Editor, Times-Union:
On January 6, 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his eighth State of the Union Address. In that speech, he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people “everywhere in the world ought to enjoy”:
1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of worship
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear
Roosevelt hoped the speech would symbolize America’s war aims and vision for a postwar world, as well as promote a justification for the U.S. to abandon its isolationist policies. In 1948, FDR’s words, with the help of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, inspired the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.
Flash forward to January 6, 2020. Another president, now officially a former president, inspired thousands of rioting insurrectionists to use the new freedoms he had given them over his four years in office, to attempt to overthrow the government and destroy democracy, and our country has been striving to clean up that hurricane of events ever since. The new Four Freedoms, according to Republicans, as explained by Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times:
1. Freedom to menace - to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.
2. Freedom to censor - to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
3. Freedom to exploit - to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
4. Freedom to control - to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and represss the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
“In the aftermath of Trump’s election loss and the insurrection at the Capitol, the right shifted their tactics: without Trump at the helm to steer their movement from the executive branch, activists have made a concerted effort to organize in the local arena, pursuing their agenda in a more decentralized fashion in venues where it is easier to gain power. Schools, especially, have been on the receiving end of ramped-up and coordinated hard-right attacks, frequently through the guise of ‘parents’ rights’ groups.” (splcenter.org)
By 2022, The Southern Poverty Law Center had exposed 1,225 active anti-government and hate groups operating in the U.S. “All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable (unable to be changed) characteristics.” (Note: at least 13 of those groups are in Indiana.)
Paula Brown
Warsaw