Following up on Tom’s post below, this piece from Mike Masnick at Techdirt calls out the hypocrisy of MAGA and the allegedly free-speech warriors like the “Twitter files” authors who had a full-blown meltdown over the Biden administration asking the social media companies not to share disinformation about COVID (which was killing people) while apparently having little problem with Trump personally threatening the owner of News Corp if they publish something about him that he doesn’t like.
Donald Trump admitted yesterday that he called Rupert Murdoch and demanded the Wall Street Journal kill its story about Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. When Murdoch couldn’t deliver, Trump promised to sue the media company and gleefully looked forward to putting Murdoch on the witness stand. Update: Just as this story was going live, it was reported that he had, in fact, sued. We’ll write about the details of the lawsuit as they become clear.
This is the exact type of behavior that Trump’s supporters spent years claiming represented “arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States history” when they falsely accused the Biden administration of doing far less.
I understand that we live in an era of blatant hypocrisy where “it’s okay if a Republican does it” is the norm, but I wanted to call out how directly similar this scenario is.
For the past few years, we covered the Missouri v. Biden (later, Murthy v. Missouri) case through all its twists and turns. The underlying claim in the case from the states, and a few social media users who had their accounts restricted in some form or another, was that there was a huge First Amendment violation by the Biden administration because it had spoken to social media companies asking them about their policies regarding fighting disinformation on things around Covid.
The case was built on out-of-context communications and outright lies, but Trump-appointed Judge Terry Doughty ruled that the Biden administration asking social media companies to explain their editorial policies was “arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.”
The Supreme Court dismissed the case for lack of standing, but the legal standard the Trump-supporting MAGA lawyers presented is crucial here. Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguinaga argued that any government “ask” to media companies about their editorial choices violates the First Amendment:
He excerpts the arguments before the Supreme Court and there is no doubt what the Trump lawyers were arguing.
So by the legal standard Trump’s own lawyers established, any government request to suppress media coverage violates the First Amendment. Now let’s see how Trump himself measures up.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a story claiming that Trump and Epstein had a very close relationship, focusing on a supposed birthday card Trump allegedly created for Epstein. Trump’s response was his usual cry of “fake news!” about anything he dislikes but—more importantly—involves him admitting he had directly pressured Murdoch to kill the story:
This isn’t just government pressure—it’s a sitting president threatening to weaponize the courts against media for editorial decisions over what he claims is “erroneous information.” By Trump’s own supporters’ legal standard, this is a textbook First Amendment violation. Perhaps the most massive attack against free speech in the history of the United States. (Update: as noted above, it’s now being reported that the lawsuit has been filed, which we’ll cover in a follow-up story).
He threatened to sue them — and he did.
Compare this to what the Biden administration actually did: some officials sent less than polite emails to social media companies asking about their misinformation policies. No threats. No lawsuits. No demands for specific content removal. Yet Trump’s supporters called that “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.”
Trump is doing exactly what the MAGA world spent years accusing Biden of doing, except with explicit threats and promised retaliation. And it’s crickets from the free speech warriors who spent four years screaming about government pressure on media.
Most of us knew that the nonsense about free speech was just that. Their “free speech” crusade against cancel culture and DEI etc only goes one way. Right now they are assiduously working to reinstate straight, white, male dominance across the whole culture using the coercive power of government. You’d have to have been willfully blind not to see what they were up to.
Charges of hypocrisy don’t work on the hard right because they are shameless. We’ll have to see how the free speech warriors like Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi, who claim that they are strictly non-partisan, respond to this. If they ignore it, as I expect, then we will have even more proof of their true roles as water carriers for MAGA and the right wing at large.