Newly sworn-in President Donald Trump speaks with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) following a signing ceremony in the President’s Room following the 60th inaugural ceremony on January 20, 2025, at the US Capitol in Washington, DC.
This week, Donald Trump barred an Associated Press reporter from covering an event in the Oval Office. Why? Because the global news organization is not using what you might call “correct speech.”
The AP said it was informed Tuesday by the White House that if it did not “align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, [the] AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office.”
“It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish [the] AP for its independent journalism,” AP Executive Editor Julie Pace said in a statement. “Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment.”
Alarming, sure, but not surprising. This is the same man, after all, who barred reporters from the White House the first time. More broadly, though, this is the same man who has turned the Republican Party into the closest thing America has seen to the Chinese Communist Party.
It’s just a plain fact that conformity and totalizing groupthink are the dominant features of today’s GOP. The Republicans, virtually all of them, now think the same, talk the same and even look the same – many of them even wear Trump’s signature navy blue suit and red necktie. Indeed, expressions of individuality risk punishment.
Now that Trump has control of the federal government again, he’s picking up where he left off with the Republican Party, and trying to force everyone else into conforming to a single, Borg-like mind. Barring an AP reporter may seem trivial, but it’s the triviality that reflects Trump’s malign intent. He will not tolerate differences of opinion. He will not tolerate conflicting facts. There can be only one way of speaking and behaving – a single, authorized system of thought.
Forget free speech.
This is correct speech.
American liberals used to be pretty good at recognizing and talking about the social and political problems of mass conformity and totalizing groupthink. But they fell out of that habit after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the worldwide decline of communist governments. Since then, conservatives in America and elsewhere have adapted anticommunist arguments in their fight against progress, comparing “political correctness” and “wokeness” to Bolshevism.
Here, for instance, is the intro to a 2017 essay published by the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank. It argues that “leftists are using PC language to indoctrinate people into ‘a single system of thought.’”
Nobel laureate FA Hayek said totalitarian regimes — Bolshevism, Fascism, and Nazism — are forms of government that direct “members of society by a single will supposed to represent the ‘whole.’” This “single will” is dictated by a Stalin, Mao, Hitler, or some collective rule. Per Hayek, such dictatorships require that “everything be governed by a single system of thought,” which rules out freedom of speech and press. These regimes may claim to aspire to lofty goals that compensate for the loss of freedoms, but they inevitably turn brutal, particularly against those who reject their ideology.
A single system of thought has many faults. At a minimum, it rules out competition of ideas. Just as the economy stagnates without competition among firms, so too do social and political regimes stagnate without a competition of ideas. This principle has applications today. The modern left disavows the most destructive aspects of totalitarianism. And yet, its approach to language and ideas is increasingly dictatorial. In recent years, radical leftists have been trying to promote a single system of thought via politically correct speech. This effort is doomed to fail.
In communist and fascist states — as exemplified by the USSR, China, North Korea, and Nazi Germany — a ruling monopoly party dictates a single system of thought which is drummed into the people by a propaganda ministry, a state-media monopoly, and the state-educational establishment. A pervasive secret police apparatus (KGB, Gestapo, or Stasi) finds and punishes those who resist.
I do not expect the essay’s author, Paul R. Gregory, to rethink his claim. “Radical leftists,” as he calls them, have never had control of the federal government. And I do not expect him to recognize that with such control, the president is creating the means and the motive to do exactly what Gregory accuses all those “radical leftists” of doing.
My point is that liberals used to know how to talk about these things. It’s time to remember and conservatives like Paul R. Gregory can help. As you can see from this excerpt, virtually everything in it can be applied to the current Trump regime, perhaps especially the part about “a ruling monopoly party [that] dictates a single system of thought, which is drummed into the people by a propaganda ministry, a state-media monopoly, and the state-educational establishment.”
Remembering can’t come soon enough. According to Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby, of Popular Information, the National Security Agency is planning to purge its websites and internal communication channels of 27 words that the White House has designated as banned. These include “racism,” “bias,” “injustice,” “prejudice,” “gender” and more.
Lists of forbidden words and efforts to correct incorrect speech are impacting many corners of the government, as the administration tries to throttle money appropriated by the Congress that it does not like. I googled “Trump banned words” and found the following headlines:
- “Growing number of federal health agencies are combing grants for taboo words, unnerving researchers”
- “CDC reportedly instructed to ban words, including ‘gender’ and ‘transgender’”
- “With billions at stake, Trump administration scrubs federal chips contracts for words like ‘diversity’ and ‘immigrant’”
- “The list of Trump’s forbidden words that will get your paper flagged at National Science Foundation”
Expect this trend to grow.
In response to the White House decision to bar an AP reporter, the head of the White House Correspondents Association said that the president “cannot dictate how news organizations report the news, nor should it penalize working journalists, because it is unhappy with their editors’ decisions.” If left unchecked, however, he really can.
As I wrote in this piece for the Kettering Foundation last month, Trump has already extorted, harassed and otherwise strong-armed social-media platforms like Facebook. Ditto for news organizations like the Post. His Federal Communications Commission has also revived three lawsuits intended to punish news broadcasters “that [the chairman] perceives as being unfair to Trump or Republicans in general.” Plus the rightwing media apparatus is already at his disposal.
With such an arsenal, it’s not hard to imagine the administration taking steps to make an example of the AP, and doing so under the guise of fighting propaganda, lies and corruption. As a matter of fact: “The Associated Press continues to ignore the lawful geographic name change of the Gulf of America. The decision is not just divisive, but it also exposes the Associated Press’ commitment to misinformation.”
That’s by Taylor Budowich, the deputy White House chief of staff.
The AP is barred infinitely, CNN reported today.
We need to relearn how to talk about a country being run by a single system of thought. If we don’t, well, get used to speaking “correctly.”