President Trump Says Only Trump Supporters Deserve Free Speech

[babylonsister]

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/trump-free-speech-twitter-google-facebook-authoritarianism.html?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=nym&utm_medium=s1&fbclid=IwAR1jhurr28ne1gz0YboUNcR80sX84agSNy9C7DXPjrG2VEXq3Zqfn0H84zE


the national interest 6:19 P.M.
President Trump Says Only Trump Supporters Deserve Free Speech
By Jonathan Chait


President Trump held a confab at the White House Thursday to promote his Orwellian notion of “free speech” online. It confirmed yet again the president’s implacable hostility to basic liberal freedoms.

Trump has repeatedly accused Facebook, Google, and Twitter of carrying out a secret agenda against him and his supporters, by hiding the president’s tweets and covertly banning his supporters. Trump presented his position as a defense of free speech against some secretive form of censorship, and warned, “I’m directing my administration to explore all regulatory and legislative solutions to protect free speech and the free speech rights of all Americans.”

snip//

But it turns out Trump cannot even defend this position, either. At the very same forum, he dismissed the free-speech rights of independent media. “To me free speech is not when you see something good and then you purposely write bad,” he insisted. “To me that’s very dangerous speech, and you become angry at it. But that’s not free speech.”

This is one of those statements that would be shocking if made by any normal president but is almost banal with Trump. He barely disguises his admiration for dictators and their freedom to murder journalists who displease them. While his own powers of suppression are far weaker, Trump is happy to use government authority to punish independent media (like CNN and the Washington Post, whose owners he has punished with unfavorable regulatory actions) and even individuals. (Trump has boasted that he personally enforced the NFL blacklist of Colin Kaepernick for the offense of kneeling during the national anthem.)

Trump’s invocation of “free speech” is consistent: His entire goal is to promote supportive views and suppress hostile ones. And the willingness of virtually the entire conservative movement to support or tolerate his cynical conscription of free speech to intimidate the media reveals how little it, too, cares about freedom.

[Wounded Bear]

1. The hardest part of freedom is giving it to others...

[Cha]

2. nazi

[robbedvoter]

3. To be fair, he doesn't think his supporters should have it either

I saw they had to submit their questions in advance for vetting. So, onlt those who think of the right “crap”

[bdamomma]

4. he continues to live

in his own paranoid delusional world. This thing is dangerous.

[ProudMNDemocrat]

5. The truth is, Trump CANNOT stand criticism ....

THAT is the issue here. Though shalt NOT challenge the Donald, let alone report the truth when he is off his rocker.

[Firestorm49]

6. Spoken like the true dictator he wishes to be.