Trump and Free Speech

 This is the text of a letter I just sent to the Everett, Washington, Herald, my local paper:

President Donald Trump is conducting a campaign against free speech, a right the US Constitution guarantees to every one of us. He has compelled CBS and ABC to cancel popular late night talk shows because their hosts, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, insist on telling the truth about him and his administration. Trump has said that broadcasters who speak out against him should lose their licenses. Freedom of speech means nothing if it doesn't apply to people and voices one doesn't like. I spend the 1975-76 academic year in Soviet Russia. I saw a freedom of speech guaranteed by the Soviet constitution mean nothing because the regime permitted only voices that supported it and suppressed voices that sought to criticize it. That wasn't freedom in Soviet Russia, and it isn't freedom in the United States of America. We will all surely lose our right of free speech, and other rights as well, if Donald Trump gets his way. We must, somehow, nonviolently, make sure that he doesn't.