This is a reply to Stephen Samela's question this afternoon on a Facebook post.
* He required recipients of government grants to agree with him on gay rights and abortion, refusing grants to organizations that expressed dissenting views, or that showed insufficient allegiance to his views. He used government aid as a carrot as well as a stick; a despicable example was exempting Planned Parenthood from HHS quality control measures that protect patient health. They're on the side of the angels: why should they have to document their infection-control training?
* He spent a huge amount of money trying to force a church to hire a teacher who disagreed with the church's doctrine. After a lot of money on lawyers, the Supreme Court unanimously slapped the administration down, but the damage was done. The whole purpose of the exercise was to chill speech after all, and it surely did.
To understand the scale of lawlessness during these years, Obama only won 45% of his cases before the Court! I think only Andrew Johnson had a worse win-loss rate.
I should note that federal taxpayer money was also used in Connecticut to support religious organizations with the "correct" view of homosexuality, but I believe that this was HHS incompetence rather than malice.
* He used the IRS to investigate and harass his enemies, in particular hundreds of nonprofits, including dozens of book clubs and at least one small publisher. The Biden administration wasted no time reinstating similar audits as soon as they took power.
* He weaponized Title IX of the Higher Education Act to require colleges to censor speech. A key part of this was a Dear Colleague letter that made it legally and financially hazardous to provide accused students with due process. When the students had the resources to bring lawsuits, the courts almost universally found colleges or their staff liable here, but the long-term damage to free speech was huge: https://buckleyinstitute.com/buckley-program-releases-eighth-annual-college-student-survey
Again, the Biden administration enthusiastically embraced the Obama's administrations civil-rights abuses as soon as they could.
* He freed the NSA to collect the text messages and emails of virtually every American (and a good part of the rest of the world.) He also collected most of the cell phone call records of most calls in the United States. In terms of metadata and call contents, he conducted more surveillance on his fellow citizens then all the presidents before and since.
His administration used some of this information against his political enemies, for example in the Russian collusion hoax. Furthermore, this data set was instrumental in the "success" of Biden's Disinformation Governance Board, which weaponized government censorship in a way that we've never seen before, even in wartime.
A case to compare with the Kimmel firing: At the 2013 Missouri State Fair, a rodeo clown lampooned President Obama and made over-the-top statements, one of which may be construed as inviting violence against him. The (Democratic) Governor complained, as did politicians on both parties.
And the rodeo clown got fired! Some might disagree, but most reasonable people would that's a good thing. But isn't a poor rodeo clown, just like a wealthy comedian, protected by the First Amendment? After all, his behavior wasn't nearly as vile as Kimmel's was.
This rodeo clown didn't use his position to spread a hoax, for example, or to mock people who are mourning a man whose corpse was barely cold. Furthermore, Kimmel, unlike the rodeo clown, spouted his hate on a broadcast TV station, whose FCC license specifically prohibits spreading hoaxes.
Why don't I see any of the people who claim to be outraged about Kimmel's firing also calling for justice for the rodeo clown? Okay, I do see why, and it's not pretty.
