The criticism “You don’t criticize Trump enough” is maddening because you learn it has to be constant to be accepted, and there’s seldom any effort to acknowledge opposing factors. It’s not true of Andrew, but in 99% of cases, these criticisms are coming from a very specific type of person.

They’re usually people who don’t even acknowledge the existence of huge ongoing threats to speech not related to Donald Trump. I get people who demand features on Rümeysa Öztürk or the removal of LGBTQ+ books from regional school libraries who don’t know or care what the Digital Services Act is, or the Online Safety Act or any of a dozen other online content codes around the world — many of which involve criminal penalties or even jail for speech — and declare with religious certainty that there is no such thing as digital censorship. They think that because these matters simply are not covered.

If there’s no effort to self-examine, then it makes it hard to talk about the Trump issues with speech. The Öztürk story for instance really would be an ominous development if it were for sure true that she was detained for writing one op-ed, which is the contention of her attorneys. But Marco Rubio has specifically denied this, saying there’s more to the story, and though he easily may not be telling the truth, it’s infuriating to see that key detail ignored in coverage of the top papers. There’s also no effort to compare it to similar behaviors under the previous regime, in which people not even convicted of crimes were debanked or removed from the Internet or targeted under the Klan Act or had their online fundraisers to pay for legal bills shut down because they were at J6 (not even inside, in some cases). Or there was the other type of J6 attendee who was actually charged with crimes like disorderly conduct and got jail time under the premise that participating meant they were “celebrating” the violent conduct of others (exactly the logic of some of the deportations). Whether or not one agrees with that is not the point: the likelihood that this background is part of the motivation for the current defunding of universities and/or denial of visas is relevant to the story. I think the Trump administration is making serious errors in its approach to 1A issues, but the desire of people to view these matters in isolation and not as part of a continuum that included (and in Europe still very much includes) wide-scale speech suppression in other directions is very frustrating.