LifeDeath

Been having a good time with the Month of Five Scandals, Gentle Reader? Slavering over the possibility of bringing down the most corrupt, most tyrannical regime ever to bestride these United States? Looking forward to a Glorious Electoral Revolution in 2014?

Party's over, pal. Actually, it ended some time ago.

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It is now the policy of the Department of Justice that speech it deems "inflammatory against Muslims" is unprotected and will be prosecuted:

DOJ: Social Media Posts Trashing Muslims May Violate Civil Rights

In its latest effort to protect followers of Islam in the U.S. the Obama Justice Department warns against using social media to spread information considered inflammatory against Muslims, threatening that it could constitute a violation of civil rights.

The move comes a few years after the administration became the first in history to dispatch a U.S. Attorney General to personally reassure Muslims that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is dedicated to protecting them. In the unprecedented event, Attorney General Eric Holder assured a San Francisco-based organization (Muslim Advocates) that urges members not to cooperate in federal terrorism investigations that the “us versus them” environment created by the U.S. government, law enforcement agents and fellow citizens is unacceptable and inconsistent with what America is all about.

...Evidently that was a precursor of sorts for an upcoming Tennessee event (“Public Disclosure in a Diverse Society”) that will feature the region’s top DOJ official [Bill Killian], who serves as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee, and an FBI representative. The goal is to increase awareness and understanding that American Muslims are not the terrorists some have made them out to be in social media and other circles, according to a local newspaper report. The June 4 powwow is sponsored by the American Muslim Advisory Council of Tennessee.

The area’s top federal prosecutor, Bill Killian, will address a topic that most Americans are likely unfamiliar with, even those well versed on the Constitution; that federal civil rights laws can actually be violated by those who post inflammatory documents aimed at Muslims on social media. "This is an educational effort with civil rights laws as they play into freedom of religion and exercising freedom of religion," Killian says in the local news story. "This is also to inform the public what federal laws are in effect and what the consequences are."

[Citation courtesy of Doug Ross @ Journal.]

Like that? Dare to say anything Bill Killian deems "inflammatory against Muslims" and he'll bring the full weight of the federal government down on you. At the very least he'll threaten it, as he did in the statement above. The whole point of his "educational effort" is to pre-deter anyone whom he would later have to prosecute.

Mind you, Killian doesn't have to win such a case. He doesn't have to put an Islam-defamer behind bars, or compel him to pay a fine, or even compel him to apologize. He just has to threaten prosecution to get what he wants -- the silencing of adverse opinion -- because the anxiety, distortions, and expense involved in defending oneself against the federal government, which has essentially infinite resources with which to hound its targets, are punishment enough to deter nearly anyone, no matter what the verdict should prove to be.

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What was that about freedom of speech? Apparently it's trumped by Bill Killian's opinions about whether you're being sufficiently deferential to the sensitivities of the savages who subscribe to Muhammad's violent, imperialist, misogynistic, pedophilic, totalitarian, and utterly hateful creed.

What creed, Mr. Killian? It's Islam, Mr. Killian, and I dare you to prosecute me for saying so. I'll cite the Koran in my defense -- I'll read the whole BLEEP!ing thing into the court records if I must -- and I'll hold press conference after press conference denouncing you, Holder, Obama, and Islam for daring to infringe on my Constitutionally protected rights.

Go ahead, Mr. Killian. Make me your test case. Let's see how you like being a nationally reviled advocate for totalitarianism.

I'm an old man with very little to lose. I'm willing to risk it all to make plain what these scum are doing to the country I love. Win, lose, or draw, the case itself would be sufficient cause for a real, flying-lead revolution. At the end, either America's remaining patriots would all be dead, in prison, or permanently cowed and disarmed; or Killian, Holder, Obama, and all their henchmen would dangle from the lampposts of Washington, D.C.

Either Americans' last vestiges of freedom or the Obamunist regime would die.

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We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission. -- Ayn Rand

A very intelligent friend, in the aftermath of a personal tragedy, said to me that "We tend to think of dying as an event. It's not. Dying is a process."

My friend's observation is as important as it is insightful. Death is a condition; dying unfolds over time. That's what makes it so painful. If it were a discrete event, over in an instant, like the fall of a guillotine's blade, it wouldn't be nearly as painful as it is. It would shock us who survive, but it wouldn't exhaust us. We would still mourn the loss of a loved one, but it wouldn't wring us dry of strength and tears the way it does.

America is in the process of dying as we speak.

It's been observed many times that freedom is seldom, if ever, lost all at once. A free people must be subjugated little by little; their rights must be flensed away slice by invisibly thin slice. The usual metaphor is the frog in the pot of water being heated ever so gradually to a lethal boil. Though the comparison might be inexact, the procedure itself is horrifyingly effective.

But because it's a process rather than a binary event, dying can sometimes be halted and reversed. It's seldom possible at zero cost; it usually takes will, effort, expenditure, and acceptance of risk.

It's been a long time since Americans were truly free. What we have today is not freedom but a few, sharply limited and tightly constrained freedoms. The right to freedom of expression, which Bill Killian has decided to threaten on behalf of his Muslim friends, is one of the very last remaining -- and if you've been following the Scandal Times, you're aware that it's under attack from more than one direction.

The process is near to its conclusion: the point at which dying produces the condition of death, which really is irreversible. Either we stand and fight now, with what resources remain to us, or we accept fetters we will never remove...which will pass from us to our children and theirs, until better men than we, in some future unimaginable by us of today, should rise to the task as we have not.

Yes, there's an alternative: to go underground. You can make yourself small, live like a rat in the walls of a prison, feeding on crumbs dropped by the slaves inside, hoping never to be noticed by the exterminators of the Omnipotent State. It is possible to live awhile in the midst of death ubiquitous. After a fashion, at least.

The hour of decision is upon us.