Vigilance Trumps Vengeance

After 49 years of HUSTLER’s fight for free speech, our constitutional rights still hang by a thread.

It’s early, but later than you think. The 2024 Presidential election is shaping up to be a rerun of 2020, when Democratic candidate Joe Biden narrowly defeated Republican strongman Donald Trump. A lot could change between now and then, especially with an elderly indicted former President and an even more elderly current one.

While largely past the horrors of the 2020 pandemic, the stakes and choices will be no less stark in 2024’s contest. Our choice, at a perilous moment in history, will have a profound effect worldwide.

In lieu of real legislative power at the national level, Republican state lawmakers are unleashing fury on their own constituents: banning free speech in public schools, removing books from library shelves, taking away healthcare, canceling reproductive freedoms. Huge companies, like Disney, that dare criticize policies are being punished by weaponized GOP state governments and wannabe autocrats.

Thirty-five years after Larry Flynt’s greatest victory for free speech—the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark, unanimous decision in HUSTLER Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell—the First Amendment is taking its beatings, particularly from Trump’s war against the media, his “enemy of the people.”