Trump orders arrest of Gaza protesters: so much for "free speech"

JD Vance and the US Right claim the mantle of "free speech" - while their administration promises to lock up protesters

Remember how the US Right made so-called “free speech” their signature cause, along with so-called “cancel culture”?

Sure, maybe some of the more cynical amongst you thought this was a convenient ruse. Maybe you suspected they meant that powerful people should be able to say whatever gruesome and inflammatory things they wanted about largely voiceless minorities, without getting any challenge or pushback.

Your cynicism may have been heightened by what’s happened since Israel’s genocide. After all, much of this brigade shut up about free speech and cancel culture altogether, largely given the same people once screeching about free speech and cancel culture have led the charge to cancel anyone who has extreme opinions like “slaughtering little children with bombs is bad actually”. They’ve focused on targeting people with such views: abusing them, threatening them, leading hate mobs against them, deplatforming them, sacking them, getting them arrested.

And what about now?

Here’s what was posted this week by Donald Trump:

All federal funding will STOP for any College, School or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!

It’s not exactly screaming “free speech!”, is it?

The same day he posted this, he declared in his State of the Union address:

I’ve stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America, it’s back!

During his address, Congressman Al Green was removed from the chamber for heckling him over Medicaid.

To help flesh out what Donald Trump in his post about protests, his pick for US Ambassador to the United Nations - Elise Stefanik - is on hand. She isn’t Jewish, something I note because she has previously denounced a Jewish Studies professor who is actually Jewish for being “known for his despicable antisemitic views,” because of his critiques of Israel. That is of course highly relevant because it underlines how the very real evil of antisemitism is redefined to mean, say, opposing Israel’s war crimes. It shows that non-Jewish Americans will persecute Jewish Americans on grounds of “antisemitism”, because of their views on Israeli atrocities.

Elise Stefanik tweeted:

Under President @realDonaldTrump, colleges and universities will be held accountable. Antisemitism and anti-Israel hate will not be tolerated on American campuses. Promises made, promises kept.

She’s very clearly conflating antisemitism with what is described as “anti-Israel hate”, which in practise of course means “opposing Israel’s war crimes”, “opposing genocide”, “expressions of solidarity with Palestinians” and indeed “supporting the right of the Palestinian people to national self-determination”.

How do you reconcile this with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution which guarantees free speech? What this points to, by the way, is how US democracy is going to be chipped away by Trump’s authoritarian government. And as I’ll explain, so-called ‘centrists’ and ‘liberals’ or whatever you want to call them have helped pave the way for this disaster.

Let’s just see the hypocrisies in their full glory shall we. Researcher Will Stancil notes the tweets of Will Chamberlain, who is legal counsel to the Internet Accountability Project, which according to its website has a mission “to lend a conservative voice to the calls for federal and state governments to rein in Big Tech before it's too late.”

In 2020 Chamberlain tweeted:

Free speech is more than the First Amendment

It's a cultural commitment to the idea that everyone should have a right to participate in public discourse.

Everyone, he says! That seems rather unambiguously clear. Now Stancil himself tweeted in response to Trump’s protest ban:

At some point the opposition needs to say what is happening here: Donald Trump is a tyrant in the full sense of the term, an American fascist dictator who believes the law flows directly from his command. And he is also an unwell, unfit, and criminal man with nonsensical whims.

And then conservative lawyer Will Chamberlain, that committed champion of everyone having a right to participate in public discourse then tweets:

Your friends are going to jail.

Not very free speechy, “everyone should have a right to participate in public discoursey” is it? Not in the classical sense, unless words now have completely different meanings.

Before we discuss how absolutely ridiculous it is that Trump’s own vice president has made ‘free speech’ his big issue, while Trump shuts down free speech - let’s not forget the role of so-called ‘centrists’ or ‘liberals’ or many people who call themselves ‘Democrats’.

Because it wasn’t just conservatives who vilified protests in the US, on campus and elsewhere, against Israel’s genocide. No, it was these supposed moderates and centrists who joined in. This was part of a deliberate attempt to turn the whole world on its head - to portray those opposed to slaughtering innocent people, opposed to war crimes, as the real dangerous hateful extremists. And in doing so, these supposed committed opponents of Trump helped pave the way for the authoritarian crackdown led by Trump today.

But what of JD Vance, Donald Trump’s vice president, and the guy who does an excellent impression of the sidekick to a schoolyard bully, sniggering at his abuse, trying to harass other people to get the bully’s approval. On Fox News on the very same day Trump issued his protest ban, he declared:

We have to ask ourselves the question as leaders: ‘Are we willing to defend people even if we disagree with what they say?’ If you’re not willing to do that, I don’t think you’re fit to lead Europe or the United States.

Are we willing to defend people even if we disagree with what they say. The guy’s boss just declared their administration is literally going to lock up people they disagree with on Israel. So if JD Vance means what he says, then he is declaring that Trump isn’t fit to lead the United States of America.

At Munich last month, JD Vance hectored European leaders for failing to defend free speech, declaring: :In Britain and across Europe free speech, I fear, is in retreat.”

He cited the Safe Access Zones legislation in Scotland which came into force last year. It prevents anti-choice protesters from gathering within 200 metres of an abortion clinic. That is to stop protesters from harassing women who are about to have a medical procedure, with the express intent of causing them trauma - or adding to it - so they don’t go through with it. He added blatant misinformation that letters were sent to people saying they couldn’t pray in their own homes.

Do I think that protesters surrounding medical facilities in order to intimidate predominantly younger women who may be vulnerable before a medical procedure is a question of free speech? Well no, I do not, and it’s certainly not comparable to students opposing the mass killing of innocent civilians, facilitated by their own government.

Indeed I do think there are questions about free speech in Europe, not least in Germany. There has been a deliberate crackdown on people speaking out about Palestine - again not something JD Vance is interested in, and I would imagine - given his President’s latest decree - he supports that.

Indeed, when Keir Starmer recently visited the White House, JD Vance made another challenge about free speech in the UK.

He was clearly referring to the violent far-right riots which took place last August, when there were variously attempts to burn to death refugees in hotels, as well as mosques, and indeed people of colour were violently targeted in the streets as well as their homes attacked. Some people went to jail for inciting such violence online.

As it happens, I wrote an entire column disputing whether prison was the right answer, because I’m sceptical about prison as an answer to most problems. But questions of incitement during attempted pogroms are protected as free speech according to this administration, but not young people protesting against mass murder.

This whole saga exposes this lie, this con, this sham. These people do not care about free speech whatsoever. They want racists and fascists in Europe to be able to say what they want, no matter how inflammatory, no matter if it’s incitement, but their own young people having the right to oppose mass murder - well, they must be arrested, imprisoned or deported.

The truth is this far right authoritarianism encapsulated by Trump is the real menace to democracy. And their talk of free speech is one big lie - and we must expose them.