Recognition that speech policing under the Trump administration and its followers is significantly worse than more organization and individual specific policing:
…Mchangama’s observation was made during a discussion about free-speech hypocrisies (also recorded as a Persuasion podcast) in which three of the four panelists had been strong critics of progressive illiberalism: Mchangama himself, Persuasion magazine founder and editor-in-chief Yascha Mounk, and Brookings Institution fellow Jonathan Rauch, whose critique of progressive speech-policing, Kindly Inquisitors, appeared in 1993. Now, he is adamant that speech-policing by the government is unequivocally worse: “I would argue it is an order of magnitude more concerning because government can yank your license, investigate you, try you, put you in jail.” We have seen, for instance, television networks being dragged into a Trump-friendly orbit through a combination of bogus lawsuits from Trump and strong-arming by the Federal Communications Commission via its power to regulate media-company mergers. Rauch expressed his dismay at “how quickly we are moving toward Hungary,” where Viktor Orbán’s ruling party has consolidated much of the media landscape in its hands through a combination of direct government control and ownership by Orbán cronies. Except that, Rauch said, America’s slide toward authoritarianism-lite has been happening “on a very fast time scale”—it is already perhaps halfway there after only eight months of Trump’s second term, compared to the fifteen years it took Orbán. It’s not creeping Orbánisation so much as galloping Orbánisation.
Other summit sessions also bore witness to the changed climate in America. The two panels dealing with higher education would once, no doubt, have focused solely on the speech-chilling effects of campus conduct codes or investigations based on student complaints over offensive language, or on the problem of left-skewed ideological uniformity. Now, the focus was also on the Trump administration’s efforts to wrestle universities into submission—including a “compact” offering expanded federal benefits contingent on the promotion of conservative viewpoints—and the danger of non-citizen students being targeted by the feds in retaliation for the expression of disfavoured opinions.
Is there room for a “both sides” argument here? In the session on challenges to academic freedom, some speakers pointed out that federal arm-twisting of academic institutions did not exactly start with Trump. Fourteen years ago, the Obama administration pressured schools to change their handling of Title IX sexual-misconduct cases in ways that weakened due process for accused students. And yet Rauch, who was also on this panel and who was also highly critical of the Title IX reform push under Obama, emphasised the difference: where the Obama administration conducted investigations and took legal action, arguably with “abuse of regulatory authority,” the Trump administration simply issues demands, makes threats, and cuts off or freezes federal funds, including money for vital medical research, to force compliance. It’s not just overreach, said Rauch; it’s “flatly illegal.”
Do universities need reform to promote more open debate and intellectual diversity? At the free-speech summit, the answer was a resounding yes. But there was an equally strong consensus that presidential bullying is not the way, and not just because of principle. Rikki Schlott, the self-described right-leaning libertarian journalist who co-authored The Canceling of the American Mind with FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff, pointed out that “grassroots organic change is the only way that’s actually a meaningful and lasting effect: what happens when the next administration has a different set of demands?” Rauch also disputed the notion that no such organic change was possible within academia until Trump rode to the rescue. In fact, he said, “campuses all over the country were adopting institutional neutrality and the Chicago principles,” which emphasise open discussion and free inquiry. And, if anything, the administration’s heavy-handed interventions “may lead to backlash in the other direction,” assuming that at some point the heavy hand will be gone.
While there is no need to pretend that past American administrations were devoted to free expression, both-sideism under Trump is unconvincing. The Biden administration’s sometimes tense and even heavy-handed interactions with social-media companies about moderating disinformation related to COVID-19 and to election integrity are a favourite “whatabout” response to criticism of the Trump administration’s aggressions against the media.
And yet, as Georgetown professor and social-media researcher Renée diResta argued on the summit’s free-speech hypocrisy panel, the comparison is entirely fallacious: it relies on uncritical acceptance of questionable GOP narratives as well as a bizarre “amnesia” that blames the “Biden censorship regime” for things that happened under the first Trump administration, such as the brief social-media blocking of links to the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop. (DiResta herself once became a target of right-wing attacks as a “government censor” because of her research on online disinformation and her past receipt of government grants. She says that while she used to support private tech-platform moderation to reduce the visibility of disinformation and extremism, she has since come to believe that giving users more control over their social-media algorithms is a far better and less antagonising solution.)…
Source: The New Speech Wars
Multicultural Meanderings 