Earlier this week, Suze at Obsolete Childhood, posed this question in her “Answer Me This” prompt.

What values are fundamental to you and why?

When I responded to Suze’s prompt, I did so from the perspective of my rights and freedoms as an American — rights and freedoms that I have always taken for granted — that enable me to be me, to be who I am.

And that is the problem. Over the past two decades, and especially since 2016 when Trump won the presidency, these rights and freedoms that I have taken for granted have eroded significantly.

Over the past decade and a half, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in the Citizens United decision, that corporations and other outside groups have a First Amendment right to free speech, which includes independent political spending. The court naively assumed that independent spending would not be corrupt and that it would be transparent. But the decision’s impact was to dramatically expand the already significant political influence of wealthy donors, corporations, and special interest groups. It also facilitated the use of “dark money” to finance political campaigns where groups can spend unlimited funds on elections without revealing the source of the funding.

The high court also eviscerated the Voting Rights Act because Chief Justice John Roberts wrote an opinion that effectively declared the end of racism in the United States. He argued that the “extraordinary measures” employed by a key provision of the Voting Rights Act could no longer be justified because our country had changed significantly since the Act became law in 1965. Seriously?

More recently, in 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, thus paving the way for states to essentially ban women who live in those states from having abortions and making it a criminal offense. Since then, fully half of the states in this country have banned abortions or tightened restrictions. Some of these states are passing laws that require women who are pregnant to register with the state! Overturning Roe v. Wade essentially took away women’s rights to choose to have abortions and their freedom to manage their own reproductive healthcare.

And in certain states, teachers are being forbidden to teach topics that the ”states” have deemed offensive, like critical race theory, tying slavery as a factor leading to the Civil War, banning books that discuss LGBTQ matters, and other “woke” (i.e., liberal) topics. Trump has promised that if he is reelected, he intends to imprison his political enemies.

I am a liberal atheist who is free to express his views on sex, religion, and politics without fear of reprisals or arrest and imprisonment. But in what may become the “new Trumpian America,” I fear that the rights and freedoms of many more Americans may be at risk.

With the way things are going in this country, how certain are you, when it comes to your freedom of expression as a blogger, it won’t look something like this?