By Dismantling Biden’s Censorship Machine, Trump Made Free Speech Great Again

For all the hysterical claims that President Donald Trump is some sort of First Amendment supervillain, the reality is precisely the opposite. Trump has done more to defend constitutionally protected speech and to dismantle the most coordinated censorship regime in modern American history than any president in living memory. But don’t tell that to the ...

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For all the hysterical claims that President Donald Trump is some sort of First Amendment supervillain, the reality is precisely the opposite. Trump has done more to defend constitutionally protected speech and to dismantle the most coordinated censorship regime in modern American history than any president in living memory.

But don’t tell that to the New York Times, NPR, or the ladies at The View. According to them, Trump is basically moments away from burning the Bill of Rights on live TV.

Why the disconnect? The modern Left has confused breaking norms with breaking laws, and those are two very different things.

Norms are unwritten rules, handshake agreements shaped by cultural institutions. Over decades, those institutions shifted left and rewrote the norms to ensure that public policy always bends in their direction. One glaring example is the “norm” that government spending must increase every year at rates higher than inflation, substantially higher.

Laws, by contrast, are enforceable with financial penalties or jail time.

Trump breaks norms. The Left breaks laws and then screams “authoritarian!” when someone tries to enforce those laws. That, in a nutshell, is the dynamic between Trump and the Democrat Party today.

To understand the elitist media’s role in all this, start with the epic collapse of journalism. The press still loves calling itself the “Fourth Estate,” bravely speaking truth to power. That may have been true once, back when reporters described reality instead of trying to socially engineer it. But over time, journalism mutated, first through ideologically uniform J-schools, then through newsroom monocultures, into something far more partisan.

Post-Watergate hero fantasies turned reporters into crusaders. Conservative viewpoints disappeared. Elitists replaced objectivity with “moral clarity” — their euphemism for political activism.

This has led to the death of journalism. The vapors emanating from its stinking corpse have made it nearly impossible for so-called “reporters” to understand basic constitutional law. So let’s clarify.

The First Amendment protects a broad range of speech, but not all speech. Speech in service of a crime? Not protected. Offer a bribe and try claiming “free speech.” See how that goes. Defamation? Also not protected. And when you take a government handout, whether as a defense contractor or a publicly funded media broadcaster, you accept the regulatory conditions that come with it.

NPR and PBS assumed otherwise. They took billions from taxpayers while repeatedly violating the law that required them to “ensure strict adherence to objectivity and balance.” They assumed the norm, that they’d always get our money through Congressional earmarks, even while breaking the law.

Trump did what no other president has ever done: he broke that norm and enforced the law. His Federal Communications Commission Chairman, Brendan Carr, has done something similar with broadcasters. That’s not censorship. That’s accountability.

The same principle applies to universities. For years, the norm was that campuses would tolerate and even encourage criminal behavior under the guise of “social activism.” Blocking highways, occupying buildings, vandalizing property, and assaulting students was perfectly fine, as long as the rioters chanted the right slogans. But the First Amendment doesn’t magically convert crime into protected speech. Trump ended that law-breaking norm, too.

None of this alone makes Trump the “greatest defender of free speech.” His words and his deeds earn him that gold model.

Just before taking the oath of office for the second time, Trump laid down the truth long forgotten by the left: “If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. … If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple, just like dominoes.”

Trump’s actions followed suit. He and his administration have eviscerated the sprawling censorship apparatus built by President Joe Biden.

MRC Free Speech America has shown how the Biden administration operated the most expansive government-driven censorship system in U.S. history. Not metaphorically. Literally.

A few “lowlights” from the Biden censorship regime include: federal agencies pressuring social media platforms to suppress lawful political speech; agencies partnering with private entities to provide “plausible deniability” while carrying out government censorship goals, and government “switchboards” funneling thousands of takedown demands, creating lists of posts to hide, throttle, or erase.

Biden’s objective wasn’t about fighting “misinformation,” as he has claimed. It was about controlling and shaping narratives before an election. This was speech policing.

This was government censorship.

This was illegal.

Trump tore it apart.

Through executive orders, personnel changes, and directives barring government censorship, Trump dismantled Biden’s censorship machine. Platforms can no longer hide behind federal pressure, and bureaucrats can no longer run secret speech-surveillance pipelines.

That is what defending the First Amendment looks like. Not symbolic gestures. Not pretty rhetoric. Real action. Real results. Restoring the foundational principle that in America, the government does not decide which opinions are allowed.

No other president has done more to defend the First Amendment. Trump truly has made free speech great again.

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Dan Schneider is Vice President for Free Speech at the Media Research Center.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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