I am not a Trump supporter. I never have been. I find his many of his views to be deeply objectionable. And I deplore all violence and destruction of property, particularly the assault on the Congress.
However, I am also quite aware that sometimes the backlash to a horrendous event goes overboard. It happened with 9/11 and the Patriot Act. It happened in Turkey after the attempted coup in 2016. It happened during the French Revolution when counterrevolutionaries tried to reverse the democratic republic and bring back absolute monarchy. But that backlash led to the Reign of Terror. It happened during the US civil war with Sherman's March to the Sea, when he arguably committed war crimes and became one of, if not the first example of total war, that eventually led to the atrocities of WWII. It happened during WWII when the USA interned Japanese-Americans and thereby violated their civil rights.
Advocating and coordinating violence is wrong and illegal, and actions must be taken to prosecute the people involved. That is not too difficult. If appropriate even the President Trump can later be prosecuted. There is a clear and present danger legal test best enunciated by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in 1919.
But that does not mean that much of the rest of what I consider to be mostly repugnant Trumpian commentary is illegal. You have the right to offend. In 1978, the American Civil Liberties Union took a controversial stand for free speech by defending a neo-N$z$ group that wanted to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie , where many Holocaust survivors lived. It has since given up on genuine free speech for all and now only believes in free speech for some.
There are lot of people who have been banned from Twitter and Facebook and Parler was one of the few places where they could present their views. But it's not just Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Google that are censoring free speech. Simon & Schuster canceled from its summer line-up of new releases Sen. Josh Hawley's (R-Mo.) book The Tyranny of Big Tech.
Simon & Schuster did not directly accuse Hawley of being one of the mob who attacked the Capitol. Its beef was ]the pro-Trump way he’s been shooting his mouth off in recent weeks. He was the first senator to object to the certification of Joe Biden’s victory as he trafficked in preposterous theories of election fraud. Of course I think he spread lies. But freedom of speech means you can say things that are not true.
Various Congressman and senators have put pressure on tech companies to censor speech on their networks and this gives the lie to the idea that free speech is only lacking if the government stops it. Well putting pressure on companies including financial and regulatory pressure is simply a backdoor to censorship. Authoritarian regimes such as in Egypt and Turkey use this clever ruse of manipulating private ownership of the media to suppress free speech all the time.
Some will say that we are just talking about private companies. But the reality is that we are moving away from paper based speech. If there is no practical way to disseminate your views (if you are not close to being a billionaire) then free speech exists on paper only (pardon the pun). We recognize that public utilities form natural monopolies and realize that traditional market forces do not work. Consequently we insist they supply certain universal services. Similarly a few large tech companies are coming to dominate the world of the dissemination of ideas. With smartphone in the USA, it's basically Google and Apple and if they both ban an app, then for practical purposes it does not exist. We need to insist that they allow all legal speech on their platforms because they are de-facto monopolies.
There are huge double standards in play too. During the past summer Antifa and a small minority of BLM activists indulged in rioting, looting and wanton violence. Most of the media and the leaders of the Democratic Party framed that particular wave of lawlessness as “peaceful” protests. The AP told its reporters not use the word "riot" even when city blocks were set ablaze. Using critical thinking that supposedly we are sent to college to learn, it is rather easy to deduce that "hate speech" is broadly ok if it comes from the left and violence was even occasionally praised.
Last summer outside the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct, protests turned violent, as people looted businesses, threw projectiles, and set the station house on fire; police in riot gear fired rubber bullets and sprayed tear gas at the crowds. Yet various media outlets discussed when violence was legitimate and at the very least sought to downplay it. They sought to understand the grievances of the protesters. 74 million people voted for Trump. They too have grievances and by denying their leaders the ability to articulate what they feel, you create a tyranny of the majority.
A mild letter asking for "toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity" published in Harper's Review in 2020 was bitterly castigated and many of the signers of the letter either retracted their signature or denied ever having done so because of the social ostracism that quickly followed. This included many minority writer and public intellectuals. When Tom Cotton wrote an Op Ed in the New York Times the editorial page editor was quickly forced out after a huge backlash from the public and the company’s own employees. Even though the purpose of Op Eds in the New York Times is to engender debate, and raise controversial points of view, because his viewpoint was not acceptable to the progressive left, extreme action was taken.
Taken as a totality, the double standards, and the choices as to when and how vigorously to enforce various speech polices, it is clear we are losing free speech. It has even gotten tot he point of blatantly unconstitutional state laws. In New York State the sale or display of Confederate flags, swastikas and other “symbols of hate” on state property is banned under a law signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo despite the fact that such a law violates free speech protection under the U.S. Constitution. I am sure that what is considered "hate" now will be vastly different to how that term is defined in 2031.
Prof Anne Glover, a former chief scientific adviser to the Scottish government was forced out forced out by Jean-Claude Juncker because she correctly asserted that such crops were safe. The scientific community was outraged that a scientific advisor was sacked just for stating scientific truth. At the time Dr Roberto Bertollini, Chief Scientist and World Health Organization representative to the EU, attacked a decision that shows Mr Juncker's "unwillingness to accept independent scientific opinion". This is where we are heading.
I have seen other cases where scientific evidence or facts cannot be openly discussed because many people object to such ideas being discussed. I have seen this firsthand.
We cannot have a liberal and functioning democracy without free speech. Yes President Trump has said and done some horrific things. Let us not allow the backlash to those things to cause us to lose valuable freedoms.
We can either fight for free speech for all, or slowly lose it. Right now it's just far right speech that is under threat. Do not be naive and assume it