Isaac Saul (20:05)
All right, that is it for what the left and the right are saying. Which brings us to my take. So on the suspension of the Rules podcast this week, I argued that the last few months have been the scariest moments for free speech that I've ever lived through. I said that in my lifetime it was unprecedented. A word that's overused to the point of meaninglessness. But I think I'm right. Kimmel's transgression was suggesting that Charlie Kirk shooter was maga. All the evidence I've seen indicates that he is not. Kimmel should not have implied this on national television, though my podcast co host Camille Foster noted Kimmel only said that Trump and his allies were desperately trying to paint the accused shooter as anything other than one of them, which I suppose is different than making a definitive statement about the shooter's beliefs. Other prominent liberals, like the historian and writer Heather Cox Richardson, have unambiguously endorsed suggestions that the suspect held far right views. This insistence currently permeating the left wing ether is conspiratorial without even meaningfully bolstering their case. The shooter having leftist political views is not an indictment of the entire left any more than Melissa Hortman's attacker being a Trump supporter is an indictment of the entire right. Both sides use extreme rhetoric that needs to be turned down, but if you aren't calling for or inciting violence, you don't have to defend the actions of other people. You can think any number of things about Kimmel's joke, that it was a fireball fence, that his show stinks, that he was on the air too long anyway, etc. But the federal Communications Commission chair openly using his position to strong arm Disney into punishing Kimmel. That's hard to deny. And a multi billion dollar company being brought to heel by the federal government is a terrifying development. The FCC chair's mafia style threat to ABC was so clear that it drew strongly worded rebukes from people like Senator Ted Cruz, the Republican president from Texas, and Senator Dave McCormick, the Republican from Pennsylvania, both of whom rarely cross Trump in public. It's also the latest episode in a series of worrisome and overt crackdowns on free speech. Just days before, Attorney General Pam Bondi faced even more ubiquitous backlash for suggesting, quote, we will absolutely target you, end quote, for hate speech, which drew such strong rebukes from the right that she ended up walking it back. President Trump is filing often frivolous lawsuits against media outlets for billions of dollars, explicitly saying that the lawsuits encompass coverage he deems unfair legal US Residents are being arrested and deported for unpopular political views. The Pentagon is now promising to revoke clearance and access for journalists who publish stories about the military that the White House has not cleared prior to release. These examples also include a litany of less direct, equally chilling developments. US Officials are threatening ordinary Americans who express views they deem distasteful, often encouraging campaigns to get them fired. Trump has successfully extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from universities and law firms with lawsuits focused on their handling of speech issues or the clients they decided to represent. The president signed an executive order cutting funding for grants based on gender ideology, which courts rejected for violating the First Amendment. Newsrooms are kowtowing to the White House to maintain access, while the owners of our biggest social media platforms see Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and artificial intelligence companies see Sam Altman, are finding new ways each week to appease and praise Trump. A lot of this isn't new. President Barack Obama spied on reporters from the Associated Press and aggressively used the espionage act against leakers. President Biden pressured social media executives to silence misinformation about COVID attempted to create a disinformation board run by the Department of Home Homeland Security, and aggressively pursued the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. President George W. Bush passed the Patriot act, which vastly increased government surveillance powers, tried to criminalize flag burning and even created free speech zones to cordon protesters far away from where he made public appearances. This is all without even getting into earlier actions in American history like Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus or Richard Nixon's list of enemies to target through the IRS or John Adams criminalization of antiquity anti government speech through the Alien and Sedition Acts. We have a long history of presidents infringing on speech. What makes this moment unprecedented, at least in the last few decades, is that so many of these threats to free speech are being pushed all at once from the same administration over the course of just a few months. And in the post Charlie Kirk era, when you remember this push, it's all in reaction to genuine political violence. It's clear that this crackdown has the potential to get much worse. This weekend, many of the country's most influential conservatives gathered in Arizona to memorialize Kirk. His wife, Erica, gave a brave and moving speech that every American should spend a few minutes watching in front of influential right wing thinkers, the president, the vice president, and the entire country. She forgave the shooter. It was a powerful moment, and had the ceremony ended there, I may have left with a sense that the temperature was turning down, that the hottest moment had passed. Then, a few minutes later, President Trump took the stage. In his remarks, he called out his one disagreement with Kirk. I hate my opponents, trump said, and I don't want the best for them. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Erica. Some in the crowd jeered, others laughed, and Trump's defenders will surely write the moment off as an innocent joke. But this is where we are right now. The day before on Truth Social, the president urged the attorney general to immediately begin the prosecution of his political opponents, including former FBI Director James Comey, Senator Adam Schiff, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. We can't wait any longer, the president said. They impeached me twice and indicted me five times over nothing. Justice must be served now. I've been enthused by some of the responses from the right, and I admire those who are willing to criticize their own side. But the response from the president, in the context of everything else this administration has done to chill. Free speech worries me, and I think we're all becoming far too desensitized to the threat at hand. The temptation for those in power to use whatever means available to justify their ends is always great, but the lasting impact is never just those people's ends. It's the means themselves. All right, that is it for my take. We actually have a co written staff dissent today from Ari and Audrey, so I'm going to send it over to them now.
