We are on the brink of what might be the last even marginally free or fair election in history. This might be our final shot at voting ourselves out peacefully.

Out of what?

Of the detailed, fascist plans the left and our elites have in mind for us — the radical transformation of a free republic into a top-down secular oligarchy that wipes out our rights at will, citing “public health” or “misinformation” or claims that our beliefs boil down to simple “hate.” A regime that demonizes whole ethnic groups, such as white people or Jews. Which declares certain religious believers to be second-class citizens, unfit to be parents who adopt or foster children. (That’s just a baby step away from declaring us unfit to raise our own biological kids, and the trans groomers at public schools are already working on that.)

The left has openly embraced preemptive censorship, selective prosecution, Stalinist show trials with openly biased judges and cherry-picked juries in unfair venues, and religious/political litmus tests for federal employees and the military. We know that even while President Donald Trump was in office, the Deep State and permanent government used state coercion to censor the media and bias the 2020 election results.

And the U.S. Supreme Court has just ruled, 6-3, that states don’t have “standing” to challenge such end runs around the First Amendment — just in time to give the Biden regime a free hand in the build-up to what might be the last real American election.

A Free Hand to Stifle Debate Before the Election

By focusing on the alleged lack of “standing” the Court didn’t rule on the merits of Murthy v. Missouri, creating a precedent that binds future courts. But it didn’t need to. If the Left wins this election, it will either gut or pack the Court. So future Justice Fani Willis or Juan Merchan will rule however she or he likes, perhaps without even bothering to cite precedents — after all, let’s not forget what a white male “patriarchal” practice that is, enshrined as it is by our racist slave-owning Founders.

Make no mistake, in the build-up to this election, this is a catastrophe. As The Blaze reported:

Justice Samuel Alito filed a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, in which he stated, “If the lower courts’ assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years.”

“Freedom of speech serves many valuable purposes, but its most important role is protection of speech that is essential to democratic self-government … and speech that advances humanity’s store of knowledge, thought, and expression in fields such as science, medicine, history, the social sciences, philosophy, and the arts,” wrote Alito, adding that the speech stifled by the Biden administration fell “squarely into those categories.”

Alito acknowledged that private entities are not subject to the First Amendment, but government officials cannot coerce them to suppress speech. He emphasized that there is ample evidence the Biden administration did just that and noted further that the majority shirked the duty to tackle the free speech at issue in Murthy, thus permitting “the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.”

Alito slammed the efforts by Biden’s cabal of high-ranking bureaucrats as “dangerous,” noting both their censorship was “blatantly unconstitutional” and that the country may come to regret the majority’s decision. …

Blaze Media cofounder and nationally syndicated radio host Glenn Beck wrote, “The Supreme Court has ruled that, practically, the government can continue pressuring social media companies to censor Americans. This is an absolute gut punch.”

Washing Their Hands with Pilate

The court lifted lower court injunctions against the Biden administration, freeing it up to use the same levers of coercion against X, Rumble, TikTok, and other platforms that might try to report on the next big election scoop — just as the CIA pressured a not-unwilling Facebook to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020.

The most perceptive comment on this decision penned by Amy Coney Barrett (whom I did warn everyone about a few years back) comes from conservative attorney Robert Barnes:

When #SCOTUS wanted to play Pontius Pilate and evade responsibility for 2020 Election issues, they cited “standing.” When #SCOTUS needed to let @US_FDA get away with lying to kids about vaccines, they cited “standing.” Now, #SCOTUS greenlights state censorship citing “standing.”

— Robert Barnes (@barnes_law) June 26, 2024

Barnes picked the right biblical character to cite. Justices Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Roberts refused to judge the rights or wrongs of the case, but simply washed their hands of it. They didn’t do that because they’re part of the radical Left, any more than Pilate belonged to the Sadducee sect. They chose to side with the administrative state and its backdoor censors and Karens because they’re “Nice” people, rather than Good people. They want peace and quiet at any cost.

Nice People Are Sheep. Good People Are Good Shepherds

That’s a crucial distinction, which we need to get through our heads. “Nice” people make their decisions based on the social signals they see all around them. They walk along with the herd and try to keep things peaceable and cheerful. They speak and think and vote and act based on imitating their betters and their neighbors. (Check out my Davos TED Talk explaining how that works.) In decent societies and sane times, that’s often enough. Maybe not to save their souls, but to keep them honest citizens and render them basically harmless.

In a basically virtuous society based on solid, truthful principles — such as the old America, before 1968 or so — being “Nice” often meant being mostly Good, since the people you were imitating and the platitudes you had internalized were actually Good. You didn’t have to think too hard for yourself — and that was safe, since what you passively absorbed from your parents and schools and churches was Good. It had been put in place originally by brave, dissenting zealots from the Apostles and the Martyrs up through our Founding Fathers — who weren’t “Nice” (like the Pharisees and the Tories) but instead were radically Good.

Pilate was nice, and so were the Pharisees and Sadducees (in public). They didn’t make waves, buck the system, or say things that upset their peers. Like our elites today, they run in herds, and enforce conformity by shredding any who step one hoof out of line.

But John the Baptist? Jesus? The Apostles after Pentecost? They weren’t nice at all. They called out kings for adultery, scribes for hypocrisy, and synagogue leaders for seeking the death of Jesus. When Saul had his vision of Jesus, he abandoned his lifelong effort to be a nice, obedient Pharisee, and instead fell in love with the Good.

Amy Barrett’s House Won’t Fly any Flags that Upset Her Neighbors

Justices like Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Roberts are eager, perhaps even desperate, to polish their social standing and attain respectability among the circles of other “Nice” people who went to top-notch schools and live in really “Nice” neighborhoods. They don’t want to be targeted as Justices Alito and Thomas have been for a constant drumbeat of hatred and dishonest charges. So the “Nice” justices won’t take any risks to side with the irritating, rough-edged rebels and zealots the Biden machine worked to silence. “Nice” people don’t push back, don’t question authority and don’t make waves. They wear the mask, take the vax, and stay locked in their homes when they’re told.

Anti-vaxxers, election fraud whistleblowers, January 6 protestors, and other socially disruptive elements might in theory have First Amendment rights. They might even turn out to be Good. But don’t expect the “Nice” crowd who want to fit in with the “best” people to risk their good names defending them. Instead, as the Supreme Court just did, they will give us Barabbas. After all, that’s what everyone seems to want.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of more than 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.