10 Freedoms the GOP Is Taking Away Right Now

Trump Voters Are Losing Everything

Number 10: Freedom of Religion

This one may surprise you. After all, the GOP says that it is all about Christian values. But if you're religious, then the erosion of the wall of separation between church and state should alarm you. Because you see, the separation of church and state was not invented by atheists to attack you. It was established by people who had just escaped a country where the government picked your religion for you. Christians fleeing persecution from other Christians. The First Amendment exists because the founders didn't want an oppressive Church of America the way that England had a Church of England.

Right now, Republican-controlled states are mandating a Protestant version of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. They've passed laws letting unlicensed religious chaplains replace school counselors. And they're funneling taxpayer money into explicitly Christian charter schools.

If you're a Catholic parent, do you really want a Pentecostal pastor counseling your kid through grief? If you're a Mormon parent, do you want a Baptist preacher teaching your fourth grader that you're not real Christians and you're all going to hell? If you are a Baptist parent, do you want your kid's public school decorated with Orthodox icons and reciting prayers to Catholic saints? The wall between church and state is the only thing that is protecting your religion from someone else's. But the cracks in that wall are growing.

Trump's Department of Defense just reduced its list of officially recognized religions from over 200 to just 30, removing Native American religions, Unitarian Universalists, Wiccans, Pagans, Humanists, Deists, Atheists, and others. And they deliberately classified Mormonism as not Christian, which led to a meltdown by MAGA's Mormon Senator from Utah, Mike Lee:

I think it's very unfortunate that the Pentagon has chosen to identify basically every faith group in America that professes faith in Jesus Christ as Christian with one exception, that is those belonging to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I find this offensive not just because that happens to be my faith, but not just because it happens to be the faith of tens of thousands of US military personnel. But it's also just repugnant to any sense of decency, any sense of our common heritage, and our common belief that the government needs to not weigh in on doctrinal disputes between various religious denominations. And so, I respectfully am imploring people at the Pentagon to reconsider this, not just reconsider it, but undo it. Secretary Hegseth, tear down that wall. This is not cool. Get rid of it, get rid of it now.

Number 9: Due Process

Right now, ICE is rounding up people by the truckload, including legal permanent residents with green cards and, in some cases, American freaking citizens. And they're disappearing them into detention facilities for weeks or months with no charges, no trial, and no lawyer, leaving families desperately fighting for the release of their loved ones.

The Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution doesn't guarantee the right to due process to citizens only. It says "to the accused." Every accused person, guilty or innocent, citizen or immigrant, regardless of status, you are innocent until proven guilty. And a trial is how that's determined. That has been the law of the country since the founders wrote the Constitution.

If the government can disappear a green card holder today with no trial, it can disappear you tomorrow. Because the same machinery that grabs a Venezuelan asylum seeker in the morning can grab a Trump-voting plumber in the afternoon. The instant that any American can be locked up in a cell indefinitely without seeing a judge is the instant that the Constitution becomes nothing more than a museum piece. A memory.

And MAGA voters are starting to wake up to this. Like the woman who voted for Trump before her terminally ill, law-abiding father was arrested by ICE. He's now spending his last moments behind bars, away from his family. In her words:

When I voted for Trump, my vote wasn't just a mistake, it was the ultimate betrayal of the very people that I come from. Living in South Florida, surrounded by Republican voices, I was brainwashed into thinking I was one of them. I fell for the propaganda, the normalization of cruelty, and I believed the lies that gave me a false sense of security and belonging. I regret my vote so, so, so deeply, and if I could go back and change it, I would. To every single person who has been affected by the choice that I made, I am so, so sorry.

Number 8: The Right to Privacy

Utah just became the first state in America to start banning VPNs. A VPN is a virtual private network. It's a tool that encrypts your internet traffic so that your internet service provider, your government, advertisers, hackers on public Wi-Fi, and stalkers can't see what you're doing online. Journalists use them to protect sources. Doctors use them to protect patient records. Activists use them to survive dictatorships. Ordinary people use them so that Verizon doesn't get a permanent ledger of every single website you've ever visited.

China, Russia, and Iran all ban VPNs. They ban them because a population that can encrypt its own internet traffic is a population that can read foreign newspapers, organize protests, and tell the truth without permission. VPN bans are the signature move of authoritarian governments that have determined their citizens are not allowed to know things. And Utah just joined that club.

Now, they're telling you that this is about protecting children from adult content. It's not. If they actually cared about protecting children, they would have voted to release the Epstein files. Instead, House and Senate Republicans voted again and again, almost unanimously, to block the release. They blocked it in the Rules Committee in July. They blocked it on the House floor by a single vote, with every opposing vote coming from a Republican. They blocked it twice in Financial Services. They blocked it in the Senate. They blocked it when Democrats tried to tie it to a must-pass defense bill. They only stopped blocking it when public pressure became so overwhelming that a few of them broke ranks, and the rest of them realized that they couldn't hold this back any longer.

You do not protect children by demanding that your neighbor scan their driver's license to visit a website. You protect children by actually locking up people who traffic and abuse them.

And when Trump turned on his supporters for wanting the Epstein files released, calling it a hoax, a rift formed in the Republican party. It led far-right streamer Nick Fuentes, once a vocal MAGA supporter, to torch the movement entirely:

And now he says, "If you're not on board with the Epstein cover-up, oh, I don't want your support. You're a weakling." Fuck you. Fuck you. You suck. You are fat. You are a joke. You are stupid. You are not funny. You are not as smart as you think you are. This just goes to show this entire thing has been a scam. When we look back on the history of populism in America, we are going to look back on the MAGA movement as the biggest scam in American history. And the liberals were right. The MAGA supporters were had. They were.

It also led Marjorie Taylor Greene, a MAGA congresswoman, to describe the exact moment it fell apart for her:

When we started talking about releasing the Epstein files, I'm like, this is a no-brainer. President Trump will just roll 'em out on a big cart himself. Stacks and stacks and stacks of the Epstein files, because obviously, Bill Clinton is all in there. Well, it was the most shocking thing when I sat in a conference meeting and I learned that the president didn't want to release the Epstein files. So we kept on trying and kept on talking about it. And then the president told Mike Johnson, "No, do not bring that resolution to the floor for a vote." He told Pam Bondi, "Don't release the Epstein files." So I signed my name on the discharge petition. Oh, did I get my name on the naughty list then! I was in my office in the Rayburn building, and I got a phone call from the president. And he said, "Marjorie, you're gonna have to take your name off that discharge petition. This is a hoax, it's a Democrat hoax." And he said, "My friends are going to get hurt." And I said, "Mr. President, people have been hurt. These women have been hurt." To actually be asked by the President of the United States to back off and not help these women... That's when MAGA died. That's when the entire thing shattered for me.

The age verification laws, VPN bans, the Palantir contracts, the period app subpoenas, the search history warrants... None of this is about children. It's about a government that wants to know everything that you read, everything that you watch, every site you visit, every place you drive, every prescription you fill. If you wouldn't let a cop walk into your living room without a search warrant, why are you handing one the keys to your phone?

Number 7: The Freedom to Read

Last school year, there were nearly 7,000 book bans in American public schools. Florida alone banned more than 2,000 titles, with Texas being just behind them. They're pulling books off of shelves about slavery, segregation, the Holocaust, sexual assault, gay history, women's history, and in some cases, dictionaries. Actual dictionaries.

They flagged Anne Frank's diary. They flagged a children's picture book about Ruby Bridges. You know, the six-year-old African American girl who in 1960 had to walk into a New Orleans elementary school flanked by federal marshals while a mob of grown white adults screamed at her. That story. The story of a little black girl integrating into a white school is apparently too dangerous for little girls to read in school. They flagged a graphic novel adaptation of the Constitution itself.

Forget Critical Race Theory, forget gender ideology, or every other culture war buzzword that they have trained you to react to. Ask yourself instead just one basic question. Do you really want the government deciding which books your kid can and can't read? The Soviet Union banned books. East Germany banned books. And the Taliban is currently banning books. What a wonderful company we've just joined.

Number 6: The Right to Peaceful Assembly

The First Amendment lists the right of the people to peaceably assemble right next to free speech and free religion. The founders put it there for a reason. It's the only tool that ordinary citizens have to push back against a government that has stopped listening to them.

And yet, 45 states have considered 384 bills restricting protest in the last few years. 57 of them have passed. They've made it a felony to block a highway. They made it a felony to stand within a certain distance of a pipeline. Kind of shows you whose interests they really care about. In Georgia, peaceful protesters at Cop City were charged with domestic terrorism for the unspeakable crime of sleeping in the woods.

As protests began to mount against the current administration, Trump's response was to send the military in. He federalized the National Guard troops and deployed them into American cities despite objections coming from the governors and mayors who actually run those cities. A federal court had to step in and tell the administration that no, political opposition is not rebellion, and you cannot send soldiers into Chicago just because the mayor said something rude about you on television.

The legal theory that the administration was testing would have authorized the use of military force against any large protest opposing the president. That is chillingly totalitarian. And it was the actual position of the US government in a federal courtroom this year. When the government's response to a hipster with a protest sign is a soldier with a rifle, then democracy is already dead.

Number 5: Bodily Autonomy and Medical Privacy

14 states have now banned abortion outright. Several more have banned it at six weeks, before most women even know that they're pregnant. Women with pregnancy complications are dying while the "pro-life" government is turning your wife's emergency room into a courtroom. Let's look at a few cases.

Amber Thurman in Georgia was 28 years old. She took a legal abortion medication pill, suffered a rare complication, and went to the hospital, which delayed treating her for 20 hours because the doctors were afraid that the standard procedure, which would save her life, might violate Georgia's abortion ban. So, she died. And Georgia's own state Maternal Mortality Review Committee called her death entirely preventable.

Nevaeh Crain in Texas was 18 years old. The morning of her own baby shower, she went to an emergency room with severe pain. They sent her home. She came back, and they sent her home again. She came back a third time, screening positive for sepsis, and the doctors made her wait through two ultrasounds to confirm fetal demise before treating her. This is a woman who wanted to give birth. She had a miscarriage. She went to the doctor, and she needed treatment, and the doctors were too afraid to act. And so she died of multi-organ failure. Doctors told ProPublica that confusion and fear about the abortion ban changed how their colleagues treated her.

In Ohio, a 10-year-old rape victim was forced to travel to Indiana to terminate a pregnancy that her body could not survive. The doctor who provided that care, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, was then investigated, threatened with criminal charges, and ultimately fined and reprimanded by the Indiana Medical Board for the crime of telling a reporter what happened.

In September 2024, Cherisse Doyle was 12 hours into labor at UF Health Jacksonville when a nurse rolled a tablet up to her hospital bed. On the screen was a judge in a black robe, a panel of hospital lawyers, and several doctors. The hospital had called a Zoom court hearing in the middle of her delivery because Doyle wanted a vaginal birth and the doctors wanted to perform a C-section. She was in active labor. She asked for a lawyer, and the judge told her that she didn't have the right to one.

And can we talk for a second about bathroom bills? Because Idaho recently made it a crime to use the "wrong" public restroom, with jail time and felony charges on repeat offenses. The party of small government has decided that the appropriate use of state power is sending an enforcement officer to stand outside a public bathroom and check whether a teenage girl with short hair and a flat chest is sufficiently feminine to pee. Do you really want that government inspecting your daughter's anatomy before she's allowed into a Walmart restroom? Your body, your chart, your bathroom, your family, none of that is the government's business.

Number 4: Free Speech and the Free Press

Remember when Republicans pretended like they were the free speech people? The ones who told you that cancel culture was the greatest threat to American liberty? Who treated a podcaster getting a content warning slapped on his Spotify show like it was the fall of Rome?

Those same people celebrated as Trump's FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, went on TV to threaten networks like a mafia boss. His exact words were, "We can do this the easy way or the hard way." That wasn't a metaphor. Because hours later, ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air. His crime? Suggesting that Trump's reaction to Charlie Kirk's death looked insincere. Sure, the public backlash was so massive that ABC was forced to bring Kimmel back, but only after they made him apologize on air like a hostage video.

That same week, Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, went on TV and said this, on camera, with a straight face:

It is a vast domestic terror movement. And with God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government, to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.

He wasn't talking about Al-Qaeda. This was about American liberal organizations, non-profits, universities, donors, journalists, basically anyone who had the audacity of disagreeing with him. One of Trump's top officials just announced openly that he is going to use federal law enforcement to destroy his political opponents.

The party that spent 10 years screaming about free speech now has Brendan Carr at the FCC, Stephen Miller in the White House, and a Pentagon that tried to formally punish Senator Mark Kelly, a retired Navy combat pilot, for telling service members not to obey unlawful orders. They're threatening universities with funding cuts over what professors teach. They're passing state laws telling teachers, doctors, and librarians exactly which words they're allowed to say out loud and which words will get them fired or prosecuted. These are the same people who lost their minds over pronouns. And yet, here they are, doing this nonsense.

Number 3: The Right to Vote

Republican policies are historically massively unpopular. Abortion bans poll terribly. Even in deep red states, voters in Kansas, Ohio, Kentucky, and Montana have all voted to protect abortion rights at the ballot box. Book bans poll terribly. Social Security cuts poll terribly. Tax breaks for billionaires poll terribly. Every single signature Republican policy is underwater with the American public.

So, the Republican party has two choices. They can change their policies, or they can rig the game. I'll let you guess which one they went with. After Biden won in 2020, GOP lawmakers went nuts, introducing over 100 restrictive voting bills in early 2021 alone. The Supreme Court just gutted the Voting Rights Act, essentially destroying representation for select minorities, which triggered widespread backlash. As Representative Ayanna Pressley put it:

There are people in this hostile anti-Black administration that would rather Black Americans pick cotton than pick the president.

That anger wasn't limited to Congress. One self-described former die-hard Republican called in to C-SPAN to say:

Well, I'd like to first say I apologize to all of America and all of Americans. I was a die-hard Republican. I cannot believ... I drank the Kool-Aid, okay? I am guilty. I drank the Kool-Aid of Donald J. Trump. This man is ruining the Constitution of the United States. What's going on in these southern states, Louisiana and Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, they're taking away the vote from the black man, the right from the black people that are part of our country. They're stealing their vote. They're making it null and mean nothing. And we need to, I don't know what we need to do, but I am not gonna vote for Donald Trump.

Republican legislatures right now are running a mid-decade gerrymander in Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida, redrawing the voting maps in the middle of the decade specifically to make sure that Republican losses at the ballot box do not translate into Republican losses in Congress. Florida just passed a law making it nearly impossible to put a citizen initiative on the ballot because Floridians kept using direct democracy to override the legislature on abortion and marijuana. They will rig every election imaginable, and then they will have the audacity to show you maps of just how conservative the US voting trends look.

This is how a party that knows it's losing behaves, because they don't need to win your vote. They just need to make sure that your vote doesn't count. I think that the most wild thing of all of this is that the party that tried to overthrow the government, which spent four years screaming about Dominion machine voter fraud and stolen elections, the same party who lost a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit over those exact lies, they are now the ones who are openly redrawing maps, purging voter rolls, and rewriting election rules. Rigging elections in broad daylight. But then again, every GOP accusation has always been a projection. (This is, after all, a movement whose figurehead launched his political career by standing on a stage and calling immigrants rapists.)

Number 2: The Freedom to Succeed

This is the one that nobody is talking about, and it might be the biggest one. The American dream is dead. And the people who killed it spent 40 years convincing you it was murdered by immigrants, trans kids, drag queens, and some librarian in Tampa. It wasn't.

In 1980, the top marginal tax rate on the richest Americans was 70%. Today, it's 37%. The top 1% of Americans now owns more wealth than the entire middle class combined. American worker productivity has more than doubled since the 1970s. Real wages have barely moved. Every productivity gain of the last 50 years went straight up the ladder, and it stayed there.

Meanwhile, Republican state legislatures have been quietly rolling back child labor laws. Nebraska, Indiana, West Virginia, Arkansas, Iowa. The same party that says a 15-year-old is too fragile to read a Toni Morrison novel has decided that that same 15-year-old is mature enough to go work an overnight shift in the slaughterhouse. Wanna Make America Great Again? Hey, let's bring back black lung! The children yearn for the mines.

Ronald Reagan's trickle-down economics was the longest-running con in American history. The money trickled up. It trickled all the way up, and it stayed up. Meanwhile, they told you that the enemy was the cashier at Walmart who had blue hair, or gasped, or who used they/them pronouns. The actual enemy was the family who owns Walmart. They picked your pocket while you were arguing with your cousin on Facebook about bathrooms in Idaho.

Big businesses made off with your retirement, your wages, your healthcare, and your kids' future. And they paid politicians on both sides to make sure that you blamed someone else. The Republican party has spent 50 years selling you the same bullshit. Cut taxes on the rich, deregulate the corporations, and blame a minority group when everything turns to shit. The American dream didn't die because a bunch of immigrants showed up chasing it. It died when billionaires climbed the ladder and then pulled the ladder up behind them.

Number 1: The Right to Be Left Alone

Justice Louis Brandeis called this the right most valued by civilized men. The right to be left alone by your government. To live your life, to raise your family, to read your books, to worship your god, to marry who you want, to see your doctor, to vote your conscience, and to walk into a public restroom without having to show your papers.

The Republican party wants your ID to visit a website. They want prayer in your kids' school, but books removed from your library shelves. They want troops in your cities preventing you from protesting. They want prosecutors in your bedroom. They want surveillance on your phone and inspectors in your bathrooms. They want their agents in your hospital, their soldiers at your protest. They want their pastors in your kids' classrooms and their hand on your paycheck.

This is not small government. It's the biggest government in American history, run by people who got elected by promising you the exact opposite. Republicans don't actually oppose big government. They oppose it when it's helping people, sure. But they love big government when it controls your body, your browser history, your classroom, your library, your doctor, your protest sign, your ballot, your bathroom, your uterus, your child's education, and your ability to tell them to piss off.

Brandeis warned us about this almost 100 years ago. He said that the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. Men so convinced that they're right that they will burn down every check on their own power to prove it.

So, as the midterm elections come up, ask yourself, do you really want to support a party that is this dead set on taking away your freedoms? Or do you want to live in an America that is the land of the free, the home of the brave? I know that many of you who are conservative voted because you were promised something that was enticing, that you wanted, that hell, that I wanted. You want an America where we're free and where the government isn't sticking its nose into every aspect of our lives. But god damn, this is not what they promised.

Right now, Republicans control the executive branch, the judicial branch, and both houses of Congress. There is no check on their power, and they are running roughshod over us, taking away our freedoms and ensuring that we never really have free elections again. Which is why I think that this upcoming election is the most important one. We need to get out, flip the House and the Senate, and take this back at least a little bit to put at least a tiny check on their power.

Sources Cited:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cG-mTi86K-eOukBQ9FH0ldZ7G1LEGUa0KrK_pYE56xM/edit?usp=sharing

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