The Bill of Rights is a joke.

I am writing this on Saturday, March 3rd, 2020.

In response to the rona outbreak in the United States, Donald Drumpf has declared tomorrow a national Day of Prayer. This has incited a moral panic on behalf of liberals who are concerned about the constitutionality of such a declaration. Some seem unaware that the US has held a national Day of Prayer every year since 1952. The more savvy among them find this point irrelevant, because the practice is a clear violation of the first amendment to the constitution, regardless. This is true. The national Day of Prayer is blatantly unconstitutional. However, this doesn’t matter. The Bill of Rights is a joke. In my lifetime, the government has never respected our “civil rights”. Some would say that’s a product of my youth. I was two years old when the twin towers where destroyed. Since these attacks where used as a justification for legislation massively curtailing civil liberties, some might argue that I’ve just never been alive and capable of much thought in the time’s when the bill of rights wasn’t a joke. This indicates a delusional misreading of history (or more likely: a lack of reading of history), as well as a theoretical misunderstanding of how states necessarily function.

Some statements in the last paragraph might strike some as bold, but in the rest of this article I will attempt to prove them true. First, I will go through each amendment in the bill of rights one at a time, and give contemporary examples of our government violating them. I may give some historical examples as well if I can remember any off the top of my head, but I’d like to publish this while “separation of church and state” is still a top trend on twitter so I’m kinda winging it here. A few of these violations have been ruled unconstitutional by the supreme court, and some may bring this up as a counterargument. This would miss the point I am making. Supreme court rulings are ad hoc by nature, in that they don’t erase the violation which occurred, or the harm inflicted on our citizens as a result. The only way around this would be to provide our supreme court justices with the capacity for time travel. (Here’s a free hashtag that makes me cringe but I’m sure anglophile liberals on twitter would love: #GetRBGaTARDIS. Go wild.) Back to my point: supreme court rulings may prevent future violations in a limited sense — in that they inform* legislation and executive action which can put an end to such violations — but they do not in-and-of-themselves do anything in terms of directly affecting change to how government action is carried out. Furthermore, these ruling do not prevent more drastic violations of the same amendments from occurring in the future. Later on we will try to answer the question of why the government does not respect the bill of rights.

On to some violations. Freedom of religion? We’re talking about one. Trumps Muslim ban is another. TSA targeting of Muslims and Sikhs after 9/11 that is probably one of the more pernicious ones. It started under Dubya, continued under Obama, and continues under God Emperor Trump.

Freedom of assembly? Look at police responses to organized protests and demonstrations all over the country. Do you have the “right to assembly” if agents of the state are almost guaranteed to show up at these assemblies, keep you spatially confined, and then shoot at you with tear gas, spray you with pepper spray, and hit you with billy clubs when demonstrators step out of line? Often times, the police don’t wait until someone step out of line to employ crowd dispersal techniques, and it’s been well documented that police departments frequently employ under-cover provocateurs to start fights to justify violence. Instances of this happening at Occupy Wall Street got a lot of coverage, but I’ve seen this “right” violated at every protest or demonstration I’ve ever attended with the exception of the Seattle Women’s March in 2016, and one tiny spontaneous demonstrations in downtown Olympia that cropped up after Quasem Soleimani was killed. Another small demonstration (which I had a hand in organizing) in protest of proposed faculty layoffs at my college also saw our right to assembly respected, mostly due to the fact that the police where unaware of our assembly in the first place. The point is that freedom of assembly is not a right which we can be said to posses in any meaningful way, since the only way to have this right respected is to either have your demonstration be so large that the police cannot possibly disperse it, so small and insignificant that they don’t care to, or so covert that they are unaware of it’s existence.

Freedom of speech? Read the Sedition Act of 1918, and the one of 1798 while you’re at it. Also look at the numerous accounts of police and secret service intimidation of activists who try to use their speech in ways that some small element of the state doesn’t like. One recent case that is well documented is when Matt “Spek” Watson — a musician and Seattle social media addict who’s gained some degree of local notoriety — was visited by the Secret Service, allegedly due to some tweet he had made years earlier about orange man bad or something. Anyone with more than two brain cells knows that the real reason is that he was playing a crucial roll in the online campaign to keep Ari Hoffman off our city council. Let’s just say Ari Hoffman has friends in the Intelligence Community, for fear that I’ll be called an antisemite conspiracy theorist if I elaborate** Dammit! >:( where’d those little stars come from? ADHD is the worst. Footnotes just appear out of nowhere and the clock skips forward like half an hour. I hope I didn’t write anything inflammatory, but you should probably not scroll down too far just to be safe. Let’s see if I can make this article so long that no one reads it all the way through and still hit my self-imposed deadline. We’ve got three and a half hours left.

Where was I? Ari Hoffman? No it’s something to do with Spek… Oh right the secret service! No that isn’t it. Freedom of speech? Sounds right. I think I was writing about how the bill of rights may as well just be used as toilet paper for the oval office bathroom. That would be a good political cartoon, and it would work with literally every president. I’m sure it’s been done, but has it been done with every historical president? Someone needs to get on that. I want to see a cartoon of John Adams wiping his ass with the preamble. Speaking of John Adams!

Freedom of the press? You’ve already been directed to the sedition act, so my John Adam’s joke isn’t going to land very well, but you gotta admit the setup was high-effort. Just look at the aftermath of the Snowden Revelations and tell me that the government wasn’t doing everything in it’s power to curtail the presses freedom, with the exception of literally launching an ICBM at The Intercept’s office. I’m sure they considered it though. Well, maybe not literally. They would probably use a predator drone or something.

A well regulated militia? I suppose they exist, but if one was organized that actually had the military capacity to challenge the federal military it would be crushed. The American civil war and Waco are sort of examples, but writing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The Union Army was BASED AS FUCK. DON’T STEP TO ME, BOOMER!

The right to bare arms? I’m not the best person to make this argument to liberals, because if I believed in civil rights in the first place I would probably be described as a second amendment absolutist, but if you’re for gun control you probably think this one was a mistake anyways, so carry on. Sorry for erasing your position, enlightened center. Centrists don’t seem to exist anyways as far as I can tell so maybe I’m not sorry.

The third amendment is a weird one. I don’t know any examples of it being violated without getting kind of esoteric. Soldiers aren’t paid nearly enough for them to buy or rent their own house or apartment in a lot of places, so I suppose parents of soldiers being forced to either let their kids sleep in a park or move back in with them after their deployment or whatever is up sorta counts. These are supposed to be negative rights though so I don’t think that argument holds water. If anyone knows an example of the third amendment being tested, shoot me a message here or on YouTube or Twitter.

Searches and seizures? The entirety of the War on Drugs relies on this being violated daily. “Unreasonable” is a bit vague, but I doubt possession of cannabis is what the founding fathers had in mind. Additionally, there is no warrant required for your car to be searched. We will talk about this more when we get to “unmolested travel.” I’m getting sleepy so we might not actually.

Grand jury? Go watch Snowden’s interview on MSNBC titled “Full Interview: Edward Snowden On Drumpf, Privacy, And Threats To Democracy | The 11th Hour | MSNBC”. He effectively debunks the idea that this is a thing in practice within the first two minutes, and elaborates much more later on in the interview.

Okay I’m already bored of this. Let’s move on to why the Bill of Rights was never going to work in the first place. What is a government, or rather, what defines a state? Materially speaking, a state is an institution with a specific territory that we call a jurisdiction. Within that territory, the state enforces rules which are called laws. In order to do this, the state must employ a body of armed men (and sometimes women, but usually men) to carry guns or other weapons and threaten anyone who disobeys these laws with bullets and batons and prison cells. We call this group of men a police or paramilitary force. Now rights, insofar as they pertain to legal doctrine, are a type of law which is meant to guarantee citizens (or those recognized to live the jurisdiction of a state) certain freedoms, or in the case of positive right: certain amenities. So far this is all basic stuff, you probably learned all this in high school civics.

Let’s dive a little deeper. In order to provide citizens with these rights, the state needs to be able to enforce it’s power within the entirety of it’s jurisdiction. This power is called sovereignty. Anyone who is “outside the law” is a threat to the states sovereignty. Furthermore, even if an activity is not illegal, or is within the realm of a citizens rights, it may — if left unaddressed — go on to compromise the states ability to enforce it’s laws. Therefore any organizing among citizens that threatens the states power, therefore cannot be allowed if the state wants to protect the rights of it’s citizens. Here we reach the fundamental contradiction of “civil rights”. The state can only enforce these rights if it has sovereignty, but in order to maintain it’s sovereignty, it must be willing to violate these rights when citizens start to take actions that threaten the states sovereignty. This logic is ironclad as stated, but it is generous. It assumes that states actually care about, or want to enforce rights. This is the case sometimes, but not all of the time. However, no matter the intentions of a state or state actor, preserving sovereignty will always be a necessary precondition to carrying out a states goals. Thus, the preservation of rights is impossible if we leave it up to the state. The founding fathers knew this. There is a reason that Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.” This was not merely a stylistic flourish meant to soothe his conscience over the blood he saw spilt in the revolutionary war. He understood that the preservation of civil rights, requires that the people do not allow state sovereignty to come about. Once a government has established sovereignty, it will do anything to keep it. In a position such as ours, if we care about our civil rights being respected, then the only solution: is revolution.

*- Some may take issue with my use of the word “inform” rather than “compel”. Constitutionally speaking, the supreme court is supposed to have the power to compel such legislation and executive action. This is not how it works in practice, and history has shows that to be the case. I would try to demonstrate that last claim here, but that is outside of the scope of this article. Perhaps I will follow this up with an article titles “The Supreme Court is Powerless.” I cannot discount the possibility that when researching that follow up article I would find examples that prove me wrong. My overall point in this article still stands, even if having to substitute “inform” for “compel” would render that particular sentence self-contradictory. The following sentence is really the more pertinent one to my overall argument.

**- Footnote: No it’s not because he’s Jewish for fucks sake. Go read Spek’s tweets from the the time of the Ari Hoffman city council campaign. Then look at the failed Safe Seattle social media campaign to have conservaboomers show up at his work and intimidate him. Then tell me that whatever list of priorities Safe Seattle and the Hoffman campaign kept didn’t have a big “GET SPEK OFF TWITTER” written at the top. Finally look at who he talked into forming armed patrols of his local cemetery to keep homeless people out, and who did security at his events, and tell me he’s not within three degrees of connection from someone in US or Israeli intelligence. You think he’s not going to make that phone call? I would make that phone call if I was in his shoes. Fuck it looks like I elaborated. I bet Todd Herman or someone is going to find this and be like “is this the ebil nazi who posted Ari to /pol/ and incited a bunch of anti-semitic death threats?” Then he’s going to sleuth through my web content and find my face and write an article trying to doxx me. Then his publisher is going to be like “that was a year ago Todd” no one will read that. And then Todd will be like, but our readership here at 770 KTH is batshit insane! And then his publisher will be like oh yeah I forgot, and then the article will get published and no one will care except the 8 boomer likud supporters with two dozen sock-puppet accounts each who make up the readership of 770 KTTH. Then they’ll make like two hundred tweets about how someone should firebomb my house and won’t see a pinch of irony in the whole thing. I should probably stop now before I give them more cannon fodder. All I can say is no, I don’t hate Jews, at least not any of the Jews I know personally, and I’m not an a nazi or a white nationalist or an “identitarian” or a “neo-reactionary” or really any kind of nationalist, I just read far too much local news. If this is the future and you’re some concerned friend of mine who read an article about how I’m a nazi, go read my first article article on Medium and you’ll have made up your mind by the end.

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