Apparently “No Law Abridging” Cannot Mean No Law Abridging

     “I have always read ‘no law abridging’ to mean no law abridging.’” – Associate Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black

     Time was, Black was regarded as a jurisprudential giant, especially by liberals. Of course, we don’t really have liberals any longer; they’ve been swallowed up by the “progressives.” You know, the political creed that’s opposed to progress. Such is life in our time, when I identify as is taken as a license to deny inconvenient realities of every sort.

     Of course, we’ve been here before. But this time around on the Left’s ideological roulette wheel, the little ball has dropped into the double-zero slot:

     Dems were actively engaged in encouraging Twitter to suppress voices and news they didn’t like. According to them, the First Amendment isn’t absolute.

     There are lots of revelations coming out from Elon Musk releasing key Twitter files surrounding the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Deanna wrote about Gaddes and Roth, which is jaw-dropping on its own.

     Now through additional tweets on the subject, we see that most Democrats truly believe that the First Amendment can be bent to their will if it furthers their narrative. What mattered to them was dragging basement-hiding Joe Biden over the finish line in November and any news item about Hunter Biden was a problem. Then, suddenly, the laptop showed up. And, the Democrats circled the wagons.

     The very same Democrats who always screamed that Twitter is a company so they can do what they want regarding speech and censorship, actively asked Twitter to censor the Hunter Biden story. They didn’t want the info out there as they knew it could hurt the campaign. How to make this go away? Pretend this was a hacked laptop, thus all info from that laptop must be viewed as suspect.

     It’s time to refresh our awareness of the Left’s attitude toward words, statements, and truth:

     It’s hard for most people to grasp that objective truth is a conception, rather than something self-evident. Yet furious philosophical battles have been fought over it. The negative side has never conceded defeat. They’ve advanced reason after reason to doubt the existence of objective reality. As each one is destroyed, they shift to another. In a sense, their proposition is its own strongest weapon, for they respond rather frequently to even the most obvious points by saying, “No, that’s your truth” — an implicit claim that it’s the not the observation but the observer’s willingness to accept it that really matters.

     John Q. Public has heard little of this, of course; it’s mostly fought in the ivory towers, and in the publications that cater to professional intellectuals. All the same, it matters to him more than he’s able to appreciate.

     Truth is an evaluation: a judgment that some proposition corresponds to objective reality sufficiently for men to rely upon it. The weakening of the concept of truth cuts an opening through which baldly counterfactual propositions can be thrust into serious discourse. Smith might say that proposition X is disprovable, or that it contradicts common observations of the world; Jones counters that X suits him fine, for he has dismissed the disprovers as “partisan” and prefers his own observations to those of Smith. Unless the two agree on standards for relevant evidence, pertinent reasoning, and common verification — in other words, standards for what can be accepted as sufficiently true — their argument over X will never end.

     An interest group that has “put its back against the wall” as regards its central interest, and is unwilling to concede the battle regardless of the evidence and logic raised against its claims, will obfuscate, attack the motives of its opponents, and attempt to misdirect their attention with irrelevancies. When all of these have failed, its last-ditch defense is to attack the concept of truth. Once that has been undermined, the group can’t be defeated. It can stay on the ideological battlefield indefinitely, preserving the possibility of victory through attrition or fatigue among its opponents.

     Slam that last paragraph. It describes the Left’s attitude in all matters they cannot protect against counter-arguments. Mike Adams provided a case for study:

     When I asked another feminist to debate me on abortion she said that she didn’t discuss such personal topics publicly. But then I read her biography. After talking about losing her virginity (including details about how she cleaned the blood off the couch afterwards) she dedicated countless pages to the issue of abortion and how a “lack of choice” adversely affects young women. After reading on, I realized why she didn’t tell me the truth. She revealed that she was a postmodernist who didn’t like to use the word “truth.”

     The next time I got into an argument with a feminist – over whether a female student who lied about a rape to get out of a test should be expelled – I understood the postmodern feminist position better. Feminists just can’t help but lie because there really is no such thing as the truth.

     Since so many feminists cannot tell the truth – because it doesn’t even really exist – I simply cannot take them seriously.

     Feminists of that sort are merely one family within the Leftist clan. “Truth” is something they evaluate as either an asset or an obstruction, rather than an objective characteristic of a statement that’s independent of whose agenda it serves. They cannot permit it to stand apart from its political value.

     Therefore, they cannot allow “no law abridging” to mean no law abridging. The phrase must somehow be magicked away, or measured against “national security,” or a “compelling government interest,” or some such. They’ve gotten away with similar exercises in politically expedient dishonesty many times, especially as regards “public use,” “cruel and unusual punishment,” powers “reserved to the states, or the people,” and “the right to keep and bear arms.”

     It will take more than mere words to put a halt to it.