I'm not one to put a gloss on the post-9/11 era - sometimes I think I am one of the cursed few who remembers - but the pressures on "speech" were, mostly, fairly minor. There were some mostly obviously lines you didn't cross, and certainly not if you were Muslim or Arab, but teachers weren't getting fired for making a George Bush joke, generally.
The Dixie Chicks incident was more exception than rule, and while it was bad, they were famous public figures, not relative nobodies.
Also 9/11 was a genuine national emergency, which doesn't excuse any overreactions to it, but does provide a context for them. Now the national emergency is that this fucking guy is president.
And, yes, I know, by March, 2003, somehow 9/11 had morphed into Iraq, with none of our fearless celebrity journalists noticing. The actual national emergency was transformed into something it wasn't. Still, context.
