Trumpworld stands ready to stamp out dissent. Not just the dissent itself, but the dissenters: those heretics who refute the Gospel of Trump and insist that his Second Coming, and his second administration, stands to deliver nothing but ill to the United States. Those with differing opinions are set to run afoul of those coming to power.
“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to become FBI director and dogged keeper of a lengthy list of enemies, told Steve Bannon in an interview last year. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
He echoed these sentiments on The Shawn Ryan Show in September, telling the pseudo-intellectual host that we need to “take a wrecking ball to the deep state.” He added that he’d revoke the security clearances of all of the former intelligence officials who dared offer their honest assessment that the Hunter Biden laptop story was part of a Russian propaganda campaign—even though those concerns have largely been validated. Patel and others have promoted the narrative that these 51 signatories—whose names he waves around like Joseph McCarthy did his list of the supposed 205 subversive State Department Communists who never existed—are “spies that lie” and thus must have their comeuppance. Yet the letter those former officials signed noted, “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails … are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement—just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”
These were people doing nothing more controversial than offering their honest assessment. To Patel, that’s a crime if it goes against “King Donald,” his heroic protagonist. Look out, anyone with an informed opinion or a set of facts that run counter to Trumpworld’s desires or otherwise cast the once-and-future president in a bad light: You’re about to meet the new breed of free speech warrior—the “free speech for me but not for thee” zealot. End up on the wrong side, and you’ll be part of one nation, under a cancellation.
Patel is both a proponent and a symptom of the ideology he peddles. Liberals tend to focus on objective truth; conservatives on enlightened truth, as they see it. They believe they see the “real” truth—the truth that makes them, like King Donald, the heroes of their story. They see themselves as the ones who have, like the apostles, come to see the light and have a vision greater than anyone who trusts the “mainstream media,” even as the conservative news outlets and right-wing talk radio shows and podcasts they devote themselves to dominate the media landscape.
This allows them to believe with near-religious ferocity that Trump, a career criminal who tried to overthrow our democracy, is instead a victim of “lawfare” from the Bidens and the deep state. Patel has gleefully courted QAnon conspiracy theorists, promoting them as truth-tellers—not in the liberal, objective sense but in the Ken Kesey way of “It’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.” They are spreading the gospel, and so they cannot be wrong, even if they make things up. Dissenters aren’t allowed—one must be fully committed. Hence their slogan: “Where we go one, we go all.”
The logic is simple: If you’re against them, you’re against the New Dark Enlightenment that they hope to facilitate, and are therefore a national enemy and a threat. There is an irony here, of course: While they promote themselves as patriots and believers in free speech, if you oppose them, you must be ignored, if not canceled outright, because you’re considered either brainwashed by the secret powers who control you or one of those secret powers. Some people, it seems, are more entitled to constitutional rights than others.
Robert Kennedy Jr. fits snugly within this movement. Like Patel, RFK Jr. has promised to clean house when approved for his new position as secretary of health and human services. He’s said he’d likely fire around 600 employees at the National Institutes of Health who don’t see his vision. He’s also promised to fire, on Day One, “every nutritional scientist at [the Food and Drug Administration] because all of them are corrupt—all of them are complicit in the poisoning of our children.”
Kennedy is likely referring at least in part to the placement of fluoride in our waters to prevent cavities, which he has advocated against. Of course, he’s also advocated against Froot Loops (really—see here at 2:45).
There are legitimate concerns about fluoride, including that levels twice the recommended amounts have been linked to lower IQ scores in children. But those levels are naturally occurring and impact only a small percentage of the populace. Here’s a fun fact: The report that published these very findings was produced by the NIH—the very same agency RFK Jr. wants to dismantle.
Not to be outdone, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has threatened to pull funding from a children’s hospital over a viral video made by a doctor telling undocumented immigrants they need not answer a question about their legal status. The hospital quickly succumbed, issuing a statement that “Texas Children’s fully supports Governor Abbott’s new Executive Order and is in full compliance.” Abbott also notably sent in his Lone Star State gendarmes to aggressively disperse antiwar college protesters.
Trump, of course, once had protesters gassed simply for being in his way when he wanted to do a photo op, and has made some brief inquiries into the legality of simply shooting racial justice protesters. Whatever answers he may have received in that regard once upon a time don’t seem to have slaked his desire to crack heads. He’s promised to pursue political opponents; has said he may look to use the Federal Communications Commission to revoke the licenses of news organizations that he feels put him in a negative light.
This is just a mere escalation: In his first administration he took away press passes for that same reason. Last time around, Trump was somewhat hemmed in by institutional rules and the more moderate individuals who’d managed to find purchase within his administration. But much has changed. The Supreme Court has now given Trump carte blanche to do as he sees fit; Trump, having survived two impeachments without paying any kind of price, including for the insurrection he led, very likely recognizes that he’ll be returning to office with few sanctions on his impunity. The court, which has become a de facto law-giving agency, is also likely to remove even more barriers to enforcing conservative orthodoxies in Trump’s second term. That means it will probably do little or nothing to stop Republicans who are banning books, closing polling stations, threatening to go after political opponents—and making good on those threats in full view of the nation.
Yet somehow the myth that liberals are the real threat to free speech persists, having spread far and wide because someone might ask you to use certain preferred pronouns or to sit for a diversity, equity, and inclusion meeting. Even liberals themselves have largely bought into the weird idea that their kind have become illiberal censors, with figures like Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff claiming that it’s liberal closed-mindedness that is stifling free speech. One can understand someone coming to that conclusion if they’ve failed to spend any time outside their bubble, where they might encounter a conservative or speak to one for longer than 30 seconds. The term snowflake is applied to liberals, but how long do conservatives last in conversations they don’t like because they offer challenges to their New Dark Enlightenment views? What is their tolerance for being debated on cable news, or actually called on the carpet for lies, or for an accurate assessment of their deceptions? Are we allowed to curse yet? Can they take a joke?
This is not to say that there aren’t liberals who are closed-minded or stifle views that may countermand their own orthodoxy. Investigating the origins of Covid is vital, and yes, it is possible it came from a lab. We should absolutely question the effectiveness of education spending (Trump’s election proves that, if anything). And no one’s asking anyone to begin every conversation seeking preferred pronouns or nomenclature—just be respectful, like your parents taught you.
Will Rogers once joked, “I am not a member of any organized political party—I’m a Democrat.” There’s truth to that still today: Democrats not only include ethnically diverse groups but also legitimate dissent about the war in Gaza, green energy, border policies, and more. The fractiousness can present challenges, but at the end of the day, liberals know what it’s like to face arguments, dissent, and debate—and they haven’t yet bundled anyone off to the gulag. Republicans, on the other hand, not only can’t brook dissent, they have purity tests and excommunications—which is why they’ve banished the last reasonable members of their party and forever keep their speaker of the House near the edge of a plank.
To make it as if the liberal threat against free speech and free ideas is in any way comparable to the very real threat we’re seeing from Trump and the Republicans is a false equivalency analogous to mistaking an ice cube tray for the iceberg that felled the Titanic. It’s ludicrous. And we’re about to find out just how vast the difference really is when Trump and Patel and Musk and all the rest of these cronies begin canceling us and stifling the dissent they claim to welcome. Liberals will be demonized, threatened, and expelled from the conversation. Our motives will be impugned and our characters questioned.
The thing about committing yourself to the politics of demonization is that it allows the practitioner, as Nietzsche said, to become the monster necessary to battle the monsters you perceive. Trump is a classic Hobbesian leviathan who presents himself as the antidote to the liberal elite his supporters perceive as the true enemy of their rights and freedoms, even as Democrats work to ensure a social safety net and Republicans peddle anger to the aggrieved. Objective truth doesn’t matter to them; it’s their truth against yours, and if you don’t accept their truth, you’re an infidel. And infidels can be sacrificed.
