On his first day in office, before a crowd of adoring supporters at the Capitol One Arena in Washington, DC, the president of the United States signed an executive order that, by its terms, sought to restore freedom of speech and end federal censorship. The moment came and went; an aide read out loud what the order was about, without getting into details, and then Donald Trump signed it quickly, moving on to the next one on a pile of executive actions sitting on a small desk set up for the occasion.

Yet anyone who stops to read the order would realize that its text has little to do with the First Amendment and the “right of the American people to speak freely in the public square without Government interference,” as the document reads.

The order, instead, called out the president’s political enemies in the prior administration—parroting talking points, common among his base of supporters, that officials in charge during the prior four years systematically censored online speech by conservatives. And that they did so “by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.” The First Amendment cannot abide this sort of suppression, the decree insists, and so the new president of the United States must do something about it: “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”

Yet in the more than 100 days of this new administration, there is more than enough evidence that the government Trump leads has launched a coordinated, uncharted assault on the First Amendment—and on anyone who doesn’t fall in line with the president’s policies and priorities. This campaign, which extends to nearly all corners of civil society, is truly without modern precedent.

In this climate of repression, no one’s freedom of speech, inquiry, association, and to report without fear or favor is safe: Not the student activists advocating for or writing about Palestinian freedom. Not the journalists who are being barred from White House press events, or the news organizations that are being harassed by government regulators. Not the colleges and universities that have seen their funding, and very existence as institutions of research and learning, threatened with extortionist demands from the administration. And not the law firms, nonprofits, and civic society organizations that fear they might be next on the president’s hit list—simply for standing up for their causes and clients.

“We’re in an alarming period,” Lee Bollinger, the First Amendment scholar who chairs the Knight Institute’s board, and someone not prone to hyperbole, told me recently. Indeed the alarm bells are ringing system-wide. One federal judge in Vermont recently expressed shock that people with every right to be in the U.S. “are being arrested and threatened with deportation for stating their views on the political issues of the day.” And in green-lighting a related lawsuit over a State Department policy that designates pro-Palestinian student activists for deportation, another judge marveled: “It is hard to imagine a policy more focused on intimidating its targets from practicing protected political speech.”

In “The Bully’s Pulpit: Trump v. The First Amendment,” I’ll endeavor to do something I’ve never done in my many years as a legal journalist. In this new podcast by the Knight Institute, I’ll put down my pen and notepad and, once a week, sit in front of a microphone, as your host. Alongside advocates from the Institute and others, I’ll aim to make sense of this moment—taking stock of the ongoing attacks on First Amendment freedoms coming from the White House, but also taking you behind the headlines. We’ll talk to the people harmed by these actions, as well as those defending those people and others with a stake in this fight. This period feels like an inflection point for many of us. By which I mean: whether we push back or cower in the face of these dangers we are all  playing an active role in deciding whether the freedoms the First Amendment protects will remain available to the rest of us and our children.

And many are pushing back. Amid so much darkness, one silver lining is that advocacy by those who have chosen to fight is already yielding fruit, and judges are affirming that the First Amendment bars the president and his government from punishing, harming, and retaliating against others simply for speaking out for things they believe in.

Indeed, Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Mohsen Mahdawi, all of whom  the Trump administration targeted over their advocacy in favor of Palestinian lives and against the war in Gaza, have challenged their arrest and detention—and judges have begun to recognize the serious First Amendment implications of imprisoning them over their beliefs.

The same is true of the scores of student advocates and protesters who have seen their visas revoked or have been marked for deportation. In case after case, courts have reinstated their lawful status, and the government, faced with all these losses, has been forced to reverse course. Meanwhile, institutions of higher education are slowly—perhaps too slowly—realizing that giving up their First Amendment right to academic freedom will only lead to their destruction. And so they’re fighting back, with Harvard recently leading the way in taking the Trump administration to court over its pretextual, and unlawful, defunding crusade. And the handful of law firms that have raised the First Amendment to shield themselves from Trump’s existential threats to their work and futures remain undefeated in court.

That’s only a sampling. There are so many other stories of courage, and resilience, to be told. A lot of fear and trembling, too. With “The Bully’s Pulpit,” we hope to show you, week after week, how people, communities, and institutions are protecting each other and rising to defend freedoms no government official, no matter how powerful, can take away from them.

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