It raised some eyebrows when Governor Phil Murphy (D-N.J.), tacitly confessing incompetence, said in April, the Constitution is “above my pay grade.” Now we learn of another public official who failed Civics 101.
In a video posted on the Hill’s Twitter account Friday, Pennsylvania lieutenant governor John Fetterman, a Democrat, passionately stated that claiming the election was stolen is “not protected speech” (video below). As Twitchy.com put it, “James Madison unavailable for comment….”
The Twitter responses said it all. First there’s journalist Sharyl Attkisson:
Note here that Facebook recently flagged an article of mine with a “False Information” warning, even though all I did was report on a Chinese COVID study; I even included a disclaimer stating that we couldn’t know if the research was valid or not.
Then, while there are millions of people who sincerely believe the election was stolen (meaning, correct or not, they aren’t lying), there’s this:
There’s also the following obvious point made by tweeter JPerkins: “So what is 4 years of Russiagate? Should we have censored our entire media? They pushed those Putin’s puppet stories for years milking them for all they were worth.”
Then there’s this even more obvious point:
Yet while it’s easy to mock Fetterman and other “ignorati,” thus dismissing them on this matter ignores an important truth. Sure, our elected “leaders” aren’t exactly the best and brightest. This is partially because the qualities necessary to win office — being glib and a slick con man — don’t correspond to those necessary to be competent in office, such as wisdom and honesty.
Nonetheless, I suspect Fetterman knows on some level that asserting the election was stolen is, in fact, First Amendment protected speech.
I also suspect he doesn’t really care.
Consider: As a dissenting justice in the 1958 Baer v. Kolmorgen case, one Judge Gallagher is quoted as having warned that “if the court does not stop talking about the separation of church and state, people are going to start thinking it is part of the Constitution.”
But the courts didn’t stop, and the result is that six decades later this “fact” is imprinted upon the American mind. So much so, that now the average Joe has been inured to the denuding of the public square of historic religious symbols out of respect for this supposed “principle” of the Constitution. “Repeat a big lie often enough, and it becomes truth,” as the Nazi-born saying goes.
In this vein, if you keep repeating that so-called “hate speech” or this or that opinion isn’t constitutionally protected, continually and passionately, couldn’t people also become convinced of that “truth”? Conditioning works. (I explained this in my 2006 piece “How We Will Lose Our Freedom of Speech.”)
Leftists have made abundantly clear that they not only despise our “dead white male” Founding Fathers, but also the constitution they birthed. Sure, they cite it, usually misrepresenting it, when it suits their ends. But they know that since it’s by nature a conservative document, it’s an impediment to their aims.
As to effecting those aims, the Left is apparently engaging in what’s known as “normalization.” This is a euphemism — and also the last stage of communist subversion.
The first stage, “demoralization,” involves the undermining of a target nation’s morality and has been occurring in the United States for many, many decades. This makes the nation ripe for the second stage, “destabilization,” which we’ve been experiencing quite obviously the last few years with the unrest, riots, and refusal by certain states and localities to quell crime.
The third stage is “crisis,” during which a revolution occurs. Whether or not this has already happened — with the stolen election essentially being a coup d’état (arrest me, Fetterman) — is a question.
Regardless, normalization, where you consolidate your power by stamping out all remaining dissent, is already being attempted culturally by the Left. This is what “cancel culture” is all about.
In fact, as I pointed out in 2012 calling it a “pacification effort,” this is the result of losing the culture war and has been occurring for a long time. The difference now is that Big Tech, serving as the Democrats’ speech-squelching proxy, is ratcheting up the censorship.
Of course, this relates to another possible purpose behind comments such as Fetterman’s: to signal Democrats’ Big Tech allies about what should be suppressed.
This said, people act out of emotion more than calculation. Fetterman’s folderol might just have been motivated by misguided passion, as his own lack of virtue shone through. But whether lie, ridiculousness, or rationalization, it’s a problem when a multitude of Fettermans infest public office coast to coast.
The even deeper problem is that there are millions of Americans who vote for them.
