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Indian J Labour Econ. 2020 Nov 12:1-21. doi: 10.1007/s41027-020-00290-x. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Migration and mobilities are vastly underestimated in India. In particular, circular migration remains poorly captured as circular migrants move back and forth between source and destination regions. Based on survey data from rural Bihar, an important source region of migration in India, this paper finds that a vast majority of migrants work and live in precarity in predominantly urban and prosperous destinations across India. However, those at the lowest rungs of the social and economic ladder in source regions-the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, other backward classes I and the labouring class-are the worst off at destination; they are part of the most precarious shorter-term migration streams, earn the lowest incomes, have the poorest conditions of work, and live in the harshest circumstances. The paper shows that social and economic hierarchies, and in turn, precarity in source region is reproduced at destination, and, thus, there is little evidence that spatial mobility is associated with social mobility. Focusing on migrants location, work, employment, income, housing, and access to basic services at destination, the paper foregrounds migrant precarity and adds to a small body of empirical literature that is significant in understanding the spatial and structural elements of circular migration in India and in turn, the migration crisis that emerged as a result of the economic shock of the COVID 19 pandemic.

PMID:33204054 | PMC:PMC7659404 | DOI:10.1007/s41027-020-00290-x

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Circular Migration and Precarity: Perspectives from Rural Bihar - DocWire News

At 7 am every day, Vala Ram Gameti, 32, sets off from his home at Koviya village in southern Rajasthan to the nearest market, about three-km away. He takes an hour for the days prep chopping onions, carrots, cabbage, and stewing sauces. By 9 am, he pulls up the shutters of Bankyarani Chinese Corner, the first-ever Chinese food stall in the area as he proclaims it to be. He set it up after losing his job as a cook in a fast-food restaurant in Gujarat and returning home in March, when a national lockdown was announced.

Gameti is one of estimated 10.5 million migrant workers who returned to villages after the national lockdown, according to data submitted by the government in parliament. More than half a year after the reverse migration from cities during the lockdown, how are migrant workers coping?

In a three-part series on how the Covid-19 crisis has impacted livelihoods, we examine how workers are adapting to the changing circumstances. In this first part of the series, we look at workers who have stayed back in villages, focusing on southern Rajasthan. The state has reportedly witnessed the return of 1.3 million migrant workers, engaged mainly in construction, manufacturing, daily wage and hospitality sectors. In the next, we will report from Odisha on workers who have returned to cities. In the final part, we will explore how the lives of women have changed due to the pandemic in Uttar Pradesh.

Of those workers who have stayed back in villages, most are waiting to go back to cities but have not found employment there yet. They are expecting the situation to change after Diwali, IndiaSpend found in the course of numerous interviews. Some said they are still fearful of the novel coronavirus, so they do not want to go back but to earn their livelihood at home instead. Although it is too early to analyse how this will change the nature of work in the long term, two trends are clear: workers are being forced to change their trade out of desperation and some were learning new skills. Returnee migrants are setting up small enterprises in rural areas to provide services thus far only available in cities.

A yet-to-be-published study by Aajeevika Bureau, which visited five districts in southern Rajasthan in April and May to survey 426 migrant workers who had returned home from different parts of the country, found the workers facing multiple vulnerabilities. Many had large families to support, but only one working member was in paid employment per family. The lockdown had left the workers jobless and cashless, and many had not been paid their last wages, the survey found.

By the end of April, 57% of workers said, they had no money left at all. In all, 22% said they were down to their last Rs 100 to Rs 500, forcing them to take out loans even to meet their basic needs. About 38% reported they had received no help from the government such as food and ration during the lockdown. With no regular work currently and little government support, 69% of workers said they wanted to get back to the cities to work, the survey found.

The unavailability of work for a long time will reduce the workers available resources which might ultimately affect their bargaining power and mobility, the study predicted.In the absence of resources, the workers might not be able to return to the city or take a credit on high-interest rates and get trapped in the debt trap. This also will highly impact the bargaining power of the workers who will be accepting the wage lesser than they deserve.

Gameti had worked in a restaurant in Vapi for more than a decade. When the lockdown was announced, the restaurant shut down and he was not paid for the month. He made his way back to his village along with two of his brothers who worked with him. They took a bus to the Rajasthan border and then walked for two days to their village of Koviya. After the lockdown was eased in June, his brothers returned to Vapi but he decided he had had enough of city life.

The city was very difficult, said Gameti, now home with his wife, three daughters and his parents. My employer refused to increase my wages. I would worry about my family. I feel safer here and there is less chance of falling ill. In August, he opened the food stall with aid from Aajeevika Bureau, a Rajasthan-based non-governmental organisation that supports migrant workers. He used to earn Rs 13,000 a month in Vapi while the Chinese stall makes close to Rs 1,000 a day and on some days a little more which he finds quite satisfactory. Besides, he likes working for himself. Main high level ka Chinese banata hun [I make top quality Chinese food], he said.

Men from Gametis village, which falls in a tribal zone, have traditionally engaged in rasoi work across India, mostly in Gujarat. The southern Rajasthan-Gujarat migration corridor provides workers for three sectors: construction, textiles, and small hotels and restaurants. A research paper from 2018 found that the adivasi community of southern Rajasthan was subject to super-exploitation in Gujarat where employers take advantage of their historically low socio-economic conditions, which perpetuates the communitys disadvantaged position across generations, even when they have jobs.

Between early April and the end of May, over 1.3 million workers returned to the districts of Udaipur, Dungarpur, Sirohi, Jalore, Nagaur, Barmer and Bikaner, according to the Rajasthan governments Labour Employment Exchange portal.

After the lockdown, workers from this region were either out of work or forced to take up any work that came their way. Many had found the cities more hostile than before.

Parta Ram, 33, from Ajaypura, not far from Gametis Koviya village, has worked in hotels and restaurants for nearly 25 years. When the lockdown was announced, Ram, along with 35 men from his village, was employed as a cook at a school in Chotta Udaipur in eastern Gujarat. He was not paid his wages when he returned home during the lockdown, and has not found any steady work since. He said he had invested his lifes savings of Rs 2.5 lakh to install a tubewell in his farm before the pandemic. With no savings and no work coming his way, he could barely meet his daily expenses. He found work for a few days under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and at private construction sites, earning Rs 100 to Rs 200 a day, which is lower than the minimum wage rate of Rs 225 for unskilled workers in Rajasthan.

Rajasthan accounted for 6.57 million of 60 million households that have availed MGNREGS since April this year. This was the second most, after Uttar Pradeshs 8 million households. There were gaps in implementation, the wages paid were below the daily wage stipulation, work was stalled and supervisors pilfered material and money, according to labour rights groups. These issues have been noted across the country.

MGNREGS has been a shock absorber in the post-lockdown period, said PC Kishan, state commissioner for MGNREGS in Rajasthan. We employed 5.4 million persons per day in the month of June this year, compared to 3 million last year in the peak months of summer. The state has revised its budget from 300 million person days for this year to 370 million.

We are anticipating more demand for MGNREGS in January and February, since migration has started but only in certain sectors and people are on the brink of poverty, he added. We will revise the budget again to 400 million person days.

However, the situation is worsening as MGNREGS work has dwindled since August, said Saloni Mundra, a knowledge and programme support executive at Aajeevika Bureau: When the workers returned in April and May, they came back without any wages. Some found work under MGNREGS and at the local level between June and July. But from August onwards that work has depleted. A lot of workers have changed their trade out of desperation, she said those who worked in textiles or hotels were taking up work in construction, a sector that has picked up while others had shrunk.

This shift in occupation has been noticed across the country. A report on the impact of Covid-19 on the urban poor conducted in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region by the non-governmental organisation Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action said, Some skilled workers reported shifting to other unskilled work in an attempt to earn. Those who have gone back to their villages to farm reported being unable to do so. In such situations, the dependence on state-provided welfare is high.

Workers have had to adapt due to loss of income, said Marina Joseph, associate director at Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action. Those who did skilled work in a sector like construction like plumbing or electrician would have moved to lifting and loading, she said, Many others have taken up street vending.

Diamond cutting in Gujarat employs a large number of youth from Rajasthan and these are skilled workers who are paid good wages. [They] are taking up unskilled work like loading and unloading to earn a few hundred rupees a day, said Madan Vaishnav, a field officer at the workers rights collective, Centre for Labour Research and Action.

It is a process of deskilling, said S Irudaya Rajan, an expert on migration at the Centre for Development Studies in Kerala. As we get closer to Diwali, sustaining livelihood in rural areas will become more challenging as people will borrow money for spending during the festive season. The government needs to recognise the crisis and make direct cash transfers to the bank accounts of those who have lost their jobs to help them tide over this period, so that the workers are not compelled to return immediately to cities, where they could face exploitation given the state of the economy.

Forming cooperative societies where groups of migrant workers come together could be a way for them to protect their rights and to develop their services, as most development economists have recommended.

In August, Ram, the cook from Ajaypura, was offered work at Mundra, a port town in Gujarat. When he reached there with 27 men from his village, they realised that the contractor had misled them. They had been promised work in a utensils factory, but on reaching there they found that the factory manufactured iron pipes. They had to work 12-hour shifts loading and unloading pipes. We are not trained for this work, each pipe was almost 50 kg, said Ram, adding, I felt my body was breaking. We returned to our village in three days. Before the pandemic, loading and unloading, work that is considered hazardous, was handled mostly by migrants from Bihar.

Ram is back in his village now, tending to his maize crop. The terrain is hard and rocky and difficult to cultivate. His one bigha (0.25 hectare) of land is not enough to sustain his family of six. But there is no fear of the novel coronavirus in these parts, Ram said, unlike in the city. The hills in the area keep the virus away, he insisted.

The crisis here is one of economic survival as the uncertainty stretches on. But Ram did not want to risk searching for new work in the city again and hoped that schools would open after Diwali so he could get back to his job cooking in a school canteen.

Amid all this, there are signs of resilience too. Some workers, supported by NGOs or of their own initiative, are trying to upgrade their skills to fit into the rural economy.

Lokesh Khorwal, a trainer at Aajeevika Bureau working on their livelihood programme, has been training young people from rural Rajasthan to repair mobile phones to enable them to set up shops in villages. There has been a steady uptick in demand for these workshops over the past few months, he said. Since this crisis we have had the highest interest in this workshop, every batch is full, said Khorwal. Every person in the village has a mobile phone but not every village has a mobile repair shop and they all have to travel far for it.

On a weekday afternoon in late September when IndiaSpend contacted them, 31 men from different districts had been attending the training for two weeks and were preparing for an exam.

Mahendra Dhodiya, 20, who was learning how to repair the motherboard of a mobile phone, said there was a lot of pressure to study and practice in the workshop. Dhodiya, who had been stranded for two months before returning home during the lockdown, used to work at a tea shop in Pune. He had already thought of a busy spot in the village market where he would set up shop.

It is possible to earn anywhere between Rs 1,000 and Rs 2,000 a day from a mobile repair shop, said Khorwal, adding that it was more than the wages the trainees would earn in the city. The workshops for two-wheeler repair and electrical wiring for houses skills that can be used to set up small enterprises in villages were also running full, he said.

This article first appeared on IndiaSpend, a data-driven and public-interest journalism non-profit.

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Migrant workers returning to Rajasthan are learning new skills to survive in a post-lockdown world - Scroll.in

The largest collection of public internet censorship data ever compiled shows that even citizens of what are considered the worlds freest countries arent safe from internet censorship.

The University of Michigan team used its own Censored Planet tool, an automated censorship tracking system launched in 2018, to collect more than 21 billion measurements over 20 months in 221 countries. They recently presented a paper on the findings at the 2020 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

We hope that the continued publication of Censored Planet data will enable researchers to continuously monitor the deployment of network interference technologies, track policy changes in censoring nations, and better understand the targets of interference, said Roya Ensafi, U-M assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science who led the development of the tool.

Ensafis team found that censorship is increasing in 103 of the countries studied, including unexpected places like Norway, Japan, Italy, India, Israel and Poland. These countries, the team notes, are rated some of the worlds freest by Freedom House, a nonprofit that advocates for democracy and human rights. They were among nine countries where Censored Planet found significant, previously undetected censorship events between August 2018 and April 2020. They also found previously undetected events in Cameroon, Ecuador and Sudan.

While the United States saw a small uptick in blocking, mostly driven by individual companies or internet service providers filtering content, the study did not uncover widespread censorship. However, Ensafi points out that the groundwork for that has been put in place here.

When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for ISPs to interfere with or block internet traffic, she said. The architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all be concerned about heading down a slippery slope.

Its already happening abroad, the researchers found.

What we see from our study is that no country is completely free, said Ram Sundara Raman, U-M doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering and first author of the study. Were seeing that many countries start with legislation that compels ISPs to block something thats obviously bad like child pornography or pirated content.

But once that blocking infrastructure is in place, governments can block any websites they choose, and its a very opaque process. Thats why censorship measurement is crucial, particularly continuous measurements that show trends over time.

Norway, for exampletied with Finland and Sweden as the worlds freest country, according to Freedom Housepassed laws requiring ISPs to block some gambling and pornography content beginning in early 2018. Censored Planet, however, uncovered that ISPs in Norway are imposing what the study calls extremely aggressive blocking across a broader range of content, including human rights websites like Human Rights Watch and online dating sites like Match.com.

Similar tactics show up in other countries, often in the wake of large political events, social unrest or new laws. News sites like The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, for example, were aggressively blocked in Japan when Osaka hosted the G20 international economic summit in June 2019. News, human rights and government sites saw a censorship spike in Poland after protests in July 2019, and same-sex dating sites were aggressively blocked in India after the country repealed laws against gay sex in September 2018.

Roya Ensafi. Image credit: Joseph Xu, Michigan Engineering

The study also makes public technical details about the workings of Censored Planet that Raman says will make it easier for other researchers to draw insights from the projects data, and help activists make more informed decisions about where to focus.

Its very important for people who work on circumvention to know exactly whats being censored on which network and what method is being used, Ensafi said. Thats data that Censored Planet can provide, and tech experts can use it to devise circumventions.

Censored Planets constant, automated monitoring is a departure from traditional approaches that rely on volunteers to collect data manually from inside countries.

Manual monitoring can be dangerous, as volunteers may face reprisals from governments. Its limited scope also means that efforts are often focused on countries already known for censorship, enabling nations that are perceived as freer to fly under the radar. While censorship efforts generally start small, Raman says they could have big implications in a world that is increasingly dependent on the internet for essential communication needs.

We imagine the internet as a global medium where anyone can access any resource, and its supposed to make communication easier, especially across international borders, he said. We find that if this continues, that wont be true anymore. We fear this could lead to a future where every country has a completely different view of the internet.

The study is titled Censored Planet: An Internet-wide, Longitudinal Censorship Observatory. The research team also included former U-M computer science and engineering student Prerana Shenoy and Katharina Kohls, an assistant professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands. The research was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Award CNS-1755841.

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'Extremely aggressive' internet censorship spreads in the world's democracies - University of Michigan News

View this letter as a PDF here.

November 17, 2020

Senator Lindsey GrahamChairmanCommittee on the JudiciaryU.S. SenateWashington, DC 20510

Senator Dianne FeinsteinRanking MemberCommittee on the JudiciaryU. S. SenateWashington, DC 20510

Dear Chairman Graham and Ranking Member Feinstein,

On behalf of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (The Leadership Conference), a coalition charged by its diverse membership of more than 220 national organizations to promote and protect the rights of all persons in the United States, we thank you for the opportunity to submit our views regarding the need for major tech companies to address threats to civil rights created or facilitated by their platforms and improve civil rights infrastructure, and ask that this statement be entered into the record of the committee hearing entitled Breaking the News: Censorship, Suppression, and the 2020 Election, on November 17, 2020.

The internet has created immense positive value by connecting people, facilitating civil rights advocacy and adding new voices to our culture and public debate. However, it can also enable discriminatory conduct, exacerbate existing disparities, and give new tools to those who want to threaten, harass, intimidate, defame, or violently attack people different from themselves. While The Leadership Conference welcomes scrutiny of the role of social media companies in our democracy, we urge caution regarding potential changes to Section 230 to ensure any proposed changes will not do more harm than good. We encourage the committee to focus on the most important opportunities to ensure these platforms serve all people, which we discuss in more detail below.

Technological progress should promote equity and justice as it enhances safety, economic opportunity and convenience for everyone. On October 21, The Leadership Conference joined dozens of leading civil rights and technology advocacy organizations in releasing updated Civil Rights Principles for the Era of Big Data, in response to the current risks to civil rights including COVID-19, a surge in hate-based violence, private sector and government surveillance, and disinformation on social media platforms designed to manipulate or suppress voter participation and with an eye toward how technology can meet its promise and affirmatively promote justice and equity. These principles provide important guidelines to aid this committee in ensuring that new technologiesincluding algorithmic decision making, artificial intelligence and machine learning protect civil rights, prevent unlawful discrimination, and advance equal opportunity.

Congress should use this opportunity to ask platforms what actions they are taking or plan to take to reduce online activities that harm communities of color, religious minorities, and other marginalized communities. For years, we have urged major tech platforms to take responsibility for ensuring that their products and business processes protect civil and human rights and do not result in harm or bias against historically marginalized groups, but they have failed to take sufficient action. And despite years of advocacy urging the companies to rectify the problems, misinformation regarding time, place, manner, and qualifications to vote and content intended to suppress or deter people from voting continue to proliferate. The failure of tech platforms to address these activities harms people of color and members of other marginalized communities. Moreover, despite new policies that ostensibly forbid white supremacy, white supremacists continue to use platforms to incite racist violence on multiple platforms against Asian Americans, African Americans, Jews, Muslims, people with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQ community. Platforms have the tools and the ability to respond effectively to these concerns if they only had the will. Congress should press tech companies on the actions they are taking to improve and enforce their own policies and stop the weaponization of their platforms to suppress the vote, spread hate, and undermine our democracy.

Congress should not be distracted by baseless claims of anti-conservative bias and should instead focus on platforms efforts to respond to online voter suppression and other threats to our democracy. A commitment to civil and human rights is not a right or left issue it is about right versus wrong. Baseless allegations of so-called anti-conservative bias should not distract tech companies. Research shows that anti-conservative bias is a phantom problem; a number of studies, articles, and reports show that the voices of marginalized communities are more likely to be regarded as toxic by content moderators and content moderation artificial intelligence.

Congress should instead focus on some of the more significant challenges facing social media platforms such as safeguarding our elections and the census from manipulation and disinformation, as well as fighting hate and harassment online. We have made a series of recommendations to obviate false, misleading, and harmful content on the companies platforms that could lead to voter suppression and the spread of hate speech. While Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms have made some recent policy changes, their lack of consistent enforcement makes these policies insufficient to prevent the spread of voter suppression. Platforms must also better utilize disinformation tools for voter suppression content as they have done for other issues like COVID-19, and platforms must prevent disinformation in political ads.

The lack of consistent enforcement was evident in the period leading up to and on Election Day this month and in the current post-election period. Twitter labeled and limited sharing and interaction on some posts by President Trump and others that contained disinformation about mail-in ballots, the process of counting the vote, and falsely declaring victory while the vote count was occurring. However, the application of these steps was not consistent, and limiting of interaction has diminished significantly since the election, even as the president and others are still questioning and spreading falsehoods about the election process. Facebook and YouTube have also labeled similar posts and videos that have appeared on their platforms. The labels stated that the vote counting process is continuing and, once the election was called, that President-elect Biden is the projected winner of the election. But these labels do almost nothing to limit the interaction and sharing of the posts, allowing the disinformation to continue to spread widely.

Going forward, it is clear that platforms have to be more vigilant about stopping the spread of disinformation about voting and elections. The current lack of enforcement and application of the platforms voter interference policies is not sustainable. Systematic and consistent solutions that slow or stop the spread of disinformation that leads to voter suppression must be implemented rather than the inconsistent piecemeal approaches that the platforms currently take.Section 230 must be considered carefully and in context. President Trumps actions to use Section 230 to pressure social media companies is a threat to our civil liberties. The Presidents Executive Order and the FCCs recent announcement defy both statutory and constitutional principles in the name of protecting the presidents own speech online regardless of the consequences to everyone else. And many of the current legislative proposals around Section 230 would do more harm than good. One such example, the EARN IT Act, threatens to not only exacerbate the censorship that many LGBTQ persons face online, but also threatens the welfare and safety of the sex worker community. Instead of looking at simply changing Section 230 as a means of platform regulation, Congress should clearly define the problem and carefully consider whether Section 230 has a role in causing or exacerbating the problem before turning to making changes to Section 230 as part of the solution.

Congress should press tech companies to conduct independent civil rights audits as well as improve their civil rights infrastructure. Structural changes within the platforms will also help better protect civil rights by ensuring platforms can hold themselves accountable to their commitment to civil rights, diversity, and inclusion. Among the companies appearing at the committee hearing, only Facebook has undertaken a civil rights audit with outside auditors, though civil rights groups have urged all the major platforms to do so. Congress must press the other tech companies to conduct credible independent civil rights audits. But Facebooks example demonstrates that without institutional commitment and outside pressure, the impact of an audit will be limited and short-lived.

That is why, in addition to pushing for civil rights audits, Congress must also urge tech companies to adopt structural reforms that comply with federal civil rights law and demonstrate that the companies understand that civil rights are not a partisan issue, but instead are fundamental to protecting the constitutional rights of all people and thus should be part of the organic structure and operations of these companies. This means that tech companies must hire in senior leadership staff with civil rights expertise. The civil rights infrastructure within the companies must be well-resourced and empowered within the company and consulted on the companies major decisions. New and clarified policies should be subject to vetting and review by internal teams with real civil rights expertise and experience, prior to their implementation. Finally, tech companies should provide a process and format through which civil rights advocates and the public can engage with the companies and monitor their progress.

Congress must also press tech companies to do more to address meaningful diversity and inclusion at their workplaces and the lack of people of color in senior executive, engineering, and technical positions. People of color who are working at the companies often face discrimination and unequal pay, as well as a culture where they are devalued. Tech companies must ensure that this does not happen in their workplaces and must address the inequities that may have already occurred. They also must expand strategies to attract and retain talent in diverse communities to expand access to jobs and opportunities.

Prevention of harm, not damage and after-the-fact repair, must be the goal. This goal cannot be fully accomplished if those with civil rights expertise are not part of decision-making processes. Congress must continue to review and scrutinize tech companies to make sure that they are taking the necessary steps to accomplish this goal.Congress should consider other meaningful ways to protect civil and human rights. Congress should also focus on other means to protect civil and human rights. For example, invasive data collection and use practices can lead to civil rights violations. Congress should pass comprehensive federal consumer privacy legislation that protects consumers by requiring companies to minimize the data they collect, define permissible and impermissible purposes for collecting, sharing, and using personal data, prohibit discriminatory uses of personal data, and provide for algorithmic transparency and fairness in automated decisions. Congress should ensure federal agencies are focusing on identifying and ending data processing and algorithmic practices that discriminate on the basis of protected characteristics with respect to access to credit, housing, education, public accommodations and elsewhere.

Thank you for the consideration of our views. If you have any questions about the issues raised in this letter, please contact Leadership Conference Media/Telecommunications Task Force Co-Chairs Cheryl Leanza, United Church of Christ, Office of Communication, Inc., at [emailprotected] and Kate Ruane, American Civil Liberties Union, [emailprotected]; or Corrine Yu, Leadership Conference Senior Program Director, at [emailprotected]Sincerely,

Vanita Gupta

President and CEO

LaShawn Warren

Executive Vice President for Government Affairs

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Letter for the Record: Hearing on Breaking the News: Censorship, Suppression, and the 2020 Election. - Civilrights.org

By Richard Reeb| For the Victorville Daily Press

Democrats across America can hardly wait for the Biden administration to commence, impatient with the seeming delay of that glorious day caused by legal challenges to questionable balloting in battleground states brought by the campaign of President Donald Trump. Evidently, they look upon the office of the President elect as an actual one, not acknowledging the fact that Democrat Al Gore held up the transition for over a month back in 2000.

I say seeming above because only the Constitution, with its stipulation that the next administration begins on Jan. 20, 2021, can be blamed for standing in the way of four years of folly, increased taxes and spending, overregulation, indulgence of rioting, incessant propaganda and, worst of all, suppression of our constitutional rights.

We must remind ourselves that the Constitution is not just a kind of guide to political conduct; it is the supreme law of the land. That refers both to the governmental powers granted and denied, and the individual rights and liberties secured. Those impatient with the pace of political change look upon that foundational touchstone as in need of changing with the times or, equally vile, being refashioned (rather than upheld) by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Our nation has in this remarkable year of 2020 (to say the least) endured a pandemic and shutdown, massive rioting in our cities and a presidential campaign marked by shameless lying and censorship designed to push over the finish line the man who often displayed signs of severe dementia. What we have endured we will be subjected to still more.

Looking at all these shenanigans with a detached perspective is Samuel Alito, an associate justice of the Supreme Court, who actually issued an order to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to stay its vote counting until issues of constitutionality can be resolved. In a virtual speech to the Federalist Society, Alito expressed alarm over what he regards as the greatest general suppression of citizens liberties in our nations history.

As Paul Mirengoff at Powerline reported, Alitos message was that key American rights are in jeopardy. He noted, for example, that the coronavirus pandemic has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.

We have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive and prolonged as those experienced for most of 2020, he said.

Alito was careful to emphasize, Miengoff continues, that he wasnt diminishing the severity of the viruss threat to public health, or even taking a position on whether the restrictions are good public policy. However, he argued that the restrictions on public gatherings and worship services highlighted trends that were already present before the virus struck, including a dominance of lawmaking by executive fiat rather than by legislators and the relegation of certain rights to second-class status.

Religious rights, for example. Alito homed in on the decision of Nevada to limit church attendance to 50 people, while reopening large casinos to 50% capacity. It pains me to say it, but in certain quarters religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right, he concluded.

Take a quick look at the Constitution, Alito urged. You will see the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, which protects religious liberty. You will not find a craps clause, or a blackjack clause, or a slot machine clause.

Alito made his remarks, mind you, as the encroachment on our liberties continues, and in the face of Biden advisor Sheldon Whitehouses threat to restructure the Supreme Court if it makes a pro-gun ruling in the current judicial session. Thats a polite term for court packing, which the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg opposed.

Add to this the frequent demands by leftist Democrats for a truth commission to squash the careers of anyone who served in the Trump administration, worked prominently in Trump campaigns or contributed substantially to them. After a finding of complicity in alleged evil, the object will be to demand that positions in the public or private sector be closed to these miscreants.

Actions follow words. For political purposes, but also out of misguided ideological conviction, the Democrats have hurled charges of racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and even transphobia against the Trump administration and all those in support of it. Now comes the fun part, which consists in validating all those specious charges by our equivalent of the French Revolutions reign of terror that sent thousands to the guillotine. If such is not now available, just give the Left time and opportunity, and some device equally deadly will no doubt appear.

This is not paranoia. When disregard for the Constitution coincides with fanaticism, the result is predictable: Political assassination.

Richard Reeb taught political science, philosophy and journalism at Barstow College from 1970 to 2003. He is the author of Taking Journalism Seriously: Objectivity as a Partisan Cause (University Press of America, 1999). He can be contacted at rhreeb@verizon.net.

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Thinking It Through: Censorship is all the rage, man! - VVdailypress.com