Trump threatens students involved in ‘illegal’ protests with arrest
In another example of his open and obvious plan to destroy our Constitutionally protected, God-given free speech rights whenever they interfere with his dictatorial ambitions, Donald Trump recently announced his intention to arrest — and if applicable, deport — college students who engage in “illegal” protests.
Mere days after announcing his plan to sue authors who write books about him that contain information critical of his performance as president, Donald Trump is apparently ready to take his war against the First Amendment to a new battlefield with his threat to arrest students guilty of doing nothing more than exercising their free speech rights to criticize and protest our ever-increasing tyrannical government (via The Standard):
Donald Trump threatened American students with arrest for taking part in “illegal” protests in his latest controversial move.
The US president said on Tuesday that all federal funding will stop for colleges and schools that allow “illegal” protests and that agitators will be imprisoned or sent back to the country they came from.
“American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.
College campuses, though left leaning in many cases, have a long history in America and other countries around the world as a place where open debate and when appropriate, demonstrations, are used to institute change. In fact, such protests played a key role in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Of course, Trump doesn’t provide any details about what constitutes an “illegal” protest but based on his track record of hostility towards the Constitution whenever it conflicts with his agenda or his need to be worshiped and adored, it’s easy to see that “illegal” is merely politispeak for free speech. For example, in October 2018, Trump sought new regulations to silence those who refused to praise him as the embodiment of perfection itself when he tried to ban demonstrations in Washington, DC using the National Park Service as enforcement muscle.
Not only would Trump’s proposed regulations have banned protests at the National Mall, but they also would have banned protests at Lafayette Square across from the White House along with the Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalks in front of the then-Trump International Hotel. The regulations would have also closed 80 percent of the White House sidewalks, placed new limits on spontaneous demonstrations, and forced “approved” protestors to pay a fee to exercise their right to free speech.
As I document in my book, The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty, the attack on liberty is a Republican/Democrat affair. This means that despite the “not Democrat” reasons we were given prior to the 2024 election to vote for Trump, his attack on the free speech rights of college students is no different than that of his predecessor.
A few weeks prior to the election, former U.S. Senator, presidential candidate, and Joe Biden’s Climate Czar, John Kerry, called the First Amendment a “major block” to ending “disinformation” and an obstruction to advancing his climate change agenda when he appeared before a panel hosted by Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum (WEF).
You see, John Kerry and his statist friends in both parties wanted to shut down any speech that contradicts their globalist objectives or gets in their way (via National Review):
Former secretary of state John Kerry recently spoke at a World Economic Forum panel and lamented the First Amendment for being a roadblock to countering online “misinformation” and “disinformation” about climate change.
Responding to an audience question about “climate misinformation,” Kerry described how social media make it difficult to form consensus and said the First Amendment makes it difficult to weed out “disinformation” online.
“But look, if people go to only one source, and the source they go to is sick and has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer it out of existence,” Kerry said. (Emphasis mine)
As a major part of their New World Order agenda, the WEF is a forum where global elites gather to conspire on ways to impose a one-world government that targets so-called misinformation and disinformation and make the U.S. Constitution obsolete. So, naturally they’re hostile to free speech and other constitutional protections.
Even though they are no longer in charge, Biden’s and Kerry’s adoption of the WEF’s agenda became a years-long obsession to destroy the First Amendment in the name of advancing the WEF’s Great Reset agenda — an agenda that Donald Trump also supports, by the way.
Donald Trump is serious about shredding the Constitution and destroying free speech, but as Judge Andrew Napolitano once pointed out, the First Amendment makes no provision for his assault on liberty:
The speech we love needs no protection. The speech we hate does. The government has no authority to evaluate speech. As the framers understood, all people have a natural right to think as we wish and to say and publish whatever we think. Even hateful, hurtful and harmful speech is protected speech.
Yet, in perilous times, such as the present, we have seen efforts to use the courts to block the publication of unflattering books. We have seen state governors use the police to protect gatherings of protestors with whose message they agreed and to disburse critical protestors. We have seen mobs silence speakers while the police did nothing.
And in perilous times, such as the present, we have seen Big Tech companies silencing their opponents. I hate when they do that, but they have every right to do so. They own the bulletin board. Twitter and Facebook can ban any speech they want because they are not the government. And the First Amendment only restrains the government. In the constitutional sense, free speech means only one thing — free from government interference.
Punishing speech is the most dangerous business because there will be no end. The remedy for hateful or threatening speech is not silence or punishments; it is more speech — speech that challenges the speaker.
Why do government officials want to silence their opponents? They fear an undermining of their power. The dissenters might make more appealing arguments than they do. St. Augustine taught that nearly all in government want to tell others how to live.
How about we all say whatever we want, and the government leaves us alone? (Emphasis mine)
For those in the audience who think that calling out Donald Trump for his war on free speech is unwarranted, let me remind you that he went on record prior to the election that he would be a dictator on day one of his second term. In other words, he has absolutely no problem acting independently of the Constitution.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties. He the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty.
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