Someday You May Wish For Others To Believe In "Due Process."

AI Generated Transcript (I only fixed glaring errors and added some paragraph breaks):

Had to click record fast before I thought too much. But here I am. Jon Davis's VoiceNotes here. What I want to say today. What I'm thinking about. So I'm at my old spot here. It seems to be becoming one of my voice notes locations. It's a fantastic spring day. Beautiful northern Illinois. Sun is out right now, although it's been cloudy a lot of the day. Just this little pull off. It's some property that's for sale, but I'm on the public road. You can see the, I don't even know what those are. They look almost like those cattail things, but they're too big. Beautiful. Just a beautiful spot.

So what am I thinking about today? What do I want to talk about? And just so you know, no, I did not prepare at all, other than my brain is working on this. But I want to address something that's going on. It's going on in the world, but I want to address more of the principles behind it. Something timeless. Something that will be true in 50 years when different issues are at hand. But there's been a lot of discussion about due process, at least amongst my friends. And what's going on in the world, for anyone that's not paying attention, is there are these mass deportations going on, or Trump and his company are trying to deport certain different kinds of people who are allegedly here illegally. And the issue of due process has come up. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not even pretending to be a lawyer, although I understand at least the general concept of what due process is. Yeah, the concept.

But I want you to think down the road. I want you to think down the road. I want you to remember that there have been administrations who would identify a conservative Christian as a borderline terrorist. So someday it might be you that needs due process. It might be you that needs that. So to me, due process, my understanding, you can set me straight if I'm wrong, is that it just means that the government cannot just do things to people without going through some sort of due process. And one of the elements, at least one of the elements of due process, is determining whether someone is actually the person at hand, and they have anything to do with what they're alleged to have done. There needs to be... So if you're going to be charged with a crime, the due process goes all the way through the whole legal system, going to court and getting charged and defending yourself in court, etc.

There's other things, as far as deportation is concerned, which my concern isn't really primarily about the current deportations, just that we apply the principles to that that we want applied to us later. That's how I want you to look at this. What principles do you want to be applied to you later? What if someone just decides in the government to have a policy that you're a terrorist and can be deported to a prison in a foreign country? And you're going to say, but, but, but, and tell me about the current situation. I know that there's, at least allegedly, and it appears to be true that there's some really bad people in our country that need to be removed from our country. That appears to me to be true. I couldn't prove it, but it looks true from what I'm seeing here.

I'm not talking, you got to get that out of your head. I'm not talking about whether or not bad people should be deported, but what if, and if you don't think this could happen, I don't know, you're not really dealing with reality. What if somebody who looks Hispanic or Mexican gets arrested and they don't have their papers and they, the people that do all of the stuff, the administrative police, the ICE agents and all that, believe it's so-and-so and they ship them off to some other country, to a prison, and then say there's nothing we can do to get him back? What if that person was born here to parents who lived here legally or were immigrants or whatever? You might be saying to yourself, that can't happen, that won't happen. There's processes to prevent that from happening. Well, that's due process, and due process really needs to include somebody other than the executive agent or the police agent. There needs to be somebody else involved, some sort of courts, some sort of judges.

But you will say to me that those systems are broken, those court systems are broken. Probably, there probably is no win here because of so much corruption and the very idea of how justice is supposed to work, but I don't want you to give up on the idea of due process. It's just, it means there is a process for determining, is this person really who they supposedly are? Have they really done what they have supposedly done? Are they really eligible to have done to them what is being proposed to be done to them? And the fact that the courts are screwed up doesn't mean it's okay to just desert that principle.

So I know it stinks. I know it's frustrating to see court systems maybe in some cases illegitimately interfering with the process of getting very bad people out of our country. But whatever those corrupt or whatever they are court systems do, don't give up on due process. Don't give up on that. Both because it's right and also because you might need it someday. Your children or grandchildren might need it someday. Always remember the pendulum is swinging back and forth. So whatever we do now that our side, if that's even, I don't, maybe you don't agree with that. I don't even know if I agree with it. But if our side is in control, whatever we do now is going to be what will be done to us or the people that we might feel a little bit more favorable towards in the future when there's a different power to be in control of things.

So I don't know. I'm feeling a little bit dissatisfied here about whether I've gotten my thought out completely and thoroughly or not. But, you know, I don't know. Do you remember? Yeah, I'm not going to go there. But hopefully that makes you think and helps you understand if you're one of the people that follows me on Facebook or whatever understands what I'm talking about. God bless. Jon Davis signing off.