Opinion By John Stossel
The Constitution’s First Amendment protects free speech for good reason.
If people can’t say what they want, we don’t have honest debate.
I was relieved when Donald Trump, campaigning for the presidency, said, “If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country!”
Good for him. Free speech is crucial to freedom.
Democrats, by contrast, had been eagerly censoring. During Covid, they threatened social media companies, ordering them to censor the internet.
“They are directly speaking to millions!” complained Kamala Harris, “without any level of oversight, and that has to stop!”
Fortunately, once Trump was reelected, he told his staff: “Stop all government censorship.”
Hooray!
But now that Trump’s president, and getting lots of criticism from the media, he’s started calling speech that he doesn’t like “illegal.”
“They’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad. I think that’s really illegal, personally.”
He also threatened TV stations: “They give me only bad publicity … maybe their license should be taken away.”
“There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech,” said his attorney general, Pam Bondi. “We will absolutely target you … if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
They will “target” people?
Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, joined in. When Jimmy Kimmel said nasty and incorrect things about Charlie Kirk’s murder, Carr threatened ABC’s TV licenses, saying, like a mafia boss, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Yet months earlier, he’d tweeted: “Dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights.”
And years earlier, he tweeted that the FCC does “not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the public interest.”
He was right … then.
But power tends to corrupt.
Once Carr was in power, he no longer supported the speech he’d recently promoted.
Fortunately, some Republicans pushed back.
Sen. Rand Paul: “Brendan Carr has got no business weighing in on this.”
Sen. Ted Cruz: “I like Brendan Carr … but what he said there is dangerous as hell.”
It was.
Carr and Bondi later “clarified” their comments. Carr said his “easy way or hard way” comment was not a threat to pull licenses. Bondi said hate speech itself won’t be prosecuted.
Bizarrely, Democrats suddenly became free speech advocates.
“Reject the government’s attempt to weaponize this moment into an all-out assault on free speech,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
But wait. When her party was in power, Ocasio-Cortez wanted government to “rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation!”
And “rein in” is exactly what Democrats tried to do, often succeeding.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg complained that Biden administration officials “would call up our team and scream at them … all these different agencies and branches of government basically just started investigating, coming after our company. It was brutal!”
Whoever is in power likes to use that power to shut the other side up.
In America, no government has the right to censor.
Politicians eager to shut the other side up should have paid attention to Charlie Kirk when, just a few months before he was killed, he said: “You should be allowed to say outrageous things! You should be allowed to say contrarian things. … That is the bedrock of a liberal democracy.”
About John Stossel
Every Tuesday at JohnStossel.com, Stossel posts a new video about the battle between government and freedom.
“In America, no government has the right to censor.” Actually, in America, no government has any rights whatsoever. All rights are retained by the people. Governments have certain powers delegated to those governments by the people to be used in protecting the rights of the people under the Constitution(s) of the various states and the Constitution of the United States. See Amendment 10. “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” But addressing Mr. Stossel’s main point, the First Amendment… Read more »
The First Amendment implicitly protects speech one does not agree with, as speech one agrees with does not require protection. This is a distinction often lost and buried under cries of “offended!” There is no right to not be offended, offense is an intrapersonal interpretation which may not apply to the actual speech at all. But ones offensive speech is certainly protected, especially if intended to be offensive, hurtful, and/or even hateful (barring specific circumstances according to SCOTUS) no matter whose political feathers get ruffled.
reason for term limits and no rule making by goobers
I speak my mind. I’m retired so NO ONE can shut me up. Dems you are out of luck when it come to me (and my retired friends)!
Yes people have the right to exercise free speech but that does not mean that free speech is free of consequences. Let that sink in
Both parties? Bullshit.
I expected more comments from the forever Trumpers defending him.
It is true that both sides suppress free speech and it’s worse in small government like town councils and even non partisan school boards school boards.
I’ve also seen suppression here on this forum.
Maybe so. But Trump isn’t going to act on it. Barack Ovomit, Hillary Rotten Clinton and Maxine Water-bucket would!
Stossel is right. The hypocrisy on BOTH sides is ridiculous. Several years ago, the so-called “right” was whining about how the liberals were censoring everything they said. They were actually correct about that as it has been obvious since I was a kid in the 60’s. Sadly, the “right” was doing as much or more censorship as the left. When it was first launched, I understand Truth Social was censoring or banning anyone who dared criticize it. Many so-called “conservative” sites were censoring and/or banning anyone who dared disagree with their narrative or aganda, which is why I used the… Read more »