Trump’s Sedition Act for Israel
At all times and places it has been difficult to speak freely. Even the founding fathers had their Sedition Act of 1798 that criminalized statements against the US government. Shortly afterward President Thomas Jefferson got most of it repealed.
President Lincoln during his 1861-1865 invasion of the Confederate States of America had a de facto sedition act. Lincoln used executive orders, military directives, martial law, and the suspension of habeas corpus to shut down free speech. At one time Lincoln had 300 Northern newspaper editors in prison
In 1918, Congress passed a new Sedition Act that applied when the US government was at war. The law prohibited speech and opinion that put the US government and its war effort in a bad light. The bad light was that US President Woodrow Wilson promised Germany no territorial loss and no reparations in exchange for an armistice, and betrayed the promise. The result was the Treaty of Versailles that as British economist John Maynard Keynes correctly predicted led to World War II.
President Trump has declared his own Sedition Act issued not by Congress, increasingly an irrelevant government institution, but by Trump’s personal defense lawyer currently serving as US Attorney General. Trump’s Sedition Act is unique. It protects from criticism not the US government, but a foreign one — Israel. The May 19 press release of the US Department of Justice (sic) says:
“President Trump has made clear that this administration will not tolerate antisemitism, and the Department of justice is committed to implementing that directive.” https://paulcraigroberts.org/acting-attorney-general-conveys-privileges-to-israel-and-trump-family-that-are-denied-to-americans/
Understand that the US Department of Justice is now the protector of Israel, as is the US military and US taxpayers, and antisemitism means any criticism of Israel. For example, Israel’s genocide of Palestine and its people, Israel’s interference in tenure decisions of US universities, the hiring and contracting policies of state governments such as Texas and Florida, Israel’s funding of the primary defeat of US Republican Representative Thomas Massie, Israel’s assassinations of foreign leaders, Israel’s suspected assassination of Charlie Kirk, suspicion that Epstein was a Mossad agent collecting blackmail information against Americans in a position to influence US foreign party in the Middle East, and on and on. Every thought, question, statement of fact that can be interpreted as hostile to Israel has become anti-semitism and will not be tolerated by the US Department of Justice (sic).
Clearly, the Trump regime, essentially a Zionist regime, has no intention of permitting any correct information to be aired. If you challenge or taunt the Regime, you are shut down like Colbert, Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and so many others.
The Washington Post published an article on May 21 about President Trump’s efforts to silence late night TV hosts. Apparently, Trump succeeded in intimidating CBS to cancel Stephen Colbert. NBC’s Seth Meyers and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel believe they are on the hit list. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/2026/05/21/trump-keeps-targeting-late-night-tv-hosts-keep-pushing-back/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter
A discredited media unable to hold Trump to account has replaced a former biased media.
During my professional lifetime the print and TV media had a liberal bias, coming down hard on conservatives and Republicans and lightly, if at all, on the leftwing and Democrats. The liberal media was more or less at the beck and call of the CIA, but the New York Times did finally decide to publish the leaked Pentagon Papers, an act that contributed to the end of the Vietnam War.
During the 1980s and I think the 1990s the New York Times asked me twice a year for an op-ed article addressing a specified subject. If memory serves, two was the annual limit for outside contributors, although perhaps not for liberal-left ones. As I had been a presidential appointee in the Reagan administration, a trustee of the Committee on the Present Danger, a Wall Street Journal editor and columnist, and a contributing editor of National Review, the liberal media regarded me as a conservative instead of a person who thought for himself.
The Washington Post was also friendly in a limited way. The Post’s editorial page editor was pleased to occasionally have me on her page and once took me to lunch with some of her colleagues. When at the end of the 20th century I could no longer stomach the corruption and backstabbing of the Washington snake pit and departed to the beach in Florida, the Washington Post sent a star reporter and camera team to my Florida home for a full-fledged interview and expressed regret that an honest voice had forsaken the nation’s capital. The fact that the Washington Post thought that I was honest did not mean that the Post thought I was correct.
In those days large newspapers like the Times and Post comfortably existed on advertising revenues so varied that no advertiser could, very often, influence the newspaper. Media had a liberal bias, but that was their own decision. It wasn’t imposed on them. Unlike today, there was enough belief left in the media in debate in place of silencing critics, resulting in occasional presentation of alternative explanations to the official narratives.
In the 21st century the media for whatever reasons has become censorious, demonizing those in opposition to official narratives. The result has been to discredit the media as a source of information.
Today we don’t have, as existed in my 25 years in Washington, a media even partially open to different explanations.
With the traditional TV and print media discredited, and the lack of transparency of most of the Internet media, to whom do we turn for credible explanations? My own attempts to deliver truth are compromised by invalid accusations against me by Zionist organizations, the political left, and liberals who still believe that more government is the answer. The assaults on me are intended to limit my readership, and the assaults have had a partial success. I suspect that I am now read more abroad than in the United States.
Perhaps I have failed in my approach to insouciant Americans who, despite the high stakes, are unaware of the demands on them of our time. If so, my failure is small compared to that of the media, which by destroying its own credibility, has destroyed the media’s checkmate on the rise of a Caesar.
America now has a president who goes to war at the request of his most important campaign contributors without authorization of the US Congress as long as the request is in Israel’s behalf. The legal advisor to the US Department of State, Reed Rubinstein, has penned a justification for Trump’s military attack on Iran which states the United States initiated its military campaign against Iran (Operation Epic Fury) “at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally”. Note that the State Department defines aggression as self-defense. Clearly Under President Trump, the United States of America now commits its resources and lives of its military personnel to the achievement of the Zionist agenda of Greater Israel. Americans are now taxed and die for Israel’s domination of the Middle East. If you dissent, you are punished as an “anti-semite.”
Until the 21std century, I cannot imagine the American media allowing this to happen. The digital revolution by putting the power of money over the media in a few hands has cancelled even a biased free press. In its place there is a propaganda ministry.
President Trump’s anti-semitism policy cancels the First Amendment if it is used by Americans for criticism of Israeli government policies, such as the genocide in Palestine.
When the Israel Lobby can cancel the First Amendment, you know that the United States is no longer a sovereign country.
A country at Israel’s beck and call is America today, thanks to Donald Trump. Yet, a significant percentage of Trump’s supporters conflates MAGA with MIGA. American patriotism now requires patriotism to Israel. As the latest mantra goes, “you can’t be an American if you don’t love Israel.” You have to hand it to the Zionists. They have even stolen our patriotism.
https://paulcraigroberts.org/trumps-sedition-act-for-israel/