Trump’s mass censorship is what far-right Republicans have always wanted
Description
Episode Summary
Since he became president for the second time, Donald Trump has launched the largest assault on free speech that we’ve seen since Japanese Americans were interned because of their family origins. Among many other things, Trump signed an executive order classifying “antifa” as a terrorist organization, even though there are no actual antifa organizations. The regime has also launched investigations against private citizen organizations like the George Soros-founded Open Society Foundation. Trump has stolen billions of dollars from private universities like Harvard and Columbia because they dared to tolerate student protests against Israel’s war crimes in Gaza.
Trump has even demanded that all late night television comedians be fired for making jokes about him, and his FCC chairman’s threats against broadcast television companies have led to the cancellation of the number-one host, CBS’s Stephen Colbert, and the suspension of ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel until public outcry forced Disney to bring him back.
All of these attacks against free speech—and this is only just a short listing—must be fought tooth and nail. But censorship opponents must also realize that Trump’s censorship agenda is actually the fulfillment of what far-right Republicans have wanted for 70 years, as exemplified by the infamous Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, and his number-one defender and proponent, William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review magazine.
Buckley’s love of censorship and his contemporary allies’ love of it as well should be more widely known, especially because the anti-freedom agenda that they had for America is now being enacted by Donald Trump today. Joining me to discuss this and a lot more is Seth Cotlar. He’s a professor of history at Willamette University, where he teaches and writes about the American right and early American history. He’s also writing a book on a white nationalist activist who became the chair of the Oregon Republican Party.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
07:52 — The Republican party’s entwined relationship with reactionaries
11:05 — Do reactionaries distinguish between private criticism and state censorship?
15:45 — William F. Buckley’s legacy of censorship
22:33 — Antisemitism and conspiracy theories in reactionary thought
25:15 — Ben Shapiro’s appearance on a white supremacist podcast
30:29 — Taking Trump seriously and literally
35:45 — The Antifa terrorist designation and its origins
40:10 — Ezra Klein and the problem of engaging with bad faith actors
47:02 — Thomas West and the absolute poverty of reactionary historiography
54:45 — PragerU’s bizarre AI history videos
01:00:58 — The anti-Americanism of the reactionary right
01:06:32 — Trump’s declining poll numbers and the informed electorate
01:10:37 — The pleasure some take in illiberalism and cruelty
01:18:29 — Conclusion
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So I wish we were talking under better circumstances, but the long and short of it is that the the recent assault on free speech and civil liberties that Donald Trump has been conducting, it’s come as a surprise to a lot of people. But for historians like yourself, this is actually the fulfillment of what the reactionary right in America has wanted since the very beginning.
SETH COTLAR: Yeah, no, there’s a long history of this on the right, not necessarily inside the Republican party. But you know, as the Republican Party has moved rightward, it has kind of moved closer to those voices on the right. [00:04:00 ]
They usually, at least since World War II, justified it in terms of anti-communism, was the way they understood it. So they, they thought, that communism was an existential threat to the United States, and hence communists should not have free speech rights in the U.S. And so, that’s how they justified their various efforts to
United States
