I’ve described Brett Kimberlin as an Anti-First Amendment activist. The TKPOTD for ten years ago today reported on his support for an attempt to partially repeal the whole Bill of Rights.( Note: In 2017, Kimberlin change the name of Velvet Revolution US to Protect Our Elections/EMPR Inc. The IRS has since revoked its 501(c)(4) status.)

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One of the subsidiary efforts of Brett Kimberlin’s 501(c)4 organization Velvet Revolution US is called Protect Our Elections. On 18 June, 2013, that organization posted it support for an effort by Senator John Tester (D-MT) to introduce an amendment to the Constitution to partially repeal the Bill of Rights. (No, I won’t link to it.) The endorsement ends with a link to another organization collecting supporters for the proposed amendment.

Here’s the proposed text:

Section 1. We the people who ordain and establish this Constitution intend the rights protected by this constitution to be the rights of natural persons.

Section 2. The words people, person, or citizen as used in this Constitution do not include corporations, limited liability companies or other corporate entities established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state, and such corporate entities are subject to such regulation as the people, through their elected State and Federal representatives, deem reasonable and are otherwise consistent with the powers of Congress and the States under this Constitution.

Section 3. Nothing contained herein shall be construed to limit the people’s rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free exercise of religion, freedom of association and all such other rights of the people, which rights are unalienable.

Ah, I see that some of the Gentle Readers don’t understand the danger in this. Allow me to explain. Most of the entities we do business with or are employed by are corporations, limited liability companies, and the like. The Girl Scouts and the Red Cross are. Most churches and other religious bodies are. All such organizations would lose their rights.

The government could seize the money in your employers bank account without compensation or due process. Your church could be told what doctrine it could publicly proclaim. Newspapers owned by corporations, such as the Washington Post and the Washington Times, could be told what they could print. And what they couldn’t. And what they must. A state or the federal government could tell the ACLU who they could and could not represent.

And don’t be fooled by Section 3. It protects only “the people’s” rights, and “the people” as defined in Section 2 expressly excludes corporations. Sure, individual reporters could write what they please, but the government would be free to prevent those reporters from using corporate resources to publish in the pages of a newspaper or even using the offices, equipment, or other assets of the organization—or even speaking or writing company time. An imam would be free to teach his beliefs on abortion, but the government could prevent him from using the mosque’s property, a corporate asset, while preaching.

Imagine what would have happened to organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the NAACP during the ’50s and ’60s without the protection (at times feebly enforced) of the Bill of Rights.

The irony of all this is that Brett Kimberlin’s “charities” are incorporated. They would lose their rights as well.

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A sufficiently advanced level of incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

—Grey’s Law