Excerpt:

“[T]he best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system, I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919)

Commenting on the recent decision of Judge Doughty in Missouri et al vs. Biden, columnist Patrick Lawrence wrote recently,

“A lot more people now stand to see that a bitter war in defense of their constitutional rights has to be fought. And it will be evident to a lot of these newly aware people that this nation’s most powerful newspapers and broadcasters are complicit in a liberal authoritarian attack on the rights that reside in American law.”

How many people even bothered to read even a few pages of the decision, much less the whole thing? https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/missouri-v-biden-ruling.pdf Not too many. The sad truth is that most people are not really very interested in the subject, the relative few who are interested are too lazy to make much of an effort to inform themselves, and even fewer still (if any) are willing to “pledge their lives, their fortunes or their sacred honor” to do anything about it.

That’s why what is happening is happening! “The most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history”? Who cares? The general reaction to it – or to the Fifth Circuit’s decision Friday is pretty much a big yawn.

So there’s the answer to Patrick Lawrence. As with Ukraine, most people are blissfully unaware of what is really going on and/or just do not care.

Much as it pains me to quote Harry Truman, Judge Doughty quoted from Truman’s Special Message to Congress in 1950 in the conclusion of his July 4th opinion. It’s worth repeating:

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one place to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

“We must, therefore, be on our guard against extremists who urge us to adopt police state measures. Such persons advocate breaking down the guarantees of the Bill of Rights in order to get at the communists. They forget that if the Bill of Rights were to be broken down, all groups, even the most conservative, would be in danger from the arbitrary power of government.”

And what would Oliver Wendell Holmes say? Maybe he’d say it is time to bring home our troops from Europe and start fighting right here at home for the Constitution of 1787 and the Bill of Rights. We won in 1783, maybe we could do it again.