President Donald Trump posted this on Truth Social on Tuesday: “All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Opinion
Trump fails to grasp that, here in the United States, thanks to the First Amendment to our Constitution, any peaceable protest, demonstration or assembly is, on its face, legal. It is one of our inalienable rights as citizens to get together and express our dissatisfaction with our government.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I wish there were as many fire-eating zealots willing to go to the mat for our First Amendment rights as there are those willing to defend our Second Amendment rights.
Perhaps those folks will come out of the woodwork and take to the streets when our First Amendment rights are threatened by the government, as Trump’s tirade against free assembly is proposing. Maybe then those freedoms will be defended as strenuously as gun ownership.
If Trump has studied our history (which I doubt) he’d realize that it was assembled colonists freely speaking their minds that began to topple the English crown. After the toppling was completed with gunpowder and muskets, “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” was enshrined in our Bill of Rights so that we could prevent future tyranny.
Maybe that’s why Trump is so nervous about free assembly and free speech.
Trump sure doesn’t seem to be too hung up on the “peaceably” condition in the First Amendment. After all, he characterized the Jan. 6 riot as “a day of love when nothing went wrong.” Immediately upon taking office, he pardoned the imprisoned “agitators” of that protest.
There is a rank hypocrisy in condoning the imprisonment or exile of one bunch of agitators, while pardoning and celebrating another. It appears almost as if Trump approves of one form of dissent and unrest among one subset of citizens, and disapproves of the same in other circumstances by other citizens.
He’s willing to grant civil liberties to one bunch of folks, even when they violently break the law, but ignore our Constitution and trample the liberties of others, depending on his mood.
This is dangerous behavior for a head of state. It is exactly like a king proclaiming, “I am the state.” This is precisely the kind of crap that demands to be protested by citizens “petitioning the government for a redress of grievances.”
Our Constitution guarantees our right to do just that, whether Trump likes it or not.
It has been 50 years since I last organized campus protests and marched in the streets against government policy. Back then, it was against the war in Vietnam. And my dad, a veteran of WWII, approved of my activism.
If Trump is trying to erode our civil liberties and weaken the Constitution, he has given us ample reason to assemble and protest once again. If we don’t resist government when it tries to take away our freedom to protest government, we don’t deserve to call ourselves citizens of the United States.
My old agitator’s heart remembers three things from my time in the proverbial protest trenches. First, tear gas won’t kill you. Secondly, women dig rebels. And most importantly, there is a deep sense of patriotism and satisfaction that one gets from defending the Constitution in the streets and on the campuses of America.
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