What we have here is the classic maneuver of the authoritarian, in which they try to make the focus of liberty “freedom from” rather than “freedom to” — it’s infuriating.
Liberty is not about being free from fear, or free from attack. It’s about being free to speak, and write, and assemble, and worship, and all those others things we all have the inherent right to do without any governmental interference.
Authoritarian-minded people perform this trick constantly. By reframing liberty as “freedom from” rather than “freedom to” they make liberty a passive rather than an active feature of American society. Worse, they essentially replace discussions of liberty with discussions of security at all costs. Security is about “freedom from” and liberty is about “freedom to” — don’t let them make you forget this, or confuse the two.
The above is from a well-worth-reading- post on ‘Freedom From’ Versus ‘Freedom To’ posted here by theonetruebix. He links to Ashcroft’s infuriating speech about ‘civil liberties.’