President Donald Trump’s administration has taken action on two Biden-era initiatives revealed by MRC Free Speech America to have been targeting Americans’ constitutionally protected speech.
MRC Free Speech America released a study on March 13 exposing 57 Biden administration censorship initiatives. Under the Biden administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a compelled speech rule requiring companies to suppress employees’ speech that ran afoul of leftist fearmongering about climate change (Initiative #45). The Biden Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), furthermore, awarded a grant to the University of Washington to create virtual “escape rooms” to push censorship (Initiative #17).
But no more. On March 14, Trump signed an executive order taking an ax to the IMLS workforce, and on March 28, Trump’s SEC voted to stop defending the Biden-era climate change disclosure rule.
MRC Free Speech America highlighted the anti-free speech SEC rule imposing liabilities if a company’s employees criticized leftist dogma on climate change. From the MRC study:
“Under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) instituted a “climate disclosure rule.” This rule mandated that companies “pronounce their subjective judgment calls about future risks—requiring, for example,‘determination[s] of’ which risks to their businesses are ‘climate-related.’” The rule required companies to consider hypothetical climate effects of actions they were only tangentially related to.
“In addition to a massive regulatory burden, this rule made companies liable if someone could argue in any court that the statements of its staff were misleading about the risks associated with climate change. This meant that, to be safe from potential costly litigation, corporations were obligated to limit any employee speech criticizing the left’s position that we are in a man-made climate crisis.”
SEC acting chair Mark Uyeda labeled the rule “costly and unnecessarily intrusive,” according to a March 28 report from The Hill.
MRC also exposed nefarious goings on at the IMLS in a supplement to the 57 initiatives study. In the supplement, MRC showed how the IMLS paid the University of Washington to create virtual “escape rooms” to push censorship. The grant proposal awarded $249,691 to address a so-called “information disorder,” which had to be treated by “deferring to authoritative sources.”
The university bragged about keeping the IMLS grant secret and declared it would “target” its reeducation campaign towards the “Black-identified.” It also frankly admitted that the designer team would be racially segregated.
Fortunately, IMLS has now been largely eliminated by Trump. In a March 14 executive order, Trump stated that theIMLS among other federal entities must be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, and such entities shall reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law.”
Free speech is under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech and government be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
MRC Senior Counsel for Investigations Tim Kilcullen contributed to this report.
