First Amendment Legal Expert Floyd Abrams on Trump’s Chilling Executive Order Designed to Kill Free Speech – Showbiz411

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Floyd Abrams is one of the countrys leading legal experts on the First Amendment. Hes also the father of journalist Dan Abrams. Floyd spoke today on Dans SiriusXM radio show regarding Donald Trumps new Executive Order designed to kill free speech.

Trump is incensed by Twitter fact checking his inane, crazy and dangerous Tweets regarding mail-in ballots for voting. Trump is trying to scare his followers into believing that mailed ballots arent safe and will be tampered with. This isnt true, of course, but Trumps sadly illiterate and easily impressionable base can be told almost anything including the sky is falling and theyd believe it.

Trumps Executive Order is only about him, and his petty differences with Twitter. But it threatens the First Amendment, which hes never read.

Says Floyd Abrams:

The First Amendment issue is: can you shut up the social media entities when they engage in what they view as fact-checking? And I dont think you can. Im confident that that would violate the First Amendment. And, at the end of the day, thats what this is all about. No matter what the results are of any internal studies. What is sought here by the president, what is sought here by the drafters of the executive order, is a limitation on speech. And thats what the First Amendment does not allow.

Of course, a lot of this has to do with Trump trying to distract his base from the fact that over 100,000 people have died from corona virus, and he let it happen. Or caused it by his inaction and his easily seen clips of denying that corona virus would do any harm. The death toll rises, the new cases rise, in places where Trump voters could be mortally affected, and he wants to point the finger at anyone else.

Nevertheless, Abrams said he doesnt think Trump can get away with it.

Abrams said: At the end of the day, Im confident, maybe wrong, but Im confident that the administration will not be able to prevent Twitter and its competitors from putting in their own ultimate, for themselves, judgment that something the presidentor anyone elsesays online is inconsistent with the truth.

Roger Friedman began his Showbiz411 column in April 2009 after 10 years with Fox News, where he created the Fox411 column. He wrote the Intelligencer column for NY Magazine in the mid 90s, reporting on the OJ Simpson trial, as well as for the real Parade magazine (when it was owned by Conde Nast), and has written for the New York Observer, Details, Vogue, Spin, the New York Times, NY Post, Washington Post, and NY Daily News among many publications. He is the writer and co-producer of "Only the Strong Survive," a selection of the Cannes, Sundance, and Telluride Film festivals, directed by DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus.

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First Amendment Legal Expert Floyd Abrams on Trump's Chilling Executive Order Designed to Kill Free Speech - Showbiz411