"which I think is the Right of every free-born Subject to make, when the Matters so published can be supported with Truth" - Two Issues

AS I RECALL THE CASE of Peter Zenger the issue successfully argued with the jury was that THE TRUTH was an absolute defense against a corrupt accusation of libel.  His landmark defense in the case that his lawyers made TO THE JURY, NOT TO THE CHIEF "justice" who was an appointed puppet was absolutely in line with what I said. 

I mean in putting Mr. Attorney [the prosecutor] upon proving, that my Client printed and published those Papers mentioned in the Information; yet I cannot think it proper for me (without doing Violence to my own Principles) to deny the Publication of a Complaint, which I think is the Right of every free-born Subject to make, when the Matters so published can be supported with Truth; and therefore I'll save Mr. Attorney the Trouble of examining his Witnesses to that Point; and I do (for my Client) confess, that he both printed and published the two News Papers set forth in the Information, and I hope in so doing he has committed no Crime.

That was what ANDREW not Alexander Hamilton, by the way,  argued, the reason that the trial was a huge step forward for the principle that publishing the TRUTH is a right that must be protected.  Publishing a lie was never something he or his lawyer supported.  So bringing him up in this supports my point the lies should be punished AND THAT THERE IS NO RATIONAL OR MORAL CASE TO BE MADE FOR PROTECTING LYING AS A RIGHT. 

The novel idea that was introduced by the Supreme Court in 1964 was that there was a right to lie that turned the vague, hastily written, ill considered First Amendment language into something it hadn't been, a permission for the mass media to lie with impunity about public officials, about many private citizens, it had always been allowed to lie about entire groups of People, members of races and nationalities, of members of religion in ways that fomented violence, murder and oppression.  Until the blockbuster, bombshell issuing addicts of the Warren Court did that it was possible for a politician who was lied about to sue.  The results of that have been the downward descent of our politics into the sub-gutter level they're at now. 

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Though I haven't read nearly enough about the frequently vilified and notorious Alien and Sedition acts signed into law by John Adams, they were clearly a freakout by the Federalists over the Reign of Terror in France FOR WHICH A NUMBER OF AMERICANS, FOREMOST AMONG THEM THOMAS JEFFERSON, WERE WILDLY ENTHUSIASTIC.   

The extent to which the friggin' founders were all beginners at this self-governance by representatives stuff should never be forgotten.  The concepts of "democracy" such as they conceived of it were untried on the scales they proposed.  At the time of John Adams' presidency the foremost example of that other than the fledgling United States was Revolutionary France and things there went to fucking hell in a way that I'm sure they could well imagine happening in the United States.  

That Jefferson, himself had enthusiastically waxed over the "tree of liberty" requiring a steady diet of "the blood of patriots" I have no doubt that John Adams was aware of.  I'm sure the first and only one-term president for the first four decades of the country - all the two-termers being slave holders - wondered if his good friend Jefferson would figure his blood and that of his party were a small price to pay for what France got through its revolution.   If he wanted any example of that among "friends" and comrades, he would certainly have gotten it in reports from the United States Embassy to the French Republic.  He was Vice President as that other numbskull hero of Revolution, Thomas Paine, then a member of the French Revolutionary Government was begging for Washington to save his ass from his fellow revolutionaries there.  I'm sure he was not unaware of the situation.

We should face the fact that Jefferson was way too enthusiastic for the sacrifice in blood from other veins.  He, never a soldier, never found a cause for which he ever seemed to think worth putting his own in danger.   Here's the passage from his 1787 letter letter to William Stephens Smith, the son-in-law of John Adams, in which he issued those stupidly stirring words.

I do not know whether it is to yourself or Mr. Adams I am to give my thanks for the copy of the new constitution. I beg leave through you to place them where due. It will be yet three weeks before I shall receive them from America. There are very good articles in it: and very bad. I do not know which preponderate. What we have lately read in the history of Holland, in the chapter on the Stadtholder, would have sufficed to set me against a Chief magistrate eligible for a long duration, if I had ever been disposed towards one: and what we have always read of the elections of Polish kings should have forever excluded the idea of one continuable for life. Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusets? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it’s motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion.1 The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independant 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusets: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted. 

He was a slave holder who never wanted liberty for his human chattles, a fucking drunk and a crackpot as much as he was ever an inspired genius.  

No doubt the later attempt of Adams in the Alien and Sedition acts to prevent something like the Reign of Terror from being successfully exported to the United States was ham-handed but he, like all of the founders were total beginners trying to do things that no one had done before.   

As it turned out the bloodshed that Jefferson was so blood thirsty for was repeatedly performed, mostly on the bodies of Black People, of Native Americans, etc. and then in the horrors of the American Civil War, THE RE-IMPOSITION OF DE FACTO SLAVERY in the end of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow period the great Civil Rights struggles of the post-war period and, now, again as we face massively armed Republican-fascists who want to impose one-party, anti-egalitarian dictatorship under a Hollywood pagan strong man or a Ron Desantis.   The fertilizer recommended by Jefferson, as much as anything fed a "liberty" tree that meant liberty for the Jeffersons and other slave-holders and de facto slave holders at the expense of the freedom and equality of those whose blood was shed.

That's what we face when we take a hard and serious look at our national mythology, lots and lots of the ideas of those 18th century amateurs don't work.  Lots of them work as intended and the results are not anything like any decent person would want today.  I wouldn't copy any of them or uphold any of them without an extensive and honest criticism BASED ON OUR EXPERIENCE GAINED IN THE LAST TWO AND A QUARTER CENTURIES.  Something that none of them could have known or observed or guessed at.