Our first right loses support
The Friday Letter / No. 554 / Oct. 20, 2023
A new poll from RealClear Opinion Research found that 42 percent of Americans under age 30 support government censorship of speech and ideas. These are the so-named Millennial generation and Generation XII (misnamed in the media as Gen. Z).
Spencer Kimball, who directed the poll, said protection of national security is more important to this group than the right to free expression. By comparison, 26 percent of those over 65 support censorship.
Kimball also found that 34 percent of Democrat voters and 14.6 percent of Republicans believe Americans have “too much freedom.” Further, 52 percent of Democrats and 33 percent of Republicans say the government has the right to censor social media content it does not like. And without defining what qualifies as hate speech, 75 percent of Democrats and 50 percent of Republicans agree that “Government as a responsibility to restrict hateful posts” on social media.
From where we sit, any percentage above zero on any of these questions shows a disturbing and profound ignorance of and lack of reverence for our nation's foundational building blocks.
The right of free expression has been around for a while. Carl M. Cannon, who wrote the RealClear Opinion report, notes that “The concept of free speech dates to the 5th century B.C. in ancient Greece and was codified in America’s founding documents on Dec. 15, 1791, with the ratification of the Bill of Rights.” The concept is well seasoned in our society, and it is not happenstance that it appears first on our list of God-given rights.
Censorship is everywhere these days, from college campuses to school board meetings and in every newsroom of the Media-Democrat legacy propaganda machine. Nowhere is it more prominent this week than in Washington, where an Obama federal judge, Tanya Chutkan, issued a gag order preventing President Trump from discussing or complaining about almost all details of his upcoming Kangaroo Court trial.
Openly partisan, she makes no pretense of hiding her contempt for Trump as she acts more as Special Council Jack Smith's prosecutor partner than as a disinterested jurist. She has issued no such gag on Smith, who is free to say whatever he wants, whether false or true.
With well-understood exceptions (See Schenck v. United States, 1919) for such as safety, libel, and national security, the right to free expression is unabridged, or at least it was until Jan. 20, 2021.
The 19th century English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) defines the right to free expression as liberty. “By liberty, (sic) was meant protection against the tyranny of the political rulers,” he wrote in the introduction to his long essay “On Liberty.”
If a ruler did infringe on this liberty, “specific resistance, or general rebellion, was held to be justifiable.” Jefferson said much the same when he said that some blood must be spilled from time to time when the rulers get out of hand.
Mill also explained constitutional checks, the concept that rulers rule only with the consent of the governed. Rulers who violate their charter must be “promptly removable.”
Human liberty grants the “absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects,” he said. These liberties include “doing what we like” as long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others, and freedom of assembly, “the freedom to unite, for any purpose not involving harm to others.”
Think of the many ways our rulers violated these rights during the Wuhan Flu crisis – people arrested for swimming in the ocean, singing or even attending church, protesting outside abortion clinics, confronting tyrannical school board members, failing to wear obedience masks.
Man yearns to be free, or so we are told. This is sometimes difficult to believe, given so many of our fellow citizens' willingness to have their lives controlled by the state.
And here is a short reading list to help parents introduce their children to liberty:
The Magna Carta, signed by King John at Runnymede on June 15, 1215.
The Declaration of Independence.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Reno v. ACLU (521 US 844, 1997)
Judicial extremism: a case study
It's difficult to image what our Founders would think about a court stepping in to imprison a prankster whose only “crime” was to expose voter stupidity.
The facts of this case are that a man called Douglass Mackey posted a fake Hillary Clinton ad before the 2016 election calling for voters to vote for Hillary by texting “Hillary” to 59925. This gag has been around since I can remember, but the federalies were not amused. He was sentenced to seven months in federal prison.
As Evita Duffy-Alfonso reported at The Federalist,
Mackey’s sentencing is unprecedented. It means America is now a place that puts citizens in prison for posting information disfavorable to the left, including satire, a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.
She noted that there was no report of anyone being foolish enough to fall for the prank. Didn't matter. Ironically, she wrote,
Mackey’s post was making a mockery of Democrat election interference. The Clinton campaign would have loved it if votes could be cast via text, as would all Democrats who persistently push to dismantle voter security rules and regulations, like requiring individuals to vote in person on election day and provide identification.
Considering that Hillary went unpunished (or even seriously investigated) for erasing 33,000 emails after they had been subpoenaed for a Freedom of Information Act request, and destroying a computer hard drive to conceal evidence of her own criminal involvement in the 2016 election scandal, it is mind boggling that Americans tolerate this corruption in the criminal justice system.
(After Trump brought up the email deleting in the Sept. 16, 2016, presidential debate, ABC News dismissed the claim by saying Hillary didn't think the emails were work related.)
So we have what we have because Americans accept this bastardization. Ultimately, only voters are to blame, as they were in the 2022 midterms, and, sadly, as they are likely to do again in less than 13 months.
Short takes on the news
New York Post
A Chinese-owned seed company is ordered to sell its 160 acres of Arkansas farmland within two years under the state's new law banning countries that pose national security threats from owning farmland in the state. “Seeds are technology,” Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday. “Chinese-owned state corporations filter that technology back to their homeland, stealing American research and telling our enemies to target American farms,” she said at a news conference. Count on a leftist judge to step in and kill this one.
Breitbart
U.S. District Court Judge Roger T. Benitez strikes down California's ban on so-called “assault weapons.” He stayed the decision for 10 days to give the state's AG time to appeal if so desired. Benitez, a senior status judge, was appointed by G.W. Bush in 2003.
Washington Times
House Uniparty Republicans, working with fanatics such as Rep. Matt Gaetz, may be about to get their wish of ceding control to Democrats through a power-sharing arrangement. This comes after conservative Rep. Jim Jordan failed to win the speakership on the second ballot.
Hello readers: Established as a weekly column Jan. 2, 2009, in the waning days of the G.W. Bush Administration, the Friday Letter has posted 554 times with a couple of long sabbaticals. As I turn my efforts to research for a book, I will now be writing the Friday Letter only occasionally. The rule is: “Whenever I feel like it.” Thanks for your understanding.