Partway through his second presidential inaugural address, Donald Trump boasted, “After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.”
Soon after, the Republican followed through, signing an order that emphasized the right of the American people to speak freely “without government interference.” The same document accused the Biden administration of using federal powers to advance “the government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”
The order added, “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society,” before concluding, “It is the policy of the United States to secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech [and] ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”
In the days and weeks that followed, the president bragged about the importance of his directive, including in his speech to a joint session of Congress in March. “I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America,” he claimed. “It’s back.”
Reading this months later, it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry. As The Washington Post summarized:
A week after the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump and his allies are attacking critics of the right-wing activist who they say have gone too far, a campaign that detractors described as an alarming attempt to curtail one of the nation’s most hallowed civil liberties: freedom of expression.
It’s unrealistic to think I can summarize every relevant instance from recent months in a single blog post, but consider some of what we’ve seen just in recent days.
A federal agency helped push a comedian off the air. The attorney general vowed to go after speech she considered “hate speech.” The deputy attorney general talked about a possible federal investigation into people who heckled Trump at a restaurant. Responding to a conservative reporter who said that anti-war protesters near the White House “still have their First Amendment right,” Trump replied, “Yeah, well, I’m not so sure.” With the government’s encouragement, employers have punished, suspended or fired countless Americans who talked about Kirk’s death in ways the right didn’t like. Immigrants were told that government officials would monitor their speech and, if they expressed views about Kirk’s death in ways federal agencies found objectionable, that their visas could be revoked. If that weren’t quite enough, Politico reported, “The Pentagon’s crackdown on employees accused of mocking Charlie Kirk’s death has startled troops, who fear an increasing stranglehold on what they’re allowed to say.” Obviously, the trend in recent months includes an avalanche of related examples that predate the Kirk tragedy, but to fail to acknowledge the crackdown is getting worse is to ignore an obvious truth.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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