Freedom for whom?

You can't travel around rural Oregon these days without running into people who align with right wing militias. The rhetoric talks about things like patriotism and liberty, but given that these talking points have largely been ginned up by groups like the National Rifle Association and militias over a period of years, it seems reasonable to ask:

Freedom for whom? Americans, including Southern Slave owners have been among the most articulate spokespeople for the ideal of freedom, but if you scratch an inch beneath the veneer, a person will recognize very quickly that freedom means those who adhere to their point of view.

If you are queer, an immigrant, black, poor, afflicted with mental illness, a woman asserting her reproductive rights, then the concept of freedom does not extend to you because you either aren't a citizen or because you have been treated as less than a full citizen for all or most of our country's history, including in the present.

More importantly, many of those who speak so eloquently about freedom seek the freedom to deny other Americans of their most fundamental liberties, including the right to bodily autonomy.

Whether that be through rewriting history to edit out truths that make them feel uncomfortable, or by seeking to impose their ideology on our government at the barrel of a gun, by denying people the right to vote, through intimidating public officeholders, or any of the other tactics, that have been used in this country for more than a century to prevent human process.

Every person in this country, citizen and non-citizen alike, have fundamental rights just by virtue of being a human being in this country. We need to recognize both that we are a nation of immigrants who has discriminated against every new generation of immigrants for our entire history.

And yet, despite the discrimination, Americans, including both Southern Confederates and modern religious white nationalists, are often articulate spokespeople for humanistic values, including individual liberties such as the rights of free speech, free association, the right to hold elected officials to account through regular elections, and so forth. Historically, America has had a slowly widening circle of who those liberties apply to.

Additionally, both the Southern Confederates and modern white nationalists who have come to replace traditional Republican conservatives both in the media and local central committees also demand the freedom to dictate their religious values and ideology and the freedom to deny basic rights to other groups.

This is not a new strain or ideology in the American experience. For the nation's entire history, we have had a significant portion of our culture has denied or abrogated the rights of people who are different in terms of race, ethnicity, or religion.

Whether it be early Christian and deist settlers murdered by Puritans; Native Americans subjected to genocide and assimilation; blacks who were enslaved and enjoyed less than full citizenship rights for most of the nation's history; women, who continue to enjoy less than full citizenship rights; gays, who continue to enjoy less than full citizenship rights -- all at the hands of certain members of our culture who see themselves as full citizens and others as less.

No modern American should accept that ideology, and yet people like Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump rely on it for their support. They are not just attacking a political party. They are attacking core Republican institutions like the free press, an independent court, and more broadly the enlightenment values on which our country was founded -- the inalienable rights of every human, acceptance of religious diversity, pursuit of reason and science, and republican liberalism and generally a representative democracy where everyone's basic rights are protected. Most thinking Independents will avoid voting Republican until the party changes course and recommits itself to the core American values of meaningfully striving to live by our highest ideals and expand both liberty and opportunity to those who have traditionally been denied it.