Another Federal War on Free Speech

“If it is known that authorities have power to coerce, few people will wait for actual coercion,” economist Friedrich Hayek wrote in the 1956 foreword to his 1944 classic The Road to Serfdom. Hayek’s insight could be the Rosetta Stone for understanding the Trump administration’s zealotry for assailing freedom of speech.

On March 25, six masked federal agents seized a Turkish graduate student on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. Rumeysa Ozturk, who was wearing a hijab, was a Fulbright sch...