Should Elected Officials Censor Americans? Trump's Administration Says Yes.
Vice President J.D. Vance and Sen. Cynthia Lummis are among the latest conservatives to turn their backs on free speech when it comes to their ideological opponents.
Last week, a gunman in Utah shot and killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk. It was a brutal and tragic event, regardless of one's politics. And yet the fallout of Kirk's murder has revealed a disturbing hostility toward free speech on the political right.
Republicans have long cast themselves as defenders of free speech against cancel culture and the censorial impulses of the political left. And there was merit to the argument—Reason has covered many cases of overreach.
But over the last week, MAGA Republicans have scoured social media for government employees posting about Kirk's murder, contacting employers in an attempt to get them fired. "Kirk's online defenders have snitch-tagged the employers of government workers over social media posts saying they don't care about the assassination, that they didn't like Kirk even as they condemn his assassination, and even criticizing Kirk prior to his assassination," Reason's Christian Britschgi wrote this week. Even for nongovernmental employees, social media detectives apparently compiled a database with tens of thousands of people who criticized Kirk, including their names and employers.
Of course, that's just people online. It's not like those with government power are advocating such a thing, right?
"I would think maybe their [broadcast] license should be taken away," President Donald Trump told reporters this week on Air Force One, about TV networks. "All they do is hit Trump. They're licensed. They're not allowed to do that."
"When you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer," Vice President J.D. Vance said while guest-hosting Kirk's podcast this week. "We don't believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility."
Vance's argument bears a striking resemblance to the comments made just a few years ago by his ideological enemies. When certain public and not-so-public figures received backlash for offensive statements, some commentators noted that this was not cancel culture, it was "consequence culture"—people merely experiencing the consequences of their actions.
It's no surprise that Trump has no principles on free speech—from the beginning of his first term, he called the press the "enemy of the American people." But Vance's position marks a notable pivot from just a few months ago.
"Just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite," Vance said in a speech at the Munich Security Conference in February. "Under Donald Trump's leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square, agree or disagree."
Now, Vance seems less keen on defending someone's right to offer views that he personally disagrees with. Unfortunately, he's not alone.
This week, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr criticized TV host Jimmy Kimmel for comments made about Kirk during his show. Carr openly intimated that ABC should take action or potentially face reprisal; within hours, the network suspended Kimmel's show indefinitely. (Trump later praised Carr as "outstanding. He's a patriot. He loves our country, and he's a tough guy.")
Of course, when the opposing party was in power, Carr recognized the error of such a threat. In 2022, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that during the 2020 election, Facebook artificially decreased the spread of a story about Hunter Biden in response to a request from the FBI.
"The government does not evade the First Amendment's restraints on censoring political speech by jawboning a company into suppressing it—rather, that conduct runs headlong into those constitutional restrictions, as Supreme Court law makes clear," Carr posted on X in response. Now that government power is in his hands, Carr apparently has fewer qualms about wielding it like that.
Other officials have made their shifting beliefs more blatant.
"Under normal times, in normal circumstances, I tend to think that the First Amendment should always be sort of the ultimate right. And that there should be almost no checks and balances on it. I don't feel that way anymore," Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R–Wyo.) told Semafor on Thursday. "We just can't let people call each other those kinds of insane things and then be surprised when politicians get shot and the death threats they are receiving and then trying to get extra money for security."
Lummis' complaint sounds like a more aggressive version of the heckler's veto, a "form of censorship, where a speaker's event is canceled due to the actual or potential hostility of ideological opponents," wrote Zach Greenberg of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. In Lummis' telling, the government must punish people for saying offensive or inflammatory things because of how others might respond.
That's not only completely wrong, it's unconstitutional.
"The First Amendment to the Constitution protects speech no matter how offensive its content," according to the American Civil Liberties Union. "Speech that deeply offends our morality or is hostile to our way of life warrants the same constitutional protection as other speech because the right of free speech is indivisible: When we grant the government the power to suppress controversial ideas, we are all subject to censorship by the state."
Lummis, Vance, and Carr apparently see no problem policing offensive speech, at least when they're the ones who are offended.
