Politics & Power Quote by Floyd Abrams

There’s a chill in how ordinary the machinery sounds: “go to court,” “with respect to,” “pieces and the like.” Abrams, a First Amendment lawyer who’s spent a career watching government test the outer edge of press freedom, isn’t predicting jackboots so much as pointing to the bureaucratic path that gets you there. The danger is framed as procedure, not spectacle. And that’s exactly the point.

The phrasing builds a ladder of escalation. Start with “bad” (aesthetic judgment), slide to “harmful” (a public-interest claim), then land on “even against the government” (naked self-protection). That “even” does heavy lifting: it exposes the tell that the real target isn’t misinformation in the abstract, but criticism that inconveniences power. Once the category includes “against the government,” censorship stops pretending to be a neutral safety measure and becomes brand management with a gavel.

Abrams also foregrounds the tactic: not banning speech outright, but “try to block” specific items. That’s prior restraint by another name, a legal move the U.S. traditionally treats as the most toxic form of suppression because it prevents publication before the public can judge it. Courts become the stage, national security or “harm” becomes the script, and the press becomes the defendant by default.

The subtext is a warning about normalization: if the state can litigate journalism into silence, freedom of the press doesn’t die in a raid. It dies in motions, injunctions, and the quiet cost of fighting the government every time you publish something it doesn’t like.