{"id":41847,"date":"2025-03-13T16:46:10","date_gmt":"2025-03-13T21:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/?p=41847"},"modified":"2025-03-13T23:56:13","modified_gmt":"2025-03-14T04:56:13","slug":"trumps-free-speech-report-card","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/2025\/03\/13\/trumps-free-speech-report-card\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump’s Free Speech Report Card"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was happy to hear Trump’s strong rhetoric on free speech. Unfortunately, he is making major missteps in the real world. Matt Taibbi is also concerned. This is an excerpt from Matt’s article at Racquet News, “<a href=\"https:\/\/www.racket.news\/p\/if-trump-blows-it-on-speech-the-world?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">If Trump Blows it on Speech, the World is ScrewedWith civil liberties flatlined around the globe, Donald Trump is blowing off the First Amendment at the worst conceivable time<\/a>“:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>China guarantees free speech, unless it undermines \u201cthe interests of the state.\u201d You can be fined 14.7 million yuan for comparing the army to a squirrel. In Russia jails are filling with regime critics, while papers like Novaya Gazeta are forced to suspend publication until after the Ukraine war. British police routinely conduct speech raids against offenders across the spectrum, Germany boasts about its thought cops on 60 Minutes, and the EU\u2019s vast censorship law, the Digital Services Act, just played a role in helping overturn an election result in Romania. Around the world, from Ukraine to Australia to Israel to India, free expression is in full retreat.<\/p>\n<p>That leaves America, where the First Amendment is the last obstacle to a global movement toward bureaucratization of speech. In last year\u2019s campaign Donald Trump and J.D. Vance rightly ran against the speech excesses of the Democratic Party, with Vance saying views on censorship constituted the \u201cbiggest difference\u201d between Trump and Kamala Harris, and Trump upon inauguration naming censored figures like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to high office. The administration initially acted like it understood the gravity of the situation, with Vance confronting Europe over its civil liberties crackdowns. They seemed to know what they wanted to achieve on this issue.<\/p>\n<p>That operation is now hanging by a thread. Trump is suddenly blowing it on speech in a big way, with two big categories of screw-ups: pandering to Israel, and reaching into the same emergency-power cookie jar that foreign counterpart-jackasses like Keir Starmer and Olaf Scholz and Thierry Breton have recently raided, in efforts to suppress populist movements like Trump\u2019s own. Once he jumps on this bandwagon, we\u2019re all screwed, because there\u2019s nowhere left to run.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was happy to hear Trump’s strong rhetoric on free speech. Unfortunately, he is making major missteps in the real world. Matt Taibbi is also concerned. This is an excerpt from Matt’s article at Racquet News, “<a href=\"https:\/\/www.racket.news\/p\/if-trump-blows-it-on-speech-the-world?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email\">If Trump Blows it on Speech, the World is ScrewedWith civil liberties flatlined around the globe, Donald Trump is blowing off the First Amendment at the worst conceivable time<\/a>“:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>China guarantees free speech, unless it undermines \u201cthe interests of the state.\u201d You can be fined 14.7 million yuan for comparing the army to a squirrel. In Russia jails are filling with regime critics, while papers like Novaya Gazeta are forced to suspend publication until after the Ukraine war. British police routinely conduct speech raids against offenders across the spectrum, Germany boasts about its thought cops on 60 Minutes, and the EU\u2019s vast censorship law, the Digital Services Act, just played a role in helping overturn an election result in Romania. Around the world, from Ukraine to Australia to Israel to India, free expression is in full retreat.<\/p>\n<p><p>\nThat leaves America, where the First Amendment is the last obstacle to a global movement toward bureaucratization of speech. In last year\u2019s campaign Donald Trump and J.D. Vance rightly ran against the speech excesses of the Democratic Party, with Vance saying views on censorship constituted the \u201cbiggest difference\u201d between Trump and Kamala Harris, and Trump upon inauguration naming censored figures like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to high office. The administration initially acted like it understood the gravity of the situation, with Vance confronting Europe over its civil liberties crackdowns. They seemed to know what they wanted to achieve on this issue.<\/p>\n<p>\nThat operation is now hanging by a thread. Trump is suddenly blowing it on speech in a big way, with two big categories of screw-ups: pandering to Israel, and reaching into the same emergency-power cookie jar that foreign counterpart-jackasses like Keir Starmer and Olaf Scholz and Thierry Breton have recently raided, in efforts to suppress populist movements like Trump\u2019s own. Once he jumps on this bandwagon, we\u2019re all screwed, because there\u2019s nowhere left to run.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,6562,3221,6610],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-censorship","category-cancel-culture","category-first-amendment","category-free-speech","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41847"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41855,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41847\/revisions\/41855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}