Trump Continues to Be a Massive Threat to Free Speech

Whether you’re a citizen or not, the Supreme Court has consistently held that the First Amendment protects your right to free speech in America. At least, that’s what it’s been saying up to this point. The Court has been reversing quite a bit of precedent lately.

“It is often said that history does not repeat but rhymes, but this rhymes so closely with the early tactics of the Third Reich that it is virtually a repetition,” Franks said. “The Nazis were focused on ideological as well as racial purity, and many of their first victims were students and professors who criticized the government.”

Timothy Zick, a professor of government and citizenship at the College of William & Mary, told Splinter that he sees a wide array of places where free speech is threatened at this moment.

“If I had to identify the most concerning executive actions in terms of threats to the First Amendment, I would say the administration’s pretextual attacks on higher education, efforts to control the media, retaliation against political foes and critics, and politicization of scientific inquiry,” Zick said.

Trump has taken “countless actions” to retaliate against his critics over things that they’ve said, Zick said, and he worries about the possibility of Trump further using the military to silence his perceived enemies. He said we’re living in the “most consequential period” for free speech since the Joseph McCarthy Era of the 1950s. 

“I worry…about the president’s autocratic designs and the lack of checks and balances to thwart them,” Zick said.

Franks said she’s also worried about a military crackdown that could further threaten Americans’ free speech rights. She says we’ve already seen Trump consolidate quite a bit of authoritarian control, but it could get worse from here.

“I do think that he is trying hard to provoke an outbreak of violence that will give him an excuse to declare a nationwide state of emergency, suspend all laws and establish truly unchecked executive power,” Franks said. “Although, given how much authoritarian control he has already established, this state would be a difference of degree, not of kind.”

Franks says years of “propaganda” have convinced people that Trump-supporting folks on the right cares about free speech and that “cancel culture” was just as bad as government censorship. That’s becoming a significant problem as Trump engages in government censorship. 

“All of us who actually believe in free speech rights for all must stop contributing to this propaganda,” Franks said. “The government does not have a free speech right to force us to listen to bigotry or misogyny or white supremacy; we the people have the free speech right to condemn and exclude it.”