Two days after an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Good in Minneapolis, Rep. Roger Williams issued an ultimatum to the Trump administration’s critics in Minnesota and beyond.
“People need to quit demonstrating, quit yelling at law enforcement, challenging law enforcement, and begin to get civil,” the Texas Republican told NewsNation. “And until we do that, I guess we’re going to have it this way. And the people that are staying in their homes or doing the right thing need to be protected.”
That’s a pretty clear encapsulation of MAGA-world’s views on dissent these days. You aren’t supposed to protest. You aren’t supposed to “yell at” or “challenge” the militarized federal agents occupying your city. And anyone who wants to be “protected” should probably just stay “in their homes.” Williams isn’t some fringe backbencher; he’s a seven-term congressman who chairs the House Small Business Committee. He is announcing de facto government policy.
For nearly a year, President Donald Trump and his allies have been engaged in an escalating assault on the First Amendment. The administration has systematically targeted or threatened many of Trump’s most prominent critics: massive law firms, Jimmy Kimmel, even, at one point, Elon Musk. But it’s worth keeping in mind that some of the earliest victims of the president’s second-term war on speech were far less powerful.
Any free speech absolutist who would like to weigh in?
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[grasshopper sounds]
Forgive me, this is the first time I’m encountering that term in a way that challenges how I understand it.
Would you mind elaborating on why we don’t expect to hear from them in this case?
It looks like a reference to Elon Musk to me. Around the time of his take over of Twitter, Musk claimed that he was a “free speech absolutist”. Once statistics came in, it turned out that Musk’s twitter had a practically 100% compliance rate with censorship requests from authoritarian states, far higher than it was before the take over.
USA conservatives also do frequent calls for violence and claim freedom of speech when called out + then turn around and try to censor other peoples free speech when they don’t like the message. The last bit was especially noticable after Charlie Kirk’s murder. People who quoted Kirk to show what a vile person he was, were harassed and some even lost their jobs.
The slogan for conservative free speech absolutism might as well be “free speech for me, but my rules for thee”.