Mahmoud has not been charged with any listed offense; his crime is his support for the Palestinian national liberation movement. Mahmoud stood against the slaughter of his people and the ongoing theft of their homeland. The fascist Empire is committed to worldwide terror and the enslavement of humanity. The state would rather us remain silent, going about our cleaved lives apathetic to genocide — this is vile and unacceptable. 

Free speech is dead. Did it ever exist in the first place?

Our free speech rights go about as deep as a puddle on the side of the road. The American Fourth Reich, aided by the skeletal Democratic party, has gutted what little was left of so-called “civil liberties” in this country. The U.S.’s liberal democracy was founded on the “rights” of only the white, slave-owning, and propertied classes, leaving everyone else, especially enslaved peoples, grasping for the shards of a deadened life.

Regardless of what the slave owners who founded this country may have intended when they wrote the Constitution in 1791, the settler-imperial government has never meaningfully valued free speech. Just seven years and one president later, the John Adams administration would pass the Alien and Sedition Acts: the Sedition laws criminalized any negative speech against the government, while the Alien Acts let the president deport any foreign nationals. Adams, who was a federalist, used the Sedition Acts to arrest journalists supporting his political opponents, the Democratic Republicans. The minute differences between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans are not terribly significant — (both supported the slavery of New Afrikans and the genocide of Indigenous Turtle Islanders) — suffice to say they were the two dominant tendencies of early USian politics. Adams lost the political battle; the Democratic Republicans won the next election and repealed the Sedition Acts. And the Alien Acts? They remain in effect to this day. The president may therefore deport any foreign national they consider to be dangerous, based on this 225 year old law.  In essence, dystopian state repression is one of the hallmarks of liberal democracy.

The Alien and Sedition Acts would be the first major crackdown on free speech, but they are not the last, nor the most recent. The Democratic-Republicans had their own opportunity to silence mass dissent a few decades later when the abolition of slavery became a contentious issue. In 1836, an Andrew Jackson-controlled Congress ratified a gag order banning any mention of abolition in the halls of Congress. 

In light of the modern national security state, first amendment rights are shallow.  With state surveillance and a history of interference in liberation movements, an American citizen’s speech may be free, but only so long as their words remain barren and removed from action. The Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the American Indian Movement: when nationally oppressed groups peaceably assemble, we can see time and time again that the First Amendment often has a selective application. Perpetual surveillance, state assassinations; sharpened knives which they are ready to use against any defiant organization. 

Before the regime will criminalize your collective expression, two circumstances must generally be met. 

1. The expression must be dissent, i.e., it must go against the regime’s foreign or domestic policy.
2. The expression must be popular. The degree of popularity can vary, but generally, the dissenting speech or collective expression must be popular enough for the regime to consider it a threat to its rule or the implementation of its policy. 

Popular dissent is forbidden.  

If this clownish blockheaded President is trying to weaken free speech rights on campus, he is late to the party. Colleges and universities across the Empire beat him to the punch by launching a full scale offensive against the right to protest before the Fall 2024 semester. Protests now have formal time limits. They are banned in popular gathering spots. Fascism on the Amerikkkan campus is objectively bipartisan. Trump’s threat is a promise to build upon the groundwork that was laid last year. Do not be scared. For fear is your greatest enemy. Now, we’re all able to see clearly without the blinding, twisted distortions of Democrats who use identity essentialism as bait in order to duplicitously rally support for their graveyard of a party, and therefore gut the very undercarriage of revolutionary understanding and action of the mass of vexed workers.

Saturday’s attack on student resistance was orchestrated by the regime’s use of the word “terrorist;” it is, by all means, a propagandistic term in the modern U.S., the same way “communist” was in the past, and is in the present. The state of course uses the veneer of a mythical “antisemitism” to justify its draconian measures. Claims of a phantasmal antisemitism from the very same administration that goes around giving Nazi salutes. Remember, the Trumpian gendarmes are the very same ilk that said “Jews will not replace us.” The very same people whose base committed a massacre in a synagogue,  now want to wage a “holy war,” which they pretend is for the very Jewish people they tried to mass murder. 

However, we must recognize that we’re in the depths of a revolutionary moment. The inflection points of class war are nearing a breaking crescendo, and it is up to us in the anti-imperialist movement to understand this dialectic of intense struggle and form a clear and firm guide to action. Now is the time to unite with left and progressive forces (While not compromising the proven Marxists analysis) to defeat the fascist juggernaut. In the age of techno-imperialism and the mass slaughter of our people, we must do away with the muddled Trotskyist tendency of splintering into groups of 50 (that has historically gutted the left in this country) and form a temporary alliance to defeat the strangling repression of the Trump regime. We, the mass reserved army of labor must pick up the red banner and fight for the liberation of all those colonized, imprisoned, and hyper-exploited. 

“The first is the right to free speech and for people to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard. The second is the rule of law. Both must be upheld. We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent.”

All freedoms under capitalism are either by concession, or they are the flexing of a confident class in power —  symbolizing that their right to rule is thoroughly uncontested. Freedom of expression is no different. “Have your freedoms,” they say, “it will not hurt us.” 

That is, of course, until it does. 

On May 5, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu closed all Al-Jazeera offices within the zionist occupied territories. It had been voted unanimously by his cabinet, and announced through Twitter. This is capitalist freedom.

This declaration comes on the eve of the fascist state’s invasion of Rafah, the last remaining bastion for the Palestinian people in Gaza. As they threaten to slaughter everyone who remains in Rafah, the zionist genocidaires have seized control of the only real exit — the Rafah crossing. There is nowhere to go. They plan to bury Rafah and declare over the smoldering graves of hundreds of thousands, “We gave them a choice.” When the occupation brutalizes the Palestinians and systematically exterminates journalists, they want their cheers, their gloating and justifications, to be the only record left. This is capitalist freedom. 

Let us  imagine, for a moment, the ruling classes of a country as the owners of a pet — the classes they dominate. Imagine that the tight collar around that pet’s throat, that leash held so dearly in the ruling classes’ hand, is the state. The length of this leash represents the degree of freedoms conditionally extended from the ruling classes to their subordinates. If the pet — us, in other words — is docile and complacent, the ruling classes will give that leash lots of slack. The minute we threaten to “make use” of the slack, zip!, they tighten it again. The length of our chain depends on how secure our masters feel.

At home, the U.S.-Canadian Empire’s ruling classes continue to support the genocide. More money, bombs, and most recently, in another bold exercise of capitalist “freedom” of the press, bi-partisan legislation to ban TikTok. While the capitalist legislature claims a ban on TikTok from all U.S. channels by 2025, part of the on-going campaign to seize the platform from China, is for the purposes of “national security,” a recent panel between Secretary of State Blinken and former Presidential candidate Mitt Romney explains what the legislation is really about:

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming [bipartisan] support for us to shut down potentially TikTok […]” Romney said to Blinken at a McCain Institute keynote conversation. “If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts. I know that’s of real interest, and the President will get a chance to take action in that regard.” 

Yank that collar. This is capitalist freedom.

Whether it’s the shaky, grassroots coverage by victims of the genocide filmed and uploaded to TikTok, or — what these ghouls claim to prefer — the mediated, professional reporting by groups like Al-Jazeera, everything that exposes the settler-colonial genocide for what it is will be silenced. This is the short leash, the extent of capitalist freedom. What this legislation, as well as the ongoing student movement, is proving beyond a doubt, is that to play by the rules created by our ruling classes is an exercise in futility. Organize, agitate, escalate. By legal means at first, until your numbers and organized militancy are at the point when only adhering to the law of the mass murderers is a hindrance. Defend yourselves from arrest and legal prosecution by all means. Cease all crying when our enemy does not play by their own rules — this is a fight for humanity, our world, not some game. Know that our oppressors will tighten freedom until it is but a hand clenching our throat — we must use the length of leash they’ve given us to strangle them instead! 

The people have made clear their desire for the truth, it is now our job to provide it. Struggle and fight for the expansion of the radical people’s presses, across all mediums and channels, for our own words and message!