The GOP is Declaring Total War on Free Speech. Now's the Time for Democrats to Reclaim It.
Increasingly, it feels like we've returned to the Bush years. That creates an opportuniy for the opposition party.
On Monday, comedian and late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel told a bad joke.
“The MAGA Gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” he said. “In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.”
The joke wasn’t very funny, and it was based on a flawed premise: the idea that the suspect in the Kirk assassination had a right-wing political affiliation. There is no reason to believe this. While jokes don’t have to be literal, they need to at least exist on some kind of factual basis that makes them ironic. So it was a bad joke.
But bad jokes happen. Every late night host has said something that outraged one side of the aisle or another and/or outraged an audience for a day. But people move on. No short-term outrage creates any long-term pain in a situation like this. That is, unless, there is another factor involved.
On Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr — who carries the power to regulate public networks like ABC, where Kimmel’s show airs — weighed in.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
In a few hours, ABC appeared to get the message. They announced that Kimmel would be suspended indefinitely. The station group Nexstar (the parent company of NewsNation, where I worked some years ago) was reportedly key to ABC’s decision. Nexstar is seeking a merger with Tegna. The people who have the power to approve or deny that merger? The Trump administration.
This is hardly the only way Trump and has administration have acted against free speech recently. In the past week:
The Vice President of the United States encouraged people to snitch on Americans they know who disparaged Charlie Kirk in order to get them fired.
The Attorney General of the United States warned Americans against using “hate speech” (no such legal category exists, but whatever).
She also seemingly threatened to have the federal government intervene if print shops refuse to produce photos of Kirk.
The Lieutenant Governor of Texas stated that miscreant students who dishonor Kirk should literally never hold a job again in their lives.
The President designated “Antifa” as a “Major Terrorist Organization,” a category that doesn’t exist in any U.S. law, promising to thoroughly investigate anybody who funds this organization (Antifa is a loose ideological moniker used by some left-anarchists and is not an organization at all). We can all guess how this will be used.
Embiggened by Kimmel’s suspension, he also asked for Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers to be fired. Their corporate employers , too, have a myriad of interests before the government. This gives Trump leverage over them.
He also filed a $15 billion defamation suit against The New York Times and Penguin Random House, saying that their writings endangered his ability to be elected president in 2024. (He was elected president, and last I checked this isn’t actually a legal grounds for a lawsuit?)
The President also suggested to an Australian journalist that they were harming Australia’s prospects in the United States by asking an adversarial question — a clear act of intimidation.
White House Adviser Stephen Miller mocked freedom of speech advocates, saying that the GOP should not “mimic the ACLU of the mid 90’s”; instead, they should take all necessary and rational steps to save Western Civilization. (Who appointed him Western Civilization czar, I wonder.)
Comedy clubs are telling comedians at open mics to not make jokes about Kirk, fearing the consequences.
I probably missed a bunch of items, as this has been a crazy week. The GOP seems to have returned fully to the censorious posture it had during the Bush years, when it had similar levels of government power and more cultural influence than it does today.
But John Ashcroft could have only dreamt of having this level of hall monitor power over the American people. The advent of social media, combined with an administration that is willing to use the levers of power the government has over major corporations, has given Trump and Vance and Bondi control of a Panopticon that can punish WrongThink from everyone from late night TV hosts to ordinary Americans.
We’re all the Dixie Chicks now.
I’m sorry, aren’t they just The Chicks now?
Which brings me to the left.
Following the events in Ferguson, Missouri, in the mid-2010s, many liberals understandably were outraged by the persistent level of racial and ethnic inequality that remains in the United States.
They backed up this belief with by re-evaluating their beliefs about freedom of speech. Maybe some speech crosses the line. Is it really fair to “punch down” against racial minority groups? Maybe some speech — even if it’s fully legal and constitutionally protected — can even make people feel unsafe.
And yet we are now witnessing the consequences of the left abandoning its longstanding commitment to free speech norms. A particularly authoritarian stream of the GOP, represented by Trump and his cult of personality, have adopted these very same views and is using them to declare a total war on freedom of speech.
This means that we could be entering an environment where free speech has basically no principled advocates on either side of the aisle. This would be apocalyptic for the American experiment of freedom of expression.
But in the face of such grave odds, there’s a real opportunity here.
In the days after Kirk’s killing, we saw from people from all walks of life about how sad they were to see such an act of murder. And this wasn’t the hardcore MAGA people saying this either.
But Trump’s authoritarian overreach in the face of this murder — his attempt to use it as a modern day Reichstag Fire to rewrite speech norms and extend his influence over a chunk of corporate media — will in time create a mighty backlash. Americans don’t like to be bullied or censored.
The Democratic Party can, if it chooses to, be the face of that backlash. It can defend freedom of speech in every arena possible, portraying the GOP as the Trump-flavored hall monitors they’ve become.
The only way to do this, however, is to acknowledge that the progressive arguments about free speech that became vogue in the 2010s were fundamentally wrong, and that the only way out of the abyss right now is to argue that people have a right to speak their mind, even if they’re rude or crude. Shutting up speech and shutting up debate is fundamentally un-American, and you can’t force people to like a podcaster who was often incendiary and offensive. I doubt that’s what even Kirk himself would have wanted.
Whether this is the right taking the opportunity to kick their opponent while they're down or a more permanent move to illiberalism has yet to be determined.
Asking the left to reclaim the mantle of free speech is asking a generation of indoctrinated leftists to abandon the principles they've lived by for a decade. I suspect the cognitive dissonance will be too much for them. Suppressing speech was always about power, and I suspect the current batch of lefty Millennials and Zoomers will conclude instead that the real lesson is that they didn't have enough of that. How they address that imbalance will have interesting implications for the stability of the country for the next few years.
🤣The Democrats have been censoring free speech for years now. The creators of the Disinformation Governance Board!