In the time since Tyler Robinson was charged with fatally shooting Charlie Kirk, I’ve been thinking about Robinson’s parents. Despite their anguish and fear, they convinced their son to surrender to police instead of becoming accessories after the fact.
It was the right thing to do, but it’s a heroically unnatural decision. The instinct is to shelter your wayward kin, take care of your tribe and let society fend for itself. Civilization asks us to rise above those base instincts, to endorse and enforce universal principles rather than the primal logic of “us” and “them.” But few of us face such a big challenge.
So pause to reflect on their sacrifice. Reflect, too, on how the rest of us live up to a much easier principle, such as free speech.
I spent the past decade watching conservatives complain about “cancel culture” and government attacks on free speech. And then, last week, I watched them enact these very things on a grander scale: Social media mobs hounding random nobodies out of their jobs; the government pushing companies to censor speech.
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Admittedly, there’s a certain insincerity to the left’s belated discovery of the importance of free speech. I have had to stop drinking beverages while scrolling social media, lest I choke on my own mordant laughter as I watch prominent cancellation artists — and their accomplices — make an about-face and start saluting the First Amendment. Apparently the old justifications, like “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences,” don’t sound so compelling when your opponents are mouthing them — and doling out the consequences.
However silly progressives look, at least they are now pointed in the right direction, while conservatives are headed in the wrong one.
Our fidelity to unnatural principles, such as free speech, is the foundation of civilization today. You cannot run a modern industrial society on tribal loyalties and personal judgments that work well for a small band of foragers. For that, you need broad and impartial principles that equally apply to everyone, and are equally enforced by everyone, even against their own.
Judge Glock warns of the perils posed by the Federal Communications Commission. Two slices:
The FCC has a long history of targeting opponents of the current administration in the name of fairness. Not long after President Franklin Roosevelt created the FCC, he bullied the commission’s chair, Larry Fly, to act against New Deal foes, whom Roosevelt felt wielded excessive media influence. In 1941, the FCC allowed a Boston radio station to keep broadcasting only after it effectively promised to silence Roosevelt critics. The commission later explained that broadcasters had a duty of “presenting all sides of important public questions, fairly, objectively, and without bias.”
Eight years later, the commission formalized this approach as the Fairness Doctrine, requiring broadcast-license holders to present both sides of any controversial issue. In its early years, the rule was applied almost exclusively against the Right.
Liberal leaders have long used the FCC to advance personal and political aims. Lyndon Johnson, for instance, built his fortune by cultivating ties with FCC officials who approved the expansion of his wife’s radio station. Ahead of the 1964 presidential election, the Democratic National Committee created a team to petition pro-Barry Goldwater stations to provide equal pro-Johnson airtime, citing the Fairness Doctrine.
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Republican senators David McCormick, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and others across the political spectrum have condemned Carr’s remarks, and rightly so. The government has no place in policing programming. Though a renewed insistence on fairness in broadcasting sounds enticing, in practice it would become just another tool of censorship—one that, in the long run, will likely be used against conservatives even more than liberals.
My former GMU colleague Tom Hazlett adds his informed voice to those warning of the dangers of the F.C.C. Here’s his conclusion:
Conservatives who supported the Fairness Doctrine soon discovered just how wrong they had been in terms of their competition in the marketplace of ideas. So did their opposite numbers. By 2000, the Democratic National Platform called to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine.
Some argue that Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation moment was a result of market forces and consumer judgment. True, almost by definition. But how much did raised eyebrows, or explicit regulatory threats, top off the corporate incentives? It is impossible to say, as the chilling effect works its own magic in the shadows. President Donald Trump embraces the view that threats from the FCC were a force multiplier, and pledges to let Jimmy Kimmel rot in his bad Ratings.” Sure. No artificial additives or eyebrows need compromise the free speech rights of American viewers, creators, speakers, stations, or networks.
Trump’s tariffs become ever-more Orwellian, as explained in the Wall Street Journal by Ed Gresser. Two slices:
Memo to Howard Lutnick and his Commerce Department: When you find yourself saying that milk is made of metal, it’s a sign that you’ve gone wrong somewhere. That’s essentially what the department has done by applying steel and aluminum tariffs to canned condensed milk.
This bizarre tariff scheme comes from a mid-August Federal Register notice announcing that goods in 407 different product categories “will be considered as steel or aluminum derivative products.” Anyone buying these goods from abroad must pay a 50% tariff on the metal they contain.
This is the latest chapter in the long saga of steel and aluminum tariffs. In 2018 the first Trump administration put a 25% tariff on most steel and a 10% tariff on most aluminum. The tariffs failed to reshore American manufacturing: According to U.S. Geological Survey data, the U.S. makes less aluminum and less steel than in 2017. The tariff onslaught has continued in the second Trump term. This March, President Trump added more steel and aluminum products to the list, reinstated the 25% steel tariff, and raised the aluminum tariff to 25%. In June he raised the rates to 50%, and in July he added copper.
Jeffrey Kessler, the undersecretary of commerce for industry and security, said that the August action—adding the 407 new products to the earlier lists of metal goods—“expands the reach of the steel and aluminum tariffs and shuts down avenues for circumvention.”
Somewhat puzzlingly, though, the Federal Register notice doesn’t list the new products covered by Section 232 tariffs by name. Instead, it reprints their tariff codes in numerical order, from “0402.99.68” to “9506.91.00.” In between are long strings of equally cryptic figures.
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What do Commerce Department officials think they’re doing? The notice appears to be a response to an economic and political problem. The tariffs on metal are hurting U.S. manufacturers that use steel and aluminum to make or package their products. Commerce Department statisticians report that by late spring, U.S. steel buyers were paying $960 a ton—more than double the $440 worldwide average. An appeal to the department for help that month by the National Aerosol Association, a group of businesses making aerosol cans and spritzers, suggests that the tariffs are harming American metal-using manufacturers.
Kimberlee Josephson makes clear that “profit isn’t the enemy of the good.”
President Donald Trump wants his Justice Department to stretch the criminal law to target political opponents (such as New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James B. Comey). President Joe Biden’s Justice Department stretched the criminal law to target political opponents, including Trump himself.
Trump’s administration pressured a company (ABC) to suppress First Amendment-protected speech in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing. Biden’s administration pressured multiple companies (including Facebook and YouTube) to suppress First Amendment-protected speech during the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump’s supporters, when confronted with this administration’s depredations against civil liberty, often argue that Democrats did it first. The tit-for-tat debate is a dead end; this is all part of the same circling of the political drain. But it’s worth highlighting one systemic difference between the “liberal” version of political repression that occurred in the early 2020s and the populist version Trump is attempting now. The liberal version was veiled and superficially neutral, while the populist version is overt and undisguisedly political.
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Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1831 insight about the kind of despotism most likely to take root in America is still relevant. He argued that democratic nations were unlikely to experience old-fashioned tyranny. Instead, the risk is something milder and more paternalistic: a “tutelary power” that keeps people “in perpetual childhood” for their own good. Think of the high-minded “misinformation” police and liberal legal experts admonishing that “no one is above the law.
When confronted with a willful sovereign, Tocqueville wrote, democracies can usually check “within certain limits the inordinate stretch of his desires.” That clash is what is now happening with Trump, the courts and civil society. The greater threat will come when Trump, or his GOP successor, makes the apparatus of repression more sophisticated and discreet — presenting its censorship and weaponization of government as moral and uplifting. People around Trump are presumably learning those dark arts.
Ms. Owens spoke of “the current awakening of the masses as to the occupied state of our nation.” This is Gnostic language—the idea that enlightened people are waking up to hidden realities while everyone else remains asleep.
This isn’t healthy political discourse—it’s spiritual pathology masquerading as analysis. Still, its appeal is obvious. Gnosticism offers a flattering explanation for life’s difficulties. Your problems aren’t the result of bad decisions, random misfortune or complex social forces—they’re the fault of shadowy puppet masters. Most seductively, you don’t need to do anything difficult to overcome them. You only need to know the right secrets. Kirk saw the danger of such conspiratorial thinking and renounced it as “demonic” last month.
Like the ancient Gnostics, modern conspiracists view contradiction as confirmation. When authorities debunk their theories, it’s proof the conspiracy goes deeper. When friends and family express concern, they’re either deceived or complicit. The theory is unfalsifiable.
The danger isn’t merely that this mindset leads people to believe falsehoods. The deeper problem is that it makes democratic engagement impossible. Democracy requires people who can weigh evidence, acknowledge uncertainty and work together despite disagreements. Gnosticism encourages the opposite: absolute certainty, alienation and the abandonment of the real world in favor of endless speculation about hidden forces.
The solution isn’t to ban conspiracy theories or suppress dissent. It’s to recognize Gnostic patterns when we see them and choose a different path. Real wisdom doesn’t come from secret knowledge available only to the initiated. It comes from the hard work of the real world: engaging with evidence, listening to opponents, building institutions, and rejecting the desire to outsource responsibility.
