Isn’t Scott Ritter a genuine American hero? And my friend Joe Lauria is the most courageous journalist you’ll ever shake hands with. And my new friend Roger Waters who watches my show every day. God bless you Roger. I’ve been a fan of yours since I was a lot younger than I am now. So when we are discussing the freedom of speech in law school, we often ask this question. The First Amendment reads in part, Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. And I would say to the students, Well, what would happen if the states ratified an amendment repealing the First Amendment? Would we still have the freedom of speech? Now, if you’re a big government type who believes that freedom comes from the government, then the answer to that question is no.

But if you recognize that freedom comes from our humanity, a gift from God who created us, then it doesn’t matter if we have the First Amendment. We will always have the freedom of speech. This is at least the theory of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. That your right to live, your right to think as you wish, to say what you think, to read what you want, to gather whatever information you want, to defend yourself against the government, if it’s taken over by tyrants, and your right to be left alone, these are rights that come from our humanity, whether the government is willing to recognize them or not.

After we fought the revolution and won the revolution and wrote a constitution, five states threatened to secede. Isn’t that interesting? The framers believed in the right of the states to secede, and they threatened to leave unless a Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution. And the Congress picked the same guy to the Bill of Rights who had written the Constitution, little Jimmy Madison. And they call him Little because he was four foot eight. So I hope when I go to heaven, I get to stand next to Little Jimmy because I’ll look like Shaquille O’Neal by comparison.

When Little Jimmy wrote the First Amendment, he insisted that the word the be in there. Hear me out. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. Recognizing its pre-existence before the government. If it existed before the government, where did it come from? It comes from our humanity. This was recognized by the framers of the Constitution and the ratifiers of the Bill of Rights. It would last for seven years. The Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791. In 1798, the Congress enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts, a law that was motivated by something that is inconceivable today, fear of the French.

All right, they feared the French because the French had just cut the king’s head off and they were worried the same thing would happen here. So they enacted this awful set of laws, which basically said, if you want to come to the US and become a citizen, come here. We’ll give you 20 acres of land. You can till it and do whatever you want, and you’ll be a citizen after 14 months. Unless you’re French, then you have to wait 14 years. Oh, and by the way, anyone who is critical of the government or the president and is convicted of this criticism shall be sentenced to two years in a federal prison.

So the same generation and in some cases, the same human beings who had just written, Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, enacted legislation that abridged the freedom of speech and punished its exercise in order to preserve the government from too much criticism. The statute prohibited criticism of the president, the Congress, and the government. Note what’s missing, the vice president. The vice president was Thomas Jefferson. He and John Adams, the president didn’t speak. Well, remember how you became president and vice president in those days. Everybody ran for president.

Whoever finished first became the president. Whoever finished second became the vice president. Could you imagine that today? Could you imagine Hillary Clinton as Donald Trump’s vice president? Hillary, get me a Diet Coke. Jefferson didn’t care what people said about him. Nor did Congressman Matthew Lyons, the Ron Paul of his era, who decided to test the limits of the Alien and Sedition Act by criticizing the president in public. John Adams, who was as wide as he was tall during his years in the White House, often wore a purple robe on his way to the Capitol building, and his wife sewed gold epulets on the shoulders.

And he looked like a regal mountain walking through the streets. So Congressman Lyons went up to him and said in front of the press, good morning, Your Majesty. Well, that did not result in a prosecution. And then he said a few days later, good morning, your pomposity. And that didn’t result in a prosecution for violating the Alien and Sedition Acts. And then he said, with the press there, good morning, your rotundity. And that resulted in a prosecution for violation of the Alien and Sedition Acts. And a member of Congress was tried in federal court in Boston and convicted of mocking the president’s waistline.

And for that, he was sentenced to two years in a federal prison. And then he did something in jail, which if you are from New Orleans, Chicago, Boston, or Hudson County, New Jersey, you are familiar with. He ran for reelection from his jail cell, and he won. And when he got to Washington, D.C., expecting to mock his rotundity, he found instead a tall, thin, raven-haired occupant in the White House by the name of Thomas Jefferson. And Jefferson proceeded to pardon Congressman Lyons and return the 430-acre farm that the feds had stolen from him during his years in incarceration.

You can see what the government thinks of the First Amendment. This would continue on and on and on. In the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, forgive me for using bad language, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus. That’s your right to be brought before a judge after you’ve been incarcerated. And then he arrested 3,000 journalists in the North for being critical of his war effort. He claimed that he received emergency powers from the Constitution. After he had died, the Supreme Court, five of whose members he appointed, ruled unanimously, there are no emergency powers in the Constitution.

You can say whatever you want in war time or in peacetime. Woodrow Wilson, during World War I, he is the former constitutional law professor at my alma mater, Princeton University. He is the former president of Princeton. He is the former governor of New Jersey, arrested Princeton students who stood in front of a draft office in Washington, D.C. and read subversive materials aloud. And he arrested them because he felt it was interfering with the draft. What were the subversive materials that the Princeton students read? The Declaration of Independence. What was the name of the federal agent sent from Washington, D.C.

to arrest these Princeton students? John Edgar Hoover. The rest, of course, is history. When Wilson was challenged on this at a press conference, Mr. President, have you read the First Amendment? Congress shall make no law bridging the freedom of speech. You’re arresting your former students for reading the Declaration of Independence, and you took an oath to uphold the First Amendment. He said to the reporters, well, read the First Amendment. It only restrains the Congress. It doesn’t restrain me. Such an answer, of course, in law school today or on the bar exam would cause you to flunk law school and never be licensed for the bar exam, because Congress shall make no law, means no government shall make any law bridging the freedom of speech.

That, of course, would not stop George W. Bush and the Republicans in the days and weeks following 9-11 when they enacted the most horrific piece of legislation since the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act authorizes one FBI agent to permit another FBI agent to conduct a search, even though the Fourth Amendment says there shall be no searches except by warrants issued by judges based on probable cause of crime and specifically defining the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized.

The Patriot Act also makes it a crime to tell anyone that you received an agent-written search warrant. Of course, they have a fancy name for these agent-written search warrants. They’re called national security letters. So if the feds show up and hand a national security letter to your lawyer, your doctor, your banker, your librarian, the lawyer, doctor, banker, librarian cannot tell you that they received this national security letter. So two librarians are in a library in Bridgewater. I know that sounds like a joke. Two drunks are standing at a bar, but this is a true story.

Two librarians are standing at a library in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and an FBI agent walks in and hands a national security letter to one of them, and she’s hard of hearing. She says, who are you? Well, I have a national security letter. What? She doesn’t understand what he says. She’s 86 years old. She hands it to her 75-year-old volunteer. She’s arrested. She’s arrested for revealing the fact that she had received a national security letter. Now, fast forward a year, and the 86-year-old is 87, and she’s a defendant in a federal courtroom.

And the federal judge says to the prosecutors, you really want to prosecute this 87-year-old lady for telling her 76-year-old assistant that she received a national security letter? Yes, we do. It’s a violation of national security for anybody to tell anybody else that they received a national security letter. And the judge says, well, wait a minute. This is a public library with government books on government shelves. How can it be a crime to take a book off a government shelf and read it? Where’s the FBI even in the library? No answer.

Who’s the attorney general, John Ashcroft? Get him on the phone, because I’m about to declare the Patriot Act unconstitutional. Well, whereupon Ashcroft says, well, dismiss the case. Dismiss the case. Pull the case before she can declare it unconstitutional. So the government then changes its mind and says, well, all right, Your Honor. We’re going to move to dismiss the indictment. And the judge says, I’ll rule on your motion tomorrow. And that night, she published an opinion declaring the Patriot Act unconstitutional, and then the next day dismiss the indictment. This has happened five times throughout the country.

And whenever it happens, the government will not appeal it for fear that a higher court will sustain the invalidation of that portion of the Patriot Act, which interferes with free speech. How can it possibly be a crime to tell your lawyer, your spouse in your bedroom, a priest in confessional, a judge in a public courtroom, that you received a piece of paper from the government? That’s how disrespectful and hateful the government is of the freedom of speech. Why does the government fear the freedom of speech so that people like Scott Ritter cannot tell you how dangerous the government’s policies are and how close the government brings us to annihilation? The government doesn’t want to hear that.

The government is so afraid of Scott Ritter, they sent 40 FBI agents to his house, including a SWAT team on a bomb squad to get his cell phone and his desktop. And then they questioned him. And Scott Ritter stood eyeball to eyeball with the government and never blinked. The government does this when it wants to chill the freedom of speech, when it wants to cause people who criticize the government to look over their shoulders before they speak, because not everybody who criticizes the government, well, not everybody who criticizes the government is as big as Scott Ritter, but not everybody who criticizes the government is as courageous as Scott Ritter.

So the freedom of speech, if you want peace, speak about it. If you want peace, challenge the government. If you want peace, shake your fist in the tyrant’s face. In the long history of the world, JFK famously said in his inauguration speech, only a few generations will be granted the role of defending freedom and its maximum hour of danger. This is that hour. This is the generation. Now is the time to defend it. Gatherings like this will rile up the people to tell the government when it is wrong. Our freedoms come from our humanity.

Whether you believe, listen, I’m an old-fashioned pre-Vatican II, Francis Skeptic, Latin mass attending Roman Catholic, but you don’t have to be that. You don’t even have to recognize the existence of God. You know that we are the highest and best rational beings on the planet, and you know that we naturally yearn to be free, and you know that those natural yearnings come from within our hearts, and they are as essential to our existence and our pursuit of happiness as anything the government can give. Government, on the other hand, is the negation of liberty.

Government only exists by stealing liberty. You’re at home at night. There’s a knock on the door. You open the door. There’s a guy with a gun. The guy says, give me your money. I want to give it away in your name. See, what the hell is this? I’m going to call the police. Don’t bother. We are the police. It’s an old Mary Rothbard one-liner. There are three ways to acquire wealth. The sweat of your brow. The inheritance model. The mafia model. Give us your money or else. Which model does the government use? Why do we tolerate this? Why do we continue to vote for and fund a government that thrives on seizing our property and stealing our liberty? Why do we have a one-party system in the Congress, in the government, a uni-party that loves war and killing and debt and surveillance and taxes and deficit spending and steals our liberty and steals our property? Because there are not enough Scott Ritter’s in the world.

That’s why we have that problem. Because there’s not enough understanding. There’s not enough understanding of our liberty and courage with which to articulate it so that the government stops. Jefferson, for all of his flaws, said, when the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty. Does the government work for us or do we work for the government? The government should fear us. We shouldn’t fear it. Why don’t more people understand that? Why? Because the government has seduced two-thirds of the population into receiving wealth transfers from it and believing that they can’t exist without it.

It is time for us to recognize that the individual has primacy over the government. I’ve been around for a long time. I’ve been doing this for 50 years, arguing for the primacy of the individual over the state, arguing for peace over war, arguing for a government that does nothing more than defend our individual liberties. When I die, I hope to die faithful to these first principles in my bed, in my home, surrounded by the people who love me. But not all of you will have that luxury. Some of you will die faithful to first principles in a government prison because of your exercise of the freedom of speech.

And some of you will die faithful to first principles in a government town square to the sound of the government’s trumpets blaring. When the time comes to make these awful decisions, you will know what to do, because freedom lies in the human heart. But it must do more than just lie there. Thank you, and God love you. Thank you, and God bless you. Hey FBI, that was for you. [tr:trw].

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