Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Tuesday Talk*: Dumbing Down Treason

A while back, I engaged in a couple of twits with Nicholas Grossman of Arc Digital as he was expressing his views about Trump committing treason. My purpose was to explain that “treason” wasn’t something he felt it was, but a crime, and as a crime, had elements that had to be met or it wasn’t treason. Nick, who isn’t a lawyer, responded that he didn’t mean treason in the legal sense, but in the “colloquial” sense, the one without any elements or mens rea. The one that just feels kind of treason-ish.

There’s a “colloquial” sense of “treason”? Apparently so.

To be clear, biolabs are not a serious discussion. They arose as an excuse only after after Putin’s first few tries failed miserably, That the crazed right feels compelled to back Putin is beyond belief. Anything to “own” the left, even if it means desperately backing a dictator’s invasion and the deaths of thousands of civilians, men, women and children.

But as disgraceful as these apologists for Putin may be, the “normalization” of some vague notion of treason on the left, and the calls for “detaining them militarily,” or investigated and imprisoned by the DoJ as the highly-regarded legal minds of The View would have it. As Whoopi smugly notes, “they used to arrest people for doing stuff like this.” Did they Whoopi?

The point is not whether Tulsi Gabbard, or any of the others who raise biolabs as if they had anything to do with the invasion, deserves to be “given oxygen,” but that the tolerance for speech and respect for the First Amendment has fallen to such a point that network television now discusses the evisceration of Free Speech as if it’s a given, something no one would even challenge as being utterly batshit crazy. And that’s because it’s not, at least not in the minds of the people whose view of constitutional rights is that they’re fine until they involve speech that is just so obviously bad that it can’t be tolerated.

Olbermann blithely asserts, without need for further explanation, that “there’s a case for detaining [Tulsi Gabbard and Tucker Carlson] militarily.” No, there’s not. There is no case at all. None. They may be wrong. They may be disgusting. They may be unhelpful to the cause of ending the invasion of the Ukraine, and disgracefully apologetic of Putin. But they have the right to be.

We are increasingly becoming a nation of fools and stooges, dredging up the most ludicrous of arguments to “win” the empty battle of words against the other tribe, just as they do the same. Neither has much concern for constitutional rights, and principles are the first casualty of this battle between good and evil.

And what’s the response to a lawyer, reminding the unduly passionate that their vacuous noise is unadulterated legal nonsense, and their dismissal of rights protected by that “trashy” Constitution, as my pal Elie calls it, reminding the voices of tribal jingoism that there are actual laws, actual constitutional rights, actual principles about which they are clueless?

Then again, it’s not as if we know the deep secrets of the Illuminati.

What has happened to us? Have we become a nation of blithering idiots, conspiracy crazies and constitutional rights deniers? Are we doomed to a future of screaming nutjobs on the one hand and the authoritarians who desperately want to imprison them? Where are the sane and rational people saying “enough” to both flavors of crazy?

Mitt Romney, in response to Gabbard, twitted “Tulsi Gabbard is parroting false Russian propaganda. Her treasonous lies may well cost lives.” Is it “treason” to exercise the right to free speech? Can free speech survive this war? Is this why people hate lawyers?

*Tuesday Talk rules apply.

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)