Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘On January 20th, his first day back in office, Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” It accused the Biden Administration of chilling speech it disagreed with and announced that

It is the policy of the United States to:

(a) secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech;

(b) ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen;

(c) ensure that no taxpayer resources are used to engage in or facilitate any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen;

(d) identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech.

The President and his Administration then proceeded to ban the Associated Press from certain press events because it did not refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, sanction law firms that represented clients whose political views the Administration regards as unfriendly, arrest and seek to deport immigrants legally in the United States for opinions they expressed in speech or in print, defund universities for alleged antisemitic speech and leftist bias, sue the Wall Street Journal for libel, extort sixteen million dollars from the corporate owner of CBS because of the way a “60 Minutes” interview was edited, set about dismantling the Voice of America for being “anti-Trump” and “radical,” coerce businesses and private colleges and universities to purge the word “diversity” from their websites, and order the National Endowment for the Arts to reject grant applications for projects that “promote gender ideology.”

After threats from the head of the Federal Communications Commission, a late-night television personality had his show suspended because of some (rather confusing) thing he said about Trump’s political movement. Other media outlets were advised to get in line. Trump has proposed that licenses be withdrawn from companies that air content critical of him. The Administration has opened Justice Department investigations into and yanked security details from people whose political views it dislikes…

This is not social shunning. This is not speaking from the bully pulpit. Apart from the libel suits, which the President can add teeth to by threatening regulatory sanctions or by slow-walking mergers and other business deals that require government approval, this is the persecution of people and organizations based on point of view. Much of this is exactly what the Supreme Court has said the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from doing. The Administration is not even pretending to follow the law, let alone its own proclamations about free speech. It’s getting results, so why should it?’ (from the New Yorker)