In a pair of recent posts, I reviewed the MAGA communication strategy successfully wielded by the Trump administration. Another aspect of the White House messaging strategy is to silence critics and quash their views. While cancel culture has been associated with the Left, MAGA has taken it up with a vengance. Furthermore, the Trump administration has openly employed state power to snuff out dissent, a clear violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution.
David French, a political conservative and evangelical Christian, who hasn’t changed his mind about free speech or religious liberty since the rise of Trump, continues to embrace constitutional principles. From today’s New York Times:
One of the most frustrating elements of our post-election national conversation was the insistence in some quarters that the election represented a repudiation of censorship and cancel culture. It did not.
Instead, nearly half the American people voted against the party that was actively moving away from extremism — including the far-left censorship regime that has long afflicted America’s elite campuses — and instead voted for the party that didn’t just weaponize government against dissenting voices (through book bans, various anti-“woke” bills and prohibitions against drag shows), it also created an atmosphere of fear and intimidation against its political enemies.
The MAGA movement relentlessly attacked election workers, school board members and anyone else who defied its will to power or dissented from MAGA’s version of American history. Trumpian political correctness is becoming so absurd that The Associated Press reported on Thursday that at the Pentagon “tens of thousands of photos and online posts” have been “marked for deletion,” including a photo of Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, presumably because its name included the word “gay.”
I spent much of my legal career combating censorship and defending free speech and religious liberty. I defended people from across the political spectrum, but I was also very familiar with censorship from the left. I filed lawsuit after lawsuit against universities that, among other things, imposed speech codes, discriminated against Christian student groups and retaliated against conservative professors.
When I filed those cases, I believed the American right had a basic commitment to individual freedom. Today, it does not. It is far more committed to fighting the left now than it was to defending liberty then. As the right rejected libertarianism, it turned against the First Amendment.
And now Trump’s administration and his MAGA movement are the most dangerous and powerful censors in the United States.
When an administration blatantly attacks the First Amendment, it attacks our national identity. The First Amendment is core to the idea of the United States of America.
Earlier this week, French highlighted an article in the Washington Post on the Trump administration’s “zeroing out” foreign aid, which devastated many Christian ministries. French observed: “If the Biden administration had done this, it would be deemed proof of the Democrats’ hostility to religion. But Trump is doing it, so his Christian allies turn against Christian ministries and gut their ability to serve the poorest of the poor.”
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