U.S. President Donald Trump vowed in his second inaugural address to “immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.”Leon Neal/The Associated Press
No principle has been as fundamental to the American experiment as freedom of speech.
The willingness to tolerate subversive and offensive discourse, essentially without limits, has long distinguished the United States from other democracies, including Canada, which regulate certain kinds of speech.
In America, free speech and the clash of ideas that it promotes have been seen as fostering social progress, resulting in a society that is more innovative than ones in which open expression is suppressed. Free speech is also held up as rampart against the political violence that erupts in societies where speech is restricted.
There have nevertheless been dark periods in American history in which the country has not lived up to its free-speech ideals. In the 1950s, Republican senator Joseph McCarthy led a witch hunt to expose gays and communists in the U.S. government, using demagogical tactics that a young Roy Cohn, who served as chief counsel to McCarthy’s senate committee, would later teach Donald Trump, for whom Mr. Cohn worked in the 1970s.
A decade or so ago, the emergence of cancel culture on U.S. college campuses created an entirely different kind of threat to the right to free speech entrenched in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It suddenly became routine to block controversial (almost exclusively right-wing) figures from speaking on campus based on the pretext that their words alone constituted a form of violence.
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In a 2017 article in The Atlantic, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and constitutional lawyer Greg Lukianoff worried that this “coddling” of the minds of college students – in effect, shielding them from opinions they found offensive – risked creating a generation of Americans more emotionally fragile and less resilient than their older peers. They particularly took issue with the increasing characterization of speech as violence.
“It tells the members of a generation already beset by anxiety and depression that the world is a far more violent and threatening place than it really is. It tells them that words, ideas and speakers can literally kill them,” they wrote. “Even worse: At a time of rapidly rising polarization in America, it helps a small subset of that generation justify political violence.”
That sentence now seems sadly prophetic.
The 22-year-old man who stands accused of killing right-wing agitator Charlie Kirk last week on a Utah college campus allegedly told his partner, in a text exchange, that he shot Mr. Kirk because he had “had enough of his hatred” and that “some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Although there is still a lot we do not know about his motivations, his texted comments do suggest that he believed Mr. Kirk’s words alone justified his alleged response to them.
The wave of solidarity with the accused killer that followed the shooting should not have come as a surprise to anyone. The proportion of Americans who say that political violence is sometimes justified has been on the rise in recent years, especially among younger Americans.
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According to polling by Mr. Lukianoff’s Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a third of U.S. college students now believe it is acceptable to use violence to stop a campus speech, up from one-fifth in 2020. Students on the left are more accepting of violence than those on the right, but support has increased across the board. “What was once an extreme and fringe opinion has become normalized,” FIRE noted this week.
Mr. Trump’s strategy in the wake of Mr. Kirk’s killing – vowing to crack down on left-wing activist groups he blames for the assassination – bears the fingerprints of Stephen Miller, the sinister White House deputy chief of staff who has replaced Mr. Cohn at Mr. Trump’s side. According to a 2016 Washington Post investigation, Mr. Cohn showed Mr. Trump “how to exploit power and instill fear through a simple formula: attack, counterattack and never apologize.” Mr. Miller embodies this approach.
Ironically, or not, Mr. Trump vowed in his second inaugural address to “immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.” On his first day back in the White House, in January, he signed an executive order 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.”
Ask Jimmy Kimmel how that’s working out. After mocking Mr. Trump on his late-night talk show on Monday, Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr, a loyal Trump appointee, seized on what he called Mr. Kimmel’s “truly sick” comments about Mr. Kirk’s killing to threaten the host and his network on Wednesday. ABC then pulled Mr. Kimmel’s show off the air.
Talk about McCarthyism all over again.
Mr. Trump is the new face of cancel culture in America, and just as frightening as the old ones. Maybe more.