By Robert Kuttner

Copyright prospect

Let’s begin with all the ways that Donald Trump has tried to destroy free expression. He has used the powers of the presidency to intimidate or shut down critical media and other sources of information. That includes eliminating funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, censoring Smithsonian museum and national park exhibits, dictating the behavior of big law firms, wielding heavy-handed federal leverage to dictate whom universities hire and what they teach, threatening the tax exemptions of critics, and using the other business interests of media owners to influence their content.

Only occasionally does public pressure, as in the case of Jimmy Kimmel, reverse those decisions; yet FCC Chair Brendan Carr is unrepentant. Media moguls, from the Los Angeles Times to Disney/ABC, have been all too eager to self-censor. Only this month, The Washington Post forced out the last progressive and the last Black journalist on its editorial page staff, Karen Attiah. And the great liberal columnist E.J. Dionne, whom the Post had reduced to once a month, if that, decamped for The New York Times.

So the idea that the Trumpian right is civil libertarian is preposterous on its face. But the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk gave Trump and his allies a fresh narrative. Kirk, in this telling, was a champion of debate, and thus of free speech, as if there were something original or remarkable about debating that somehow excused all of Trump’s other assaults on the First Amendment.

This depiction was enough to fool someone as thoughtful as Ezra Klein, who thoroughly embarrassed himself in a column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” But Kirk’s supposed civility included making enemies lists of leftist professors and pressuring colleges to censor or fire them, as well as Kirk’s own anti-Black and antisemitic statements. In the Trump era, civility has been dumbed down, so much so that Ezra Klein fell into the trap.

And a closer look at Kirk’s “debates” suggests that he wasn’t quite what is being depicted. He hardly ever participated in an actual debate with formal rules, as normally defined. Kirk’s method was to go on a twice-yearly campus tour and take questions from the audience, where he often made up facts, with great self-assuredness, to intimidate student questioners.

The New York Times, in an excellent piece based on a review of the videos of more than four dozen Kirk campus appearances, found that Kirk falsely claimed that C-sections were safer than abortions, that 80 percent of Black children did not live with a male parent or stepparent, that there is no evidence that poverty breeds crime, and several more examples of invented facts. Then, when the student questioner was unfamiliar with Kirk’s “facts,” he would claim victory. But that he invited questions at all (“Prove me wrong”) allowed the right to portray Kirk as a champion of free debate.

Meanwhile, as part of the free-speech narrative, the right has doubled down on its claim that the left has used political correctness to demand conformity and cancel those who disagree. In this column, titled “Now the Left Cares About Free Speech Again,” New York Times columnist Bret Stephens lists instances where some on the left sought to limit hate speech, or hold web platforms responsible for inflammatory content, or use boycotts, or update classic works such as Dr. Seuss to eliminate language deemed offensive by current “politically correct” standards.

This attempt at false equivalence is way overstated. The power of peer pressure from “woke” activists is pretty feeble compared to the power of the full force of the state when wielded by a narcissistic tyrant.

Yet Stephens has the germ of a point. The cultural far left gave a huge political gift to the right when, for example, peer pressure to use pronouns ended up helping the right to create the most effective ad of the 2024 campaign, with the tagline “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

The ad deftly conflates the unease that many straight people feel about trans people with the pressure to declare pronouns, which most citizens view as a classic case of left excess. A YouGov poll in 2022 found that only 13 percent of Americans supported the idea that everyone should declare their pronouns.

As one who teaches at a liberal university, I’ve resisted the pressure to declare my pronouns. We don’t do it at Prospect staff meetings. I find the logic perverse. Why should we out someone who may still be sorting out their gender identity? We don’t declare our religion. Virtue signaling is a form of cheap grace.

Emphasis on wokeness is also a misplaced political priority. As Todd Gitlin famously wrote in his 1995 book The Twilight of Common Dreams, “While the Right has been busy taking the White House … the Left has been marching on the English department.”

But the cultural far left, for all of its influence in some quarters, is only one fragment of the left. The mainstream left has always been civil libertarian. The problem is that the debate about left, right, and civil liberty serves as one more example of Trump’s favorite weapon—distraction—from the massive damage that he is doing to the democracy, the economy, and the well-being of ordinary Americans.