What Is Rights Laundering?

The nasty trick governments use to erode your rights away without you realising

You’re probably heard of the mercenary firm Blackwater (now ‘Academi’) for their human rights abuses in Iraq. 4 guards were convicted of killing Iraqi civilians back in 2007. Notice who isn’t being jailed? The government.

The government uses Blackwater as a proxy arm, doing the dirty bidding that the government isn’t allowed to do. The US government used mercenaries in Syria as well. It’s not a one-off, it’s a wider government strategy.

What’s that got to do with my rights?

Well, the mercenaries serve a very specific purpose - shielding the US government from responsibility. The US government can shrug their hands and say ‘but they’re priiiivate’ and pretend like they can’t do anything (and then go and hire more mercenaries).

However, the responsibility they’re being shielded from isn’t the legal consequences as seen above… but people’s rights. You see, the US Constitution, Federal laws etc mainly only apply to the US government itself, which means, by perverted inversion, anything not the US government is immune.

Silent talk

So you have a right to free speech under the Constitution from the US government and States… but you don’t have a right to free speech from private third party firms. Maybe you disagree with the last part, but it’s there to prevent businesses from hosting viewpoints they don’t want to be associated with.

Imagine if you had a store where one of your employees kept screaming ‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’ at customers walking in, or worse, tried to share their beliefs in ‘My Little Pony’. As a business you don’t want to have to host speech that could ruin your business’ reputation (even as some businesses choose to do so anyway).

The loophole: Rights Laundering

This double-edged sword gave the tyrannical government a bright idea - what if they could get around all these pesky rights and laws that impede them from doing illegal activities in other countries, and just outsource the activity to a private third party firm, effectively laundering away your rights?

The proposed UK Online Harms Bill suggests exactly this, devolving censorship to the Big Tech companies themselves. The US government’s Surgeon General Vivek Murthy suggested Big Tech censor what he thought was “misinformation”, and it turned out the US government flagged posts on Facebook for deletion more directly.

The US government will try to argue this isn’t censorship, it isn’t actually ‘deleting’ the posts, it is just ‘flagging’ them, but the fact of the matter is, they’re working to undermine people’s rights by using third party proxies to do their dirty work for them.

Caked up

Essentially, they have laundered the Constitutional rights through the third party firms so they cease to exist, essentially trying to bait the public to implement such rights on said firms in an effort to force them to host speech they do not want to.

For example, the Colorado baker who the Colorado government tried to compel to make a ‘binary cake’, prevented by the double-whammy of First Amendment religious grounds and the fact private firms cannot be compelled to host speech. One must be careful not to fall into the trap of extending the Constitutional rights to all private businesses compelling them to host speech.

Instead, Rights Laundering itself must be the thing that is prohibited as being unconstitutional. The government itself is attempting to subvert the Constitution by moving around it using third parties as proxies.

Those actions, on behalf of the government, must be recognised as violating the Constitution (the important part being: on behalf of the government), and litigated against until the US government is put back into their box.

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