Free Speech Shouldn't Be Just For The Party In The White House
What they're not telling you: The Executive Order Against. Censorship Is Already Breaking Under Its Own Administration President Trump signed an order forbidding federal employees from pressuring social media companies to remove speech—then his own officials immediately began pressuring social media companies to remove speech. The contradiction sits in plain sight. On Trump's first day in office, he issued "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship," an Executive Order explicitly designed to prevent the coercion tactics deployed during the Biden years.
What the Documents Show
The order's text is unambiguous: no U.S. Government employee shall take actions violating First Amendment rights of American citizens. This was, in theory, a response to documented abuses—Surgeon General Vivek Murthy threatening "appropriate legal and regulatory measures" unless platforms "voluntarily" censored COVID discussion; Deputy Assistant to the President Rob Flaherty dropping expletives in emails to Meta demanding removal of posts he "requested" be taken down; other Biden staffers addressing social media executives with the contempt of a manager berating unprepared interns. The Justice Department itself recognized these practices as unconstitutional. In a consent decree signed in March 2024, settling a lawsuit brought by Louisiana and Mississippi, the government agreed to prohibit the Surgeon General, the CDC, and CISA from threatening social media companies for refusing to remove or limit protected speech.
Follow the Money
The document is a formal admission: the Biden Administration had violated citizens' First Amendment rights. Yet here we are weeks into the Trump Administration, and Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson—described in the source material as "a vast improvement" on his predecessor—appears to be continuing the pattern the Executive Order was meant to kill. The specific allegations are thin in the source material provided, cutting off mid-sentence. But the structure of the problem is clear: the order exists as public theater while the machinery of pressure persists unchanged. Ferguson's actions suggest either willful ignorance of the Executive Order Trump signed, or worse, a deliberate choice to ignore it. An FTC Chair operates under the President's direct authority.
What Else We Know
If Ferguson is pressuring platforms to remove speech, Trump's own administration is immediately contradicting Trump's own stated policy on Trump's own timeline. This is not abstract constitutional theory. The Justice Department's consent decree proves the government had been using regulatory threat as a cudgel against speech. The Executive Order attempts to end that practice. If federal officials are already violating it, then what was signed as protection becomes mere rhetoric—a document citizens can point to and ask why it's being ignored while it's still new enough to be called policy. The mechanism matters because it reveals how institutional power persists regardless of which party holds the White House.
What strikes me most about this story is not the hypocrisy itself, but the speed at which it manifests. Trump signed an order against federal censorship pressure and his own appointee is allegedly continuing it within weeks. This tells us something crucial: the problem was never one administration's ideology. It's structural.
The pattern here is that whoever controls the executive branch discovers the same levers of power available to their predecessors and finds them impossible to resist. Biden officials pressured platforms. Trump issued an order against it. Trump's officials appear to be doing the same thing. The machinery is bipartisan. Restraint is temporary.
What benefits from the official narrative that this is merely a Trump vs. Biden dispute? Everyone who profits from the public not seeing the permanent architecture of executive coercion underneath the partisan theater.
Watch the FTC's enforcement actions and comments on social media moderation over the next six months. Demand FOIA releases of internal communications between federal agencies and tech platforms. Understand that an Executive Order without enforcement is just a press release. The consent decree that settled Louisiana and Mississippi's lawsuit is now the test: does the Trump Administration enforce its own stated policy against its own officials?
Primary Sources
- Source: ZeroHedge
- Category: Government Secrets
- Cross-reference independently — don't take our word for it.
Disclosure: NewsAnarchist aggregates from public records, API feeds (Federal Register, CourtListener, MuckRock, Hacker News), and independent media. AI-assisted synthesis. Always verify primary sources linked above.