“Pay this shit head journalist with public money” — Thomas Jefferson, apparently

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Talk to me. It was yet another wild week of provocative executive orders that may or may not be legal, and — as is now a law of nature — everyone lost their minds. America is reopening a supermax prison on San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island. Panicked film producers are facing a 100% tariff for movies shot abroad. And “sanctuary cities,” which is to say cities actively abetting illegal immigration, might be stripped of federal funding. But amidst the torrent of potentially paradigm shifting policies, nothing kicked the media hornets’ nest quite so hard as President Trump’s decree the government would no longer subsidize “public broadcasting” giants PBS and NPR.

Well! Clutch those New Yorker tote bags, ladies. We have a lot of ground to cover.

Our public broadcasters “receive millions from taxpayers to spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news,’” the President’s team argued in an article posted to the White House website (rather elegantly titled “President Trump Finally Ends the Madness of NPR, PBS”). A long list of the outlets’s allegedly biased pieces and segments followed, including but not limited to: an oddly nuanced take on cannibalism, a Valentine’s Day special on “queer animals,” Sesame Street’s apparent support for the BLM riots (Big Bird, WHY?), and a PBS children’s program “that featured a drag queen named ‘Lil’ Miss Hot Mess.’”

But far more troubling for PBS and NPR was the White House’s focus on viewpoint discrimination, which included everything from erroneous fact checking in apparent service to Democratic Party narratives and what seemed to be at least one ideologically-motivated firing to NPR’s public and explicit refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story, which famously preceded the 2020 election by about a week (this March, in statements before Congress, NPR’s Katherine Maher apologized on behalf of NPR for this decision).

Long story short, if our “public broadcasters” want to carry on propagating far-left political ideas, they will have to do so with money they actually earn. Or so the President argued.

This, we quickly discovered, was “authoritarianism.”

The executive order to defund public broadcasting is “blatantly unlawful,” argued PBS CEO Paula Kerger. NPR’s Katherine Maher was more aggressive. This decision, she wrote, is “an affront to the First Amendment,” which gives us a pretty good sense of Washington’s next great “free speech” legal battle. The Washington Post helpfully explained the position that public broadcasters maintain a constitutionally-protected right to taxpayer money, flush with opinion from their “legal experts.” And so the take was set: actually, you’re legally required to pay me for my story about genderqueer dinosaur enthusiasts (actual thing NPR published).

Now, with a legal battle pretty much inevitable, will the courts agree the constitution requires the American taxpayer to pay NPR for their genderqueer dinosaur story? While I would love to think not, a few weeks ago a federal judge sided with the Associated Press and ruled President Trump is constitutionally bound to restore the news outlet’s access to the Oval Office, White House briefing room, and Air Force One. In other words, he and his team sort of have to talk to AP journalists. So I don’t know what to tell you, I’m learning new things about the First Amendment every day, and much of what I’m learning is litigated in court. Specifically, it’s now clear the press’s view here can persuade courts, or at least the elements of our press most friendly to the bureaucratic state, as their view tends — for whatever little reason! — to become the law. And the press’s view is honestly insane: some speech (theirs) must be funded, while other speech (yours probably, mine definitely) must be actively policed.

What, you thought I just forgot about the Biden Administration’s attempt to institute a Ministry of Truth? NPR’s current CEO, the woman presently demanding federal funds for her media company on grounds revoking that funding violates the First Amendment, publicly bragged about coordinating with our government to censor information while she worked at the Wikimedia Foundation. Am I not supposed to bring that up? Do you think, after years covering the left’s broad turn against free speech, I would really deeply care about one of its most censorious agents losing her public funding — my money — to say a bunch of crazy shit I don’t believe in or even vaguely care about? Come on.

But there is a broader question worth asking about Trump’s record on speech, which is certainly complicated.

Last week, a WIRED piece opened with the shocking headline “Brendan Carr Is Turning the FCC Into MAGA’s Censoring Machine.” It focused on the FCC chair’s investigation of CBS, a recent legal enemy of Trump’s, for political bias, and the Commission’s threat to revoke the company’s license to broadcast on public airwaves. While a good amount of the article’s shock factor requires some ignorance pertaining to the ways in which a network like CBS is different than a cable channel to sufficiently frighten a reader, the notion Carr’s behavior is unusual for an FCC chair, including the fact that he seems to be taking direction from the president, is certainly true. It’s also worth considering.

In the narrow case of CBS, Carr seems to be investigating the question of whether the network, which operates freely on public airwaves in exchange for service in the public’s interest, is operating in the public interest. “The trouble with this,” author Steven Levy writes, “is that it’s obvious that ‘the public interest’ here is being interpreted as ‘stuff Donald Trump likes.’”

And from my seat, this basically does seem true. It also seems to be how Trump justifies his battle with Harvard. Last month, the president froze $2.2 billion in federal research funding for the college until it caved to a series of honestly batshit demands, including some amount of control over both hiring and admissions to restore “ideological diversity.” My view on this (“batshit”) is of course complicated by my view on strings-free federal funding for private universities (get a job). But this seems to be a pronounced targeting of the institution, and that’s certainly not nothing.

After Harvard declined to submit to Trump’s demands, the President threatened its tax-exempt status on grounds it’s a “political entity.” Here, unless we are revoking that status for every private college in the country (I’m open to this), as well as every non-profit (I’m really open to this), I have a much bigger problem, because only withholding funds from Harvard, or the other “woke institutions,” implies funding for speech the president finds affirming. And obviously our government should simply not be in the business of paying people for their opinions, like it does with PBS and NPR.

But as with almost every major controversy over the Trump administration’s relationship with speech, we are once again litigating the public’s right to an opinion about what their government does with their money. And similar stories have played out like this for months.

Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order defunding Voice for America, the USAID propaganda organization charged with disseminating pro-America stories throughout the world. He also canceled federal contracts with the law firm Perkins Coie and Susman Godfrey, which represent his political opponents — an apparent act of retaliation, which a district judge immediately overturned. Voice for America is suing the administration as well, and the case is still in court.

In the pantheon of “free speech” violations, this is all very different from what we were litigating under Biden, which generally concerned what private American citizens, and private American media companies, were allowed to say on private American speech platforms. And no court seemed to give a shit. Neither did Levy, for what it’s worth, though he sure is animated now:

“The mere act of investigating — or even criticizing — a media company’s actions,” writes Levy of FCC chair Carr’s investigation into CBS, “whether they involve objective journalism or a DEI policy, can have a chilling effect.”

But this is 2025, baby. We’re all the media now, and our posts have been “investigated” for years. Famously. Like, where have you been actually? Because I know where your colleagues have been. A few choice WIRED bangers from the before times:

Oh wait one more, “A Trump Ban Is Easy. Fixing Facebook and Twitter Will Be Hard.” This one characterized Trump’s removal from the entire social internet as more or less rudimentary, and even inevitable, if a little too late (Trump, our sitting president at the time, had already made so many infractions, you see, and should have been banned from the internet much sooner). Broadly, the piece defends the concept of deplatforming people who spread “hate” and “dangerous” information (by which we mean people with ideas the author finds abhorrent), and would surely strike a free speech enjoyer like Levy as totally shocking. I’m assuming he never saw it, otherwise he would have publicly disagreed with his colleagues on the matter, as… oh no look at that, he wrote it himself. Oops!

Hypocritical media breathlessness on the topic of free speech is legion. PBS, in its ongoing efforts to prove itself an unbiased source of news, published an incredible piece on the subject, in which the following incredible piece of language was employed: “First Amendment advocates say they’ve never seen freedom of speech under attack the way it has been in Trump’s second term.”

Really?

Really?

Not even that time the deep state quietly coordinated with every major speech platform in the country to censor Americans, for over half a decade, on every topic from Covid to “election integrity,” which all parties involved then lied about until the entire scheme was uncovered after Elon Musk bought Twitter? Not even that time the government coordinated with every major speech platform in the country to censor a true story about President Biden’s son just weeks before his election? Does the FCC’s CBS “investigation,” which has presently gone nowhere, constitute a greater “chilling effect” than that time the President of the United States was erased from the social internet for several years? Is it more “chilling” than every lawsuit Elon Musk was hit with by the government (65 legal actions across 11 different federal agencies) following his revelation of the government’s relationship with our speech platforms, and his support of President Trump (a fairly straightforward example of political speech, by my read)?

PBS further cites Trump’s personal lawsuits against outlets he believes defamed him as “attacks” on the First Amendment. Okay. Defamation is illegal. Suing people is obnoxious, but also perfectly normal, and sometimes necessary. To be clear, none of Trump’s cases strike me as actual cases of defamation. But most of them have already gone to court, where they were settled by judges who agreed there was no defamation. Just a couple months ago, a judge forced Trump to pay the New York Times $400k in legal fees after losing one such case. Trump paid them. How has speech been “chilled,” here, by anything other than our legal system? Which almost always sides with the media companies?

Free speech is your right to speak and write, unobstructed by the government. It is not your right for me to listen to you speak. It is not your right to sit in a press room and ask questions. It is not your freedom from litigation, or immigration law, and it is certainly not your right to be paid, by me, to write about the latent “fatphobia” inherent of the average doorway size (yes, another authentic NPR banger). Because just as you have a right to your opinion, I have a right to mine. Or, this has always been my conception of “free speech.” The bureaucratic state’s position, as it comes further into focus, is rather different.

The State Left — which is to say the center left bureaucratic elements of our government, the institutional left, and the writers and executives who support them — seems to believe in “free speech,” but to conceive of “speech” as a proper noun: “Speech,” one half of a dialogue with power. Speech is an entity, almost, with a very specific set of “democratic” values on behalf of which it fights, and always in alignment with the State Left. In this way, the AP is Speech, which is why the outlet is entitled to a seat in the White House. NPR and PBS are Speech, which is why cutting their public funding is an act of “authoritarianism.” But assholes like us? We are just a bunch of people speaking, and the value of our speaking only matters insofar as it affirms the values of women like Katherine Maher. Which is just a load of bullshit.

Sure, I might feel differently if the government started paying me. But that just sounds like a good reason for the government to never pay a media outlet, and for readers to never trust a media outlet paid by the government.

-SOLANA