How Would You Like This Wrapped?
The Next American Constitution has no First Amendment
I recently ran into this (image above), which is a Twitter response to this (below):
Notice the sponsors. More information here and here. But this bill, which some critics say threatens to deanonymize the Internet via age verification, isn’t my main point.
My main point is the cartoon comment: “How would you like this wrapped?”
What phony, pretend protection of (kids, women, white people, Christians, Jews, simple folks like yourself, our American Democracy) would you like us to use to take your freedom away and give it to our friends at (the Pentagon, Palantir, NSA, CIA, Trump) to use as they wish?
The latest assault on First Amendment protection is advanced in the name of pro-Zionist murderers and friends. But that’s not the first assault on the First. The use of “free speech zones” — an oxymoron itself — goes back to the 1940’s, picked up in the ‘60s, and really took off from there.
Liberals loved it when the government, through “partners” like Facebook, Twitter and Stanford University, shut down dangerous (read, right-wing and pro-Trump) speech to protect your freedom.
Now that that cudgel has been handed off to the Right, who have bipartisan permission to use it, suddenly the self-professed left is Ms. Free Speech again.
Sorry. That ship has sailed. The Next American Constitution has no free speech in it.
How would you like that wrapped? As a blessing or curse?
My favorite analysis of the death of the First Amendment comes from Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835:
"I know no country in which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America...
...In America the majority raises very formidable barriers to the liberty of opinion: within these barriers an author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent it if he ever steps beyond them. Not that he is exposed to the terrors of an auto-da-fe [1], but he is tormented by the slights and persecutions of daily obloquy. His political career is closed forever, since he has offended the only authority which is able to promote his success. Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. Before he published his opinions he imagined that he held them in common with many others; but no sooner has he declared them openly than he is loudly censured by his overbearing opponents, whilst those who think without having the courage to speak, like him, abandon him in silence. He yields at length, oppressed by the daily efforts he has been making, and he subsides into silence, as if he was tormented by remorse for having spoken the truth.
...Under the absolute sway of an individual despot the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul, and the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose superior to the attempt; but such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved."
- Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835, pp292-3 original Henry Reeve translation, PSU, http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/LojkoMiklos/Alexis-de-Tocqueville-Democracy-in-America.pdf. With exquisite irony, all or most of this material has been edited out of every print edition I’ve ever seen... Note I found this on a *Hungarian* web site! :)
[1] note: "auto-da-fe" is de Tocqueville's contemporary but now-anachronistic term for being burned at the stake for the crime of heresy. The modern term, of course, is “cancel culture”, but the concept dates back at least as far as Athenian ostracism law and prosecutions of dangerous deviants such as Socrates.
That was always the problem with the pandemic era disinformation campaigns under Biden, which included the short lived proposed disinformation agency under the Hillary hack Nina Jankowitz: who decides whjat is disinformation? The same goes for the Biden era attacks on pro-Palestinians and searches of those opposing the US role in Ukrine (see the withdrawal of passport from Scott Ritter and Judge Napolitano). This was so obvious that it speaks to the entire Biden administration's dementia that they could not fathom that they were settting a precedent, what is good for the goose is good for the gander. All those Obama executive decrees, they all set up precedent for Trump's expansion of their use.