Amid all the noise, an eerie hush is spreading across America. Companies, scientific researchers and Trump critics are clamming up as the MAGA movement ushers in a new era of government censorship.
A new era of government censorship has dawned
Donald Trump fancies himself a champion of free speech. Oh, really?
January 30, 2025 The Washington Post
The first kind of speech to be shushed was scientific speech.
Last week, the administration ordered a blackout on public communications from government health agencies — in the middle of flu season and a global zoonotic outbreak. For the first time since 1952, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention withheld its weekly report on morbidity and mortality data updates.
The blocked issue was slated to contain two important new studies about bird flu transmission, KFF reports. The move echoed Trump’s data-suppression approach to covid-19. (“If we stopped testing right now,” he said in June 2020, “we’d have very few cases, if any.”)
Other federal departments, such as the Energy Department, were also ordered to cease public communications unless they had explicit approval of the acting secretary, according to memos shared with me. Some agencies have been blocked from sharing data even within the government. Others have canceled previously approved data access or other exchanges with outside researchers.
In one case, a University of North Carolina legal scholar was told his scheduled talk at a U.S. attorney’s office was canceled. The topic of the event: complicity of German lawyers in the creation of the Nazi state. You can’t make these things up.
These actions, among other measures canceling research grants and public engagements, appear related to efforts to expunge so-called wokeness from government. Civil servants have been ordered to snitch on colleagues who might secretly harbor support for DEI — or diversity, equity and inclusion — initiatives. An executive order issued on Wednesday says the government will withhold funding from public schools that teach concepts such as “unconscious bias.”
Some public institutions are bending over backward to avoid becoming targets. Michigan State University abruptly canceled an annual Lunar New Year celebration this week, just in case it violated Trump’s DEI executive orders.
The president and his allies have also leaned on private firms to disavow politically incorrect values. For example, a group of 19 Republican state attorneys general sent a letter to Costco demanding the retailer drop its diversity commitments, citing a Trump executive order. Separately, a major federal contractor this week discouraged its employees from including pronouns in their email signatures, according to a person affected who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation.
Other Trump allies have engaged in speech- and thought-policing, the kinds of actions for which they once condemned progressives (sometimes rightfully!). Last week, for instance, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) obliquely threatened Apple’s CEO for not yet renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Trump-blessed “Gulf of America” in Apple Maps. (Google Maps has caved, however.)
Trump has appointed himself top language cop — and he is determined to earn his keep.
Even before he entered politics, Trump was known for filing spurious lawsuits in retribution for constitutionally protected speech. Recall his 2016 promise to “open up those libel laws.” As documented in the forthcoming book “Murder the Truth” by David Enrich, Trump is part of a broader conservative coalition working to overturn the Supreme Court’s landmark free-speech ruling, New York Times v. Sullivan.
But as president, Trump doesn’t need new laws or court decisions to chill disfavored discourse. Media and tech companies are already preemptively buckling.
A month after Trump’s election, ABC News settled what appeared to be a bogus defamation suit for $15 million, plus Trump’s legal fees, related to his charges in a sexual abuse case. This week, Meta agreed to pay $22 million to settle Trump’s suit over the suspension of his Facebook account. Paramount Global has reportedly discussed settling a suit Trump filed regarding a “60 Minutes” interview. (Trump alleged that the editing made his then-rival, Kamala Harris, look too good.)
Such big-ticket settlements are efficient: They can serve both as a lucrative shakedown (Paramount has merger business pending before the administration, for instance) and as a warning to anyone tempted to criticize Trump. Or his friends, for that matter: A local weather forecaster at a Milwaukee news station was recently fired for criticizing Elon Musk’s definitely-not-a-sieg-heil arm salute. Like Trump, Musk has regularly attempted to muzzle his critics through legal action. However formidable such threats might have seemed before, given Musk’s deep pockets, they’re even worse now that he is steering administration policy.
Not to worry; Trump, like Musk, still fancies himself a free-speech champion. “We have saved free speech in America, and we’ve saved it strongly with another historic executive order,” the president crowed to the World Economic Forum last week. With saviors like these, who needs enemies?