Part 2 of the interview will air on 3/14/23. I will post a reminder and a link when I get it.
I am heartened teaching my citizenship class, with faces from around the world discussing and encouraging each other to speak freely, share openly in person, and tell their stories. Sometimes, we have two people translating to get the drift, but we take our time, and we abide in unity in the sheer atmosphere of this liberty. One of my students passed her test last week – she became a U.S. Citizen! We will have her as our honored panelist to Q & A and celebrate her in an upcoming class!
As RFK Jr. shared in Part 1 of the interview, the framers of the Constitution knew all about pandemics. There were many outbreaks that killed thousands at the times of our founding …yet the Fathers decided not to put in an “epidemic” exception clause to our sacred freedoms: speech, assembly, worship, redress, right to a fair trial …
In 1927, Justice Brandeis wrote that:
[t]hose who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties… They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth…that the greatest threat to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. Whitney v. California