“Clear and present danger” aren’t words any president should use lightly because that’s when the big guns used to come out against the First Amendment — and might again.
Set aside for a few minutes the vaguely Nurembergesque optics of Thursday night’s historically divisive speech by Presidentish Joe Biden so we can concentrate on the content.
“MAGA Republicans have made their choice. They embrace anger,” Biden angrily declared. “They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow lies together.”
“That’s why respected conservatives, like Federal Circuit Court Judge Michael Luttig, has called Trump and the extreme MAGA Republicans, quote, a ‘clear and present danger’ to our democracy.”
Ben Shapiro called it “the most demagogic, outrageous, and divisive speech” he’s ever seen from an American president because Biden “essentially declared all those who oppose him and his agenda enemies of the republic.”
Biden’s speech came just two days after he not-so-implicitly threatened [VIP link] millions of law-abiding Americans with military action. “For those brave right-wing Americans,” he sneered, “if you want to fight against the country, you need an F-15. You need something little more than a gun.”
Ricochet’s Jon Gabriel said that Biden’s word choice was as “deliberate as it was divisive,” reminding readers that the C&PD doctrine was “created by the Woodrow Wilson-era Supreme Court to curtail the free speech of Americans.”
Biden, warned Gabriel, “floated a legal pretext to silence Republicans heading into the midterm elections.”
Already, social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have been revealed as willing stooges for government end-runs around the First Amendment, as our own Stacey Lennox noted just today:
On the heels of shocking comments by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the FBI’s role in censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story, initial e-mails related to a lawsuit filed by Schmitt and Landry show even more evidence that the Biden administration is using Big Tech to do what it is not, allowed to do according to the Constitution.
Lennox wrote that “Further disclosures could demonstrate that Big Tech and the government are conspiring to censor information related to any number of issues.”
But back to Thursday night’s demagoguery.
MSNBC’s Eugene Robinson approvingly described Biden’s speech as an “urgent, wartime address.”
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Well, with whom is Biden at war?
Biden has met the enemy, and he is us.
Many on the Right, including my friend and colleague Stephen Kruiser, believe that Biden’s speech was a display of weakness, “the panic and flop sweat of every Washington power player inside the Beltway.” I don’t necessarily disagree, but let’s at least consider that it might have been something else: A display of dangerously hubristic overconfidence in the administration’s own power.
Their power not to govern but to rule.
What else is there to call it when the Biden regime goes from surreptitiously silencing critics via social media back channels to openly floating a Wilson-era pretext for jailing us?
If this scheming mediocrity believes he can use his signature to transfer up to a trillion dollars from blue-collar Americans into the wallets of lawyers, doctors, and Trans Deconstructive Lit Theory majors and call it “debt relief,” why wouldn’t he think he can use the coercive power of the state to silence his critics?
I’ve been writing for PJ Media for over 15 years, but this is the first time I ever felt like the company, all of these voices, might not be here tomorrow.
I don’t know if the Swamp cabal running the White House will get away with it, but I’m sure as hell not going to be quiet about it — and neither will anyone else on any of the Townhall websites.
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Forget “democracy” — our republic might depend upon it.
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