The censored video that proves Trump’s battle to restore free speech is deadly serious

Leftists who accused the president-elect of ‘fascism’ should look in the mirror

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He called his political opponents “garbage”. He’s disparaged journalists. He took hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from Big Tech billionaires. And he even said his rival should be sent to prison.
Sounds like “Orange Hitler”, right? Wrong. The above actions were carried out by Joe Biden, currently sitting out the remainder of his term while his party descends into a frenzy of recriminations.
There’s little to be gained from engaging in a presidential blame game, but in the interests of neutrality it is worth granting the sitting president the same treatment as Donald Trump.
The president-elect could claim with some legitimacy to be the most famous man in the world, but there is still plenty of (wilful) misunderstanding of his political agenda. The most pernicious smear is surely the claim of “fascism”. Trump, we are led to believe, is fundamentally opposed to free speech – even to freedom itself.
A video currently doing the rounds on social media complicates this conception. First posted two years ago, Trump speaks about what he intends to do if re-elected to solve the rising challenge of censorship. What it contains is nothing short of revolutionary – and not for the reasons his detractors would like.
“If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. It’s as simple as that.” Flanked by American flags, Trump pledged to sign an executive order banning any federal department from collaborating with any other organisation to censor, limit, categorise or impede the lawful speech of American citizens. He would halt the use of federal money to label speech as “mis-” or “dis-” information, along with firing any federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship in the past.
Former employees of intelligence agencies would face a mandatory seven-year cooling-off period before they would be allowed to take a job at a company possessing vast amounts of data on US citizens. Social media bosses don’t get off lightly, either, with Trump demanding that they meet high standards of neutrality and transparency or face heavy penalties. 
He doesn’t sound like Hitler, he sounds like Ron Paul – or perhaps even a pre-2016 Bernie Sanders. What kind of a fascist fights for free speech?
What a shame, then, that when this video was first created Trump had been banned from YouTube – along with Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, Reddit, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, and Discord. Had he not been, he may have been able to reach an audience beyond the dreaded “echo-chamber” that Leftists so fret about. The president-elect certainly knows the dangers of the “disinformation” racket more than most.
One of the worst offenders, since publicised by the Trump-backed America First Legal organisation, is the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). The group had a good run under the Biden administration, calling in 2021 for the likes of RFK Jr to be deplatformed. It has since lobbied senators to adopt “STAR”, the group’s “Global Standard for Regulating Social Media”, and appeared to float a plan to “kill Musk’s Twitter”.
Awkwardly, Trump seems also to have been correct in warning of the dangers of foreign interference from online “referees”: the misinformation-censorship complex spans the Atlantic, with senior Labour Party figure Morgan McSweeney having had links to the CCDH. Its connections with Labour raise questions of potential meddling in the democratic processes of a country that is ostensibly Britain’s closest ally.
Knowing the scale of the disinformation problem in America, it is heartening that Trump has taken up the cause of liberation. But this development didn’t occur in an ideological vacuum. MAGA Republicans fundamentally believe in the values that built America. It is the political mainstream that fell out of love with the Founders, finding fault with “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” each respectively. For decades, the rights to free speech and free association have been trampled in favour of pursuing progressive dogma, aided by the Left’s institutional death-grip over the legal system and bureaucracy.
MAGA didn’t weaponise Title XIII to force biological males into women’s sport, nor did it continue to push Affirmative Action discrimination in higher education. MAGA certainly didn’t weaponise branches of the federal government to suppress speech and legally punish ideological enemies. Those seeking to paint the president-elect as an extremist ought to look in the mirror. Trump is no constitutionalist, but he didn’t start the fire: he is fighting for freedom, whether his opponents like it or not. 
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