In his first days back in office, Donald Trump is launching a campaign against freedom of speech. He has declared that MSNBC “shouldn’t have the right to broadcast” and called for the revocation of CBS’s broadcast license (even though there is no license to revoke at the network level). His extension on the TikTok ban sounded good at first, but he has suggested that its future presence in the USA may be contingent on its turning over 50% ownership to the United States (which seems to mean the government but isn’t fully clear). (Update: Recent reports indicate he’s shifted to wanting a consortium of US companies to acquire a majority stake, which at least wouldn’t be American socialism.)

We need to remember that current levels of freedom of speech in the United States haven’t always prevailed. It was only around 1960 to 1970 that the Supreme Court recognized their present broad status.

In 1917, Charles T. Schenck was sentenced to ten years for urging people to oppose the military draft. Not to resist it, just to express their opposition and try to get it repealed. The Supreme Court upheld his conviction, and Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes infamously compared political activism to “falsely shouting fire in a theatre.” That quote is still very popular with the pro-censorship left, even though Schenck was a socialist.

The Comstock Act, passed in 1873, criminalized the sending of “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile” material, including any information about abortion or contraception. That provision was actively enforced until the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade stopped it. It’s still on the books, and some people are concerned that after Dobbs v Jackson it could be reactivated.

In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg gave the news media copies of a classified study of the US government’s actions in Vietnam, known as the “Pentagon Papers.” The New York Times began publishing them, and President Nixon got a restraining order. The Supreme Court ruled in New York Times Co. v. United States that the government could not prohibit their publication. This ruling has been a major pillar of press freedom since then.

For a long time, state blasphemy laws were enforced, almost always designed exclusively to protect Christianity from disparagement. Some are still on the books. In an aside to the 1897 Robertson v. Baldwin, the Supreme Court invented a “blasphemy” exception to the First Amendment out of whole cloth.

The point of this history is that full freedom of speech and the press didn’t exist for most of US history, and there’s no guarantee it will stay. The Supreme Court can reverse any past decision. Courts can gradually narrow the scope of the First Amendment, just as they once broadened it.

What happens depends heavily on the direction our culture takes. Right now the Trump administration is trying to silence its critics, but its opposition to free speech is mostly opportunistic. Systematic opposition to free expression comes more from the left, notably with efforts to carve out a “hate speech” exception. Freedom of speech means nothing if it excludes speech you hate. Everyone supports freedom of speech for people they agree with.

We could easily return to the days when the government decided which speech deserves freedom. It all depends on what people want and are willing to stand up for.