The Brew: Supreme Court Weighs Whether 1st Amendment Can Be Suspended Whenever the Government Really, Really Wants To
Editor’s Note: Stream stalwart John Zmirak will be producing “The Brew” this week while Al Perrotta is on vacation.
Last week we pointed out that the manufactured COVID panic and the crackdowns on freedom of movement, speech, and association it allegedly justified were a dry run for our elites to tear up all our remaining rights — allegedly for our own protection. They deemed us to be too gullible, too easily led, too subject to Russian disinformation to read more than one opinion on public health, consult the doctors we trust, or even fill the prescriptions they wrote us without help. That’s for hacks at the China-dominated World Health Organization and political entrepreneurs in the National Institutes of Health like Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci to decide — and the censors at YouTube and Facebook to enforce.
If you’re one of those nostalgic souls who is still attached to old-timey notions like “freedom of speech” or the “Nuremburg principles,” you might have wondered how any of these aggressive attempts to pen us all up like veal calves awaiting slaughter passed constitutional muster. If you voiced such an objection, the answer you would have received from our self-appointed masters would have combined one or all of the following three elements:
- How quaint. You’re still beguiled by that outdated set of rights conceived for themselves by slaveowners.
- You’re killing people, just as surely as the Nazis did. How can you call yourself a Christian?
And - Your account has been deleted. There is no appeal.
It almost seems like a miracle, but the Supreme Court is actually hearing a case on whether any of this was ever legal in the first place. As the Daily Caller reports:
The case, Murthy v. Missouri, asks the justices to consider what a district court judge referenced as the Biden administration’s “Orwellian” efforts to suppress speech online. It stems from a lawsuit filed in 2022 by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, along with five individual plaintiffs whose own speech was censored on social media.
“Even if you have not been personally censored, you’ve been impacted by this censorship because the First Amendment exists, not just for the speaker, but also for the listener,” Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, one of three doctors who joined the case as a plaintiff, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It’s necessary in a democracy that people have access to both sides of a contested issue or a public debate.”
Records obtained by the plaintiffs in the course of the litigation highlighted explicit requests by the White House asking platforms to remove posts “ASAP” or take an account down “immediately” … .
One of the plaintiffs seeking to discredit the public health dictatorship we lived under is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a brilliant epidemiologist and professor at Stanford University — where he was targeted in a coordinated campaign of harassment for questioning lockdowns and rushed, untested, mandatory vaccines.
(Jay and I attended the same conference in Florence in 2022, at which time I got the chance to interview him about the genesis of the COVID panic/crackdown and his role in resisting it. Check it out if you’ve never read it.)
If you’d like to follow the legal arguments between these freedom advocates and the legal spokesmen for the Biden regime, see scholar Jonathan Turley’s fascinating thread:
The oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri are about to begin on the censorship of social media by the government. It could prove one of the most important free speech cases in the history of the Court…
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) March 18, 2024
Meanwhile, remember that the so-called TikTok ban which gullible Republicans are lining up behind scheming Democrats to support would make any such censorship at the whim of a sitting president infinitely easier. He would simply have to direct someone like Peter Strzok to “determine” (not in any way prove) that Rumble or X or The Eric Metaxas Show or The Stream was “controlled” by foreign “adversaries.” That definition too would be entirely up to the Deep State, which could theoretically declare the Vatican or the government of Hungary an “adversary,” and censor anyone publishing “disinformation.”
The Neville Chamberlain of Texas?
It’s always worth listening to what Tucker Carlson has to say — and at this rate, who knows how much longer we’ll even be permitted to? Carlson visited Texas to address the open borders which Biden has imposed on the whole country, noting that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott endured three long years of unbridled lawlessness and chaos before political pressure finally forced him to protect Texas citizens. The excellent Texas Scorecard reports on Carlson’s remarks:
“I don’t understand how you can be the governor of a state in 2020 and see the border open up and get invaded and not do anything about it.”
When later asked by Tarrant County GOP Chairman Bo French to rate the governor’s performance handling the border crisis, Carlson said, “Neville Chamberlain will get a fairer shake” when judged by history.
“In a lot of ways, [Greg Abbott] is a wartime governor. There’s an invasion of your state. And he’s completely ignored it.” …
Carlson’s remarks also centered on a recent theme in his own reporting: the spiritual battle taking place in America.
“This is not flesh and blood at all. If you’re offended by prayer, you’re taking orders, okay? I don’t see another rational explanation for it.”
It sounds as if Carlson agrees with the “Gadarene Swine” theory of progressive politics so often voiced here at The Stream.
Would You Like a Cluster Bomb With Your Slurpee?
But hey, if the chaos gets too unsettling, just remind yourself of the mantra “Our Diversity Is Our Strength.” Keep repeating that whenever you’re tempted to think “Christian Nationalist” thoughts or resent the invasion of unskilled, unvetted foreigners who now outnumber the population of most of the red states. Maybe you can whisper those words as you breathe your last, should you happen to be the victim of a “new American” like this one The New York Post reports on:
A Lebanese migrant who was caught sneaking over the border admitted he’s a member of Hezbollah, he hoped to make a bomb, and his destination was New York, The Post can reveal.
Basel Bassel Ebbadi, 22, was caught by the US Border Patrol on March 9 near El Paso, Texas. While in custody, he was asked what he was doing in the US, to which he replied, “I’m going to try to make a bomb,” according to a Border Patrol document exclusively obtained by The Post.
What could possibly go wrong?
Cops With Guns Show Up to Protect “Diversity”
In case you’re wondering where our country is headed without God’s intervention, with bipartisan coalitions voting to give the president and the Deep State arbitrary powers of censorship … the once freedom-loving Swiss have given us a preview. Gateway Pundit reports:
Conservative activist Martin Sellner, of Génération Identitaire, was prevented from giving a speech at an event in Switzerland addressing the dangers of European nations taking in migrants.
Sellner shared on X that he had been invited by a local group, Junge Tat (Young Deed), to “talk about remigration and the ethnic vote” and what happened at a recent meeting in Germany.
Check out the video. And remember that Switzerland is a country with robust gun rights and a constitution closely based on ours:
BREAKING: Armed police shut the power and arrest Martin Sellner just as he was about to deliver an anti-immigration lecture today in Switzerland
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 16, 2024
Women, Shut Up and Comply
But it’s not as if our masters would use their new, absolute power to enforce anything crazy. Their goals for our society are all perfectly rational, moderate, and entirely evidence-based. For instance, their insistence that women who object to “trans” men shaving their whiskers in women’s bathrooms should have their gym memberships revoked:
Woman in Planet Fitness claims she went into the bathroom and this man who thinks he’s a woman was in there shaving.
Why does @PlanetFitness allow men to use the women’s bathroom and invade women’s private spaces?? pic.twitter.com/qVJ0YUFQvc
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 12, 2024
Along The Stream
If you watch a lot of “MAGA” media you might get the idea that right-wing, Hindu nationalists in India are our allies. After all, they’re opposed to China and to militant Islam. But these quasi-fascist pagans hate one thing even more: Christianity. And they’re engaged in literal genocide against Indian believers, as Jason Jones reports.
Don’t miss Stream contributor and scholar Tim Furnish’s thoughtful account later today of how we can learn about the fallen realities of power and how it’s wielded by streaming Shakespeare’s plays.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His upcoming book is No Second Amendment, No First.
