[Program Note: Once again, we are pre-empting the entire format of this column due to the seriousness of the situation America now finds itself in. Most weeks, we strive to rise above the firehose of distractions from Donald Trump and his administration, to focus instead on things which truly matter -- which, this week, include Trump once again rolling over for Vladimir Putin while he invades another NATO country's airspace, as well as Trump blowing up boats in international waters just because he feels like it. But this week the distraction truly was what really mattered. Because this week we had a direct assault on the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press in a way not seen since Joe McCarthy trod the halls of the U.S. Capitol. So we had to write an extended rant instead of our usual column, just to warn everyone in advance.]

 

Our subtitle this week is meant to honor the passing of Rick Davies, one of the founding members of the musical group Supertramp, who passed away less than two weeks ago. In one of their biggest hits ("The Logical Song"), one lyric seems to sum up where we now stand as a nation:

I said, now, watch what you say, they'll be calling you a radical,
A liberal, oh, fanatical, criminal

We follow this up with a quote often misattributed to Voltaire (the pen-name of François-Marie Arouet), but was actually written much later by S.G. Tallentyre (the pen-name of historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall), who was describing an incident from Voltaire's life. She wrote the line as being a thought within Voltaire's head, after he had denounced the official political condemnation of a work written by the French philosopher Claude-Adrien Hevétius. Voltaire wasn't a big fan of the work, but he defended it on the principle of free speech with the attitude of (as interpreted by Tallentyre):

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

This is a powerful message, and a powerful stand to take on principle. It lives on today, as evidenced by a recent politician rewording it a bit:

[W]e may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree.

That wasn't actually the full quote, though. It was delivered during a speech (on the sanctity of free speech) given earlier this year, as the speaker was castigating a foreign government for what he saw as their efforts to censor political speech. The speaker was Vice President JD Vance. Here is the full quote:

In Washington, there's a new sheriff in town. And under Donald Trump's leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree.

Donald Trump himself entered office promising to restore free speech to all. He signed an executive order on it on his first day in office, and bragged that "free speech is back" during his first address to Congress. In fact, there are plenty of examples of Trump, Vance, and other administration officials and Trump supporters lauding free speech and promising that it would flourish if Trump was re-elected.

But it turns out (surprise, surprise!) it was all hypocrisy. Because the only free speech Trump and Vance and all their followers are interested in protecting is speech with which they agree. When they disagree or disapprove of a speaker's views, then they feel fully justified to use any means necessary to cancel and censor such speech entirely. As we've seen, time after time.

They are following the playbook of autocrats and dictators, plain and simple. Here's a rather succinct summary of what this has meant so far:

From the beginning, Trump cracked down on the speech of immigrant students for voicing support for Palestine by arresting them and threatening them with deportation. He issued executive orders purporting to ban speech related to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, transgender rights and support for immigrants, and used those orders to force censorship on universities, nonprofits, researchers and law firms. Trump has also repeatedly pressured media companies with frivolous lawsuits, most recently targeting The New York Times, in an attempt to threaten and punish them into altering coverage.

That really just scratches the surface. Trump (aided by Elon Musk and other henchmen) instituted a purge of anyone in the executive branch who ever said a single negative thing against Trump, or did anything in either their official capacity or their private lives that Trump didn't like. He has attacked universities and tried to both extort them of enormous sums of money and threatened them with all sorts of official punishments if they don't change their rules and curriculum to reflect what Trump thinks they should be teaching. Law firms were also targeted and extorted in similar fashion, for having the temerity to file lawsuits Trump didn't like. Media companies have had to pay what can only be called tribute money (used in the feudal sense of that term) to Trump, if they want to survive (although some have fought back, as evidenced by Trump's $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times for saying mean things about him now having been laughed out of court by the judge). But, sadly, precious few of them have fought back. Most have just paid the tribute and bended the knee. Trump has gone after immigrants, foreign students, and Americans both individually and collectively, with dire threats of punishment if they say things he doesn't want to hear. He has demanded the Smithsonian and the National Park System only portray the parts of history that he wants to see. He has demanded the Kennedy Center only produce artistic events that he approves of.

This is not free speech. This is not the American ideal. This is not constitutional.

America has always had political parties that disagree with each other. In the very beginning, they weren't called parties but "factions," and there were two big ones: the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. Contrary to the way the term is used today, the Federalists were for a strong central government -- as strong as possible. This was when the U.S. Constitution was written, after the failed Articles of Confederation had proven to be unworkable. So the Federalists wrote the Constitution and tried to get all the states to ratify it.

Several states were strongly Anti-Federalist, however. They demanded changes. The biggest complaint was that while the Constitution laid out what the federal government could do, there was little or nothing in it that said what the government could not do. So the Anti-Federalists proposed their changes. Ten of these would become the Bill of Rights (there were twelve of them, originally). That was the price of admission -- the Anti-Federalist states would only ratify the Constitution if the Bill of Rights was also passed and sent to the states for ratification. The Bill of Rights is, for the most part, a list of things the federal government can never do. The first of these amendments barred the federal government from ever infringing upon (among other things) the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press.

Free speech has a long history in this country, but like many other things in American history, it has a checkered past. It has not always been upheld as an absolute principle. For over a century, the courts interpreted the First Amendment as only applying to the federal government -- leaving state governments free to pass and enforce anti-free-speech laws. Even one of the most monumental free speech cases in our history was a complete travesty, as while it did give us two stirring phrases ("falsely shouting 'Fire!' in a theater," and "clear and present danger"), the Supreme Court decision was just flat-out wrong, since it allowed the imprisonment of a person who was just passing out a rather benign anti-war leaflet (we wrote a long article on Schenck v. U.S. a while back, if anyone's interested).

And then, of course, there was McCarthyism. And the "House Committee on Un-American Activities." As noted, free speech has a checkered past in America.

But we are now at a historical moment when free speech is under attack in precisely the same fashion as McCarthyism, except now it is not limited to being some anti-communist crusade but instead is based entirely on the whims of one man. Donald Trump has made no secret of how he'd like to see things work. Anybody who writes or says or does anything he doesn't like should be chucked in jail, plain and simple. It ought to be illegal to say anything negative about him, period. He isn't shy about admitting this, either. As far as he's concerned, the government should use every tool at its disposal to police everyone's speech and come down like a ton of bricks on anything Trump doesn't like.

This pivotal moment came after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist. Kirk is being lauded to the skies by conservatives now as if he were not only a strong proponent of free speech but some sort of saintly speaker of Christian and conservative truth on college campuses.

He wasn't. He was a racist and a misogynist and he celebrated his insensitivity towards others. Here are just a few of his quotes:

[Black women] do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a White person's slot to got be taken somewhat seriously.

In response to the collision of a commercial aircraft and a military helicopter over the Potomac River, Kirk's immediate response (while knowing absolutely none of the facts of who was responsible for the collision) was:

If I see a Black pilot, I'm going to be like, "Boy, I hope he's qualified."

There simply is no other word for such sentiments other than racism.

As for him being some sort of Christian paragon, can you imagine what Jesus Christ would have to say about Kirk's take on caring about others? Here you go:

I can't stand the word "empathy," actually. I think empathy is a made-up, New Age term that does a lot of damage.

So much for all that hippy-dippy "love your neighbor" stuff, eh? And the quote that has been repeated the most recently, since it was so eerily fitting after his death by an assassin's bullet:

We must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty.... We need to be very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. But I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment.

So to logically mark Kirk's death in the way he would have wanted would be to not feel any empathy towards him or his wife and children, but instead just shrug and chalk it up as "unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year" and celebrate your Second Amendment rights. By his own words, that seems to be what he would have wanted us all to do. This is the man who is being lauded as some sort of Christian martyr, or at the very least a martyr to free speech.

Even though he espoused racist sentiments, last weekend almost every NFL stadium flew their flags at half-mast in his honor. Trump ordered government flags be flown at half-mast as well -- something he didn't bother doing a few months back, when two Democratic politicians in Minnesota were shot by a right-wing assassin (one died, one survived). Trump didn't even bother calling the governor of the state after that one.

Trump and those around him have pounced on the Kirk assassination as the launching point for attacking the left. They are issuing dire threats about what they're going to do to people who say anything negative about Charlie Kirk (or anything positive about his assassination) -- all the way up to the attorney general, who this week stated that "hate speech" is illegal (spoiler alert: it is not). And they're just flat-out threatening people and groups with prosecution just for their opinions -- which is exactly what the First Amendment is supposed to protect against:

President Trump has begun a major escalation in his long-running efforts to stifle political opposition in the United States, using the assassination of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk to make the baseless argument that Democratic organizations and protesters are part of a violent conspiracy against conservative values and the American way of life.

In the six days since Mr. Kirk was gunned down in Utah, Mr. Trump and his top officials have promised a broadside against the political left, indicating that they would go after liberal groups like George Soros's Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation; revoke visas for people seen to be "celebrating" Mr. Kirk's death; begin federal investigations into hate speech; and designate certain groups domestic terrorists.

"We want everything to be fair; it hasn't been fair, and the radical left has done tremendous damage to the country," Mr. Trump told reporters on Tuesday, as he continued to play down and excuse violence on the right. "But we're fixing it."

This week, Trump declared that "Antifa" is a terrorist organization. This is worrisome for multiple reasons, folks. In the first place Antifa isn't even an organization at all -- it is an unorganized belief (it stands for "anti-fascism"). It's like "feminism" or being "anti-abortion." It is a belief, not a formal organized group. The second thing wrong with this is that there simply is no legal way to designate a domestic terrorism group (even under the PATRIOT ACT). Foreign groups may be designated terrorist organizations, but these laws do not include any category for purely domestic organizations. Thirdly, since it is merely a belief system and not an organization, this leaves Trump and his minions free to define it however they want -- and apply the label to any actual organization or group they wish. Earlier, Trump had called for George Soros's foundation to be prosecuted under RICO laws (which were put in place to fight mobsters and other organized crime), but it won't be long before he'll be accusing them of being terrorists, too.

As far as Trump is concerned, each and every protester from the left is being paid by some mastermind who directs all such lefty protests in this country. He simply cannot conceive of people protesting for any other reason than getting paid, as evidenced by his reaction to some people who vented their feelings when Trump made a recent visit to a Washington D.C. restaurant:

As Trump prepared to sit down to dinner during a rare visit to a Washington restaurant last week, several protesters inside the business shouted, "Free DC! Free Palestine! Trump is the Hitler of our time!" They were quickly escorted out.

Asked Monday about the protest, Trump suggested Attorney General Pam Bondi should prosecute the participants, who he claimed were paid agitators. "I've asked Pam to look into that in terms of bringing RICO cases against them -- criminal RICO," the president said, referring to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

Trump and his henchmen insist all the while that political violence is purely a phenomenon on the left. He brushes aside any mention of rightwing political violence, which should surprise exactly nobody after he pardoned all the violent January 6th insurrectionists who attacked police officers while trying to storm the U.S. Capitol.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice tossed down the memory hole an inconvenient report that had been on their own website. This report categorized how rightwing political violence is a much bigger problem in this country than violence from the left, so of course it had to disappear.

"The number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism," the opening paragraph of the study reads. "Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives. In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives."

The study, entitled "What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism," was published in January 2024 and hosted on the Justice Department's Office of Justice Programs website. Per 404 Media, it was still accessible as recently as Sept. 12, but no longer is. Presently, it's available via the Wayback Machine, which archives old versions of websites.

Which all brings us, in a very roundabout way, to a pivotal moment that happened this week. Jimmy Kimmel, in his late-night show on ABC, made some jokes this Monday about what had been happening since Charlie Kirk's assassination. One of the things he said -- the bit that has been held up as the most offensive -- was:

We had some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

That's it. He was not mocking or in any way celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, he was trying to point out the political opportunism that had been happening ever since. Which absolutely enraged the MAGA folks, who then proved Kimmel's point by opportunistically using his words to not only "cancel" him (in the sense of the "cancel culture" the right used to denounce in the strongest possible terms) but to use the might of the federal government to remove him from the airwaves.

This is a double-standard. Recently, a host on a Fox News show expressed the desire on the air that all homeless people be forcibly given lethal injections. Just kill them all -- that would solve the problem, right? This is not only reprehensible and inhuman, it could be seen as inciting violence against the homeless. He was allowed to make a weak on-air apology and kept his job. This is in stark comparison to what happened to Kimmel.

The chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, issued what can only be seen as a threat a mob boss would be proud of, on Wednesday. Carr, just like all the other Trump minions, used to extol free speech to the skies, mind you. Here he is from 2019:

Should the government censor speech it doesn't like? Of course not. The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the "public interest."

Here's more of what he used to profess to believe:

And even if the Constitution did not bar such coercion, the Communications Act expressly withholds from government the power to "interfere with the right of free speech by means of radio communication." The law denies the commission "the power of censorship" as well as the ability to impose any "regulation or condition" that interferes with freedom of speech.

[Brendan] Carr no longer quotes that inconvenient language from the law. Gone are the days when he would condemn government efforts he said "inject partisan politics into our licensing process," correctly calling it "a deeply troubling transgression of free speech and the FCC's status as an independent agency." And he doesn't call meddling with broadcasters' editorial choices "a chilling transgression of the free speech rights that every media outlet in this country enjoys" that "should be beyond the reach of any government official," as he once did.

Now, he is leaning into exactly what he once condemned. In a big way. Speaking of Kimmel and ABC and their corporate owner Disney on a podcast this week, Carr warned:

This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.

He also, for good measure, called Kimmel's comments "truly sick." But did you catch that no-so-subtle threat in there? "We can do this the easy way or the hard way." This is mobster-speak. It is a direct threat, along with: "there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead." Governing by such threats might be called "thugocracy" -- and it is exactly what Carr used to swear he was against.

Within hours, a company which owns ABC affiliates pressured Disney into immediately yanking Jimmy Kimmel from the airwaves. This company just happens to have a pending merger before the FCC, it bears mentioning. Just like Paramount did, when it earlier cancelled Stephen Colbert's late-night show.

Reaction was swift, and is still growing. Here is just a sampling of what people have been saying:

"This is beyond McCarthyism," Christopher Anders, director of the Democracy and Technology Division for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. "Trump officials are repeatedly abusing their power to stop ideas they don't like, deciding who can speak, write, and even joke. The Trump administration's actions, paired with ABC's capitulation, represent a grave threat to our First Amendment freedoms."

"Jimmy Kimmel has been muzzled and taken off the air," comedian Marc Maron said in an Instagram video posted early Thursday morning. "This is what authoritarianism looks like right now in this country.... This is government censorship."

Democrats have been just as outraged. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer responded forcefully: "I can't think of a greater threat to free speech than Carr in many, many years. He's despicable. He's anti-American. He ought to resign and Trump ought to fire him."

Barack Obama was just as scathing:

After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn't like.... This is precisely the kind of government coercion that the First Amendment was designed to prevent -- and media companies need to start standing up rather than capitulating to it.

Kamala Harris was also pretty direct: "What we are witnessing is an outright abuse of power. We cannot dare to be silent or complacent in the face of this frontal assault on free speech."

Here are a few more reactions from Democrats:

"We are in the biggest free speech crisis this country has faced since the McCarthy era," said Representative Greg Casar, Democrat of Texas and the chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, said that what happened to Mr. Kimmel "isn't just about one comedian. It's about whether we as Americans still have the freedom to laugh at those in power, to question authority."

Even a few brave Republicans are protesting that this is very wrong. Even Ted Cruz (of all people) warned his fellow Republicans that this would be a very dangerous precedent to set:

"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 out there if we don't like what you’re saying,'" Cruz said Friday on his podcast, "Verdict with Ted Cruz."

"It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel," Cruz later added. "But when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it."

Cruz then played Carr's words and reacted to them:

"They have a license granted by us at the FCC, and that comes with it an obligation to operate in the public interest," Carr said on right-wing activist Benny Johnson's podcast. "But frankly, when you see stuff like this, I mean we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or, you know, there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead."

“No, no, no, no,” Cruz said on his show after playing Carr's comments. "What he said there is dangerous as hell." He added: "That’s right out of Goodfellas. That's right out of a mafioso coming into a bar. 'God, nice bar you have here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it.'"

When things get too thuggish for Ted Cruz, you know they've gone too far. But we have to say we fully agree with him, and his warning to conservatives: Someday the shoe will be on the other foot. If you support what Carr is doing now, then some future Democratic administration could very easily do exactly the same thing to conservatives, and you would have no leg to stand on to protest it.

The Constitution's guarantee of free speech was created to protect speech which you do not like. Period. It was not created to protect only speech which the government in power approves of. This basic concept has always been tested, and at times the government (Congress, the president, and the Supreme Court) have fallen woefully short of the ideal enshrined within the Bill of Rights.

This has always been true. In 1797, Benjamin Franklin Bache (grandson of Benjamin Franklin) published in his newspaper Aurora his glee at seeing George Washington leave office. Here is part of what he wrote, on Washington's final day in office:

[George Washington,] the man who is the source of all the misfortunes of our country is this day reduced to a level with his fellow-citizens, and is no longer possessed of power to multiply evils upon the United States. If ever there was a period of rejoicing, this is the moment. Every heart in unison with the freedom and happiness of the people, ought to beat high with exultation that the name of Washington from this day ceased to give a currency to political iniquity and to legalized corruption. A new era is now opening upon us -- an era which promises much to the people; for public measures must now stand upon their own merits, and nefarious projects can no longer be supported by a name. It is a subject of the greatest astonishment that a single individual should have carried his designs against the public liberty so far as to have put in jeopardy its very existence. Such, however, are the facts; and with these staring us in the face, this day ought to be a jubilee in the United States.

A group of Washington supporters then broke into the offices of the Aurora and "threw its type into the street, and almost demolished the inside of that newspaper establishment." A man who was officially convicted of assaulting Bache was named by President John Adams to a diplomatic post -- before he had even served out his sentence (sound familiar?). Bache responded to this by stating the Adams administration was "giving direct encouragement to assassination, and setting a price upon my head." Congress then passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which Thomas Jefferson wrote was designed for the "suppression of the Whig presses. Bache's particularly has been named." Abigail Adams urged Bache be arrested. Even before the Acts were passed, Bache was arrested (for "seditious libel"). He posted bail, however, and died from yellow fever before his case came to trial.

The freedom of political speech has been attacked multiple times throughout America's history. Sometimes, the government succeeds in repressing political speech it doesn't like. And sometimes the courts step in and uphold the First Amendment.

We are now in one of those times. Trump and his henchmen have zero respect for the rule of law and zero respect for any part of the Constitution. This has been proven in many ways. This week, they are directly attacking the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. And they don't seem inclined to slow down or stop these attacks any time soon.

Late-night comedians are the historical analogue of court jesters. In Medieval times, court jesters could get away with saying outrageous things directly to those in power, as comic relief for the overlords. But occasionally they'd go too far and wind up in a dungeon or on the gallows. This is precisely why the First Amendment exists -- to ensure that this never happens in America to anyone who questions authority or makes statements (or jokes) that offend the people in power. Carr himself used to even defend this principle, saying political satire was "one of the oldest and most important forms of political speech," because it "challenges those in power." He's singing a different tune these days, however.

In conclusion, the chorus to Supertramp's "The Logical Song" asks a question that needs to be slightly broadened:

There are times when all the world's asleep
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man
Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned?
I know it sounds absurd
Please tell me who I am

That last line, to fit our current situation, should really read: "Please tell me who we are?" The First Amendment is a bedrock part of who we are as a country, and it is under attack. Stephen Colbert gave the answer to that question on his own show, last night: "We are all Jimmy Kimmel."

-- Chris Weigant

 

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Cross-posted at: Democratic Underground