How a free speech evangelist became the White House's state censor-in-chief

Trump-appointed chair of the US media regulator, Brendan Carr has launched an alarming attack on the president’s critics, reports Hugh Tomlinson in Washington

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In the opening line of his entry in Project 2025, the 900-page conservative manifesto that has become a blueprint for Donald Trump's second presidency, Brendan Carr was clear about the fundamental goal of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

“The FCC should promote freedom of speech,” Carr wrote in his chapter on TV and tech regulation last year.

Carr had long made clear he was a free speech evangelist. “Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not,” he wrote on Twitter, now X, in 2019. “The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.”

In December 2023, nearly a year before Trump’s election victory, Carr declared: “Free speech is the counterweight — it is the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.”

This is the same Carr, now Trump's handpicked chair of the FCC, who last week launched arguably the biggest governmental assault on freedom of speech in US history.