Are you been confused by the DeSantis rhetoric about the “Free State of Florida”? Is it hard for you to see how censorship of reading materials, restrictive abortion laws, permitless concealed carry provisions, and anti-gay, anti-trans legislation passed this year make us free?
Well, New York Times columnist, Jamelle Bouie, explains the new Republican Four Freedoms:
“There is the freedom to control—to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
“There is the freedom to exploit—to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
“There is the freedom to censor—to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
“And there is the freedom to menace—to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people
“Roosevelt’s four freedoms were the building blocks of a humane society—a social democratic aspiration for egalitarians then and now. These Republican freedoms are also building blocks not of a humane society but of a rigid and hierarchical one, in which you can either dominate or be dominated.”
Image Credits: Diane Rado
