For most of the day yesterday, I attended a meeting of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, focused largely on human rights and religious liberty violations in China.

But I couldn’t help but think I could just as easily have been at a meeting about human rights and religious liberty violations here in the United States.

As I have often said, the attacks on Trump over the last four years were about much more than Donald Trump. The left despises Donald Trump and it despises us. The left wants to silence every conservative voice it can. And the progressive assault on the First Amendment just went into high gear.

Pelosi Pushes Impeachment

President Trump made it clear in his remarks last week that he was focused on a smooth and orderly transition of power. He also called for calm, healing, and reconciliation. But the left doesn’t seem interested in calm, healing, or reconciliation.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced that House Democrats will pass a resolution calling for President Trump to be removed through the 25th Amendment. That’s not going to happen, and Pelosi knows it.

So, she’s also planning to bring articles of impeachment to the House floor later this week. According to Politico, at least 218 House Democrats support impeaching the president for allegedly inciting violence. But that’s not going anywhere either.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell noted that the Senate is in recess and cannot hold an impeachment trial until January 19th at the earliest, potentially overshadowing the inauguration and bogging down the Senate for days.

Faced with these realities, House Majority Whip James Clyburn said that Speaker Pelosi would likely delay transmitting the articles of impeachment to the Senate, just as she did last year.

“Let’s give President-elect Biden the 100 days he needs to get his agenda off and running,” Clyburn said. “And maybe we will send the articles some time after that.”

While it’s debatable whether former officials can be impeached, Pelosi was clear about her motivation. The speaker said in an interview with “60 Minutes” this weekend that “one of the motivations that people have for advocating for impeachment” is to prevent Trump from running for office again, adding, “He has to pay a price.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez echoed Pelosi’s desire to ban Trump from the political arena, saying, “We’re also talking about complete barring of … Donald Trump from running for office ever again.”

Joe Biden should tell Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats to stand down. Pushing impeachment with just barely a week left in the president’s term will do nothing to help heal or unite this country.

Silencing Trump & You

The social media giants and other Big Tech firms quickly moved in lockstep to toe the Democrat Party line. Twitter and Facebook “permanently suspended” President Trump’s accounts due to the “risk of further incitement of violence.”

That multiple private companies feel free to “permanently suspend” the free speech rights of the president proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Trump is hardly a dictator.

It also proves yet again that Big Tech is a danger to the First Amendment with its selective enforcement. Here’s a sampling of violent tweets that Twitter has tolerated.

Meanwhile, other tech companies piled on, cutting off the Trump campaign’s ability to accept online donations or sell merchandise.

But the attacks on free speech didn’t stop there.

Parler, a social media platform committed to free speech, was completely shut down this weekend. Apple and Google banned the Parler app, and Amazon banned Parler from its web hosting service. All their vendors, including their lawyers, have abandoned the company.

Millions of conservatives who used Parler, including me, have been silenced by Big Tech’s tyranny.

Speaking of lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, is under investigation by the New York Bar Association. Other lawyers affiliated with the president have been forced to resign from their law firms.

Again, my friends, we need to be clear about this: While Donald Trump may be the left’s immediate target, it is also sending a message that is designed to demoralize and intimidate you.

The Big Lie

I want to make something very clear: The left, the media, and too many Republicans are suggesting that Donald Trump incited violence last week and caused that riot on Capitol Hill. He did no such thing, and we cannot allow this “big lie” to prevail.

During his remarks before the terrible events that unfolded on Capitol Hill, President Trump said, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your votes heard today.”

Calling on Americans to “peacefully and patriotically” protest at the Capitol, at the White House, and at the Supreme Court has been done since the founding of this country. The president did not incite his supporters to riot.

Famed Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz vowed to defend Trump again, insisting that his remarks do not rise to the level of an impeachable offense and that they were constitutionally protected free speech.

Even the left-wing site Snopes refused to say that Trump incited violence. And this timeline of events indicates that the president was still speaking when the violence began.

Any reporter and politician who insists that President Trump incited violence is engaged in a big lie to smear the president, his conservative supporters, and the entire conservative movement.

The intolerant progressive left won’t be satisfied with driving Donald Trump from office. It wants to make conservatives unemployable and it wants to make normal conservative opinions unspeakable.

This is tyranny plain and simple.

The Blame Game

While Nancy Pelosi and other progressive politicians are doing everything they can to blame President Trump for last week’s riot, numerous security officials on Capitol Hill have already been fired or forced to resign for failing to do their jobs. And more resignations may be coming in the days ahead.

In spite of repeated denials, several officials were well aware of plans to assault the Capitol days before it happened. NBC News reports that the FBI and the New York Police Department had intelligence that violence was possible and had warned the Capitol Hill Police in advance.

In fact, federal agents reportedly met with “more than a dozen extremists already under investigation to urge them not to travel to Washington.”

If these reports are accurate, then last week’s assault on Capitol Hill was the result of a colossal intelligence failure.

If there was so much advance warning that the FBI had time to dispatch officials to tell known extremists to stay out of Washington, then the National Guard should have been deployed the day before the joint session of Congress in sufficient force to prevent the horrific scenes and the tragic loss of life we witnessed last week.

But that didn’t happen because some officials were worried about “optics.” Well, the failure to plan appropriately resulted in terrible optics and an emboldened progressive movement that is crushing free speech.