America on Parole

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, July 10, 2022

 

If Democrats get their way, America’s crisis-pregnancy centers will be wiped off the map — literally.

 

A small army of progressive activists and Democratic officials including New York attorney general Letitia James is leaning on Google to ensure that its mapping service does not direct women experiencing crisis pregnancies to crisis-pregnancy centers — to ensure that these women are directed to abortion clinics and to abortion clinics only. As Jezebel complains: “Nearly 40 percent of search results for ‘abortion’ on Google Maps direct people in abortion-hostile states to crisis pregnancy centers instead of real clinics.”

 

Why bother with persuasion when anybody who disagrees with you can just be digitally disappeared?

The progressives’ delegitimization game is old, familiar, and tedious: Forcing children to parrot ideological bromides as an educational requirement is not indoctrination but “cultural competence”; climate policy is not a matter of political, social, and economic tradeoffs but a question that can be answered empirically via science, and, hence, opposition to the progressive climate-policy agenda is anti-science; criticizing that climate agenda is not political activism but somehow is securities fraud; talking to unhappy people experiencing gender dysphoria is forbidden “conversion therapy” that stands criminally in the way of the obvious medical necessity of ritual mutilation and genital amputation. Etc.

 

And, of course, helping women with crisis pregnancies to understand that abortion is not their only option — that they do in fact have a choice, as they say, and that if their choice is not abortion then there are many kinds of help available to them — isn’t help or counseling or outreach, but “fake medicine” happening at “fake clinics.”

 

There is power in information, and progressives seek to use their political advantage in states such as New York and California to lean on technology firms to impose an Orwellian blackout on wrongthink — removing unpopular voices and views from social media, cutting off verboten institutions and communications from the digital infrastructure, and, if it comes to it, manipulating GPS services to simply erase unwelcome charities and businesses. If you ever were bewildered by the old Stalinist practice of airbrushing photos to remove figures who have fallen into disfavor, this is the same sensibility at work.

 

There is one slice of life in these United States in which it is very common to use GPS mapping to oversee and control the choices people make: parole. That bears meditating upon.

 

It is the power of the parole officer that progressives dream of lording over their fellow citizens — the power to set boundaries to govern the lives of everyone else and, especially, of those who attempt to escape that power. We hear it from the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and we hear it in Elizabeth Warren’s “you didn’t build that” nonsense: the idea that we live and work and prosper only at the sufferance of the state and its progressive masters, that we require permission to enjoy our freedom and our prosperity — and that this permission is liable to be revoked for infractions against the progressive sensibility.

 

We right-wingers are a paranoid bunch, but, sometimes, I wonder: Are we paranoid enough?

 

It is easy to see the kind of politics practiced by Letitia James et al. descending into any number of dystopian scenarios. If we are all using self-driving cars in 20 years, you can be sure that the Letitia Jameses of the future will try to control where those cars will go — and where they won’t. Progressives already have weaponized the financial system against their political enemies — here, again, Letitia James is a major offender — and you can be sure that in a cashless society they will simply try to exclude wrong-thinking businesses, if not entire wrong-thinking industries, from the system. (Sturm Ruger & Co. makes a legal — and excellent — product, but it has been unbanked three times because of left-wing political pressure.) And it is not as though weaponizing travel would be unprecedented: You already can have your passport taken away over a relatively small tax debt — even if the debt is the subject of an ongoing dispute.

 

The Internet was supposed to be a decentralizing power, but, in many cases, the rise of ubiquitous information technology has had a centralizing effect that must be guarded against and, where possible, counteracted — because it is liable to be exploited by those who believe that justice requires that their fellow citizens be something other than free.

 

Freedom irritates progressives. In late June, Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick published a story decrying recent Supreme Court decisions, juxtaposing the Dobbs abortion decision with the right-to-pray decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton. As the headline put it, the issue is “the story this court is telling about who deserves rights,” and the ghastly outcome that “men are free to pray everywhere.”

 

Heavens to Betsy.

 

Of course Americans are free to pray everywhere, free to exercise their religion — that was kind of the main idea from the very beginning.

 

In spite of the efforts of the campus administrators to put up invisible fences around “free-speech zones,” the United States of America — all of it — is a free-speech zone, and a place in which the free exercise of religion is protected as a fundamental matter of the law. The Kennedy case was a school-prayer case only to the extent that it involved a man employed by a school district praying after a sports event. Students were not being asked to participate in that prayer, much less required to do so. Everybody was free to pray or not. That progressives could not abide this speaks to their weird understanding of freedom, their perverse belief that your freedom is defined not by what you are permitted to do but by what other people are prohibited from doing — and not prohibited from doing to you, but prohibited from doing in a world in which you simply exist.

 

Our Democratic friends are single-serving libertarians, happy to say: “If you don’t like abortion, don’t have one.” But that of course doesn’t hold for them where firearms are concerned — or where prayer is concerned, or where employment is concerned, or even where comedy is concerned. Progressives are free to turn off Joe Rogan, but they will not be happy as long as you are free to listen to his podcasts. Progressives are free to advocate abortion, but they will not be happy as long as you are free to advocate nonlethal alternatives. The vegans and the bug-eaters will not be happy until veganism or insectophagia or whatever their particular dietary obsession might be is mandatory. They cannot feel themselves to be free until you aren’t.

 

The people who want to take crisis-pregnancy centers off the maps want to take nonconforming radio programs and television networks off the airwaves, too. They want to take publications they disagree with off the Internet and off the newsstands, and they want to take comedians who hurt their feelings off television. (Do check out Noah Rothman’s excellent new book on that subject, The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun.) And, ultimately, they want to control your lives just as comprehensively — and at least as ruthlessly — as the parole system does those under its jurisdiction.

 

Happily, there already is a palpable sense that the cultural tide is turning against the little suppressors. But progressives will continue to exploit — with all the mercilessness they can manage — their positions of power at the sensitive junctions of important institutions, from regulatory agencies to college campuses, where the especially cruel practice of revoking undergraduates’ admissions as a form of political retaliation against the thoughts and words of children remains in force.

 

We are not probationary Americans or Americans on parole — and I do not think that most of us will consent to live as though that were the case. The emblem of this country is an eagle in flight — not an eagle wearing an ankle monitor. But we will always have to fight against the kind of omnipresent surveillance and control dreamt of by the likes of petty totalitarians such as Letitia James.