Trump lays out aggressive free speech agenda

News analysis

President-elect Donald Trump and his transition team have looked like rockets launched from Cape Canaveral since election day, with Trump announcing a flurry of major appointments for his new administration, but perhaps the most important announcement made so far has not involved personnel.

It involved the Constitution of the United States. Specifically, it involved the First Amendment. 

Against a backdrop of four years of censorship in which the Biden-Harris administration worked with and pressured social media tech firms such as Facebook — by Mark Zuckerberg’s own admission — to censor dissenting points of view, Trump has said he would take immediate steps to reinstate and preserve constitutional guarantees of free speech.

“If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country,” Trump said in a video announcement of what actions he intended to take on the first day of his administration. “It’s as simple as that. If this most cherished right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple, just like dominoes, one by one. That’s why, today, I’m announcing my plan to shatter the left-wing censorship regime, and to reclaim the right to free speech for all Americans.”

Reclaim was a very important word, Trump said, because free speech has essentially been taken away.

“In recent weeks, bombshell reports have confirmed that a sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media have been conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people,” he said. “They have collaborated to suppress vital information on everything from elections to public health. This censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed. And it must happen immediately.”

Within hours of his inauguration, Trump said he would sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens.

Such an executive order would specifically prohibit the types of communications and meetings the Biden administration had with tech companies during the pandemic, in which the administration pressed for the cancellation of certain social media accounts, including those of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Alex Berenson, and the take-down of individual posts. 

Thousands of accounts were censored, discovery documents in two federal censorship cases and internal Twitter documents released by Elon Musk show. After the January 6 riots at the Capitol, Twitter banned 70,000 right-leaning accounts, according to The Washington Post.

Trump said he would do even more to protect free speech.

“I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as mis- or dis-information,” he said. “And I will begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship, directly or indirectly, whether they are the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health, Human Services, the FBI, the DOJ. No matter who they are.”

Second, Trump said he would order the Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in the new censorship regime, which he called destructive and terrible, and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified.

“These include possible violations of federal civil rights law, campaign finance laws, federal election law, securities law, and anti-trust laws, the Hatch Act, and a host of other potential criminal, civil, regulatory, and constitutional offenses,” he said.

To assist in those efforts, Trump said he was urging House Republicans to immediately send preservation letter s to officials to retain their records. 

“We have to do this right now — to the Biden administration, the Biden campaign, and every Silicon Valley tech giant — ordering them not to destroy evidence of censorship,” he said.

Third, upon his inauguration, Trump said he would ask Congress to send a bill to him revising Section 230, the liability shield for big tech social media platforms.

“From now on, digital platforms should only qualify for immunity protection under Section 230 if they meet high standards of neutrality, transparency, fairness, and nondiscrimination,” he said. “We should require these platforms to increase their efforts to take down unlawful content, such as child exploitation and promoting terrorism, while dramatically curtailing their power to arbitrarily restrict lawful speech.”

Fourth, Trump said, he believes the government should break up what he called the entire toxic censorship industry that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so-called mis- and dis-information.

“The federal government should immediately stop funding all nonprofits and academic programs that support this authoritarian project,” he said. “If any U.S. university is discovered to have engaged in censorship activities, or election interferences in the past, such as flagging social media content for removal or blacklisting, those universities should lose federal research dollars and federal student loan support for a period of five years, and maybe more.”

What’s more,Trump urged the enactment of new laws that would establish clear criminal penalties for federal bureaucrats who partner with private entities to do an end-run around the Constitution and to deprive Americans of their First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights.

In other words, Trump said, those bureaucrats were depriving Americans of their vote.

“And once you lose those elections, and once you lose your voters like we have, you no longer have a country,” he said. “Furthermore, to confront the problems of major platforms being infiltrated by legions of former Deep Staters and intelligence officials, there should be a seven-year cooling off period, before any employee of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DNI, DHS, or DOD is allowed to take a job at a company possessing vast quantities of US data.”

Fifth, Trump said, the time has come for Congress to pass a digital Bill of Rights.

“This should include a right to digital due process,” he said. “In other words, government officials should need a court order to take down online content or send information requests such as the FBI was sending to Twitter.”

Furthermore, Trump continued, when users of big online platforms have their content or accounts removed, throttled, shadow banned, or otherwise restricted, no matter what names they used, they should have the right to be informed that it’s happening and the right to a specific explanation of the reason why.

“And the right to a timely appeal,” he said. “In addition, all users over the age of 18 should have the right to opt out of content moderation and curation entirely and to receive an unmanipulated stream of information if they so choose.”

The fight for free speech is a matter of victory or death for America and for the survival of Western civilization itself, Trump said.

“When I’m president, this whole rotten system of censorship and information control will be ripped out of the system at large,” he said. “There won't be anything left. By restoring free speech, we will begin to reclaim our democracy and save our nation.”

Reaction

Reaction from conservatives and civil liberties’ advocates was effusive. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said that, for that speech alone, Trump deserved a place on Mt. Rushmore.

“This alone puts DJT [Donald J. Trump] in company with the greatest U.S. presidents since Lincoln,” Kennedy posted on X. “The globalist project has laid siege to democracy and freedom across the globe. The USA is the final redoubt. President Trump just launched freedom’s counterattack.”

For his part, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul said he was looking forward to Kennedy’s role in the Trump administration, which he said would boost transparency and free speech by assuring the release of Covid records that public health agencies have refused to turn over.

“We’re very hopeful that whoever will be head of Health and Human Services will now reveal the documents I’ve been trying to get for three years,” Paul said. “NIH and HHS have refused to turn over the documents as to why Wuhan got this research money and why it wasn’t screened as dangerous research. Those documents exist and they won’t give them to me. I think a friendly Trump administration will.”

Paul said he was looking forward to getting the documents, mainly to try to make sure an attack on civil liberties doesn’t happen again.

For his part, X owner and the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, posted Trump’s video to his 204 million followers on X. In recent weeks, Musk has been a fiery proponent of taking action to preserve free speech.

“If people don’t know what’s going on, if they don’t know the truth, how can you make an informed vote?” Musk asked at a Trump rally weeks before the election. “You must have free speech in order to have democracy. That’s why it’s the First Amendment. And the Second Amendment [the right to bear arms] is there to ensure that we have the First Amendment.”

While Republicans were positive about the movement to preserve speech, Democrats were largely silent in the wake of Trump’s announcement — a sharp contrast with the past few years.

While Trump said he would seek to have government take action against government officials who conspired with big tech to censor speech, former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, appearing on MSNBC in September, was saying just the opposite, especially when it came to speech that she said  “parrot[ed] Russian talking points.”

“There are Americans who are engaged in this kind of [pro-Russian] propaganda, and whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrence,” she said.

In another interview, Clinton said platforms should be compelled to monitor the content on their platforms, by holding them responsible for that content.

“If they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control,” Clinton said.

During the campaign, Vice-President Kamala Harris said much the same thing: “I will double the civil rights division and direct law enforcement to hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to democracy. And if you profit off of hate, if you act as a megaphone for misinformation or cyber warfare and don’t police your platforms, we are going to hold you accountable as a community.”

Also, on the campaign trail this year, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said the First Amendment was conditional.

“Years ago, it was the little things, telling people to vote the day after the election,” Walz told MSNBC. “And we kind of brushed them off. Now we know it’s intimidation at the ballot box. It’s undermining the idea that mail-in ballots aren’t legal. I think we need to push back on this. There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy”

Actually, the Supreme Court has determined that hate speech is protected, in Matal v Tam.

“[The idea that] the Government has an interest in preventing speech expressing ideas that offend… strikes at the heart of the First Amendment,” wrote justice Samuel Alito for the majority in that case. “Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’”

Justice Anthony Kennedy agreed in a concurring opinion.

“A law found to discriminate based on viewpoint is an ‘egregious form of content discrimination,’ which is ‘presumptively unconstitutional,’” Kennedy wrote. “ … A law that can be directed against speech found offensive to some portion of the public can be turned against minority and dissenting views to the detriment of all. The First Amendment does not entrust that power to the government’s benevolence. Instead, our reliance must be on the substantial safeguards of free and open discussion in a democratic society.”

Musk himself had expressed concerns before the election that Harris would move to shut down X if she won the presidency.

“They won’t [let it continue in its current form],” Musk said. “They will try to shut it down by any means possible. They might try to pass laws. They’ll try to prosecute the company, prosecute me. The amount of lawfare we’ve seen taking place is outrageous.”

But Harris lost, and, rather than seeking out speech to censor, Trump has vowed his administration would seek out and stop those in the government who were and are the censors.

Richard Moore is the author of “Dark State” and may be reached at richardd3d.substack.com.