“If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other.
Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers.
After a while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.”
The above is one of my favorite quotes by Clarence Darrow from the Scopes trial of 1925 (and repeated by Spencer Tracy in the movie Inherit the Wind.) Darrow was directing his comments against the single issue of censorship of the idea of evolution, but the same principles apply to much of what is happening today.
These thirteen “If today...” statements lay out the dangers we are facing.
If today you can send masked government officials to abduct a single foreign student — lawfully in this country — from the street and deport her for allegedly uttering words or fostering anti-Semitic attitudes ...
tomorrow you can abduct an American student in the same way and incarcerate him or her without legal recourse.
If today you can take away funding from a university because it may have programs or courses that discuss diversity, equity, and inclusion ...
tomorrow you can impose prescriptions on what that university can teach or who they can hire as professors.
If today you can count on a Supreme Court to routinely issue declarations supporting your personal agenda ...
tomorrow you may have such complete control over that Court that nothing you do will ever come to question before the law or that Court will abrogate all lower court opinions against you.
If today you can unilaterally impose usurious tariffs on other countries by declaring a national emergency ...
tomorrow you may declare the same and militarily attack another country without redress from Congress.
If today you can arbitrarily fire and discharge federal workers without providing evidence that they have committed some egregious error or failed in their duties ...
tomorrow you can replace those same workers and assure that the replacements will accede to all your personal directives and continue to fire those who are felt to harbor attitudes not in support of your principles
If today you can fire the top military commanders without cause ...
tomorrow you can replace them with sycophants who will mindlessly follow your demands even if violating Constitutional rights when they possess fealty to an individual rather than to the Constitution.
If today you can place incompetent and ill-prepared individuals in important federal leadership positions ...
tomorrow you may have so decimated those agencies that they can never be reconstituted without tremendous expense or find people unwilling to work in the federal system again for fear of the same thing happening to them.
If today you can pardon hundreds of convicted criminals who have been adjudicated guilty of insurrection against the basic institutions of the United States ...
tomorrow you may call on those same individuals to rise up and create havoc among the civilian population in your favor without fear of retribution and characterize them as “good people, peacefully demonstrating.”
If today you can excuse top-level administrators for seriously exposing military personnel to danger—and allow them to lie about it ...
tomorrow you can encourage them to act in similar irresponsible ways and not worry about consequences.
If today many of your comments are simply lies (Obama was not born in America, the 2020 election was rigged, illegal Haitians are eating people’s pets in Ohio, the majority of immigrants are rapists and criminals) ...
tomorrow lying will become a standard part of your repertoire no matter how serious the subject matter.
If today you can act as though you are protecting religion by curtailing free speech ...
tomorrow you may use that power to condemn and persecute all non-religion as well, or religions other than Christianity.
If today you can freely consort with dictators without questioning their deeds against humanity ...
tomorrow you may demand those same dictators institute actions that you would not dare take on yourself.
If today, you can subjugate a huge segment of Congress by threats of withholding support in their elections ...
tomorrow they will become your minions in whatever you choose to do, no matter how egregious.
As Darrow so accurately pointed out, “Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding.”
Today, they are not just feeding – they are perfervidly feasting.
--30--
Written by Chuck Witt. Cross-posted from the WinCity Voices.
