The 1st Amendment Does Not Exist
The U.S. government is suppressing speech and intimidating its critics.
Whenever someone criticizes the United States of America, whether it’s the country’s racial injustices, wealth inequality, or War on Terror failures, those who champion the United States as a positive global force invoke a semblance of freedom to argue our country is superior to the rest.
“Yes, America has its problems,” they’ll say. “But we’re allowed to vote for our preferred candidates and say whatever we want without the fear of government suppression.”
At face value, this claim holds up. No one is sitting in jail for tweeting “Joe Biden sucks,” nor do Americans have to worry about a midnight visit from the police if they write “SpongeBob” on an election ballot. But when we look under America’s cosmetic layers, we see a countervailing reality. As has been made clear by the violent state crackdown on pro-Palestine protestors, the United States Government and its allies actively seek to repress, distort, and punish the viewpoints of citizens who threaten American hegemony.
Free Speech (Some Exceptions May Apply)
America’s defenders often point to the civil liberties enshrined in the Constitution as proof of the nation’s commitment to individual freedom. They specifically highlight the 1st Amendment, which ostensibly protects Americans from the totalitarian repression of speech seen in other countries. However, the recent upsurge in state violence acts critical voices shows that, while no one has crossed “abridging the freedom of speech” out of the foundational document, the 1st Amendment exists only in theory.
As we’ve all seen, the government loosed its attack dogs to quash the Palestinian solidarity movement that arose across the country. In red and blue states alike, heavily armed police raided the camps with vicious intent, attacking protestors and bystanders, arresting hundreds, and even training snipers on “dangerous” poetry circles. While fascist Republicans cheered the assault, President Biden took a softer, yet equally diabolical tone, insisting that the raids were necessary to maintain “order” and “combat antisemitism.”
While the detained have had their dubious charges dropped, these arrests still violate the 1st Amendment. The government knows it can’t charge people with “saying the wrong thing,” but it also knows it doesn’t have to. A phalanx of trigger-happy, tomato-faced cops wearing Blue Lives Matter punisher patches is enough to scare any well-meaning college kid off the protest line. If they do stay and are arrested, the government has curtailed their speech by disbanding the protest, destroying its infrastructure, and intimidating its participants. Alongside the prosecution of Julian Assange, it’s the most egregious violation of speech rights I’ve seen in my adult lifetime.
But this anti-speech crusade isn’t limited to the police. On May 1st, the House passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act (AAA). If passed, the bill would require the Department of Education to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism when enforcing anti-discrimination laws. As this definition includes criticism of Israel as “antisemitism,” this means any school that allows peaceful protests in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle could lose federal funding, face lawsuits, and see their presidents hauled before Congress to be ridiculed and forced to resign, just like their colleagues.
If the AAA passed the Senate and was signed by Biden (which, fortunately, seems unlikely), it would quickly be challenged and voided by a court. It’s such an obvious 1st Amendment violation, that we can conclude the authors know it wouldn’t last. But the advocates of this Act aren’t trying to turn this into law. They’re willing to lose a court case a few years down the road in exchange for the Act’s true purpose: silencing current criticism of Israel. In conjunction with the White House’s campaign to smear everyone sympathetic to the Palestinian plight (including Jewish-Israeli historians) as an antisemite, the purpose of this bill is to intimidate college presidents into suppressing the speech of their students.
To make matters worse,
has reported Congress is pressuring intelligence agencies to investigate and infiltrate these protests in search of potential “Hamas links.” As there is not even the slightest indication of a connection between college kids and Hamas (obviously), this is yet another government overreach that attempts to intimidate and dissuade speech under the cover of “investigation.”A Global Crackdown
While the vast majority of the repression has happened here in the United States, these tactics are not confined within our borders. As many North Atlantic nations also see Israel as a guarantor of their interests, they’ve committed similar offenses to suppress dissent against their anti-Palestine policies. France outright banned pro-Palestinian protests, while Canada followed America’s approach with a deceitfully named “Online Harms Act” (OHA). Hidden behind good provisions that combat underage pornography, the OHA creates a new definition of "hate crime" under Canada’s Criminal Code to any crime found to be motivated against a protected trait, such as race, national or ethnic origin, language, color, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Such crimes are now punishable with life in prison. Combatting bigotry is an unequivocal good, but just like in the U.S., the smearing of Palestinian supporters as “antisemites” opens the door to state repression of legitimate, civil speech.
The internet advocacy group Open Media has opposed the OHA’s draconian provisions, which don’t require prosecutors “to follow normal rules of evidence in court, or evaluate whether the offending speech was true.” The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has echoed these concerns, claiming the OHA “enables blatant violations of expressive freedom, privacy, protest rights, and liberty.” Given this act was brought forth just as Canada’s own pro-Palestine encampments were surging, and our northern neighbors have shown they have no qualms about silencing Palestinian voices (the Ontario Legislature banned keffiyehs, the traditional Palestinian headdress), one does not need to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce the true purpose of this bill is to frighten Canadians away from protesting their government’s Zionist stance.
If A Right Can Be Violated, That Right Does Not Exist
Unfortunately, “free speech” has become a neutered term in recent years, making it difficult for Americans to see the government’s vice closing around our throats. Debates about whether or not YouTube demonetizing Alex Jones or Facebook shadow-banning Holocaust deniers have made “free speech” a catch-all for “content moderation I don’t like.” While I find these arguments to be overstatements, what is happening now is as clear as a free speech violation can be. The United States government, with the help and encouragement of private and foreign actors, is using its monopoly on violence to silence the dissent of its citizens. It has yet to fully shred the 1st Amendment by imprisoning its critics, but it is violating it. The 1st Amendment doesn’t mean the government must limit the punishment of speech it doesn’t like, but that it can not punish such speech. As evident by the attacks from America’s notoriously unhinged police force, legislative intimidation, and suppressive actions by both of its political parties, it’s clear the American government is doing everything in its power to ensure critical voices go unheard and the American-Israeli genocidal project remains on track.
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Well, it does but only for speech approved by the ruling class. No police crackdowns on actual Nazis.
https://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-charlottesville-white-nationalists-rally-20170812-story.html
There has been a free speech war raging against the American people for years now. Everyone should go back about 8 years and see when and how the infringement creep started, first exposed by "Russia Gate." Pervasive government sanctioned censorship (ie CISA Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a department of Homeland Security) is run by a host of patriotic sounding organizations (ie. Election Integrity Partnership) with the same disinformation/information czars' names popping up time and again. It's a censorship war against anyone who dares to question or dispute the agendas of the elite run world order from scientists to doctors to politicians to ordinary citizens. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger have and continue to do a bang up job exposing this in their substacks. Matt released a data dump of FOIA documents just this morning. I encourage your readers who are not familiar with their work or are interested in learning how deep this deep state runs to do their homework and don't wait for the mainstream media to "mis" inform you.