Jill Filipovic: Freedom for the Few

[Nevilledog]

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Jill Filipovic
@JillFilipovic
How is it that conservatives claim to love freedom, but then embrace so much of what curtails it, from authoritarianism to guns? It’s not as incoherent as it looks. It's a definition of freedom that assumes one man's freedom requires him to dominate others

jill.substack.com
Freedom for the Few
Why do the self-styled proponents of freedom embrace authoritarianism and violent domination?
2:25 PM · Jun 9, 2022

https://jill.substack.com/p/freedom-for-the-few?s=r

Ever since the Uvalde shooting, as the country has again been shown just what our lax guns laws do, as a community questions whether it can ever right itself after being so unimaginably struck down, and as a nation again appears again poised to allow the sacrifice of its children for a demented, violent ideology, one question keeps running through my mind: What kind of freedom is this?

And one answer keeps coming up: It’s a particular kind of American freedom, one deep in our country’s bones. It’s the freedom of a few men to claim radical independence as they rely on the labor of an invisible many, and cause the suffering of a wiped-away more.

Freedom is the value that gun extremists invoke when they refuse any attempt to curtail which types of deadly and military-style weapons are available for purchase, or who might purchase them. But how free is any member of a society awash in weapons? How free are any of us if the places we go in the normal course of a day — the places we shop, the places we worship, the places we send our children to learn — can so quickly turn into places of violence and death, and are not places where we can feel secure? This is freedom dressed up as tyranny. This is the freedom of domination and violent enforcement for a few, and of subjugation and persecution for the many.

I’m currently reading / listening to The Dawn of Everything (I’m late on it, I know), and one thing the book makes clear is that what we see on today’s American right — a penchant for authoritarianism, violence coexisting with religiosity, a patriarchal definition of individualism and freedom — has a long history, and not just in the US. Freedom, in a long-standing view held by various Christian sects and European men who believed themselves to be free, involved an acquiescence to hierarchy that puts white men just below God, places most others in their service, and requires everyone to suspend reason and judgment.

*snip*

[unblock]

1. Yup! They see slavery an an infringement on their freedom to own people

Yeah I know they haven't said that out loud yet but they will get there if we let them....

[kimbutgar]

2. They scream rights and freedom while taking reproductive rights from women, taking rights from LGBTQ

Taking voting rights away from people who don’t vote Republican and taking everyday rights against people who aren’t white.

I hate that freedom bs they sprout all the time!