Along with an appreciation of civic virtue, freedom of speech and of thought forms the bedrock of any great political system. In 1943, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson wrote that “if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
Freedom of speech is all the more vital in academia for reasons Justice Earl Warren put so clearly in 1957: “The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident. … To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation.”
Unfortunately, it is also a remarkably fragile right when compared to its brethren. Over 60 years ago, Justice William Brennan Jr. declared that “because First Amendment freedoms need breathing space to survive, government may regulate in the area only with narrow specificity.”
Back during the Biden administration, Republican politicians were fully capable of recognizing these truths. If you can still remember the four years between Trump presidencies, they just couldn’t stop talking about how Biden was trampling all over the First Amendment.
In 2023, Alabama’s senior Senator Tommy Tuberville warned in an opinion piece for the far-right site Breitbart that “there has been a dramatic shift from principled rejections of falsehoods, to partisan restrictions on speech that contradicts the political views of the people in control.”
Then, in 2024, he argued in an article for the Daily Wire that the country is ruled by a “Woke HR Complex,” which has the Democratic Party for its political wing. Tuberville prattled:
The main rule of the Woke HR Complex is simple: in order to succeed, make sure you adhere 100 percent to the standards of political correctness and identity politics. Be sure to never offend the liberal sensibilities of the regime. If you ask questions, you will be labeled an “extremist,” “conspiracy theorist,” or worse. If you transgress the Complex, you will be disciplined, like an HR department, for attempting to think freely.
Now, in 2025, if you took Tuberville’s descriptions of the “Woke HR Complex” and just switched a couple words out—an “Anti” in front of “Woke,” “SJW” for “conspiracy theorist,” and so on—you’d have the sort of striking denunciation of the second Trump administration Tuberville would never, ever make.
You see, once the “regime” in power is staffed by open racists and disciples of dictators, the senator appears perfectly happy to slide into his new role as an HR officer, as do his copartisans.
Soon after the horrific murder of conservative media figure Charlie Kirk, folks on the right began putting together databases and lists of people who didn’t express enough grief for the late podcaster, and then calling to have them fired. Despite his earlier statements, Tuberville has hardly been reluctant to join in the “fun.”
First, during a press conference, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the administration would “go after you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” (She later tried to walk that back.) And when asked about Bondi’s comments, President Donald Trump told ABC News correspondent Jon Karl that Bondi likely meant she would go after Karl and other reporters with “hate in your hearts.”
Ryan Cooper, a senior editor at the American Prospect, has accurately summed up the right’s reactions since the assassination as an “all-out attack on free speech rights in this country.”
As just one example, Auburn University’s president announced last week that several employees of the university had been fired over “hurtful, insensitive” comments on social media. Senator Tuberville, along with his fellow Senator Katie Britt and many other Republican politicians in Alabama, quickly and unreservedly praised the decision.
“Thank you, @AuburnU, for taking action and FIRING these sick people,” Tuberville tweeted. Sans any public information about what the posts in question were, or any acknowledgment that universities firing employees for their speech has First Amendment implications, he was instinctively on board with firing people for their social media posts.
Tuberville has also tried to put a target on the back of A.J. Bauer, a journalism professor at the University of Alabama. Last week, he shared an article about some of Bauer’s social media posts along with a simple message: “@UofAlabama, fire him.”
The egregious post in question? “This right on right violence is out of control,” a more-or-less throwaway message sent a couple days after Kirk’s death.
Because of that sentence, the headline of the article Tuberville shared triumphantly declares that Bauer “peddles [a] ‘left wing conspiracy theory.’” One wonders if Tuberville remembers that he was denouncing the Woke HR Complex’s ability to brand anyone a “conspiracy theorist” just last year, or the words of Justice Warren.
When private companies chose to restrict misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines after receiving comments from the Biden administration, “Coach” ominously warned that Democrats “are DESTROYING the First Amendment by censoring anyone who disagrees with them.”
But now that the right has taken power, Tuberville is excited to personally drive anyone who doesn’t weep at Kirk’s grave from the nation’s universities. Moreover, he is perfectly willing to cosign the federal government coercing private companies into censoring speech.
Last week, Disney-owned network ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live! from their schedule after FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr called comments Kimmel made about the right’s depiction of Kirk’s killer “the sickest conduct possible.”
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr stated, apparently threatening ABC News’ broadcast license. Trump has also repeatedly said the administration might revoke licenses from outlets that are too critical of him.
And when a comedian had his platform temporarily revoked—by all appearances because the government had directly threatened the network—where was Tuberville the free speech warrior? After all, when Zuckerberg wrote in a letter that the Biden administration had recommended taking down “certain COVID-19 content,” but it had still been Facebook’s “decision whether or not to take content down,” Tuberville was right there, accusing Democrats of ending freedom of speech.
Well, this time Tuberville was publicly praising ABC and Disney for caving into government pressure and cancelling a comedian. “It isn’t ‘cancel culture’ for Sinclair and Nexstar to hold him ACCOUNTABLE for his words,” he laughably claimed. “I’m glad to see ABC and Disney grew a spine, for once.” Freedom of speech is evidently only a right enjoyed by a specific, select group of people in his eyes.
To quote a certain U.S. senator one final time, “there has been a dramatic shift from principled rejections of falsehoods, to partisan restrictions on speech that contradicts the political views of the people in control” as of late. Given recent events, I cannot help but worry this shift will continue.
