The First Amendment: Will no one rid me of this meddlesome conceit?

According to the left, our foundational ideals are a threat to our foundational ideals. Go figure.

Our First Amendment is an anachronism that is a threat to democracy. Will no one rid me of this meddlesome conceit?

It’s been nigh on a decade since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential race to Donald Trump. Almost two full election cycles. And yet the majority of the left still hasn’t managed to come to grips with the fact that it wasn’t Russian collusion, James Comey, low-information voters, deplorables, misogyny, or any of the rest of the litany of excuses from the left, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, for her loss, that did her in.

The fact is that when Clinton looks in a mirror, it’s a bad political candidate whose arrogance and sense of entitlement make effective campaigning problematic, waving back at her. In fairness, Clinton was also laboring under the considerable disadvantage of carrying the banner for the party of high taxes, lax immigration, soft on crime policies, having a village raise your kids instead of you, and massive government overreach in areas in which the government probably shouldn’t be involved in the first place. None of this is a recipe for political popularity.

That’s the reason that Clinton lost in 2016. It’s not rocket science.

But that’s not the story that’s being peddled by the powers that be on the left (including the Harris-Walz camp) and their sycophants in the media. Never a group to let reality interfere with their victim-cum-totalitarian impulses; it’s all about, according to them, disinformation.

Now disinformation happens to be both very real and very well-defined. Disinformation is false information that is spread deliberately to manipulate and deceive in order to gain some advantage. There’s not a lot of room for ambiguity in that definition. But that’s not the way the left sees it. Their definition of disinformation is a bit more nebulous: anything that we find inconvenient.

There is no dearth of salient examples. But let’s just start with the premise that disinformation is actually all that it’s cracked up by the left to be, i.e., an existential threat to our very way of life here in the U.S. of A.

Even if that premise is true, it’s not the government’s role to fix it, at least not according to our Constitution. To wit:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Help me out here. I don't see any language in the First Amendment allowing for any sort of government-run Disinformation Governance Board (or anything like it) to police speech. In fact, the First Amendment appears to me to specifically prohibit such efforts.

Further, I disagree with the left’s assertion that disinformation is among our greatest existential threats. Economic ruin, social disorder, totalitarianism, weapons of mass destruction, rogue asteroids, the Spotify top ten—these are all existential threats. Disinformation is way easier to deal with than the horrible aftereffects of a dirty bomb or another appearance by Taylor Swift on an NFL broadcast.

As I reconnoiter the current lay of the land, it seems to me that the particular form of disinformation ubiquitously pimped by the media as a threat to the very fabric of democracy isn’t actually disinformation at all; it’s mostly stuff that the left and their allies just don’t like. That makes their take on disinformation, disinformation.

Doubling down on a bad hand, the left has no evident reluctance to discard inconvenient parts of our Bill of Rights in order to “save our democracy.” From a recent interview with Ms. Clinton:

“I think it’s important to indict the Russians, just as [former FBI director Robert] Mueller indicted a lot of Russians who were engaged in direct election interference and boosting Trump back in 2016. But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda. And whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrence, because the Russians are unlikely, except in a very few cases, to ever stand trial in the United States.”

Now, thanks to the word salad method of policy talk made popular by the current Democratic candidate for president, Kamala Harris (herself a veritable cornucopia of disinformation on this very topic and many more), I understand that sentences uttered in plain English often have figurative (and disparate) meanings that float majestically in their own rarefied air far above both the hoi polloi and their literal meanings. So allow me to translate: Forget the First Amendment. Will no one rid me of this meddlesome conceit? The biggest threat to our democracy? Our foundational ideals. Our foundational ideals are literally a threat to our foundational ideals.

I feel your look. Excoriate me not. I’m just the interpreter, not the one claiming that there’s any reason at the other end of this. For that, you have to go to (1) a former contender and (2) another current candidate to be President of the United States. I kid you not, though I wish that I were. Faced with such depressing absurdity, I’m reminded of the immortal words of Roberto in Down by Law: "It's a sad and beautiful world."

What Clinton, Harris, Walz, Obama, and the rest of the power players on the political left have utterly failed to comprehend is that the First Amendment (and failing that, the Second) was incorporated into our constitution specifically to protect the rest of us from the likes of, well, them. Our government has many responsibilities specifically delineated in our constitution (most of which they do a bad job of), but policing speech is specifically not among them.

I read a great piece this week by Michael Shellenberger on Public News about the left’s slow but unswerving march towards totalitarianism. One of the things that Mr. Shellenberger points out, something that I’ve seen firsthand for decades, is that totalitarians rarely see themselves as bad. They see, rather, virtue and the benevolent defense of virtue in their efforts.

For decades, I sat on university committees and in meetings with public officials where consequential decisions were made with respect to policy by those who were enamored with this point of view. Rarely did I get any sense of we’re all in this together. It was generally much more of we know what’s best for everybody, whether they know it or not.

What is now referred to as “woke” has been around for decades. It’s always been arrogance and smugness disguised as benevolence and virtue. It’s our way or the highway. I would agree with you if only you were right.

That’s how you get to blowing up our foundational ideals to save them.

I rarely observed as much as a scintilla of acknowledgement that there might well be room for perfectly reasonable people to disagree with this crowd. That’s why I don’t think that help is on the way. The academic/political/professional left doesn’t even see the possibility that they might not be right about everything. Ideas originating with the riff-raff outside of their bubble are unworthy of serious consideration; just moralizing and rebuke.

Not content with assaulting just the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to “save democracy,” consider this pearl from then DA Harris concerning the Second: "We're going to require responsible behaviors among everybody in the community, and just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn't mean that we're not going to walk into that home and check to see if you're being responsible and safe in the way you conduct your affairs."

Where to begin? Well, let’s examine the plain text of the Second Amendment.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Someone ought to clue DA Harris into the fact that guns aren’t even mentioned in the Second Amendment; it’s the right to bear arms that’s mentioned. That could be anything from a Blunderbuss to a trebuchet, including guns. Once she’s able to cipher that courtesy of her UC-Hastings legal education, we can start on the part where the government has absolutely no right, as specified in not one but two amendments in the Bill of Rights (the Second and Fourth) to visit your firearms without probable cause.

So, there you go. In the event that I have not made myself sufficiently clear both here and in many columns over the past few months, I will not be supporting the Harris-Walz ticket this November. I’m done lamenting our choice, such that it is.

Chalk me up as another former left-of-center type who’s watched the landscape shift, alarmingly, as they stood relatively still. There’s simply no way that I’m going to support or vote for anyone who thinks that our founding ideals are a mere inconvenience along the road to their version of Utopia. Anyone so bereft of comprehension as to why this country was founded and what it’s supposed to be all about is, in my view, far more dangerous than Trump.

And that’s saying something.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.