On the eve of the 21st annual Free Speech Week, “No Kings” protesters filled the streets, denouncing “The Great Dictator” for trampling the Constitution, especially the First Amendment. The irony was entirely lost on them.
After four years of President Joe Biden coercing Big Tech to silence dissent, starving conservative media outlets of funding and trying to imprison or disqualify Donald Trump, the grey-haired demonstrators failed to notice a simple fact: they were completely free to chant their 1960s-era slogans without interference.
The modern left has come to see free speech not as the foundation of democracy, but as its greatest threat. They openly call for suppressing so-called “hateful” or “misleading” speech, a deliberately elastic category that conveniently includes anything they dislike. Yet the First Amendment was designed precisely to protect speech that offends.
Rather than rediscovering the First Amendment, the left has twisted it to create a new censorship regime built to protect its own power. For example, the Biden administration coordinated with, and sometimes coerced, Big Tech platforms to suppress conservatives; used the Treasury Department and the SEC to pressure banks against political opponents; labeled parents at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists;” equated Christians and conservatives with neo-Nazis; targeted Elon Musk’s Starlink for political reasons; and even denied hurricane relief to people who supported Trump.
And that’s just for starters. Biden’s Department of Justice also indicted his political rival for his speech, then sought a gag order to silence him. Almost as disturbing, the Departments of State and Homeland Security colluded with foreign partners to drive advertising dollars away from conservative media outlets. In all, the Media Research Center (MRC) uncovered and reported on at least 57 censorship initiatives like these, launched during the Biden administration.
These are precisely the kinds of actions used by authoritarians to silence speech rights and suppress political opponents.
Fortunately, President Trump has launched a massive effort to restore free speech rights for all Americans. He and his appointees have reversed over 75% of Biden’s 57 censorship initiatives to date. In addition, Trump has defended his own rights against those who have sought false sanctuary in the First Amendment to attack him.
For example, Trump sued ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and CBS’s 60 Minutes for their unlawful conduct against him. Stephanopoulos was repeatedly warned by ABC’s lawyers not to spread falsehoods about Trump. Similarly, CBS intentionally engaged in “broadcast news distortion” to tilt coverage toward Kamala Harris. Defamation isn’t protected speech, nor is fraud. The First Amendment does not grant a “get out of jail free” card for such conduct.
Late-night television hosts at ABC and NBC discovered the same. Broadcasters don’t own the airwaves. They use the public spectrum, granted to them for free, on the condition that they serve the entire public, not just a partisan faction. Breaking this legal standard can result in the termination of their broadcast licenses.
For years, ABC, NBC and CBS have acted less like journalists than partisan super-PACs, with relentlessly one-sided coverage. ABC, for example, gave Kamala Harris 100% positive coverage in the month before her debate with Trump, and in return gave Trump 93% negative coverage.
This bias reached a grotesque low when Jimmy Kimmel used his platform to sneer at and distort the assassination of Charlie Kirk, to whom the MRC posthumously awarded our Free Speech award earlier this week. ABC’s token disciplinary gesture (Kimmel was handed a six-day suspension) sent the message that it understood that the law is supposed to mean something and that it had to start serving the whole public again.
The left has one guiding principle: power. Its leaders and activists increasingly attack the First Amendment as a relic of the patriarchy and seek to replace constitutionally-protected speech with a managed discourse, policed for “harm” and “disinformation,” where dissenters of the left’s agenda are excluded by design.
Biden’s unprecedented assault on free speech rights has been met with Trump’s equally-robust defense of these rights.
The First Amendment was not written to shield the powerful. It was written to keep those in power from deciding who may speak. The “No Kings” protesters claim to have rediscovered this truth. In reality, they buried it long ago and can’t seem to remember where they hid it.
Dan Schneider is Vice President for Free Speech at the Media Research Center.
