My Summer Book Project
Time to Research How the Bill of Rights Came to Be, & Why It Might Save Us Now
It is nine months now since I first launched this Make Orwell Fiction Again blog post. My first column was about the vaccine. The subhead said: “A Vaccinated American Speaks Up for the Rights of the Unvaccinated.”
Since then, we have grown as a community, from a few friends who liked that first piece, to the several hundred who now subscribe, plus the hundreds more who read through links on social media. I delight in your comments. Well, most of them.
Lately, I’ve felt a distance from the daily headlines, weary, as you must be at times, with the constant battle against those who would destroy our country. The war against female athletes forced to compete against biological mails, the FBI’s targeting of parents as domestic terrorists for inquiring about their children’s education, the collapse of US sovereignty at the southern border and attempt, shot down for now, to place the World Health Organization— those same bureaucrats who refused to investigate how a virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan — in charge of all our pandemic protocols, along with the digital tools to track our compliance — it is all too much.
And then the tragedies — babies in hospitals suffering malnutrition because Biden’s FDA fell asleep on the job, working Americans weighted down by the inflationary spike in gas and food prices and soon asked to pay off student loans of the entitled, slaughter of young children at an elementary school in Uvalde, TX, many who probably bled out because police delayed going in — it is much for the heart to hold.
So I’ve decided to take the summer away from the blog to research a new book about a group of men and women who after the Revolutionary War fought for a Bill of Rights. Called Anti-Federalists, these patriots opposed the new US Constitution in 1787 for fear it would create a federal government as dictatorial as the British king they had just defeated. They would vote to ratify the constitution, they insisted, only if it contained a Bill of Rights to protect personal liberties and state rights from central government overreach. You might call them the insurrectionists of their day.
For most of American history they have been relegated to the sidelines – seen as ineffectual, narrow-minded, conventional actors who failed to understand the grandeur of the new Republic’s founding, dismissed by contemporaries as well as historians. I want to restore these dissenters to the pages of our history, and to make the case that their legacy — our First Ten Amendments — can rescue us again now.
I’ve noticed lately that a number of conservatives are using the First Amendment as a foundation for lawsuits against the media. As a former journalist, it is my firm belief that the mainstream media and their allies in Social Media, in opting to promote radical causes and silence conservative voices, have destroyed our civic engagement.
A year ago, former President Trump sued Twitter, Google & FB, arguing that they violated his First Amendment free speech rights, and that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — which shields social media companies from liability — is unconstitutional. A judge has dismissed the case, but who knows for how long.
This year, attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana have joined forces to sue President Biden, press secretary Jen Psaki and Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top administration officials who “pressured and colluded” with Big Tech social media companies to suppress news on Hunter Biden’s laptop and on the origins of COVID.
And recently, John Paul Mac Isaac, the Delaware computer repairman who turned over to the FBI Hunter Biden's laptop, with its incriminating evidence of Biden family corruption, launched a defamation lawsuit against impeachment imposter Adam Schiff, CNN, the Daily Beast and politico — all of whom accused him of being a Russian disinformation agent for disclosing the information. You can tell how serious the allegations are — and potentially costly — because the Daily Beast has already apologized for saying Isaac had “stolen” the laptop. “We have removed that word, and we apologize to Mr. Mac Isaac for the error,” said an editor’s note.
There’s also a new book by James Kirchick, out today. Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington argues that it was the First Amendment that enabled gay Americans to achieve marital and societal equality. Now, he argues, a new generation of gay extremists pushing gender identity politics seeks to purge the free speech of any who disagrees with their radical agenda. In an excerpt he writes:
“Each successive advance in the march for gay equality—the first picket for gay rights outside the White House (1965), the Stonewall uprising against police harassment (1969), the decision by the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders (1973)—was enabled by the free speech and association rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. As the gay legal historian Dale Carpenter argued, “the First Amendment created gay America.”
In March, ostensibly in the name of defending transgender people, hundreds of Yale Law School students disrupted a bipartisan panel on civil liberties, drowning out a conservative speaker with shouts of “Protect trans kids!” When the professor presiding over the event told the crowd that their behavior was in violation of the school’s free speech policies, she was met with raised middle fingers.”
I hope my research on the forgotten founders who protected personal liberties will be a bridge between our times and theirs, one that helps us better understand and rescue a Bill of Rights now under siege by a generation never taught its history.
In the meantime, I wish you a summer of barbecues and swimming pools, movies and picnics, beach books and car rides, laughter and memories, renewal, before we all return in the fall for one of the most gargantuan battles of our nation’s political future.
Excellent article, Johanna! All the best to you as you research and write your new book! This country is in need of knowledge surrounding the Bill of Rights, we've strayed too far from its holdings.