Hello again, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another episode of Freedom's Creed. Today is December the twenty-fourth, twenty twenty one. It's Christmas Eve. And if you celebrate Christmas like I do, I hope that you are ready for a great and wonderful Christmas and that you, like me, strive to remember the reason for this Christmas holiday. I realize that Christmas is celebrated throughout the world in many different countries, but here in the United States, I feel particularly blessed because we live in a country where we are free to worship as we please, to celebrate a particular holiday, no matter what that is. And it's a great blessing that all of us have, and I hope that we don't take it for granted. I know sometimes I may take things like that for granted, but I think it's important that we don't take these kinds of holidays for granted, particularly because we've become so accustomed to being able to live in a free society where we are allowed and privileged to be able to celebrate the Christmas holiday as well as any other holiday. And for that matter, to be able to celebrate the freedom, liberty and independence that we enjoy in this country should never be taken for granted. Listen, if you have paid attention to any of my podcasts, you know that I talk a lot about liberty and freedom and the independence that we enjoy being American citizens. So today I am talking again about freedom. Now, if you go back to May eighteenth, 2021, it likely was a day like any other for you, but that's a day that I published an episode on Marxism. If you haven't listened to it, I invite you to go and listen to that episode. This episode today will certainly be the antithesis of that episode, for sure. I trust that the following words are familiar to each of you. We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. That, of course, is the preamble to the Constitution. Now, I know that there is a lot of talk out there today about the illegitimacy of the Constitution, that it's a document that was forged on the backs of slavery, that it was created by a plurality, a majority, a hundred percent majority of white males, and therefore cannot be efficacious in the lives of all people. Well, that's just a straight up falsehood. The Constitution is a document for all people, irregardless of the people who penned it. To me, it's nothing short of a miracle that this document has stood the test of time. There is no other country that was based on an idea, an idea of freedom and independence and liberty from tyranny. There is no other country that was an idea like America is. The United States of America is an idea now grown into a reality for millions upon millions of people to this very day and continues to do so. The only way that it will not continue to do so is if we fail to teach it to our children and the rising generations. If we don't teach the fact that the Constitution is a miracle and that it is something that is beneficial to all people, then that's when we can expect to have a multiplicity of problems which the likes of we've never seen before. Here's something else that I think we're all familiar with. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's god entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Up until the eighteenth century, now think about this. Up until the eighteenth century, there was never anyone or any group of people who came together and decided that we seek to be independent of any tyranny of any government and eventually broke away from that monarchical rule. They broke away from tyranny and they established the United States of America. Now it was not without sacrifice. Much blood was spilt. It was not without its problems. Certainly, slavery was one of those challenges. The subjugation of women was certainly a challenge. But in that regard, and in regards to slavery as well, you can't pin that on a group of people coming to the new world in the 18th century. That goes back thousands of years. So don't put that blame on those white guys. None of us were around then. We're here now. So what are we going to do about the here and now? Are we going to continue just to complain about the things that took place over two centuries ago? Or are we going to do something about it by making sure that laws that are crap don't exist anymore? That laws that make it so that another human being is somehow less than any other human being is not allowed to exist anymore. We can sit around and complain about what took place back then, but the smart thing is to make sure that we're talking about how it won't be perpetuated in our time. Doesn't that make more sense? It does to me. I hope it does to you too. I read the preamble to the Constitution and then followed that up with the first couple of paragraphs from the Declaration of Independence. Finally, you'll recognize these words. Those words come from, of course, the First Amendment. Now, what does it mean to be able to speak freely or to have the freedom to speak one's mind? I'll tell you what it means to me. To be free of the worry of losing one's job by saying something that is deemed, quote, extreme, unquote, or not having fear of being canceled, or the fear of any repercussions whatsoever based upon an idea or an opinion that we happen to express. We have the right to speak about or say anything we want in the United States, even if it may be considered offensive by some. Here's what I also think. If you don't want to read something, then don't. If you don't want to see it, then go somewhere else. If you don't want to hear it, choose not to listen or find a way to ignore it. And please don't misunderstand, I'm talking here about adults. People who are from birth to eighteen years of age, obviously there needs to be exceptions put in place for the things that children are exposed to. We have a right, we have a duty to do that. You don't introduce something that it in many cases a lot of adults can't process, let alone children who have limited experience or practically no experience. So of course, yes, I believe that children ought to be protected and not subjected to the things that even adults sometimes can't process. Children are truly a protected class of people, or at least should be. Back in the nineteen seventies, there was a word that was coined by a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist named Chester Pierce, and that word is microaggressions. Essentially, microaggressions are construed as racially insensitive, classist, sexist, or otherwise not being politically correct. Let me break this down in its most basic form. Microaggression is the new rude. Okay, plain and simple. And I'm not trying to be funny, I'm not trying to be sarcastic, not trying to be anything other than real, and that's this. I was taught by my mom that if you can't say something nice about someone, then don't say anything at all. Clearly, a lot of people weren't taught that by their moms. Jeez. There's a group of people who seem to think that they can say anything about anyone else that they so choose. But when the rules are reversed, it doesn't work out that way. You can't say anything to that person because they'll take offense at what you have to say. The right to freedom of speech is guaranteed to everyone. We don't need the courts, we don't need politicians to parse the words of the First Amendment. We know what that means. It means that you can say whatever you want to say. You have the freedom to do so. It's the freedom of speech, not the freedom from speech. So I'm sorry if you take offense to something that I may say or something that anyone else says. You know, I find it interesting that in academic circles at colleges and universities, the place where freedom of speech should be hailed as one of the greatest blessings that anyone living in the United States of America could ever have. Yet the exact opposite oftentimes takes place. And you don't need me to tell you this. You've probably seen instances where academics who have done all this so-called research and have taken billions of dollars of taxpayer money, mind you, to do this research and to publish this research. Well, guess what? A lot of that research only ends up in academic circles. The vast majority of what many academics publish only ends up remaining in that circle of academics. It doesn't make its way into the public domain. For instance, the idea of microaggressions. There have been a lot of academics since Chester Pierce who have written about microaggressions and who have molded it to fit the narrative that they want to push. And that to me is not a good thing. And perhaps this whole idea of microaggressions may be for another time. So anyway, let's get back to freedom. If someone says something that I disagree with or I take offense to, or it's something I consider to be downright rude, that is their right. And I would not complain in hopes that what they say be restricted, or curtailed, cancelled, or heaven forbid, outlawed. But Rex, you say, what about all the court cases regarding free speech, expression, etc? Yeah, what about it? I haven't studied all of those court cases, but recently it seems that most of the examples outside of the known court cases that have to do with freedom of speech, they seem to be having a negative outcome for a certain class of people. No, I don't mean children either. I mean, in other words, conservatives. I don't want to see anyone's speech restricted. Not a conservative, not a liberal, not anyone else between that spectrum or outside of that spectrum. I don't want to see that. Because when we start seeing the parsing of speech, in other words, putting it speech into certain categories as offensive, racist, insensitive, microaggressive, whatever characterization you want to put on it, whenever we start going down that road, there'll be no coming back, ladies and gentlemen. It'll be lights out for the rest of us and one amendment that they can check the box off and say, oh, we got rid of that one. Let's go on to the next one. I don't want to see that, and I hope that none of you want to see that either. As long as my speech or anyone else's, for that matter, isn't hurting anyone physically, then it should be protected under the First Amendment. You know, in a lot of ways, our society today is much more soft than it used to be. Anything is potentially offensive to some people. Therefore, it has to be restricted. What I have to say about that is absolutely not. We cannot afford to go down this road. As I've said before, we just can't. In this podcast, I will always, always talk about the right to freedom of speech, not freedom from speech. If I don't like what somebody has to say, then I have to find a way to deal with it. And the same is true on the flip side. If someone else doesn't like what I have to say, then they have to find a way to deal with it. Sorry, but that's just the way it is. Actually, I'm not sorry, because that is the way it is. So why should I apologize for something as grand as the freedom of speech? Well, I'm not going to apologize for it. The freedom of speech is, if not the most fundamental element of our society, it's got to be right up there. Because everything, it seems to me, hinges on that. If we don't have the right to speak freely, to criticize our government, to speak our mind, to give our opinion, then what do we have? We have censorship, we have a government that is involved, and and when I say government, I mean any government type entity, be that a public school, a state college, any school that is funded, where students are funded with Title IV funds for going to school, then they would have a right to try to tell the rest of us what we can and what we can't say. And that's dangerous. It's ground that we can't afford to be standing on because it's not solid. It's not a firm foundation, it's not the basis for anything solid. In other words, there are certain absolutes that we have to be able to count on living in the society of these great United States. I want to thank you for listening. And as I said before, much of what I do in this podcast centers around freedom, around liberty, independence, and being able to do the things that we desire to do within the confines of the law that is not physically hurting anyone else. These are things that we need to uphold, preserve, and protect. So I hope that you'll make it a great week, have a great Christmas, or whatever holiday that you might celebrate on December the twenty fifth, or any other day between now and the new year. I'm going to do something a little different from my quote today. I'm going to actually read the quote and then tell you who said it. So here it is. Quote Our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech. Here in the United States, countless publications provoke offense. Like me, the majority of Americans are Christian, and yet we do not ban blasphemy against our most sacred beliefs. Moreover, as president of our country and commander in chief of our military, I accept that people are going to call me awful things every day, and I will always defend their right to do so. End of quote. It did indeed come from Barack Obama in a speech that he gave to the United Nations General Assembly back in 2012. With that, if you can think it, you can plan it. If you can plan it, you can do it.