Trumpworld Is Coming to Cancel Us All
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
stand 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 Russia
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 that 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 cancelled 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 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 1, “every nutritional scientist at FDA 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 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 anti-war 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 on that regard
once upon a time haven’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 FCC 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 DEI 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 for 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 thirty 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 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 Israeli-Palestinian war, 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 pratitioner, 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.
