Is the First Amendment Under Attack on Its Birthday?
By Jane Hampton Cook on Substack
Though it is the most cherished of the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment is under attack as the Bill of Rights reaches its 230th anniversary.
“What’s happened in this country over the last year is kind of this bizarre imposition of totalitarian controls, the deconstruction of the Constitution,” Robert F, Kennedy, Jr. explained to Tucker Carlson on Fox Nation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments declared an emergency and set aside all of the Constitution’s amendments except for the second amendment. Kennedy is the author of the new book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.
Kennedy explained that Big Tech and many in the news media took particular aim at the First Amendment’s freedom of speech by finding ways to shut down views that dissented from the federal medical bureaucracy, including views expressed by physicians and scientists.
“Anybody who wanted to criticize the government they got rid of. That’s why we had the Revolution — so that we could criticize the government. And we put that first, and yet it’s gone,” Kennedy said.
Big Tech doesn’t hide it. Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, declared that Twitter’s “role is not to be bound by the First Amendment.” Instead, he advocated and implemented censorship.
How does today’s cultural attack on the First Amendment compare to other times of crisis in American history?