After all, if there was no concern that federal officials would try to suppress speech, there would have been no reason to enact the First Amendment.

Recent events confirm the wisdom and foresight of our American ancestors. That's because the federal government is doing everything it can to shut down critics of the U.S. national-security state, its overseas empire of military bases, and its interventionist foreign policy, especially as it concerns Russia.

The government's attacks on free speech revolve partly around a registration law that was enacted in 1938, which requires people who operate as agents of a foreign government to register their names, addresses, positions, and activities with the U.S. government. If they fail to do so, the government prosecutes them for "failing to register," which entails the possibility of a 10-year prison sentence.

Just recently, the feds prosecuted a small political group in Florida named the African People's Socialist Party and its related "Uhuru" movement. For more than 50 years, the group has been advocating for the rights of blacks, especially with respect to police abuse, reparations, and socialism. Most important, however, the group has long been highly critical of U.S. foreign policy, most recently with the U.S. role in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. In its prosecution, the government maintained that because the group supposedly received money from Russia to expound views that the group had been making for decades, that made them agents of the Russian government, thus requiring them to register with the federal government.

But the threats don't stop there. The feds have also threatened critics of U.S. foreign policy who have gotten paid by the Russian government to express their views on RT and other Russian media outlets. The feds allege that such payments convert the critics into agents of the Russian government and, therefore, that the 1938 law requires them to register with the federal government. Those who have failed to do so now face the distinct possibility of facing a federal criminal indictment for failing to register or conspiring to fail to register.