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After more than a decade of liberal-driven censorship and cancel culture, Donald Trump’s second election win was meant to have, in his own words, “saved free speech in America,” starting with an executive order on day one to “stop all government censorship,” which is “intolerable in a free society.” Instead, Trump’s ascent to the presidency is so far seeing a dramatic, across-the-board clampdown on all kinds of First Amendment–protected speech, and a ramping up of government suppression of certain viewpoints.
We tend to associate this with pro-Palestinian activism, and there’s no doubt that’s the area that’s seen the most aggressive actions taken to chill political speech. The Trump administration has, without precedent, asserted the right to unilaterally revoke the legal status of permanent residents and deport them based purely on their criticisms of US foreign policy, have canceled reportedly hundreds of visas on this same basis, and are looking through the social media histories of visa applicants to find any pro-Palestinian speech. They have been assisted by private institutions like universities and businesses, which have sometimes assisted federal agents with making arrests or clamped down on pro-Palestinian speech themselves. This is a shocking assault on freedom of speech, and the Trump administration isn’t even pretending otherwise.
But this barely touches the surface. One visa holder, a French scientist here for a conference, was barred from entering the United States and sent back to France not because of anything pro-Palestine he said. Instead, authorities went through his phone and found private messages he had sent that were critical of Trump’s science policies.
The president had, on his first day in the White House, signed an order to keep out anyone with “hostile attitudes toward [US] citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles.” In keeping with that, the administration just suspended the visa of a former president of Costa Rica who has recently criticized Trump. The message is clear: any criticism of the US president will get you barred from the country, a sharp departure from American political tradition, which vehemently protects, even celebrates, the people’s right to criticize people in power.
It’s not just foreigners. Shortly before what was planned as a massive nonviolent protest against Trump’s policies in the US capital this Saturday, the White House issued an executive order for, among other things, “deploying a more robust” federal and local law enforcement presence in DC and more strictly enforcing laws against “unpermitted disturbances and demonstrations, noise, trespassing.”
Along with a provision making concealed carry of firearms easier in the district, the order clearly creates a more intimidating and potentially dangerous atmosphere for anyone planning to march on the day. The administration denies the order has anything to do with the demonstration, of course. But if Joe Biden’s White House had done the same thing a week before a huge, planned march against vaccine mandates and other pandemic policies, the Right would have had no question about what they were trying to do.
Meanwhile, as first reported by Ken Klippenstein, a recently obtained FBI document suggests the bureau is keeping tabs on Americans’ social media and any hostility to corporate executives that they exhibit on the platforms. The document listed six examples of what the FBI described as “lone actors, unaffiliated with specific ideological groups,” who were “using social media to intimidate high-profile employees” — all of them social media posts that certainly used overheated rhetoric, but were far from actual, substantive threats — posts like “I’ll shoot the ceo of con Edison before I pay that light bill” and “Corrupt CEOs should start watching the news.”
The trouble for the bureau is not only that the document itself states that these posts “often fall short of federal prosecution,” but that rhetoric like this is not uncommon in the United States today thanks to popular rage at a horribly unfair health care system. When the UnitedHealthcare (UHC) CEO Brian Thompson was murdered last year, thousands of frustrated Americans shared their understanding, approval, and even amusement at the terrible crime on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit — with posts drawing many thousands of likes or laughing emoji reactions — as well as in the comments sections of conservative outlets like the Daily Mail, Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and New York Post. I myself saw a Luigi Mangione flag flown from the balcony of a house shortly after the crime.
The point is that, as distasteful and impolite as this might be, if the FBI considers this kind of talk a genuine threat to public safety, it will lead to even more large-scale government surveillance of a massive swath of ordinary Americans, or even attempts to put them in prison for the things they say. Recall that just a month after Trump’s election and the “vibe shift” it brought with it, a Florida mother of three was, at the FBI’s tip-off, charged with the felony of threatening a mass shooting or terrorist act after she said to the health insurance company denying her claim the words the UHC killer engraved on his bullet casings. (Those charges have since been dropped after triggering an outcry.)
This attitude is bleeding over into the Trump administration’s war on vandalism against Tesla, the car company owned by the president’s megadonor and now cutter-in-chief Elon Musk. Needless to say, vandalism and arson are not legitimate speech, but they are also already crimes — which begs the question of why they are now going to be prosecuted as “domestic terrorism,” as the president, his FBI director, and attorney general have all threatened, or, as the DC police are doing, investigating such incidents as hate crimes.
We are already seeing those charged labels being cast beyond actual vandalism to encompass simply speech and activism against the company and its billionaire owner. A Boston professor who advocated for nonviolent picketing of Tesla dealerships nationwide is being labeled a terrorist and accused of stoking violence. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has called for a criminal investigation into “Democrat-leaning NGOs” and other institutions critical of Musk, like Indivisible and Democratic Socialists of America, which she charges “may be involved in the recent Tesla attacks.” How long before anyone else critical of Musk is baselessly accused of the same thing?
Trump’s election hasn’t even led to the end of specifically online censorship of speech he promised was over.
Despite promising a “return to that fundamental commitment to free expression” at the start of the year, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta seems to have simply changed the targets of its speech suppression, kicking off Trump’s term by censoring the posts and accounts of several abortion pill providers, as well as pro-LGBTQ posts that it later said were removed because of a “technical error.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights watchdog critical of tech censorship, has warned that online suppression of abortion-related content “appears to be increasing” and is happening across almost every social media platform.
A man who announced he would make a satirical set of “Most Wanted CEO” cards — incidentally, one of the exact examples cited by the FBI in its surveillance of anti-corporate online posts — was banned from several different platforms simultaneously, shortly after the New York Post labeled his idea “disturbing” and he was interviewed by police officers at his doorstep. As the EFF pointed out, the same platforms who banned the man have allowed the promotion or sale of the same kind of “Most Wanted” playing cards when it comes to Hamas or figures involved in pandemic-related controversies — so it’s not the concept, but the specific political message in this case that’s considered objectionable. This is on top of the many other accounts censored for posting even vaguely positive content about the UHC assassin.
More recently, the Instagram account of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of pro-Palestine student groups protesting for a cease-fire and university divestment from Israel, was locked out of its account for supposedly violating community guidelines. Over on Twitter/X, the platform of self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” Musk, you’ll still find complaint after complaint about non-Palestine-related accounts being suspended for unclear reasons.
Sometimes, those accounts are suspended because of the Twitter/X owner’s own personal, petty grievances, as when he accused one user who had named members of his Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) department of committing a crime, before their account was suspended shortly after. In another case, a journalist who had debunked an online theory that was unflattering to Musk was also, bafflingly, kicked off the site and her story blocked. This isn’t totally surprising, since last year, the platform disclosed it suspended more than five million accounts in the first half of the year, more than four times as many as before Musk took it over.
Meanwhile, self-censorship is rife. The mayor of Washington, DC, ordered the Black Lives Matter mural painted on a city street five years ago removed, to stave off possible interference from Trump’s federal government. The Air Force and Navy are warning troops not to criticize the president or his officials in case they are prosecuted for military offenses like “contempt against officials.”
Major newspapers have made sweeping editorial policy changes mandating a “break” from covering the president or barring viewpoints critical of “free markets” from the opinion section. Whole programs, contracts, and positions are being eliminated for using certain words and terms that personally trigger the “snowflake” sensibilities of the president and his allies, from “equity” and “gender” and to “safe drinking water” and “mental health,” effectively barring whole parts of the English language for federal employees, contractors, and organizations that might apply for federal funding.
Mind you, these are just a few cases that have been publicized, and doesn’t even include actions like the threatened federal prosecutions of environmental groups, the executive orders targeting law firms connected to Trump’s political opponents, or the president’s private lawsuits against media companies. That means there are likely many, many more examples where people and institutions have privately, quietly decided to stay silent on certain topics and avoid a fuss.
There was no shortage of policies that threatened free expression under the Biden administration, whether the overly broad use of terrorism charges against protesters, or the government’s involvement in social media companies’ censorship policies, to the point of trying to ban an entire platform because of the political content it carried. But all of that now looks positively tame.
In just three short months, the Trump administration has created an atmosphere where foreigners, immigrants, and even US citizens have to watch what they say and do, particularly when it comes to criticizing and protesting the government or its political allies, but also simply in the kind of language they use. Overheated political rhetoric against corporate malfeasance can get you surveilled by the FBI or visited by the police, while tech censorship is going as strong as ever. And some are so intimidated that self-censorship on a variety of topics is rampant.
Had the Biden administration done any of this, it would have, correctly, been deemed an alarming and un-American attack on the First Amendment and led an army of commentators to scream bloody murder. Now that they’re happening under a Republican president, many of those same voices are silent. It’s enough to make you suspect that neither the new administration nor the “free speech warriors” allied with it were ever really that committed to free speech except as a partisan cudgel.
Great Job Branko Marcetic & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
