The Life in My Years

The first of two parts about the Trump Administration’s assault on the First Amendment.

“Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself.” ~ Burmese Days by George Orwell

On January 20, 2025, Donald J. Trump’s first day in office, he signed Executive Order 14149. The E.O. is titled, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship”. The title is an unambiguous declaration that the Executive Branch will be a bastion for the right of freedom of speech and expression as guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution.

When Trump signed the order it was a promising sign that maybe the 47th President would back off from some of his bellicose campaign rhetoric. Well, promising to the gullible. Because since January 20th, Trump and his administration have been laying waste to the freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment. Just as he said he would.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” George Orwell’s, 1984.
In his novel, 1984, George Orwell introduced the literary world to the term, Newspeak, a language prescribed by the all powerful, ruling Party for use by the people of the fictitious state of Oceania. The idea behind Newspeak was to destroy the traditional language (Oldspeak) in order to restrict free thought.

Published in 1949, Orwell’s classic dystopian horror story of government control has existed for my entire lifetime as the stern warning. Since it was published it has been the chilling, “what if”; the red line; the third rail. Call it what you want, 1984 was not the place Americans wanted to go. For decades the idea of an American 1984 was largely brushed off. We have a Constitution. We have guardrails. We have checks and balances. We have a deep and abiding appreciation for the the law, and for the judicial system that keeps the wolf of tyranny at bay. We survived McCarthyism and we survived Watergate. We were authoritarian proof.

And now we have Trump.

And here we are.

Trumpspeak
Trump’s Executive Order 14149 notwithstanding, the Trump Administration, with its irrational fixation on anything that it feels smacks of “wokeness” or DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) put together an expansive list of forbidden words that have been deemed to promote “wokeness.”

The list was compiled, and the order went out that government websites and documents should, whenever possible, be scrubbed of the offending words, and whenever possible, to limit or avoid the usage of those words in the future. The list includes the words: activism, at risk, abortion, prostitute, pregnant person, multicultural, underrepresented and . . . the list goes on and on and on. The list also includes “climate science” and “climate crisis”; because if you don’t say it, it can’t be happening.

Targeting the “elites”
Not content with bleaching the federal government, the administration has been targeting universities by threatening to withhold federal funding if certain demands aren’t met. The administration isn’t asking for complete control of the helm but it is certainly extorting for a very strong hand.

Columbia University capitulated to all of the Trump demands including one of the most egregious, which is to place the university’s Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department under government approved oversight.

Laurie A Brand, is the chair of the Committee on Academic Freedom at the Middle East Studies Association and professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, and she said of Columbia’s capitulation, “It is appalling that the federal government intervened like that. It’s frightening and it bodes terribly for the immediate future for higher education.” Brand “compared the move to the Turkish government’s centralized control of higher education during its “hard authoritarian turn” in the 2010s.” Source, New York Times.

Historically, universities have been a target of authoritarians because it’s universities that promote diverse viewpoints, free thought, intellectual freedom, and free speech, all of which are seen by authoritarians as threats and roadblocks to the consolidation of their absolute power.

In her essay How Authoritarians Target Universities, author and historian of authoritarians, propaganda, democracy protection, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, cites numerous examples of strong men repressing higher education.

“In the Cold War era, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who seized power through a 1973 U.S.-backed coup, claimed that universities were hotbeds of Marxism and targeted them for “cleansing.” By 1975 24,000 students, faculty, and staff had been dismissed (and thousands sent to prison), and philosophy and social science departments had been disbanded.”

Notable for being in stark bold print (Ben-Ghiat’s emphasis, not mine), she writes, “We don’t hear enough about how (Viktor) Orbán has slowly defunded public education, subtracting 16% from its budget over the past decade, and Hungary already has a dire teacher shortage. Privatization and defunding schemes are also pillars of Project 2025 in America.”

Trump and the authors of Project 2025 told America in no uncertain terms and in writing exactly what to expect.

And yet here we are.

Muzzling the press
Trump is flexing his power as regards the free press.

When the Associated Press refused to adopt Trump’s ridiculous renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, AP journalists were denied access to press events in the White House. A U.S. The District Judge ordered the Trump regime to lift the restrictions on the AP. In his ruling the judge wrote, “The Court simply holds that under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists — be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere — it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints,”

The ruling was made on April 8th and as of this writing, the Trump regime continues to defy the court.

In response to features aired on “60 Minutes” that Trump doesn’t like, the President has asked FCC Chairman Brandon Carr, a Trump bootlicker of the first order, to go after CBS and impose maximum fines and punishment “for their (CBS) unlawful and illegal behavior.”

Carr’s FCC has been investigating ABC News, NBC, PBS, NPR and the Walt Disney Co.

The fine print
So what does one make of Executive Order 14149 and the promise of free speech and the promise of protection of the First Amendment? Like most of Trump’s promises, like Trump himself, the EO is a fraud.

While the title of the EO and much of the wording sounds very Jeffersonian, the premise is very clear in Section 1, which states:
Purpose. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution, an amendment essential to the success of our Republic, enshrines the right of the American people to speak freely in the public square without Government interference. Over the last 4 years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve. Under the guise of combatting “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate. Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.

The EO is just another of Trump’s grievances, this one about content moderation and fact checking by online platforms and broadcasters. Clayton Weimers of Reporters Without Borders writes, “Free speech doesn’t mean public discourse has to be free of facts. Donald Trump and his Big Tech cronies like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are dismantling what few guardrails the internet had to protect the integrity of information. We cannot ignore the irony of Trump appointing himself the chief crusader for ‘free speech’ while he continues to personally attack press freedom – a pillar of the First Amendment – and has vowed to weaponize the federal government against expression he doesn’t like.”

The EO states, “It is the policy of the United States to 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.”

And yet, we have the banned Associated Press and the regime defying a court order.

And yet, we have CBS, ABC News, NBC, PBS, NPR and the Walt Disney Co all under government scrutiny because Trump doesn’t like this or such that those organizations did.

And yet, we have Donald Trump saying that Politico journalists should be jailed.

And yet, we have Donald Trump suing the Des Moines Register over a poll he didn’t like.

And yet, despite Executive Order 14149, Donald Trump, his press secretary and a gaggle of cabinet members, members of Congress and assorted Trump camp followers and groupies are regularly intimidating the press, with everything from demeaning them as stupid to making threats to the very existence of the press.

And yet, even after George Orwell told us, even after Donald Trump told us, even after the authors of Project 2025 told us – here we are.

“Threats to freedom of speech, writing, and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect, and unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.” ~ George Orwell

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