Michigan’s ‘Feel Good' Law Directly Attacks Free Speech

Jun 29, 2023

I’ve been a student of history all of my life, although I must admit I was less than enthusiastic about the activity when I attended Butler Junior High School in the western suburbs of Chicago. Then, I looked upon the time spent in Mrs. Schmidt’s social studies class as more of an hour to get through rather than an opportunity to consume the excellent curriculum she constructed for us.

Today, I wish I could thank Mrs. Schmidt for the in-depth instruction on The Charters of Freedom she executed in our class, and for even those of us (like me) who weren’t enthusiastic about the endeavor. Graduating from 8th Grade at Butler required the passing of what we called the “Constitution Test”; extensive testing on The Declaration of Independence, The US and Illinois Constitutions, and the US Bill of Rights.

Mrs. Schmidt prided herself on each of her students passing with a score – not curved, not manipulated for special interest students, but a true score – of not less than 95 percent. This would today be the equivalent of understanding The Charters at least at a college 101 level, if not more advanced than that.

Later in life, as I began to understand why Mrs. Schmidt taught with such a passion on the subject, I exploded into a desire to want to more fully understand the Constitution, the Federalist and Ant-federalist Papers, the Bill of Rights and Declaration, and even the Magna Carta, which I always thought should have been included as the starting point for it all.

I and my then-wife started a 501c3 that centered on teaching constitutional literacy and the direct threats our Republic faced by external and internal (read: Fifth Column) actors who, at times, exhibited seething hate for our nation. From the many Islamofascist groups that both plotted and executed attacks on our nation and our citizens to ideological malefactors amongst us, I came to understand at least two very potent truths: 1) there are murderous malcontents both at home and abroad who do not value life, and 2) President Reagan was correct when he said the loss of freedom is never more than one generation away.

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We
didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.” – Ronald Reagan

Recognizing The Most Potent Threat
& It’s Not White Supremacy

As much as I initially focused on the threats to our nations from organizations like al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the devout (not radical, but staunchly devout) Islamofascists, I have grown to recognize the Fifth Column as the most potent threat to our nation. That threat has been facilitated by a grotesque level of constitutional illiteracy and a century-long propaganda campaign by the Marxist movement, which today is executing its “fundamental transformation” of our Republic in the form of wokeism.

As I wrote in the article, The Fight Against Wokeism Should Be A Bipartisan Effort:

“Where many on both the Right and the Left want desperately to believe that wokeism is a product of American and Western enlightenment – with approximately 60 percent of Democrats saying being woke is a “good thing”, the movement’s genesis is parked squarely in the anarchism that facilitated Marxism…
“Wokeism’s goal is to inspire a revolutionary awakening by blurring reality, creating victimhood, and subjecting those who hold common values respective to the Judeo-Christian values employed to create our nation – the freest nation on the face of the planet and throughout the history of man – to moral relativism that espouses ‘individual truths’...
“What better example of executing an action to blur reality and foment chaos than championing a false narrative that men can be women and women can be men; that men can lactate and give birth and women can produce sperm? And what better way to confuse and victimize our youth than for the mainstream anarchist-supporting media to lend legitimacy to the charade?”

Nowhere are the efforts of the woke more representative than in proposed legislation recently passed out of the Michigan State House.

Michigan’s Dangerous Dance With The Marxist Devil

As reported in The Daily Wire:

“HB 4474, is part of a package of legislation that would replace Michigan’s existing Ethnic Intimidation Act and make it a hate crime to cause someone to ‘feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened.’ Under the bill’s framework, ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity or expression’ are included as classes protected against intimidation. If passed, the hate speech legislation would make violators guilty of a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of $10,000…
“The newest version of the bill, which passed the House, uses the term ‘harassment’ without defining specifically what it could refer to.
“‘Intimidate’ means a willful course of conduct involving repeated or continuing harassment of another individual that would cause a reasonable individual to feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened, and that actually causes the victim to feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened,’ the bill states.”

Professor Emeritus William Wagner, a former federal judge and legal counsel in the US Senate, rightly pointed out that, “Proponents use these laws to silence and financially cripple those who dare to adhere to a different viewpoint and oppose their agenda.” He continued to say that under the proposed legislation, the definitions of “intimidation” and “harassment” would be left to interpretation. And because the bill determines what is criminal “after the action”, due process – required by the Constitution – is jettisoned.

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin
by subduing the freeness of speech.” – Benjamin Franklin

Constitutional Illiteracy Leads To Despotic Chains

One of the many things I was taught in Mrs. Schmidt’s class – and something that made more sense to me as my desire to understand the Charters grew – was the meaning of the phrase, “You’re right to throw a punch ends where my nose begins.” A simple phrase with a potent yet complex meaning.

Put succinctly, because our Republic was founded on principles that guaranteed the inalienable rights to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”, we have a right – an uninfringeable right – to believe the way we choose to believe and to express ourselves in a way we prefer as long as we cause no physical harm to another and as long as we don’t encroach on another’s right to believe and express themselves as they see fit as well.

The proposed bill making its way through the legislative process in Michigan obliterates those inalienable rights; those uninfringeable rights, to instead elevate one faction over another; to grant a “preferred” and “favored” status to a specific faction that disenfranchises all other factions. Even more egregious to our individualism – which is the crown jewel of Americanism, is that the “crime” being contemplated into existence here would be predicated not on fact, not tangible truth, but on someone’s “feelings”. This makes the law – should it pass – completely subjective and vulnerable to being made a tool of oppression, and an unconstitutional tool of oppression at that.

As I wrote in an article titled, If We’re Going To Push Back Let’s Start At The Beginning:

“...There is a reason the protection of Freedom of Speech is the very first thing mentioned in the Bill of Rights. Without the freedom to express oneself; without Free Speech, there is no way there can be opportunity for all, no way there can be equality of freedom, for that matter.
“Without Free Speech for all – not just for those aligned to a narrative preferred by the bully elites but for each and every person counted amongst the citizenry, we fall into a system that places the vocally dominant, the connected, and the privileged in the position to decide what is allowable speech and what is not.”

To be contemplated is this. How do speech laws – and especially Michigan’s HB4474, protect our inalienable right to be a free people? How do they protect the most important of rights held by a free people: the freedom of speech/thought? They don’t. And if HB4474 is passed into law the seeds are sown out of the State of Michigan that mandates we are not free. Rather, we would exist under the illusion that we are free.

My Awakening Started In Mrs. Schmidt’s Class

Through all of Mrs. Schmidt’s instruction and all of the years I studied the Charters of Freedom; in all my years battling the cancer of constitutional illiteracy, at no time have I come across any passage in any document that guarantees an inalienable right to “not be offended.” That is because the “feeling” of being “offended” is subjective and malleable.

This wholly unconstitutional law, making its way through Michigan’s legislature, would be tantamount to creating a new inalienable right outside the process of amending the US Constitution and one enforced through the punishment of incarceration. This would be an act of despotism – totalitarian, oligarchal despotism antithetical to the very essence of freedom.

As long as we bend a knee to the dominant Woke ideology being crammed down our throats by “the vocally dominant, the connected, and the privileged” in positions of power to decide what is allowable speech and what is not, we will continue to travel the “road to serfdom”, on which we are well down the lane.

And to Mrs. Schmidt and all of the teachers out there – both past and present – who understand that teaching the Charters of Freedom with fidelity is to give the gift of freedom: Thank you. I wish I would have paid better attention in class.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell
people what they do not want to hear.” – George Orwell