September 24, 2025

The Blue Scare: Keeping ScOR #14

This is not a rapid-response newsletter. I don’t write these pieces in a day. I choose a topic and start in, gather building blocks, then tinker and add a few paragraphs at a time, typically over a week or so.

Meanwhile, events tumble forward. You’ve been pondering an idea for an essay when someone murders Charlie Kirk and the Trump government launches a fresh assault on free speech. You’re still digesting that step toward full-on autocracy when here comes another: Trump’s public pressuring of his attorney general, via social media, to prosecute several of his enemies and to do it “NOW!!!” You wonder what other jackboots will drop before you can get your next post out the door.

They want to establish a full dictatorship but mostly, so far, they’re just playing autocrats on TV.

About the Trump-Bondi matter, my observation for the moment is about the news coverage. If Trump had sent his message to Bondi in a private text and a reporter had obtained it, that would be a major scoop and, in normal times, an enormous scandal. President tells A.G. to go after enemies. But is it somehow smaller news because Trump just ... truthed it out?

The newspaper of record led with the story on Sunday and the tone of the article itself was, by the careful standards of the Times, aptly hair-on-fire, I thought. “Even for a president who has shattered the traditional norms of maintaining distance from the Justice Department,” wrote lead author Alan Feuer, “Mr. Trump’s unabashedly public and explicit orders to Ms. Bondi were an extraordinary breach of prosecutorial protocols that reach back to the days following the Watergate scandal.”

And yet. Am I alone in finding the size of this headline, below, inadequate to the moment?

The Washington Post put the story below the fold in its Sunday print edition. The Post did make it the lead story the next day under the headline, “Trump’s new demands on Justice Department raise alarm among prosecutors.”

Over the last eight months I’ve often thought our major media, at their best, have done a respectable job of chronicling America’s rapid descent into fascist autocracy — while failing to call it what it is.

(Scene on Radio’s 8^th season, coming in the spring, will explore the news media and America’s information crisis. Watch this space and the podcast feed.)

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In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, the Administration took the opportunity to accelerate its war on the media – media Trump doesn’t like – and on “the left” more broadly. This has unnerved even some right-wing and MAGA figures. To name a few, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and GOP senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul spoke out against FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and his explicit threat toward ABC TV affiliates.

To review: The day after Kimmel opened his show by asserting that Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, was a MAGA guy — while Utah officials would say the shooter’s politics lean left — the FCC Chair went on the far-right podcast hosted by Benny Johnson. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” The next day, two large corporate owners of TV stations announced they would pre-empt the Kimmel show. ABC followed by suspending the show indefinitely – before reversing course a few days later.

Carr’s threat was backed by leverage. His FCC controls stations’ licenses. And one of the companies that dumped Kimmel, Nexstar, needs FCC approval for a pending $6.2 billion merger.

Following Carr and displaying sanctimonious wrath after the assassination, other Trump henchmen unleashed full-throated threats against the administration’s political foes. Deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller made the tried-and-true authoritarian move of branding, apparently, many millions of his fellow citizens as criminals who must be punished. Referring vaguely to left-wing groups, Miller said on Kirk’s podcast, “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks....” Miller floated the idea of bringing criminal charges such as racketeering, conspiracy, and insurrection against these as-yet-unnamed enemies.

The Vice President of the United States, on the same podcast, promised a crackdown on left-leaning nonprofits, “the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence.” J.D. Vance mentioned the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation as potential targets.

As for the top guy himself, Trump casually threatened reporter Jonathan Karl of ABC with prosecution for committing journalism that’s insufficiently kind to the president. Karl had asked Trump for his thoughts on an extraordinary and legally false statement by Bondi asserting that hate speech is not protected speech. Those who engage in hate speech (as defined by the A.G., presumably) would soon be in trouble, Bondi said. She backed off the remark after an outcry, with some conservatives again expressing alarm. But when Karl asked the president for his thoughts on the matter, Trump told Karl that Bondi would “probably go after people like you. Because you treat me so unfairly.”  

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The Trump regime’s stepped-up assault on free speech has led to one line of thinking that begs for a response. Some observers, especially conservatives, are now warning of a new “woke right.”

Can we not?

It’s fine to point out that some on the right who long called themselves free speech absolutists are now trying to shut down speech they don’t agree with. Yes, yes, the hypocrisy. But let’s not pretend that this is simply a matter of the “wokeness” shoe having been slipped onto the other foot. The obvious problem with that notion is that progressives, as scoldy and self-righteous and annoying as they’ve been at their worst, have sought to persuade, to apply cultural pressure – at times, yes, to shame and to call for people to lose their jobs.

What we’re seeing here is something else. As conservative writer David French said, “The president of the United States is now every bit as intolerant of speech as the most radicalized Oberlin undergrad, except he’s the president of the United States. And he’s employing all the power of the state, and that is what makes this so much more alarming than sort of a wave of cancellation in private life.”

More succinctly, from Jon Stewart: “It ain’t the pronoun police. It’s the secret police. It always has been and it always will be.”

Trump and his underlings are expressing in increasingly incendiary and demagogic terms that the regime does not intend to tolerate opposition for much longer. At the memorial service for Kirk over the weekend, which filled a stadium in Arizona, Stephen Miller outdid himself, giving a speech that would make a good parody of a fascist diatribe if only it were parody. Here’s a taste:

“We are the storm,” Miller intoned, “and our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion. Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture, they built the industry. ... The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen (sic) in all of us. Because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. And to those trying to incite violence against us ... what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. ... You have no idea the dragon you have awakened.”

It's all there. The absurdly stark us-vs.-them rhetoric. The in-group’s mythical past, which the out group was never part of and wants to destroy. The victimhood of the “real” nation, which will justify unchecked retribution against the degenerate other. Check, check, check.

Who is Miller’s “we,” and who is this “you,” the enemy? We know, more or less. The question is how far the circle will extend if this White House gets its way. How many will be targeted before it’s over? Everyone who dares to oppose them, it seems — including, perhaps, by identifying as a Democrat. In yet another deranged rant on Fox News, Miller declared that the “Democrat Party” is “not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”

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It’s an ominous and dramatic picture, but we have to remind ourselves that Trump and his people are claiming powers they don’t have. They want to establish a full dictatorship but mostly, so far, they’re just playing autocrats on TV. Stephen Miller can huff and puff like a wannabe Goebbels but we can reply with an embarrassed wince and a “nice speech, bro.” Brendan Carr could not in fact order ABC or its stations to kill Jimmy Kimmel’s show. (See: 1^stAmendment, U.S. Constitution.) When the affiliates obliged anyway and Disney/ABC caved, the popular backlash was strong. The network backpedaled and restored the broadcast. Sinclair and Nexstar, the affiliate owners that announced they’ll continue to pre-empt Kimmel, may be acting out of ideological agreement (Sinclair is famously right-wing) or financial self-interest (remember that Nexstar merger), but any coercion is indirect. Their obedience is voluntary.

Trump and his allies would like to create a world in which they can punish whoever they want for any reason or no reason. If enough people and institutions continue to obey in advance, the regime just might consolidate enough power to make that nightmare a reality. But we’re not there yet. Stopping this country’s vertiginous descent will require more of us to stand up and say no.

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