Speaker 1: I want to start today talking a little bit about so-called freedom, and the reason I say
so-called is because much of the discussion of freedom, much of the use of the word freedom
is actually coming from extreme authoritarians who only believe in the type of freedom that
benefits them. They only believe in the type of freedom that allows them to impose whatever they
want on to everybody else restricting everybody else's freedom. It's an extremely authoritarian
and historically popular with fascists perspective on what freedom means, the freedom to tell others
what to do, for example, or the freedom to stay in power. Even when you lost an election. It's
freedom to be extremely authoritarian, no matter what anybody else wants, says or believes. And
in the past, we've talked about the people that claim their rights. We saw this early with COVID
a lot. Actually, they focus on these are my rights. They claim their rights, but they're
obsessed with their rights in a complete and total vacuum from the responsibilities that come with
those rights and that allow everybody to maintain those rights. And this is sort of a similar thing,
much the same way. Freedom during the pandemic that's been preached by a lot of these people
means my version of freedom only, which is a very authoritarian concept and perspective. And
you know, some examples by freedom the state of Florida under Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is
a really good example. There's a very good article in the Guardian that explains that the theme and
the concept of freedom pushed by DeSantis and the Florida Legislature is actually authoritarianism
cloaked as freedom. Look at the so-called Stop WOAK Act, and that imposes from above
from people who know nothing about education, what is allowed to be taught in individual classrooms.
They talk about it as freedom, but it's actually extremely authoritarian. Republicans are talking
about in Florida an extreme abortion ban without even an exception for rape or incest. That's an
outrageously authoritarian way of telling women what they have to do, outlawing mask requirements
in all sorts of places. That's not freedom and liberty. It's authoritarian. You're imposing one
option on all sorts of organizations, despite claiming to be about freedom. They claim to be
against regulating business. And yet they say we are banning masking or vaccination requirements.
And even in the context of the Big Lie around the 2020 election, they talk about the freedom
to have only legal votes counted. That's what they say and all of these catchphrases.
But ultimately, all of it is in service to the wildly dictatorial, authoritarian idea
that when you lose an election, you can find some way to stay in power and there's few
things more dictatorial than that. There's some really interesting research into the concept of
competitive authoritarianism. You can google that phrase and you'll find a ton of academic papers
about it. And what competitive authoritarianism refers to is you have, in theory, the front of
democratic institutions and electoral competition. Whoever convinces voters that they are the better
candidate, the better choice wins and gets to govern. But it's actually unfair competition
where incumbents try to use all sorts of mechanisms, including courts. Remember Trump with
a 63 of five court filings, the media going out at 2am and putting into the media the narrative
that I actually won manipulation of the voting systems, telling and telling Georgia to do this
in Arizona to do that. They're using the courts, media and the voting systems to stay in power
even when they lose, when there is a front of fair democratic institutions. And that's a lot of what
2020 looked like. There's a very good Vox article which says You what these people want to do
is strike a balance where they want to rig and control elections just enough to stay in power.
But don't make it all look democratic so that citizens believe they are choosing and they don't
rise up. And it often doesn't quite work. I mean, it didn't quite work for them in 2020 and that
ultimately Joe Biden was still inaugurated the president. But this concept of calling things
the opposite of what they are referring to a total ban on mask mandates as freedom, when in reality,
it's the opposite of freedom. It's really. Lord and fleshed out in detail in George Orwell's 1984,
it's almost cliche, it's almost apocryphal tons of people love to misquote or misuse, or they
misunderstand aspects of 1984 and that they talk about 1984 when it really doesn't apply. But this
opposite naming by authoritarians, it's straight out of the book. In 1984, you have the slogan War
is peace. Freedom is slavery. That's fundamentally at a core level what we're talking about here.
And in fact, one of the scariest things is that if you look historically, fascism has a long history
of being called freedom. Fascism uses explicitly populist, libertarian sounding rhetoric,
and they talk about, you know, a heroic mass effort to get back to some previous period
where we had greatness. And we, you know, Trump literally using the greatness thing. It often
demands loyalty to a single leader. It often leads to a cult of personality and and unquestioned
obedience to whatever the leader says. He says the election was stolen, it was stolen,
and we will all repeat it uncritically. Whether we truly believe it or not historically reminds
us of many different things and sort of like the calling card of those four years of Trump and
continues because the rallies have restarted, which we'll talk about a little bit later.