Donald Trump and maga Republicans cannot prevent Free Speech or block First Amendment rights but they try to squelch peaceful dissent

Echo opinion essay published in New York Magazine Intelligencer by Ross Barkin

"They can't make all MEDIA into MAGA"

ABC’s indefinite suspension of Jimmy Kimmel's late night show is, for anyone who cares about free speech in the United States, greatly disturbing. Kimmel is off the air because he made a joke about the accused murderer of the young conservative activist, Charlie Kirk, and the Trumpzi administration longs to systematically silence dissent. “Hate” speech is not free speech, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi. 

JD Vance celebrated the idea of publicly shaming and firing anyone who speaks ill of Kirk. Donald Trump himself is repeatedly suing news outlets that defy him, and he’s hoping a ludicrously specious 💲15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times will force the newspaper to retract its tough reporting on his administration and career. (Note: This outrageous lawsuit was quickly dismissed by the courts.)

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. The moral panics of the 20th century, for all their vileness, had genuine backing across the culture; there was widespread anti-communist mania that fueled the Red Scare and made Red-Baiters like Richard Nixon into major political and cultural figures. After September 11, George W. Bush enjoyed an approval rating north of 90 percent, and antiwar dissidents were forcibly suppressed as many Americans cheered on new invasions. The specter of another mass-casualty terrorist attack was the Bush administration’s justification for the Patriot Act, Guantánamo Bay, and spying on American citizens.

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. 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. The Kirk assassination is to the right what George Floyd was to the left: a spectacular, filmed murder that galvanizes their side to make unprecedented demands on language and speech. 

In 2020, openly criticizing the movement to defund or even abolish the police was, on the left, the ultimate taboo. It was similarly taboo to question the conventional wisdom of prolonged COVID lockdowns. 

A year later, individuals who refused to take the new COVID vaccine could be fired from their jobs and barred from all forms of indoor entertainment. Open discussion of vaccine injuries was, for a period, largely verboten in liberal circles, and mainstream outlets like the Times wouldn’t even broach the topic until 2024.

Now it’s the right that is making speech taboo. Stephen Miller, Trump’s revanchist deputy, stated it plainly: “The path forward is not to mimic the ACLU of the mid 90’s. It is to take all necessary and rational steps to save Western Civilization.” ⚠️

Any criticism of Kirk, Trump, or Israel — the woke right is obsessed with policing college campuses to stamp out pro-Palestine wrong-think — must be excised. What’s different between now and the 2000s is that the Trump administration can’t even begin to claim a mandate for its menacing actions. In the Bush era, political elites enjoyed a blending of hard and soft power, with the White House press secretary warning Americans to “watch what they say” while antiwar celebrities like the band then known as the Dixie Chicks were enduring career-altering backlash. The masses, for a period, were fully behind Bush, giddily lapping up their “freedom fries” and pleading for jingoism in almost all facets of entertainment. Even liberal Hollywood wasn’t immune; Michael Moore, for opposing Bush and the Iraq War, was booed at the Oscars.

At least the Bush administration had the pretext of the worst terrorist attack in American history to violate civil liberties and the First Amendment; it was all vile, but it flowed from an unsettling logic. There are no similar cataclysms today. The assassination of Kirk does not represent a national security threat. Neither do liberal professors who teach gender ideology that conservatives dislike or immigrant students who protest the war in Gaza. 

Perhaps MAGA imagines a kind of endgame in which the entire American left and the bulk of the media are slavishly devoted to them, and Kirk is honored, in perpetuity, in every town square. To create new right-wing safe spaces, all offending speech can be effectively outlawed. Israel hawks and Kirk acolytes can be equally coddled, with reeducation camps for those who aren’t yet thinking the MAGA way. Cable television, like Sinclair, can forever interrupt offensive programming with Charlie Kirk🥱 tribute specials.

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. The difference between then and now is the power of the state: If the Biden administration could pressure tech platforms over certain content about the pandemic, it never wielded the Federal Communications Commission to force a major news conglomerate to suspend a comedian who offended the president. This is new and should be resisted. The good news is that, unlike the speech crackdowns in the wake of 9/11 or the McCarthy period, there is no widespread support for such blatant overreach. Trump is not a popular president, 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, currying favor with the federal government as their parent companies seek mergers, the Times, lacking corporate ownership, will be glad to battle Trump in court and win.

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. The moral panics of the 20th century, for all their vileness, had genuine backing across the culture; there was widespread anti-communist mania that fueled the Red Scare and made Red-Baiters like Richard Nixon into major political and cultural figures. 

After September 11, George W. Bush enjoyed an approval rating north of 90 percent, and antiwar dissidents were forcibly suppressed as many Americans cheered on new invasions. The specter of another mass-casualty terrorist attack was the Bush administration’s justification for the Patriot Act, Guantánamo Bay, and spying on American citizens.

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. 

It’s remarkable to witness how fast conservatives abandoned any pretense of caring about the First Amendment, after years of decrying illiberalism on the left. The Kirk assassination is to the right what George Floyd was to the left: a spectacular, filmed murder that galvanizes their side to make unprecedented demands on language and speech. In 2020, openly criticizing the movement to defund or even abolish the police was, on the left, the ultimate taboo. It was similarly taboo to question the conventional wisdom of prolonged COVID lockdowns. A year later, individuals who refused to take the new COVID vaccine could be fired from their jobs and barred from all forms of indoor entertainment. Open discussion about vaccine injuries was, for a period, largely verboten in liberal circles, and mainstream outlets like the Times wouldn’t even broach the topic until 2024.

The mistake the left can’t make is the mistake of ascribing vast and total power and influence to Trump; he needs enablers to enforce his will. And all of this, over time, can be beaten back. Media outlets, colleges, publishers, and ordinary organizations in Trump’s crosshairs can and should openly defy him. Comedians, in solidarity with Kimmel, should not shy away from the satire that is essential for a free society. Artists, writers, intellectuals, politicians — anyone with a voice must use it now. 

Trump can bend America, damage America, but he cannot break it❗  For centuries, the First Amendment has been challenged and even ignored; free discourse, in the United States, has always been contested. It has never, however, been destroyed. A MAGA regime will run the country for at least three more years. If it can 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. 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.