America Abandons the First Amendment

A Close Look at the Amici Briefs in Murthy v. Missouri [Missouri v. Biden]

John Leake

Mar 20, 2024

The Brownstone Institute just published a “A Close Look at the Amici Briefs in Murthy v. Missouri [Missouri v. Biden]” and they are perfectly appalling.

Judging by their content, the leaders of many of America’s top institutions have already abandoned the First Amendment.

As one who has spent forty years studying history, I am overwhelmed with the impression that we are watching our Constitutional Republic being dismantled. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Biden, we will be at the mercy of whatever men and women happen to occupy the offices of the Executive Branch. The rule of law that protects our ability to communicate with each other will be exploded.

Why this is happening reminds me of something my late teacher, Roger Scruton, told me thirty years ago when I was visiting him at his farm in Wiltshire.

We study history and literature to give us a perspective on human nature and civilization, and this enables us to evaluate what is happening during our own brief lives. If you want to help preserve civilization from the philistines who constantly threaten it, you must read all of the good literature that has ever been written and remember it.

A stunning ignorance of history and human nature is evident in the Amici briefs. The simplest realities of human affairs—such as the ever-present threat of coercion when government power is exercised—are not discussed with any adult sophistication.

When a ranking White House official calls a ranking executive at Twitter, OBVIOUSLY he is not going to speak like a mafia boss issuing explicit threats of reprisal. He will say things like, “We [occupying the most powerful office on earth] would be most grateful to Twitter if you would view this matter as we see it.”

In oral arguments, one of the government’s humbug attorneys alluded to Teddy Roosevelt’s “bully pulpit” style of leadership, as though speaking in a public forum (from a pulpit) is comparable to confidential communiques between the White House and tech executives about censoring US citizens in the public forum.

At the risk of sounding arrogant, it seems to me that much of the problem we are facing lies in the fact that many people who now occupy positions of power are just plain stupid.

I don’t know about the readers of this Substack, but in recent years, I have often encountered people who strike me as conspicuously diminished in their cognitive capacity—the defendant in the current matter before the Supreme Court being the most spectacular.

This makes me wonder about the injections that so many have received since 2021. Could these at least partly account for what strikes me as an acceleration of cognitive decline in recent years?

One of the plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, just shared the Brownstone Institute’s analysis of the Amici Briefs on his Substack. Please read it and share it with your networks.