This election has been portrayed as critical for the future of our democracy.
But a key part of that democracy, our First Amendment rights, will no doubt remain under attack – no matter who wins. Republican candidate and former president, Donald Trump, openly threatens those who do not agree with him. At the same time, vice president and Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris – and Pres. Joe Biden – are guilty of doing little to protect the rights of those who protest, get arrested, and even report on rallies against the mass killings of Palestinians and now Lebanese.
No doubt, Trump has gotten the media spotlight for statements like he made on Fox News recently that “radical left lunatics” should be handled by the National Guard or the military, if necessary. That is a terrifying proposition.
An NBC News story even warned of Trump’s escalating “rhetoric on outlawing political dissent and criticism.”
The new biopic drama film, “The Apprentice” by Ali Abbasi, amplifies these concerns by highlighting the relationship between a young Donald Trump and Roy Cohn, who was chief counsel to U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy during his “Red Scare” campaign.
But Trump’s threats should not obscure what we have seen over the past year under the watch of the current administration and many others in political power.
We saw crackdowns at major colleges and universities, attempting to quash free speech in the form of demonstrations and protests and other civil disobedience. We saw reporters get arrested – even if those charges were often later dropped – and students cuffed and even booted from campuses. Some international students had no choice but to leave the U.S., long believed to be the “freest” place in the world. We saw gray-haired professors thrown to the ground and carted away.
All of this happened on the watch of the current administration, which, while not directly responsible for the responses, did not use its influence to dissuade the crackdowns, and at some points incorrectly portrayed protesters as hateful.
A recent report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is largely critical of the Trump administration’s rhetoric against the press, included this: “The 2023-24 protests in the U.S. in response to the Israel-Gaza war offered hints of yet more shifts in the safety paradigm for journalists. As of late September 2024, at least 58 journalists have been assaulted and at least 42 detained, arrested, or charged at those protests, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.”
While more than half of the assaults came from private citizens, according to CPJ, the rest came at the hands of law enforcement.
Even worse for press freedom globally, the current administration has looked away from Israel’s own mass murder of Palestinian journalists and blocking of foreign press. According to the most conservative estimates, around 112 journalists have been killed in the Israel-Gaza fighting, and the number grows by the month.
The CPJ also quoted a Palestinian journalist saying that it was unlikely a Harris administration would be much better for the press there.
Yet, both candidates have argued over who’s more ready to protect Israel – apparently no matter how many lives that government kills and no matter how many journalists that government kills.
To be fair, it’s not just our two current presidential candidates with the most chance of winning the election in November who have been problematic here.
We have a host of lawmakers, too, who see little value in protecting freedom of expression they don’t like. U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton comes to mind first, but he’s just one of many. He’s the senator who suggested people who face demonstrators blocking roads to “take matters into your own hands.”
“These little Gazas are disgusting cesspools of antisemitic hate full of pro-Hamas sympathizers, fanatics and freaks” is how Cotton referred to campus protest groups.
But perhaps Americans – at least an angry minority of them – are getting what they want from elected officials whom they keep voting in. After all, we have a society ever more eager to quiet, cancel, censor and shout down voices we don’t like. We have a society so out of touch with the idea that freedom of speech only works if it’s for everyone that it’s ready to have books pulled from libraries.
This is happening in Massachusetts and around the nation.
If this sounds like hyperbole, note that efforts to limit expression are now even coming from some libraries themselves. This month Harvard’s Widener Library put a “temporary ban” on a dozen pro-Palestine student demonstrators “for holding a silent ‘study-in’ in the library’s reading room” earlier this month, according to a report from the Harvard Crimson.
The lesson here is that no matter who gets voted in this November, the task of protecting voices of dissent, of criticism, of free thinking, must be guarded by you and by me.
