After CNN was forced to retract yet another fake news story
about “Russian collusion” it did what all Leftists do when caught in a
lie: It played “victim.” It did so by claiming that President
Trump’s calling out of the fake story, which CNN now admits was a fake, was an
attack on freedom of speech in America. So, according to CNN, publishing
fake “news” is free speech, while pointing out the truth is an attack on free
speech.
To hammer home the point that it, CNN, is the nation’s protector
of free speech, the network attempted to taunt the president on the Fourth of
July by tweeting an inscription that is chiseled into a wall at the “Newseum”
in Washington, D.C. They apparently thought that this would be a death
blow to the president, for the quote was from the god of the state, Abe
Lincoln. “Let the people know the facts, and the country will be safe,”
Abe supposedly said. Yes, just let them “know” that Vladimir Putin
personally hypnotized Donald Trump, turning him into a Manchurian candidate,
and then rigged all the election machinery in the United States to assure his
election. They will then be “safe” to know that Hillary Clinton is their
real president.
Unfortunately
for CNN, the Lincoln quote is more fake news because the quote itself is a
fake, as proven by several researchers and reported by The Federalist Web site. How telling
–and appropriate — that CNN and the “Newseum” invoke this fake Lincoln quote as
their motto. Lincoln was a tyrant and a dictator with regard to the
media, shutting down over 300 opposition newspapers in the North during the War
to Prevent Southern Independence and imprisoning their editors and owners
without due process. No other president has ever come close to being as
big an enemy of freedom of the press.
As
historian Dean Sprague wrote in Freedom Under Lincoln,
in a chapter entitled “The Policy of Repression,” the “first step” in Lincoln’s
“program against the anti-war newspapers” in the Northern states “had to start
with the muzzling of the New York press” (p. 142). The New York papers
“dominated much of the nation,” meaning that many other newspapers followed their
lead in reporting the news and editorializing on it. The Journal of Commerce was the most influential of
the New York newspapers, and it published a list of over 100 other Northern
newspapers that had editorialized against the war in early 1861.
Most newspapers
at the time were delivered by mail, so the Lincoln administration ordered the
Postal Service to cease delivering the opposition newspapers. Eventually,
they began arresting (without due process, since Habeas Corpus had been illegally suspended) editors
who persisted in selling their papers. The editor of the New York Freeman’s Journal, James McMasters, was
especially heroic in his defense of his paper and of free speech.
Consequently, Secretary of State William Seward (from New York) orderd federal
marshals to “arrest [McMasters] and send him to Fort Lafayette.” Fort
Lafayette in New York Harbor was at the time used as a gulag where political
critics of the Lincoln administration were rounded up and imprisoned.
Such repression taught many of the other papers a lesson:
criticize the Lincoln administration and you, too, will be dragged off to Fort
Lafayette. Consequently, the New York newspapers “had been silenced by
the end of September 1861,” writes Sprague (p. 149). But then there were
other newspapers elsewhere in New York state, from Long Island to the Canadian
border, that commenced criticism of the Lincoln regime. They soon
received the same treatment from Seward, Lincoln’s media henchman, and were
silenced. Then “the mania for arrests [of opposition newspaper editors]
soon spread outside New York State. Pennsylvania suffered greatly” (p.
151).
Another
book that describes Lincoln’s 1861 “summer of rage” against free speech in the
Northern states is Lincoln’s Wrath: Fierce Mobs, Brilliant Scoundrels and a
President’s Mission to Destroy the Press, by
historians Jeffrey Manber and Neil Dahlstrom. During that summer,
“Republicans around Lincoln systematically shut down all dissenting
voices. Editors and writers of antiwar newspapers were subjected to
myriad punishments. Some were tarred and feathered, some were thrown into
federal prisons and held without trial for months at a time. Others were
forced to change their opinions and publish only glowing praise of the
government actions” (p 2).
This
enabled the state to fabricate a fake history that eliminates “a forgotten
generation of editors, writers, and publishers” who dared to express “their
anger that the Constitution was being trampled” by Lincoln. These men
were outraged at “Lincoln’s willingness to shut down any loyal opposition” (emphasis added). At
the same time, pro-Lincoln newspapers were subsidized with tax
revenues to cement into place the fake history of the war that
was being fabricated by Lincoln and the Republican Party.
Lincoln
believed that he had the “right” to redefine the Constitution in whatever way
he personally preferred, the formal amendment process be damned. Treason”
is defined by Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution as “only” levying war
upon the United States, or giving aid and comfort to their enemies. The word “their” is all
important here, for it means “United States” is in the plural,i.e., the individual states being united to form
a confederacy. Treason is levying war upon the individual, free and independent
states. That of course is exactly what Lincoln was doing – levying war
upon the states of the South. He chose to redefine treason to mean
instead any criticism of himself and
his policies. That was the basis of the mass arrest of hundreds of
newspaper editors and owners, and thousands of other Northern citizens
suspected of being critics of government policy.
All of this is why it is totally appropriate that the words of
Lincoln, of all people, are literally engraved in a wall at the Fake News
“Newseum” in Washington, D.C.
Thomas J.
DiLorenzo [send him
mail] is professor of economics at Loyola University Maryland and
the author of The Real Lincoln; How Capitalism Saved America; Lincoln Unmasked; Hamilton’s Curse; Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government;
and most recently, The Problem With Socialism.
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