As we learned in class, the Sedition Act that was first passed in 1798 and then again in 1918, essentially made it illegal to criticize the government. Of course, it was worded in a way that didn't explicitly say you can't criticize the government. Never the less, it was a clear violation of the First Amendment.
The act was later appealed in 1920, however, antiwar voices who criticize the government are still being silenced.
This country was founded on criticizing the government, so why do we suppress those who do?
In my opinion, it's due to the fact that nobody wants dirt thrown on their name, especially the United States government. No government is perfect, that's for sure, which is why many of them don't like when antiwar voices criticize their decisions or expose their secrets.
It could be much worse. We could live in a country where we are brutally tortured for speaking out against the government. Our country grants a lot of freedoms, that's not to say that these freedoms are always enacted correctly.
On the American Conservative, one of the first articles to come up is about how all the medicine we need to fight the Coronavirus is in China. According to the article "about 80 percent of our core chemicals for generic medicines comes from China."
The site exposing this leads for more and more people to criticize how the government is handling this outbreak.
On the other side of the coin, when people discuss anti-war ideas, a lot of the times they are seen as being "anti-American." This could be due to the fact that the government likes to lead us to believe that war, and the deaths of innocent civilians, is just good old American payback. But it's not that simple.
If we are going to shout from the rooftops about how the 2nd amendment was our "god-given right", then we should also shout from the rooftops that criticizing the government and its decisions is also our god-given right.
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