He was an angler, though:
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True. Here in the UK we’re hardly ones to talk - at least you’ve got a ‘constitution’ to point at and argue about. Our ‘constitution’ exists but it’s wildly more diffuse and depends far more upon tradition than anything else. Which means that it’s even easier for someone to attempt to disapply those traditions. Especially when the executive branch is part of the legislative branch.
(On the other hand, our judicial branch is not overtly politically appointed, which does mean that extreme policies can get shut down more easily.)
OK, that was definitely the wrong word to use, and thank you for picking me up on it! I think I was trying to get at the idea that the reason it’s hard for people to get worked up is that they think the checks and balances are still good enough. They may well be incorrect in that thought (I clearly was!)
You’d think that. Here in the UK we’ve just spent getting on for a decade pointing out that Brexit was basically this same argument. And the people who said everything would be fine - no, better than fine! - are, of course, now the ones turning around and saying “what’s gone wrong? Why is everything falling apart?”
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Well that’s obviously a different story. There are at least a couple parts of the Bible explaining why Jesus is a great guy to have along on your fishing trip.
Not only will He help you net a ton of fish, He is also a highly effective emergency flotation device.
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And if the dude could actually turn water into wine there’d be no point in drowning.
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Generally speaking, the people who aren’t that worried aren’t [eta: fixed word here] being directly targeted… They are already passing laws to target particular groups of people from society. A kid was literally killed last week because of who they were… so, no, not all of us counting on the systems of checks and balances.
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I sure wish 20 year old Onion articles would stop being so prescient
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Has the ACLU been standing up for MAGA folks and Neo-Nazis recently? Last I’d heard they were raising the ire of right-wing libertarians for taking the oh-so-sinister position of “considering the harm of hate speech instead of taking a free speech absolutist stance on everything” in the wake of Charlottesville.
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I don’t mean the ACLU specifically (not that I took the time to be specific). More so the idea that defending the bedrock principles of fair play leave a lot of room for bad actors to act badly.
I still stand by those principles, but they’re a hell of a lot more work to defend, and a hell of a lot less popular than I would have assumed less than a decade ago 
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The classic example:
Law Relating to National Emergency Defense Measures of 3 July 1934:
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/2057-ps.asp
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Would would have happened in 2020 if the secretary of state of Georgia had given into the pressure from Trump to find the 17,000 extra votes?
What would have happened on Jan 6th 2021 if Congress had rejected the electoral college vote for Biden?
The system squeaked through those challenges and we still have widespread election denial years later.
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As Doctor Emmett Brown* once so clearly explained in an old episode of The West Wing:
Not a set of laws: a sense of the rule of law.
*Sorry, I mean Professor Lawrence Lessig, of course.
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Oh, that’s true, but there’s also an argument that says that it has never not been true - laws that were passed to bar women or black people from doing normal things have largely been supplanted by laws that bar e.g. trans people from doing normal things. On the surface, one might argue that this is a step forward (meaning that the target groups are smaller and smaller; this is not a defence of those laws!), but of course the vulnerability in the system is that it was possible to pass the earlier laws at all so it wouldn’t be hard to go back there?
The real defence is that people who voted for the Leopards Eating Peoples Faces Party do often discover the consequences quite quickly. Again, this is not meant to be an argument in favour of voting for said party.
The ultimate example of a “free speech absolutist” who defends the right of hate groups to inflict harm through free speech would probably be Glenn Greenwald.
From a purely abstract and legalistic standpoint, it’s possible to make a case, as Greenwald has, for a Jewish attorney to defend the civil rights of a militaristic anti-Semite and neo-Nazi. And from the first news story I read about his involvement, I understood this. The ethical case, however, is not so clear. After all, Hale’s group was primarily engaged in the business of depriving minorities—particularly blacks and Jews—of their civil rights through hate crimes, threats, and intimidation. They saw spreading such hate as one of their own rights.
So, from where I sat in Montana, spending time with the frightened victims of WCOTC thugs, someone who was defending their ability to use the levers of the legal system essentially was enabling their “right” to deprive other people, vulnerable people, of theirs. More to the point, in a world in which there are myriad opportunities to defend genuinely needy, innocent people being wrongly deprived of their civil and free-speech rights, I struggled to understand why any humane and capable attorney would devote their efforts to defending neo-Nazis’ rights.
There HAVE been gains for the LGBQT+ community too, including a rather recent SCOTUS ruling confirming trans rights in the work place. So, yes, there HAVE been gains across the board. Just because there are direct attacks on the trans community doesn’t make that less true. The attacks are the backlash because of gains made.
I do pay attention to major events in my own country, after all, especially in important issues such as civil and human rights. 
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It does not mean that they will in the future, especially if bad faith actors (such as Mike Johnson) are in place.
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More evidence that we can’t count on institutions to save us. Especially when they’re actively being undermined or corrupted by the fascists they’re supposed to check.
The law? The highest court in the land has one justice who’s on the take and who is married to an insurrectionist, and another who’s made his vocation formulating disingenuous arguments to support far-right policies.
A free press? The corporate media continues to engage in Bothsidesism in the name of “fairness” but really in a futile attempt to retain the quarter of their potential audience who considers them “enemies of the people”. And those are the outlets that aren’t overt right-wing propaganda machines.
Academia? It’s slowly being neutered, turned into a gig economy business like any other, its administrators focused not on educating but on delivering expensive debt-funded credentials for those who want “good jobs”.
“Free” markets? Please. Contrary to what establishment neoCon Republicans and establishment Third-Way Dems claim, democracy and capitalism are not deeply intertwined; now fascist tycoons are openly proclaiming that they’re fundamentally incompatible.
Either the majority of Americans apart from the Know-Nothing 27% actually believe and accept that the fascists will do what they say and take a stand now, or find out later the hard way.
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Not much. That would only have changed the electoral count to 290 Biden to 248 T****. It wouldn’t have swung the outcome, though Brad Raffensperger would probably be in prison right now.
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Which is why he has been so very cooperative.
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