Thread by @ZaidJilani

The GOP is declaring a Total War on freedom of speech.

Now's the time for Democrats to reclaim their historic mantle as defenders of free expression, but it requires them to jettison bad progressive ideas about speech that proliferated in the 2010s.

theamericansaga.com/p/the-gop-is-d…

Like any other millennial, I grew up in the Bush years. Those were the years where John Ashcroft was covering up nude statues and the Dixie Chicks were forced off the air for criticizing the war in Iraq while our troops were in a war zone.

The Bush administration even limited the public's exposure to flag-draped caskets, fearful that this would undermine the war effort.

One study of this policy found that partisans were the biggest defenders of it. Blind loyalty took precedence over freedom of speech.

Bill Maher was kicked off his show Politically Incorrect for saying that the 9/11 attacks weren't cowardly because they were suicide attacks, instead bombing people from airplanes is cowardly.

THEY CANCELLED A SHOW CALLED POLITICALLY INCORRECT FOR BEING POLITICALLY INCORRECT.

(Bill Maher has made sure to not make that mistake ever again, he rarely criticizes US foreign policy in the Middle East anymore.)

South Park was censored for an inoffensive episode that discussed Islam en.wikipedia.org/wiki/201_(Sout…

One institution that fought back bitterly was the ACLU, which at that point was the Old ACLU, not the one that progressives took over in the 2010s. Here they noted a case where police threatened to arrest students for hanging a flag upside down to protest the war in Iraq.

At the time, the Democratic Party was much more in favor of freedom of speech than the Republicans were. They, after all, were in the opposition.

The Obama years were a muddled time for freedom of speech, but there was a warning sign. The administration aggressivelly pursued a number of leakers under the Espionage Act, picking up where the Bush people left off.

Towards the latter half of the Obama presidency, we saw the Great Awokening. Progressives, incensed by the racial and other inequalities that persisted in America, decided that speech was part of the problem. It can make people not only feel unsafe, but be unsafe.

Great Awokening brought with it extensive speech codes at American colleges and universities -- where administrations increasingly policed the utterings of students and faculty alike -- and more trepidation from politicians who would've in the past defended unlimited expression.

This eventually bled into the social media firms: Big Tech. Big Tech was both staffed by people who graduated from schools with extensive speech codes and run by people who wanted the favor of the Democratic Party.

Rather than look at failures like Obama's bungled housing rescue or the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, many Democrats adopted the new conventional wisdom that social media misinformation got Trump elected.

This created intense pressure on Silicon Valley to do expansive "content moderation" on an ever-expanding category of misinformation, disinformation, "hate speech," malinformation, etc.

Mark Zuckerberg, who once portrayed himself as such a free speech absolutist that he would be fine hosting Holocaust denial content, decided that it would be better to start censoring to get the Democrats off his back.

This created a new normal for American institutions. Social media was no longer thought of as a telephone. It was a publisher. And the publisher started censoring thousands, millions of people in order to please the government.

This culminated in the Biden administration hectoring the Big Tech cos to do censorship on topics like COVID-19.

It also helped ease the way to creating a norm for someone who had far more ambitious authoritarian goals than Biden ever did: Donald Trump.

Trump's FCC chair more or less threatened ABC unless they canned Jimmy Kimmel. So they suspended him. Nexstar, one of the parent groups who was starting to remove his show, has a massive merger before the Trump administration's regulators.

Oh, but he told a bad joke. That had a bad factual basis.

Give me a break. I've been informally involved in comedy for years. Nobody expects these Late Night hosts to never offend anyone or to have the factual rigor of 60 minutes. There was no real audience backlash.

Kimmel's ratings were also fine.

But you make *way* more money on these mergers as an executive than you ever would with the best comedian on the planet working as a late night host for you.
variety.com/2024/tv/news/j…

Kimmel was a sacrificial lamb for Corporate America to extract regulatory concessions from Trump. Give Trump one Jimmy Kimmel. He gives you the capacity to buy lots more beach homes after the merger goes through.

Of course it's not just corporate corruption at work here.

The GOP is also playing a bread and circuses game with its voting base.

As the economy tanks, Trump needs people focused on warring with other Americans, not asking him why their kids can't afford an education.

So Trump is declaring Total War on Free Speech not only to consolidate his own power but also to give his base a hit of opium. He's owning the libs. Who cares if your business goes under or you can't buy groceries. The Libs are Owned.

And here's how he's been owning them the past week, he and his administration have been on a North Korean-style march through the institutions trying to shut down freedom of speech in every arena, with wide-ranging consequences.

The people with the most agency here are the opposition party. The GOP will not oppose Trump on this because most of them don't care about corporate power and they don't care about freedom of speech, particularly on the job, which they think should be a dictatorship.

It's up to Democrats to decide whether shibboleths created by truly weird people in their progressive branch are more important or preserving 250 years of free speech tradition is more important. Trump doesn't give a damn about free speech. But hopefully someone else does.