Happy birthday, America.
Now, shut up.
That’s the greeting card President Joe Biden and his merry band of deep staters should send to U.S. citizens after spending the better part of the past four years bludgeoning the First Amendment. From “Disinformation czars” to tongue-cutting gag orders on political enemies, the Biden years will be remembered for unrivaled attacks on primary rights.
As Jonathan Turley writes in his new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, Joe Biden is “the most anti-free speech president since John Adams.”
“He has created an unprecedented system of censorship through financial support and his public statements. So the idea that he is really the symbol of constitutional fealty is really alarming, it’s so detached from reality,” the attorney, law professor, columnist, and popular television analyst recently said on Fox News Radio’s “Brian Kilmeade Show.”
Criminalizing Criticism
Turley isn’t spinning hyperbole. Adams’ wholehearted support of the Sedition Act saw a sweeping attack on free speech and freedom of the press at the dawn of the republic. Political enemies were arrested and sent to prison for criticizing the government.
One of the “most dramatic” victims of the law was a representative from Vermont, Matthew Lyon, who was imprisoned for speaking out against President Adams’ “unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and self avarice.” He also featured such rhetoric in his campaign speeches.
Lyon won reelection — from his jail cell.
Sound familiar?
A Dark Age for Freedom of Speech
Biden’s politically weaponized Department of Justice, led by Democrat Party henchman Attorney General Merrick Garland, has unleashed a prosecutorial whirlwind on former President Donald Trump, Biden’s Republican challenger in the rematch of the 2020 presidential election. In large part, DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith is targeting Trump for his speech — what the outgoing president said to his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021. His words — that demonstrators who believed the election was stolen would march to the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically” — became the impetus for charges of “insurrection” and “election interference.”
Federal prosecutors, too, went after hundreds of Americans, many of them engaging in “mostly peaceful protests,” unconstitutionally employing a 2002 obstruction law that the U.S. Supreme Court recently found to be an abuse of power.
At the same time, leftist judges have slapped Trump with gag orders silencing his ability to defend himself in the court of public opinion. The former president has come dangerously close to being ordered to serve jail time for violating the orders.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has worked with Big Tech to silence opposition to their policies, shutting down those who dare to speak out against pandemic lockdowns or the efficacy and dangers of Covid vaccines. The deep state has interfered in elections, using former intelligence agency officials to push a lie that “Russian disinformation” was behind a damning laptop owned by Biden’s convicted felon son. Speaking of disinformation, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security was forced to shut down an Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board” after Americans saw the KGB-style speech monitor for what it was: a threat to the First Amendment.
‘Limits of Presidential Powers’
In the wake of this week’s Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, after Justice Sonia Sotomayor ridiculously warned that the down-the-middle decision allows presidents to order the assassination of their political enemies, Biden just as ridiculously insisted that he had “character” enough to resist abusing his powers.
“I know I will respect the limits of the presidential powers that I have for three-and-a-half years. But any president, including Donald Trump, will now be free to ignore the law,” Biden claimed in a brief speech following both the court’s ruling and his disastrous debate performance last week.
Turley told Kilmeade that not only are Joe Biden and Justice Sotomayor not telling the truth to the American people, but the current White House resident is anything but a beacon of integrity on the limits of executive branch power. (On a related note, Turley mentions how Biden was vice president when then-President Barack Obama ordered the targeted killings of U.S. citizens, including a 16-year-old boy — who had not been charged or convicted of a crime — in a drone strike in Yemen.)
“This president has racked up an impressive array of losses in federal court that repeatedly found that he has violated the Constitution, including racial discrimination rulings,” Turley said.
A Legacy of Destruction
The legal expert takes his new book’s title from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, a tireless voice for civil liberties and the indispensable right of free expression.
In a 1927 opinion Brandeis wrote, “Those who won our independence … believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile.”
The difference between John Adams and Joe Biden is that Adams performed countless acts of noble service to this exceptional land of liberty, despite some very wrongheaded and tyrannical policies to the contrary. Biden has spent a lifetime in politics enriching himself and his family while weakening the liberties and nation Adams helped build.
Biden’s legacy among U.S. presidents will be the many ways he destroyed and allowed the destruction of the indispensable right.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
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