The criminalization of speech is coming. In fact, it’s already here.

And fewer and fewer people, mired as they are in political tribalism, seem to give it much thought, let alone find it a key issue for the country going forward.

This is a mistake: when the bed is shaking and thumping under your weight but the earth around you is not, it’s time to bring out the smoking sage bundle and leave the CAT scan on the back burner for the time being.

Now, I get it: when you have to choose between gasoline or ramen, between heating your house or feeding your dogs, the mind focuses naturally on the immediate and tangible, less so on the assumptions undergirding a governing philosophy built around the preservation of individual autonomy. That said, we simply must be able to walk and chew gum simultaneously. And if a shoe comes untied or we encounter a catcall, we can’t instantly collapse into a heap of laces and embarrassment, a wad of Juicy Fruit blocking our airways.

With all that in mind, here’s a quick note: the Colorado Springs nightclub shooter so much top of mind to journos today — journos whose hand-wringing is aimed at inserting their own virtue into a story that has nothing at all to do with them — had a felony arrest a year ago because of a supposed bomb he’d made, weapons he had, and threats he’d articulated to his mother and police. His entire block had to be evacuated. He was also charged with kidnapping. But that charge, like the others, was dropped.

This is the 22-year-old who, we’re being told, is the new representative of the subhuman “ultra MAGA alt-right” — before any motive has been released, and with his history of violent crime tied to no specific agenda that I could determine. What “MAGA rhetoric” radicalized him to threaten to blow up his entire neighborhood in conservative Colorado Springs?

— Guess the Paul Pelosi story isn’t selling well anymore, since it came out he answered the door, then walked back inside toward the “ultra-MAGA” hemp jewelry maker on sojourn from his Berkeley nudist commune.

At any rate, last I checked, a felony conviction means you can’t obtain a firearm lawfully in my home state — and you’re required to surrender your existing firearms cache. But if you aren’t charged — as the shooter wasn’t for his previous offenses once the DA dropped his case — nothing is going to show up on your background check. And that’s because if you aren’t formally charged and convicted, you aren’t a registered felon. Which is how it should be. I say this as a CO FFL holder, and as someone familiar with local gun shows, the vast majority of which require CBI background checks, even on private sales. Democrats here are naturally mobilizing to create new gun control laws, because all the gun control measures they’ve passed since Columbine have been working so well. Clearly.

The fact that a young man with felony arrests known to both the local police and FBI was released back onto the streets before committing a mass shooting a year later, is a product of the kind of soft on crime liberal prosecutors who continue to be loath to charge violent felons with appropriate violations that lead to reasonable, punitive incarcerations. It also speaks to the inadequacy of mental health evaluation and treatment — and to the failure of our overbroad gun control laws to control criminals getting guns — in the blue state of Colorado.

Now, nothing is likely to come of this call from a former FBI stooge, now an MSNBC contributor (who famously found Nazi numerology at play in a flag lowering gesture by the Trump Administration), to charge as accessories to unrelated violence those — on one side only, unsurprisingly — who argue against, eg., mutilating children or teaching pre-schoolers to twerk for singles; after all, that would be akin to calling for charges against the legacy media, the president, and a whole litany of invidious leftwing lawmakers every time a Commie whack job shoots up a GOP baseball team, or runs down a teenager for “looking conservative.”

So Tucker Carlson and Matt Walsh and Lauren Boebert are likely all safe for now, at least legally.

But there certainly are leftists in power who wish more than anything to strike down at least the first two amendments to the Bill of Rights (and likely more, including the 4th and 5th) — as well as impeach a sitting SCOTUS Justice for the completely lawful views of his wife.

— And yet those same dullards would cluck like tortured hens should anyone suggest that when a husband dies, his wife be loaded onto a funeral pyre along with him. Some spouses are more tied to their partners than others, I suppose.

Still, that a suggestion for bringing legal proceedings against public figures engaged in policy talk is even floated without enormous backlash from people in both parties tells you that the Democratic Party, as most continue to think of it, is dead as a boot. The party takeover planned by the New Left in the late 60s and early 70s found its full fruition under the Obama Administration, who seeded our intelligence agencies, the military, and the permanent bureaucracy with “progressive” activists. Obama himself famously attended the Cooper Union gathering in the early 80s, in which the debate among the communists wasn’t over socialism vs capitalism, but rather over incrementalism vs aggressive policy action, as well as whether to overtly identify as socialists, or continue to hide those beliefs on the national level behind the legacy reputation of the Democratic Party. To attendees, capitalism had already been relegated to history’s ash heap. And of course, Obama’s political career was famously launched by the leaders of the leftwing terrorist group Weather Underground, who later were given authority over national curricula development.

We are living through his third term. And the push could not be more clear: to bring about a global corporatist / communist system, criminalizing dissent and controlling both speech and arms is crucial.

The US alone stands in the way. More specifically, the US Constitution and our agreed-upon civic fidelity to it. Once the social compact fails, so too does the country.

It’s come down to a will to power vs a commitment to the ideals enshrined in a parchment protected by a vanishing few Justices determined to uphold them.

I don’t like the odds, frankly. But then, I also refuse to live on my knees. So there’s always that to factor in to any Great Reset equation.

And I suspect I’m not alone.

Update: a commentator at Instapundit suggested I’m about 15 years behind and that I’ve finally caught up with the left’s linguistic agenda.

After laughing for a few moments, I decided to go check the protein wisdom archives. My earliest criticism of “hate speech” was posted in December of 2001, when my blog began.

Then there’s this discussion of the potential trajectory of a (at the time) largely fringe Trans movement. July 2002.

I’d say I’ve been “caught up” for a while now.

Update 2: “Aaaaaaaand SCENE!”

Source.

protein wisdom reborn!

Kings and Queens and Guillotines