 For as long as I can remember, the right has always claimed to have a monopoly on freedom. They support freedom of speech, and the left does not. They support freedom for individuals, and the left does not. But none of this is true. Their version of freedom is a bastardized or welly inversion of freedom that doesn't actually mean freedom for anyone who isn't part of their political tribe. And Tom Hartman wrote an interesting op-ed in Salon addressing this very issue titled, Republicans and billionaires are selling Americans a deadly caricature of freedom. For decades, Republicans have owned the concept of freedom. What they're really pushing is suffering and death. Now this lengthy PC explains how for decades, Republicans and billionaires have kind of set the parameters for freedom. What is and isn't freedom is defined by them. And most Americans have kind of just accepted that. But what he's going to advocate for is for all of us collectively to reject their Orwellian version of freedom. He writes, for 40 years, Republicans have owned the word freedom to the point of inserting it in the names of their organizations and splashing it all over their ads right next to the AR-15s they love to pose with. Back in the 1930s, wealthy right-wingers argued that Franklin D. Roosevelt's proposed social security program was a socialist plot to destroy America's freedom. Ronald Reagan made a similar argument in the early 1960s against Lyndon Johnson's great society proposal to start a single-payer healthcare system for seniors called Medicare. If Medicare passes into law, the consequences will be dire beyond imagining, Reagan said. One of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in America before Medicare when men were free. For the last 40 years, Republicans and their billionaire owners have used a massive media campaign to tell us that democratic socialist programs like unemployment insurance, social security and the minimum wage diminish Americans' freedom. They argued a decade ago that Obamacare was a direct assault on our freedom. So basically, in every instance, when our country actually tried to do something good for its people, the Republican Party, they framed that as an attack on freedom. And people largely went along with it until later on, they found out that, oh, that wasn't actually an attack on freedom. Social security didn't take away freedom. It expanded freedom. Medicare didn't take away freedom. It expanded our freedom. And as flawed as the Affordable Care Act was, this wasn't necessarily an attack on freedom so much as it was giving people the freedom to have more options to secure healthcare. So every single time they talk about freedom, there's no meaning there. There's no value behind that word. It's just a buzzword when it shouldn't be a buzzword. Freedom is a word with the real meaning and we shouldn't let them define it. And it's not just Republicans, as Tom Hartman argued. It's also business. Think about the way that Elon Musk, for example, has defined freedom of speech. When he doesn't actually know about the First Amendment, nor does he care about freedom of speech. Really, freedom of speech, according to him, is just his tribe doesn't get censored from social media. But when it comes to left-wing voices, well, he's censoring them. So it's a case of freedom from me and my team and not the. But the left has got to start taking back freedom. And this whole notion of freedom, because this authoritarian fascistic party and the billionaires who own them, they do not hold a monopoly on freedom. Conversely, they are threats to freedom. Think about the way that Ron DeSantis restricted the freedom of school teachers who are LGBTQ plus. Some districts were instructed to take down photographs of their same-sex partner. In the state of Texas, if you have a trans child, the government is literally telling you that they are going to investigate you as a child abuser if you seek out gender, from and care for them. Currently, we have the freedom to die if we get sick and don't have health insurance. And even if we do have health insurance in some instances, if we can't afford the deductible, and every time the subject of single-payer Medicare for all comes up, there's always fear mongering about this socialist boogeyman and how freedom is under attack. When no, we need to reject that unequivocally and we need to define freedom. We need to take back freedom. So when I talk about LGBTQ plus rights, when I talk about socialism, I am talking about it in terms of freedom explicitly. So I say my position, unlike Ron DeSantis's position, is the pro-freedom position. I support autonomy for LGBTQ plus people. I support parental rights and them having the ability to do what they feel is appropriate for their child. And Tom Hartman goes on to define freedom and how the left needs to start talking about freedom. Back in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt in his inaugural address pointed out that a necessitous man is not a free man. If you're unconscious and on a ventilator because the right-wing media machine told you getting vaccinated was for wimps, you're not free. If you're hungry and can't buy food for your family, you're not free. If you're afraid every day that your child may not come home from school because the GOP has saturated the nation with assault weapons, you're not free. If your landlord threw you out on the street and you're homeless because you lost your job and can't afford to pay rent, you're not free. If you're pregnant and afraid of being thrown in jail, you're not free. If you're queer in America where Republican politicians use hate as a political lever, you're not free. If you're sick and afraid to go to the hospital because you know the bills will leave you broken homeless, you're not free. If you need to go to college or trade school to get a better life but can't afford it, you're not free. And he's exactly correct about that. We are the ones who are actually in favor of freedom. Not these billionaires, not these Republican politicians, but us. They've stolen the word freedom and they're using it for authoritarian and Orwellian purposes in order to sell people on their own oppression. And I think that it is time for us rhetorically to adopt freedom. So when we talk about abortion, we are talking about an issue that fundamentally comes down to freedom for women. When we talk about trans rights, we are fundamentally talking about a pro-freedom issue. We are taking the pro-freedom stance. So do not allow them to take this word and co-opt it any longer. Freedom is about the ways in which we live our lives. If we don't have the opportunity to thrive, we are not truly free. So this article by Tom Hartman is great. It's very lengthy. I know we read quite a bit of it, but I would encourage you to read the whole thing because I think he makes a very powerful case as to why we rhetorically, as a collective political group, need to get better at selling people on freedom. Because so long as we don't take back freedom, then we're allowing Republicans and their billionaire owners to define it and claim that we're against freedom when that's not true.