Republicans want to protect free speech for themselves and no one else
The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress continue to attack free speech in numerous ways.
Republicans have been desperately trying to portray themselves as the defenders of free speech for the past decade or so. If the Trump administration has made anything clear, it's that this was a fraud. When it comes down to it, Republicans want the right to say anything they want, and they don't care if anyone else retains that right.
We have White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller regularly calling critics of this administration "terrorists," which is something we've seen in countries like Russia and Turkey. Republicans in Congress have used the same language to describe people planning to participate in the No Kings protest on October 18th.
Vice President JD Vance told his supporters to call the employers of people who spoke ill of Charlie Kirk after his death so they would be fired. Donald Trump put a fine point on this recently when he said, "We took the freedom of speech away," while discussing his efforts to jail people who burn the American flag, which the Supreme Court has long said is protected speech.
Adam Serwer, a staff writer at The Atlantic, often says that Republicans believe, "Conservatives can say what they want, and everyone else can say what conservatives want."
"So it basically means that only conservatives have a right to free speech," Serwer tells me.
They feel that people on the left criticizing what they say violates their right to free speech, Serwer says, so left-wing speech "does not even count as speech" and can be "regulated or censored as needed."
"I sometimes refer to it as conservatives believing they have a right to monologue," Serwer says. "They can speak, and you have to listen and like it. But you can't talk back."
Serwer says this mentality has been used to justify actual censorship. As we've seen, they're clearly willing to use the power of the state to silence people in institutions throughout the country.
"This is already happening with government-funded scientific and historical research and with the administration's extortion campaign against American universities, as well as the firing of federal employees over previously expressed views supporting the equality of groups that have been discriminated against on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation," Serwer says.
Of course, the gravest threat to free speech of all is this administration's domestic use of the military and the concurrent mobilization of ICE agents. Mary Anne Franks, a professor of law at George Washington University who focuses on free speech issues, tells me that her main concern right now is the "use of violence to suppress speech."
"MAGA Republicans wasted no time exploiting the murder of Charlie Kirk to whip up a bloodthirsty frenzy against 'leftists,' by which they mean anyone who holds views that Trump doesn’t like," Franks says.
Franks says Trump explicitly blamed “radical left lunatics” for Kirk’s death, and he followed up on these statements with an "increasingly unhinged set of executive orders and statements threatening violence, investigation, arrest and imprisonment of 'left-wing' individuals and organizations."
"Other MAGA officials have echoed or amplified Trump’s dehumanizing rhetoric towards immigrants, Democratic leaders and even Trump-appointed judges who have failed to embrace Trump’s authoritarian agenda," Franks says. "The administration has also become much more explicit in attempts to force people to say what the government wants them to say, such as Pam Bondi threatening to use the DOJ to prosecute people for not praising Kirk as a martyr."
Thor Benson
The deployment of the National Guard into American cities is "very much" a free speech issue, Franks says, because it is being done to intimidate residents, suppress their speech and provoke violent confrontations. Franks believes Trump's ultimate goal is to "ignite a civil war."
Though Franks is obviously a big fan of the First Amendment, she says the Trump administration has made it "brutally clear" that the First Amendment isn't adequately protecting free speech in this moment. She says legal challenges to violations of the First Amendment by this administration are "necessary" and "important," but they tend to come after people's free speech rights have already been violated.
"When the government threatens to kill, arrest or deport people for their political views, sends armed soldiers to surveil and intimidate their communities, turns their universities into factories of far-right propaganda, coerces newspapers and television stations and social media sites into purging critical commentary and dissent, [then] free speech has been chilled in a way that cannot be undone by the courts after the fact," Franks says.
The First Amendment is vitally important, but this administration is happy to violate it, and justice moves slowly. It will be incumbent upon political leaders and the people to aggressively defend it wherever it is being threatened so it is not further eroded.
