(Originally Posted July 2018)
This 4th of July, when you watch the fireworks, will you think about the Declaration of Independence? No other country was founded on limited government and free speech.
This Constitution Day, John Stossel asks: what’s the most important part of the 230-year-old document?
John interviews Collin Lehmann, the winner of the “Censored in America” essay contest. Lehmann’s essay makes an eloquent advocacy for maximum First Amendment freedom.
I have always said that the Left are “totalitarians,” and that is because they want “total thought” — in other words, homogenized thinking through the filter of Leftism (race, class, sex: the “unholy trinitarian” goal of the Left). Here is the latest on this fight for societal freedom.
This is the excuse the totalitarians are looking for, PJ-MEDIA has a must read:
….While conservatives rightly denounced the violence this week, this response bodes ill for conservative speech not just on social media, but in the public square and even in private organizations.
In the aftermath of the Capitol riots, Twitter suspended President Donald Trump’s account for the first time and Facebook permanently banned the president. After Trump deleted the tweets Twitter had flagged and had his account restored, Twitter proceeded to ban him entirely on Friday, and then it banned the official President of the United States (POTUS) account.
Facebook throttled the great Rush Limbaugh, notifying him that his “Page has reduced distribution and other restrictions because of repeated sharing of false news.” Limbaugh left Twitter in protest after the platform banned Trump. Apple and Google attacked Parler, claiming that the new haven for conservatives had allowed people to plan the violence of the Capitol riots on its platform.
House Democrats filed articles of impeachment that explicitly blame President Trump for the Capitol riots, even though he never told his supporters to invade the Capitol. While the president’s exaggerated rhetoric inflamed the rioters, Democrats repeatedly did the same thing this summer. Before and after Black Lives Matter protests devolved into destructive and deadly riots, Democratic officials repeatedly claimed America suffers from “systemic racism” and institutionalized “white supremacy.”
Big Tech did not remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s accounts when she called for “uprisings” against the Trump administration. Facebook and Twitter did not target Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when she claimed that allegedly marginalized groups have “no choice but to riot.” These platforms did not act against Kamala Harris when she said the riots “should not” stop.
This week, Joe Biden condemned the Capitol rioters, saying, “What we witnessed yesterday was not dissent, it was not disorder, it was not protest. It was chaos. They weren’t protesters, don’t dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists. It’s that basic, it’s that simple.”
Yet he refused to speak in those terms when Black Lives Matter and antifa militants were throwing Molotov cocktails at federal buildings, setting up “autonomous zones,” and burning down cities. Instead, he condemned Trump for holding up a Bible at a church — without mentioning the fact that that very church had been set on fire the night before.
Despite this hypocrisy, Biden’s speech on Thursday proved instructive. Biden used the Capitol riots to condemn Trump’s entire presidency, accusing Trump of having “unleashed an all-out assault on our institutions of our democracy from the outset.” Biden twisted Trump’s actions into an attack on “democracy.” He claimed Trump’s originalist judges were a ploy to undermine impartial justice — when they were truly the exact opposite. Biden claimed Trump’s complaints about the Obama administration spying on his campaign were merely an “attack” on America’s “intelligence services.” Biden said Trump’s complaints about media bias constituted an attack on the “free press,” when the Obama administration actually attacked the free press.….
UPDATED post via PJ-MEDIA… who points out that these social media tech giants think they are the arbiter of speech as well as the type of information you consume. What is the free market solution? To start your own “companies,” or outlets of free speech. However, as PARLER is succeeding against Twitter and Facebook as a place to speak freely, Big Tech is going after those, too. More via PJ in a minute.
Many #NeverTrumpers love David French’s views — as he is the intellectual leader of the rational side of the movement. This article by THE FEDERALIST needs to be gone through, here is the portion I think is most relevant, but the entire thing should be read (I linked to it in a conversation I just had with a #NeverTrumper):
….National Review writer David French has criticized the bill for attempting to regulate free speech. He argues that this invites a dangerous level of government involvement in public discourse. Subjecting social media companies to government scrutiny may sound appealing with a Republican president in power and a predominantly Republican Senate, but this could backfire if Democrats take control: “Will a Kamala Harris administration decide that disproportionate conservative success violates political neutrality?”
Bad Examples Abound
Besides taking a rather Pollyannaish view on conservative success on social media—never bothering to mention the blatant partisan censorship of conservative voices like Steven Crowder, Prager University, or Live Action—this argument from French and those of other like-minded critics rests on two counterexamples where government cannot regulate speech without violating the First Amendment: a controlled forum like a college classroom, and a public utility like a telephone service.
However, these two examples do not have any bearing on what is meant by free speech. In the case of regulating a public utility, this does not involve actual speech. Speech, in the First Amendment sense, consists of arguments made to a public audience. A telephone service is a means of communication, not a platform for facilitating speech. Therefore, the federal government cannot demand a company like AT&T refuse service to pathological liars or criminals because they perpetuate harmful speech.
Furthermore, if AT&T executives did start to do this, on the grounds that they work for a private company and can do what they want, customers could rightly charge them with discrimination (violating the 14th Amendment). They must provide phone service to all who agree to pay them, not just those who meet their speech guidelines—again, because their service does not pertain to speech, but basic communication, a utility.
In the case of a college lecture hall, the speech in question is not actually free. The professor can make his arguments and say whatever the school permits him to say. He also sets the rules for what students can say. If Dr. Kevin Sorbo tells his students that God doesn’t exist, as he does in the Pure Flix movie “God’s Not Dead,” his students are not free to debate him unless he allows it—which he foolishly does, much to his demise. Nevertheless, they do have the right to free speech outside his class (unless they attend Harvard University) and can complain about their atheist professor all they like.
This is different from students who request government action when they feel their free speech rights are somehow violated because a professor has an opinion that they dislike. Hawley’s bill would not require the fictional Dr. Kevin Sorbo or the real Dr. Fang Zhou to change their views or speech policies to uphold political neutrality in their classroom. It only applies to large social media companies and is meant to prevent silencing any particular view, conservative or progressive.
It’s Naive to Think Big Tech Companies Will Die Out
Given that these social media platforms have billions of users altogether, and will simply buy up any worthy competitor if it stumbles on a new idea (which is the ongoing plotline of the television series “Silicon Valley”), it is misguided to assume that they will pass away like the social media companies of yesteryear (Myspace, Friendster, etc.). The Big Tech platforms are less like a few popular channels on television and more like the whole cable and basic television package. The truth is that they won’t need to change; conservatives who try to create content on their sites will.
Without any laws to check them, Big Tech companies are removing conservative voices and clearing the way for the Democratic narrative that Trump is terrible and more government can save America. Heard often enough, this narrative will convince Americans who have no way of knowing better to vote for Democrats. And it is not a stretch to assume that the first order of business for any Democratic president will be to impose speech laws that suppress conservative ideas or grant greater authority to the Big Tech thought police.
In this, French is right to ask what a Harris administration would do to free speech if given the chance, but wrong to conclude that she would exploit Hawley’s law to do it. She doesn’t need to. Speaking for most Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposes taking away social media’s legal protection (Section 230), considering it a “gift.” She recognizes that Democrat politicians will continue to benefit from the bias dominating all media and only stand to lose if conservatives compete on a level playing field.
It is nonetheless worth noting that even with numerous obstacles put in place, conservatives still dominate the internet because most Americans recognize that they have the better argument and discuss more relevant issues. By contrast, leftist publications depend on skewed narratives and bad arguments and tend to focus on tired topics like the Mueller report, Trump’s tax returns, and Joe Biden.
When given the chance, viewers will watch the watch Crowder over Vox’s Carlos Maza because Crowder is funnier, smarter, and doesn’t rely on people’s sympathy for his success. Of course, if Crowder stops producing his show because YouTube demonetizes his videos, viewers will not have a choice anymore.
In light of this fact, it is probably more accurate to frame the issue of regulating social media as more a matter of a free market than one of free speech, although one depends on the other. Many people on the left want to eliminate competition online and stop losing to conservative content creators. Allegations of hate and radicalization are merely a pretext to this.…
Now, here is the continuation of PJ-MEDIA….
….After the social media platforms nixed Trump, people appeared to leave platforms in droves.
Nancy Pelosi, Ayanna Presley, and other Democrats have egged on rioters in the streets. Their social media accounts are still intact.
Conservative Americans have left the platforms in the understandable belief that if they could cut off the most powerful man in what used to be known as the free world, then they stood no chance.
They’re right.
To avoid the speech police, Americans have been leaving those platforms for Rumble and Parler, social media sites that promise to have few filters on speech. Parler does not allow illegal activity on its site under its terms of service.
But even as conservatives fled Facebook and Twitter for Parler, Big Tech decided to censor the site.
As I reported at PJ Media, Google Play cut off the Parler app from its app store and Apple followed suit in short order.
On Friday, a group called the “Amazon Employees for Climate Justice” wrote a screed to management demanding the tech behemoth boot the Parler app from its servers.
[….]
On Saturday, Amazon capitulated to the leftist rage mob and informed Parler it was getting rid of the social site from its servers.
Parler CEO John Matze announced that at midnight Sunday, Amazon would expunge the app content from its servers. Furthermore, he alleged that the tech giants conspired to orchestrate their moves to make it harder for Parler to stay afloat.
Sunday (tomorrow) at midnight Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet. There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons [sic] proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products.
We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business, however Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies.
This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place. We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out.
#speakfreely
This is tyranny. This is groupthink.
To sum up:
Double standards abound. No one on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram was tossed off those platforms for protesting, rioting, looting, and vandalizing on behalf of Black Lives Matter and antifa. Lobbing Molotov cocktails wouldn’t get a group booted off a platform.
Ayatollahs and the Chinese death camp operators are held in higher regard than the president of the United States of America – and his supporters – because of Wednesday’s siege on the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.
The line is drawn.
UPDATE!
RED STATE and WEASEL ZIPPERS notes the latest attack on free-markets and free speech by the Tech Giants:
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Mocks Parler after Coordinated Big Tech to Take Down His Competition
…So with this coordination to take down the right and any other alternative to Twitter, you would think that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would be standing up for free speech, right? Just kidding.
Not only are they cool with booting off folks on the right from their site and removing the followers from virtually every right leaning account on Twitter, they’re also cool with their competition being stomped on. Indeed, if we were looking into antitrust questions in the coordination of all this, what Jack just posted would be Exhibit #1 in that action.
Here’s Jack celebrating that instead of Parler being the number 1 App on the App Store, his Signal App private messenger is instead. With a little help from his friends.
WEASEL ZIPPERS continues:
Amazon Kills Parler Server
You are not allowed an alternative either. They’re pulling them down tonight at 11:59 p.m. so Parler is looking for a new server.
Via BizPac Review:
Calling it a “coordinated attack,” Parler CEO John Matze informed the social media platform’s users Saturday that Amazon kicked Parler off their web hosting service, which will wipe them off the internet until they find a new host.
This devastating blow coming after Parler was removed from Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store.
The narrative employed to justify the Big Tech attack on Twitter’s biggest competitor is to link Parler, a free speech site being billed by the corrupt media as a “pro-Trump” site, to last week’s U.S. Capitol protest, claiming they allowed “calls for violence.”
MORE:
Video shows a Hasidic synagogue in New York City hosting thousands of people for the wedding of the head rabbi’s grandson in defiance of COVID-19 regulations. The Nov. 8 event were made completely in secret: Neither city officials, who nixed a 10,000-person Hasidic wedding last month, nor the firehouse next door knew of the event, according to the New York Post. Footage depicts a packed crowd in the temple, max capacity 7,000, cheering, singing, and dancing without masks to celebrate Yoel Teitelbaum, grandson of Satmar Grand Rabbi Aaron Teitelman.
Business owners in Buffalo, NY demand “health inspector” leave private property. “Go get a warrant.”
People have had enough of the #COVID19 tyranny curbing their life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. pic.twitter.com/7lo6YKKVrU
— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) November 21, 2020
As an aside… not only has Parler and BitChute are Twitter and YouTube alternatives. The reason is that YouTube demonetizes and censors videos and thought. Another future “separation” will be banks/credit cards. “It is a slow and steady form of gun control gradually gaining momentum with limited public fanfare: If guns cannot be directly taken from the hands of citizens, the next best target is the banks and financial institutions that enable transactions or loans for the industry” (FOX NEWS). Here is NATIONAL REVIEW:
….These efforts started with Citicorp saying it would forbid its retail clients — businesses that, for example, receive loans or offer store credit cards — to sell guns to anyone who didn’t pass a background check (which is already the law for licensed gun dealers). It also barred sales to customers under 21, as well as sales of bump stocks.
Bank of America followed, saying it would no longer lend money to manufacturers of “military style” weapons. (Bank of America was in a particularly interesting position since it was part of a group refinancing Remington Outdoor, a major manufacturer of assault weapons, as it emerged from bankruptcy.) BlackRock Funds, the world’s largest asset manager, said it would offer a new investment fund that excluded gun manufacturers and sellers.
In the resulting outcry, part of the problem was that the discussion mixed up two very different issues: the willingness of banks to lend money to weapons manufacturers and the ability of consumers to use credit cards to make purchases. While banks’ lending policies can have a devastating impact on the companies denied financing, there is no inherent right to a loan from any bank. But if the banks use their financial clout, which they maintain under federal oversight, to impose restrictions on companies’ sales practices, that is a significant step toward a bank-imposed gun-control regime — one that could ultimately choke off the right of consumers to purchase legal products.
When so-called socially responsible lending and investing crosses over into ordering companies to stop selling certain products or to curtail sales to certain buyers, banks begin assuming a power that no one voted to give them. And one needn’t be an alarmist to understand that once financial institutions are allowed to start down this road, they could end up curtailing the rights of businesses and consumers in a way that is incompatible with democracy…..
So soon I expect “conservative banks” and “conservative” credit cards, etc. Why? Because we are running from the truth? No, we are running from the Ministry of Truth.
Mark Dice has a good bit below… but as usual, I am adult enough to put my own warning and let people make up their own minds.
(MOONBATTERY) Liberal establishments act surprised that regular Americans — fed up with being lied to and censored — are escaping the information reservation by establishing their own means of communicating and keeping themselves informed. Join Mark Dice in laughing at their distress as they watch the monopoly they have so obnoxiously abused slipping through their fingers:
Big technology companies are using the COVID-19 tragedy to increase their power over the American population.
At the end you hear people yell “Good!” when the person says freedom of speech was taken away. Just to be clear, Canada DOES NOT HAVE A FIRST AMENDMENT. They really do not have “freedom of speech.” But Canadians “think” they do, and so push this Natural Right by Nature’s God and so are on the side of justice. True justice that protects the freedom of speech of ALL PEOPLE (no matter creed nor religion). America is the ONLY NATION founded on limited government… unfortunately, we have a couple generations that have no idea what that means. And so we will slide slowly to a place similar to Canada. And Canada will be that much further along.
I originally saw this on CHARISMA NEWS, but also wish to encourage those visit WINTERY KNIGHT. Here are some excerpts from both. One More Thing To Note… while there are links to the above video, one should watch any number of Lynn’s videos, they are good and show his demeanor throughout. Loving.:
Pastor David Lynn of Christ Forgiveness Ministries was arrested on June 4, 2019, for preaching the gospel publicly in Toronto, Canada. The neighborhood he was preaching in was Church-Wellesley Village. This neighborhood is known to be a place where many of the LGBTQ community in Toronto reside. His ministry is currently on an outdoor preaching tour throughout the 22 districts of Toronto. June 4, happened to be the day they scheduled for that district.
It is not uncommon for someone to think “open-air preaching” and “LGBTQ neighborhood” and immediately jump to thoughts of preachers condemning homosexuals to hell. However, Pastor Lynn’s preaching was some of the most loving and gracious preaching I have ever seen and heard, which is why it is outrageous that he was arrested.
The entire time of preaching was livestreamed via Facebook and can be found on YouTube. Throughout the video, it is surprising to see the reaction of those who were listening to Lynn’s preaching. The more love he poured out, the more hate and resistance he received. As anyone can see if they view the video, Pastor Lynn was respectful and kind throughout all of his time preaching. As he shared the gospel, he also made statements like “We are here to tell you that we hate nobody.” He emphasized God’s love again and again.
[….]
Canada does have hate-speech laws. However, there is no way Lynn’s preaching could be deemed as hate speech. He stated while preaching, “Everyone is accepted. … and that is what we preach as Christians.”
In order to not make anyone listening feel singled out, he said “Jesus died for the sinner. … Every heterosexual has sin. Every homosexual has sin. Sin is when we violate the laws of God.” He did not target any particular group of people or single out homosexuality.
Though he was very loving throughout the entire encounter, tensions escalated, and people began to form a mob of protest around him. As he tried to walk away from the most adamant protesters, they crowded in on him and would not let him move. Throughout the encounter, as he tried to walk away from them, they pressed in on him and blocked him. At times, they even pressed their bodies against him, which in technicality is assault.
When the police arrived, rather than dealing with those who were assaulting Pastor Lynn, the police blamed him for creating a disturbance of peace. Even upon his request to deal with those who had assaulted him, the police would not listen to him.
Pastor Lynn, preaches on a weekly basis all throughout Toronto with amplification and, according to his statements, he has never been in violation of the law by using amplification. In the video that captured the entirety of the event, the officers told him that he needed to preach without amplification. They said this despite him not being in any violation of the law. He then proceeded to preach without amplification, but not long after, the officers decided to arrest him.
Later that evening, in a statement to the media, he said, “Every community in Toronto should have the same laws, and everyone should be welcome.” He continued, “Everyone should have rights, dignity and respect, just like Christians should as well.”
He clarified that throughout his preaching, he was telling those listening, “God loves you. There is hope for you.” “Whatever community you are, God loves you. Jesus died for you.”
We must understand the importance of this event. It is a gross violation against free speech, and it shows any Christian a precursor of what persecution could look like in the future.
Here in North America, we are in a serious battle for rights that we have taken for granted. There are groups, organizations and individuals that want to make certain types of free speech illegal. Pastor Lynn’s arrest is nothing short of a violation of his right to free speech. He was not inciting anyone to violence, and neither was he being defamatory. He was preaching the gospel. He was preaching that Jesus Christ loves each person and died specifically for them. In spite of this, he received harsh protest which ended in his arrest. This should greatly concern any Christian…….
This isn’t the first time this has happened. Steven Crowder loves to run through a bit of the history with people, some examples (the third video shows the creep of totalitarianism [total thought] here in the states):
And now they’re arresting Christian pastors. Here is a short — true — statement by WINTERY KNIGHT, who eruditely acknowledges the above (I will emphasize)
I try to stay informed about countries that are more advanced on the path of secular leftism, such as Canada and Venezuela. Canada is about 10 years ahead of us down the path of secular leftism. They legalized same-sex marriage 10 years before we did. They started persecuting Christian businesses 10 years before we did.
[….]
You can clearly see that in Canada, the police don’t care about basic human rights. Those policemen have been taught secular leftism. They don’t know anything about “human rights”. They only know that to keep their jobs, they must do as the secular leftists in power tell them. The laws are not based on morality. The laws are based on the need for the secular leftist elites to be able to do what they need to do without anyone disagreeing with them. The police aren’t the guardians of the moral law, they’re just hired muscle there to enforce the will of the secular left.
Rights like free speech and religious liberty DO NOT EXIST in Canada. Christians and conservatives have a duty to pay taxes to their secular left overlords, but they don’t have a right to disagree with their secular left overlords. They don’t have a right to live their lives as Christians, and run their families as Christians. If they try to act like Christians, then they wind up in front of a Human Rights Commission, or a criminal court, or in a jail cell.
And there is no freedom of the press in Canada. If a Canadian tries to expose any of the abuses of human rights to the public, the courts will send the police to their door to arrest them. You see, they want to suppress the human rights of those who disagree with them, but they don’t want anyone to know about it. They want people to believe that Canada is as free as the United States, so they don’t want reports about their heavy-handed totalitarianism to get out to the rest of the world. This suppression of the truth by force has always been the standard operating procedure of the secular left – in every country where they have seized power.
If you don’t want this for America, then you have to vote against the secular left, and do your part to persuade others not to vote for them.
WINTERY goes on to link to similar topic he has posted on:
Related Posts
(UPDATED ARTICLE)
An update to an old case from NATIONAL REVIEW (h-t ELDER STATEMENT):
…In a stinging 63-page ruling, the court held that Marquette University violated its own faculty handbook when it effectively terminated professor John McAdams for writing a blog post criticizing a graduate student instructor’s attempts to silence debate about gay rights in her ethics class.
The facts of the case are relatively simple. In late 2014, a student approached Professor McAdams and told him that his instructor, a graduate student named Cheryl Abbate, had “listed a number of issues on the board” — including “gay rights” — and then said, “Everybody agrees on this, and there is no need to discuss it.”
After class, the student approached the instructor and attempted to engage her in a discussion about gay marriage. After an initially appropriate exchange, the instructor shut down the discussion, saying that “you don’t have a right in this class to make homophobic comments” and “in this class, homophobic comments, racist comments, will not be tolerated.” She then “invited the student to drop the class.”….
Here are three older uploads regarding the issue above, newest to oldest:
Dennis Prager gives us a quick update to Professor John McAdams story.
For background on this, see my posts on the matter:
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has called for McAdams’s reinstatement in light of Marquette’s egregious violations of his rights.
See more at Marquette Warrior Blog.
Dennis Prager interviews a tenured Professor John McAdams from Marquette University… a Jesuit [Catholic] University. He recounts a student being told — essentially — that any in-class discussion of same-sex marriage is akin to bigotry and intolerance.
The Professor has a blog entitled “MARQUETTE WARRIOR” where he recounts this issue. Of course it was picked up by other sites as well, for instance, BREITART, as well as on national radio (listen herein).
The irony is that this is suppose to be a religious institution and a place for higher learning. In all the philosophy classes I have been in I have never had the right NOT to be offended when talk of my Christian faith comes into class discussion. Nor would I want or force people to accept the claims of my faith “in situ.”
Challenge and freedom of thought IS a corner stone of any healthy society. We see what barbaric societies do to try and intolerantly make another civilized society tolerant (speaking here of Charlie Hebdo).
If, in a philosophy or ethics class, or a political science class subjects are untouchable… is this not an intolerant form of governance on the university level? Where thinking outside of boxes or freedom of expression and thought are suppose to be paramount? It turns out the university is the most “unfree” place in America — the opposite of its goal I think:
This is a sad-sad story.
Here is Sean Hannity interviewing James O’Keefe. This is sort-of an intro to the following videos…. which I will add as they are released.
ONE – A Project Veritas undercover investigation has revealed a senior network security engineer at Twitter suggesting that his company turns over the private communications and deleted tweets of President Donald Trump to the Department of Justice. If true, it is yet unknown whether Twitter is voluntarily disclosing this sensitive information or acting under a court order. Twitter is currently in the midst of defending itself from left-leaning criticism that President Trump hasn’t been removed from the enormous media platform for violations of Twitter’s Terms of Service.
TWO – In the latest undercover Project Veritas video investigation, eight current and former Twitter employees are on camera explaining steps the social media giant is taking to censor political content that they don’t like.
THREE – Project Veritas has released undercover footage of Twitter Engineers and employees admitting that Twitter employees view”everything you post” on their servers, including private “sex messages,” and “d*ck pics.” The engineers also admit that Twitter analyzes this information to create a “virtual profile” of you which they sell to advertisers.
Greg Lukianoff is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He previously served as FIRE’s first director of legal and public advocacy until he was appointed president in 2006. He graduated from American University (Washington) and Stanford Law School. In this clip, he talks about ridiculous cases of prohibited speech on university and how they are losing on free speech issues in court. Full video is HERE.
Michael Medved discusses and takes some calls regarding SCOTUS hearing oral arguments today about Masterpieces Cakeshop’s case (Podcast: SCOTUS Hears Oral Arguments For Masterpiece Cakeshop Case [The Federalist] | Statement of cake artist Jack Phillips following oral arguments at US Supreme Court [ADF])
This post should be married to my other post regarding the 2nd Amendment,
“The 2nd Amendment Was Only For Muskets.”
Here is the amendment as ratified by the States and authenticated by Thomas Jefferson, the Secretary of State:
As Founder, Tench Coxe, of Pennsylvania — noted:
“As the military forces which must occasionally be raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the next article (of amendment) in their right to keep and bear their private arms.” — Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789
In other words, the comma in that Amendment separates the clause… there are TWO part to this Amendment, and so it should read (The RPT version):
In other words at the split in the sentence, what is reasonable to protect a state (tanks, bazookas, planes). And what is reasonable to protect a home and hunt with (pistols, semi-auto rifles/shotguns [like the AR], etc).
Here, Mark Levin explains these concepts to a caller to his radio show:
David French discusses some of the issues in his article in NATIONAL REVIEW discussing the original text of this Amendment:
…As Justice Scalia noted in his Heller decision, the amendment contains both a prefatory clause and an operative clause. The prefatory clause, a common feature at the time of drafting, does not limit the operative clause; rather, it explains its purpose.
The operative clause is, of course, clear: “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” As Scalia correctly observed, every other time the original, un-amended Constitution or the Bill of Rights uses the phrase “right of the people,” the text “unambiguously refer[s] to individual rights.” Further, the language clearly indicates that the amendment wasn’t creating a new right but recognizing a pre-existing individual liberty — one that is referenced in the 1689 English Bill of Rights. The language “shall not be infringed” indicates recognition, not creation.
But what about the prefatory clause? What does the a “well regulated militia” have to do with an individual right? Scalia explained well in Heller:
The Second Amendment’s prefatory clause announces the purpose for which the right was codified: to prevent elimination of the militia. The prefatory clause does not suggest that preserving the militia was the only reason Americans valued the ancient right; most undoubtedly thought it even more important for self-defense and hunting. But the threat that the new Federal Government would destroy the citizens’ militia by taking away their arms was the reason that right — unlike some other English rights — was codified in a written Constitution.
To believe that the Second Amendment is a collective right, Scalia concluded, is to believe that the authors of the Bill of Rights employed individualist language in order to protect the people’s right to take part in militia organizations over which the national government enjoys plenary power…
[….]
It is critical to remember that the Founding Fathers were Englishmen before they were Americans. When they began to sow the seeds of revolt against the British crown, they sought not to destroy all that had gone before but to protect rights that they believed they already possessed. Thus, when George III responded to unrest by attempting to disarm rebellious colonists, he “provoked polemical reactions by Americans invoking their rights as Englishmen to keep arms,” Scalia wrote. (“Arms,” incidentally, did not mean only “muskets” but included any personal weapon that could be wielded by an individual, including but not limited to “musket and bayonet,” “side arms,” and “sabre, holster pistols, and carbine.”)
Justice Scalia understood this well:
By the time of the founding, the right to have arms had become fundamental for English subjects. Blackstone, whose works, we have said, “constituted the preeminent authority on English law for the founding generation,” cited the arms provision of the Bill of Rights as one of the fundamental rights of Englishmen. His description of it cannot possibly be thought to tie it to militia or military service. It was, he said, “the natural right of resistance and self-preservation,” and “the right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defence.” Other contemporary authorities concurred. Thus, the right secured in 1689 as a result of the Stuarts’ abuses was by the time of the founding understood to be an individual right protecting against both public and private violence.
Writing in 1803, after the ratification of the Bill of Rights, St. George Tucker updated Blackstone’s Commentaries. In America, Tucker wrote, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed . . . and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government.” The United States, he boasted, “may reasonably hope that the people will never cease to regard the right of keeping and bearing arms as the surest pledge of their liberty.”
[….]
One cannot analyze the Second Amendment without understanding its moral and philosophical underpinnings. Colonial America was a land populated by people who were both highly literate biblically and steeped in Lockean philosophy.
The biblical record sanctioning self-defense is clear. In Exodus 22, the Law of Moses permits a homeowner to kill even a mere thief who entered his home at night, and the books of Esther and Nehemiah celebrate the self-defense of the Jews against their lawless attackers. Nehemiah exhorted the Israelites to defend themselves: “Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your homes.” The oft-forgotten climax of the book of Esther is an act of bloody self-defense against a genocidal foe.
Nor did Jesus require his followers to surrender their lives — or the lives of spouses, children, or neighbors — in the face of armed attack. His disciples carried swords, and in one memorable passage in Luke 22, he declared there were circumstances in which the unarmed should arm themselves: “If you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.” Christ’s famous admonition in his Sermon the Mount to “turn the other cheek” in the face of a physical blow is not a command to surrender to deadly violence, and it certainly isn’t a command to surrender family members or neighbors to deadly violence.
In his Second Treatise of Civil Government, Locke described the right of self-defense as a “fundamental law of nature”:
Sec. 16. The state of war is a state of enmity and destruction: and therefore declaring by word or action, not a passionate and hasty, but a sedate settled design upon another man’s life, puts him in a state of war with him against whom he has declared such an intention, and so has exposed his life to the other’s power to be taken away by him, or any one that joins with him in his defence, and espouses his quarrel; it being reasonable and just, I should have a right to destroy that which threatens me with destruction: for, by the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred: and one may destroy a man who makes war upon him, or has discovered an enmity to his being, for the same reason that he may kill a wolf or a lion; because such men are not under the ties of the commonlaw of reason, have no other rule, but that of force and violence, and so may be treated as beasts of prey, those dangerous and noxious creatures, that will be sure to destroy him whenever he falls into their power. (Emphasis added.)
Moreover, Locke argues, these laws of nature were inseparable from the will of God:
The rules that they make for other men’s actions, must, as well as their own and other men’s actions, be conformable to the law of nature, i.e. to the will of God, of which that is a declaration, and the fundamental law of nature being the preservation of mankind, no human sanction can be good, or valid against it.
This right is so fundamental that it’s difficult to find even leftist writers who would deny a citizen the right to protect her own life….
Here are a couple quotes by the men who knew the details of what they wrote:
(NRA)
More quotes from the Founding Fathers DEFINING the 2nd Amendment can be found at THE FEDERALIST PAPERS