Can you imagine a presidential candidate from 20 years ago needing to have a Freedom of Speech platform as part of their campaign? If that had happened, most of us would have thought, “Wait, don’t we already have free speech?” But as we have learned increasingly over the past decade, our rights are under an all-out assault from Permanent Washington, a.k.a. the Swamp. President Donald Trump, who it seems has always had his finger on the pulse in America, has released his “Restoring Free Speech” platform. Let’s dive in and take a look.
President Trump announced that he’ll be issuing an executive order to accomplish most of these objectives. Hopefully they will be codified into law by Congress at some point as well, so some future Democrat can’t just immediately overturn them. We’ll go through the proposed executive order point-by-point.
Trump plans to ban federal agencies from colluding to censor Americans. This is a necessary first step. Federal agencies were censoring conservatives and Trump supporters from the shadows. They didn’t do it out in the open because they knew it was illegal. We don’t even know the extent of the FBI’s involvement with Twitter yet, because Elon Musk hasn’t released any of those files.
Agencies would be banned from labeling any information as mis- or dis-information. Misinformation and disinformation are BS terms anyway. Something is either true or it is a lie, and the only way free people can determine that sometimes is if we have access to all sides of an issue. It’s fundamentally wrong for federal agencies to be labeling information in regard to political speech (or Covid vaccine speech).
The president plans to fire every federal bureaucrat who was involved in censoring American speech in any way, shape or form. I couldn’t agree more! Fire them and cut off their pensions if they have them. Using a government paper-pushing office and a six-figure salary to censor truck drivers you disagree with is probably worth at least a January 6-style stint in jail but firing them is still a pretty good punishment.
Trump wants to have the DOJ investigate and prosecute all parties involved in online censorship. Who would do that at DOJ? The FBI was literally participating in the censorship and having weekly meetings at the tech companies, telling them who to censor about Joe and Hunter Biden.
He wants to revise Section 230. Meh. There are pros and cons to that. Seems like there should be a more specific and effective way to open the tech companies up to liability than that. But it’s better than what we have in place right now. Unfortunately, it will take an act of Congress, and that won’t happen anytime soon.
Trump wants to cut off federal funding to all non-profits and colleges that had a hand in censoring Americans. I think most of us totally agree with that. Most of us don’t think of these things in the elevated terms that the Founding Fathers used. But silencing someone – preventing them from speaking through the power of government – is akin to depriving someone of their life. That’s how important our free speech is. So, if Harvard or Stanford or some non-profit loses its federal funding, that’s a fitting and appropriate step.
He wants to enact criminal penalties for any federal employee who partners with a private entity like Twitter to violate your Constitutional rights. Yes!
Trump is also imposing a 7-year cooling-off period before a person who worked at an intel agency or in national security can take a job at a Big Tech company. Twitter was crawling with feds, as we now know. So are many state-level Secretary of State offices that just ran the 2022 midterms. This is a good proposal, but probably doesn’t go far enough. It’s been well over a decade since I left my position at ABC News, and I still have friends and contacts in the industry, everywhere from Fox News to the Weather Channel. It’s the same for people working in federal agencies like the CIA and the FBI. This should be longer than 7 years.
Finally, President Trump is proposing a Digital Bill of Rights. I like the sound of it, but we don’t have details on that. It’s a good platform, although it’s kind of hard to process the fact that we’re talking about free speech as a political issue in America. Next, I want to see President Trump’s proposal for amnesty… for every January 6 political prisoner who has been in Joe Biden’s gulag for almost two years now.
