MAGA thinks we’re only entitled to their opinion

[cartoon id="300118"] Bear with me as I flash back, albeit briefly, to 2009. Ted Kennedy died that summer, an event that triggered a tsunami of online hatred. I wrote about the Kennedy fallout, lamenting how the internet had afforded idiots the opportunity to exhibit their worst selves. But it never occurred to me to demand that such people should be hunted down and fired from their jobs, or, more broadly, that free speech should be less free and that vile opinions should be censored. Nor would it have remotely occurred to the Obama administration to create and unleash Thought Police. But today Trump and his minions are goose-stepping all over the First Amendment - Jimmy Kimmel was only the latest casualty (thankfully just temporarily) - and what amazes me is that anyone with a brain can be shocked that this is happening. Fascists aren’t shy about their intentions. I blame the voters who were too oblivious, feckless, or stupid to see what was so blatantly obvious. So here we are, stuck with a crew of opportunists who are exploiting Charlie Kirk’s murder to suppress speech - in open defiance of our constitutional rights to rudely dissent, or satirize, or misspeak in ways that might piss some people off. I’m old enough to remember when conservative Republicans feared federal government overreach. But now we have Trump’s toadies (with predictable Republican complicity) flexing unprecedented federal muscle to squeeze cowering corporations. Exhibit A is Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, who pressured Disney-ABC “to take action on Kimmel.” Earlier last week, on a right-wing podcast, Carr said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way” - which is like something you’d normally hear a crime thug say in a Guy Ritchie movie. That’s ironic. Six years ago, FCC member Carr wrote on social media: “Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not.” Three years ago Carr wrote: “Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech. It challenges those in power while using humor to draw more people into the discussion.” Two years ago he wrote “censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.” And one year ago he said “free speech is the check on government control.” But now Carr wears the MAGA armband. Now he marches with Trump, who said the network news shows criticize him too much and “they’re not allowed to do that.” Actually, according to the First Amendment, they are. This is straight from the tyranny playbook - as practiced these days in places like Russia, Hungary, and Turkey. It doesn’t seem to matter the U.S. Supreme Court, in a landmark case 61 years ago, wrote unanimously that, under our Constitution, “every citizen may speak his mind…and may not be barred from speaking or publishing because those in control of government think that what is said or written is unwise, unfair, false, or malicious.” One shudders to think what today’s MAGA-captive court might say about that unanimous ruling - although last year, in a case involving the NRA, it did rule that “Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.” So perhaps they’d agree with David French, a conservative attorney who has long defended the free speech rights of conservative speakers, who wrote: “The Constitution is most vital when times are most contentious. The First Amendment exists precisely because the founders knew there would be times when free speech would be deeply unpopular. This is one of those times.” Even The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page writes that MAGA is flexing too much muscle. It says that “in a free society,” a comedian’s remarks “shouldn’t be cause for the government to push someone off the airwaves.” And it warns: “The political cycle of using government to punish opponents is taking the country into dark corners that will result in less freedom, and less free speech, for all sides.” Dare we hope for the tide to turn, for the First Amendment to weather this crisis? Only if the sentiment voiced by The Journal is echoed far and wide. Only if fury triumphs over ennui. Historian Peter Englund recently wrote a great book, November 1942, which focused, at ground level, on the average people who were caught up in the fascism of the 1940s: “They were part of that great uninterested and unwilling mass - the silent despairing majority for which history is a remote and incomprehensible enigma which has done, is doing, and will continue to do another of its cruel twists and turns; and as if it were a force of nature, it has suddenly burst into everyday life and, whether directly or step by step, changed it or destroyed it, in spite of people’s hopes that it won’t really be that bad or that it will blow over or that it will mainly afflict others.” Unless we speak our minds en masse, this metastasizing storm will afflict us all. - Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]