Donald Trump is showing us what an unaccountable class of corporate decision-makers looks like—and it looks like a lot of fear, and a terrible loss of freedom.
We are in a full-blown crisis of free speech. Earlier this month, ICE agents detained Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder, with plans to deport him because of the content of his speech. Trump banned AP reporters from press briefings after the AP refused to use the phrase “Gulf of America” instead of “Gulf of Mexico” in its style guide. And the administration is following through on threats to withdraw funding from universities that allowed disfavored speech. While Trump will lose in court on many of his efforts, many corporate, university, and nonprofit leaders are quietly obeying in advance, avoiding conflict.
In the 1960s, the Free Speech Movement was a rallying cry for students and activists who understood that the right to dissent, argue, and speak freely was essential to democracy. Today, we need a new Free Speech Movement—and not just a retread of the 1960s. A new free speech movement would recognize that both the direct authoritarian power-grabs of the Trump administration, and the power grabs of private monopolist entities represent a significant danger.Trump’s oligarchs—his big tech allies who control the flow of news and information—are themselves an independent threat to open society.
For decades, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was seen as the gold standard for defending free speech. It stood up for the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, and forcefully argued that the principle of free expression mattered more than the content of any particular speech. But in the past 10 years, several critics—including former executive cirector of the ACLU Ira Glasser—have persuasively argued that the ACLU has compromised or even abandoned those values, choosing cases on the basis of a particular substantive vision, instead of fiercely protecting speech regardless of its content.
One of its most notorious missteps came when a high-level ACLU lawyer argued in favor of getting Amazon to ban a book, saying, “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.” This claim was not just a stupid tweet by an activist; it revealed a fundamental and long-standing misunderstanding of how consolidated corporate power threatens free speech.
In the ACLU vision, private power never poses a risk to free expression. If Instagram wants to suppress Palestinian content (as credible reporting suggested it did), that does not implicate democracy, regardless of Instagram’s market share.
When Biden’s DOJ fought to stop a merger between two book publishing goliaths, recognizing that authors having multiple possible outlets is essential to free expression, the ACLU remained silent. Instead, it has repeatedly filed briefs on behalf of Big Tech, defending Silicon Valley’s freedom to act as unaccountable monopolists, claiming that the state has no right to regulate the design of big tech, even if that regulation would make it more content-neutral.
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This is not a new phenomenon. The ACLU was one of the driving forces behind Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court case that held that money is speech, and the organization boasts that the ACLU “created much of the constitutional framework that has constrained all federal campaign finance legislation.” It was behind several subsequent challenges to campaign finance laws, and was also a strong supporter of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, filing a brief stating that corporations should have the right to spend unlimited money in elections.
Such views reveal the crucial weakness of the 1960s free speech movement—namely, its neoliberal core, that refuses to understand how power works, and understands censorship in a wholly formal way confined to governmental actors.
Even if that approach might have seemed plausible 30 years ago, it has long since passed its sell-by date. Trump’s oligarchy requires us to build a newer, deeper, more principled understanding of free speech—one that sees both government suppression and private censorship as real dangers to democratic debate and human freedom.
In Trump’s oligarchy, the line between government speech and private speech is not clear. Trump openly threatened Mark Zuckerberg with jail if he stood up to him, calling into question whether Zuckerberg’s changes to Facebook and Instagram—which themselves suppress speech—are versions of enacting Trump’s will. Trump’s increasingly close ties to Jeff Bezos (who has found many ways to subsidize Trump’s empire) and Elon Musk (who controls Starlink, Twitter, and much of the Trump agenda) mean that when either billionaire makes viewpoint-based decisions about what to suppress, they are enforcing more than just a private preference.
The history of Reconstruction offers another stark lesson. After the Civil War, Black Americans were politically active like never before in our history. Sixteen Black politicians served in the US Congress, over 600 were elected to state legislatures, and Black and white citizens together drafted new state Constitutions. But one of the most overlooked techniques used to dismantle Reconstruction was the use of credit monopolies.
In many parts of the South, Black farmers could not get the loans they needed to survive without going through local general store owners, whose own credit was controlled by Northern banks. These monopolists wielded near-absolute power. They denied credit to Black farmers who engaged in political activity and dictated what crops they could grow—forcing them to cultivate cotton instead of food to maintain economic dependence.
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The lesson is clear: controlling access to basic necessities—whether credit, land, or in today’s case, speech platforms—can be as effective in stifling political freedom as outright government bans. A society that fails to recognize the speech threat of monopolistic corporations likeAmazon, Google, or Meta is one that has abandoned the true spirit of free expression. There’s a reason that Louis Brandeis, the OG champion of First Amendment rights, was also a hard-core antimonopolist.
It’s too bad that it took a second Trump term for many people to realize it, but the groundwork is now laid for a new Free Speech Movement. This new movement will challenge both state suppression and recognize that monopolistic control over platforms of discourse is not merely a business issue, but a civil rights issue, and fundamental to a free society. Trump is showing us what an unaccountable class of corporate decision-makers looks like—and it looks like a lot of fear, and a terrible loss of freedom.
Donald Trump’s cruel and chaotic second term is just getting started. In his first month back in office, Trump and his lackey Elon Musk (or is it the other way around?) have proven that nothing is safe from sacrifice at the altar of unchecked power and riches.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
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