This is not a unique or new observation, but so many MAGA attacks on others are projection, claiming that Democrats were doing the very things that MAGA always knew they would do if they were in charge. We’ve certainly spent plenty of time talking about Donald Trump’s myriad and non-stop attacks on free speech, and just recently I wrote about how Trump has turned his FCC into the very “ministry of truth” that Fox News falsely claimed Biden had created. But two recent articles show how MAGA has gone all in on doing the two things it most loudly (and falsely) accused the other side of: suppressing free speech on campus, and running a “censorship industrial complex” to coerce private companies into silencing speech it doesn’t like.
On the “free speech on campus” thing, we already know that the Trump admin has disappeared students for their speech. But Adam Serwer, over at The Atlantic, has an incredible story on how MAGA officials in Texas have effectively silenced all kinds of speech across universities in Texas.
At Texas Tech, medical students no longer learn about racial disparities in medical care. Faculty at the university’s medical center in Lubbock were advised to “refrain from treating transgender patients, for any medical condition, if a medical student was present,” according to a lawsuit filed by the American Association of University Professors. (When asked for comment, a spokesperson said that the university’s “written guidance is publicly available and expressly protects instruction necessary for licensure and patient care.”) According to the same lawsuit, the censorship bot—officially known as the Course Content Review Process—ordered a Tech philosophy professor to remove Plato’s Republic from a syllabus because “it references Plato’s beliefs concerning gender roles and homosexuality.”
Professors in the Texas A&M system have had to strip their syllabi too. According to an ACLU lawsuit, last January, Aaron George, a professor at Tarleton State University, was told by administrators to remove A Gay Manifesto, a Stonewall-era LGBTQ-rights pamphlet, and White Flight, a history of urban segregation, from his American-political-history course. After a student complained that a different class the professor taught violated university policy, George was informed by administrators that it would be canceled if he did not make “necessary” (but unspecified) changes. He cut a reference in the course description to the significance of the Fourteenth Amendment for LGBTQ rights, and the class was allowed to proceed.
The University of Texas at Austin, the flagship school of the UT system, announced last month that it was eliminating majors in Africana studies, Mexican American and Latino studies, women’s and gender studies, and race and migration studies. More than 100 courses have been flagged for removal from the core curriculum, primarily ones relating to slavery, race, gender, sexuality, and the environment. Consolidating majors isn’t necessarily nefarious, nor is rethinking a core curriculum (a central group of courses from which students must take a certain number to graduate). But these changes are happening, Lauren Gutterman, an American studies professor at UT, told me, “entirely because of the political context.”
Where are all the folks who spent years screaming about “academic freedom” and insisting that colleges were censoring conservative speech? Remember how Bari Weiss and Joe Lonsdale created their “University of Austin” because (they falsely claimed) there were no universities where people could speak freely — and then they fired someone for suggesting that there might be some value in thinking about the importance of diversity.
Hilariously, Texas Governor Greg Abbott had signed a bill back in 2019 guaranteeing “free speech on campus.” But as Serwer’s piece details, these days there are all sorts of banned topics on Texas college campuses, and basically none of free speech grifters who spent years crying crocodile tears over supposed attacks on “campus speech” seem to have anything to say about it.
Even more ridiculous, Serwer details how Texas Tech is using AI to scan syllabi for wrongthink, with predictably stupid results:
Alan Barenberg, a history professor who specializes in the Soviet Union, was told to remove readings by the Princeton historian Joan Scott and the French philosopher Michel Foucault from his Ph.D.-level historiography class, after they were flagged by the AI—whose assessments he described to me as “completely inaccurate.” It also seemed to have mixed his course up with a different one. The texts were part of a unit of the class related to how treatment of gender in historical research has changed over time. “These things have been taught in classes for a long time,” Barenberg told me. The material is controversial, he said, only “in the eyes of a few people who aren’t even actually on campus.”
“The fact that the system AI doesn’t work, that it makes inaccurate pronouncements—that’s a feature, not a bug. They don’t care if it’s accurate or not. They just want to be able to say, Look, we’re making sure that your children are not being exposed to these horrible ideas from these radical professors,” Barenberg said. “A key part of how authoritarian systems often work is that, through the vagueness and sending up signals and vibes, they’re essentially saying, You know what not to do, but being deliberately vague about it.”
Although the AI is now reviewing only some courses, the university could extend the process to more. For now, professors are the ones responsible for volunteering whether their own materials may be considered controversial. Many, unsure of what might trigger the bot, told me that they had private conversations with administrators who told them to simply self-censor and remove materials from their courses in advance, so as not to draw the wrath of leadership or lawmakers.
So the “free speech on campus” crowd is now actively censoring speech on campus because a computer program told them it was woke. What could go wrong?
Now, the other story: Anthony Fisher, at MS Now, is pointing out how Donald Trump has absolutely created the “censorship industrial complex” that a bunch of factually challenged “free speech” grifters insisted the Biden admin had built.
MAGA-adjacent journalists, one of whom now runs CBS News, have claimed there was a vast “censorship industrial complex” — run exclusively by Democrats, of course. In 2022, they peddled Elon Musk’s nothingburger “Twitter Files” as the free speech scandal of the century. It was, in fact, a fake controversy driven by politically motivated reasoning and faux-journalistic laziness, and none of them ever had the integrity to admit they were led by the nose by the world’s richest man or that they got the story completely wrong.
But the Trump Censorship Industrial Complex is very real. It is chilling speech in the media, academia and everyday life.
“Over the last two years, there’s been escalating threats against ABC,” Wilkinson said in court Tuesday. She added that the president “has control over vast regulatory powers that he’s willing to use against those he does not like” and “has put in place a chairman at the FCC who understands his marching orders and is not shy about saying so. These are blatant violations of the U.S. Constitution.”
You can follow the links there to get more details, but the most important detail is that when some individuals and two MAGA-run states sued the Biden admin over the supposed “censorship industrial complex,” it was two Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justices — Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — who pointed out how wrong they were.
During oral arguments Kavanaugh practically laughed at the lawyer making these claims, pointing out that government officials merely pressing their side of the story with no associated threats or coercion happens every damn day in the government, and is not even remotely close to censorship. Then Coney Barrett wrote the decision of the court, noting the complete lack of evidence tying any government outreach to actual moderation decisions, and called the lower court judge’s factual findings “clearly erroneous.” That resulted in the case being sent back for lack of standing due to the fact that there was zero evidence presented of any coercive behavior.
So there was no Biden “censorship industrial complex,” but there absolutely is a Trump one. As Fisher notes:
The Trump administration’s juvenile bullying has already restricted The Associated Press’ White House access for more than a year over its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. And those efforts have now bled over into MAGA Republican-dominated states, like Alabama, where a new law requires “all state and local entities and their employees” to refer to the body of water as the Gulf of America. That means public schools, colleges and even the state’s NPR affiliate have to abide by Trump’s embarrassing attempt at patriotic virtue signaling.
Carr has threatened broadcasters’ licenses for reporting accurately on Trump’s asinine and failing war on Iran. The administration is still in a legal battle with MS NOW, CNN and Politico, as it preposterously claims its ban on the three news organizations is a national security issue. And the administration has been siccing its secret police force on private citizens who’ve written social media posts criticizing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s brutal crackdown on immigrants — and U.S. citizens caught in their lawless dragnets.
And not a peep from those who falsely argued that it existed under Biden. How strange.
Once again, those complaints were all lies and projection. Richard Hanania, the far right commentator who spent years spreading hate and white supremacy online and now pretends to have turned against the very MAGA Trumpism he long supported, at least admitted clearly, back before Elon Musk took over Twitter, that right wingers like himself only scream about “censorship” because they want to do it themselves. This was in response to him getting banned from (again, pre-Elon) Twitter for violating its rules against hateful conduct. At the time, he said:
I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I’m actually impressed they let me get away with the things I’ve been saying for this long.
But that kind of honesty about how much MAGA authoritarians want to censor people while screaming about non-existent “censorship” from the other side is rare.
Still, it would be nice if everyone stopped pretending that Greg Abbott, Donald Trump, or Elon Musk ever stood for free speech at all. They all whined about free speech solely as a means to make sure that they were in charge of censoring those they disliked.