Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The lofty ideals of the First Amendment have inspired humanity and rightfully swelled American citizens with pride from their first articulation on the world stage almost 250 years ago. For the first time in the history a government had been formed with limited powers delegated to it by the citizenry. When those implied limitations were deemed not sufficiently clarified in the United States Constitution, the people added the Bill of Rights to paint unmistakable lines on the pavement to keep the federal government in its own lane. It included the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to add guardrails on either side to clarify that the final word on the reach of the federal government would be reserved to the people and the state governments, respectively.
The problem with lofty ideals expressed concisely is applying them to real-world situations where the inherent ambiguities of words and phrases meet the test of practical application – and where the personal philosophies of those tasked with sorting it out (bureaucrats, legislators and judges) affect the interpretation and thus the ruling. Therefore, it matters greatly whether those decision makers value “original intent” and see their own role as its guardians (“conservatives”) or whether they view the Constitution and its amendments as a “living document” to be reshaped to conform to their self-directed “tide of history” (“progressives”).
In my lifetime, the “progressives” have won that contest more times than not, and so today there is no part of the First Amendment that has not been seriously reshaped to suit progressive interests – except freedom of the press, left untouched because it has been the primary driver of progressive narratives to which the decision-makers have conformed.
To the founders, “religion” in the First Amendment meant Judaism-respecting Christianity, which was eventually refined in Supreme Court rulings to the phrase “Supreme Being” inside of a clearly biblical context. The court summarized the history of this legal doctrine in Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457 (1892), after more than a century of careful development.
To the founders, forbidding “establishment of religion” meant government could not adopt or prefer one Christian sect over another, as had occurred for centuries in Europe and in the American states prior to adoption of the Constitution. It absolutely did not ban acknowledgment of God’s sovereignty over America as proven by countless unimpeachable documents including the Declaration of Independence and George Washington’s inaugural addresses.
In 1947 a progressive SCOTUS majority in Everson v Board of Education shifted America off that biblical foundation and onto a Secular Humanist one by intentionally twisting Jefferson’s “Separation of Church and State” metaphor into a ban on church/state cooperation and elevating their false revision to the status of binding constitutional law. (What Jefferson and the founders actually intended – and in fact established as policy – was the “coadjuvancy” of church and state!)
The follow-on case of Torcaso v Watkins (1961) – defining atheism as a “religion” with equal protections had the legal and practical effect of empowering militant atheists to purge Christianity from public life, to be systematically replaced over the next half-century by LGBT cultural supremacy as other cases fell like dominoes along that satanic new trajectory.
All of the other elements of the First Amendment have also been redefined to suit progressive interests, always empowering government at the expense of the people. The COVID plandemic lockdowns alone show how many freedoms we’ve lost on every First Amendment front. As for freedom of speech, who would ever have imagined that we’d fall so far into Marxist delusion that wide swaths of American youths would clamor for its abolition as a “cause celeb” of “social justice” to protect from criticism such atrocities as the genital mutilation of children?
All of these travesties have been orchestrated and facilitated by the one First Amendment sacred cow left entirely untouched: the “free press.”
WND’s motto is “A Free Press for a Free People,” but I am virtually certain that our government today, in cooperation with radical leftist groups like the SPLC, is using its power to limit WND’s reach. This affects me personally. To whatever extent government officials or agents are defining my speech in this venue or any other as “disinformation,” “misinformation,” or “hate” to justify suppressing it, they are violating the plain meaning of the First Amendment. Indeed, grassroots political opinion like mine was THE speech at issue in the days of the founders – not news reporting by corporations – meaning I (and all citizen editorialists) should have greater standing in this matter than all the multinationals combined. I’m pretty sure Thomas Paine would agree with me.
The Twitter files exposed massive government coercion of social media, and investigations of public health spending to push the fake vaccine have exposed big government payoffs to traditional media companies to peddle their COVID propaganda. I suggest such conspiracies are a First Amendment deal-breaker. To whatever extent these media companies are controlled or manipulated by government they are not “free press” in the original intent of the founders and should not enjoy its protections.
Trump’s stunning victory has presented opportunities to the MAGA movement to repair the massive damage Marxists have done to this country over the past century – starting by breaking their propaganda machinery by which they mentally enslave the not-yet-red-pilled masses.
I suggest two simple lines of attack. First, impose an “equal time” mandate on all media entities that accept government money or assets, starting with the infuriatingly biased NPR/NPM. On any topic of public controversy, all perspectives, accurately represented by people of comparable stature and knowledge, must receive equal time. Compliance will be monitored by a large body of registered volunteers – say 300, chosen by annually by lottery – operating under the supervision of the both the FCC and Congress: the whole system operating as a Public Media Oversight Network to ensure fairness and accuracy.
Second, by congressional statute create a “false light” cause of action in defamation cases for deliberate misrepresentation by media companies, with lower standards of proof, in which the punishment is limited to prominently correcting the record and issuing a statement of apology to the defamed – with monetary damages available only against four-time repeat offenders. Grant private media companies who voluntarily participate in the Public Media Oversight Network an exemption from litigation.
The “Free Press” must never again be allowed to manipulate We the People by abusing their power over public information.
