On this New Year’s Eve, billions of people will gather with friends to ring in 2025 with the hope of a better year to come. For the first time in many years, free-speech advocates have a reason to celebrate.
With 2024, we will say goodbye to one of the most reviled offices in the Biden Administration: The Global Engagement Center. I discuss the Center in my recent book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage as one of the most active components in the massive censorship system funded by the Biden Administration. The demise of the GEC is a good start. However, like weight loss resolutions, it will take much more of a commitment if we are going to restore free speech in the United States. It is time to make the ultimate resolution to rip out the censorship root and stem from our government.
This month, the Biden Administration fought to keep the GEC funded, but Republicans refused to include it in the continuing resolution for the budget. However, even with the closure of this one office, Biden will leave behind the most comprehensive censorship system in the history of the United States.
Over the last three years, many of us have detailed a comprehensive system of grants to academic and third party organizations to create blacklists or to pressure advertisers to withdraw support for targeted sites. The subjects for censorship ranged from election fraud to social justice to climate change.
I testified at the first hearing by the special committee investigating the censorship system funded or coordinated by the Biden Administration. It is an unprecedented alliance of corporate, government, and academic groups against free speech in the United States. The Biden Administration established the most anti-free speech record since the Adams Administration.
House investigations showed the critical role played by government officials in “switchboarding,” or channeling demands for removal or bans in social media. Officials evaded the limits of the First Amendment by using these groups as surrogates for censorship.
The system has functioned like a multiheaded hydra where cutting off one head only allows two more to grow back. These censors will not simply walk away and become dentists or bartenders. They have a skill set for censorship and this is now a profitable industry supporting scores of people who now market themselves as “disinformation specialists.”
Shutting down the GEC will eliminate a $61 million budget and 120 employees. However, these employees will find ample opportunities not just in other agencies but in academia and state agencies. There are also pro-censorship sites like BlueSky, which are becoming safe spaces for liberals who do not want to be “triggered” by opposing views . (Notably, BlueSky hired a former Twitter employee who was fired after Musk cleaned out at what is now X).
They are not going anywhere unless the Trump Administration and the Congress makes free speech a priority in eliminating each of these funding sources.
As I wrote in the book, we need to get the United States out of the censorship business by passing a law barring any federal funds for the use of censorship, including grants to academic and NGO groups.
Rooting out this censorship system will require a comprehensive effort by the new Trump Administration. So here is a resolution that I hope many in the Trump Administration will share: let’s get the United States out of the censorship business in 2025.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
I wish Fox news would get out of the business of deleting good, informative Islam-critical comments in its comment section.
I remain shocked that Americans so freely tolerate suppression of free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of religion, and freedom of thought. Our extra-constitutional 2-party system seems to rely upon the freedom of both majority parties to grasp at authoritarian and even totalitarian powers in response to the swinging of the political pendulum from one party to the other. Both parties accuse the other of being the most anti-democratic and anti-constitutional.
Is this actually an overflow safeguard? Or does it guarantee that we permanently view the Constitution has having no clear meaning about anything, rendering the court system completely arbitrary?
We need to reject “galinformation,” estrogen-rich assertions immune to factual evidence, rational thought, and human nature.
I realize this comment is technically off-subject, what with the murders at 3 am New Year’s Day in New Orleans, among my immediate reactions is this one: why aren’t Biden and the usual knee-jerk reactionaries screaming ‘truck violence! just as loudly as they do ‘gun violence’ whenever someone is bound and determined to create death and destruction using a weapon that fires bullets rather than a truck which uses its gross vehicular weight to mow down innocent human lives. And the answer is: because these are mentally deranged people doing these dastardly deeds.
New Year’s Resolution: start reading more of what the foreign press thinks of the United States, both bad and good.
To say it’s ‘eye-opening’ would be an understatement!
The US and americans LEAD the world – we do not follow.
Much of the structure and government of the modern world today i the consequence of that leadership.
While I have no opposition to gathering information from many points of view, and sometimes foreign POV are useful of americans.
The FACT is that we both lead the world and are by far the most successful country in the world.
We are 1/3 of the world economy and yet 1/30 of the worlds people – we are by far the most productive people in the world.
We are not the best at absolutely everything – but we are best at very nearly everything.
I would be happy to see the rest of the world challenge our total dominance – that would be good for them and for us and for their own people.
So how should they do that ?
It is self evident that whatever they are doing NOW – it is inferior to what we are doing.
So any expectation that they can do better than the US by doing more of what they are doing differently now, is highly likely to prove failure.