“I’m proud to be an American
Where at least I know I’m free.”
(Lee Greenwood, lyrics to “God Bless the USA”)
Sorry, Lee Greenwood. If you were writing that song today, the lyrics would have to read “Where I used to be free.” The fact is that America is no longer a free country, and it’s becoming less free with every passing day. Our society now operates on the philosophy of “repressive tolerance,” an ideological construct introduced in a 1965 essay by Herbert Marcuse, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who became a college professor in America. His basic premise was that civil liberties serve as a means for imposing oppression on society, namely:
[T]he exercise of political right (such as voting, letter-writing to the press, to Senators, etc., protest-demonstrations with a priori renunciation of counterviolence) in a society of total administration serves to strengthen this administration by testifying to the existence of democratic liberties which, in reality, have changed their content and lost their effectiveness. In such a case, freedom (of opinion, of assembly, of speech) becomes an instrument for absolving servitude.
His conclusion was:
Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left… as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive inequality of freedom (unequal opportunity of access to the means of democratic persuasion) and strengthening the oppressed against the oppressor. Tolerance would be restricted with respect to movements of a demonstrably aggressive or destructive character (destructive of the prospects for peace, justice, and freedom for all). Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled. As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for “the other side,” I maintain that there are issues where either there is no “other side” in any more than a formalistic sense, or where “the other side” is demonstrably “regressive” and impedes possible improvement of the human condition.
Although Dr. Marcuse’s philosophy is associated with the 1960s New Left and succeeding generations, America experienced occasional episodes of limiting freedom of expression from the earliest days of our Republic, the first being the passage of the Alien and Sedition Laws in 1798, a highly partisan move by the Federalist party unbecoming of one of America’s principal founders. The Sedition Law criminalized public criticism of the John Adams administration, and was used primarily against newspapers that editorialized in favor of Thomas Jefferson. It failed, as Jefferson won the 1800 election, while the Federalists never regained power and their party dissolved soon thereafter.
Speaking of war, the next major offense against free expression occurred early in the Civil War (which ironically happened because the American political system, unlike that of Britain and France, failed to end the enslavement of Black Americans, a deprival of liberty not fully corrected until the 1960s-era civil rights laws). Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and sent federal troops to arrest Maryland state legislators before they could vote for secession, thereby leaving Washington, D.C. as an isolated, indefensible enclave between the slave states of Maryland and Virginia. In response, the Supreme Court waited judiciously (pun intended) until the war was over before declaring Lincoln’s actions unconstitutional retroactively.
Another incidence of violating civil rights on racial grounds was the forcible removal of Japanese-American residents from the West Coast in 1942 and sending them to “relocation camps” in Utah. No such measures were directed against German-Americans on the East Coast who openly spouted Nazi propaganda. And again, the Supreme Court took no action until well after the end of World War II.
The massive suppression of free expression that still plagues us today began with the second term of Woodrow Wilson, the first “progressive” President. Facing widespread opposition to America’s entry into World War I, his administration embarked on a program of crushing dissent spearheaded by the American Protective League, composed of “extralegal vigilance organizations… [who] sought to ensure Americans’ full participation in the war effort, often through measures of intimidation, harassment, surveillance, and outright violence,” as reported by the New York Public Library in 2014.
The NYPL report went on to state, “Indeed, with the quiet consent of the Department of Justice, the American Protective League’s 250,000 civilian members – many of whom wore official-looking badges reading ‘Secret Service’ – undertook vigilante actions against supposedly disloyal socialists, pacifists, and immigrants; engaged in domestic surveillance operations; raided businesses, meeting halls, and private homes in an effort to uncover pro-German sympathizers; and bullied citizens who, it was believed, were less than fully committed to the country’s war endeavors.” People were actually prosecuted for remarks made in their own homes.
Most notably, in September 1918, “along with local police and federal agents, thousands of A.P.L. operatives conducted a three-day ‘slacker raid’ in New York City, resulting in the arrest and questioning of more than 75,000 suspected draft dodgers.”
We may add that in 1919, Wilson’s Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, conducted the so-called “Red Raids,” in which thousands of Socialists and Communists were rounded up and prosecuted, so that the 1920 Socialist nominee for President, Eugene V. Debs, had to conduct his campaign from a jail cell. (He was released when Warren G. Harding became president.)
Wilsonian measures were revived after 9/11 with passage of the Patriot Act, which authorized the extensive use of domestic surveillance against Americans. Abuse of civil rights intensified in 2011 when the Obama administration changed the rules governing how colleges should treat accusations of sexual misconduct against male students. The constitutional presumption of innocence was replaced by a presumption of guilt, expressed as “believe the woman,” except that if she were accusing a prominent Democrat such as Bill Clinton or Joe Biden, the radical feminists arose not to defend but to defame the alleged victim. Men were denied the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment protections of the Bill of Rights: No defense attorney, no opportunity to question the accuser in court, often even no opportunity to see the evidence. Male students were summarily suspended or even expelled. Many of us remember the false accusations against the Duke University lacrosse team.
A recent troubling development has been the growth of government-sponsored censorship. At first, President Trump was the prime target, but censorship has mushroomed, beginning with suppressing any evidence that the National Institutes of Health funded gain-of-function research into Covid viruses at the Wuhan Laboratory in China. NIH officials Drs. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins even slandered scientists such as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who raised questions about the safety of mRNA vaccines. Furthermore, the Biden administration embarked on an unprecedented program of stifling dissent by pressuring social media companies to censor any content that contradicted federal policy positions, so that, for example, Children’s Health Defense has been banned from Facebook and Instagram since August 2022. A scathing 800-page report by the House Judiciary Committee included several instances where the platforms censored information relating to Covid-19 due to top-down pressure.
Fox News’ Jamie Joseph wrote in May 2024 that “Big Tech altered their content-moderation policies in 2021, the report said. Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon all adjusted their policies to censor information ranging from Covid-19 ‘misinformation’ to what kinds of books were permissible on the Amazon Marketplace…”
No account of civil rights abuses is complete without a discussion of how Jews, both in America and throughout the Western world, are increasingly treated as if we have no rights that anyone is bound to respect. We have all seen Jewish students having to seek refuge from a mob in the Cooper Union library, with the college’s callous response being that they should have gone upstairs or sought an alternate exit from the building. We have seen how Jewish students at Columbia University have been verbally and even physically assaulted by groups acting in concert with Hamas, with the university taking no action until President Trump began canceling their federal funding. We have seen how demonstrators at UCLA have declared “Jew-free” zones, with the university not only doing nothing to stop them, but with employees actually helping to erect the barricades. We have seen the presidents of three elite universities responding to Representative Elise Stefanik’s question about whether calling for genocide against Israel or Jews in general violates their school’s code of conduct with an assertion that “it depends on the context.”
And, according to FrontPage magazine reporting on March 20, “A few days after the anniversary of Oct 7, the New York Times reported that Columbia University Apartheid Divest [CUAD] officially endorsed terrorism against Jews and withdrew an apology by one of its members for threatening to kill Jews. “Over the past weeks, the paper and the entire Democratic Party, including 103 members of Congress, the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the Jewish Democratic Council of America led by Kamala’s former foreign policy advisor, went all in on fighting for Mahmoud Khalil, a leader in CUAD who had defended terrorism, from being deported,” the article stated.
Frankly, I’m hard pressed to see any difference between antisemitism at American universities and at, say, the University of Heidelberg in the 1930s.
Abuses of Jews aren’t confined to the campus. Just recently The Jerusalem Post reported that a United Airlines pilot, angered by a visibly Orthodox Jew, Yisroel Liebb, remaining in the restroom for half an hour suffering from constipation, broke down the door and exposed him with his pants down. According to the article, “With Sebbag [his seatmate] leading Liebb, the pilot proceeded to repeatedly push the [two] back to their seats while making threats of getting [them] arrested and making scathing remarks about their Judaism, and how ‘Jews act,’ the complaint stated.
“Once the plane landed in Houston, several CPB [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] officers boarded the plane and arrested Liebb and Sebbag, taking them to a detention facility inside the terminal. During the walk from the plane, Liebb said that he had a legal right to know why they were being detained, after which the officers responded, ‘This isn’t a country or state; we are Homeland [Security], you have no rights here,’ according to the complaint. One of the officers, in addition, reportedly tightened the handcuffs on Liebb’s wrist in response.
“Liebb pleaded with the officers, saying that they were being cooperative and that he was not a threat. Liebb and Sebbag, however, were thrown into separate cells and handcuffed to tables. At the same time, they and their luggage were ‘subjected to intrusive, unconsented, unwarranted and unreasonable searches,’ according to the complaint.
“Liebb and Sebbag were released without charges; however, they missed connecting flights to New York. They were rebooked for free on another flight the next day; however, the pair incurred additional hotel and food costs during the delay.”
All the foregoing leads me to wonder whether the United States of Soros can possibly get out of the tailspin we are in.
Then again, perhaps the destruction of America is a prerequisite for the coming of Moshiach, as humanity realizes that because of our inherently sinful nature, we are incapable of governing ourselves by manmade law and need to follow G-d’s Law. Who knows?
