Time’s person of the year for 2024 was a 34-count convicted felon. That same felon is not serving prison time but serving his second term in the Oval Office as the 47th President of the United States of America. With him, he touts a sordid brotherhood contingent and a populist policy guide, the ground soldiers intended to ‘abrogate’ the delicate and singularly profound system of checks and balances that exist in America’s democracy. This trenchant political uncertainty provokes an equally pertinent legal instability, manifest most fearfully in a curtailment of one’s freedom to express.
The land of the free and home of the brave is a twisting and widening gyre, a proverbial dam once brimming with dreams, broken to reveal a spillway mired by a capitalist dystopia, megalomania, censorship- an unchecked American nightmare.
The right to freedom of expression in the US, once the bedrock of a fearless American identity, is facing an undeniable doomsday. The architects of the Trump campaign and Project 2025 have made clear a universal truth of the administration- to reform the federal government is “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will”. This fetid reality is born a tragic and natural consequence of Trump’s socially conservative policies and an even more frightening view to the emerging oligarchic figures influencing these policies. But make no mistake, the limitation is not without legislative legitimacy. There exist legal strategies in present-day America known as SLAPP Laws that provide a convenient guardrail for this crooked administration. SLAPP is an acronym for Strategic Legal Actions Against Public Participation. But these laws do not seek to ‘right a wrong’. Instead, the UK Government define SLAPP actions as “an abuse of the legal process, where the primary objective is to harass, intimidate and financially and psychologically exhaust one’s opponent via improper means”. Where most nation states are united in the common belief that the existence of anti-SLAPP legislation is imperative for preserving the freedom to express, America’s federal government show no signs of the same homogeneity of ideas. In fact, the country has never faced a greater danger with regard to the legislation than with the Trump administration and his oligarchic henchmen.
So what about the oligarchs, the fat cats and their fat pockets- the megalomaniacs? How are they relevant here, and more specifically, how are these laws of relevance to them? President Biden, the frail and final frontier of free America, left the presidency and the world with a message akin to an almanac’s foretelling of a fallow season, a desert for hope and prosperity. He outlined the idea that there lies a “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people” explaining that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom, It doesn’t take a decorated historian to realise that the idea flies in the face of all America has ever stood for: a seat of democracy and equal opportunities for all, a constitution of parity and of dreams, by the people and for the people. The address has been debated, but what hasn’t been is the data that legitimises Biden’s claims. It has been proven that ‘the richest 1% of Americans possess more wealth than the bottom 90%’. A sizable number of the 1% are tech moguls that control the flows and channels of information, and these are the henchmen in question. That’s the difference, and that’s the relevance. As Daniel Kinderman notes, if technology giants wield power aligned with a single interest—especially the Trump Administration—America's future is in question, and censorship becomes a convenient tool for that gilded few to advance. Indeed, Trump himself has been no stranger to using these maligned measures to advance his career. In his case against author Tim O’Brien, a vocal critic of Trump, the president commented that he ‘spent a couple of bucks on legal fees and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about’. Indeed, in both Trump v The New York Times 2020 and Trump v CNN 2022, the cases were fuelled to an end of silencing- punishing and intimidating critics through expensive litigation. Both cases were dismissed, but this is a far cry from the point. The principle stands that Trump was enabled to waste time, money and legal resources all to bolster his Janus-faced reputation by exploiting the freedom of others to express their opinion. It consolidates the ‘strong man’ mentality that has infected the integrity of the presidency, this idea that might is right, where the might in question is a case of the highest quantifiable wealth. SLAPP laws seem to say that to have an opinion is to have money. Opinion is fast becoming a pursuit of the wealthy- a right for them and a privilege for the rest of us.
So, where do we go from here? Does there exist a route upwards, or do we face an inevitable spiral? A descent into the ‘broligarchy’ seems to be the spectre looming above us for now. History attempts to comfort us with the ever-present allegorical pendulum- the idea that a swing back to the reasonable is inevitable. But conveying an idea that complex modern-day political and legal scenarios are as arbitrary as the movement of a weighted piece of metal aligned with clockwork provides a futile explanation. If humans are anything, we are certainly not beings akin to the regimentation of clockwork. The unprecedented is the only true paradigm of human history. So, while oligarchies have existed since ancient Greece, the sinister and far-reaching impact of a modern-day one cannot be underestimated and certainly can’t be diminished by any proverbial pendulum. With the existence of SLAPP law strategies, or indeed notable lack of any substantial anti-SLAPP legislation, the pendulum looks set to stagnate: our freedom to express threatened and the unjustifiable, justified. This abuse of legal tactics will bear consequences globally, as Amnesty International lists SLAPP tactics not only a risk to freedom of expression, but indeed to a host of other fundamental human rights. The American President’s wide and liberal use of the strategies inside and outside his career in the oval office generates a dangerous precedent for other nations to encourage the same abuse of dissent, the same abuse of expression.
Comments