A Code Pink protestor could be headed to prison for a year after a court ruled that she was guilty of laughing during Jeff Sessions’ confirmation hearing as Attorney General. This is a continuation of the crackdown on dissent that began under the Trump administration, and it certainly won’t be the last case like this that we see. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript of the above video:
Desiree Fairooz, the woman who laughed during Senator Jeff Sessions’ confirmation hearing as Attorney General of the United States, has been found guilty of disorderly conduct and disrupting a Senate confirmation hearing, and she now faces up to one year in prison. Two other women, who are also a part of Fairooz’s protest there, are also facing up to one year in prison, so we may have three women in the United States going to prison because they had the audacity to laugh during Jeff Sessions’ confirmation hearing.
They laughed because the soon-to-be Attorney General made a statement talking about the fact that the preservation of equality and equal rights in the United States was always going to be one of his main focuses, something that everybody understands is not true, so Desiree Fairooz laughed at that. Now she might spend the next year of her life in a federal prison.
Admittedly, these three women did show up at this hearing wearing handmade KKK robes to protest Jeff Sessions’ leniency on the KKK and his pro-white people mentality, so perhaps their tactic went a little too far, but that’s not why she was on trial. She was on trial for laughing. That is how far we have come in the United States since January 20th.
We have already seen the Inauguration Day protestors locked up, over 600 of them, I believe, facing criminal charges for protesting, not because they destroyed property, not because there was a riot, but for protesting. Journalists facing prison for covering these Inauguration Day protests, North Carolina introducing legislation to make it perfectly legal for you to hit a protestor with your car and keep on trucking. If they’re blocking the road, hell, just plow through them in North Carolina. We don’t care about dissent. We don’t care about people’s First Amendment rights to assembly, to protest. No, not in the United States in 2017, not in Donald Trump’s ‘Merica.
This is what’s happening. We are criminalizing dissent. We are making it illegal to say anything bad about the Trump Administration or to protest the Trump Administration. This is the exact same thing that we see in brutal dictatorships all over the world, where you’re not allowed to say anything negative about Kim Jong Un. You’re not allowed to say anything negative about Duterte down in the Philippines and now, in the United States, you’re not allowed to say anything negative about Donald Trump. He’ll go after you on Twitter. We’ll arrest you. If you dare chuckle, you’re going to prison.
That is what is happening in the United States today. You protest in the streets, we may hit you with our car and then you’re probably going to be responsible for any damage that happens to the car at that point. We have devolved so much since January 20th as a country. We are losing our rights daily. Donald Trump wants to remake the rules of the Senate so that he can get his legislation passed. They’ve toyed around with completely doing away or rewriting the First Amendment. They want to change libel laws so that if you say something negative about Donald Trump, if you write something negative about Donald Trump, they can sue you. That’s America in 2017.
This is not an America that, honestly, I ever thought I would see. We’ve seen things get bad. We have. We saw it in the Bush years. We had these wars, we had thousands of American troops coming home in body bags, but those people understood that they were representing America. They were trying to fight for our freedom. Remember that? Remember those talking points? Fight for our freedom, for our way of life, and now we’re still losing it. We’re losing it because we elected – or the Electoral College elected, most people did not vote for him – this idiotic autocrat who believes that he is above any kind of criticism and that he can just change the laws in America on a whim when he feels like people aren’t being nice to him.
This court case with Desiree Fairooz going to prison for laughing at Jeff Sessions is Exhibit A in why the United States is on a downward spiral that, at this point, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to recover from it.
