Left, Right, and Free Speech

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-09-30-left-right-and-free-speech/



Let’s begin with all the ways that Donald Trump has tried to destroy free expression. He has used the powers of the presidency to intimidate or shut down critical media and other sources of information. That includes eliminating funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, censoring Smithsonian museum and national park exhibits, dictating the behavior of big law firms, wielding heavy-handed federal leverage to dictate whom universities hire and what they teach, threatening the tax exemptions of critics, and using the other business interests of media owners to influence their content.

Only occasionally does public pressure, as in the case of Jimmy Kimmel, reverse those decisions; yet FCC Chair Brendan Carr is unrepentant. Media moguls, from the Los Angeles Times to Disney/ABC, have been all too eager to self-censor. Only this month, The Washington Post forced out the last progressive and the last Black journalist on its editorial page staff, Karen Attiah. And the great liberal columnist E.J. Dionne, whom the Post had reduced to once a month, if that, decamped for The New York Times.

So the idea that the Trumpian right is civil libertarian is preposterous on its face. But the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk gave Trump and his allies a fresh narrative. Kirk, in this telling, was a champion of debate, and thus of free speech, as if there were something original or remarkable about debating that somehow excused all of Trump’s other assaults on the First Amendment.

This depiction was enough to fool someone as thoughtful as Ezra Klein, who thoroughly embarrassed himself in a column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” But Kirk’s supposed civility included making enemies lists of leftist professors and pressuring colleges to censor or fire them, as well as Kirk’s own anti-Black and antisemitic statements. In the Trump era, civility has been dumbed down, so much so that Ezra Klein fell into the trap.

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