And to think I was raised on a ranch in Wyoming and never had to get a license to ride a horse....

Ask the UK, Australia, Canada, China... who being unarmed against a tyrannical government is working out for them?

amen. I am 78 and remember how it was then.

Amen to you both. Being 71 years young - soon to be 72 - I can recall thinking back in my teenage years in the '60s things were going to get better. Star Trek had its Klingons and Romulans, but future life looked pretty good. It seemed like the civil rights movement was going to do away with all the racial crap and we can finally just get along even if it wasn't heavenly perfect. I went to a racially and ethnic mixed high school and after school worked in a mixed business and most of us kids all had a good time together even if our parents may be a bit chilly or skeptical of the whole thing.

Nobody would have or even could have guessed that "Political Correctness" would begin its rise in the mid '70s and finally morph into the full fledged insanity of wokeness we have today. Things went bad. I don't know if I will live long enough for things to get better.

Me too! I often thought of what craziness might be ahead, given I grew up in the sixties, but I'm afraid this is WAY beyond the pale.

It's easy to imagine a $200 tax or a fine for so-called "dangerous words" when people are now being "cancelled" to the point of losing jobs for truthfully saying accurate things like "men can't give birth to babies."
Soon to turn 77, in all my life me dino never imagined there could ever be such deranged stupidity.

Or maybe the insurance "industry" of thieves should petition con-gress to do to freedom of speech what they did to freedom of health care.
Oops, pesky Bill of Rights again.
Thank you, George Mason.
We owe you our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, and it's about time that we back up our words with actions.

Sure! A free-speech insurance liability tax. So you can freely verbally set fire to a building and you've paid for it already!!! Speech is a privilege, just like driving, right???

they went way past the $200 in outright banning people in the last 4 years

Another example of a bureaucracy imposing legislation on the people "just because it can".

Also from the article: "And for that matter, why is the Second Amendment treated as a second-class right? Imagine if the United States put a $200 tax on the First Amendment for the use of "dangerous" words." I figure that's on its way.