Good Day Citizens and Welcome to What Would Jefferson Do?

Our weekly opportunity to discuss current American events

with President Thomas Jefferson,

who is seated across for me.

Good day to you, Mr. President.

Good day to you, Citizen.

Mr. Jefferson, recently, a reporter was killed.

Now, he's not an American citizen citizen and he wasn't murdered on US soil, but he does

have legal residence here. He writes for an American newspaper. I'm wondering, sir, how you would react to a situation like this in a diplomatic sense.

A Voltaire, who was not a reporter, but a philosopher in France, was beaten up by a rich nobleman's lackeys for writing things that the

nobleman found offensive to him. So beatings and tar and feathers and intimidation of journalists is as old as the world, I'm certain.

We in the United States have a fortunate tradition. The Declaration of Independence

says that we are entitled to life, liberty, and the by a foreign power, and we have the First Amendment, which is maybe the most powerful

doctrine and protection of free speech that exists anywhere on earth.

And that is one of Mr. Madison's gifts to the American Republic.

So in our country we don't do that sort of thing and when it happens somewhere else

particularly if there's a tie to the United States as there was in this case, we need

to protest firmly without any ambiguity whatsoever, and to say that it simply is the case that the United States

does not want to have significant interests with any regime anywhere that would treat a foreign journalist or any journalist in this manner.

So in the history of the world, most of these things have never come to the attention of the people in your age of universal media access and

diffusion events like this suddenly become international crises.

And so now the question is not what will happen to the country that did this, but what will the

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