The Death Of The First Amendment

by JASmius



Remember, back in the late 1960s, when the University of California at Berkeley had a "free speech" movement?  That was only for their speech:

To put some numbers behind that perception, the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale recently commissioned a survey from McLaughlin & Associates about attitudes towards free speech on campus. Some eight hundred students at a variety of colleges across the country were surveyed. The results, though not surprising, are nevertheless alarming. By a margin of 51% to 36%, students favor their school having speech codes to regulate speech for students and faculty. Sixty-three percent favor requiring professors to employ “trigger warnings” to alert students to material that might be discomfiting. One-third of the students polled could not identify the First Amendment as the part of the Constitution that dealt with free speech. Thirty-five percent said that the First Amendment does not protect “hate speech,” while 30% of self-identified liberal students say the First Amendment is outdated. [emphases added]

NOW do you all see why the work that Doug Gibbs and myself and everybody else associated with him in attempting to connect the American people with the values and principles of the United States Constitution that they've never been taught by the socialized education system is so critically important?  Sure, I don't disagree that college speech codes don't obviate the First Amendment itself, which only bars Congress from abridging free speech (among other things).  But they do continue to entrench that mentality in the contemporary political culture to the point where one day, there will be a Congress (or imperial president) that WILL repeal the First Amendment, either openly or implicitly, in whole or in part.  And when that day arrives, it will be too late for Amendment I and the rest of the founding document (assuming it isn't already), because if freedom of speech can be openly crushed, the rest of the the Constitution will already be gone.

And that brings us full circle to how the Left used "free speech" in order to normalize anti-constitutional heresies to the point where they had the political power they sought all along to then start taking away the constitutional rights of their political opponents.  Because it has never, for them, been about freedom or liberty or the free exchange of ideas or "dialogue" or robust intellectual debate, but the totalitarian crushing of dissent from leftwingnut orthodoxy (i.e. anything they deem "racist" or "sexist" or "Islamophobic," etc.,).  It's about power and domination.  And anybody who dares to even raise their voice against that orthodoxy is targeted for Alinskyite destruction.

There used to be a saying favored by "liberals": "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."  Boy, those were the days, huh?