Hey everyone welcome to another edition of TLDR, I’m the girl with kaleidoscope eyes John Henry from JohnHenry.US, please don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe! Today we’re going to talk about bias, why you need to be aware of your own, and a simple bias check you can use to help ensure you’re living up to yourself.
It’s probably important to note the context here: Ed Whelan is an arch-right lawyer and talking head who clerked for Scalia and write for National Review – we are NOT in the same lane ideologically, and that makes the point that much sharper:
I strongly disagree with Ed Whelan on nearly everything, but that’s not what this is about. The simple fact is he’s right in this case, and he’s not only right but it’s incredibly important that every human being on the planet knows it. This is an exercise I do constantly myself and believe we all should.
Why does it matter? Look no further than the dialogue surrounding the ongoing indictments of former president Trump. The current leftist cheerleading for the Espionage Act – one of the most troubling and problematic sets of law in our entire history of law – is frankly more than a little scary, and provides a great example of why it’s important to go through the exercise Whelan describes. Any sort of law that criminalizes speaking against the actions of the government is terrifying and should absolutely be subject to the harshest scrutiny…and all it really takes to understand that is saying to yourself “what if it was Donald Trump trying to use this power to his advantage, rather than it being used against him? How would he be able to abuse or misuse it?”
Reverse this situation and have the Trump administration prosecuting Joe Biden illicitly under some pretense like the minor scraps that turned up at his home office, suddenly it’s not so cool. When you’ve got a war being prosecuted for unjust or unworthy reasons, suddenly it’s not so cool that you can be sentenced to ten years simply for advocating against war when war is what the government wants, like Eugene Debs.
That’s not to say I think the prosecution of Trump is at all illicit or even flawed, just that if we were thinking clearly we’d have a lot more conversation happening about the Espionage Act that isn’t driven simply by the former president’s sycophants trying to make excuses for him in the media.
But it makes someone like me who constantly writes in criticism of power and its abuses and those who hold and abuse it feel really uncomfortable about some of the company I’m keeping, when I start seeing ostensible left-wing activists and personalities getting all happy about the Espionage Act.
When you turn it around, the flaws in the act become problematic, and we can’t afford to ignore that simply because those flaws happen to be working in a way that is both personally satisfying and morally righteous in the particular case of Trump. I’m not even saying “fix it first, worry about Trump after.” It’s the tool we’ve got now to do the job and the job needs doing, so we’ll use it.
What I am saying, though, is we’ll keep having problems like him until we build and implement systems that actually do what they say they’re supposed to, like form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
The only way to do that for sure is to resist the urge to ignore abuses of power when they’re accomplishing things you like.