Intelligencer writer Ross Barkan reports Trump “is going to lose the war on free speech” in a pattern reminiscent of Democrats’ overreach on police reform, but worse.
“This all amounts to what one could call the ‘woke’ right; a resurgent regime that is stifling free discourse and justifying it through the same logic that social-justice activists and certain Democratic politicians employed in the 2010s and early 2020s,” Barkan wrote.
The similarity here is the absence of organic, nationwide support.
“Unlike the speech crackdowns in the wake of 9/11 or the McCarthy period, there is no widespread support for such blatant overreach,” said Barkan. “Trump is not a popular president, [Charlie] Kirk was nowhere near as revered as conservatives seem to believe he was and if ABC and CBS have already capitulated to the White House … the Times, lacking corporate ownership, will be glad to battle Trump in court and win.”
Barkas said another issue with the greater public and MAGA’s emerging war on free speech is that the greater public is, well, greater.
“What those in MAGA-land will learn, as enough time passes, is that they cannot engineer full cultural control. They cannot force millions of people to suddenly pretend to think Kirk is a fallen martyr who should never be critiqued again. They cannot convince college students, through brute pressure on gutless administrations, to salute the Israeli flag and cheer Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal incursions into Gaza.”
George W. Bush’s ability to forcibly suppress antiwar dissidents at the onset of the Iraq invasion came courtesy of the September 11 attacks, which gave him an approval rating north of 90 percent.
“Trump has no comparable emergency to gesture toward, and Republicans, utterly subservient to his whims, are glad to dispense with the illusion they ever cared about free speech,” said Barkan. “It’s remarkable to witness how fast conservatives have abandoned any pretense of caring about the First Amendment after years of decrying illiberalism on the left.”
But the Trump administration can’t even “begin to claim a mandate for its menacing actions,” Barkan said.
A MAGA regime will run the country for at least three more years, he said, but even if it manages to control the levers of government, it will never have organic support from the culture again.
“It has been exposed for what it is composed of: sniveling would-be commissars longing for a dystopia they will never, no matter how hard they try, be able to build,” said Barkan. “They can’t trick young people into backing the Israeli government or treating Kirk like Martin Luther King Jr. They can’t make all media into MAGA propagandists. Their wrath, if unnerving, is ultimately pathetic.”
Read the full Intelligencer report at this link.