The Atlantic: Donald Trump's Hatred of Free Speech [View all]

[Dennis Donovan]

The Atlantic - (archived: https://archive.ph/nsfsI ) Donald Trump’s Hatred of Free Speech

The former president is not just going after journalists. He is targeting all Americans.

By Adrienne LaFrance

November 4, 2024, 7 AM ET

In the fall of 2022, pro-democracy protesters in cities across mainland China developed a clever tactic for speaking out against government forces that wished to silence them. They began holding up blank sheets of paper, as well as tacking up blank paper in public spaces, to register their disapproval of restrictive lockdown rules as well as their disapprobation of the government’s repressive censorship laws.

Observers from all over the world noted with admiration the courage and creativity of the protesters, who’d found a bold way to speak out while saying nothing at all. Chinese authorities cracked down on the dissenters, censoring online reporting about them and arresting or otherwise threatening those who have tried to remind people of the movement since then.

In America, a country consecrated to freedom, the dystopian scenes out of China seemed distant. Americans understand on a bone-deep level that, to paraphrase James Madison, absolute sovereignty belongs to the people, not the government. Americans are free to say what we believe, and free to share our ideas with our fellow citizens. We are free to criticize the government, which is accountable to the people, not the other way around. The First Amendment does not grant us these freedoms—they are an inviolable right. The First Amendment does, however, dictate that the government dare not interfere with these freedoms, that officials have no right to cut down the American people’s speech, including the people’s right to free press.

To be comfortable in these freedoms, to assume that we would never need to resort to holding up blank sheets of paper to criticize the powerful, is a luxury that Americans cannot presently afford.

The United States is on the eve of an election that could see the return to power of Donald Trump, an autocrat who vociferously and repeatedly threatens the basic freedoms of the American people—with a particular preoccupation with curbing freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Worse still, he has persuaded his followers to cheer on the demise of their own freedoms. When Trump tells people that journalists are “the enemy of the American people,” or “evil,” when he says that Americans who describe the criminal charges he faces should be investigated for treason, he is not merely denigrating a professional class; he is directly attacking the rights of all Americans. He is attacking those who happen to work as journalists, but he is likewise attacking their neighbors—every American who has the right to free speech and free press themselves.

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