From DC to California, Pro-Israel Censorship Is Getting Worse , by Harrison Berger

Is Trump’s censorship even worse than Biden’s? From Harrison Berger at theamericanconservative.com:

When President Donald Trump announced earlier this year that he would “restore free speech,” many civil liberties advocates believed the government’s censorship apparatus constructed under the Biden administration would finally be dismantled. Ten months later, it is difficult to find any civil libertarian who still feels that way.

I spoke with attorney and podcaster Jenin Younes about free speech under Trump as well as her work as the new national legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, an organization which recently filed a major lawsuit in California challenging a new state law that restricts “antisemitic” speech without defining the term.

You made a name for yourself as an opponent of the Biden censorship regime. That was a well-financed, government-backed effort to control the information system, to censor dissidents of official orthodoxies around COVID’s origins and the government responses to it, the war in Ukraine, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and much more than that. 

So, it’s fair to say that you’re not a fan of the Democratic Party or its censorious behavior. You must have been very excited then, when Trump announced in January that he was going to restore free speech. He made this big executive order. Well, it’s been about ten months since that happened. How are you feeling about this free speech restoration? Are things better?

No, it’s worse. It’s worse than anything Biden did. I think that was pretty evident early on. So, along with that executive order, which I was slightly optimistic about, he signed another executive order basically saying that the administration would find ways to remove people from the country if they don’t like Israel. I was very concerned when I saw that. Given what some members of his administration had been saying along those lines, I thought, “Oh, what they’re gonna do is start deporting people who are critical of Israel,” which then started happening in March. It began with Mahmoud Khalil. 

Since then, it’s been a multifaceted effort. It’s not just the deportations, but also pressuring universities, threatening to withhold or withholding funds unless they stamp down on “antisemitic” activity (which clearly means criticism of Israel and pro-Palestine protests), scouring people’s social media posts before letting them into the country, which is unprecedented, threatening to revoke people’s green cards, or denying them adjustment of status if they’ve been “antisemitic.” It’s very clear, based on what this administration has done and said in the past, that they consider criticism of Israel to be antisemitism, or at least they pretend to consider it that. So, it’s really the opposite of free speech. 

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