Is the First Amendment Under Attack on Its Birthday?

By Jane Hampton Cook

Though it is the most cherished of the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment is under attack as the Bill of Rights reaches its 230th anniversary.

“What’s happened in this country over the last year is kind of this bizarre imposition of totalitarian controls, the deconstruction of the Constitution,” Robert F, Kennedy, Jr. explained to Tucker Carlson on Fox Nation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments declared an emergency and set aside all of the Constitution’s amendments except for the second amendment. Kennedy is the author of the new book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.

Kennedy explained that Big Tech and many in the news media took particular aim at the First Amendment’s freedom of speech by finding ways to shut down views that dissented from the federal medical bureaucracy, including views expressed by physicians and scientists.

“Anybody who wanted to criticize the government they got rid of. That’s why we had the Revolution — so that we could criticize the government. And we put that first, and yet it’s gone,” Kennedy said.

Big Tech doesn’t hide it. Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, declared that Twitter’s “role is not to be bound by the First Amendment.” Instead, he advocated and implemented censorship.

How does today’s cultural attack on the First Amendment compare to other times of crisis in American history? For example, did President Franklin Roosevelt set aside the Bill of Rights as America faced Adolph Hitler and the Japanese empire during World War II?

Roosevelt took the opposite approach. Established Bill of Rights Day on the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, Dec. 15, 1941, Roosevelt led Americans in celebrating the Constitution’s first ten amendments a mere eight days after the Japanese military bombed the U.S. military at Pearl Harbor.

“What we face is nothing more nor less than an attempt to overthrow and to cancel out the great upsurge of human liberty of which the American Bill of Rights is the fundamental document,” Roosevelt declared on the radio.

The president contrasted America’s First Amendment to the totalitarian doctrine that “the individual human has no right by virtue of his humanity, no right to a soul, a mind, a tongue or a trade of his own or to live where he pleases or marry the woman he loves, that his duty is one of obedience only to Adolf Hitler.”

More importantly, everyday Americans also stepped up to defend the Bill of Rights during the crisis.

“Most important of the ten amendments, because it is the very Foundation of our liberties, is the first one, guaranteeing freedom of religion, speech, press and the right to assemble peaceably and petition the government for redress,” Ohio’s Plain Dealer published, declaring that “we cannot permit the Bill of Rights to be perverted to the active aid of the enemy, wittingly or unwittingly.”

In contrast to Twitter’s censorship today, newspaper editors in 1941 recommitted to preserving Americans’ freedom of speech.

“In general we believe that the more completely we defend the integrity of our Bill of Rights during this war, the better able we shall be to defend the integrity of our territory and carry the fight to our enemies. Fundamentally the Bill of Rights is an expression of faith in ourselves and faith in ourselves is one of the things we must have to win this war.”

He was not alone. “The object of the Bill of Rights was to protect the individual against the totalitarian kind of government, to preserve the individual’s right against a dictatorship which should try to control his every thought or act,” Rabbi A.H. Silver proclaimed.

“The Bill of Rights is not only a set of guarantees, but also a set of challenges to the character of the people. Without self curbs to supplement the curbs imposed on our government through the Bill of Rights we shall lose our rights.” Silver said of the need for culture to uphold our freedoms.

From the start, the American people played a role in elevating the First Amendment. If it had been left to Congress, today’s First Amendment would have been third.

When George Washington became America’s first president in 1789,  two states had not joined the union under the U.S. Constitution: North Carolina and Rhode Island. A major stumbling block for these antifederalists was the Constitution’s lack of a Bill of Rights. This led Congressman James Madison to call on Congress to pass amendments to the Constitution. After analyzing hundreds of possibilities, Congress settled on twelve amendments to be ratified by the people through their state legislatures.

The original first two amendments focused not on the rights of the people but on Congress, specifically its apportionment power and salary. Not surprisingly, these two amendments failed to be ratified by three-quarters of the states. This rejection elevated the third Amendment into the First Amendment. The First Amendment and the other nine amendments became law on December 15, 1791, when Virginia’s general assembly became the final state needed to ratify them.

What should Americans do on the 230th Anniversary of the Bill of Rights, when the First Amendment is under attack? They should take Rabbi Silver’s advice.

“The Bill of Rights should be read and reread in these times by every American,” Silver said. “Implicit in the Bill of Rights is the right of sacrifice in the cause of Freedom, a right reserved to all the people, a right of sacrifice which is now ours.”

It’s time for the We the People to make the Bill of Rights the centerpiece of culture once again. Doing so requires sacrifice, such as presenting differing opinions on platforms that assail free speech or abandon those platforms and news outlets to build new ones. We need to tolerate differences of opinion again. We need to fear the loss of our rights more than we fear a disease.