By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2025-01-23 00:09:01 | Updated at 2025-01-23 03:52:45
4 hours ago
Within hours of his inauguration, President Trump launched a major strike on the Censorship-Industrial Complex — the first step toward fulfilling his campaign promise to dismantle and destroy a regime that conspired to silence all dissent from ruling-class orthodoxy.
The opening salvo came in the form of an executive order, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” that aims to get the federal government out of the speech-policing game and deprive the censorship regime of the taxpayer dollars that are its lifeblood.
The order forbids every “Federal department, agency, entity, officer, employee or agent” from using “any Federal resources” to fund, facilitate or participate in conduct “that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”
That a president would ever need to promulgate such a policy tells you how twisted and tyrannical our federal government had become in recent years.
The order’s preamble details the sordid facts: The Biden administration “trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms,” coercing social-media companies and other third parties “to moderate, deplatform or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.”
In fact, the anti-speech skullduggery predates Biden.
During Trump’s own first term, in the run-up to the 2020 election, a raft of Deep State officials groomed social-media platforms to look for and suppress The New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, potentially — and perversely —swinging the contest against the president they supposedly served.
My reporting at RealClearInvestigations revealed that these authorities also colluded with third-party cutouts to pressure social-media companies into censoring derogatory views on election integrity and the election itself.
These actors developed a “whole-of-society” censorship model that the Biden administration later put on steroids to purge COVID-19 wrongthink.
The feds justified their efforts by claiming a responsibility to combat purportedly dangerous “mis-, dis-, and mal-information.”
In practice, purging such unauthorized speech from the digital public square cleared it for government to advance its “preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate,” as Trump’s order notes.
The censorship regime inflicted what a federal judge deemed, in Missouri v. Biden, perhaps the largest attack on free speech in US history.
Unfortunately for the First Amendment, the Biden White House and complicit agencies continued to insist on exerting their right to silence wrongthinkers.
They appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court — where the majority punted, ruling 6-3 that the parties who sued over Biden’s censorship lacked standing.
As such, the justices never ruled on the merits of the plaintiffs’ argument that when the feds lean on social-media companies to abridge protected speech, it deputizes them as government speech police, violating the First Amendment by proxy.
Congressional Republicans further exposed fed-led censorship efforts, but have so far failed to pass legislation prohibiting them.
That makes Trump’s executive order the first major step toward ending government censorship, from the top down.
The directive is vital. The Censorship-Industrial Complex is not an effort of social-media companies alone, but is largely fueled, coordinated and underwritten — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars — by the federal government.
Starve it of its federal direction and funding, and the regime’s foundation begins to crumble.
Along with prohibiting future government censorship, Trump’s order directs his attorney general and other top officials to investigate censorship activity over the last four years and to “correct” the government’s “past misconduct.”
That’s critical: Only full exposure of the size, scope and nature of federal censorship activities will bring accountability and deterrence.
The Trump administration must publicly identify every government entity involved in online censorship, map their funding flows, expose the policies they implemented, name their personnel — and remove them all.
Then, Trump and Congress must codify legislation prohibiting and defunding censorship activities, and imposing crippling penalties on anyone who would execute them — ensuring that speech freedom will survive the pen strokes of any future censorious president.
Without free speech we will not have a free country.
The fed-led censorship regime imposed on Americans “for our own good” stifled our rights, allowing the state and like-minded elites to unconstitutionally secure a monopoly on political and social narratives in an effort to perpetuate their power.
Trump’s first-day executive order has set us on a path that will end this illiberal nightmare.
Benjamin Weingarten is editor at large at RealClearInvestigations.
