In her latest for TheNew York Times, opinion columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom warns that the chilling of speech by President Donald Trump and his administration is leading to self-censorship and criminalizing dissent.
"Whether you want to call it authoritarianism or not, the president is criminalizing dissent, from regular people and comedians to political rivals. The culture of retribution breeds a natural but regrettable human impulse to self-censor in our public squares," she says.
McMillan Cottom, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, says she teaches her students how to vet quality information and "check sources against their biases."
"It is part of being a responsible citizen, I tell them," she writes. But she worries how the president's actions will hinder that vetting.
"Reading and research aren’t yet illegal or impossible. But they are in danger of becoming so. President Trump has defunded museums, libraries and public media. He has directed public parks, memorials and cultural institutions to remove historical references to slavery, Indigenous people, women, trans and queer people and anything else that he doesn’t like," she says.
Referring to book bans taking place in various red states, McMillan Cottom says that right-wing influences are a danger to a "balanced media diet."
"Conservative activists have criminalized reading lists in schools, backed conservative centers on university campuses to sanitize critical thinking and funded social media influencers to promote right-wing talking points," she says.
And then there's the issue of corporate consolidation of media by "deep pocketed tech executives" who "are making it so we’re all living in the information world that Fox News built."
"Of the 19 centibillionaires on Forbes’s wealth tracker, at least six have significant control of American media. Some of them want more," she says, referring to centibillionaire Larry Ellison and his family, who are poised to purchase TikTok following his son David taking control of Paramount, whose portofolio includes CBS.
"They aren’t pitching this deal as the MAGA Media Empire industry analysts see it as, but the Ellison family also hasn’t signaled a commitment to remain nonpartisan or independent," she notes.
McMillan Cottom says that this is much "bigger than simply industry gossip," and that it is "part of a larger trend of monopolistic control that weakens our civic health. It is also a sign of this administration’s direct influence over the press, of citizens’ First Amendment rights and our very sense of reality. This consolidation wave isn’t only about amassing wealth; it is also part of a political project to make all information partisan."
Free speech has especially been attacked in the wake of the killing of MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, she writes, noting the crackdown by Trump and MAGA on speech, narratives, viewpoints and stories they didn't like.
"What we have seen in the wake of Kirk’s assassination is an old Red Scare playbook, when corporate antagonism to New Deal reforms dovetailed with political witch hunts."
Kirk, incidentally, maintained a watchlist of his own of left-wing professors, and, McMillan Cottom says, "In either case, an army of trained provocateurs stands ready to destroy their lives to prove their bona fides as conservative activists. That threat has been chilling speech on campuses for years. Now it’s coming for all of you."
Debate, she writes, is a "luxury of norm." But that luxury has been weaponized.
"Whether in the form of abortion opponents who show up to 'debate' women about why bodily autonomy is a sin or scientific racists who show up to 'debate' Black and Indigenous thinkers about the rational arguments of their human depravity, the aim isn’t debate but debasement," she says.
In the wake of Kirk's death, debate, she says, is one-sided. "If you were someone who was just trying to understand what some people thought was so bad about Kirk, you were largely out of luck," she says.
And the president, she says, is taking advantage of this.
"The internet and the people who, for all intents and purposes, now own it have excelled at making Trump good at authoritarianism," she writes. "They commodified information. They quelled regulation. They escaped blame for degrading collective action while raking in profits for spectacles of violence that degradation predictably produces. Now, via their president, they are using it to crush the First Amendment, to supercharge the Second Amendment, to stand up bot armies and real armed militias to defend their ownership of your civil liberties."
Silence, she says, however, is not the answer.
"We will have to become far less complacent and far less scared. We also will have to organize. Because no citizen who simply settles for being a consumer of democracy should expect to have a real democracy ever again."