“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”--The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified Dec., 15, 1791.

An open assault on the First Amendment is occurring across America, as college students who are peacefully exercising their Constitutional right to freedom of speech, challenging government policies, are being arrested in droves.

The self-appointed Congressional Overseers of Higher Education, who hauled politically naïve university presidents into their star chambers and publicly castigated the savants for not admonishing their students to be sufficiently sympathetic to genocide, essentially demanded loyalty, not to America, but to the deadly agenda of a country not our own. 

Leading government officials have expressed dismay at the furor which has erupted on campuses and have encouraged the use of repressive tactics. 

What is happening on campuses?  Did the students not get the message? - -   Obey!

Obey, or there will be no graduation. Obey! Or you cannot be valedictorian. Obey! Or be suspended, expelled, even denied employment opportunities. Obey! Or you will be marked for life as a troublemaker, a disrupter. Obey! If you want to get ahead in society.  Obey!  Don’t make demands. Don’t even ask questions. Obey! You are students.  Your lot is to listen, and Obey.

The relative quiescence on campuses in the past few decades has been misread as students being interested in their inner world and not the outer world.  Social media had become a soporific and a grand distraction. Campuses were generally the last places expected to ignite political movements.

Oh, how dangerously wrong America’s leaders are about the energy that issues  spontaneously on campuses, demanding an end to mass violence sanctioned and financed by our government.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, campuses were the flash points from which the Vietnam-era anti-war movement grew. I remember student rallies at Cleveland State University (CSU).  Then, instead of threatening students with arrest, CSU President Harold Enarson created a space for them to gather, spoke to students, encouraged peaceful protest and, as a result, Cleveland State University, still in its infancy, was a catalyst for social and political change. 

The protests focused public attention on the Vietnam War. The  political became personal.  President Lyndon Baines Johnson became the target.

“LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today,” was a chant heard on campuses and on streets where masses gathered to demand an end to the war. 

The protests drove Johnson from the presidency.  He announced on March 31, 1968:

“I have concluded that I should not permit the presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year….Accordingly, I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

Then came Kent State University, and four dead in Ohio on May 4, 1970.

Years later, as chairman of a congressional oversight subcommittee, I quietly probed the Kent State shootings and learned (as had others before me) that a suspected FBI asset on campus, taking pictures of protestors, found himself suddenly surrounded by students who believed him to be an informant, and he drew a gun.    

He may have fired shots in the air which were mistaken as an attack on the Ohio National Guard,  (which unfortunately had been ordered to campus by the Governor), and the Guard returned fire, setting off a national tragedy. 

Unfortunately, the FBI did not cooperate with my request for a further search of records to determine the precise role of its informant and my term in Congress came to a close.  Who fired the first shot?  Was it someone acting as an agent of the government?   

Government at all levels must tread lightly in using force against peaceful protestors who are exercising their constitutional right to freedom of speech. 

Agencies and counter-parties to the debate over U.S. foreign policy must avoid sending informants, or worse, agents provocateurs into a campus fray. 

One only needs to be aware of the execrable COINTELPRO gambit of US intelligence agencies which infiltrated, disrupted and derailed protests and causes which challenged the status quo, during the Vietnam era.

 We should view campus protests as one of the few healthy signs in a nation where government spying, support for a genocidal war, abandonment of Constitutional liberties and media complicity has constructed not only an alternate politics, but an alternate reality.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.  It was their final, most essential command,” wrote George Orwell in 1984.

College students are not rejecting the evidence of their eyes and ears.  Thirty-Four thousand dead Palestinians, most of them women and children.  The students know the horrific violence going on thousands of miles away, and they know their government is licensing it.  They are demanding the war cease.  

They are standing on more than two centuries of citizen action challenging the government. Those who misuse their authority to suppress legitimate dissent are undermining foundational Constitutional freedoms, the Freedom of Speech and the Right to Protest. The First Amendment is the cornerstone of the American Republic.

Our Constitution; Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness... Economic Security, Being Sacrificed to Endless Wars

Dwight David Eisenhower, the Prophet-President of the United States, sixty-four years ago warned of the ascension of the military-industrial state, presently morphed into the military-industrial-intelligence complex, which, fully in control of our government, induces and manipulates our fears, creating serial enemies, justifying endless war for profit, openly canceling long-cherished constitutional rights, within  the hoary rubric of “National Security,” read: Plunder of the American taxpayer.  

Congress, as an Article One creation is in the thrall of  murderous interest groups which  are actively driving mass killings, assassinations, famine and ethnic cleansing, the progeny of genocide, in plain sight, recycling  U.S. taxpayers’ hard-earned money to tighten its grip on American politics, all the while using its media influence to deny any of this is happening, denying even the existence of a people, or how they died,  as  bodies pile up by the tens of thousands in Gaza.

The extent to which patriotic Americans are being cynically manipulated is exemplified by events of the past week.  Congress forfeited, by single votes in the House and Senate, our Fourth Amendment right to from unreasonable search and seizure, passing the FISA extension and setting the stage for an official police state.   

Next, Congress cheered as members wildly waved the flag of another  nation inside the chamber of the House, (!) ignoring a $34 trillion deficit, adding  another reality-defying $95 billion for “foreign aid,” (war) on top of the nearly one trillion dollars which now goes ANNUALLY to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to wage, on the national credit card, unrelenting war against countless innocents, while across this land anyone who dares exercise our Constitutionally-guaranteed  First Amendment right to speak out in protest on campus, at work, or  in the media,  is condemned, suspended, expelled, or fired.    

Our President and the leaders of foreign nations are in a deadly gandy-dance of denial and mass death, one theatrically begging the other to stop the bombing while providing bombs, not to escalate, while paying for escalation, thus enabling an ever more heartbreaking level of carnage, and collective punishment in open betrayal of our sacred quest for “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of. Happiness.”  Our government stands ready to defend almost any  country’s borders, but our own.

In our country, Americans are smothered in debt, having difficulty keeping up with inflation, seeing a middle class destroyed while trade agreements drove down wages and benefits, eliminated jobs, putting housing, education and health opportunities increasing out of the reach of more and more Americans, making a mockery of the America Dream.

We must break this deadly fealty to shadow-nations and corrupt and corrupting interest groups whose own leaders have without conscience enacted the worst example of man’s inhumanity to man in dark service of an ethno-religious project which is antithetical to every moral principle articulated in America’s founding documents. 

It is urgent that 2024 be the year when we, the American people, make a new beginning.

We must take up our Constitution as a shield and insist upon the Freedoms it guarantees.

We must align with those essentially spiritual values which support life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

We must stop licensing and financing genocide.

We must stop funding and fueling wars around the world.

We must stop building up the freedom- extinguising national debt.

We must take care of our own people here at home.

We must begin to pay attention to the one nation whose affairs should matter most to us:

The United States of America.

The owners of the Cleveland Browns, who have accepted massive taxpayer subsidies, and who are apparently engaged in backroom discussions about moving the team, must comply with ORC 9.67, a state law which requires them to offer the team to either the city or local investors, first, before moving the team. 

I know. I wrote the law as a member of the Ohio Senate to protect the taxpayers, sports fans and cities from being manipulated by billionaire sports team owners who don't care about breaking the hearts of loyal fans.

Are the Browns' owners negotiating in good faith with Brook Park, Ohio, and disclosing that the owners cannot move the team from Cleveland without first complying with ORC 9.67, the state law which puts restrictions on sports team owners who receive tax benefits?