For Trump supporters, freedom of speech was only ever for straight, white men

Ten years ago today I set up my blog! To celebrate my Ten Year Blog-a-versary I am writing about freedom of speech, which I am exercising by writing this blog. 

The signs were there. Of course they were. When Putin, Erdogan and Sisi – leaders known for locking up journalists at alarming rates – are among the first to congratulate your Presidency, attacks on freedom of speech won’t be far behind. 

Still, day four? 

Before I went to bed last night, I saw that journalists in the USA had been arrested during the protests on Friday 20 January. These journalists were doing their job: reporting and recording a news story. Whatever happens next in their case, it’ll be harder now for journalists to report on protest in the USA. It’ll be riskier, and so fewer protests will be recorded.

Around the same time, Trump’s administration banned employees of the Environmental Protection Agency from posting on social media. As a result, environmentalists have ‘gone rogue’ in a strange new world where ‘going rogue’ means using your professional social media account to tweet facts about the environment. Trump has done this in part to keep things quiet about the Dakota pipeline  – a development he has business interests in and which will do terrible harm to the environment and wreck First Nation land.

The signs were there.

Freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech was always, it seemed, so important to Trump supporters. When you condemned them for sending racist and sexist abuse to a woman who had the temerity to be funny in an 80s movie remake, they yelled ‘freedom of speech!’ at you. When you pointed out that Breitbart was a cesspit of racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic lies, they yelled ‘freedom of speech!’ at you. When you asked them not to send rape threats to women gamers, or suggested they didn’t scream ‘lock up the bitch’ about HRC, they yelled ‘freedom of speech’ at you. They condemned political correctness as an attack on freedom of speech. They liked Trump for ‘saying the unsayable’ – as if saying racist and sexist lies have ever been ‘edgy’, have ever been anything but the norm.

But to these Trump supporters, freedom of speech only ever meant freedom of speech for one group of people: privileged straight white men.

They saw freedom and liberty as a zero sum game. And when women, people of colour and the LGBT community raised their voices and claimed their right for freedom of speech, they saw it as an attack on their so-called freedom to use language to abuse, intimidate and threaten oppressed communities.

They support Trump because they see anyone else being given freedom of speech as an attack on their freedom of speech. They see other groups using their voices in protest, in solidarity, in honesty, as an attack on them. Now Trump’s policies are sending a clear message: he will repress freedom of speech. Where is their defence of this fundamental right now?

It’s not just journalist arrests and bans on tweeting.

Trump’s reinstatement of the global gag rule denies women the speech to say ‘I need reproductive healthcare’ and denies charities the speech to say ‘we can support you in that.’ It denies freedom of speech to women all over the world, the speech to say their bodies are their own. Ultimately, this ruling will lead to more women dying – silencing them totally.

Trump’s signing of an executive order to ban visas to people from Iran and war-torn countries including Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Iraq denies freedom of speech to people asking for safety, for support, for a home. It denies freedom to those who already have their basic freedoms under attack.

And the Texas Supreme Court’s proposal to roll back on equal marriage rights denies gay people the freedom of speech to say ‘I love you’ and ‘I do’ in public, before friends and family.

All those Trump supporters screaming freedom of speech to yell ‘kill the bitch’ at Hillary. All those Trump supporters screaming freedom of speech at Twitter for banning Milo. Where are their voices now, that freedom of speech is truly under threat?

They’re silent, of course.

They never believed in freedom of speech at all. They only ever wanted to silence the voices of those who for so long had been denied it.