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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   32727 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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‘People Are Going Silent’: Fearing Retribution, Trump Critics Muzzle Themselves

The first step to authoritarianism is creating a climate in which dissent is punished.

Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.

As professor Levitsky astutely points out,

“When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,”

The atmosphere is becoming so toxic and dangerous people are afraid to even come out publicly with criticism.

One prominent first-term critic of Mr. Trump said in a recent interview that not only would he not comment on the record, he did not want to be mentioned in this article at all. Every time his name appears in public, he said, the threats against him from the far right increase.

Business leaders are generally reticent to criticize presidents when they are in office,

But that business leader thinks that chief executives see the way that Mr. Musk is going about slashing the federal work force as “totally crazy” — but would say so only on the condition of anonymity, fearing retribution.

Congressmen have to expend thousands of dollars out of concern for their personal safety.

Mr. Swalwell, who receives plenty of threats himself, said that he spends hundreds of thousands of dollars of his campaign and office funds on security for his own family, and that his daughter recently included a member of his security detail in a drawing of her family for her kindergarten class.

Both republican and democratic defense secretaries are speaking out about Trump firing senior military leaders in an unprecedented fashion.

In a letter to lawmakers last week, five former defense secretaries who served under Republicans and Democrats — Lloyd J. Austin III, Jim Mattis, Leon E. Panetta, Chuck Hagel and William J. Perry — condemned Mr. Trump’s firing of senior military leaders last month and asked that the House and the Senate hold “immediate hearings to assess the national security implications of Mr. Trump’s dismissals.”

Instead of being afraid, more of us need to speak out for the values of democracy. It is harder to suppress voices this way. And people who are threatened by Musk and Trump especially need to be supported.

  • -28

But that's complete bullshit. First of all, nobody is muzzling themselves - Trump is being criticized all around. Second, there's no evidence of even a single person prosecuted for criticizing Trump (I don't mean shooting at him or stuff like that, but just coming out and saying he's a bad person or racist or hitler or anything like that that is being done thousands of times a day). There's also absolutely zero evidence that the threat against leftist congressmen has increased. I imagine all politicians with public profiles constantly receive threats from all kinds of wackos, but nothing really changed here, at least no evidence has been provided it did. The only actual evidence in the article is Musk calling somebody names on Twitter (gasp! unprecedented!) then regretting it and praising them instead (that's even more insidious somehow!)

And of course many presidents - from Lincoln to Obama - fired top military brass when they saw fit. It's absolutely within the President's authority as Commander in Chief, and many precedents exist. Pretending as any attempt of Trump to actually govern is a grave threat to "our democracy" is bullshit, and that's about 100% of what that article is. You of course are free to speak out and stand up for anything, included whatever misguided notion of "democracy" that doesn't involve actual democratically elected leaders controlling anything, you have - and absolutely nobody would "suppress" you. Yes, Musk could call you names on twitter. So fricking what?

As one of those libertarian types who has been saying for over a decade that everyone, on left and right, should value free speech because it protects you when your ideas are unpopular, this comment just makes me feel smug.

I mean, I don't believe its accurate. I haven't seen anything outright censorious from the current regime, but if lefties believe they're being censored, they're just showing me that I was right all along.

So thanks, I guess. What lessons might we take away?

This article just presents the trivial fact that many liberals strongly -believe- they're under threat of persecution and silencing. So what? That's not evidence they're right. How much Swalwell spends doesn't matter without evidence he needs it. If a wide range of business leaders believe this, it could be a different story (and we have conveniently few details here), but this is nothing new. All major social media sites altered their policies at the behest of the previous administration's pressure. Boo hoo.

"The wicked flee when no one pursueth" is how this reads to me.

I can understand people on the left being worried about Trump based on how speech has changed. Personally I don't think it's because Trump is censoring speech, in fact I think it's the opposite.

The progressive left heavily censored speech in the U.S. for the better part of a decade, ramping up especially in the last few years. We have the receipts, it's common knowledge at this point that the FBI and other government organizations colluded with social media sites, news outlets, et cetera to push a pro-progressive message, and sideline or outright ban even relatively centrist people with dissenting views.

If there is a lot of genuine concern, I think it comes from people on the left getting a distorted view of what the information landscape looked like, via their censorship. As things bounce back towards a more representative information environment, of course people will feel shocked.

Nope. When the blackshirts march through my street I will fly whatever their ensign is and offer them iced tea. To do anything else would be dumb.

Both republican and democratic defense secretaries are speaking out about Trump firing senior military leaders in an unprecedented fashion.

Even if we grant everything else in your comment, what does this have to do with "democracy?" Is it undemocratic for a civilian head of state to exercise control over the leadership of the professional military?

university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,

My libertarian friends back in the day would have you know this line was crossed and the ship sailed the better part of a century ago. I'm not going to say I'm broken-hearted over the people that lost in the '60s, but when masked protesters [1] blocked students from getting to schools and engaged in the sorts of violence that sound a lot like the Hamasniks at Ivy League schools this past year, JFK mobilized 30,000 troops. Various Federal civil rights laws clamp down pretty harshly on certain kinds of speech in schools and workplaces (or effectively force those places to clamp down) [2], even if the penalties aren't always technically "criminal".

It feels like the broader Left is only really complaining about "authoritarianism" here because the levers controlling speech regulations that they championed are no longer under their firm control, and are no longer solely against their outgroup.

  1. In fact, the laws on the books in various jurisdictions prohibiting masked protests mostly date back to the time when "masked protest" meant "Klan rally".
  2. For most cases, I'd even agree that the speech that is banned is pretty darn reprehensible, and I'd judge anyone unironically saying, posting, or expressing those sentiments pretty harshly. But if you're complaining about restrictions on absolute freedom of speech, I'm not feeling terribly sympathetic.

People would probably listen more if the leftists hadn't been crying wolf for the last 8 years. At this point, I assume that any statements like the above are just crybullying in the vein of "I feel unsafe" designed to scare or shame non-leftists into letting down their guard so that leftists can abuse their dominance of the media and deep state to undermine and destroy literally anything my side tries to do. So, too bad. I guess we'll just have to suffer some corruption and incompetence as a country. You kept distracting us and nudging our arm when we tried to use the scalpel, so now we're using the chainsaw, because we've got to do something soon.

ETA: Is this guy just a troll? He made a few other posts recently that boiled down to "things are terrible now" without any effort to convince and keeps deleting posts. This post seems tailor-made to push buttons.

I am starting to suspect the OP may be fishing for comments like yours to show how bad we are, or something like that. It's odd behavior if they aren't being underhanded, but are instead being sincere.

Are you serious or are you taking the piss?

By which I mean, after decades of censorship from the left, where even slight heterodoxy could get even genius tech founders like Palmer Luckey ejected from facebook almost as soon as he was brought on for billions - now, only now, is it creeping authoritarianism?

If you aren't joking you need to seriously take a step back and try to think how things look to someone outside your adamantium bubble for one moment in your life. I'm in disbelief that someone who posts here could be so oblivious by accident.

Archive of comment

The first step to authoritarianism is creating a climate in which dissent is punished.

Are you going to seriously sit here and post about how terrible it is that people aren't bringing up their political opinions or views due to fear of retribution from Trump, and then claim that this is the start of some creeping authoritarianism? Have you been in a coma for the past two decades? You're describing a kind of pressure and chilling that doesn't even reach ten percent of the pervasiveness of social justice culture as some brand new authoritarian threat, but if you actually took your stated position seriously you'd have been cheering Trump on in the hope that he could smash "woke" culture (if that is the case then I applaud your consistency).

Instead of being afraid, more of us need to speak out for the values of democracy. It is harder to suppress voices this way. And people who are threatened by Musk and Trump especially need to be supported.

"Values of democracy" - could you please tell me what those are? Because your post seems to imply that these values are just "uncontested rule by the managerial class", and I don't think "democracy" is a good word to describe that.

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