A recent commentary by Dan Schneider of the Media Research Center’s Free Speech America initiative argues that President Donald Trump has taken sweeping action to dismantle what he describes as a far‑reaching censorship apparatus built under President Joe Biden. The piece contends that Trump’s directives and staffing moves curtailed federal involvement in moderating online speech and strengthened protections for political expression.
In an opinion column published by The Daily Wire, Dan Schneider, vice president for free speech at the conservative Media Research Center (MRC), claims that President Donald Trump has moved aggressively against what he calls censorship mechanisms established under President Joe Biden.
Schneider writes that MRC Free Speech America has documented what it describes as “the most expansive government-driven censorship system in U.S. history,” alleging that under Biden, federal agencies pressured social media companies to suppress lawful political speech, partnered with private organizations to provide “plausible deniability” for censorship efforts, and used government “switchboards” to route thousands of takedown requests for posts to be hidden, throttled, or removed.
According to Schneider’s account, these efforts went beyond attempts to combat misinformation and instead focused on shaping political narratives ahead of elections, amounting, in his view, to unlawful government censorship. He contends that Trump responded by issuing executive orders, installing and directing key personnel, and adopting internal directives that bar federal officials from engaging in censorship of protected speech. In the column’s telling, these moves significantly weakened what Schneider calls Biden’s “censorship machine” and reduced the leverage federal officials could exert over social media platforms.
The Daily Wire piece also highlights remarks Schneider attributes to Trump “just before taking the oath of office for the second time.” In that passage, Trump is quoted as saying: “If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. … If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple, just like dominoes.” The article presents this as an example of Trump publicly framing robust speech protections as essential to American democracy.
Schneider further argues that Trump’s approach extended beyond social media. He asserts that National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service accepted billions of dollars in taxpayer funding while failing to comply with legal obligations to ensure “strict adherence to objectivity and balance.” In his description, Trump’s administration and Federal Communications Commission officials, including Commissioner Brendan Carr, sought to enforce those statutory standards on publicly funded broadcasters, which Schneider characterizes as “accountability” rather than censorship.
The column also contends that Trump challenged what Schneider calls a longstanding norm on university campuses of tolerating criminal acts such as blocking highways, occupying buildings, vandalizing property and, in some cases, assaults, when those activities were framed as social or political activism. Schneider claims that Trump’s Justice Department and other federal agencies made clear that such conduct would be treated as criminal behavior rather than protected expression under the First Amendment, though the Daily Wire piece does not detail specific cases.
Summing up these actions, Schneider maintains that Trump has “done more to defend constitutionally protected speech and to dismantle the most coordinated censorship regime in modern American history than any president in living memory.” He concludes that, in his view, Trump “has made free speech great again” by reinforcing the principle that the U.S. government may not dictate which opinions are permissible.
The claims in Schneider’s essay reflect the perspective of MRC Free Speech America and The Daily Wire. Many of the legal characterizations in the column — including whether Biden’s policies amounted to illegal censorship and whether Trump’s actions fully dismantled a coordinated federal ‘censorship machine’ — are matters of ongoing political and legal debate, and are not uniformly accepted by legal scholars, courts, or other news organizations.