Just as you can’t reasonably discuss political violence in our nation without acknowledging that it is perpetrated by insane extremists of all stripes, so you can’t pretend that the other side is full of melty snowflakes who can’t take the heat when your side takes cancel culture to new levels without any sense at all of the double-standard irony.
President Donald Trump, unlike any other president in modern memory, in the wake of the assassination of his ally Charlie Kirk refused to acknowledge that such violence is being perpetrated by malign forces on the right as well as on the left. But Trump as usual takes such a position to extremes. Asked at a press conference why he did not order flags lowered to honor Melissa Hortman, the Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives who was assassinated alongside her husband this summer, as he did for Kirk, Trump initially said he was “not familiar” with the case. Uh huh.
Now, more than ever, the Trump administration is on the warpath against (formerly) protected expressions of opinion. In what was already one of the most precarious moments for freedom in our society in our time, Trump is making matters radically, dangerously worse.
His vice president tells podcast listeners that if they hear opinions they don’t like from other Americans, they should contact employers in order to have people fired.
When Trump hears TV host Jimmy Kimmel say something he doesn’t like, he doesn’t just use his bully pulpit to disagree. He says that his Attorney General Pam Bondi’s recent statement about her intent to prosecute what she sees as “hate speech” about the late Charlie Kirk could mean she will “go after” Kimmel’s employer ABC “because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate.” Trump and his FCC chair, Brendan Carr, started talking about revoking ABC’s broadcast license, which is not really a thing that exists, except on the local-station level. No matter. It’s a threat to the network’s business by powerful people. This despite the fact, as free-speech group FIRE notes, “The FCC has no authority to control what a late night TV host can say, and the First Amendment protects Americans’ right to speculate on current events even if those speculations later turn out to be incorrect.” But, in order to protect corporate interests, ABC steps in and gets ahead of the game, cancelling Kimmel’s show on its own.
In the midst of a previous political correctness epidemic, it was the American right that created the term “cancel culture,” and insisted, quite correctly, that people can say what they will in our free society. Not anymore. It’s one more sign that this administration is not really of the right, though they play conservatives on TV. They’re something else entirely: merely authoritarian.
Although, not if people of good will, ourselves, don’t allow it, and rebel, as good Americans always have, against the rising tide of conformity.
Talking of TV hosts, I have to love what David Letterman said in response to Kimmel’s suspension: “You can’t go around firing somebody because you’re fearful or trying to suck up to an authoritarian — a criminal — administration in the Oval Office. That’s just not how this works.”
Again, it is if we let it happen without speaking out.
Trump, who doesn’t believe in the First Amendment, sued “60 Minutes,” sued ABC News, sued his friend Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. And now, in his most absurd effort yet at censoring the press, he’s suing The New York Times for a cool $15 billion for, among other things, endorsing Kamala Harris in an editorial he describes as “deranged” because the endorsement wasn’t for him, and for failing to write that Trump was already “a mega-celebrity and an enormous success in business” when he was hired for “The Apprentice” TV show.
Stop the assassinations. Snitch on people you know who are crazy and want to kill political figures, so their guns are taken away. And, just as importantly, stand up against these despots who want to take away the most American thing of all: your freedom of speech.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com
