If you’re a conservative, you’re gonna love this site. The American Conservative. You should really check it out as it has some really great articles that are direct and on point with the conservatives of this nation. I saw one of the ladies responsible for the site on Real America’s Voice’s Warroom Pandemic today. Sorry but I failed to get her name but she is a very smart young lady. She has real values, American values, that is that resonate what this country was founded on. Check it out! You’ll be glad you did.
Article Source: Joe Biden and the Death of Free Speech | The American Conservative
The media loved Joe Biden’s inauguration: his platitude-laden speech and his calls for “unity” struck the perfect note for a Washington establishment that wants no more guff from the “deplorables.” But few commentators stooped to point out the radical changes of Biden’s big day, such as its being the first inaugural since 1865 with the military openly occupying the nation’s capital.
In his inaugural address, Biden castigated “a riotous mob [that] thought they could use violence to silence the will of the people.” But politicians invoked that same mob to justify silencing protesters for miles around the inauguration. Biden also declared, “That’s America. The right to dissent peaceably, within the guardrails of our republic. It’s perhaps this nation’s greatest strength.” Yet during Biden’s inauguration, new “guardrails” drove free speech into the dirt.
The Washington Post, a bellwether of the media’s adulation of the new president, had no problem with silencing dissent. Its report on the issue was headlined, “In closing Mall, officials try to strike a balance between the First Amendment and securing Biden’s inauguration.” The “balance” was achieved by suspending the First Amendment on the most important protest day on the American calendar.
The Post noted that only one protest would occur during the Biden inauguration “with about five demonstrators manning a video screen, tucked away near Union Station, along a secure perimeter, surrounded by largely vacant D.C. streets.” Amazingly, the Post portrayed this as proof that the First Amendment had survived: “D.C. and federal officials reached a compromise. They said the plan allows the city’s tradition as the nation’s preeminent stage for protest and free-speech gatherings to continue.”
The federal government dictated so many restrictions on protests that almost all the groups that planned to demonstrate threw in the towel. But that didn’t deter federal officials from taking a victory lap. National Park Service spokesman Mike Litterst declared, “When the government is under assault, that’s especially a time you do not want to appear to be denying civil liberties or denying people their rights under the First Amendment.”
Federal repression got a seal of approval from an organization long renowned for its uncompromising defense of free speech. Scott Michelman, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington D.C. office, told the Post:
It’s no question that closing off public spaces, even for a limited time, affects people’s ability to exercise their free-speech rights, but at the same time, the government is permitted to carry out temporary targeted closures of common areas when they have a good reason and aren’t trying to favor one viewpoint over another. If they close the Mall for the inauguration based on a threat, the First Amendment doesn’t prohibit that. If they close the Mall for all of 2021 because there was a threat in January, that is very likely to be overly restrictive.
Very likely? At least the ACLU didn’t endorse shutting down the Mall for the entirety of Biden’s presidency. But neither the federal government nor the District of Columbia government provided clear evidence of an imminent threat that would justify shutting down the Mall and effectively banning protest throughout the vast “Green Zone” that the feds had declared for the Biden inauguration.
The ACLU sounded happy to see protests suppressed so long as pro-Trump activists were kept off of the streets…