FOr those who are afraid that Donald Trump is a despot in labor, don’t worry: he has an answer. “I stopped all government censorships and returned free speech in America,” he successfully expressed at his State of the Union address. “Come back!” JD Vance destroyed Europe in his speech at the Munich Security Conference last month, declaring that “free speech was in retrospect” throughout the continent.
Like all the creed of authority, Trumpism turns reality on its head and enables the words of their meaning to an effort to sow confusion and anxiety with its critics. On the same day Trump announced the resurrection of free speech in Congress, he posted on the fact that the federal funding for educational institutions that allowed “illegal protest” would stop. Noteworthy, being illegal is not specified, but the issue is determined by Trump, of course, Palestine. “The agitators will be jailed/or permanently returned to the country where they came from,” he declared. “American students will be permanently eliminated or, depending on the crime, arrested. No mask!”
Trump’s first target: Columbia University, with a $ 400m of federal funds collapsed because the government said “constantly inaction in the face of the constant harassment of Jewish students”. At least nine other campuses – including Harvard and University of California – may next. All are the sites of extremely peaceful camps protesting the Genocidal attacks of Israel against the Palestinian people. Not only do they oppose their government’s facilitation of this ferocity, by weapons, diplomatic assistance and support, but their colleges are being asked to stay away from the companies that are linked to Israel.
Just as Trumpism has no guarantee of free speech, nor is it a vanguard of anti-racism: it is, in fact, conversely. The true menace of antisemitism is systematically confined to any criticism of the crimes committed by the state of Israel. This is what “Anti-Israel Hate” means, like Elise Stefanik, Trump’s choice as a new UN ambassador puts it, which has become an icon of right after facing the university’s presidents of Israel. The president’s strongest allies were Elon Musk, a man who in 2023 expressed his agreement with a tweet saying that Jewish communities were pushing “hostility against the whites”, and recently conducted Nazi salutes at a Trump rally.
Trump himself declared that the American Americans who supported the Democrats – that is, the majority – “angry with their religion”, “angry with everything about Israel” and “should be ashamed of themselves”, and said menacingly said they would have “many” blame if he had lost the president’s election. The university protests, on the other hand, had a great presence of Jews, and the Jewish students signed a letter that refused “ways that these camps were to be used as antisemitic”.
In fact, Columbia in particular victims of its own students. The university banned the Jewish voice for peace before the began began, ordered police attacks that led to more than 100 students who were arrested, disciplined and evicted, and targeted the sympathetic academia. One was Katherine Franke, a Jewish professor who was publicly stunned by Stefanik – who was not Jewish – and forced to retire. Far from protecting the Jewish students, Franke claimed, it was about “radical advocates for Israel” that lies about campus protests. “This university is bent by one knee and coddled bullies,” he said of Columbia’s suppression of students’ free speech – and still funding it.
It gets a more sinner. The Department of Homeland Security has arrested one of Columbia’s top entrepreneurs: Mahmoud Khalil, a green US card holder of Palestinian origin, married to a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant. Unbeknownst to her husband, she sent more than 1,000 miles away to a well -known detention center in Louisiana. The Department’s claim: that he “led the activities aligned with Hamas”, a flawless attempt to confuse Palestinian’s unity with the militant group responsible for war crimes on October 7.
Far from restoring free speech, Trump’s administration is incinerating the first amendment. When it comes to Palestine, free speech does not exist. Certainly there is someone who is particularly angry at this anger. After all, just last week he declared: “We need to ask ourselves as leaders: ‘Are we willing to defend people even if we do not agree with what they say?’ If you’re not ready to do that, I don’t think you can lead Europe or the United States.
But the truth is, the US right doesn’t really care about free speech. It is a simple ruse, intended to give any attempt to re -rebut its catalyst against the more pointless minors. The Trump administration has risen to the greatest aggression against free speech since McCarthyism: even before the power of power, those who oppose the genocide of Israel are faced to be replaced, victimized and really targeting institutions such as Columbia.
But it’s not just the right of hardcore that destroys these protests. Many self-described “liberal” and “cents” have joined, destroying those who oppose some of the worst atrocities of the 21st century as hate, dangerous extremists-American Americans to them. In doing so, they helped with the unavoidable authority of today’s authority. Simone Zimmerman, co-founder of the American American campaign group IfnotNow, told me that we now see “the scary logical conclusion of smearing anyone calling Palestinian freedom as an antisemite: a white national national management that conducts its war on civil rights and free speaking under the banner of ‘fighting antisemitism’. of a flawless attack on our democracy. “
It is deeply flawless to believe that this suppression will end with attacks on people who express unity in Palestine. An earlier established can be quickly expanded. Like this, US media is increasingly excluding from other things-Trump’s actions, the threat of irritating investigations and plutocrats like Jeff Bezos who are bent on the knee to the king. Free speech is aroused by those who claim to be its greatest advocate.
