 You know, I often hear folks talk about how concerned they are with freedom of speech, but they never actually address the real threats to freedom of speech, which is an actual crackdown by the government on your political speech. It happens all the time as it relates to BDS and increasingly as the Black Lives Matter movement gains more prominence rather than actually addressing the concerns of people out in the streets protesting against police brutality, Republican legislatures and dozens of states literally are choosing to ignore their concerns and just try to criminalize them from speaking their mind in the first place. The first state to sign an anti-protest bill into law is Florida. Ron DeSantis did that just this week, but I alluded to the fact when we talked about that that Florida isn't alone and this new article from the New York Times sheds a little bit more light on how prevalent this is and how egregious these laws are so as Reed Epstein and Patricia Mazae of the New York Times explains Republican legislatures in Oklahoma and Iowa have passed bills granting immunity to drivers whose vehicles strike and injure protesters in public streets. A Republican proposal in Indiana would bar anyone convicted of unlawful assembly from holding state employment included elected office. A Minnesota bill would prohibit those convicted of unlawful protesting from receiving student loans, unemployment benefits or housing assistance and in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed sweeping legislation this week that toughened existing laws governing public disorder and creating a harsh new level of infractions. A bill he's called the strongest anti-looting, anti-riding, pro-law enforcement piece of legislation in the country. The measures are part of a wave of new anti-protest legislation sponsored and supported by Republicans in the 11 months since Black Lives Matter protests swept the country following the death of George Floyd. The Minneapolis police officer who killed Mr. Floyd, Derek Chauvin was convicted on Tuesday on murder and manslaughter charges, a cathartic end to weeks of tension. But while Democrats seized on Mr. Floyd's death last May to highlight racism and policing and other forms of social injustice, Republicans have responded to a summer of protests by proposing a raft of punitive new measures governing the right to lawfully assemble. GOP lawmakers in 34 states have introduced 81 anti-protest bills during the 2021 legislative session, more than twice as many proposals as in any other year according to Ellie Page, a senior legal advisor at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which tracks legislation limiting the right to protest. So I want to repeat that 81 anti-protest bills have been introduced in 34 states in the 2021 session. This is absolutely terrifying. Anyone who claims to care about freedom of speech, who's concerned about censorship in America, this is the time to sound the alarm right now. This is absolutely horrific to see. And you know, you hear these details, right? You hear, oh, well, it offers immunity in some of these bills and states to people who mow down protesters who drive their cars into crowds of people. But that can't be correct. That has to be hyperbole. There's no way that that's real, right? Actually it's literally real. It's included in Florida's bill as well, which has gone into law immediately. Now what these laws do and what the one that Rhonda Santis signed into law does is they grant immunity to people who drive into crowds of protesters and literally kill them by shielding them from lawsuits and criminal penalties. So long as the person who drives into the crowd of protesters, they claim that it was because of self-defense. That's literally how they're justifying this. So in other words, the neo-Nazi who drove into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville that killed Heather Heier, all he had to do, if he lived in a state with one of these laws, is say it was self-defense. I know that there's video footage of me driving into a crowd of protesters, but you know what? I felt threatened. I felt like this mob was coming after me and I had no choice but to drive into them to stop them from attacking me. Now what's funny is that the lawmakers in Florida will defend this provision here and they'll say, no, no, no. That's different actually because the individual, the neo-Nazi specifically who drove his car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville and killed Heather Heier, he wasn't actually doing it out of self-defense. He was doing it because he was a bad person. He wanted to kill people. Okay, first of all, how exactly are you going to prove that? Second of all, do you not understand how you're incentivizing driving cars into protesters by Republicans who think that these folks are terrible? They're the mob? I mean, look at that gun-toting couple that threatened to shoot protesters that were marching to a governor's mansion. Folks around this country clutch their pearls as they see these protests and they want to see violence be done to folks. I mean, look at how many people defended Kyle Rittenhouse. So what you're doing is you're giving these folks an excuse, permission essentially, to kill protesters. It's unbelievable. It's insane. Folks claim to care about freedom of speech, and they're not talking about this, unreal. Now this is less controversial than it should be because, you know, they can point to all of the rowdy protests, the rioting, the looting, and they could say, look, we're just solving a problem. We're responding to an issue. But if you are buying into that frame, understand that you're being duped by a media that has an incentive to publish sensationalist content. Most of the Black Lives Matter protests are actually overwhelmingly peaceful. But which one do you think a news organization like CNN or Fox News is going to want to play? The one where there's violence, which will attract eyeballs, which will in turn attract advertisers, or this boring, peaceful march where people are just chanting justice. I think we know the answer to that. And don't take my word for it. Take the word of analysts at the Washington Post, who in 2020, they looked at more than 7,300 protests. And here's what they determined. The overall levels of violence and property destruction were low, and most of the violence that did take place was in fact directed against the Black Lives Matter protesters. In short, our data suggests 96.3% of events involved no property damage or police injuries, and in 97.7% of events no injuries were reported among participants by standards or police. In other words, because the media has led folks to believe that these Black Lives Matter protests are overwhelmingly violent, well, maybe this type of legislation is justified. Now how they try to justify giving immunity to people who drive their cars into crowds of protesters, that's a different story. But when folks are afraid and they think, oh my God, these protests really are violent and we've got to do something. I mean, maybe I support the First Amendment, but we've got to do something, right? They're giving the government permission to do things like this, and guess what? You might not like the Black Lives Matter protests, but this does cut both ways. Republicans that want to protest? If you live in a Democratic-controlled state that institutes more regulations on guns, for example, well, guess what? This can be applied to you just as easily. Now luckily for you, most cops are Republicans and conservatives, so they're probably not going to crack down on you so much as they crack down on Black Lives Matter protesters, but still understand the implications of this law and how it affects everyone equally. You might think that this is a gotcha to the Black Lives Matter protesters who have been demonized, but this is, make no mistake about it, further erosion of the First Amendment. And the folks who aren't talking about this but report to CARE about censorship and freedom of speech in America, they're frauds if they're not sounding the alarm right now about this issue.