The Joys of Freelancing

 When you tell people you are a freelance writer, you usually get one of two responses. 

"Oh, yeah, I do that sometimes." These people call themselves freelancers (and they are), but they don't freelance for a living. It's a side gig that they either haven't put the effort into building or they just use it in their spare time. 

Then, there is the starry-eyed response as if freelancing is a dreamy job. There are a lot of people who self-publish, and I imagine they do have that starry-eyed job of writing what they want, when they want. They might not have money, but they certainly are pursuing their dreams. That is not me.

I have writing dreams, but I also have a family to feed. That means I don't get to always write what I want to write or edit what I want to edit. (Don't get me wrong, I refuse any jobs that I find ethically wrong and jobs that I find morally wrong--although some savvy employers have managed to pull the wool over my eyes a few times.) 

The starry-eyed responders don't realize that when I am editing someone else's story--it can be quite rough. Once or twice it was borderline unreadable. I also get those Master's theses on the (to me) rather unexciting topics of computer data analysis or teaching theory. I get to write reports comparing international banking practices, or talking about high-end, international real estate sectors. 

There is, of course, an upside: I get to write about interesting things, too. (My favorite was Zombie Skin Care.) But, if you want to make money, you have to do things that aren't necessarily appealing to you. 

Picking up the Pieces

 So, I had a rough past few years. I was horribly censored, despite using extensive citations in everything I wrote. My book, Hitler's Big Lie, still cannot be accessed, edited, or updated, but I am planning to try again, soon. 

My long journey of censorship and attacks--regardless of how much scientific evidence I had supporting my statements--is hopefully ending. I have started working on social media again--where threats and having my account stifled made me stop.

I have been kicked out of Court not because I did anything wrong, but rather because the issue was "moot" (after the court sat on it for a year without doing anything) or the judge said I wrote incoherently--you, dear reader, can be the judge of that--or, perhaps most painfully, because I was a pro se litigant and had the audacity to file more than one lawsuit. For the record, I tried to get a lawyer. Only two returned my calls--one said the government could do whatever it wanted during an "emergency" so I didn't have a case. The other one said I had a good case, but their practice had some big clients who wouldn't be happy with them suing me. I had video evidence.

Kicking people out of court, permanently ("with prejudice") because their complaint "fails to state a claim" is great for courts--they can stifle anyone they want permanently without "wasting" resources on a trial. However, when the judge says "this is an ADA claim" and then goes on to say the complaint was incomprehensible; or when in a preliminary meeting, the judge tells the defendants I have a good case and they need to work with me, but a few months later, after the defendants tell the judge I have filed more than one pro se lawsuit--the judge suddenly decides I don't have a case and have, that's right, "failed to state a claim." 

I tried to appeal, but I never was notified in the case of the last decision, and once you get to the Supreme Court, there is little chance that they will see your case. They have, in fact, prohibited pro se litigants from coming before them unrepresented. They are supposed to assign you a lawyer if they agree to hear the case, but this requires resources, and there is a question of who is going to pay for that lawyer. Further muddying the situation is that the U.S. government was on the other side of one of those lawsuits. Many people don't realize it, but the Dept. of Justice advises the Supreme Court on which cases to hear. I was going against a brief written by 14 government and other lawyers from some of the top firms in America. 

I think I probably spent about $10,000. I went into it never expecting to win (although I was very hopeful with the last one.) I just knew if I could get my evidence and complaints into the system, maybe other lawyers would look at them and use those arguments better than I did. (Or since they were lawyers, they would at least be able to get to a trial of the evidence.) I had to stop freelancing because it took so much of my time to follow everything. I knew even if I won as a pro se litigant, I could not recover money for time lost. 

Now, we are "getting on with our lives post-pandemic," but little has been done to address all the rights violations that the Courts ignored and allowed to happen. I, too, am returning to freelancing. But I can't forget that American government and Courts violated so many areas of the Constitution and did not think twice about doing it--refused to listen to reason, to science, and even to statistics. People need to be careful. The government agents--Republican and Democrat--who are now in power only care about that power and not our rights.