President Donald Trump let fly a flurry of executive orders in his first week as president. Among those was a reaffirmation of the US Constitution’s First Amendment prohibitions against government regulation of Americans’ liberties to speak and communicate free of government censorship. Volumes of evidence now point to blatant violations of this vital constitutional restraint by the Biden administration, including revelations by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that the White House intensely pressured his social media platforms to regulate content. The new executive order directs government agencies to investigate these past violations as well as prohibiting future transgressions.
Free Speech Paramount for Liberty
It is hard to imagine that the nation whose courts have upheld the rights even of Nazis and the KKK to speak freely could devolve into surreptitious government efforts to undermine open discussion of novel vaccines, DEI, or illegal immigration. The First Amendment’s guarantees are a bulwark against precisely such government abuses, designed to tie the hands of government agencies and actors – not US citizens – to prevent tyrannical control.
Free speech in any society is paramount for the defense and preservation of all other individual liberties. President Trump’s executive order affirms that his incoming administration will respect the First Amendment. Then it condemns recent transgressions:
“Over the last 4 years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve. Under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate. Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”
Inaugurating Liberty
In his inaugural address, President Trump defiantly promised: “I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America. Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents….” Incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a January 22 press release similarly promising: “The State Department I lead will support and defend Americans’ rights to free speech, terminating any programs that in any way lead to censoring the American people.”
After Trump recently joked that outgoing President Joe Biden neglected to pardon himself, the order’s clear mandate to investigate past government abuses is ominous.
Critics may aver that this provision itself constitutes a persecution of political opponents, but accountability is, by definition, not persecution but a necessary requirement to maintain the integrity of the Rule of Law. The allegations against Joe Biden, amplified by recent revelations from Zuckerberg, suggest a much more heinous offense than mislabeling payments to Stormy Daniels. If what Zuckerberg claims proves accurate, POTUS Biden grossly infringed upon fundamental constitutional guarantees.
International Implications
Further afield, the executive order serves as a shot across the corrupt bow of EU and other foreign efforts to censor Americans’ free speech from abroad. The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) seeks to punish social media and other companies doing business there if they fail to filter US accounts in compliance. As Mike Benz, Director of Foundation for Freedom Online, observed on Real Clear Politics:
“Americans talking to Americans, being heard on social media by someone in Germany or France, is effectively illegal depending on whether or not this tiny body that Breton oversees calls it disinformation … [T]he only thing that can really turn that around is a State Department delegation sent to the EU to fight back. This delegation would need to apply leverage with carrots and sticks, including threats of sanctions, trade regulations, tariffs, and taxes on European companies operating in the U.S.”
The United States might also weigh recourse against the EU or other foreign offenders in the International Court of Justice, invoking the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1967, which provides in Article 19(3):
Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.
Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.
Other nations may offend against these ideas, but the Trump toolbox to ensure future speech protections in America is hefty with steel. Presumably, US government actors who brazenly breached these central tenets of the US Constitution imagined they could do so with impunity in false hopes of a continued reign over American’s liberties after the election of President Kamala Harris and Vice President Tim Walz. But that electoral win never came. Now Donald Trump’s executive order joins a raft of similar initiatives against such breaches of trust.
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