https:\/\/reason.com\/2025\/10\/22\/trump-campaigned-on-free-speech-that-isnt-how-hes-governed<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“now that Trump’s president, and getting lots of criticism from the media, he’s started calling speech that he doesn’t like “illegal.”
\n“They’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad. I think that’s really illegal, personally.”<\/p>\n
He also threatened TV stations: “They give me only bad publicity\u2026maybe their license should be taken away.”<\/p>\n
“There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech,” said his attorney general, Pam Bondi. “We will absolutely target you\u2026if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”<\/p>\n
They will “target” people?<\/p>\n
Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Brendan Carr, joined in. When Jimmy Kimmel said nasty and incorrect things about Charlie Kirk’s murder, Carr threatened ABC’s TV licenses, saying, like a mafia boss, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”<\/p>\n
Yet months earlier, he’d tweeted: “Dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights.”<\/p>\n
And years earlier, he tweeted that the FCC does “not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.'”<\/p>\n
He was right\u2014then.<\/p>\n
But power tends to corrupt.<\/p>\n
Once Carr was in power, he no longer supported the speech he’d recently promoted.”<\/p>\n
https:\/\/reason.com\/2025\/10\/22\/trump-campaigned-on-free-speech-that-isnt-how-hes-governed\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[221,2212,875,2006,848,136,1584,170],"class_list":["post-20131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-donald-trump","tag-fcc","tag-free-speech","tag-freedom-of-press","tag-freedom-of-speech","tag-media","tag-speech","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20131"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20133,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20131\/revisions\/20133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}