Last week, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, the Trump Administration responded not with a serious deep dive into the availability of high-powered rifles or by attempting to lower the temperature of the current political discourse. It certainly didn’t respond by acknowledging the huge number of violent actions, up to and including assassinations, carried out by hard-right acolytes in recent years, as well as the myriad documented examples of incitements to violence spouted by Trump, by Steve Bannon, and other hard-right avatars.
Instead, it immediately took a mallet out and started demolishing the First Amendment–essentially ordering corporations and universities to fire anyone who didn’t publicly grieve enough for Kirk’s murder and threatening to yank the FCC broadcasting licenses from ABC and other broadcasters unless they took off the air Late Night hosts who questioned the MAGA plot line regarding the murder victim, the murderer, and the murderer’s motivations.
SFR
The highest profile casualty of this McCarthy-era style purge was ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, who questioned the motives of the MAGA grief machine, intimated that it was possible the killer came from the right rather than the left of the political spectrum, and made jokes about how Trump was or wasn’t displaying his grief for Kirk. Shortly afterwards, FCC chair Brendan Carr announced that Kimmel’s remarks were “truly sick” and that ABC and its parent company, Disney, could do this “the easy way or the hard way:” either voluntarily yank Kimmel off the air or risk losing their broadcasting licenses.
The tone was so off-putting that even Texas senator Ted Cruz, hardly a paragon of liberalism, warned that Carr was talking like a mob boss. Now, Cruz isn’t one of my favorite people, and I can’t think of another instance when I’ve felt the need to approvingly quote him. But, hell, there’s always a first time for everything. The Texan responded to Carr’s comments with “I gotta say, that’s right out of Goodfellas; that’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.’” On his podcast, he explained that “I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying we’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying.”
Cruz is absolutely right. The First Amendment doesn’t state that “You can say whatever you want as long as it doesn’t annoy the President or the Attorney General or the Secretary of State or the FCC chair.”
All those MAGA snowflakes out there who apparently love defending the constitution and the Bill of Rights without their ever having read these documents, you should try actually reading the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights one day; it’s pretty stirring stuff. The First Amendment is short and to the point–short enough even for the attention span of somebody who still believes that Trump has the best interests of ordinary Americans at heart and that the MAGA leader isn’t a serial violator of the law and constitution. And it goes like this: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Note: it doesn’t even bother to mention Executive Orders and other Executive actions against free speech, because the founders assumed that this was the purview of Congress. Had they imagined a scenario where the entire Executive would be captured by people with the souls of fascists and the integrity of jackals, I imagine they would have added a brief note saying something to the effect of “and the Executive, too, will not abridge those freedoms.”
This is a Free Speech fight that every broadcaster, newspaper, magazine, blogger, podcaster in the country should be itching to have, it’s a free speech fight that every civil rights attorney in the country should be jumping to sign onto because they would win–and that win would, alongside decisions such as that in the Pentagon Papers case, be among the most important First Amendment decisions in US history.
Yet the Trump Administration seems in no ways constrained by such minor impediments as the Bill of Rights. This past week has been unremittingly bleak for those who care about free speech in America. The White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich made the extraordinary claim that the administration was pushing what it calls “consequence culture”–which translates roughly to “say the wrong thing and have the full fire hose of White House venom directed your way.” In reality this is nothing more than a hard-right mirror of the loathed “cancel culture” they so often inveigh against; except, it’s a cancel culture backed by every branch of government and egged on by the chronically thin-skinned, snowflake, president-something the most woke of woke progressives could never have dreamed of during their moment in the sun a few years back.
Trump announced that he would find ways to ban supposed hate speech against him by yanking the license of any broadcaster who employed late-night hosts who were critical of him. That’s not the marketplace of ideas conservatives so frequently tout; rather it’s the idea of lèse majesté, which criminalizes criticism of the monarch as well, more broadly, of any action deemed to impinge on the dignity of the ruler. This is the concept that has resulted in so many critics of the Thai king being sentenced to prison terms, some decades in length, in recent years. I can’t think of anything more un-American than attempting to impose such norms on the US public, on the media and on universities.
Astoundingly, Trump’s efforts to enforce lèse majesté law in the US are getting buy-in from every relevant branch of government. Attorney General Pam Bondi told Katie Miller, the podcasting wife of Trump’s odious henchman, Stephen Miller that “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” The State Department announced that they would deny visas to would-be US visitors who had expressed opinions online about Kirk that didn’t tow the party line, and Secretary of State Rubio promised that existing visas were already being revoked for those who spoke about Kirk’s death in ways deemed to be celebratory. When four individuals saw the Trumps out for dinner one night at a DC restaurant and began shouting at them, the deputy head of the Justice Department announced that they could all face RICO charges–racketeering charges which can trigger decades-long prison sentences, and which are typically used against cartel and mafia higher-ups.
Later in the week, Trump announced that he would be declaring Antifa a “major terrorist organization,” and his administration declared that it would root out the funders of this amorphous group. Vice President Vance denounced liberal funders such as George Soros and the Ford Foundation for allegedly helping fund extremist networks. So, too, did Stephen Miller, who promised before God to use the full force of the state to wipe out these groups.
But “Antifa,” which Trump’s people hold up as Exhibit No. 1 in their anti-free speech campaign, isn’t a membership-based organization. It’s simply a loose group of people who subscribe to an “anti-fascist” ideology. One doesn’t pay dues to join; there are no leadership elections; there is no executive board or council. It’s essentially a catch-all term that can be used both by fans and foes alike to label people. As a target for specific legal and public policy responses, it is about as imprecise as promising to bring racketeering charges against people who take sugar with their coffee.
Which brings me back to Ted Cruz, who rightly declared the administration’s tactics versus ABC to be “dangerous as hell.” You know things are hitting rock bottom when it’s the brutalist Texas senator who is the one seeking to prime the brakes on the worst assault against free speech launched by a sitting president since Richard Nixon.
