Federalist No. 84 is famous for Alexander Hamilton’s argument against the need for a Bill of Rights. The listing of such specific liberties, he wrote, was “not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous.”

Why might he think this? Because such specificity, he believed, would give bad men bad ideas. If it were spelled out that certain liberties couldn’t be restricted, what would become of all the other liberties that weren’t so thoughtfully and specifically spelled out? As he trenchantly put it, “For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?”

Clearly, Hamilton couldn’t have imagined an American president like Joe Biden. Otherwise, he might’ve thought twice about the need for spelling out certain fundamental rights — such as the right to be free from government censorship.

As it turns out, the Biden administration spent the last four years undermining the First Amendment at every turn. According to a 38-page report from the Media Research Center, the people in charge of the Biden White House concocted 57 distinct initiatives for defiling the First Amendment. These censorship efforts included “coercing and colluding with Big Tech platforms to silence his opponents; using taxpayer dollars to fund censorship organizations that pledged to cancel conservative voices; enlisting foreign agents to suppress stories from right-leaning media outlets; and weaponizing federal agencies to target those critical of the administration.”

Leftists have thus gone from decrying the censors to embracing them — indeed, even becoming them. Remember: The Free Speech Movement itself began at Cal-Berkeley in the mid-1960s. But what we saw from the Biden administration could rightly have been called the Anti-Free Speech Movement.

Indeed, leftists were in favor of free speech before they were against it. Their favorite free-speech cliché, in fact, goes back more than a century: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. That utterance is falsely attributed to Voltaire, but that’s not the point. The point is that it’s impossible to imagine today a leftist actually putting his life on the line to defend free speech.

But let’s get back to the Biden administration and the MRC report, whose executive summary puts it this way: “The degree and extent of this coordination is dizzying, spanning no fewer than 90 different government agencies, entangling hundreds of government officials and including thousands of individual censorship actions. The number of people silenced, or prevented from receiving messages they wanted to hear, is all but incalculable. The harm to the nation’s constitutional framework and the system of limited government is similarly beyond measure.”

The report lists four general ways in which Team Biden chipped away at our free speech rights:

1.) Direct action, such as ordering a judge or a social-media platform or even a foreign government to do their dirty work, as was the case during the COVID pandemic, when the administration leaned on Amazon to make certain COVID books unavailable

2.) Policies and rulemaking, such as the State Department’s agreement with 20 other countries to work together on Big Tech censorship and Alejandro Mayorkas’s aborted attempt to create that Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board”

3.) Partnerships, such as the State Department’s collaboration with Big Tech to use AI for policing and suppressing online speech

4.) Grants, such as the awarding of millions to NGOs (i.e., the National Science Foundation) for the flagging of inconvenient speech, or to sleazy speech adjudicators such as NewsGuard here at home and the UK’s Global Disinformation Index

The scope of these efforts is remarkable, and the report exhaustively details all 57 initiatives. The most troubling aspect, though, is the whole-of-government approach behind them. They weren’t carried out in a vacuum; instead, they were part of a deliberate philosophy and a far-reaching apparatus.

Heck, if we didn’t know any better, we’d say the Democrats were creating a Censorship Industrial Complex.