Few thinkers, past or present, could match the intellectual and rhetorical power Christopher Hitchens harnessed when he sat down to put pen to paper, excoriating what he saw were the misdeeds of leaders across the cultural and political spectrum, from Joseph Ratzinger, Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa to God himself.
“One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority,” he once said. “It’s indispensable.”
No one is above scrutiny, I believe he would say.
Sadly, we lost this imperishable writer in 2011, but one wonders what he would say today if he could witness the widespread regression taking place in politics and society, at a time when free speech is being threatened on college campuses across the nation, when journalists are demonized as “enemies of the people” and when the nation is being led by one of the most dishonest, borderline autocratic and nationalistic administrations in United States history.
The Washington Post’s motto reads, “Democracy dies in darkness.” While the battle for free speech on college campuses and elsewhere may not appear to be related to President Donald Trump’s administration, the two are actually working in tandem to dim the light of our democracy.
In recent years, dozens of speakers, including evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, libertarian Ben Shapiro, classical liberal and psychologist Jordan Peterson, conservative commentator Ann Coulter, feminist Christina Hoff Sommers and former CIA director John Brennan, of all people, have been either deplatformed or forced to end their talks early amid protests at public events in traditionally progressive centers.
To take one case, Dawkins was blacklisted by Berkeley progressive radio station, KPFA, for what the station described as “abusive speech” against Islam. Readers of Dawkins well know that while he is an unapologetic atheist, he, along with other members of the New Atheist movement, which includes Hitchens, have been careful to criticize the ideas of Islam, not the people who practice it.
Thus, officials at Berkeley and many other liberals toeing the social justice line have confused, and continue to confuse, this distinction, such that many rational liberals and progressives have been compelled to defend conservatives in the interest of free speech and the latter’s inalienable right to speak openly. College campuses and liberal towns are supposed to be bastions of free speech and expression. That is where students go to be intellectually challenged, not to be coddled.
“How have the mighty fallen,” Dawkins said in 2017. “Berkeley, the home of free speech. Now, the home of suppression of free speech.”
Trump’s ongoing attacks on the media — exempting, of course, his friend Sean Hannity and other supporters at Fox News — stick the dagger in even deeper.
To its credit, Fox News scolded Hannity for appearing on stage with Trump during an event in late 2018, but that was too little too late. With even a cursory look at the cable news channel, one must conclude that it stopped pretending to be “fair and balanced” long ago. For Trump’s part, dismissing stories as ”fake news” — fake, not because they aren’t true, but because the president just doesn’t like the reporting — and lambasting journalists who have an important job to do, maybe the most important job to do in this era of misinformation, undermines one of the pillars of our democracy.
For a sitting president to sneer at reporters and childishly complain that he is being treated unfairly, as he has done repeatedly since before the election, is beyond the pale, and even many of his fellow Republicans have found this behavior indefensible.
In August, the GOP-controlled Senate unanimously passed a symbolic resolution declaring that the media is not the “enemy of the people,” and Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., was among those on the right to challenge Trump’s charged rhetoric.
“We can’t go on like this,” Flake said. “We’ve got to reach across the aisle and find common ground. If we don’t, it’s just going to escalate further.”
Compound Trump’s hostility toward the media with overseeing one of the nation’s most secretive, intellectually dishonest administrations — potentially one of the most corrupt if special counsel Robert Mueller’s work provides incontrovertible proof of collusion with Russia — one could argue, as E.J. Dionne Jr. with The Post did in August, that we as a nation are “slouching toward autocracy.”
While we can laugh, and often do, at Trump’s Twitter meltdowns and the ridiculous speeches — he has the “best words” — what we have here is a prelude to disaster if the nation continues down the road of less transparency and the subversion of free speech and the press.
The First Amendment must be protected at all costs. In the year 2019, this should not be a controversial statement.
But in the radio sound clip above, Limbaugh clearly and in his signature bombastic style said, “I want everything he’s doing to fail.”
In the interview with Hannity, of course, he said the same thing, with the caveat that he supported Obama IF he enacted or maintained good conservative principles, but if Obama enacted and sought to maintain liberal principles, like supporting women’s rights, reversing Bush’s tax cuts, etc, he hoped Obama failed. He outright said he hoped the stimulus package failed. The rub is that Limbaugh knows Obama (though he claims the contrary), and he knows Obama’s not going to go against his own principles. He’s going to run the country as he thinks it needs to be run, that is, in the liberal framework. Thus, Limbaugh literally was saying he hoped Obama would fail, both generally and specifically. It wasn’t taken out of context, and the word “everything” wasn’t supposed to just mean Obama’s “social agenda,” but all of his policies.
Though I certainly don’t agree with Robertson on most points, I do agree with him that Limbaugh was off base saying he hoped Obama failed. If Obama fails, we are in a world of trouble. If the stimulus package fails, we are in a world of trouble. Limbaugh’s multiple repetitions, “He is my president,” mean nothing. If he was your president, Rush, you would get behind him, at least until your party gets another attempt at the White House because if he fails, what does that mean? More chaos in the Middle East? Another attack on the country? A second Great Depression? If he fails, you may not have the ability to keep your radio show. You might end up in a soup kitchen with the rest of us.
Two interesting notes from the Hannity interview: