Say it anyway

As MAGA is collecting scalps for wrongthink, the easiest thing to do is bury your head, but that just gives the blade a clean angle to the back of your neck.

I know the feeling; I’m feeling it right now. Wouldn’t it be safer to just say nothing? That nagging in the back of your head that they might come for you if you leave some record of wrongthink. I have a wife and a child. Maybe I should just pack it in…

Here’s the truth of the matter, which you also know: doing so creates the world we fear. The surest way to enter into the authoritarian moment is to welcome it in without any fight. This is the deep irony of this moment: the fear of what may come enables—ordains—that authoritarian state we fear.

It may not be enough to stand up to it, to say the damn thing. This may well be a losing battle. But you can’t Pascal’s Wager your way out of this. You can’t hedge your bets by staying silent; silence is a bet, and it's a bet on the world you fear most.

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I don’t want to write a treatise on the First Amendment here. I trust that if you are subscribed to this publication, you don’t need an intricate explanation of why the most important speech to protect is the speech with which we disagree. It is no accident that the benchmark First Amendment cases protect the speech rights of Nazis, the KKK, flag-burners, the Westboro Baptist Church, etc. We don’t need protection for speech those in power agree with. But political dissent? The ability for the citizenry to speak truth to power, to challenge the government, to argue with their elected officials?

That is the very core of democracy.

We have to allow each of us to hold unpopular opinions, to allow those of us who hold them to express them. Unpopular ideas often win out as they are debated. For nearly 250 years, the government has lied to us, shading the truth, manipulating facts to serve a political end. The body politic must be able to call that out without fear of official reprisal.

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Charlie Kirk is dead, and he should be alive. A very online young man woke up and chose violence. The internet is replete with thought pieces on Kirk and political violence. I have no intention of adding to that literature here. Political violence is fundamentally anti-democratic and must be denounced.

The use of Kirk’s death by the President, Vice President, and MAGA leadership is nothing less than authoritarian power grab—a naked attempt to impose speech restrictions on people who have differing political views. By Kirk’s free speech absolutist logic, he would have opposed this, especially when done in his name. But again, I don’t want to get into the politics of this: it’s almost beside the point.

When Brendan Carr of the FCC comes out and demands Jimmy Kimmel’s scalp for saying something pretty anodyne and ABC dutifully delivers the scalp, we have crossed into dangerous territory. The truth is, it’s rarely the powerful institutions that put up any fight. Rarely the powerful and wealthy. They think they have too much to lose, and so sign up to suborn themselves, not realizing they’ve signed up to lose everything they’re trying to protect.

But it’s people like you and me, people who don’t have large platforms or fabulous wealth, who most often and most effectively insist on keeping our voices. As we saw with the big firms and the tech oligarchs, they’re caught in a spiraling collective action problem. It’s up to us to hold dear what we fear might be taken. To look these bastards in the eye and say—to adapt a favorite phrase of the right—this is my voice, molon labe.