Conservatives had long predicted that the attacks on the Second Amendment would eventually turn into attacks on the First Amendment. Liberals used to ridicule that until they turned leftward and joined the attack.
The premise of the attacks on the First Amendment are familiar.
Speech is dangerous. Not everyone ought to be able to exercise it without proper supervision. Surely the Framers hadn’t anticipated the internet and would have agreed that disinformation needs to be restrained because it leads to conspiracy theories and insurrections. And there’s no better way to defang conspiracy theories than by ruthlessly suppressing them. That has never led to an insurrection or deep paranoia about the government in the history of mankind.
The old parodies of Second Amendment attacks have been wholly embraced by the Democrat establishment. A contingent of the Left, led by Glenn Greenwald, have gone on the attack, because they don’t trust a Democrat establishment with full power over speech not to use that power to crush enemies to the Left.
JFK weaponized the IRS against conservatives, but also against lefties. (That could not have endeared him to Lee Harvey Oswald and his ilk.)
Stripped to its bare essentials, the question of both the First and Second Amendments is one of power. Can ordinary people be trusted with it. Or ought it to be under the supervision of government officials.
As Second Amendment advocates rightly predicted, those who didn’t trust people with guns, also don’t trust them with speech.
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