Real chilling effects

A extraordinary pattern of government censorship and threats to speech

Normally I record the classes I teach. It gives students who miss class a chance to catch up. I also make space in my classes to talk about what is happening in government right now. A couple of weeks ago, students asked we keep the discussions, but stop recording the class. They worried about any record of their words that might be viewed as criticism of the current administration, and somehow weaponized against them.

It’s a small example of how fear is creeping into American life. The right to say what we want, to choose our topics of study, is essentially American. But we don’t live in America any longer. The truth is, we live in a foreign country now. Our idea of America — the one you grew up with if you were born here, or that drew you to this country if you were an immigrant — and the reality of America today, well, these are different places. We might get back there. But first we have to map the distance between that America and where we are now.

Do I sound alarmist? Yes. Am I exaggerating? Well, lets check where we are.

• The President has politicized the Department of Justice and threatens to unleash the power of the federal government on his political enemies. For example, he has promised to punish law firms that provide legal support for his opponents, Now, many are no longer willing to do so.

• Critics who once held security clearances or security details have them removed.

• Organizations fearful of threats from the President preemptively erase ideas, or silence dissenting voices.

• The President has suggested that critics are supporters of terrorism, using vague language that allows him to threaten nonprofits, or promise to deport protest leaders, including green card holders.

• Words and ideas are banned. Censors rifle their way through government documents and websites to remove them. Federal spaces, like schools on military bases, are purged of books that even mildly hint at the idea that diversity is a good thing. Executive orders that purge these ideas tend to be ambiguous, leading organizations to respond broadly and to self-censor.

• Funding of research ideas is being taken away from research experts and handed to political appointees who are defunding the ideas they dislike. Campus officials are trying to decide how to respond to government orders to remove ideas. Environmental groups are being threatened with criminal prosecution for receiving grants from the President’s predecessor.

• The President has pardoned militant supporters who engaged in violence to try to reverse the outcome of a previous election, and demoted officials who investigated those supporters.

• The President and the richest man in the world routinely make wildly dishonest claims about the government they are running. Critics of the employees of the richest man in the world can expect to be threatened with prosecution from the federal government. The richest man in the world purges ideas or even methods of disseminating ideas from the platform he owns. Qualified and credible voices who know the inner workings of are afraid to publicly expose his failures. They are threatened with firing if they explain to the public about the damage being done, or fired even when its their job to do so.

• Elected officials are not exempt from such threats. The President’s opponents face threat of investigation, while even his supporters fear to disagree with him. They also fear criticizing the richest man in the world, even though his actions in destroying much of the government are widely unpopular.

• The work of the richest man in the world is exempted from open records laws. We really don’t know what he is doing, and members of Congress refuse to ask him in public. And the employees charged with responding to open records requests are being fired in some agencies.

• Public employees are illegally purged if they are viewed as disloyal to the new regime. This includes top-ranking officers in the military, and the lawyers in government who set the boundaries for what a President can do. Within a few weeks, this has started to seem normal, and inevitable. The media coverage often fails to mention how the President is acting illegally.

• Some of those are purged because of their gender identity, or because they are associated with ideas now deemed unfashionable, or even for going to a meeting where those ideas are discussed. The government has created tip lines to help identify the disfavored.

• Individual journalists whose job it is to hold the President accountable know that they will face a torrent of abuse if they are critical. The richest man in the world might call for a journalist to be fired, falsely accuse media organizations of secretly being paid by shadowy pro-government forces, or sue them to drain resources. Their organization may be banned from press events if it is deemed insufficiently supportive of the President, replaced by partisan outlets who only provide uncritical propaganda.

• Some media companies find excuses to bribe the President on the flimsiest of pretexts, humoring his demands for massive financial compensation when faced with normal journalistic practice, because their corporate owners fear the President’s retribution. Corporations have become accustomed to making multi-million contributions to the President as a form of protection money for their businesses.

• The judges who provide the last, best hope of constraining the President and the richest man in the world face a historic wave of threats. Judges in the DC area had pizzas mailed anonymously to their homes, to communicate that their address is known to potential attackers.

• More and more people are turning to secure private apps to communicate, reflecting worries about state surveillance.

It’s hard to read that list, isn’t it?

Normally, we treat each bullet point as a separate story. But they are all connected. We are witnessing an extraordinarily broad chilling effect in American society. It is not just what you want to say, but what you are allowed to ask. It is about both formal government actions and informal threats, with threats of professional ruin or even violence from the President’s supporters. It is about both censorship and self-censorship. It is about a sense of collective fear.

Read that list again. And ask yourself, what country does it describe? The America you thought you knew is gone, its undoing germinating for years, and culminating in a matter of weeks.

Government oversight

These chilling effects run into every aspect of American life. Right now they seem centered on silencing both bad policies and the authoritarian turn in government.

Our government is simply less accountable when qualified and credible people are afraid to ask questions, or share information. It is also more poorly run. Many in DOGE don’t know the basics of government — how its systems work, and what laws mean — and they won’t know until they are made to hear about it.

Meanwhile Congress flatly refuses to provide any oversight of DOGE. When Dems tried to subpoena Elon Musk, they were voted down. There is even a DOGE subcommittee that has not not dared to bring anyone from DOGE to speak under oath.

Governments where capable bureaucrats are fired, or reassigned if they offer uncongenial truths, will not relay accurate information to decisionmakers, and so, decisions will get worse. We are living through a moment where in some policy domains, right wing social media posters exert more influence on decisions than people who actually know how those policies work.

It is hard to recall such conformity within a party. Republicans are canceling town hall meetings rather than criticize Musk publicly, after Musk has made clear he will not just attack them, but also fund opponents. Eric Swalwell, a Democratic member of Congress said of his Republican peers:

I’m friends with a lot of these guys, and I had wrongly assumed that what was holding them back from speaking out against Trump was they were afraid of losing their jobs. But what they’re afraid of is their own personal security. They tell me that their wives tell them, ‘Don’t contribute to us getting harassed at church or at the grocery store or at the club.’

Free speech hypocrites

For the past decade or so, you were told that America faced a crisis of free speech, characterized by wokeness. Some compared the atmosphere to Maoist China, so great were the chilling effects. Now, as we move into a period where the government is crushing the speech of those it disagrees with, or purging ideas (or the people who represent those ideas) it dislikes, those claims look not just naive, but reckless, since they were used to justify the real chilling effects exist. Anti-wokeness is a handy justification for censorship, as it turns out. It is the means by which the censor can say: “I've stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.”

There are obvious hypocrisies and failures. The plan to use terror as a means of governing was clear for a while and it was employed by Trump even when he was out of office. And yet, it was not conveyed with the same vigor as the threat of wokeness. Both the right-wing and much of elite media portrayed wokeness as an existential threat, especially on their opinion pages. They might caveat that Trump was an unprincipled threat to speech, but their focus was on threats from the left. This was a basic fail, and one which should fundamentally discredit those that made it.

How will the anti-wokeness critics respond to our new reality? Some might move on, or adjust their writings. For example, it seems silly to write an op-ed fulminating that some employees at a university proposed an unofficial list of words it wants people to avoid using when the federal government is formally purging a much longer list of words.

Many of those who portrayed themselves as free speech champions or classical liberals are on board with censorship and purges, and will have no difficulty dismissing the charge of hypocrisy, because they never really believed in free speech ideals. They have redefined free speech to be the speech they support, and other speech to be subject to government control.

For example, Niall Ferguson was recently featured on 60 Minutes touting the need for his private university, University of Austin, to serve as a counterpart to cancel culture. Ferguson, a former critic of Trump, is now supporter. He has visited him at Mar-A-Lago. He sees little risk that Trump will undermine our freedoms: “I’m convinced that whatever impulses he has or has had in the past, the system can contain them as it was designed to.”

Chris Rufo is no longer pretending that concern about cancel culture needs to be even-handed. He says the rules of cancel culture simply need to be rewritten:

to determine how the Right can protect its own members from unjust cancellation attempts and how it can enforce just consequences on political opponents who violate the new terms.

Others still cling to the idea that it was wokeness that is causing the current censorship, since it fueled the reactionary forces of Trumpism. Or relabel the right to be “the woke right” to try to maintain the relevance of the trope. If you spent the last decade being fundamentally wrong about the gravest threats to speech in America, these are clever ways to rewrite history to give the impression that you were right all along.

Courage and collective action

Peter Baker, the New York Times White House correspondent, compared the current moment to his time at Russia at the beginning of the Putin era:

By the time we left in late 2004, Moscow had been transformed. People who had happily talked with us at the start were now afraid to return our calls. “Now I have this fear all the time,” one told us at the time. There is a similar chill now in Washington. Every day someone who used to feel free to speak publicly against Mr. Trump says they will no longer let journalists quote them by name for fear of repercussions, both Democrats and Republicans…in decades of reporting in Washington, under Republicans and Democrats, it has never felt quite like this

This is a grim comparison, but one that forces us to acknowledge the scale of the change. It is all the more astonishing since Baker is known for being famously (and even infuriatingly) non-partisan.

There is reason for hope. America has a more independent judiciary, media and civil society than Russia. But all of those institutions are themselves under attack. Their willingness to act, not their mere existence, is what gives them power. The norms do not defend themselves. As more institutions go quiet, or offer their co-operation with the new regime, the erosion of norms still occurs, even if it it occurs more slowly than it did in Russia.

Defending democracy against a coercive government poses a collective action problem: we are all better off when people are willing to publicly defend basic freedoms, but few want to be the guy standing alone in front of the tank.

So many institutions and individuals see what is going on and don’t want to say anything. To do so would threaten their livelihood or organization, or employees, or the personal safety of themselves or their families. It is understandable at an individual level, but collectively disastrous.

Courage is contagious. As people offer examples of a willingness to publicly push back, more will stand up. For example, climate scientists and misinformation researchers have fought for years against efforts to silence them. CBS apparently changed its mind about settling a frivolous lawsuit with Trump, and now promises to fight back. Some politicians are courageous despite the vitriol they have always faced. For example, AOC mocked threats by homeland security czar Tom Holman to investigate her.

Individual actions and collective organizing help to remind others that the actions of the Trump administration do not have broad support. It can’t all be on individuals, however. Universities, philanthropies, corporations, nonprofits, and professional organizations need to remind each other of the power they have, and the principles they stand for.

Related from Can We Still Govern?