On Thursday, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) sent one of the most despicable tweets sent out since Donald Trump was kicked off Twitter.
Basically, Warren threatened Amazon with breakup in order to prevent them from criticizing her. This tweet could have come from a tinpot wannabe dictator from a banana republic.
One of the things that make America an exceptional nation is that we can heckle Senators and every politician in this country for that matter. These people work for us and are entitled to listen to the criticisms from their employers, the American people. If Elizabeth Warren cannot take criticism, she should get out of politics.
To threaten the destruction of an American business simply for criticizing her is anti-American. Forget that this is Amazon, a company that provides more value in a single minute than Warren has ever provided in her career as a taxpayer-leeching bureaucrat and Senator, for just a second. Imagine if Warren was threatening a small business in order to make sure they’re not big enough to “heckle senators with snotty tweets.”
Unfortunately, Warren is not the only Democrat who has an apparent problem with opposition speech. A couple of her House colleagues sent a letter to cable and satellite providers pushing them to no longer carry opposition news channels.
Democratic Congressmen Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, both from California, sent a letter to TV content providers asking them why they continue to carry Fox News, One America News Network (OANN), and Newsmax. The two Democrats accused the three conservative networks of “misinformation.”
Congressmen writing letters to TV content providers urging them to remove opposition TV channels is chilling. It is a threat to freedom of the press and free speech.
Ok, so we have a former presidential candidate threatening Amazon for criticizing her and a couple of backbenchers threatening TV content providers who carry conservative news channels. Surely, these authoritarian views are not prevalent in the Democratic party? Well, their authoritarianism has made its way into legislation.
One of the centerpieces of the Democratic Party’s legislative agenda and the Biden administration is H.R./S. 1 “For The People Act”, which is their super election reform bill. The legislation would fundamentally alter how elections are conducted in the country by essentially nationalizing them. It has already passed the U.S. House.
Genya Coulter, aka @ElectionBabe on Twitter, is an election official and election security expert. She wrote a piece called “H.R. 1: The Good, The Bad, and The WTF” for the website Elections Daily breaking down the legislation. I encourage you to read the piece in full but I want to draw attention to the WTF part, which is disturbing.
Division A, Subtitle D, Sections 1301-1304, aka the Prohibiting Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Act, is practically begging for a First Amendment challenge. Facially, it prohibits just about any dissemination of materially false information by any means of communication that “intends” to impede a voter from registering or voting, misstates the time and place of an election, the qualifications required to register or vote, false statements about federal elections, false endorsement of candidates, or payments to vote or refrain from voting. And just about any aggrieved citizen may file a complaint or bring civil action. The penalty is five years in prison and/or a fine that could go as high as $100,000 dollars. It’s unclear how strong the plaintiff’s burden of proof must be in a case like this, or how long a statute of limitations lasts. One person’s “materially false” is another’s “well-intentioned but incorrect advice” or still another’s “edgelord shitpost” intended as satire. Under this subsection, all could be considered federal criminals depending on how aggressive enforcement and prosecution is.
Without a single trace of irony, the title of the next paragraph of Division A, Subtitle E is titled “Democracy Restoration”. Everyone deserves a second chance, and the tools needed to reintegrate into society. How can we expect voters who are starting over to take our commitment to democracy restoration seriously when we include that provision in a bloated piece of legislation that introduces no fewer than five separate federal offenses that involve heavy penalties and imprisonment?
The bill has just walked the readers through the creation of a brand-new class of federal criminals, and now they want to restore voting rights to everyone convicted of a felony upon release from prison. And in a startling about-face, Democrats who typically favor open borders and asylum for undocumented immigrants, support H.R. 1’s move to deport foreign nationals over the suspicion of involvement or financial contribution to political campaigns, ignoring the tidal wave of money that pours in from domestic dark money groups.
If H.R. 1 becomes law in its current form, you could go to prison if you make an obvious satirical social media post such as “Republicans vote on Tuesday, Democrats vote on Wednesday” or something along those lines. You could even go to jail if you give well-intentioned but incorrect advice about elections. It’s easy to see how that section could be used to silence opposition speech in the name of “combatting misinformation.”
If you want to challenge these Democrat attacks on the First Amendment in the courts, you might want to move quickly. Some of them want to pack the courts and destroy the concepts of judicial review and an independent judiciary in the process.
The conduct of Democrats, especially since 1/6, proves that many of their complaints of Donald Trump acting like an autocrat were not sincere. Instead, their real problem was that they were not the ones wielding the power.