OpsLens

Is the ACLU Attempting to Criminalize Thought?

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

I was lucky as a high school student. I had teachers who forced me to read and analyze thought-provoking books. Of these, 1984 by George Orwell was one of the most influential in developing my inquisitive nature of the world around me. The premise of the book, for those who have never read it, is painting a picture of the apex of government control.

There are several terms that Orwell coins to explain these. Two of my favorites were “doublethink” and “newspeak.” Doublethink was essentially the ability to believe two contradictory views at the same time. It was the essence of control and allowed the government to change views, values, and doctrine at a whim and have it accepted by the masses.

Newspeak was the deletion of words in the language to control thoughts. As stated by one of the protagonists in the book,

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word, which is simply the opposite of some other word?…In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston?”

The beauty in it is the belief that if you lack the words to express an idea, you lack the ability to formulate that idea in the first place. Get rid of words such as love and hate and you begin the process of controlling the emotional states of people.

In order to enforce these standards, the government had the Thought Police. These agents were tasked with rooting out individuals who had ideas contrary to the party line. The beauty in this is that thoughts cannot be proven or disproven. It is not as if they leave DNA. They also cannot prove a motivation for an action minus a freely given statement of intent by the individual.

In our society, we have always drawn a line between mens rea (the intent to commit a crime) and the motivations behind it (until 1968, with the passage of the first federal hate crime statute). Unfortunately, in our society, this is starting to shift.

In the latest example, Omar Jadwat, an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney, is suing the federal government to stop President Trump’s travel ban. His argument is not the constitutionality of the act. In fact, he tells the justices directly that if a different president had created the ban, it would be completely legal. Instead, he is arguing that because candidate Trump made a statement about banning Muslims as a religion, then his thoughts should be accepted as the motivation for the travel ban. Therefore, argues Jadwat, the president is violating the separation of church and state.

The short-sightedness of many liberals has always astounded me. In their desperation to silence those who disagree with them, they create the pathway to totalitarianism that this country is happily walking down. I make the same argument against hate crime legislation that I make in their quest to overturn the president’s order.

To allow the government to essentially criminalize a thought is the first step in the destruction of the First Amendment. The parallel to Orwell’s 1984 cannot be missed and should terrify us all. If we can start looking at the thought process behind an act, it allows carte blanche to government abuses.

Further, what is the point of having an elected leader if the opposition can pick apart their every motivation for an action as opposed to what the Constitution of the United States actually states? Congress gave the president broad powers in the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952. The law clearly states,

“(e) Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”

There is really no getting around what the law states. So instead of arguing on the basis of the law, the left is acting as the Thought Police. Clearly the temporary ban on immigration from countries supporting terrorism is legal on its face. So instead of accepting what the law states, the ACLU is attempting to criminalize thought—the same thing that hate crimes do, just on a broader scale.

The issue is that once a door is opened, it is almost impossible to close. Once thoughts are allowed to be prosecuted, how is it possible to have freedom of speech? The potential for abuses are endless. In almost all crime there are three elements that must be proven: actus reus (criminal act), mens rea (intent to commit a crime), and concurrence (that when you committed the crime you intended to commit the crime). These three elements ensure that those who are mentally ill (criminally insane) do not get arrested for something they do not understand. If you cannot understand that you committed a crime, how can you be punished for it?

Thought crime would completely upend our criminal justice system. Instead of proofs of action, one would simply need to imply motivations. From here, anything can be criminalized, depending on who is in power. Once this is allowed to occur, there can be only one outcome. As Orwell again states in 1984,

“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

Of course, this is not the intent of the typical liberal. The problem with the left as a whole is its belief that it can legislate fairness and happiness. In the majority of cases, the motivation of the left is to fight for those whom they believe cannot fight for themselves or have in some way been harmed by society. Yet as the old proverb states, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Liberals, for all their desire to enforce happiness, simply cannot see the secondary effects of their actions. To them, they see stopping President Trump’s ban as a win for the oppressed people in foreign countries looking to seek refuge in America. They cannot see the fact that this only helps a statistically insignificant number of people and opens the door for those who wish to do us harm. They also fail to see how this allows one’s motivations to be criminalized.

None of this will happen anytime soon, no matter what the courts decide. Indoctrination takes time and patience, just like eroding one’s freedoms. This is not a sprint for the finish, it is just one more domino knocked down on the path to Big Brother. Abraham Lincoln summed it up completely.

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”