I’m under no illusions that the elected officials in Congress are collectively brilliant. Anyone that’s listened to Eric Swalwell or Maxine Waters riff on anything is probably pretty numb to it all. Even still, there are days when one of them says something so ridiculously dumb that it makes you double take.

Enter Frederica Wilson, noted hat connoisseur and crazy person. Last we heard from her, she was spreading the contents of a private phone call to a dead soldier’s widow to take political shots at the President. After she was criticized for her antics, Wilson would go on to attack Gen. John Kelly (who lost his son in Afghanistan) as a man with no honor. Once all that died down, Wilson sunk back into the obscurity she’s known for most of her regrettable career in Washington.

Today, she made her comeback.

Democrat Rep. Frederica Wilson (FL) says that people who are “making fun of members of Congress” online “should be prosecuted” pic.twitter.com/f69KwOeJ0n

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) July 2, 2019

“Those people who are online making fun of members of Congress are a disgrace and there is no need for anyone to think that is unacceptable,” Wilson said during a press conference. “We are going to shut them down and work with whoever it is to shut them down, and they should be prosecuted.”

What the heck did I just watch?

That’s one of the most bizarre rants I’ve witnessed in politics, and I don’t just mean her inability to speak complete sentences with proper word usage. A sitting U.S. Congressional member is calling for the prosecution of people who…make fun of Congress online. Could Wilson help us all out by citing the criminal statute she’s referencing? I’ve made fun of Frederica’s ugly hat fetish before. Should I be looking for black helicopters out my window?

I’m not who she’s referencing when she says we’ll “work with whoever” to shut down free speech on the internet, but I’d assume she’s talking about the tech companies.

Hearing someone in a position of power make statements like this would be scary if Wilson wasn’t such a joke. I’m going to sleep soundly tonight knowing she can’t actually do the lunacy she espoused in her speech. What it does show though is a streak of illiberalism that’s readily apparent in the Democrat party. This isn’t actually something new, they are just more emboldened these days to say the bad parts out loud. There’s no accountability anymore for the left. Not only does anything go, anything will be propped up and reinforced.

Had a Republican said something like this, it would be big news and it would be justified in being so. No elected official should be calling for the prosecution of free speech, much less targeting people for joking on the internet. Just as concerning, no politician should be calling to collude with others in positions of power to “shut them down” just because people say something you don’t like.

Despite the bluster we constantly hear about Donald Trump, the real threats to the first amendment consistently show themselves on the left. Will the brave heroes in our fabled news industry take notice of this latest example and condemn it? Nah.

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