The U.S. Constitution is clear: Political speech is protected by the First Amendment.
Also, battles over the acceptance of electors to validate a presidential election are wholly within the political realm and should not be subject to criminal sanctions. Yet our nation is very close to setting a dangerous precedent by criminalizing speech and politics, and one political faction is rushing into this folly headlong.
If the Biden administration is allowed to criminalize speech and politics, we will become a nation where the losers of presidential elections are arrested instead of being sent into retirement with book tours and libraries.
The criminalization of politics is a dangerous game that Democrats used to decry, when they thought the shoe might end up on the other foot. No matter how you feel about former President Donald Trump’s activities after the 2020 election, the reaction of putting Trump in jail for his speech and activities to organize opposition to Congress counting Electoral College votes would degrade our political system and set the precedent that one party can criminalize the political activities of the other.
Notwithstanding all the legal spin you are hearing on a day-to-day basis from talking heads on cable television, it is a fact that the First Amendment to the Constitution vindicates the freedom of political speech. When you hear the talking point that “you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater,” know that the media are trying to gaslight you — to make you believe that there are limits to political free speech, when in fact there aren’t.
If government is permitted to redefine the Bill of Rights as something subjective and not containing inalienable rights, then the government can take anyone’s rights away, including yours.
Yelling fire in a crowded theater has nothing to do with political speech. It is also a red herring in the discussion of free speech. The position that this is an exception to the First Amendment was disowned a century ago by the justice who first coined the phrase, and subsequently by a Supreme Court majority.
Yet the left today is using the fire-in-a-theater example as a pretext for criminalizing some political speech, and to make believe that your natural right to express unpopular political beliefs has limits. It does not.
R&I~Smit
DGM