NEW YORK: A founding principle of the United States, enshrined in its constitution’s opening amendment, is that the republic depends on citizens’ freedom to disagree with one another. They need to be able to do so intensely, on matters of life and death, including war and divisive modern issues like abortion, gun safety and health insurance.

There are limits to free speech, yes, but they involve edge cases, like falsely shouting fire in a theater or inciting an imminent act of violence. If the American ideal of freedom means anything, it is that Americans can engage in an extremely wide range of political speech, including the tasteless and the offensive.

The US President Trump is himself a purveyor of tasteless and even threatening language, speaking in ways that no previous president did. Yet his own exercise of his First Amendment rights—the constitutional protections guaranteeing freedom of speech—has not stopped him from encroaching on those of others. He has punished universities, immigrants, law firms, federal prosecutors, military leaders, national security officials and others for voicing opinions with which he disagrees.

Now he is taking his campaign against free speech to a new level by using the assassination of Charlie Kirk as a justification to promise the repression of groups that he describes as liberal. Mr. Trump’s aides are drafting an executive order that could come as soon as this week, The Times reported, and it will most likely target left-leaning organizations. On Monday, the country's Vice President JD Vance mentioned both the Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, saying that they benefited from a “generous tax treatment,” the same tax treatment that benefits nonprofit groups like religious charities and the National Rifle Association Foundation.

The intimidation campaign is already having an effect. Federal officials have urged companies to fire workers who have criticized Mr. Kirk, and some have done so. In a direct exercise of government influence, Brendan Carr, the chairman of the F.C.C., threatened Disney for remarks that Jimmy Kimmel made on his late-night ABC show. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Mr. Carr said. He also urged television stations to stop broadcasting the show. Two major station owners quickly did so, and ABC has suspended the show indefinitely.

As we wrote last week, we are horrified by the killing of Mr. Kirk, and we mourn his death. The evidence suggests that he was murdered for his views, which is the most fundamental violation of free-speech principles. We vehemently disagree with people who suggested that Mr. Kirk bore any responsibility for his own shooting. As Spencer Cox, Utah’s Republican governor, said afterward: “We need more moral clarity right now. I hear all the time that words are violence. Words are not violence. Violence is violence.” Yet it is the Trump administration, not the left, now violating Mr. Cox’s standard.

Mr. Trump’s promised crackdown depends on the false premise that liberal and nonpartisan groups are part of a far-left conspiracy that promotes violence against conservatives. In truth, the country has experienced a surge of political violence and plots that have targeted both Democrats and Republicans, including Mr. Kirk, Mr. Trump, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Representative Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and two state legislators in Minnesota. As this list suggests, the highest-profile targets show no clear partisan pattern.

Mr. Trump and his aides tell a very different story — and a false one. They claim that political violence comes mostly from the left. “The radicals on the left are the problem,” the president said last week. In fact, multiple data sources show that neither side has a monopoly on political violence, but it is more likely to come from the right. Between 2015 and 2024, 54 percent of ideologically connected killings were committed by people on the far right, according to the Anti-Defamation League. By comparison, 8 percent came from the political left.

Conservatives and progressives alike should reflect on whether the nasty and often personal rhetoric of today’s politics may have contributed to an atmosphere in which unstable or angry people become more likely to commit violence. Still, even that scenario is very different from one in which political groups are organizing and helping commit the violence. There is zero evidence that left-wing groups played a role in Mr. Kirk’s killing or in other recent violence against Republicans. “Absent additional facts, there was one person responsible for Charlie Kirk’s assassination,” Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s former vice president, pointed out on Thursday.

If anything, many elected Democrats and prominent progressives have clearly and consistently condemned Mr. Kirk’s killing in ways that prominent Republicans failed to do after attacks on Democrats. After the attack at Ms. Pelosi’s home, which included a brutal assault of her husband, Paul, Mr. Trump himself and other prominent Republicans mocked the victim and spread absurd conspiracies that the episode was staged. After the shooting of two Democratic legislators and their spouses in Minnesota, Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, bizarrely blamed “Marxists,” while Laura Loomer, an influential Trump confidante, falsely blamed “goons” working for Gov. Tim Walz, the Minnesota Democrat.

These are terrible things to say. They are not crimes, however, and they are certainly not grounds for a government crackdown against conservative groups. The Trump administration is now targeting other groups for lesser sins and maybe no sins at all. Mr. Vance’s specific (and tenuous ) claim about the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundations was that they helped to fund The Nation, which published an article lambasting Mr. Kirk after his death. If that article — whatever you think of it — is grounds for government punishment, the First Amendment has no meaning.

We urge Mr. Trump and his aides to remember the free-speech criticisms that they and other conservatives have often made of progressives over the past decade. Republicans have excoriated the left for its attempts to conflate personal safety with contestable ideas and to quash political expression on Covid-19, race, trans issues and other subjects. Conservatives have been correct about some of these excesses, too. In his Inaugural Address in January, Mr. Trump promised to “bring back free speech to America.” Mr. Vance, while speaking in Munich in February, excoriated European countries for restricting speech and promised, “Under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree.”

Instead of living up to these principles, the Trump administration and its allies are attempting to restrict speech in ways that are more extreme than anything that Democrats have done. Stephen Miller, a top White House aide, has claimed the existence of a “vast domestic terror movement” on the left and denigrated the Democratic Party as a “domestic extremist organization.” Attorney General Pam Bondi has suggested that a business that refused to print signs promoting vigils for Mr. Kirk deserved to be prosecuted. Representative Clay Higgins of Louisiana called for permanent social-media bans on “every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk.” Mr. Higgins, it is worth noting, is one of the congressmen who previously criticized social-media companies for suppressing conservative speech — and who belittled the attack on Mr. Pelosi.

If Mr. Trump refuses to stand up for the basic American right to disagree without fear of oppression, others still can. An executive order that follows through on the threats that he and his aides have made would be clearly unconstitutional. And it would deserve an immediate injunction from the federal courts and a swift rejection from the Supreme Court. The ability to disagree with other people on raw, difficult issues, without fear of repression, is the essence of American freedom.

Articles tagged with "First amendment"

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