As adjectives go, “Orwellian” tends to be prematurely invoked — and hyperbolically, if often in good faith. It warns of language being hijacked toward antithetical means and authoritarian ends. It’s also usually a bit more subtle than President Trump’s recent congressional address, but subtlety doesn’t define his policy formulations or his gaudy architectural aesthetic.
“I’ve stopped all government censorship and I’ve brought back free speech in America,” he declared from the dais. Then, mere moments later, to thunderous applause from the Republican chamber, he added, “I renamed the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ the ‘Gulf of America.’”
This is a fairly dumb detail. But should the free media wish to continue referring to the “Gulf of Mexico,” as the Associated Press did – and others have for, oh, 400 years – it would be banned from covering Trump in the White House press pool.
The politics of free speech, it seems, stops at the water’s edge.
The AP sued on First Amendment grounds and, though a Trump-appointed federal judge didn’t yet lift the ban, he indicated that the policy smacked of “viewpoint discrimination,” wherein the government precludes speech based upon its content.
As for that content, the magic — and emptiness — of branding is that it creates nothing from something. Hence, renaming an international body of water: a symbolically hollow move that changes little of material conditions, yet is befitting a mind (and culture) ever-obsessed with appearance at the expense of reality.
For an administration whose first-day executive orders included a proclamation restoring “the right of the American people to speak freely in the public square without Government interference,” one might assume this includes the freedom of copy editing exercised by journalists.
It doesn’t, of course, because Trump’s commitment to “free speech” has long been fraudulent doublespeak, to borrow once more from Orwell, even as the media frequently indulges that framing. A decade ago, the canary in this coal mine was NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick.
Kaepernick, you might recall, kneeled during pre-game national anthems during the 2016 season to call attention to the Black Lives Matter cause and police violence. It was arguably the most explicit — and explosive — political act in half a century of sports culture. It also gave Trump a winning, Apprentice-style rally line: “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field, right now, he’s out? He’s fired. He’s fired!’”
Leaving aside the substance of Kaepernick’s grievance, as a “free speech” issue, it always seemed pretty cut-and-dry. If one believed that the star-spangled banner flapped “o’er the land of the free,” then protest during its veneration – not against it, as was deliberately misconstrued – is precisely the affordance that the ritual symbolizes.
Kaepernick couldn’t have kneeled in Pyongyang or Havana or any number of countries that the right-wing free speech brigade wanted to deport him to – and that’s the point of the flag. Moreover, that’s the point of uncensored expression and classic liberalism. Free speech is the vehicle for epistemic humility and the guarantor of democratic efficacy: that we can’t know who’s right unless we can all argue it out, unfettered.
All this seems wildly obvious to the point of unremarkable, introductory civics-class cliché, but, as any enduring wisdom, it gets relearned as conditions change. Like the filibuster’s fabled power, free speech is treasured most when you’re the minority party, shut out of power.
To be sure, neither side has shown a monopoly on this wisdom. The left suddenly rediscovered the virtues of campus free speech amidst the Gaza protests of the last academic year – at precisely the moment the right suddenly sought to curtail it.
If one doesn’t support a person’s right — not righteousness, mind you — to chant “from the river to the sea” or wear a shirt that says “there are only two genders,” then one doesn’t really believe in free speech. Most of us — including me, to say nothing of President Trump — lack that epistemic humility. But that’s why, as principle, the First Amendment needs only 45 words to uncomplicate things and relieve the burden of adjudicating content parameters.
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Don’t mistake this for a false equivalency of ideological offenders.
In his first month back in office, Trump’s efforts have included cracking down on DEI language at universities and corporations, forbidding teaching about race and gender in local schools, banning the display of pride flags at VA facilities, vowing to expel or deport protesting students, and seizing control of the White House press pool access.
All the hallmarks of what one would hope for from a committed “free speech” president.
In that first-day executive order, Trump castigated the Biden administration for coercing social media companies to suppress misinformation. Yet Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg’s capitulation when it comes to content moderation is also but an anti-censorship feint. They no more believe in “free speech” on their platforms than they do democratic input or transparent disclosure of their algorithmic designs.
Post whatever you like on X or Facebook. They control who sees it. Their algorithms are where the real power lies in today’s digital public square. Freedom of expression can’t be confused for freedom of distribution. Of course, as owners of private companies, that’s entirely within their right to preclude who sees what. It is not, however, President Trump’s.
The more censorship that’s pursued by his administration, the louder that boasts about “free speech” will need to persist. That’s how power obfuscates unseemly machinations: by claiming to be doing the opposite. Hopefully, we’ll still be allowed to call it Orwellian.
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