Squash, Anyone?

 The Trump administration earned a richly-deserved defeat yesterday in an important First Amendment case. In the wake of ICE's extrajudicial killings of two people in Minnesota earlier this year, a private citizen had sharply criticized the director of the agency in an email and said his conscience would haunt him.

DHS responded by warning the man of potential criminal prosecution, and sent agents to his door to harass and intimidate him. 

The judge ruled this was likely a clear-cut case of retaliation for First Amendment protected speech and granted him relief. 

This was some overdue good news in an incident that—if the government had been permitted to get away with it—threatened to chill free speech across the country. 

But what my brain got stuck on yesterday was a single word in DHS's characteristically screechy public response. The statement they apparently provided to media read as follows: "Any allegation that D.H.S. and its components are attempting to 'squash' free speech is categorically false."

Squash? 

I was immediately reminded of a scene in Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

Several of the funniest scenes in that always-great novel revolve around the inner machinations of the local municipal council—who see themselves as the intellectual lights of Mugsborough. 

At one point, these luminaries debate the flat earth theory, for instance. If the world is really spinning around, they ponder, how come a hot air balloon can land in the same place it took off from? Deep thoughts. 

At one point, one member of the Council, Mr. Grinder, "appeal[s] to the Chairman to squash the amendment."

Another member, Councillor Didlum, Tressell writes, "remarked that he supposed Councillor Grinder meant 'quash': in that case, he would support the suggestion."

To which Grinder responds, "[h]e did not care whether they called it squashing or quashing; it was all the same so long as they nipped him in the bud."

Tressell's point in all this narration being to show that the local bigwigs on this council—in addition to being corrupt and venal exploiters of labor and of the tax base—are also something else as well. 

They are also idiots. 

And I think this is what this incident with DHS and its infamous letter and home visits reveals as well. They are petty thugs and would-be authoritarians with a total lack of acquaintance with our nation's founding documents; but they are also something else too. 

They too are idiots. 

I will have to suppose with Councillor Didlum, that they meant to say "quash" in the statement they provided to media. 

But even on those grounds I do not support the suggestion.