I don't know. I mean, that seems like an optimistic take on reality, but I don't know.

I mean, I think mostly people like to smash their enemies more than they care about the principal free speech.

Like, I think that's all our experience for the last 10 years.

And we have the president suggesting he's going to declare Antifa, whatever that really is, as a terrorist group,

something he actually can't do if it's in the United States.

Take this all together here.

This seems like it is a systemic, a planned crackdown and one that seems to be very, very dangerous.

Right. In our political vernacular, there's a term that gets bandied about to describe repression, which is McCarthyism.

And I think it's worth comparing the repression that happened in the late 1940s and the 1950s to what's happening now.

In the 1950s, over the course of a decade, 10,000 people lost their jobs.

Here, in the course of a week, it seems as if, according to reporting, more than 1,000 people lost their jobs. Here, in the course of a week, it seems as if, according to reporting, more than

a thousand people lost their jobs. It took years for the McCarthyites to bring Hollywood

to heal. Here, it seems like it happened in an absolute flash. And it's because the state

is at the center of the repression, not some, you know, not some drunken senator on a rage, on a rampage and some other up and coming ambitious politicians exploiting an issue.

And if, you know, I think about project 2025 and how that provided a roadmap to remaking the kind of the mechanics,

the plumbing of the federal government in order to achieve all sorts of longstanding

conservative goals, but also to engage in a form of culture war. And when we look at what's happened, not just to the entertainment

industry, not just the threats that have been, in actual punishments that's been inflicted on

media, you look at what's happened to the university and the fact that the these, that the

president of Texas A&M was just fired this week, over a controversy where a professor

was fired. You look at the fact that there is a federal monitor now installed at Columbia

University and that there are all these other threats being wielded against other institutions.

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