45th President Donald Trump has announced a major new free speech policy platform, declaring that it is a “matter of victory or death for America.”
In the first video of a series posted to Truth Social, Trump announced his new plan to “shatter the left-wing censorship regime, and to reclaim the right to free speech for all Americans,” because “if we don’t have free speech, then we don’t have a free country.”
Citing the recent Twitter Files reports, which revealed the collusion between “a sinister group of deep state bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media,” Trump argued that the “censorship cartel” responsible for suppressing “vital information on everything from elections to public health “must be dismantled and destroyed.”
Watch President Trump’s policy presentation on Spreely.video:
Following a victory in 2024, Trump revealed that “within hours” of being inaugurated, he would sign a new executive order that would ban any federal department or agency from colluding with anyone else to censor the speech of Americans, adding that anyone who did so in the past would be identified, and fired.
The Department of Justice under a second Trump administration would then be ordered to investigate anyone involved “in the new online censorship regime,” both in and out of government, in case they violated any civil rights, election, anti-trust, or any other federal laws.
Strong free speech platform for 2024 just announced by Trump:
-Banning the Federal Government from policing lawful domestic speech.
-Firing any Federal Bureaucrat who has directly or indirectly engaged in censorship.
-Barring federal funds for universities that censor speech. pic.twitter.com/yoaCtZpYNw— Andrew Surabian (@Surabees) December 15, 2022
“To assist in these efforts I am urging House Republicans to immediately send preservation letters… to the Biden administration, the Biden campaign, and every Silicon Valley tech giant, ordering them not to destroy evidence of censorship,” Trump said. A Rasmussen poll found this week that a majority of all voters support an investigation into Big Tech censorship by House Republicans.
Section 230 of the Communications Act, which provides a “liability shield” for online platforms, would be revised, with Trump arguing that Big Tech platforms should “only qualify from immunity protection under Section 230 if they meet high standards of neutrality, transparency, fairness and non-discrimination.”
“We should require these platforms to increase their efforts to take down unlawful content such as child exploitation, and promoting terrorism, while dramatically curtailing their power to arbitrarily restrict lawful speech,” Trump added.
Trump had previously looked at Section 230 while he was President, and had argued that it was unconstitutional in a lawsuit he brought against Twitter for removing his account. The Biden administration announced earlier this year that they too were looking at Section 230 reform, although their aims were to prevent the spread of “misinformation.”
BREAKING: President Trump announces free speech policy plan for 2024! pic.twitter.com/66VBvXy7t0
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) December 15, 2022
Federal money would also no longer be permitted to label speech as “mis- or disinformation,” with Trump declaring that he would break up the “toxic censorship industry” that had arisen around tackling the supposed threat it posed, including the immediate defunding of any “non-profits or academic programs that support this authoritarian project.”
Universities that engaged in “cenorship activities” would be stripped of federal funding “for a period of five years, and maybe more,” with new criminal penalties enacted for any “federal bureaucrats who partner with private entities to do an end-run around the constitution, and deprive Americans of their First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights.”
Former employees of the FBI, CIA, DoD, and other similar agencies, would be prevented from taking a job “at a company possessing vast quantities of US user data” for a period of seven years, in order to “confront the problems of major platforms being infiltrated by legions of former Deep Staters and intelligence officials.”
Finally, Trump declared that Congress must create a new “Digital Bill of Rights,” which would stop federal agencies demanding digital content be removed without a warrant, along with providing a right to know when your content has been restricted and a right to appeal it, and the right for adults to “opt out of content moderation and curation entirely.”
“The fight for free speech is a matter of victory or death for America, and the survival of Western civilisation itself,” Trump concluded. “When I am President, this whole rotten system of censorship and information control will be ripped out of the system at large. There won’t be anything left. By restoring free speech, we will begin to reclaim our democracy and save our nation.”
This news and commentary by Jack Hadfield originally appeared on Valiant News.
