Do Not Give Up The High Ground On Freedom Of Speech!

The four years of the Biden presidency were a terrible low point for the protection of freedom of speech in the U.S.  A web of government agencies and allied NGOs sprang up with remarkable rapidity to identify and ban disfavored speech, almost always of conservatives.  As just a few examples: the White House itself pressured social media platforms to suppress disfavored speech on politically sensitive topics like Covid and climate change; the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency collaborated with universities and NGOs like the Stanford Internet Observatory to get disfavored speech banned or suppressed; the Department of Homeland Security formed a Disinformation Governance Board to coerce social media companies to suppress speech deemed “disinformation”; and the FBI conducted wide-ranging investigations of Republican politicians and organizations.  The entire enterprise got the accurate nickname of the Censorship Industrial Complex.

This was an extremely important issue that drove many voters to Trump.  After Trump was elected, we had every reason to expect that efforts like those of the prior administration to coerce the suppression of opponents’ speech of would come to an end.  And, for the most part, they have.

However, the past week has seen two bad unforced errors on the freedom of speech front by high-ranking members of the Trump administration:

Pam Bondi.  Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared on a podcast with someone named Katie Miller that aired Monday, September 15.  NBC News has some quotes of key statements made by Bondi:

Asked if the Justice Department would be cracking down on groups that engage in such speech, Bondi said, “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, anything — and that’s across the aisle.” . . . “You can’t have that hate speech in the world in which we live,” she said. "There is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society,” Bondi said, referring to Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who was assassinated on a college campus in Utah last week.   

Brendan Carr.  Carr, Chair of the Federal Communications Commission, appeared on Wednesday, September 17, on a podcast with someone named Benny Johnson.  Quotes of the key sections of the interview can be found at this article in Reason:

Carr warned that there are "actions we can take on licensed broadcasters" that carry Kimmel's show. He said it is "really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast [which owns NBC] and Disney, and say, 'Listen, we are going to preempt, we are not going to run, Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out, because we licensed broadcaster[s] are running the possibility of fines or license revocations from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion. . . .  When you see stuff like this—I mean, we can do this the easy way or the hard way," he said. "These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead."

Both of these statements were badly out of line as a matter of law and policy.  But they were also politically damaging.  Republicans in general, and Trump in particular, have fought an endless battle to preserve freedom of speech and to claim the high ground of being the protectors of free speech.  They need to keep this high ground.