2024 Is 1800 All Over Again, Because Free Speech Is On The Ballot

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 3^rd 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 21^st 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. 

This is where 1800 and 2024 may, and indeed should, converge.  In 1800, Americans were so disgusted with the Sedition Act that they handed the Federalists a defeat from which they would never recover. They lost the presidency. They lost 22 of their 60 seats in the House and as a result lost their majority. In the Senate they lost 4 of their 7 seats that were up and would lose their majority two years later when they lost 6 of their 9 contested seats. Other than a minor uptick when opposing the War of 1812, the party would remain on life support until finally being dissolved in 1828.

Essentially the Federalist Party’s attempt to eliminate the 1^st Amendment so galvanized the American people that it signed its own death warrant.  The Democrats’ attempts to obliterate the 1^st 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 1^st 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…

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