Sex, sexual ambiguity, race, incompetence, war mongering and foreign interventions. While those are familiar issues in 2024, they’re merely echoes of earlier times… like the election of 1800!
The presidential campaign of 1800 was the sequel to the first
truly contested American presidential election in 1796 and featured the same
two primary players. John Adams won and
Thomas Jefferson lost and became vice president – the only time in history
that’s happened.
Although friends, the men became viscous rivals – although
never actually campaigning themselves – and the campaigns were as brutal as any
seen in modern times.
With the French Revolution still ravaging our first ally, their
ambassador openly
advocated for the Francophile Jefferson, seeking to defeat Adams who was
thought to be considering war with France. At the same time the Federalists –
Adams’ party – tried to paint Jefferson as potentially getting the US into a
war with Britain.
Four years later the campaigns became far more personal and far
more viscous. “Jefferson's camp accused President Adams of having a "hideous
hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man,
nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." In return, Adams' men
called Vice President Jefferson "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the
son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father."
As the slurs piled on, Adams was labeled a fool, a hypocrite, a criminal, and a
tyrant, while Jefferson was branded a weakling, an atheist, a libertine, and a
coward.”
Perhaps most consequentially as it relates to the election
of 1800 vs. that of 1796 was the 1798 passage of the Sedition
Act, part of what’s commonly referred to as the Alien and Sedition
Acts. The Sedition Act essentially
targeted Democratic-Republicans (Jefferson’s party) editors and made it illegal
to “write,
print, utter or publish…any false, scandalous and malicious writing…with intent
to defame the…government” To demonstrate how partisan this law was, the
Federalists, who controlled Congress, wrote it to expire on March 3rd
1801, so that it wouldn’t be available to the Democratic-Republicans if they
prevailed in the election.
Ironically, the law, which was intended to help Adams and targeted
Jefferson supporters didn’t have the desired effect at all, and Jefferson
won. It’s interesting, that John Adams, one
of America’s primary Founding Fathers, sought to undermine the Constitution the
first opportunity he got. Indeed, he
understood that the Constitution itself was little more than a piece of paper, telling
the Massachusetts Milita: “Our
Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly
inadequate to the government of any other.” While the law was highly
controversial and was enforced only sparingly, it stands as a monument to the
reality that Americans must be vigilant in the protection of the right to free
speech.
Which brings us to Democrats in the 21st
century. Everywhere we go we see
limitations on free speech from campus speech codes to hate speech legislation
to schools coercing
teachers to use “correct” pronouns.
And government interventions are almost never productive. Take “hate
speech” where the feelings of victims are elevated above the rights of
speakers. Does it change the opinion of the speaker? The person towards whom
(if any) the speech is directed? Not
usually. If the premise is that government can protect “victims” from hearing
speech that offends, where does it stop?
Must blacks be protected from discussions of IQ
differences based on race? Must
whites be
protected from being characterized as racist? Facebook recognizes
56 different genders. Are Americans going
to be forced to learn all 56 pronouns so as to not hurt anyone’s feelings?
As if all of that was not bad enough, COVID and the 2020
election opened a Pandora’s Box of speech restrictions. The Democrats and their
fellow travelers in the media, the intelligence community and the Healthcare Industrial
Complex spent years
seeking to ban speech with a different perspective of the official narrative.
Doctors who wanted to talk
about alternatives were suspended while videos opposing “lockdowns” were
deleted and those mentioning “vaccine misinformation” were banned.
Then of course there was the election. This was easily the
single most treacherous use of government to quash speech in American
history. Between the 51
liars from the Intelligence Industrial Complex claiming that the Hunter
Biden laptop was Russian disinformation to the social media companies being
coerced (it
didn’t take much) into banning stories about it, no other effort at
censorship ever turned
an American election as this one did.
Essentially the Federalist Party’s attempt to eliminate the
1st Amendment so galvanized the American people that it signed its
own death warrant. The Democrats’
attempts to obliterate the 1st Amendment should generate the exact
same result. And if anyone had even a remote notion that somehow that was not
the Democrats’ plan, they need only look back two years when Biden created the Disinformation
Governance Board. That short lived board
was, far more than the Federalists’ Sedition Act, a tool to regulate virtually every
aspect of American life by a leviathan government that knows no bounds.
The bottom line is, free speech is at the core of American
culture, indeed western civilization itself.
From Copernicus and Galileo questioning an earth centered universe to Matt
Walsh asking What is a Woman, and virtually everything in between involves
speech of one sort or another. Free speech, questioning one another and
exchanging ideas are the bedrock of growth and liberty, both individually and
as a society.
Any party which, in contravention to our 1st
Amendment, seeks to crush free speech in order to accumulate or keep power
should by default, be destroyed, and in 2024 that is the Democrat Party. Democrat
constituencies, whether gays or blacks or Jews or Muslims or crazy cat ladies
should be wary of feeling secure just because they are part of the “majority”. As New York mayor Adams discovered this past Wednesday,
it doesn’t matter how strong your Democrat bona fides are, if you cross the
leadership you will be targeted. Now imagine what they can do to average Janes
and Joes who stray from the plantation.
America is at a critical point in her history. The choice we make in November will send a
message for centuries to come, just as did the election of 1800. Do we value
free speech or not? Soon we’ll know if Americans
of 2024 understand the importance of our most important right to the degree they
did 224 years ago…
Follow me on Twitter at ImperfectUSA
