Bill Promises Punishment for Free Speech

siam.pukkato / shutterstock.com
siam.pukkato / shutterstock.com

You might assume that anyone elected to Congress would have an express interest in maintaining America’s laws and freedoms. After all, they were elected by people who expect them to do nothing less. In fact, the whole point of their job is to ensure that their constituents are being heard and given a voice in our nation’s capital, according to our founding documents.

Why? Well, so that when problems arise in their state or district, Washington will fight on their behalf and for those foundational freedoms.

However, it would seem that some congressional members don’t quite understand that.

Take Texas Democrat and Representative Sheila Jackson Lee.

When it comes to guns and your Second Amendment rights, she doesn’t want you to have them. When talking about border and, therefore, national security, she ignores it all. And now, she’s even vilifying your free speech.

How?

Well, it’s all thanks to her newly introduced bill titled the Leading Against White Supremacy Act of 2023. As its name implies, the monstrosity of a bill would supposedly work to eliminate or at least limit white supremacy and its effects in the US. But it would actually target anyone who dares to publish anything that she and her comrades don’t agree with.

As the bill states, it would seek to “expand the scope of hate crimes” by taking into consideration any material anyone who might commit a crime might have posted or written prior to engaging in activities that “constituted a crime or were undertaken in furtherance of activity that, if effectuated, would have constituted a crime.”

In everyday speak, that means that if Jackson Lee and her ilk find what someone said online or in print to be unacceptable, those persons can be charged with a “white supremacy-inspired hate crime.”

Specifically, material based on what is called “replacement theory” is mentioned in the bill. If you haven’t heard of such a thing, basically, it’s the idea that illegals and legal immigrants are being brought in, usually by the Democratic Party, to replace the whites of the nation and eventually make whites the minority.

It’s an idea held by those usually involved in white nationalist or white supremacy fringe groups. And to be sure, it can be dangerous. However, it is also one’s right to believe such if one wants to. Just as it is one’s constitutional right to be pro-LGBT or believe in critical race theory (the idea that all whites are inherently evil).

Naturally, the problem comes when some misguided soul decides to take action on extreme views of their beliefs, whether that be terrorist acts or beating up someone because they belong to the church or political party.

Unfortunately, Jackson Lee doesn’t appear to be on that same page.

Instead, it’s her idea that if you are posting things or writing down ideas that might be taken or seen as “against any non-White person or group,” you should be punished.

Even more dangerous to our rights is the fact that her bill would hold you or anyone writing such material accountable for any actions that someone else might perpetrate an alleged white supremacy-inspired hate crime.

The bill literally says that if the material was published anywhere where it could be “viewed by persons who are predisposed to engaging in any action in furtherance of a white supremacy inspired hate crime, or who are susceptible to being encouraged to engage in actions in furtherance of a white supremacy inspired hate crime.”

As you can imagine by the rather vague language used in the bill, it wouldn’t be all that difficult for any creative prosecutor to make them mean whatever he or she wanted.

You know, kind of like how January 6 protesters have been treated as if they committed treason. And what about how Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives and an actual investigation was started on his “incitement violence.”

If those kinds of prosecutions weren’t already becoming the norm, this bill would only make them more common and a whole lot more difficult to get out of.

It would mean that Trump could have been charged with a white supremacy hate crime for telling citizens to make themselves heard, making him responsible for the “predispositions” of his audience.

Talk about spitting in the face of free speech and our founding fathers.