Donald Trump boasted before Congress on Tuesday that he had “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.” But his administration then proceeded to spend the rest of the week proving him wrong.

Since the October 7 attacks in 2023, protests on American campuses have too often descended into lawlessness and often antisemitic discrimination. Just last week, keffiyeh-wearing students occupied a building at Barnard College in New York and allegedly assaulted an employee.

Yesterday, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to address incidents like these across American campuses. He announced harsh punishments for student “agitators”, and threatened to revoke federal funding from universities which fail to sufficiently clamp down on "illegal protests".

United States President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to target US universities that are hubs of student protests, from even before his election in November.

In 1791, the nation’s founders ratified the First Amendment to the Constitution. It would come to offer protections in the new nation essentially never seen before: the right to ask things of and to criticize the government; to express opinions, popular or not; to assemble peacefully; to practice diverse religious beliefs; and to have a free press that publishes information without fear of censorship or retribution.

Like a child custody battle in a throuple, U.S. tech companies are getting pulled in three directions as the Trump administration abandons its predecessor's tacit tolerance, if not always explicit approval, for official censorship in the European Union and Brazil.

A federal judge on Monday denied a request by the Associated Press to restore full access for the news agency’s journalists after President Donald Trump’s administration barred them for continuing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico in coverage.

U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, declined to immediately grant the AP’s request for a temporary injunction restoring its access to the Oval Office and Air Force One during a hearing in Washington federal court.

The Associated Press’ war with the Trump White House suffered its first loss when a judge declined to restore its Oval Office and Air Force One access. This legal scuffle is in no way over, but for now, the AP and their fake news reporters are barred from certain events at the White House. Still, the judge’s opinion also carried a warning that the White House was skating on thin ice (via NYT): 

At last week’s Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance delivered some harsh truths to the Europeans within the audience.

JD Vance spoke over the weekend at the Munich security conference on behalf of the United States -- the primary topic was Ukraine, for obvious reasons -- but instead of discussing the immediate geopolitical matter, he took his time at the rostrum to deliver a harsh message to the European grandees gathered there about the enemy “within.” And he wasn’t subtle in identifying that threat as the overreaction of Europeans to dissident populist parties:

Dozens of police teams across Germany raided homes before dawn in a coordinated crackdown on a recent Tuesday. The state police weren't looking for drugs or guns, they were looking for people suspected of posting hate speech online.