When freedom of speech means freedom to lie, we are in a sorry state

Martin Shipton

Free speech is, of course, one of the bastions of liberty, but the blatant misuse of the concept by the likes of Donald Trump and Elon Musk is causing the world serious problems.

The First Amendment to the US Constitution states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

It was drafted in 1791, at a time when the founding fathers were inspired to provide citizens with protection against the kind of restrictions prevalent elsewhere in authoritarian states, from which many of them had fled in search of a better life.

Freedom of speech didn’t apply to everyone, of course, especially slaves, but in its time it was undoubtedly a progressive step forward.

In 1791 the idea of deliberately misleading the populace into believing things that aren’t true was not nearly as well advanced as it is today, partly because the means of doing so were simply not available.

The rise of social media has greatly accelerated the opportunity to mislead.

‘Free speech’

Recently an American acquaintance who has lived in Wales for quite a few years, but who now largely gets his news from Elon Musk’s X channel, asked me why there was a problem with “free speech” in the UK. He’d clearly latched on to the narrative being pushed by Musk himself and far-right propagandists that the UK Government was systematically engaged in suppressing freedom of speech.

This can be traced back to the summer of 2024, when a lot of misinformed and racist messaging was posted to social media in the wake of the shocking Southport murders, leading to an appalling outbreak of rioting in many parts of Britain. Bringing those involved swiftly to justice was absolutely the right thing to do, and represented one of the few early decisions taken by Keir Starmer with which I could agree.

For the far right, however, the crack-down on the rioters and those who posted inflammatory messages on social media was indicative of how Britain’s freedoms were being taken away by a totalitarian government of the left.

The Trump / Musk / far right definition of free speech encompasses, it seems to me, the right to incite racial hatred, the right to tell lies in order to promote a pernicious ideology and the right to distribute material that abuses children and women.

Andrew Tate

For people with any kind of moral compass, Andrew Tate is a hateful, misogynistic disgrace of a man who has caused untold damage in his role as an “influencer”. But for Donald Trump Tate is a positive role model who deserves admiration for exercising his freedom of speech in a way Trump can relate to, and a VIP invitation to the White House.

How is freedom of speech doing in Trump’s America?

If you’re a Trump-supporting, MAGA-cap-wearing neanderthal, you can say what you like and pretty much do what you want.

But if you make a stand against Trump or causes he supports, or if you are a federal employee who may be seen as a threat by Trump or to the business interests of his billionaire allies, you’d better be looking over your shoulder.

The footage of Rumeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, being grabbed off the street by plainclothes officers from the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away into a nearby SUV as she screamed, is chilling.

Her crime was to co-write an op-ed for a student magazine that was critical of the Trump administration’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza.

Öztürk was transported to Louisiana, which has a notoriously pro-Trump judiciary and where another detainee is Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian postgraduate student whose visa has been revoked by the State Department because he helped organise protests on the campus of Columbia University in New York.

War crimes

Both Öztürk and Khalil were clearly exercising their free speech rights under the First Amendment, but that means nothing to Trump, who is, of course, the main enabler of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and elsewhere.

Does Trump care that Jewish settlers are defying international law and stealing the land of Palestinians in the West Bank, as well as physically attacking and threatening the lives of those who speak out against what is happening, including Hamdan Ballal, the co-director of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land? Of course not. And to prove he doesn’t care, he is blackmailing universities, telling them that he expects them to crack down on “antisemitic” behaviour, a term whose definition has been expanded to include anything that risks offending pro-Zionist students, including, naturally, protests against Israel’s atrocities.

Freedom of speech for Trump is very much restricted to the right to agree with him and his cohorts.

Trump himself, of course, sees freedom of speech as a licence for him to say whatever he pleases, in whatever the circumstances may be.

In imposing his tariffs on the rest of the world, he displayed a ludicrous table which suggested that other countries were already imposing swingeing tariffs on goods from the US.

To judge from posts on X, many have accepted without question that such is the case. In fact, the table is massively misleading. The figures supposedly relating to tariffs imposed on the US have nothing to do with tariffs at all, but represent a wholly spurious set of calculations based on the ratio of imports to exports in the trading relationships between the US and other countries.

This is where false freedom of speech collides with fake news to create a new entity that is doubly reprehensible.

Contagion

I suspect there will be contagion here in Wales, with mounting quantities of far right malevolence masquerading as freedom of speech in advance of next year’s Senedd election. Sadly we have right-wing politicians who envy Trump’s success and will seek to emulate him at his egregious worst.

It’s important to guard against what they say and be prepared to call it out as nonsense.

Those who offer trite solutions usually turn out to be the most dangerous. Just look at the USA, where words now mean their exact opposite.