Vince Coyner
In the extraordinarily vicious political environment of 1800, free speech was on the ballot. Then, Americans made the right choice. Will they do so this time, too?Sex, sexual ambiguity, race, incompetence, warmongering, and foreign interventions. While those are familiar issues in 2024, surprisingly—or perhaps not—they’re merely echoes of earlier times…like the election of 1800!
The presidential campaign of 1800 was the sequel to the first truly contested American presidential election in 1796 and featured the same two primary players. John Adams won and Thomas Jefferson lost and became vice president—the only time in history that’s happened.
Although friends, the men became vicious rivals—although never actually campaigning themselves—and the campaigns were as brutal as any seen in modern times.
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Image by Vince Coyner.
With the French Revolution still ravaging our first ally, their ambassador openly advocated for the Francophile Jefferson, seeking to defeat Adams, who was thought to be considering war with France. At the same time, the Federalists—Adams’ party—tried to paint Jefferson as potentially getting the US into a war with Britain.
Four years later, the campaigns became far more personal and far more vicious:
Jefferson’s camp accused President Adams of having a ‘hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” In return, Adams’ men called Vice President Jefferson “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” As the slurs piled on, Adams was labeled a fool, a hypocrite, a criminal, and a tyrant, while Jefferson was branded a weakling, an atheist, a libertine, and a coward.
Perhaps most consequentially as it relates to the election of 1800 versus that of 1796 was the 1798 passage of the Sedition Act, part of what’s commonly referred to as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Sedition Act essentially targeted Democratic-Republican editors (those on Jefferson’s side), making it illegal to “write, print, utter or publish…any false, scandalous and malicious writing…with intent to defame the…government.” To demonstrate how partisan this law was, the Federalists, who controlled Congress, wrote it to expire on March 3, 1801, so that it wouldn’t be available for the Democratic-Republicans to use against their rivals if they prevailed in the election.
Ironically, the law, which was intended to help Adams and target Jefferson’s supporters, didn’t have the desired effect. Instead, Jefferson won.
It’s interesting that John Adams, one of America’s primary Founding Fathers, sought to undermine the Constitution the first opportunity he got. Indeed, he understood that the Constitution itself was little more than a piece of paper, telling the Massachusetts Militia: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” While the law was highly controversial and was enforced only sparingly, it stands as a monument to the reality that all Americans must be vigilant in protecting the right to free speech. They cannot trust their politicians.
Which brings us to Democrats in the 21st century. Everywhere we go, we see limitations on free speech, from campus speech codes to hate speech legislation to schools coercing teachers to use “correct” pronouns. Government interventions are almost never productive.
Take “hate speech,” where the feelings of victims are elevated above the rights of speakers. Does it change the opinion of the speaker? The person towards whom (if any) the speech is directed? Not usually. If the premise is that the government can protect “victims” from hearing speech that offends, where does it stop? Must blacks be protected from discussions of IQ differences based on race? Must whites be protected from being characterized as racist? Facebook recognizes 56 different genders. Are Americans going to be forced to learn all 56 pronouns in order not to hurt anyone’s feelings?
As if all of that wasn’t bad enough, COVID and the 2020 election opened a Pandora’s Box of speech restrictions. The Democrats and their fellow travelers in the media, the intelligence community, and the Healthcare Industrial complex spent years seeking to ban speech with a different perspective from the official narrative. Doctors who wanted to talk about alternatives were suspended while videos opposing “lockdowns” were deleted, and those mentioning “vaccine misinformation” were banned.
Then, of course, there was the election. In all of American history, this was easily the single most treacherous use of the government to quash speech. Between the 51 liars from the Intelligence Industrial Complex claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation to the social media companies being coerced (it didn’t take much) into banning stories about it, no other effort at censorship ever turned an American election as this one did.
This is where 1800 and 2024 may, and indeed should, converge. In 1800, Americans were so disgusted with the Sedition Act that they handed the Federalists a defeat from which they would never recover. They lost the presidency. They lost 22 of their 60 seats in the House and, as a result, lost their majority. In the Senate, they lost four of the seven contested seats and would lose their majority two years later when they lost six of nine contested seats. Other than a minor uptick when opposing the War of 1812, the party would remain on life support until it was finally dissolved in 1828.
Essentially, the Federalist Party’s attempt to eliminate the First Amendment so galvanized the American people that it signed its own death warrant. The Democrats’ attempts to obliterate the First Amendment should generate the same result.
And if anyone had even a remote notion that somehow ending the First Amendment was not and is not the Democrats’ plan, they need only look back two years when Biden created the Disinformation Governance Board. Far more than the Federalists’ Sedition Act, that short-lived government entity was a tool to regulate virtually every aspect of American life by a leviathan government that knows no bounds.
The bottom line is that free speech is at the core of American culture and, indeed, Western civilization. From Copernicus and Galileo questioning an earth-centered universe to Matt Walsh asking What is a Woman?, along with virtually everything in between, speech—and, therefore—free speech is at issue. Free speech—questioning one another and exchanging ideas—is the bedrock of growth and liberty, both individually and as a society.
Any party that, contravening our First Amendment, seeks to crush free speech to accumulate or keep power should be destroyed by default, and in 2024, that is the Democrat Party. Democrat constituencies, whether gays or blacks or Jews or Muslims or crazy cat ladies, should be wary of feeling secure just because they are part of the “majority.” As New York Mayor Adams discovered this past Wednesday, it doesn’t matter how strong your Democrat bona fides are; if you cross the leadership, you will be targeted. Now imagine what they can do to average Janes and Joes who stray from the plantation.
America is at a critical point in her history. Our choice in November will send a message for centuries to come, just as did the election of 1800. Do we value free speech or not? Soon, we’ll know if the Americans of 2024 understand the importance of our most important right to the degree they did 224 years ago…
Follow Vince on Twitter at ImperfectUSA.
