Trump’s Failed Prescription For Freedom of Speech

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Trump announced a “2024 Plan” to restore and enforce Freedom of Speech in America.  It is surprisingly problematic.

Make no mistake; this nation is in a cold civil war.  Neo-Marxist progressives are criminally abusing both the law and their control over institutions to destroy anyone who stands in their way.  Most of what they are doing — from abridging speech to unequal application of the law; from warring on religion to inserting racism into all aspects of law and society; from the tyranny of Biden legislating from the Oval Office (for example, erasing Student Loan debt) to the tyranny of extra-constitutional regulatory bodies being used to fundamentally alter society (the Constitution gives the sole right to pass laws to Congress) — is patently unconstitutional and unlawful.  But of all of these criminal acts, it is the government conspiracy to abridge freedom of speech that poses the most immediate, if not most substantial threat, to our nation.

Twitter has exposed much of that conspiracy over the past few weeks. Government actors and Twitter employees have for years conspired to abridge the freedom of speech of conservatives and anyone who fell off the neo-Marxist plantation.  Click on the threads below to read it all:

In light of these not-so-surprising revelations from Elon Musk’s Twitter, former President Donald Trump yesterday announced his proposals to “Restore Freedom of Speech” in the United States.  His son, Donald Trump, Jr., posted the plan on Twitter:

Ninety percent of this can be broadly restated as a mandate to enforce the laws, both constitutional and statutory, of the United States.  Do it fairly and without political favoritism.  And here is a truism — none of this progressive garbage ends until progressives come to expect that they will be tried (outside of the DC Circuit and) prosecuted for violating our Constitutional and statutory laws.

As a threshold matter, I have great respect for Donald Trump.  He accomplished more conservative goals during his four years in office than Reagan did in eight.  Unfortunately, Trump failed in several ways, at least one of which was catastrophic.  That would be his failure to reimpose equal justice under the law.  As it stands today, the neo-Marxist leftists are above the laws of our nation and all of their ideological enemies are below the protections of the law.  We are a nation circling the drain because of it.

I hold Trump liable in large measure for our current situation, and Trump’s “plan” gives me no confidence that he understands the fundamental truth of his failure to impose respect for the rule of law.  To the contrary, Trump unforgivably muddies the legal waters with most of his “plan.”

We do not need any new laws or policies to hold government actors liable for constitutional violations.  We do not need to “ban federal agencies” from “colluding to censor American Citizens.”  It is already patently illegal.  We do not need to “enact” some new “criminal penalties” for government censorship, as that suggests that what these criminals in the Biden Administration are doing to abridge the right of Freedom of Speech is otherwise legal.  That is pure bullshit.  And lastly, we do not merely need to “fire every bureaucrat” who “engaged in domestic censorship”; we need to prosecute them, every damned one of them.

Let me explain this in a bit more detail.   Understand that our Constitution, along with our congressionally enacted civil rights laws, make the Constitution both a shield and a sword.

The Constitution, as amended, is a shield against acts by the government.  When the government prosecutes a person or takes his property in a way that runs afoul of constitutional rights, that person can raise the Constitution as a defense. For instance, under the Fifth Amendment, no government can take private property for public use without fair compensation.  When a government takes a person’s property as a criminal penalty for a minor violation of the law, that act may be void for violating the Eighth Amendment.  Any time a government searches a person or seizes something from him without probable cause, the government violated the Fourth Amendment.  And of interest in this essay, government actors cannot “abridge” a citizen’s “freedom of speech” under the First Amendment.

The statutory civil rights laws provide a sword to punish constitutional violations.  42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil action for deprivation of rights), passed into law in 1871, gives private citizens the right to sue for damages when a government actor violates their rights.  Congress passed other related sections of criminal law in 1871 as well.  18 U.S.C. § 242 (Deprivation of rights under color of law) provides that the government can prosecute government actors who deprive citizens of their constitutional rights or who, with unlawful intent, unequally apply the laws.  18 U.S.C. § 241 – (Conspiracy against rights) provides that the government can prosecute those state actors who conspire with another person to deprive citizens of their constitutional rights.

All of the above laws, all over a century-and-a-half old, are completely sufficient to vindicate every act the government (federal or state) takes that violates our Constitution.  These laws merely need to be applied.  So, when Donald Trump thoroughly muddies the water about existing law, he is not doing any service to conservatives.  To the contrary, he is only helping the criminals in the Biden administration.

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