Opinion | The MAGA War on Speech

Then he began suppressing access to posts with words like “transgender” and “bisexual,” or ideas like Ukraine’s battling against Russian aggression, and made it more difficult for users of his platform to read articles from independent news organizations, including The Times and Reuters. Purveyors of hate speech were invited to return to Twitter, which he later renamed X, and when some critics advocated a boycott of the platform in response, he moved to block them. Mr. Musk even boosted his own pronouncements on X, forcing his posts to appear loudly even on the timelines of those who chose not to follow him.

And when he couldn’t quiet his critics, he sued them. He filed suit against Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog group that wrote about advertisements on X appearing next to neo-Nazi content, and then sued a group of prominent businesses, including Unilever and CVS, for what he said was an illegal advertising boycott of his platform. (Last year a federal judge threw out a similar lawsuit Mr. Musk brought against the Center for Countering Digital Hate.)

When the magazine Wired published the names of six inexperienced young men working for Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Musk falsely announced on X that publication of the names constituted a “crime.” And later, illustrating the connection between Mr. Musk’s aims and those of the administration, one of the loyalists that Mr. Trump installed as a federal prosecutor in Washington made an inflammatory announcement that he would use his position within the Justice Department to defend claims that Mr. Musk had raised.

The administration’s desire to control speech and thinking has also extended to Congress, the military and college campuses. Among other recent examples:

• After the office of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, conducted a webinar instructing immigrants of their constitutional rights when challenged by federal officials, Tom Homan, the president’s so-called border czar, said he had asked the Justice Department to investigate whether she crossed a legal red line by suggesting noncompliance with federal immigration officers.

• The Pentagon began pulling books off the shelves of school libraries used by the children of military families if they violated Mr. Trump’s new rules on not speaking about gender or racial equity issues. Among the titles subject to military review are a picture book about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a book by the actress Julianne Moore about a young girl coping with her freckles.

• In a fact sheet accompanying an executive order about antisemitism last month, Mr. Trump said he would deport legal immigrants if they joined in “pro-jihadist protests,” and would cancel the student visas of all pro-Hamas sympathizers on college campuses. “We put you on notice,” he wrote. “Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you.” Supporting terrorism is always wrong, and antisemitism is vile in any form. Even some congressional Democrats cheered the executive order. What the administration is establishing, however, is a much more expansive legal definition of hate speech to include even just strident critiques of the Israeli government policy.

The current administration may argue that these steps are simply payback for an American political left that can be rightly criticized for policing speech in recent years, from trying to shut or shout down conservative speakers to trying to enforce adherence to its own list of acceptable words and phrases like “pregnant people,” the “unhoused,” “incarcerated individuals” and “Latinx.”

But the Trump administration’s early and furious reaction to criticism and pungent speech isn’t just guilty of the same sins, it expands upon them, worryingly, with the powers of the state. If the MAGA movement were really confident that the American public stood firmly behind the new intolerance, then why not welcome serious news reporting, or even the jeers of critics, and let the best ideas win? That, in fact, seemed to be what Mr. Vance was advocating in recent remarks to the Conservative Political Action Conference.