Politics & Power Quote by Jon Porter

Porter’s line is engineered to feel less like policy wonkery and more like a warning flare. By foregrounding “current law,” he casts the situation as an active failure of governance, not a theoretical gap. The technical detail (the Volunteer Protection Act’s nonprofit requirement) is immediately translated into a blunt moral: “the average American” is exposed. That phrase isn’t accidental. It’s a political incantation that compresses a sprawling category of people into a single, sympathetic protagonist: ordinary, civic-minded, undeserving of risk.

The absolutism does the heavy lifting. “Absolutely no legal protections” is less a lawyerly claim than a rhetorical dare. In strict terms, there are often other protections and liabilities that vary by state, circumstance, and insurance. Porter chooses maximal language because he’s not litigating nuance; he’s building urgency. If volunteering is framed as potentially punishable, the audience is primed to see a chilling effect: good deeds deterred by fear of being sued.

Subtext: the law is out of step with how Americans actually volunteer. People coach youth sports, organize neighborhood cleanups, respond to local crises, and do mutual-aid work that doesn’t always route through a registered nonprofit. Porter is arguing that civic life has outgrown the paperwork that government uses to recognize it. The context is classic small-government populism with a pro-social twist: remove barriers, reduce legal exposure, let citizens help each other without needing an institutional middleman. It’s policy advocacy dressed as cultural alarm, aimed at making liability reform feel like protecting community itself.