Bulwark Takes - Trump's 'Free Speech Warrior' Goes After Free Speech

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

Across The Movie Aisle's Sonny Bunch, Alyssa Rosenberg, and Peter Suderman talk about the Trump administration's FCC Chair, Brendan Carr, is targeting Disney and ABC over diversity initiatives, raising significant free speech concerns. Critics argue this is a misuse of government power aimed at punishing media companies perceived as political opponents. Hey, if you enjoyed this edition of Controversy or Nontroversy, we do it every week on Across the Movie Aisle. We also review a movie—sometimes a TV show—every week. This week's was A Working Man, which sparked some strong disagreements between our trio. Check it out on Substack!

First up in controversies and non-troversies, Donald Trump's Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, urged the organization's enforcement arm to open up an investigation into whether or not Disney and ABC are engaging in, quote, invidious, end quote, DEI efforts that run afoul of the commission's rules against discrimination. Now, Disney has already said that it is ending or amending a number of their diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, but this is not enough for Carr. In a letter to Disney chief Bob Iger, he wrote, quote, although your company recently made some changes to how it brands certain efforts, it is not clear that the underlying policies have changed in a fundamental manner, nor that past practices

complied with relevant FCC regulations, end quote. Among the highlighted transgressions are the creation of, quote, affinity groups, end quote, and the mandating of quotas in products that required at least 50% of characters and staff on shoots come from quote unquote marginalized groups. And this is one of those stories where like it's theoretically possible to make a good, good faith case here that the FCC is in fact trying to uphold the law, right? Quotas not, not allowed. Can't do the quotas discriminating against potential employees on the basis of race, even in an effort to increase some numerical ideal of racial diversity. That's it's wrong. Hot take. People should be neither hired nor fired thanks to the color of their skin.

However, it's impossible to argue that the Trump administration's FCC chair is doing this in good faith because the Trump administration has made a habit of going after opponents, real and perceived, with the power of government. Like who can forget that the FCC, for instance, went after Paramount Global, which is in the midst of an already tricky merger with Skydance itself, a thing that's under FCC review, because Trump and his team were convinced that CBS did something shady with Kamala Harris's interview during the presidential campaign. What did they do? I don't I don't know. No one really seems to know what the accusations of editing in a way that we're going to harm Donald Trump and favor Kamala Harris for all about. Well, they edited. They edited it. It was right. That was the accusation.

Yeah, I understand. I'm saying I don't understand how that would impact things one way or the other. Spoiler interviews are edited all the time. Again, editing is bizarre, bizarre moment in American politics. And the idea that a broadcast network can be held to account for how it edited an interview because the interview didn't make the president's campaign opponent look bad is insane. That's an insane thing to quote a recent president who I think we're all coming to appreciate just a little bit more. That's an insane thing. To quote a recent president who I think we're all coming to appreciate just a little bit more. That was some weird shit. Peter, what is the deal with this variety of weird shit? So look, Donald Trump started his second term by signing an order

declaring that he was like bringing back free speech, that there would be no more censorship, that like he was the free speech president. And a lot of the people who supported Donald Trump, in particular, a lot of the people who came to support Donald Trump sort of later, right, like relatively late in the game, right, people who kind of flipped, were maybe skeptical of Donald Trump the first time around, were people who were like, you know what, cancel culture is bad, and free speech is good. And that's why we want Donald Trump, because Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, the Democrats, that's the cancel culture party. There's some truth to that. At least the part that like Democrats were much more sort of on

board the cancel culture train than Republicans were. And Donald Trump keeps saying things that like if you take them totally at face value, like as statements of deep and meaningful principles that like guide your behavior are pretty pro free speech. And then he keeps doing things that are totally antithetical to this, and in particular, appointing Brendan Carr to the FCC. So Brendan Carr is supposedly like a free speech warrior. I think that's a phrase that has been used here for him. And so much of what he has done in his brief time in office is basically go after media organizations for political reasons. This is that this is the same thing happening again. And it's it's just ridiculous. He went after NewsGuard, for example. He's not the only Republican to go after NewsGuard, but he went after NewsGuard, which is this news rating source that's like, here, we're going to give news organizations, media organizations, independent ratings for their reliability, accuracy, that sort of thing, right? And he's got basic facts about how NewsGuard runs their business. Totally wrong. Completely mistook this.

But also, even if NewsGuard is doing stupid stuff, even if NewsGuard is doing stuff that I totally disagree with, like they're an independent organization that is that is relying on free speech protections to say, we think that this organization is more accurate or this organization is less accurate. And we're going to give these people five stars. We're going to give these people one star or whatever their ranking is. It's not actually stars, right? But this is, this is just a consistent thing that you see with Donald Trump, where he and his people say, we're totally pro free speech. And they say a bunch of the right words in the right order as and then they don't turn out to be statements of principle at all. Because anytime it comes down to discussion of Donald Trump, discussion of stuff that Donald Trump cares about discussion of things like di right, you see that they are trying to suppress private organizations and

individuals from engaging in protected, in protected speech and in protected expression. To a certain extent, both of you, don't you think part of the problem is that there is not actually sort of a broad based coalition in support of a broad understanding of free speech in the country right now? Right. I mean, you know, Peter, you talk about sort of liberals being more on board with cancel culture. But I think as liberals have justly pointed out, you have had a lot of Republican politicians who have brought extremely, you know, sort of heavy tools of the state to bear to suppress, you know, kids access to various kinds of books, right? I mean, you know, the... Though I would say that I don't think that that specific thing falls under the rubric of cancel culture, and where Republicans are worse, it's more just sort of like a kind of quasi-censorship

rather than cancel culture. Sure, yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, sort of cancel culture is sort of an aspect of our free speech debates, right? Like, it's not actually fully constitutive of a conversation about whether there is sort of the ability to have a wide range in public conversation about a lot of issues, but also, you know, whether people have consistent access to different kinds of material, you know, whether you can be deported for writing an op-ed in a tough student newspaper. I mean, you know, free speech includes a lot of different kinds of speech. It includes a lot of different kinds of access to information. It includes the ability to resist both, you know, sort of social pressures against certain kinds or against or disfavor certain kinds of speech, but also the ability to be free from government intervention. And there is not, I mean, there is not actually a big, broad American public consensus in favor of the idea that speech should be pretty freewheeling and wide open, right? I mean, you know, Greg Lukianoff, who runs FIRE and does a lot of really good free speech work across the aisle,

has actually sort of had to say, like, yeah, actually, we defend all of these different kinds of speech in part because, you know, free speech has become practically a meaningless term in American politics. And sort of, we would need to have a kind of a common definition of what it is again, in order to sort of rational conversation about who constitutes a free speech warrior or not. Yeah. There's this really ironic thing happening in which the Trump administration and its supporters are reacting against what they perceived as a culture war against them by saying, we want to end the culture war against us. But then what they're doing is reenact, like just reversing it, just taking the culture war back to the other side.

And it's not quite literally an inverse or a negative image of what, you know, of the thing they are reacting against, but it's surprisingly close. And it really does seem like a lot of the folks who are sort of claiming to be, you know, free speech types on the, on the Trump side are, they don't actually value free speech and they don't understand what the first amendment is for. Um, and they don't understand that, like, I mean, the, the very specific first thing, like the, the two things that people like just overlook about about the First Amendment in particular, in the way the First Amendment protects free speech. Is, first of all, the most important thing that the First Amendment protects is the ability to criticize the government almost in an unlimited way. I mean, literally, unless your criticism amounts to a physical, like an

imminent threat of physical harm, basically any criticism of the government, even if it has no merit, even if it's based on kind of nonsense, basically any criticism of the government is fine, like under the, is protected. That's protected speech. And it has to be. No, no. Because the whole point. Anything that's mean and unfair to Mr. Trump is not free speech. Well, I'm sorry. Thank you. Thank you, Alyssa, for I misunderstood. You're right. No, it's but this is the real this is the real point here. And the real problem, right, is that

I I know a lot of these people Peter is talking about who, you know, kind of kind of reluctantly came reluctantly came to Donald Trump said, well, you know, we've got we've got to end this. We got to end this, you know, cancel culture thing. We got to end this, you know, demonization of speech. You know, people need to be free. And I'm sorry, there is nobody on in the government who believes in free speech less than Donald Trump. Like he has made a case repeatedly in the course of his campaigns and as president that the most important thing is to punish the people who are mean to him and who say bad things about him and who oppose him in ways that he does not approve of. And he has made it very clear that

he is willing to use the power of the government to do so. And this is the real issue here with the FCC. Again, let's bring it back to the FCC, because the real danger here, it goes beyond general fuzzy principles about, well, freedom of speech, what are the limits on, do we want to allow people to say whatever? but like, this is, this is, this goes beyond that. And it's very specifically a first amendment thing, the government, the government, uh, using the powers that they have to punish organizations for speech that the president does not like, even if it is gussied up in this, well, they're actually going after discrimination. It's about the DEI discrimination.

That's what they're doing here is insane and wrong and has to, like, it has to stop. People have to speak out about it in a uniform and principled way that I have frankly only seen from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or whatever their new acronym is. I will defend my organization, Reason Magazine, and the Reason Foundation has been pretty consistent on that. We are quite aligned with our friends at FIRE. Blanket disclaimer, you're one of the good ones.

But no, I mean, but also part of what has to happen here is some of these media companies have to not settle, right? I mean, they have to see through this, you know, just obviously bogus, vindictive litigation that's been brought against them instead of folding. Because that's part of how you get the precedence. You need to impose some costs on the people who are doing this sort of thing. The FCC needs to lose in court some. Trump needs to lose in court some. But when everybody folds, it lends the perception that there's merit to some of these insane claims. And, you know, I think the unwillingness of any institution to fight, just even on its own behalf, not even in defense of the larger principles in a broad way, but the sort of lack of willingness to sort of, you know, win the war where it started as opposed to letting, you know, be a bunch of incursions into territory. And I'm going to stop torturing this metaphor because it's bad. Torture is always bad. Yes, torture is always bad, even in metaphors.

Sunny's like, I don't know. That's a different debate. We can have that debate at some other point speaking of george w bush uh yes i was coming around full circle um but no i think that yeah look um there needs to be some sort of corporate self-defense here because you know i mean i think if we all think back to sort of the fcc of our youth right it was like those debates about decency feel sort of laughable now right like you know eminem was absolutely correct that like the fcc was not ultimately gonna have a lot of power over him because he was too popular right like you know sort of decency violations weren't really going to get anywhere. But when the turn has come to shutting down sort of institutions and the issue is not, you know,

did Justin Timberlake rip off part of Janet Jackson's bra, but like, can companies operate in an independent way? We're in real trouble unless somebody decides to say, no, I'm going to defend my company. I'm going to defend this speech. I think that's actually one of the things that I find scariest about this moment is that the decision that those who are playing defense, the rear guard action is what's going to carry the day because it's not clear to me that it is.

I do think that the courts are going to be pretty good on this. And they have, yes, the courts have tended to be, yeah, the courts have even Republican appointed judges have tended to be quite good on speech. That's not a blanket. That's a that's a tendency, not a blanket statement. I'm sure you can find exceptions. But in general, the Supreme Court, in particular, has been quite defensive of a of a strong and expansive understanding of the First Amendment. I think that ultimately they will be here as well as the lower courts. And the News Guard suit stuff that I talked about earlier was, in fact, tossed by a judge just this last week because it was so obviously BS. Yeah. Well, it's one of the legacies of Antonin Scalia, who was a very strong, very conservative,

very strong defender of expression across a wide range of activities and beliefs. All right. So what do we think? Is it a controversy or a non-troversy that the FCC is targeting Disney and ABC and other outlets that the administration does not seem to care for for its DEI activities. Peter.

It's a controversy, though, sadly, it's not an unexpected one. Alyssa. It's a controversy. And all of this administration's talk about free speech is just one of the great acts of psychological projection I've ever seen in American politics. It's amazing. It's very clearly a controversy. And I just want to end this with a quote from Ari Cohn at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, who kind of sums it up perfectly here. Quote, the threat is if you say things that I don't like or that I think will anger the president of the United States who appointed me,

then I'm going to exercise whatever rights that I have as FCC chair and wield the power of this agency to hassle you in other ways. End quote. That was to your publication, Peter. That was a quote given to Reason magazine. But it's the crux of this whole thing. It's insane. It's insane that we're even having to argue about this. There is no universe in which the FCC should be playing in any of this, but it's a real, it's a real reminder that one of the things that could have been done over the last four years was reducing the amount of power that the federal government had to do things like this unilaterally. And sadly that chance was not taken again, argument for another time. Uh,

yeah. Anyway, uh, make sure to swing by Bulwark Plus on Friday for our bonus episode about some truly terrible ideas to improve the state of movie theaters. Gotta love them. They're trying the worst things possible. Hey, if you enjoyed this edition of Across the Movie Aisles, Controversy or Non-Troversy,

we do it every week on the show, Across the Movie Aisle. We also review a movie, sometimes a TV show, every week. This week, we discussed A Working Man, which sparked some really strong disagreements between me and Peter and Alyssa. So I hope you check out the whole show

if you enjoyed this. Like I said, we do this every week. Goes up Tuesday. Got some bonus episodes on Friday at Bulwark Plus. So just look for us at Across the Movie Aisle.

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