Donald Trump and maga Republicans must reject evilism spewed by Tucker Carlson and antisemite Nick Fuentes

"Tucker Carlson is fog," writes John Mac Ghlionn in this interesting political analysis published in the Boston Globe.

John Mac Ghlionn contributes regularly to US News & World Report, Spectator World, and The Hill.

Tucker Carlson recently chose to interview the evil Nazi

Nick Fuentes, a man loathed by most of the American left and by a substantial share of the American right. Fuentes is widely understood, across ideological lines, as toxic. 

Fuentes has spoken admiringly of figures like💢 Hitler and Stalin, flirted openly with antisemitic ✡️conspiracy theories, rejected the legitimacy of liberal democracy, argued that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, and spoken approvingly of political violence and ethnic nationalism. None of this is ambiguous. None of it requires interpretation. Fuentes has said disgraceful things. Full stop.💢❗

But, politically speaking, the evil Fuentes is a much easier problem for Republicans to handle than Carlson is. 

Fuentes is an threatening evil flare 🔥in the night sky. 

Evil, crude, and easy to track. Everyone knows where he stands. He doesn’t pretend to be a loyal party man. He has withheld support when it suited him, including refusing to back Trump in 2024. He attacks Trump directly, in plain language, without deflecting blame onto lower-level figures.

So, it allows the maga Republicans to say, “That’s not us,” 🤥and (sort of❓) mean it.🙄 Fuentes functions, in this sense, as a kind of ideological quarantine zone. He is visible, legible, and — crucially — containable.  (Except that Fuentes continues to attract attention making him dangerous. "Evil is as evil does". His evilism is like an evil magnet that catches metal nails.) 

Carlson is weirdly different. Not because he is “worse” in the moral-ranking sense people enjoy arguing about online, but because he is more structurally dangerous to the GOP. 

Fuentes is outside the house, shouting. Carlson is inside the house, rearranging furniture, insisting he is only “asking questions” while he does it.

Before going further, I should be explicit about where this criticism comes from.

I write this as a conservative who regularly watches Carlson — his YouTube clips, his long-form interviews, his podcasts. This is not the view of a drive-by critic or a partisan adversary. It comes from sustained exposure. And that exposure has become increasingly frustrating. 

Carlson says one thing and then does another. (Ugh❗ "who  knew"❓) He gestures toward restraint and then indulges provocation. He flirts with accountability and then retreats into ambiguity. When viewers notice the contradiction, he waves it away — cackles, shrugs, insists they’re imagining things. What he sells as misunderstanding is, in fact, gaslighting, and any attentive viewer can see it.👀

There’s an old principle here. The better enemy is often the one you can see. The threat you can name. The real trouble is the fog that rolls in quietly and convinces you it’s just “weather.”

Carlson is fog.

He is the kind of “dissident” who wants insider access and outsider swagger, Establishment proximity and anti-Establishment theatrics. He throws stones from behind the wall and then acts surprised when people notice his name etched into them.

This isn’t an abstract concern. In late December, more than a dozen senior staffers left the Heritage Foundation to join a new group founded by former vice president Mike Pence. Their exit followed internal turmoil sparked by the growing influence of right-wing media figures pushing antisemitic and extremist narratives. Carlson became a central flashpoint because he occupies a uniquely powerful position within conservative media — powerful enough to force institutions to choose sides.

The rupture was not really about Carlson alone. It was about what he represented, and what defending — or refusing to defend — him signaled. Editors, donors, board members, and allied organizations faced an uncomfortable choice: Was Carlson still an asset to be shielded or a liability to be contained? The fracture followed those answers. Some closed ranks around him, viewing criticism as Establishment overreach. Others stepped back from him, driven less by ideological disagreement than by their instinct for institutional survival.

The Heritage Foundation bombshell came shortly after Turning Point USA’s annual youth conference — intended as a unifying celebration honoring Charlie Kirk — devolved into a public brawl over the future of Trump’s movement. Ben Shapiro used the stage to deliver a scathing attack on Carlson and his allies, calling them “grifters and charlatans” trafficking in conspiracy theories and falsehoods. 

Carlson took the stage soon after and fired back, escalating the confrontation before thousands of young conservative activists. That moment mattered because it revealed real fault lines in the conservative coalition. Internal division creates opportunity, especially for figures like Carlson, who thrive on provocation and plausible deniability.

The pattern was evident in Carlson’s recent trip to Qatar, when he headlined the Doha Forum, interviewed Qatar’s prime minister, and then announced he was buying property in Qatar “to make a statement,” insisting he’s “an American and a free man” who will live wherever he wants. That’s a remarkable posture for a man whose brand is built on warning Americans about hostile ideologies, foreign money, and the slow-motion sabotage of the West.

Qatar is not some harmless foreign backdrop for a trolling gesture. Rather, Qatar is a hostile regime that has long operated as a banker, broker, and diplomatic shield for Islamist terror networks, including Hamas and Hezbollah. It hosts Hamas’s political leadership, funds aligned groups, and functions as a key back channel in conflicts that have spilled Western blood. Whatever one thinks about Israel, Gaza, or Middle Eastern politics more broadly, Qatar sits at the center of the reality being ignored.

The problem becomes clearer in Carlson’s treatment of Israel and Jews. This is not a defense of Israel or of Christian Zionism, both of which are legitimate subjects for debate and criticism. The issue is Carlson’s insistence on having it both ways. He regularly says he “likes Israel” even as he repeatedly singles it out for scorn, derides Christian Zionism, and peppers his commentary with remarks about Jews that are clearly designed to provoke. 

In the eulogy for Charlie Kirk, Carlson likened Kirk to Jesus and invoked shadowy “people in power” conspiring in lamplit rooms, “eating hummus,” to silence truth-tellers. 

The implication was unambiguous, even if it went unnamed. When challenged, Carlson retreats behind the claim that he isn’t antisemitic  ✡️. It’s a familiar routine: push the line, gauge the reaction, deny intent.

Fuentes, by contrast, dispenses with pretense. He calls himself an antisemite ✡️ and means it. 🤢 His views are abhorrent, 💢but they are unmistakable. He doesn’t hide behind irony or implication. Republicans don’t have to guess where he stands. With Carlson, they are invited to 

pretend there is nothing to see. This is why Fuentes is useful as a foil and why Carlson is the real bellwether. The test isn’t whether conservatives denounce a 27-year-old shock merchant. That part is easy. The real test is whether conservatives will confront Carlson’s far more consequential pattern of deception and evasion.

This is what makes Carlson dangerous in a way Fuentes isn’t. Fuentes doesn’t have institutional leverage. He can’t tilt committee staffers. He can’t normalize a new foreign-policy fashion among influencers who actually shape the party’s mood. He can’t blur the line between “America First” and “Qatar First” while still being treated, by many, as a serious man.

Tucker Carlson can. He has a second kind of leverage, too: family adjacency to real power. His son, Buckley, works for Vice President JD Vance.

That doesn’t mean Carlson dictates policy through his son. It means Carlson’s ecosystem overlaps with the governing ecosystem. The “outsider” is not outside. He is in the wiring. He is close enough to touch the current.

And what does Carlson do with that position? He almost never fires cleanly at the top. He rarely, if ever, says “Trump is wrong, and here is why.” Instead, he attacks the perimeter: appointees, advisers, agencies, “neocons,” “globalists,” nameless operators — anyone who can be blamed without forcing a direct break with the one man whose coalition he still wants to influence.

It’s how you remain “inside” and “against” at the same time. It’s how you get to market yourself as a martyr while still dining at court.

I have grown disillusioned with the right — fed up with evasions, with the Epstein nonanswers, with the reflexive closing of ranks whenever accountability might cost something. This isn’t the opposition talking; it’s disappointment from someone who once believed Trump could actually Make America Great Again. I was wrong. The second term has been more erratic, not less. The promised draining of the swamp never happened; power simply reorganized itself. Tucker Carlson didn’t oppose the marshy makeover. He learned how to thrive within it. And that is why he poses a greater danger to Republicans than Fuentes.

Liberals may be tempted to dismiss this as a family quarrel on the right. That is a mistake. Trump is already a volatile leader, and he still has three years left in office. Internal divisions within his coalition are widening, not narrowing. As Trump's political opposition pressure mounts, he lashes out more frequently, targets more erratically, and governs more impulsively.

Republicans will not win in the midterms in 2026 — and continue to govern after 2028 — when they  continue to blindly support Donald Trump like lemmings heading off a cliff.  Fuentes is an evil marginal figure who is easy to reject, but Carlson is ambitious, he aspires to be a powerful media figure who presents himself as a truth-teller while slowly expanding what the wrongminded Republican party is willing to accept, excuse, and blindly defend.

Donald Trump can look in the mirror to see reflections of Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and the ghost of Adolf Hitler

Echo opinion letter published in The New York Times:

Donald Trump’s Dismantling of Our Democracy

Authoritarian takeovers in the modern era often do not start with a military coup. Instead, they involve an elected leader who uses the powers of the office to consolidate authority and make political opposition more difficult, if not impossible. Think of Vladimir Putin in Russia, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and, to lesser degrees, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Narendra Modi in India. These leaders have repressed dissent and speech in heavy-handed ways.

Over the past year, Donald Trump and his allies have impinged on free speech to a degree that the federal government has not seen since perhaps the Red Scare of the 1940s, and 1950s. Trumpzi's administration pressured television stations to stop airing Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show when Mr. Jimmy Kimmel criticized Trump supporters after the murder of Charlie Kirk; revoked the visas of foreign students for their views on the war in Gaza; and ordered investigations of liberal nonprofit groups. Donald Trump so harshly criticizes people who disagree with him, including federal judges, that they become targets of harassment from his supporters.

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) German dictator during the Nazi period from 1933, until his death by suicide

Opinion Letter To the Editor: I urge you to add another measure to your index of autocratic and anti-democratic developments under the Trump administration: a research-backed measure of the president’s personality characteristics.

Autocratic leaders tend to share many characteristics, including narcissism, manipulativeness, a need for power and a lack of remorse. To not include a personality category when measuring a slide toward one-person rule is to miss the point. It is akin to issuing a police bulletin that outlines a crime but offers no mention of the perpetrator.

Everything autocrats and their acolytes do must be viewed, at least in part, through the lens of personality. To fail to do so is to abet their power. It is to paint their actions with a sheen of respectability that is dangerously misleading.

From Marian Place in Durham, North Carolina
The writer is a licensed clinical social worker.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are engaged in fascist operations against American citizens - Fire Harmeet Dhillon!

• Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon reacts to the burning of a judge’s home with a partisan snark.
• The San Francisco attorney seems to care more about social media than ensuring civil rights for every American.

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Mark Z. Barabak

On Saturday, October 4, 2025, a home belonging to a South Carolina Circuit judge burned to the ground. Three people, including the judge’s husband and son, were hospitalized with serious injuries.

The cause of the fire was not immediately clear. An investigation is underway.  The incident, which occurred on October 4, and went viral after being caught on camera, left many viewers to come up with their own interpretations of what happened, especially with Goodstein's recent ruling to temporarily block South Carolina from handing voter registration data to the Trump administration in September.

Obviously, the harm and destruction were terrible things. But what turned that particular tragedy into something more frightful and ominous is the fact the judge had been targeted with death threats, after ruling against the Trump administration in a lawsuit involving the state’s voter files.

Last month, Judge Diane Goodstein, temporarily blocked South Carolina from releasing data to the U.S. Department of Retribution, er, Justice, which is turning over tables in search of “facts” to bolster Donald Trump’s lies about a stolen 2020, election.

Among those who criticized the decision, which was reversed by South Carolina’s Supreme Court, was Harmeet Dhillon, the San Francisco attorney who now heads the Justice Department’s beleaguered Civil Rights Division.

Here’s a short quiz. Using professional norms and human decency as your guide, can you guess what Dhillon did in the aftermath of the fire?

A) Publicly consoled Goodstein and said the Justice Department would throw its full weight behind an urgent investigation into the fire❓

B) Drew herself up in righteous anger and issued a ringing statement that denounced political violence, whatever its form, whether perpetrated by those on the left, right or center❓

C) Took to social media to troll a political adversary who raised concerns about the targeting of judges and incendiary rhetoric emanating from the Trump administration❓

If you selected anything other than “C,” ✅you obviously aren’t familiar with Dhillon. Or perhaps you’ve spent the last many months in a coma, or cut off from the world in the frozen tundra of Antarctica.

The cause of the fire could very well turn out to be something unfortunate and distinctly nonpolitical. Faulty wiring, say, or an unattended pot left on the stove. South Carolina’s top law enforcement official said a preliminary inquiry had so far turned up no evidence that the fire was deliberately set.

What matters, however, is Dhillon’s 👽💢 hideous response.

Not as someone with a shred of sympathy, or as a dogged and scrupulous seeker of truth and justice. But as a fists-up political combatant.

The timing of the blaze, the threats Goodstein received and the country’s hair-trigger political atmosphere all offered more than a little reason for pause and reflection. 

At the least, Goodstein’s loss and the suffering of her husband and child called for compassion.

Dhillon, however, is a someone who reacted to the 2022 hammer attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband not with concern but rather cruel and baseless conspiracy claims.

By then, Dhillon — a critic of Trump before he won the 2016 Republican nomination — had shape-shifted into one of his most vocal backers, a regular mouthpiece on Fox (Fake❗ )News and other right-wing media. Her pandering paid off with her appointment to the Justice Department, where Dhillon is supposed to be protecting the civil and constitutional rights of all Americans — not just those in Trump’s good graces.

There’s plenty of tit-for-tat going around in today’s sulfurous climate. Indeed, the jabbing of fingers and laying of blame have become something of a national pastime.

The administration asserts left-wing radicals are responsible for the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and a sniper attack on the ICE field office in Dallas. Those on the left blame Trump and his venomous vassal, Stephen Miller, for the incineration of Goodstein’s home.

When Neera Tanden, a liberal think-tank leader and prolific presence on social media, suggested there might be a connection between the blaze and Miller’s hate-filled rhetoric, Dhillon responded like a juvenile in a flame war. “Clown … grow up, girl,” Dhillon wrote on X.

When a spokesman for Governor Gavin Newsom pointed a finger at Dhillon and her criticism of the South Carolina judge, Dhillon seized on some over-the-top responses and called in the U.S. Marshals Service. “We will tolerate no such threats by woke idiots, including those who work for @GavinNewsom,” Dhillon said.

All around, a sad display of more haste than good judgment.

Harmeet Dhillon (ugh❗)

That said, there is a huge difference between a press staffer getting his jollies on social media and the assistant attorney general of the United States playing politics with personal calamity.

And, really, doesn’t Dhillon have better things to do — and better ways of earning her pay — than constantly curating her social media feed, like a mean girl obsessing over likes and followers❓

Worse, though, than such puerile behavior is what Dhillon embodies: an us-vs.-them attitude that permeates the administration and treats those who didn’t vote for Trump — which is more than half the country — as a target.

It’s evident in the talk of shuttering “Democrat” agencies, as if federal programs serve only members of one party. It’s manifest in the federal militarization of Democratic-run cities and the cutting off of funding to blue states, but not red ones, during the current government shutdown.

It’s revealed in the briefings — on military plans, on operations during the shutdown — given to Republican lawmakers but denied to Democrats serving on Capitol Hill.

Dhillon is just one cog in Trump’s malevolent, weaponization of Washington. But her reflexively partisan response to the razing of Judge Goodstein’s home is telling.

When the person in charge of the nation’s civil rights enforcement can’t muster even a modicum of civility, we’re living in some very dark times indeed.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans use the First Amendment Free Speech as a weapon to punish others who also have this freedom

"The postman always rings twice❓"- The weaponization of Free Speech haunts Donald Trump's legacy because he lies about everything.

Where the Battle Over Free Speech Is Leading Us

Echo essay published in The New Yorker magazine.
Doxing, deplatforming, defunding, persecuting, firing, and sometimes killing—all are part of an escalating war over words. What happens next? By Louis Menand

The United States is in a speech war. 😯😧😥

Normally, human beings fight over money or land or love, but that is not what is happening today. Today, people are fighting over words. People’s lives are being damaged and sometimes destroyed not for something they did but for something they said. We live in a society of doxing, trolling, cancelling, sanctioning, slandering, deplatforming, defunding, persecuting, prosecuting, firing, and sometimes killing over the expression of an opinion. A big part of the craziness is that some of the people going to war over words are casting themselves as champions of free speech. It’s the people they are trying to silence, they claim, who are the enemies.

The lord of misrule here is the person you would expect. On January 20th, his first day back in office, Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” It accused the Biden Administration of chilling speech it disagreed with and announced that  "It is the policy of the United States to:
(a) secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech;
(b) ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen;
(c) ensure that no taxpayer resources are used to engage in or facilitate any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen;
(d) identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech.

Donald Trump and his Administration then proceeded to ban the Associated Press from certain press events because it did not refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, sanction law firms that represented clients whose political views the Administration regards as unfriendly, arrest and seek to deport immigrants legally in the United States for opinions they expressed in speech or in print, defund universities for alleged antisemitic speech and leftist bias, sue the Wall Street Journal for libel, extort sixteen million dollars from the corporate owner of CBS because of the way a “60 Minutes” interview was edited, set about dismantling the Voice of America for being “anti-Trump” and “radical,” coerce businesses and private colleges and universities to purge the word “diversity” from their websites, and order the National Endowment for the Arts to reject grant applications for projects that “promote gender ideology.”

After threats from the head of the Federal Communications Commission, a late-night television personality had his show suspended because of some (rather confusing) thing he said about Trump’s political movement. Other media outlets were advised to get in line. Trump has proposed that licenses be withdrawn from companies that air content critical of him. The Administration has opened Justice Department investigations into and yanked security details from people whose political views it dislikes. It has also warned that it may revoke the visas of and deport any foreign nationals who joke about the death of Charlie Kirk. West Point cancelled an award ceremony for Tom Hanks, after having already winnowed its library of potentially offensive books.

Donald Trump is suing the Times, which he calls “one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country,” for libel. (In the initial iteration of the case, the judge threw out the eighty-five-page-long court filing as “decidedly improper and impermissible.”) A top complaint in his lawsuit is that the paper ran its “deranged endorsement” of Kamala Harris on the front page. Apparently, this is tortious behavior. At press conferences, Trump makes noises about investigating reporters whose questions he doesn’t like. (Who’s the snowflake now?)

This is not social shunning. This is not speaking from the bully pulpit. Apart from the libel suits, which Trumpziism can add teeth to by threatening regulatory sanctions or by slow-walking mergers and other business deals that require government approval, this is the persecution of people and organizations based on point of view. Much of this is exactly what the Supreme Court has said the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from doing. The Administration is not even pretending to follow the law, let alone its own proclamations about free speech. It’s getting results, so why should it❓

Compared with all this, a bunch of college students shouting down the conservative political scientist Charles Murray—an incident at Middlebury College now immortalized through endless retelling—is small potatoes. Somehow, though, in the war of words, college students tend to get the blame. “Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking on a college campus,” the president of Barnard College, Laura Ann Rosenbury, wrote in a recent Times opinion piece. “This is a grim moment for higher education, for our country and for freedom of speech. Violence is never a legitimate means of disagreeing with a speaker on a college campus.”

What is she talking about? Neither Mr. Kirk nor his alleged shooter was a student. The incident says nothing about tolerance for speakers on college campuses, and it is irresponsible for a college president to suggest that it does. Rosenbury notes disapprovingly that there was a petition to rescind Kirk’s invitation. A petition is classic First Amendment-protected expression. Surely the president of Barnard is not suggesting that students are inciting violence when they sign a petition. She is effectively throwing a bone to the White House, which can claim that Mr. Kirk was the victim of academic cancel culture.

As many people have rightly remarked, the response to Mr. Kirk’s murder is emblematic of the current hypocrisy. Mr. Kirk is being celebrated as a champion of free speech who was willing to debate anyone anywhere and who was killed by someone who could not tolerate his views. At the same time, Mr. Kirk’s admirers are campaigning to get people who make negative comments about those views—which are, after all, highly controversial and designedly so—fired from their jobs. And many have been. The Attorney General initially suggested that Mr. Kirk’s detractors could be prosecuted for hate speech (which happens to be constitutionally protected). Evidently, saying racist things is not hate speech, but calling someone out for saying racist things is.

All this suggests that Christopher L. Eisgruber’s new book, “Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right” (Basic), is not ideally timed. Eisgruber is the president of Princeton University. It is a truth universally acknowledged that university presidents should not write books about their own schools, to which they have a fiduciary duty. The terms of their tenure require that they not do or say anything that might damage the school’s reputation or fund-raising capacity. It is therefore impossible for them to comment disinterestedly or openly on topics bearing on their own institutions.

Within the self-censoring limits of the genre, Eisgruber has sensible things to say, maybe too sensible. His main practical point is that, as he puts it, “speech must be both uncensored and regulated.” This seems to mean that we should be in favor of what are called “time, place, and manner” restrictions on campus speech—no chanting in the library, no bullhorns in the quad, and so on. Fair enough. There are all kinds of things you cannot lawfully do in public spaces. The problems arise when you try to draw the line of permissibility, and Eisgruber doesn’t help us much here. His own reactions to speech controversies at Princeton, as he relates them, seem to have been largely seat-of-the-pants. And, so far, reasonably successful.

Eisgruber also believes that speech should conform to norms of civility. “It is possible to believe in free speech and insist that people ought to address one another civilly and politely,” he writes. Again, nice to say. But the right to free speech is intended to protect what the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., called “opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.”

In the free-speech marketplace, “fuck you” is legal tender. But private universities can constrain speech in ways public universities cannot, and, if Princeton wants to impose civility constraints on its students, it may. No one is being forced to go there.

The same is true of the workplace. There is what we might call a free-speech norm in the United States, such that we are sensitive to the suggestion that someone is being penalized—not getting a promotion, say—for things they have said or beliefs they espouse.

Most Americans would not want to give up this norm. But it is unenforceable. You have a right to say what you like, but you do not have a right to host a late-night talk show. ❓A lot of campus speech regulation is an effort not to violate this norm, but this is not because students need a “safe space.” It’s because maintaining an ethos of free speech is central to the educational mission. You can’t run Princeton like Disney.

In general, Eisgruber thinks that “free speech is more robust on college campuses than in other sectors of our polarized society” and that “when it comes to getting free speech right, colleges and America’s young people deserve higher marks than they get.” A lot of what look like acts of censorship from the outside, he argues, are actually attempts to negotiate a level playing field.

There may be some whistling past the graveyard here. Many surveys show that college students are fearful of saying something that will alienate them from their peers or invite the disapproval of their instructors. And faculty worry that teaching certain subject matter and texts might offend students and, if students complain, lead to administrative sanctions. The faculty experience has been that administrations often side with the complainers. If this is so, it is because, until recently, the complainers have had agencies on their side that enforce federal anti-discrimination law (Title VI of the 1964, Civil Rights Act, Title IX, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, plus, for public schools, the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment). Universities did not want to sanction the professors, but they did want the complaints to go away.

You could say, as Eisgruber does, that campus speech anxieties reflect the polarization in our society as a whole, but the freedom to say what you think is not the essence of most jobs, and it is the essence of liberal education. Without the ability to speak freely, teachers are not educating and students are not learning.

Eisgruber discusses some of the well-known campus disputes, many of them venerable chestnuts in the free-speech wars, like the picketing of Charles Murray, which happened eight years ago, and the blowup over Halloween costumes at Yale, which happened when Barack Obama was President and we were still living on the Big Rock Candy Mountain. All the same, it is hard to fight off the sense that Eisgruber is mainly interested in defending Princeton. He is doing, much less recklessly, what Barnard’s president was doing with her opinion piece: he is preëmptively defending his institution against government attack.

That’s fine. That’s his job. But you would never know, reading his book, that there was a pro-Palestinian encampment on the Princeton campus in the spring of 2024. You would never know that there were sit-ins and that students were arrested. There is virtually no mention of Trump in the book, apart from a vague reference to “multiple Trump administration executive orders that targeted higher education” and a remark that Trump has not done a lot for civility norms. This is despite the fact, also not mentioned, that last April the Administration suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants to Princeton.

Eisgruber spoke out quite assertively at the time in defense of academic freedom, but he has said little publicly since. That Harvard is in court and subject to multiple phony “investigations” as the government tries to bully it into submission goes unmentioned in his book, too. Yet he does see fit to critique Harvard’s institutional-voice policy, which limits public pronouncements by the university to issues affecting higher education, that being the one subject academics are competent to opine on. He prefers an approach unconstrained by such “mechanical formulae.” Again, fine as long as it works.

You also would not know from the book that in 2020, hundreds of Princeton graduate students, staff, and faculty—including professors from thirty-four of Princeton’s thirty-six departments—sent the university administration a four-thousand-word petition demanding that it address systemic racism by, among many other things, rewarding departments that have hired underrepresented minority professors and denying new appointments to departments that have not, and granting extra pay and sabbatical time to professors who are members of underrepresented minority groups.

The petitioners further demanded that the administration constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty. Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.

This could be read, and by many people was read, as a chilling assault on the principle of academic freedom, which courts have interpreted as a component of the First Amendment protection of free speech.

Eisgruber’s elision of this episode—there is an oblique reference to “widespread student and faculty interest in seeing the university do more to address the effects of racism on the university community and America”—is understandable. The petition was widely circulated in the academic world, and it was not received with enthusiasm. The idea of a faculty committee empowered to vet scholarly publications for racial bias has, ineluctably, a Star Chamber vibe.

The omission is particularly unfortunate because it bears directly on the main point Eisgruber wants to make, which is that free speech and equality are not rival ideals but, in fact, belong together. His key text is the Supreme Court’s opinion in the 1964, case New York Times v. Sullivan. That is where the Court raised the bar in libel suits by public officials, ruling that, absent “actual malice,” meaning willful or reckless disregard for the truth, you can publish anything you want about someone the Court recognizes as public—a category that has expanded over the years.

Eisgruber, who is a scholar of constitutional law, believes that Sullivan is the cornerstone of American free-speech law. And it is significant, he argues, that it was a civil-rights case. It involved an advertisement in the Times soliciting donations to Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s defense fund that contained some factual inaccuracies. Those were the basis for the lawsuit, which was filed by an Alabama official. In ruling for the Times, the Court was in solidarity with the civil-rights movement. of course, the authors of the 2020 Princeton petition were also trying to strike a blow for racial equality. For them, a highly permissive interpretation of free-speech law gives cover to racists, and a permissive interpretation of the principle of academic freedom allows for the perpetuation of exclusionary scholarship.

Fara Dabhoiwala teaches in the history department at Princeton, but he was not a signatory to the petition. Which is surprising, since his new book, “What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea” (Belknap), is entirely in its spirit. (Although it is a good rule never to sign a letter you did not write. You will be responsible for every word.)

When we see “a dangerous idea” in the subtitle, we naturally assume that Dabhoiwala means dangerously good, in the sense of dangerous to bullies and tyrants. But this is not what he means. He means that free speech is a bad idea. Eisgruber thinks that the maximalist character of American free-speech law is the best thing about it, but Dabhoiwala thinks it’s the worst. (Maine Writer comment here...."who's on first"❓ )

When we think of the history of free-speech rights, we tend to think of the Anglo-American legal tradition. A virtue of Dabhoiwala’s book is that it is transnational, and there are discussions of free-speech traditions less familiar to American readers. The first free-speech law, for example, was enacted in Sweden, in 1766.

The point Dabhoiwala wants to make is that the Anglo-American concept

is not universal. On the contrary, he says, “America is now the only country in the world where even local ordinances against ‘hate speech’ are treated as presumptively unconstitutional.” First Amendment jurisprudence is absolutist and libertarian. Other nations have speech rights, but they are qualified. Hate speech can be prosecuted in the United Kingdom.

For a historian, Dabhoiwala is rather judgy. He calls free speech “a kind of secular religion, with its own shifting dogmas and hagiography,” an “inherently unstable fiction,” and “a contrived, invented concept.” 

Of course, all our concepts are invented. They are tools for dealing with the world, which happens to include a lot of other human beings, many of whom, sadly, don’t agree with us.

“The creation and interpretation of rules about ‘free speech,’ ” he says, “is a perennially mutable and politicized process: freedom is never equally distributed.” And he shows that, ever since the idea of free-speech rights arose in eighteenth-century Europe, the concept has been, as he puts it, racialized and gendered. 

Freedom of expression, like, to a large extent, the franchise, was understood to be a right enjoyed by white men. Even John Stuart Mill, the model nineteenth-century liberal and a feminist, did not think that Indians in British India were ready for free speech. In other words, free-speech rights—like all rights, really—reflect, and therefore can be enlisted to perpetuate, existing power relations.

But we don’t think the right to vote is suspect because the franchise was once restricted. Those restrictions may be shocking to twenty-first-century sensibilities, but aren’t they what we should expect? In a patriarchal and highly class- and race-stratified society like Mill’s England, it is not surprising to find legal rights reproducing those inequities.

We are in a different place today, and one of the things that make us feel we are is the expansion of First Amendment freedoms throughout the twentieth century, beginning in 1919 with the dissents of Justices Holmes and Louis Brandeis, and then in Court rulings in the nineteen-fifties and sixties that protected not only political speech but artistic expression. Yet Dabhoiwala thinks that the trend is all in the wrong direction. He says that, since the sixties, “American free-speech jurisprudence has gradually abandoned any conception of the common good, beyond its abstract obeisance to ‘free debate’ as the
highest ideal.”

The right way to determine what speech should be tolerated, he says, is to give up the “dubious distinction” between words and actions. “Their supposedly different potency,” he maintains, “is just a convenient myth.” We should regulate speech in the same way we regulate behavior. It is “perfectly reasonable to oppose utterances that you believe to be seriously harmful,” Dabhoiwala says, “and to argue that these shouldn’t qualify as ‘free speech.’ ”

Which is exactly what Trump argues. I hope that he has given Dabhoiwala second thoughts. When academics tried to stigmatize certain terms and beliefs, as they did at Princeton, they forgot the first rule of free speech: the postman always rings twice. Today’s policed are tomorrow’s policemen. (IOW fate or justice will inevitably catch up with you, even if you manage to avoid it the first time.)

If the Administration’s actions are so blatantly unlawful, why does everyone seem to be caving❓ Some of it is just cost-benefit analysis. Paramount, which owned CBS, wanted to merge with Skydance Media, a transaction that required government approval. The company calculated that it was not worth jeopardizing the deal over a news program, which is a tiny piece of its empire. Jimmy Kimmel’s show was suspended after Nexstar, which owns some thirty ABC affiliate stations, put pressure on Disney, which owns ABC. Nexstar intends to buy a competitor, Tegna, which owns thirteen ABC affiliates, and the transaction needs F.C.C. approval. (The following week, after a “thoughtful conversation” with Kimmel, ABC reinstated the show, but Nexstar and Sinclair said that their affiliates would not air it.)

Government agencies can be challenged in court, and some of those challenges have succeeded at the appellate level. But the buck has generally stopped at the Supreme Court. For some whom the government now casts as enemies in the free-speech wars, that’s a worry. Universities that shut down or rename their diversity offices are not merely trying to appease the President. They anticipate that the Court will back government agencies that interpret “diversity” as an alibi for impermissible racial classification, in violation of the equal-protection clause and Title VI. Professors who complain that their schools are “caving” when they drop the term “diversity” should know this. But university presidents can’t tell them the reason they are renaming diversity offices, because they would basically be telling the Court that they’re cheating and are just racially classifying students under a different rubric. So there is a lot of crosstalk.

In the case of the attacks on the First Amendment, one big concern (unmentioned by Eisgruber) is the future of Sullivan. Members of the Court, specifically Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have indicated an interest in overturning that holding, thereby reinstating a lower bar for libel suits by public figures by removing the “actual malice” requirement. There is little reason to assume that, given the right occasion, this Court will not overrule Sullivan, handing Trump another weapon in his war against free speech. 

Of course, if the law were to change, it might not be a total win for him. After all, no one is more reckless with the🤥 truth than Trump. He could be sued almost every time he opens his mouth. ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated the category of person covered by the “actual malice” standard in the original New York Times v. Sullivan decision.

Published in the print edition of the October 6, 2025, issue, with the headline “Sticks and Stones.”

Donald Trump and maga Republican are flat out wrong to point fingers at the causes of deadly political violence

Echo opinion published in the Virginian-Pilot newspaper by Anita Chabria.  How Much More Political Violence are Americans Going to Tolerate❓

We are going to hear politicians, commentators, bloggers and others remind us that political violence is never OK. There is no room in a healthy democracy, or a moral society, for killings based on vengeance or beliefs — political, religious, whatever.

I would add President Abraham Lincoln (b. 1809- d. 1865) 

But herein is the sad reality. Our democracy is not healthy and violence is a symptom of that. Not the make-believe, cities-overrun violence that has led to the military in our streets, but real, targeted political violence that has crept into society with increasing frequency.

Our decline did not begin with the horrific slaying on September 10th, of Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old father, and conservative media superstar, and it will not end with it. We are in a moment of struggle, with two competing views for where our country should go and what it should be. Only one can win, and both sides believe it is a battle worth fighting.

The painful and hard specter of more violence to come has less to do with far-right or far-left than extreme fringes in either political direction. Occasionally, it’s ideological, but more often it isn’t MAGA, communist or socialist so much as confusion and rage cloaking itself in political convenience. Violence comes where hope is ground to dust.

A few months ago, we saw the horrible political massacre in Minnesota, aimed at Democratic lawmakers. 

Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were killed by the same attacker who shot state Sen.  John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, and attempted to shoot their daughter Hope. 

On June 14, 2025, Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman was assassinated in a shooting at her home in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, in the United States. Hortman, the leader of the state House Democratic caucus, was killed alongside her husband, Mark.

Authorities found a hit list of 45 ❗ targets in the killer's possession❗ (Hmmm ❓Is it coincidental that MAGA cult leader Donald Trump just happens to be the 45th president of the US❓)

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was a victim of political violence when his Harrisburg home was firebombed this year on the Jewish Feast of Passover. 

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer faced a somewhat bumbling kidnap plot in 2020. In 2017, a shooter hit four people at the congressional softball game, including then U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and U.S. Capitol Police officer Crystal Griner.

Despite the fact that these instances of violence were aimed at both Democrats and Republicans, we live under a Republican government at the moment, one that holds unprecedented power.

Already, that power structure is calling not for calm or justice, but retribution.😟😰

“We’ve got trans shooters. You’ve got riots in L.A. They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not. They are at war with us,” said Fox News commentator Jesse Watters shortly after Kirk was shot. “What are we going to do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate? And that’s the question we’re just going to have to ask ourselves.”

“It is extremely important to caution U.S. policymakers in this heated environment to act responsibly and not use the specter of political violence as an excuse to suppress nonviolent movements, curb freedoms of assembly and expression, encourage retaliation or otherwise close civic spaces,” a trio of Brookings Institution researchers wrote as part of their “Monitoring the pillars of democracy” series. “Weaponizing calls for stability and peace in response to political violence is a real threat in democratic and nondemocratic countries globally.”

The slaying of Charlie Kirk is reprehensible, and his family and friends have suffered a loss I can’t imagine. 💙😢Condolences don’t cover it.

But the legacy of his death, and of political violence, can’t be crackdowns — because if we do that, we forever damage the country we all claim to love.

If we take anything away from this tragic time in our history, let it be a commitment to democracy, and America, in all her chaotic and flawed glory.

Anita Chabria is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, based in Sacramento.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are AGAIN creating a false narrative about how horrible political violence is an American epedemic

With appreciation to the opinion writer Benamin Wallace-Wells, I must say some of the graphics described are difficult to read but important nonetheless.  

Charlie Kirk’s Murder and the Crisis of Political Violence
After a shooting with obvious political resonance, news about the perpetrator’s motives rarely brings clarity.  Opinion published in The New Yorker by Benjamin Wallace-Wells.  

Full disclosre, I knew nothing about Charlie Kirk until after his brutal assassinaation in Utah, in broad daylight, while hewas speaking to a group of students.  His short bio: Charles James Kirk (October 14, 1993 – September 10, 2025) was an American right-wing political activist, entrepreneur, and media personality. He co-founded the conservative organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA) in 2012 and was its executive director. He published a range of books and hosted The Charlie Kirk Show, a talk radio program. Kirk was a prominent voice of the MAGA movement within the Republican Party, and was considered to have become an icon of modern American conservatism. Kirk was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs of Arlington Heights and Prospect Heights, briefly attending Harper College before dropping out after one semester to pursue political activism full-time.

UTAH- Three thousand people attended the conservative Turning Point USA event at which Charlie Kirk spoke on Wednesday, September 10, 2025, on an outdoor green at Utah Valley University. The sheer size of that crowd—in the morning, at a school in a suburb of Provo, and even if some were there to protest—is just another piece of evidence that Kirk, in his years-long campaign to inspire a hard-right turn among people in their teens and twenties, had built a formidable movement. There was a Q&A portion, and someone asked how many transgender Americans had been mass shooters in the past decade, to which Kirk replied, “Too many.” The person next asked, “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last ten years?” Kirk said, “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Then, in videos, there is a single, audible crack, and Kirk’s body jerks and then goes limp. In the audience, heads turn: someone had shot him, apparently from an elevated position about a hundred and fifty yards away. Soon, Kirk’s spokesman announced that he had been killed. He was thirty-one, and left behind a wife and two young children. Donald Trump, a close ally, ordered all flags flown at half-staff until Sunday evening.

Kirk’s death was brutal, and tragic. It also had the effect that terrorists aim for, of spreading political panic. In the immediate aftermath of a killing with obvious political resonance, there is a period of nervous foreboding, as the public waits for news of the perpetrator’s identity and for any hints of what might have motivated the terrible act, and braces for the recriminations to come. But, as often as not, information brings no clarity. 

We have a fairly good sense of the politics that motivated Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O., and James Fields, who sped his car into a crowd of counter-protesters at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, killing a young woman.

But attempts to define the political motives of Thomas Crooks (who tried to kill Trump last summer, in Butler, Pennsylvania), or of Cody Balmer (who has been charged with firebombing Governor Josh Shapiro’s official residence, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in April), or even of Vance Boelter (the longtime anti-abortion activist who, in June, allegedly killed one Minnesota state lawmaker, along with her husband, and tried to kill another) quickly become ensnared in the problems of their apparent mental illness or a more basic incoherence. Robin Westman, who stands accused of shooting and killing two children at a Catholic church in Minneapolis last month (and whose transgender identity was the focus of many right-wing media reports), had written “Kill Donald Trump” on some weapons, and neo-Nazi slogans (“Jew gas” and “6 million wasn’t enough”) on others, and expressed alignment with the Sandy Hook shooter, Adam Lanza. The motives were strange and idiosyncratic enough that they couldn’t easily be blamed on any one partisan side.

The effect of these violent acts on politics has been easier to track. Shortly after the news of Kirk’s shooting, the former Obama Administration official and liberal pundit Tommy Vietor echoed a common sentiment when he wrote on social media, “Political violence is evil and indefensible. It’s a cancer that will feed off itself and spread.” If that is right—if violence is contagious—then that is because each act generates its own responsive pattern of fear. The news itself in recent years has been a catalogue of the ubiquity of political aggression and anticipatory dread. In 2022, a man arrived at Brett Kavanaugh’s home with a Glock and padded boots; later that year, a man broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and tried to murder her husband with a hammer. 

Unfortunately, the threats against members of Congress have also escalated significantly in the past decade. The Republican senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, said at a conference this summer, “I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real.” After the shootings of lawmakers in Minnesota, the Democratic congressman Greg Landsman told the Times that every time he went out on the campaign trail he was haunted by a vision of himself lying murdered. “It’s still in my head. I don’t think it will go away,” he said.

What politicians can control is how they respond. Speaking from the Oval Office on Wednesday evening, Trump denounced his perceived enemies. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he said, and vowed to find those he deemed responsible for “political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.” Unlike Barack Obama, who sang “Amazing Grace” at a funeral after the mass shooting at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel church, Trump made no gesture toward common national feeling; he limited his litany of victims to those with whom he is aligned. The man sitting at the Resolute desk and blaming his enemies for political demonization—for acting “in the most hateful and despicable way”—had earlier in the week promoted a new campaign of ICE raids in Chicago with a social-media post featuring himself as Robert Duvall’s character in “Apocalypse Now” and the tag line “ ‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning . . .’ Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” That aggression, combined with Kirk’s shooting, seemed to be literalizing the culture war, in real time.

The footage of Kirk’s murder is horrifying. His head flops; blood gushes from his neck. At a press conference afterward, the university’s police chief, who had just six officers to protect the crowd of three thousand, said, “You try to get your bases covered, and unfortunately, today, we didn’t.” It is hard to blame him. The ubiquity of weapons and the ease with which just about anyone can get them has made the protection of human lives increasingly difficult. That the threat of political violence is so endemic is one reason that what was once true of Trump’s movement is increasingly true of the country: it is distrustful, and feeling imperilled. In Utah, the people closest to the stage threw themselves to the ground quickly, and then so did hundreds of others, as they realized what was happening, in a wave that moved outward from Kirk. It was a visual manifestation of fear, spreading. ♦

Americans who remember when life was once upon a time politically "normal" must push back against extremism- GOP Alert!

Echo opinion letter published in the Boston Globe:

Utah Governor Spencer Cox: said he is sad and angered after the killing of Charlie Kirk on the campus of Utah Valley University. But it was Kirk's own words who helped him."When people stop talking, that's when you get violence," Cox said, quoting the conservative activist, known for visiting college campuses and inviting people to debate him. Cox read several of Kirk's quotes about forgiveness and having human connections, telling the younger generation to build a culture that is different than today's political climate. https://cbsn.ws/46oOENl

Dear Editor of the Boston Globe:  About the only thing I’ve heard in the two weeks since Charlie Kirk’s sad and tragic assassination that has made much sense to me was Utah Governor Spencer Cox’s encouragement to “log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member, and go out and do good in your community.” Wise words. So much of the rest of what passes for public discourse in America today assaults our senses.

Out here in normie-land, we do not want a civil war. 

Instead we vigorously renounce political violence and its encouragement — period. We wish that political leaders of all stripes — but honestly, especially the hard right and all the “near-right” leaders who have been sucked into that vortex — would just put down their swords and work together to solve the grave problems we face. Those of us on the left are not members of a cabal of child-eating America-haters; those of us on the right are not fascist Hitler wannabes. 💥😡

Who are we❓ We are (the normal people❗) most of the country, and by a very wide margin. 

But you would never know that from a glance at social media or even the pages of this newspaper. What would happen if we all took Cox’s advice❓ What if we turned off social media and worked together to solve our common challenges❓ What if we elected leaders who genuinely felt the same way and acted on that impulse❓

From Andy Calkins in Gloucester, Massachusettes

Donald Trump is a terrible leader his incendiary rhetoric is stirring up the entire nation when his job is to call for healing- God Bless Erika Kirk

Editorial echo published by the Baltimore Sun newspaper:

If the Charlie Kirk memorial last Sunday in Arizona was a test of faith — if all those in assembly wanted to demonstrate their support for the slain conservative activist, for his religious beliefs he held, for the causes he espoused and for his grieving family — then it was mission accomplished. 

HELLO❗With one notable exception❗ 💥When the final speaker took the podium to eulogize the 31-year-old head of Turning Point USA and father of two young children, the man so many before him had praised for his commitment to his family and his Christian faith, that individual was clear and unambiguous in his views on forgiveness and redemption and second chances.

He was having none of it.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first fill with hate.

“He did not hate his opponents,” Donald Trump said of Kirk. “He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. 🙄I’m sorry.”😕😠

Hate, as Captain Ahab discovered in Moby Dick, is ruinous. It metastasizes like cancer, reproducing itself at warp speed. And to hear Trump embrace it, even as thousands prayed, sang to Christian contemporary music and spoke of better days ahead at the combination religious service and political rally, was deeply disappointing. Not entirely surprising, but disappointing nonetheless.
What a contrast to Kirk’s widow. Erika Kirk 😢echoed Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, in expressing forgiveness, not hate, for her husband’s assassin. Tearful, sometimes shaking and looking upward as if to meet her late husband’s gaze from heaven, she spoke with the magnanimous spirit of Jesus in Luke 23:34, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

It was jarring, appalling and churlishly rude (add "sinful") that Trump would reject that spirit of the moment — and the will of the Kirks — in celebrating hate. So unabashedly. So myopically. 

So narcissistically. Trump fulminated at Charlie’s funeral. Given this remarkable opportunity to bind the nation’s wounds, as a certain president once sought to do, he instead spoke of hate.

Such hatred is unbefitting of anyone. It is especially unbefitting for a president who is supposed to be a role model for the country.

Do many of Trump’s opponents reciprocate his hate? Absolutely, but that is no excuse. President Abraham Lincoln was reviled unmercifully by many during the Civil War. Yet in his second inaugural address, the great man preached, “With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Hate engendered the climate that provoked Kirk’s assassin. Continuing down that path risks more of the same. 

Where is the adult in the living room who will tell Trump, “No,” even with the high risk of provoking retribution❓ No nation can survive without courage. It occupies the summit of virtues because it makes all others possible.

We strongly urge Donald Trump to retract his embrace of hate. His stated ambition is to surpass George Washington as the greatest U.S. president. He can start by following Washington’s admonition at the constitutional convention: “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest may repair.” Let us at least attempt to have a civil conversation about our disagreements — or at least not boast about our hatred for each other.

Baltimore Sun editorial writers offer opinions and analysis on news and issues relevant to readers.