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If You Love Your Freedom, Thank a Dirty Effing Hippie

… Every single bit of freedom we have comes from the troublemakers, rabble-rousers, pariahs, the people utterly devoid of respectability — the Dirty Effing Hippies, in Nixon’s parlance — and their willingness to say things the government doesn’t want them to. Our freedom is expanded and defended by the very types of people who are spat upon — run out on a rail — by “good respectable citizens,” and tossed in jail by local cops. Our freedoms come from the people who were imprisoned by John Adams under the Sedition Act, the thousands of Wobblies who packed local jails during the Free Speech Campaign, and Breanna Manning who is tortured daily in prison for exposing the American government’s war crimes to the world. …