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Notes -
I e always taken the thought that a good deal of the unacceptability of the thought deemed a crime was at least pushed by two things.
First, that the very idea itself is too dangerous to be publicly expressed. This goes back through religion and state power and other belief systems and basically the legitimacy of people who rule. In much of European history, publicly questioning major Christian dogma was, in modern terms, thought crime. Being openly non-trinitarian was treated as a terrible crime. But likewise, questioning the legitimacy of your king, suggesting that he’s not a legitimate heir to the throne is treasonous. These things call directly into question the legitimacy of the institution being questioned. If Charles III isn’t the son of Elizabeth II, he’s not a legitimate heir to the throne. This isn’t a big deal now (in fact royalty following Twitter has often claimed that both princes are the product of different affairs, without harassment) but saying the same thing in an era where the king has real power and others vying for his throne, and it’s not something the authorities are going to ignore. Democracy’s legitimacy hinges upon the idea that the will of the people should determine the leadership. Thus, the claims of election fraud are still treated as dangerous ideology.
The second I hung is that the claims have to be at least plausible, if not true. If I claimed that Biden was using black magic to cause fires in Hawaii, that’s not a thought crime, because nobody really takes claims of black magic seriously. Likewise, claims like flat earth, faked moon landings, alien autopsy videos, or cryptids are not thought crimes. At best people laugh at the idea of the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot. Make other claims like two genders, Hunter’s laptop, HBD, biological differences between the sexes, or lab leak theory, and it’s a serious thought crime.
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