Republicans, conservatives and MAGA fellow travelers love to beat their chests about their commitment to free speech. But when it comes to the current leadership of the party, it’s an absurd claim.
Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, got into the free speech act during his July 17 speech at the Republican National Convention when he accepted former President Donald Trump’s nomination to be his 2024 running mate.
“Shouldn’t we be governed by a party that is unafraid to debate ideas and come to the best solution? That’s the Republican Party of the next four years, united in our love for this country and committed to free speech and the open exchange of ideas,” the senator intoned in Milwaukee.
For all the MAGA posturing about free speech, few political figures are more hostile to free expression than Trump, who every day continues to pad his lengthy resume of trying to silence his critics.
Those words would sound great to my civil libertarian ears if I hadn’t already heard them all before.
For all the MAGA posturing about free speech, few political figures are more hostile to free expression than Trump, who every day continues to pad his lengthy resume of trying to silence his critics. And Vance supports some disturbing carveouts to the First Amendment.
To cite just a few examples of Vance’s free speech tourism: He told Tucker Carlson that the government ought to seize the assets of nonprofit groups that advocate for political initiatives he doesn’t like; he called for raising taxes to punish corporations that engage in political activities he doesn’t like; as a senator he sent a menacing letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding a federal investigation of a Washington Post writer who penned an op-ed he didn’t like; he expressed the hope that the U.S. would emulate Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s move to take government control of universities and purge them of teachers and ideas he doesn’t like.
In 2021, Vance told a reporter for a Catholic magazine that he supports a ban on pornography, a proposal that’s also included in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy document. (Incidentally, Project 2025’s lead writer, Kevin Roberts, has a book coming out in September with a foreword written by Vance, making the Trump campaign’s feigned ignorance of Project 2025 even less plausible.)
That’s about as “free speech for me, not thee” as it gets.
When it comes to the GOP’s boss, Trump, free speech hypocrisy is one of the only consistent political principles he’s ever held. Just this week, he reiterated his long-held support for criminalizing flag burning. And he’s called for using the government to strip TV stations of their licenses for running content of which he disapproves; banning vaguely defined “woke ideologies” from classrooms; and has used his wealth to file an endless stream of bogus lawsuits against media outlets and journalists as a means of making their lives “miserable.”
He’s also repeatedly called for lowering the bar for journalists to be sued for libel and defamation. While a president can’t do such a thing, a MAGA-dominated Supreme Court could by overturning the landmark Sullivan v. New York Times decision — something that Justice Clarence Thomas indicated he’s open to doing. Thomas called the 1964 decision and subsequent judicial affirmations of it “policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law” and having “no relation to the text, history or structure of the Constitution.”
Don’t let them get away with calling themselves free speech warriors.
Now, to be sure, Democrats have not cloaked themselves in glory and honor when it comes to protecting Americans’ rights to free expression. Support for rigid, punitive and selectively enforced campus speech codes, poorly thought-out policy proposals to clamp down on free expression in the name of fighting disinformation and the government’s “jawboning” of private companies to intimidate them into policing certain speech … all that stuff’s really bad for freedom of speech. But it’s been a long time since Democrats writ large have made vocal and robust support for free speech a major part of their branding.
It’s Republicans like Trump, Vance and allies like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who talk a big game about standing tall for free speech in the face of the tyranny of the “woke mind virus” — while also deciding that they should be the arbiters of acceptable speech, for the good of society.
Don’t let them get away with calling themselves free speech warriors. They’d absolutely curb Americans’ rights if given the power. We know this because they’re saying it — right to our faces.