The Formerly Free State of America
Ten weeks into the new America, some people are already feeling the dangerous effect of Trump’s speech crackdown.
It’s been ten weeks.
I’ll be the first to admit that as dire as I believed a second term Trump administration would be, things are going much, much worse than I thought it would this early on. An unelected edgelord investor is illegally remaking the federal government in his image, under the incorrect guise of saving money and cutting bureaucracy. The economy is sputtering, which Trump claims is a necessary correction but in reality is a response to his economically illiterate on-again, off-again tariff and protectionist plans. The federal government is taking over and attempting to control the behavior of state-run public schools, colleges, and companies. Far from being “the party of small government,” the Trump-run GOP is expanding the federal government to control every aspect of our lives they believe we, as individuals, do wrong.
None of this is surprising. This was not a secret - Trump has been talking about remaking America into a more insular, less free, less prosperous nation for his entire career and certainly for the entirety of his 2024 campaign. Trump has surrounded himself in this term with extremely online nationalists who believe that the world is a zero sum game, and in order for America to “win” others must suffer. Even if those “others” are Americans themselves.
I wrote in October that while it warmed my little libertarian heart to see Kamala Harris campaigning on “freedom,” freedom has never turned out to be a popular or winning message in America. In general, most American voters see themselves as free as they can be, and associates any further push for freedom to mean allowing “the others,” whatever out or marginalized group they are afraid of, to gain more power and therefore cause “a ruckus” as our Secretary of State would say. It’s been a continuous challenge for broadly liberal politicians, from progressives to libertarians, to figure out how to message that more freedom for everyone means more freedom for YOU as well. It’s one they are rarely successful at but need to figure out quickly in the coming years weeks.
The reason I went on a spiel about freedom in this country is that Americans’ freedom has been drastically restricted in the last ten weeks, whether they all yet realize it or not. I haven’t written much since Inauguration Day partially due to time and work, and partially because there is so much happening it’s hard to focus on one issue. I wrote about the threats to DEI last month. That is itself a threat to freedom. Companies and individuals cannot, under the Trump EOs, safely implement diversity and inclusion programs without facing some threat of federal government retaliation, from loss of government contracts to spurious discrimination investigations by the DOJ. It doesn’t mean you’ll be thrown in jail for celebrating Pride Month, but it does and is causing companies and individuals within them to hesitate before doing or saying anything that could be seen as “promoting DEI,” which generally refers to being a decent and understanding person. That should be terrifying that in America we have to second guess ourselves lest we face retribution from our government, but ten weeks into the Trump administration there we are.
There is a much more sinister, and visible, threat to freedom right now of course and that is the abductions (for lack of a better term) of visa holders by the federal government. Multiple international students, in the U.S. legally on student visas or permanent residents, have been detained and imprisoned for the “crime” of speaking out against the Israeli war in Gaza. To be clear, these people were not even accused of supporting or aiding Hamas. Marco Rubio made clear that they were simply “participating in [pro-Palestinean] movements,” and therefore subject to removal. It wasn’t even that they had their visas revoked though - they were purposefully arrested and detained in very public, authoritarian ways, agents with masks on grabbing them off the street, no different than a public kidnapping, designed to inflict maximum fear in the population.
Not only will you potentially be thrown out of the country for saying something unpopular, but you will be removed from your family, thrown in any one of many dangerous and deadly prisons, and in some cases not even deported to your home country. They are not citizens, but they are still subject to proper due process, to their habeas rights, and yes, still have free speech rights, every bit as much as American citizens do. And if you take any comfort that they have so far only targeted non-citizens in the anti-speech and the horrific anti-Venezuelan round ups, the old saying about “first they came from the communists, but I did not speak up because I was not a communist” starts to ring a bell.
I’m not here to make any value judgement on the opinions of the students arrested, I have kept my opinions on the Israel-Gaza war to myself and don’t plan to change that. There are a lot of other issues associated with the attack on student visa holders, including that it will destroy a lot of higher education programs and ultimately severely harm our economy if people are no longer willing to come to the U.S. to learn and work. But no matter what Marco Rubio says about their opinions’ affect on American foreign policy, I don’t think you can watch the videos of those being grabbed off the street and be confused about who in that video is anti-American.