(Short link for this post is psacot.com/z)

This just in… the First Amendment, age 234, is barely hanging onto life¹ after multiple attacks by federal agents, most recently the arrest of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort. The regime’s alibi for the arrests is the purest bovine effluvia.

It claims they were engaged in “conspiracy to deprive others of their civil rights,” which is rich coming from a government that plans to walk proudly up to the First Amendment as it lies dying and finish it off by strangulation or gunshot.

Apparently covering a news event is conspiracy. A magistrate and a federal appeals court decided there wasn’t enough evidence to arrest Lemon, and so, in a crude and craven example of venue-shopping, the feds used a compliant grand jury to indict him. ²

The arrests of Lemon and Fort, alas, are not unprecedented in the sense of the government attempting to suppress dissent.

In 1734, 57 years before the amendment was born, Journalist Peter Zenger was brought to trial for libeling Gov. William Cosby. He was acquitted, setting a precedent for free speech and the First Amendment by allowing public criticism of the government and government officials.

In 1798 Congress—angered by criticism of the President—passed the Sedition Act [expired in 1800] which criminalized criticism of the government. They called it sedition, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Department of Injustice calls it conspiracy. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

My First Amendment Doomsday Clock

Footnotes

1. 1. https://psacot.com/murder ↩︎
2. 2. Just after it indicted a ham sandwich ↩︎