Welcome to ‘Whose Free Speech Is It, Anyway?’

Comparing Trump to Orwell’s ‘1984’ totalitarian playbook

Among the many embarrassing incidents marking Donald Trump’s second trip to the United Kingdom was his appreciation during the state banquet at Windsor Castle of “the language born on these isles and perfected in the pages” of British authors George Orwell and Rudyard Kipling – “incredible people, unbelievable people like we have rarely seen before and probably won't see again.”

Orwell was a life-long democratic socialist famous for writing about free-thinking people being seduced, manipulated and forced into non-critical compliance with Big Brother’s propaganda, enforced by the “thought police.” Both Animal Farm and 1984 portray unrestricted government power, government censorship and fearful self-censorship.

Kipling, however, is famous for his 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden” in which he exhorts Americans to embrace their racist moral obligation to spread imperialism - specifically, their Manifest Destiny “to colonize the Philippine Islands conquered from Imperial Spain.”

Orwell despised Kipling: “During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him….Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting.”

Some considered Trump “morally insensitive” after his"very fine people on both sides" remarks after violent Aug. 2017 clashes at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia where racists protested the removal of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s statue. Trump called Lee a “great general;” meanwhile, 32-year-old counterprotester Heather Heyer was rundown and killed.

Trump’s penchant for “both-sides” is akin to Orwell’s Newspeak “doublethink.”

“The key-word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this,” Orwell explained in 1984.

“But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink,” Orwell wrote.

While Trump consumed a royal feast on Sept. 17, Americans tried to digest Newspeak about popular comedian Jimmy Kimmel – a longtime Trump target – being taken off the air “indefinitely” by ABC for allegedly disparaging the “MAGA gang.”

“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said during his Monday night monologue.

Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carrimmediately called on licensed broadcasters to stop airing Kimmel’s show.

“I think that it’s really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say, ‘Listen, we are going to preempt, we are not going to run Kimmel anymore, until you straighten this out because we, we licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion,’” Carr told conservative podcaster Benny Johnson.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr added. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Carr’s Orwellian Mafioso role started with the first words in his Project 2025 chapter on the FCC: “The F.C.C. should promote freedom of speech.” Then he told CNBC that Trump's election created a "permission structure" for a “massive shift” in the media landscape. "We're not done yet with seeing the consequences of that shift."

Trump later elaborated, telling reporters that “permission” enabled him to retaliate against networks that go after him. “I have read someplace that the networks were 97 percent against me, I get 97 percent negative, and yet I won and easily,” Trump said. “I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”

Trump then went further. “They’ll take a great story, and they will make it bad,” Trump said. “See, I think that’s really illegal. Personally. … You are getting free airwaves from the United States government, and you can’t have that….That’s no longer free speech. That’s just cheating, and they cheat….The networks, in my opinion. They are just offshoots of the Democrat National Committee.”

Trump’s musings about the FCC may not be breaking news to his associates at The Apprentice.

“[Trump] bloviates about so many things, so how much of this is bullshit or not? And will he really act like a dictator on day one and then remain that way?” former NBC chief marketing officer John Miller asked Gabriel Sherman for an Oct. 29, 2024 2024 Vanity Fair interview.

“I do think that he would like to take CBS off the air and NBC off the air and ABC off the air. Anybody, other than Fox News, who says anything bad about him he wants off the air….I do think he would like to be a dictator,” said Miller, who “regrets mythologizing Trump’s business savvy.”

In his inaugural address, Trump promised to “stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.” He then signed the “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” executive order to ensure that no federal government employee “would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”

“Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society,” Trump’s order proclaimed.

But on Sept. 18, the New York Times noted: “In the last week, White House has moved to target the tax status of liberal groups, monitor online speech, deny visas and threaten to designate certain groups as domestic terrorists. The administration has argued such measures are necessary to crack down on hate speech that could incite violence, even as Democrats and others warn that it amounts to a crackdown on opposing views.”

FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez, a Democrat, said: “This FCC does not have the authority, the ability, or the constitutional right to police content or punish broadcasters for speech the government dislikes.

A snippet of Big Brother TV appeared on April Fool’s Day, 2018, when the Sinclair Broadcast Group forced anchors of its 200 stations to read the same coordinated promotional script warning viewers about "fake news" in other media. Sinclair was part of deplatforming Kimmel, arguing that suspension is not enough.

Meanwhile, beloved Comedy Central Daily Show anchor Jon Stewart surprised viewers Thursday night by satirically introducing himself as a “patriotically obedient host.” His pitch perfect monologue about free speech offered a “fun, hilarious, administration-compliant show.”

Stewart hit doublethink about 10 minutes in when he played a clip of a British reporter asking Trump if free speech is “more under attack in Britain or America.”

“I don't know who this Johnny Drimmel Live ABC character is,” Stewart said in mock anger. “But the point is: Our great administration has laid out very clear rules about free speech. Now, some naysayers may argue that this administration’s speech concerns are merely a cynical ploy, a thin gruel of a ruse, a smokescreen to obscure an unprecedented consolidation of power and unitarian intimidation — principle-less and coldly antithetical to any experiment in a constitutional republic governance.”

Stewart paused, feigning struggle: “Not me, though. I think it’s great.”

In an ironic full-circle reference to Kipling, Stewart brought on US-born Filipino journalist Maria Ressa, author of How to Stand Up to a Dictator. She won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for “safeguarding freedom of expression” through her courageous investigative reporting into disinformation and the violent reign of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who is now in custody at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague on charges of crimes against humanity.

Stewart asked Ressa about people who are now “living on eggshells on the whims of one man.”

“This is happening,” Reesa said. “If you do not reclaim your rights, if you don’t stand up, it’s going to be significantly harder to claw them back.” Later, she added that “Americans are like deer in headlights.”

LGBTQ+ people are frightened, too. “There are moments when the deepest, darkest fears that haunt the recesses of the human mind come to pass,” says Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director Wayne Besen, a longtime activist for LGBTQ+ people. This week was one such time, with “the right-wing cabal behind Project 2025 brazenly announcing their arrival and unapologetically kicking down the closet door. In the most vulgar fashion, they exploited the Charlie Kirk assassination to seek retribution against their political opponents.”

Besen has the receipts. “The manufactured outrage over comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s act was first ignited by the Media Research Center, which is one of 114 organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board. NewsBusters, an M.R.C. publication, heavily promoted a clip of Kimmel’s comments about Kirk….While the crybabies at M.R.C. were enraged over Kimmel, the group’s founder. L. Brent Bozell, showed no such restraint in 2011, when on Fox News’ Hannity, he said Barack Obama looked like ‘a skinny ghetto crackhead.’”

(LGBTQ+ Freedom Fighters has an in-depth interview with Wayne Besen coming up.)

Meanwhile, real LGBTQ+ people are being physically and psychologically harmed behind the scenes.

The Advocate reports that the architects of the Project 2025 “urged the FBI to add a new designation to its list of domestic violent extremist groups for Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism, falsely claiming violence from trans people and allies is increasing.”

“TIVE is based on the belief that violence is justified against those who do not share radical views of transgender ideology. It has led to an increasing trend of TIVE domestic terrorist events across the country,” The Heritage Foundation says in a press release.

The Advocate’s fact-check: “Trans people make up less than a percent of mass shooters. They are much more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. Mass shooters tend to be cisgender men.”

R.G. Cravens , who has a PhD in political science, is a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center in the intelligence project where he leads a team that studies hate and extremism, including the virulently anti-LGBTQ+ Religious Right legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom, with which now-Speaker Mike Johnson and US Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett were both affiliated. served as senior counsel.

ADF’s doublethink is dangerous. “And in the course of the now hundreds of cases the Alliance Defense Fund has now fought involving this homosexual agenda, one thing is certain: there is no room for compromise with those who would call evil ‘good,’” ADF Founder and first CEO Alan Sears told the World Congress of Families in Madrid, Spain in 2012.

Then there’s the doublethink of money and power. When the cases against marriage equality failed in 2015,Cravens notes, “that was a serious problem for a lot of anti-LGBTQ+ groups because it seemed to take away a point of contention or division for them.” There was a loss of funding, talking points, conferences – “all of these things geared to stoke division.”

SPLC released a report in 2023 showing the anti-LGBTQ+movement decided to “focus on creating an anti-transgender wedge” pursuing a “divide and conquer strategy” in a space where little was known about trans people.

“That meant there was a lot of room to move opinions,” Cravens says. “Not that people's attitudes about trans folks and rights were trending negatively - they weren't. They were trending positively. But there was a significant number who held no opinion.”

The collection of groups had legal and scientific- sounding names, Craven says. But a lot were part of that same Christian Right lineage right that have long opposed LGBTQ+ rights.

“They manufacture these anti-trans moral panics,” Cravens says, which is a boon to litigation and lobbying. These are hate groups that “opportunistically exploit division to advance a political agenda. And in this case, it's still informed by that false notion of LGBTQ+ people as dangerous to society.”

So, when battling for the First Amendment right to speak freely, amend Rachel Maddow’s favorite phrase and watch what they do AND what they say.

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