noisiest, most sensitive, and most opinionated the authority to define exactly what attitudes and opinions are “acceptable”?