"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
The First Amendment. Freedom of Religion, Speech, Assembly, Petition… these are all about you, right? YOUR freedom of speech. YOUR freedom to practice YOUR faith.
So why did Madison and Hamilton and the other giants at the Constitutional convention lump freedom of the press into the first amendment? I mean… freedom of the press isn't about you; it's about reporters, right?
"Hold on there, Mr. Madison… Before we finish the Bill of Rights, let's take another look at that FIRST Amendment again. We forgot to mention REPORTERS! God forbid JIM ACOSTA doesn't get a special mention in the Bill of Rights!!!"
Of course... that's absurd, right?
The freedom of the press is not a special right carved out for someone with a journalism degree. They didn't even have journalism degrees in the 1780s. Back then, they wasted all their time in college learning the classics and Latin and philosophy.
Freedom of the press is for you. It's for me. It's for us. It's for WE THE PEOPLE.
Despite the sanctimonious grandstanding of the self-obsessed teleprompter readers in DC and Manhattan, THEY are not the guardians protecting our constitutional republic by speaking truth to power with a "freedom of the press sword and shield" forged for their exclusive use. YOU are.
The Founders recognized that the only way our country stood a chance was for you and me to have a free and unfettered flow of news, information, and opinion outside of the control of the federal government. They knew from their own experience the corruption and authoritarian oppression that can so easily occur when WE THE PEOPLE don't have the ability to share information and opinions about our leaders.
Imagine what kind of trouble we would be in if we the people, didn't have a free press to inform us and to hold our government accountable…
Imagine if a close family member of a presidential candidate was caught up in a tawdry, illegal, and corrupt scandal that made him vulnerable to blackmail and extortion from our most dangerous foreign adversaries. Imagine reporters covering that blockbuster story (who had hard evidence including pictures, witnesses, and correspondence) were somehow bullied, intimidated, and silenced in their attempt to spread that story just weeks before an election.
Just imagine.
Ironically, the New York Post was founded by Alexander Hamilton, who was in the room where the Constitution happened. Flash forward about 225 years later, and Hamilton's New York Post faced one of the most terrifying, orchestrated mass censorship operations in American history over the exact story I just described.
And the most insidious part of that censorship is that ultimately, the federal government left no fingerprints at the scene of the crime. They didn't have to.
You see, congressmen and senators do favors and provide protections for huge, multinational corporations who own most of our media outlets or the social media engines that distribute news from those outlets, and then those corporations know exactly what they have to do to keep the favors and protections going. THEY do the censorship for the government without even needing to be told.
Consider the words of my mentor, Andrew Breitbart. He once said in a speech, "Hey mainstream media, the American people don't hate you because you're biased. They hate you because you suck!"
That was over a decade ago. In just these last ten years, Andrew's observation of the mainstream media, which was so spot-on at that time, is a little bit off today.
Oh, don't get me wrong… they still suck, and we still hate them. No, what is no longer true is that they are mainstream. They are not.
Through the efforts of Andrew Breitbart and the website he created and the multitudes of websites and independent voices he has inspired to expose the Democrat media complex for what it is, the monolith that we used to routinely refer to as "Mainstream Media" has been revealed to be the fringe group of weirdo narcissist extremists that they've always been. I mean, these people held Anthony Weiner up as a hero back then, and they hold Andrew Cuomo and Michael Avenatti up as heroes today.
They are not mainstream; they never were.
And Press Freedom is not about them. It's about us. They've hijacked it, and they pretend that freedom of the press is only about their obscene, extreme tactics and agenda. It is not.
Freedom of the press is about us, and it always has been about us. We love this country. We love our freedoms. And we demand today, just as our forefathers demanded at our founding, that we retain the God-given right to freely exchange information and opinions without the overarching powerful iron fist of the state or their corporate oligarchs who sycophantically do their evil bidding.
Demand the truth. Demand a free press. Accept nothing less. It is your God-Given Right, and WE THE PEOPLE, WILL NOT BE SILENCED.
The preceding is the text of a speech Larry O'Connor delivered last Saturday, July 10, 2021, at CPAC 2021 in Dallas, Texas, during a special segment on the First Amendment.