As a new Ministry of Truth has been established in the US, it might be time to address the problem of the Freedom of Speech.
Americans have not been taught Civics in the last 30 or more years. Among my students, only about one in 300 knew, where they were allowed to wield the utmost power: in jury duty, where they become the law and, in the case of a “runaway jury,” the whole legal profession has to re-learn the law. Consequently, already by 1996, four out of five judges instructed the jury that they were supposed to examine if the accused had broken the law, instead of taking a look at the law itself, which was based on previous jury verdicts. An unjust law, theoretically, can be rejected by a jury, although jury selections and whatever the judge allows in his or her court of law, fundamentally affect the verdict.
For us, remaining Americans, this is how it started, in Thomas Jefferson’s Inaugural Speech, after he had been bailed out of prison for talking against the government, because that was against the law after the first President’s administration had passed the Sedition Act. Jefferson, instead of looking for revenge, said the following:
“All too will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind, let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty, and even life itself, are but dreary things. And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance, as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions. . . [E]very difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans: we are all federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.”
As someone, who was born and grew up in a ghetto, I can attest to the fact that life is not worth living, if you cannot even speak your mind. In fact, living in fear is far worse than death, something the covidiots must have learnt by now.
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One more thing to add:
In 1989, when I read a Jewish community newspaper in MA, the editorial was about historical revisionism that stated that the Holocaust had never happened. While that statement has been proven more and more over the years, I didn’t know much about the details at the time.
In the first paragraph, the editorial simply presented the fact that there were parties that denied the Holocaust.
I expected the second paragraph to say that such people should be drawn and quartered. Instead, the editor said something like this:
“What a wonderful country we live in! We can say what we think. Imagine, if you empower someone to stop anyone from talking and even punish for that, one day, the same power can, and will be used against you.”
FYI, Holocaust denial is a crime, punishable with prison sentence in several countries. In Germany, a 94-year-old woman was sent to jail a short while ago.
Freedom of speech and religion or lack thereof..
These became first amendment because those other amends rest squarely on foundation of first, which a few amongst may have forgotten.
So here:
Bill of Rights article, effective December 15th, 1791..
1. Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibition 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.
Other than my personal situation, this was the law from 12-15th -1791 until...3-11-2020.
Oh well, that was a good 229 years and a few months until disCog 1.