by Ethan Huff, Natural News:
The Washington state legislature has passed a bill to create a statewide snitching infrastructure for residents to report their neighbors for “wrongspeak.”
Senate Bill 5427, which passed both the Senate and the House and now awaits Gov. Jay Inslee’s signature, allows private individuals, including non-citizens and illegal aliens, to reports “bias incidents” to the state attorney general’s office. Each reporting incident comes with a potential reward payout of $2,000.
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The bill’s supporters say its purpose is to protect “victims of hate crimes” before said crimes even occur, but at what cost? In essence, SB 5427 creates a tattletale hotline designed to intimidate people in Washington from speaking their minds, especially when such speech might be politically incorrect.
From what we can tell, SB 5427 is unconstitutional for at least the following five reasons:
1) It infringes on one’s right to confront his accuser
2) It impedes freedom of speech
3) It violates freedom of thought, an implied right in the First Amendment
4) It steamrolls freedom of religion
5) It impairs freedom of the press
“People will stop talking to others and writing to others except very close friends and relatives for fear a greedy ‘Karen’ will report them to Washington’s version of the Gestapo,” is how one independent media outlet framed SB 5427.
(Related: Remember back during the Wuhan coronavirus [COVD-19] “pandemic” when Washington Gov. Jay Inslee was caught setting up COVID concentration camps to imprison the non-compliant?)
Washington, the tyranny state
For a constituency that prides itself on “bodily rights” (abortion) and other do-whatever-we-want beliefs, SB 5427 sure will put a muzzle on the mouths of Washingtonians – at least those who express unpopular viewpoints.
In a public testimony before the Senate Ways and Means Committee on February 20, Conservative Ladies of Washington Founder and President Julie Barrett blasted the bill for completely overriding the United States Constitution.
“Spend five minutes on Twitter on any given day and I assure someone would say something offensive under this law that we could call a ‘hate crime’ and collect $2,000 from the attorney general,” Barrett said.
“It potentially target[s] people for actions they don’t like, but are not actually hate crimes. In collaboration with bills like HB 1333, this would create sort of a ‘tattletale hotline’ to report people one doesn’t agree with or doesn’t like.”
In defense of the bill’s $2,000-per-report offering, one supporter of SB 5427 tried to argue that the money “is not a reward to people who report to the hotline,” but rather compensation to cover the cost of “damages” incurred, whatever those might be.
SB 5427 explicitly mentions “an expression of animus” as one of the offending actions that warrants a call to the state government, to which we wonder: What, exactly, does this mean?
Imagine a police officer arrives at your home for questioning about a “bias incident” you allegedly committed. Since the statute prohibits him from telling you who called in the complaint, and also bars him from answering any questions you might have, all you know is that you said something “wrong” and must now pay a price with no way to defend yourself.
