Laws, like houses, lean on one another. – Edmund Burke
The inability of naive people to understand the power of legal precedent is one of the greatest forces for evil in the world. These well-meaning dunderheads simply refuse to understand that once a law is passed and enforced unchallenged, or when the state prevails in challenges to that law, that other laws and procedures can follow on the trail blazed by the first one. It makes absolutely no difference what the “intent” of the first law was, nor if the laws which follow it were passed with completely different intentions; once the precedent is established that it’s OK to criminalize xa, laws that criminalize xb, xc and xd are quick to follow, all leaning on the first like Burke’s row houses. Any legal weapon given today to any state actor for use against people you dislike, will be used tomorrow against people you like, and once the process gains momentum it’s nearly impossible to stop before it reaches xz.
It seems so obvious, one has to marvel that people still don’t get it; they’re willing to give “their” guy extraordinary weapons to deal with what they view as a menace, and can’t seem to fathom that someone else with very different ideas about what constitutes a menace will occupy the throne in a very short time, and that extraordinary weapon will still be available to him in the armory, to use however he pleases. Useful idiots are so convinced of their own righteousness, they’re unable to conceive of anyone branding them as evil. It’s the result of a sheltered existence in which the force of the state has never been used against them, just against others they can feel good about standing up for. Last weekend I was tweeted at by one such idealistic fool, who insisted it’s possible to draw a “bright clear line against ‘hate speech'”, differentiating it from other kinds of speech so as to allow censorship. This nitwit was seemingly unaware that “hate crime” laws have already been extended to cops via so-called “blue lives matter” laws in several states; from there it’s only one more step to criminalizing speech that criticizes cops or politicians, and a package of laws going through Congress right now paves the way for paying for sex to be classified as a “hate crime” by defining it as “gender-based violence”. And after that, it’s just one step further to defining speech about decriminalization as “hate speech” because it “promotes gender-based violence”. But do sheltered idiots who talk about “bright clear lines” vs “hate speech” get that? Nope, because never once in their sheltered ninny lives have they seen laws and policies maliciously applied to harm them or those they love. They just sit in their freaking ivory towers and blame some convenient “other”, when in actuality the laws used as weapons of oppression were supported and cheered on by previous generations of useful idiots exactly like them, who never admit that oppressors rarely take power; they’re given it by privileged idiots to fight Muslims, “sex trafficking”, “terrorists”, “Satanists”, “sex predators”, “criminals”, “illegal aliens”, drug users, whores, communists, Jews, black people, the “yellow peril”, “witches” or whoever the fashionable villain of the day might be. And the evil effect of those laws remains long after the moral panic is gone, causing both direct harm themselves and indirect harm by propping up the still-more-evil laws that inevitably follow them.
