The White House is following an old authoritarian playbook to suppress dissent.
A mobile billboard assails the censorship regime of FCC Chair Brendan Carr outside the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC.( Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images for Free Press)
In his previously unreleased preface to Animal Farm, discovered by Ian Angus in 1972 and published later that year by the Times Literary Supplement, George Orwell wrote: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
As an anti-fascist, Orwell most likely meant that liberty means the right to tell people in power what they do not want to hear. Most Americans would agree that the right to question authority is a nonnegotiable premise of democracy, but one that has met with repression throughout our history and even more so now, during wartime.
Evidence of that repression is quietly mounting all around us. Among the more alarming examples is the federal government’s recent threat to revoke broadcasting licenses if the administration finds content displeasing.
In March, Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), warned that broadcasters could lose their licenses if their reporting fails to comply with MAGA doctrine. “Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions—also known as the fake news—have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr posted on X. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”
On Truth Social, the president seconded that threat, accusing some media organizations of being “Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic” and whining that they “get Billions of Dollars of FREE American Airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES.” Trump concluded by referencing the reality series he once hosted: “As I used to say in The Apprentice, ‘FIRED.’”
These comments suggest that MAGA officials now fear free speech and may consider those who use it as potential criminals or enemies.
As the late great Bob McChesney would often remind us, the Federal Communications Commission has a mandate to manage the airwaves in the people’s interest, not those of big business or the president. The “No Kings” purpose of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution is to distribute power, not concentrate it, a mission augmented by independent media.
The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that the federal government cannot punish news organizations—or anyone else—for oppositional viewpoints. The First Amendment’s protection of press freedoms would be little more than ink on the page if officials could cancel broadcasting licenses whenever coverage aimed to keep them in check.
Fascists fear free speech, and fear is the source of Carr’s demand that broadcasters “correct course.” Such language echoes a familiar pattern in systems that treat democracy as the enemy: First, authorities insist that the media must align with official narratives; then they demand the same obeisance from the general population.
Press freedom advocates recognized the danger immediately. Will Creeley wrote: “Brendan Carr’s authoritarian warning—that networks risk their broadcasting licenses for Iran war reporting that the government doesn’t like—is outrageous.” When government demands the press “become a state mouthpiece under the threat of punishment,” he said, “something has gone very wrong.”
California’s Governor Gavin Newsom warned that “if Trump doesn’t like your coverage of the war, his FCC will pull your broadcast license. That is flagrantly unconstitutional.”
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
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Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz described Carr’s statement as “a clear directive to provide positive war coverage or else licenses may not be renewed.”
Democratic Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts immediately wrote a public letter to Carr saying his threat to revoke licenses is “your latest authoritarian attempt to weaponize the FCC’s statutory authority to censor the media. It is a stain on the FCC’s storied history, and you should resign.”
Their concerns were preceded by a bipartisan group of FCC commissioners who warned in November 2025 that the mere “specter of government interference alone chills broadcasters’ speech.”
As a former pamphleteer, pirate radio broadcaster, and low-power FM advocate who took the FCC to court to preserve the public’s right to access the airwaves at the community level, I believe deeply in the free and unfettered use of radio, libraries, streets, and public parks as spaces for challenging power and imagining new ways of being, learning, and loving. We are now gradually losing ground in many of these spaces.
Existential threats to democracy emerge not only through attempted coups like the one staged on January 6, 2021, but also through smaller, incremental acts: a few unjustified arrests here, a few ICE killings there, along with the quiet criminalization of those who, like the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, dare to expose the atrocities caused by our policies. No one act may irrefutably prove full-blown fascism has arrived, but what does that really matter if you or your loved ones are among those who have been threatened, disappeared, silenced, or killed?
The president’s propagandists insist that the FCC simply expects broadcasters to serve the public interest. But in a constitutional democracy, the public interest cannot mean blind obedience to the boss. Challenging official narratives serves the public interest—especially in wartime, when governments feel compelled to control information and deflect public outrage from horrors like the killing of 165 Iranian schoolgirls in a war that was not authorized by the people’s representatives in Congress.
The tilt toward Orwellian censorship underscores a broader shift concerning the meaning of trust in the media. Carr suggests that tighter control is the solution for broadcasters’ straying from the administration’s version of events. But conforming to official doctrine can never render journalism credible. If anything, the opposite is true: Credibility depends on the public knowing that reporters are free to pursue investigations wherever they lead—particularly during wartime—without the fear of death threats, losing one’s job, or worse.
Threatening to silence broadcasters—or anyone else—for critiquing the atrocities being committed in our name erases democratic accountability and replaces it with a demand for obedience.
It was heartening, therefore, when, on March 17, 2026, Joe Kent, a combat veteran and former CIA officer, refused to continue taking orders from the president and quit his job as MAGA’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center. In a letter of protest addressed directly to the president and sent to over 430,000 online followers, Kent said, “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.” The rationale for going to war, Kent explained, was based on a “lie” similar to the lies once used to draw the US into a “disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.” We can only hope that Kent’s refusal to go along with the lies will be emulated by others in the MAGA regime.
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The framers crafted a constitution that protects our right not only to freely critique those in power, but also to freely reimagine power itself. This opened space for what W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, and others have called “abolition democracy”—one capable of shedding the violence of settler-colonial legacies and advancing new frontiers of liberation based on solidarity, community, human affirmation, and love.
While those legacies dominate, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. The truth today is that we live in an age of creeping fascism, genocide, and war. Pretending otherwise is a form of complicity. Keeping the publicly owned airwaves open as a space to challenge a dystopian agenda is the true and revolutionary purpose of democracy and free speech, and we should infuse all of our movements with tactics for their defense.
Greg RuggieroGreg Ruggiero is an editor at large for Seven Stories Press.