Taibbi delivered a righteous and necessary speech on the need to preserve the First Amendment to the Constitution, in particular the right to free speech at a ‘Recue the Republic’ gathering in Washington D.C. on 29 September 2024.

Taibbi makes the pertinent point that the current government efforts to eliminate dis-or-misinformation from the public discourse is not the real goal but that “The endgame is getting us to forget we ever had anything to say.”

He continues that the writers of the constitution’s Bill of Rights were absolutist in how the First Amendment could be interpreted, stating: “[James] Madison [author of the First Amendment] famously eschewed the word toleration or tolerance when it came to religion and insisted on the words freedom or liberty instead. This became the basis for the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which in turn became the basis for the Bill of Rights. That’s why we don’t have “toleration of religion” or “toleration of speech.” We have freedom of speech.”

Read the entire speech, link below. It’s a quick read and entertaining to boot.

Source: My Speech in Washington: “Rescue the Republic” (racket.news). Graphic: First Amendment, Melissa Randall, LibreTexts.