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When presidents declare war on the press, the battle for free speech and democracy.

Yesterday for Thanksgiving, I published a short history of Jefferson's and his

Democrats' reaction to John Adams' fearmongering for political power around the XYZ affair.

I referenced Adams' shutting down the opposition newspapers in America, but a surprising number

of people responded with, what?

Really?

An American president shut down all the opposition newspapers because they insulted him?

That really happened?

So here's the rest of the story.

Some Americans are suggesting that the ascendance of a strong man president who wants to shut down America's press is totally new in the experience of America and may spell the end of both democracy and the bill of rights.

History, however, shows another view which offers us both warnings and hope.

Although you won't learn much about it from reading the Republican histories of the founders

being published and promoted in the corporate media these days, the most notorious stain on the

presidency of John Adams began in 1798, with the passage of a series of laws that would give him

virtually unlimited strongman powers to attack his political enemies, and, like Trump says he wants to do,

end the First Amendment right of a free press. It started when Benjamin Franklin Bach, grandson of

Benjamin Franklin, an editor of the Philadelphia newspaper, The Aurora, began to speak out

against the policies of then-President John Adams. Bach supported Vice President Thomas Jefferson's

...