Trump’s mass censorship is what far-right Republicans have always wanted

Flux • Oct 1, 2025

Donald Trump tells reporters to be quiet during a press availability at the White House. Harrison Koeppel/White House

Episode Summary

Since he became president for the second time, Donald Trump has launched the largest assault on free speech that we’ve seen since Japanese Americans were interned because of their family origins. Among many other things, Trump signed an executive order classifying “antifa” as a terrorist organization, even though there are no actual antifa organizations. The regime has also launched investigations against private citizen organizations like the George Soros-founded Open Society Foundation. Trump has stolen billions of dollars from private universities like Harvard and Columbia because they dared to tolerate student protests against Israel’s war crimes in Gaza.

Trump has even demanded that all late night television comedians be fired for making jokes about him, and his FCC chairman’s threats against broadcast television companies have led to the cancellation of the number-one host, CBS’s Stephen Colbert, and the suspension of ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel until public outcry forced Disney to bring him back.

All of these attacks against free speech—and this is only just a short listing—must be fought tooth and nail. But censorship opponents must also realize that Trump’s censorship agenda is actually the fulfillment of what far-right Republicans have wanted for 70 years, as exemplified by the infamous Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, and his number-one defender and proponent, William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review magazine.

Buckley’s love of censorship and his contemporary allies’ love of it as well should be more widely known, especially because the anti-freedom agenda that they had for America is now being enacted by Donald Trump today. Joining me to discuss this and a lot more is Seth Cotlar. He’s a professor of history at Willamette University, where he teaches and writes about the American right and early American history. He’s also writing a book on a white nationalist activist who became the chair of the Oregon Republican Party.

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Related Content

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

07:52 — The Republican party’s entwined relationship with reactionaries

11:05 — Do reactionaries distinguish between private criticism and state censorship?

15:45 — William F. Buckley’s legacy of censorship

22:33 — Antisemitism and conspiracy theories in reactionary thought

25:15 — Ben Shapiro’s appearance on a white supremacist podcast

30:29 — Taking Trump seriously and literally

35:45 — The Antifa terrorist designation and its origins

40:10 — Ezra Klein and the problem of engaging with bad faith actors

47:02 — Thomas West and the absolute poverty of reactionary historiography

54:45 — PragerU’s bizarre AI history videos

01:00:58 — The anti-Americanism of the reactionary right

01:06:32 — Trump’s declining poll numbers and the informed electorate

01:10:37 — The pleasure some take in illiberalism and cruelty

01:18:29 — Conclusion

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So I wish we were talking under better circumstances, but the long and short of it is that the the recent assault on free speech and civil liberties that Donald Trump has been conducting, it’s come as a surprise to a lot of people. But for historians like yourself, this is actually the fulfillment of what the reactionary right in America has wanted since the very beginning.

SETH COTLAR: Yeah, no, there’s a long history of this on the right, not necessarily inside the Republican party. But you know, as the Republican Party has moved rightward, it has kind of moved closer to those voices on the right. [00:04:00]

They usually, at least since World War II, justified it in terms of anti-communism, was the way they understood it. So they, they thought, that communism was an existential threat to the United States, and hence communists should not have free speech rights in the U.S. And so, that’s how they justified their various efforts to run the kind of McCarthyite movement in the fifties, but then it continues on into the sixties and so on.

And so, this is why when contemporary politicians refer to center-left American politicians as communists, it’s simultaneously kind of laughable, but it’s also kind of ominous. Because that it is the rationale that historically was used by people on the right to justify squelching free speech.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, It really has. And and I mean, and I guess we could say that it kind of started with the Red Scare, in the early 20th century. And they’ve never really gotten a different tactic since then, which is especially ironic considering that the Democratic party, economically speaking, has moved quite a bit to the right. And only recently, maybe has had some kind of pushback from their own voters against that.

But you know, like the idea of Democrats being communists is just laughably stupid, but it’s effective, I think, for a lot of people.

COTLAR: It is. Well, and, this is part of the deal with kind kind of right-wing propagandists, the charge of communism never really had to have much legitimacy to it, or heft. The John Birch Society famously regarded Dwight Eisenhower as a communist. Robert Welch claimed that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist, which at the time most people were like: Wait, seriously, you’re, kidding, right? And he wasn’t kidding.

Like he really meant it. Yeah, he did. And somehow, I mean, at the time they were an object of great ridicule. But [00:06:00] enough people were kind of willing to plausibly believe it. And in the the late fifties and early sixties, reason why that charge sometimes stuck with some, particularly kind of deranged people, often it it had to do with the Little Rock Nine.

And that Dwight Eisenhower sent troops to integrate the Little Rock School 1957. And And so by communism. Communism is is like a great floating signifier, right? And what, what, people meant by communism was like the integration of schools, for example, is one thing people associated with communism or that that Dwight Eisenhower might be, slightly okay with the existence of labor because of this, therefore obviously he was a communist, right? Because he was willing treat labor unions as if they have a right to exist. And so the charge of communism on the part of these right-wing activists has nothing to do with the actual understanding of the. They haven’t read Marx and they don’t understand communism is.

It’s, a, it’s just a a smear that they can then link to other causes that they know maybe their audience isn’t happy about, doesn’t agree with. Common charge is that the L-G-B-T-Q movement is part of a communist effort demoralize and undermine the morality of Americans. Right? So communism just becomes this kind of catchall term that you use to explain why particular group or this particular movement is not just other Americans who are maybe different from you, but rather there are other Americans who are your existential enemy who must be silenced crushed in order to save America.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

The Republican party’s intertwined relationship with reactionaries

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And, Trump, I mean, he’s made that viewpoint very explicit. It in the elite circles of the Republican party, [00:08:00] these types of expressions, they were, they tended. And you’ve done a lot of research on your own scholarship about how the, Republican party in Oregon and elsewhere had kind of, they relied on these reactionaries for votes and for money.

But they always tried to keep them from having power and from the public knowing fully who they were. It was like they were the crazy wealthy aunt in the attic who owned the house, but they didn’t ever want to let her out. And that’s kind of the model that they followed for a long time, I think.

COTLAR: Yeah, no, for sure. And there was a real so it’s been interesting to see people like Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz and Carl Rove speak out against what happened with Jimmy and I don’t know how much credence to give this, I don’t know how much faith actually making these arguments, but, they are saying what is the the right thing to say, which is that the FCC putting pressure on private companies to fire people because of their speech is, it’s like the low hanging fruit of Civics 1 0 1, right.

That every educated American should know. And so, Princeton educated Ted Cruz, and I don’t know where Tucker Carlson college, but you know these are not unintelligent people—

SHEFFIELD: Somewhere expensive.

COTLAR: —So, yeah. yeah. So, so, and they’re now saying the right thing. Who knows? Why they’re saying it or what the impact will be But but, this is where having someone who is the head of your party who either doesn’t know or just doesn’t care, right. That, like, as the president, you don’t issue a statement telling NBC who who they’re supposed to hire and fire for their late night shows. I, believe according to the tenets of originalism that was in article two, that the president gets to decide on those late night shows.

It’s so just facially, ludicrous, and authoritarian. But the GOP used to be dominated by [00:10:00] people who would immediately clock that and call it out and say, no, this is not the role of the president to do this. But now the party is comprised of a large number of people who are perfectly fine with the president doing this apparently.

And then a couple people who are willing their neck out and say, this is bad, but who obviously are not going to do anything about it. And let alone. Criticize the president and the head of their party for doing it. So it’s the political culture of the party isn’t a really bad authoritarian place.

And I, my worry is that, if we congratulate Ted Cruz too much right now for saying the right things can imagine a future, a few months down the road where Cruz is is like, well, I, this isn’t good, but, these people are communists. And so, free speech is a difficult issue.

And so, we need to, in hard times, we need to rethink our principles. I hope he doesn’t do that. But as we’ve, the, past track record Republican politicians over the last 10 years should not give us great hope that they’re actually going to, stand up for principle.

Do reactionaries distinguish between private criticism and state censorship?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it should not.

The other thing also in the right wing reactions to Jimmy Kimmo getting suspended indefinitely by a, b, C it’s also been kind of fascinating in that I think a lot of them do not distinguish between private actors criticizing somebody and a government official with force of law power criticizing someone and ordering someone to be fired.

they don’t seem to like, they, make no distinction. So like I often I’ll see them say, oh, well, you guys got Gina Carrano, the actor, fired from Star Wars. And it was like, well actually those were private citizens expressing their opinions. Right. And the government had nothing to do with her being fired, But they, genuinely seem to place no distinction between, private media actors or [00:12:00] private citizens and the Democratic Party. Like, and this is also why, for instance, they impute any violence done at a left wing protest. that’s actually the Democratic party. The highest people in the party are responsible for that violence, even if they condemn it and don’t support it.

It’s really astonishing. And, it’s not, I don’t think it’s an act though, which is weird. I don’t know. What do you think?

COTLAR: Yeah, no, no, and it, right, it’s the distinction between civil society actors mean, there’s a long history of boycotts in the US right? I mean, yeah. Saying of course on the American Revolution right now.

I mean, that was basically how the mobilization for the American Revolution worked, is that organized boycotts. They ostracized people who broke the boycotts. If you were caught drinking tea, your neighbors would tut at you and tell you shouldn’t do it. And sometimes if you refused, could get a little ugly, So, the history of civil society functioning in such a way as to persuade slash encourage people to alter their behavior in the name of contributing to a kind of broader project is hundreds and hundreds of years old. It’s like the most common thing in the world. And. Yes. That is a very different thing than someone with political power who has the ability to revoke an FCC license for a multi-billion dollar company telling you, telling that company what they should do.

Right. are are completely things. The other thing thing that I will point out is that, back in, I think 20 18, 20 19 McKay Coppins wrote this great article for The Atlantic that was was all about this coordinated network of cancellation organized by Donald Trump Jr. And coordinated with Breitbart and, eventually lives of TikTok, I think was involved with this, where they collect all of this data on journalists and other a activists who they don’t in preparation for the time when they might have to cancel them.[00:14:00]

So the the idea that like, this is such a terrible thing, is is like this is exactly their modus operandi, right? This is what they do in terms of their approach towards trying to use intimidation, et cetera. And oftentimes the information that they select is sometimes wrong, sometimes very like decontextualized, et cetera.

But the, the idea that like they’re opposed to the cancellation of private citizens for what they say is just. Ludicrous. I mean, that’s basically, so, that is one of the main things that they do in as part of their, I mean, that’s what they’re doing now with like, people who said things they don’t like about Charlie Kirk online, they’re collecting, names of and trying to get them fired.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And also government officials saying that as well, JD Vance telling people call and inform on your coworkers and your friends family if they criticize St. Charlie the beloved,

COTLAR: right?

Yeah. And like, and there is a difference between the president’s son coordinating these networks with the owners of some of the largest, right-wing outlets in order to coordinate their messaging in order to target people.

That’s a bit different than just some citizens on Blue Sky being like, man, I don’t Disney. I’m going to cancel my Disney subscription because I don’t like that they made this, decision. So, the the dynamics of power at play here, both economic power, but more importantly political power when the president does it or the vice does it, or the FCC chair does it. Yeah, completely different different things.

William F. Buckley’s legacy of censorship

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And and then going back further in the history. I think a lot of people who are educated today have this false concept of William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review. That they, often, I [00:16:00] oftentimes people say, gosh, I wish the Republican Party was like, it was when Buckley was alive.

And it’s like. You guys have paid attention to his actual life and the things that he did. I mean, his first book, God and Man at Yale, is literally him saying: ‘Yale, you’ve got to stop these commie and Jewish and atheist professors who like racial integration and writes for women and say, the Bible’s true. You got to fire him because we can’t have this, this is wrong.’

That’s the whole point of his first book. And then his second book was a defense of Joe McCarthy called McCarthy and His Enemies. That basically it was effectively a well you don’t have to like McCarthy, but gosh, he’s sure going after the right people.

And this is literally the same arguments that are being made now by many of these sort of Quisling Republicans for Donald Trump. They, claim not to like him, but You know, they also seem to think that even though Donald Trump is actively attacking the free press and trying to revoke licenses and censor teachers and history and revoke science budgets, that even though he’s doing all these horrible, illegal things he’s still somehow not as bad as some grad students who have purple hair. That’s seems to be what they think.

COTLAR: Yeah. Yeah. I mean it’s Buckley, I I mean, one of the things that I learned was kind of shocking to me is when is when he writing God and Man at Yale, there was a woman named Lucille Cardin Crane, who was running this organization called Educational Information Incorporated, that was basically looking through textbooks that were being used in school and identifying them as secret communist Trojan horses.

These were like pablum social studies textbooks. But she had sussed out that these were [00:18:00] actually secret communists who were trying to brainwash children into communism. By which, and oftentimes the sign that these were communists had to do with the fact were pro racial equality was one of the offs her.

And the person who funded her work was none other than bill Buckley, Sr. F f Buckley’s father. He was the guy bankrolling this entire project, which was actually quite, it’s kind of the Moms for Liberty 1.0. kind of, and it led to this kind of movement of women often sort of working in local school, boards to intimidate local superintendents, school superintendents teachers to drop certain textbooks that they considered to be communistic.

was was especially potent in the South as white southern women tried to thwart this kind of imposition of a certain idea of America as a multiracial democracy. That was. You know, becoming kind of the the norm amongst social scientists and other kind of public figures post World World War II era, for understandable reasons, given what we just fought the war about.

And so fighting off those efforts to kind of teach American history in such a way that sort of treated white people and black people and Native American people as equally human was a really important strategy for those sort of grassroots women activists. But it was also part of a broader kind of national network funded by people like William F. Buckley Sr. That provided those women the kind of ammunition to go into their school boards and explain to them why these books had to be taken outta the library, why they needed to be removed from the curriculum, et cetera.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, the other thing also about William F. Buckley Sr. is that he also for seemingly the, entire latter part of his life funded a local newspaper in South Carolina that was in support of segregation.

And, and that obviously filtered into his son’s [00:20:00] views. the father said that his son was a hundred percent in support of segregation. And in subsequent decades after that passed through, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and some of the other cases got rid of segregation formalized, Buckley later admit said that, well, okay, yes.

I think that those were good ideas, but then he still kept, there was a vestige of his former attitudes in that he opposed any sort of attempt to put embargoes or pressure on South Africa. National Review was till the very end, a very strong supporter of the South African segregation regime.

And that’s a, it’s an important part of the magazine’s history that I think should be more widely known.

COTLAR: For sure. And the Sam Tannenhouse biography just came out is really great on all of this. And sort of, you know, just, he’s the one that think has discovered this tie to this South Carolina.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, he did.

COTLAR: Yeah. Um, which was amazing research find on his part. does really out elements of, Buckley was one of these figures who is. Able kind of just straddle that line the kind of liberal conservatism and illiberal conservatism or

SHEFFIELD: Conservative and reactionary as I call it.

COTLAR: Right, right. That’s another way to think so that so that he be in in dialogue with friends with who were on that other side the line, people who were comfortable with actual, like government censorship, while could sort of maintain sort plausible position as well, not calling So, or his relationship to segregation. Wrote Why South Prevail in 1957 segregation.

But he, he defends it in this kind wiggly sort way. And then says like, well, just that like for now, whites are the [00:22:00] advanced race. So he is claiming he didn’t believe in fundamental necess permanent racial inequality. It’s just now he wanted to protect black people from themselves, Right, right. That’s his argument. then makes this specious claim oh, he’d be in favor disenfranchising poor, uneducated white people too.

Which he knew was never going to but he, that is way he. Justified his support for disenfranchisement black by claiming wasn’t about race. just, it’s about education him. Anyway,

Antisemitism and conspiracy theories in reactionary thought

COTLAR: to me, part of what’s really out in that tannin house biography and think is important for our current understanding of why people are willing to consider acts that are to infringe upon speech is conspiracy theories heart of are.

Really important, For understanding what makes so father was bucket. Antisemite, right? And, it’s important us to recognize that antisemitism in the 1930s, forties and fifties didn’t mean that one was just personally rude Jewish people. it’s a totalizing theory about how world this idea Jews are communists, Jews behind communist conspiracy.

that that Jews further that communist is through their control of higher education. brainwash children that way their control media. brainwash children that way and through their control Hollywood and entertainment, another way which they brainwash So goes that and this is just. Empirically baseless ludicrous, but it’s, it, taps into the, that kind of antisemitism. And oh, also Jews were behind the civil rights movement as was the kind last piece this. so you can explain to people why is that we need to maybe some these media [00:24:00] outlets or some of these professors so on.

Because they’re not really like us. They us. out destroy us, therefore this is just purely defensive. we silence these voices, so so the, con, the theory gets people look upon a pretty, like normal looking, professor the of Oregon like a new deal, FDR Democrat and say, oh no, that actually is part this shadowy secret conspiracy that seeks destroy and seeks to freedom and to destroy America.

And that Buckley, very much participated in, but also tried distance himself bit from like, when criticized Robert Welch of Birchers, right?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. but never the Birchers.

COTLAR: Never the Birchers themselves.

SHEFFIELD: Very

COTLAR: fine

SHEFFIELD: people.

COTLAR: All very fine people. It’s just Robert Welch who’s the problem, right?

And so is where he, kind of, he allowed that conspiracy obsessed dimension of the American, right, which is to my mind, a very defining feature of the reactionary version of conservatism. He allowed that to flourish. Yeah.

Ben Shapiro’s appearance on a white supremacist podcast

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and and he was, in many ways, I think one could say so the, term that I use to describe people like Buckley is a fictitious Republican.

Somebody who knows how to use a salad fort, who’s a well-dressed white person. And so therefore, what they’re saying, can’t all be bad. And so we have to be in dialogue with these people because look at them: They know how to dress well!

And and, we see that recently with Ezra Klein did a, an interview with Shapiro. I mean, Ben Shapiro has literally gone on a neo-Nazi podcast and bashed Jews. Ben Shapiro done this. Yes. I’ll, I’ll, actually play the audio for the listener here. Let me I’ll, pull it up him.

COTLAR: Who was the host? [00:26:00] What was the podcast?

SHEFFIELD: Um, It was the Red Ice show with Lana Lokteff

COTLAR: Gosh. on that.

SHEFFIELD: He went on that, yes. And he bashed Jews in Hollywood and said that they were conducting a war on Christianity.

COTLAR: Oh my god. oh my, oh my gosh. The title of it straight up, I mean, I’ve got a million things in my archive that are just that title from, the White Aryan Resistance Newsletter or William Luther Pierce.

Ben Shapiro: BEN SHAPIRO: There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood that they have a perverse leftist view of history pushed by the Soviet Union that what really destroyed Europe was Christianity. It was not fascism, it was not communism, it was not leftism, it was Christianity. And therefore, the cure to intolerance is to bash the hell out of Christianity.

And so, there’s a war, there certainly is a war on Christianity, it’s coming from some people who are secular Jews, it’s coming from a lot of leftists. But yeah, I mean, there’s no question that evangelical Christians support Israel at a much higher clip and much more substantially than most Jews in America do. Because most Jews in America don’t care about Judaism. (Cut in source video)

Ben Shapiro: BEN SHAPIRO: I mean, everybody who’s bad is by nature a member of the white patriarchy, and everybody who’s good is by nature a member of a minority group. This is why you have the stock character who is the wise black friend, right?

It’s never the wise white friend, it’s always the wise female friend, or the wise gay friend, or the wise black friend. Because the impression is that the only wise people in our society are members of minorities.

Which is not to say, of course, that there are not wise black people. There are plenty of them, right? I mean, Thomas Sowell is a very wise black man.

But the idea that every person on television who is wise must be of minority persuasion is really a very subtle war on the white males in our society. Which, [00:28:00] of course, white males can take, but it does pervert the American mind as far as how we view certain segments of the population.

Lana Lokteff: LANA LOKTEFF: Conservatives are always racist, sexist, homophobic. Right now, they’re pushing this anti-nuclear family, anti-white, anti-Christian, so what is it that they want here?

Ben Shapiro: BEN SHAPIRO: Well, I mean, what they want is they want to destroy the foundations of American society. And there’s no question that this is what they want.

I mean, this has been the case for the left since the 1960s, and they’re just part of the broader left culture, which suggests that American culture is deeply evil, that bourgeois are deeply evil.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

COTLAR: that’s a sentiment I’ve read many times over the course of doing my research and every time I’ve seen it in the past, that’s usually been said by a neo-Nazi type.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

Not by a Jewish person.

COTLAR: Yeah, not by Jewish person!

But anyway, I mean, That, yeah, that is truly shocking that someone. it’s really really complicated the relationship between Orthodox Jews and evangelical Christians around Israel as an issue. think most orthodox Jews have a very um idea about this alliance and don’t really care about the theological reasons why evangelicals might be pro-Israel.

Which usually involves a kind of vision of the End Times in which Jews go to hell. But but you know, if, you, and they’re

SHEFFIELD: Burned alive, actually, right?

COTLAR: Oh, nice. nice.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

COTLAR: So yeah, but you know, if you don’t believe that, if you don’t share that belief then know, what do you care what reasons people have, right?

For supporting political interests? Yeah. So that, alliance is a really, opportunistic and strategic one. But it, involves not taking the Christian nationalism of some of these Christians seriously. And not understanding that for a lot of folks, what they like about Israel is that it is a religiously exclusionary state. And so therefore they imagined [00:30:00] that America could be like that.

And the people that that they would want to exclude from their ideal America would be people like me and Ben Shapiro. And so Ben Shapiro apparently doesn’t take that that seriously as a potential future or potential threat. If knew much about American history, he would know that probably not some energies you want to be like just kind of toying with and playing in in the name of just advancing a particular foreign policy goal that you might have.

Taking Trump seriously and literally

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, you wouldn’t. And I think that attitude also certainly does extend to Donald Trump as well, because there’s that phrase that a lot of Republicans now have as a platitude regarding him. They say, well, you need to take him seriously, but not literally.

And it’s like, well, his crackdowns on free speech and his going after licenses and demanding people be fired, demanding people pay him money in order to get approval for certain things. When he says it should be illegal for you to do something, he actually does mean that.

And I think that a lot of these conservatives, they have this concocted version of Donald Trump in their head, who doesn’t take anything seriously, who has, and it’s true that Donald Trump, isn’t smart enough to have an ideology. But nonetheless, you he has a personal totalitarianism and peevishness is about him. It’s, it is a, totalitarianism, born of pettiness, but it is nonetheless a totalitarianism.

COTLAR: It’s, and I think the reasons for poo-pooing it is because they take for granted the existence of liberal institutions that they themselves are also working to to undermine, but which they just take for granted.

So, yes. Donald Trump doesn’t currently have the power to wave a wand and get people fired yet. Right. and in in part he doesn’t, because all these things have go through the courts and then the the courts will make a a ruling

SHEFFIELD: Certainly trying to do that federal reserve.

COTLAR: Well [00:32:00] right, right.

So he, like, he pushes all of this stuff. And then there are these various guardrails in our system that are still, to some extent, limiting what he can do. And so The audience of of people who want you to think that, like, oh, the people warning about Donald Trump, they just have Trump arrangement syndrome, right?

Like, they don’t know what they’re talking about. And to the extent that they are right, that Trump hasn’t successfully done all of these authoritarian things that he wants to do. To the that that hasn’t happened, it’s not because of anything about him, it’s because of of something about these institutions that the people saying, oh, don’t worry about Donald Trump.

They themselves don’t care about institutions. They They themselves are undermining those institutions. And so to the, once those institutions are this is why, like for example, I don’t trust Carlson when he talks about this stuff. Like he’s been participating in the undermining of our judicial system and the legitimacy of the judiciary of anyone who doesn’t rule in the favor of Donald Trump, right?

So like the idea that somehow he’s, he is contributing to the situation in which it may become possible that there are no guardrails stopping a president from just. To squelching the free speech of individuals. And and so, so that, that to me is the part that is really, frightening is how those guardrails that most, people who don’t study politics for a living or don’t study history for a living, like there’s there’s no necessary reason why they should know how our judicial works, right? Or how the Supreme Court rules.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. It’s not relevant to their lives at all.

COTLAR: Right. They’re busy, they’ve got other other things to do. Right. And so this is where, the fact that like just about everybody who studies this for a living is raising major, you know, warning flags about what’s happening.

And that’s why they’re trying to undermine the universities trying to undermine, [00:34:00] academics. Because these are people who actually know stuff. This is why they’re trying to undermine, people like Tony Fauci or other, sort of experts around vaccines or other things.

Is that. want to impose their particular vision of the world their their use of federal power. And anyone, or anything, journalists, academics, who stand in the way are their targets. And it’s just right out of the authoritarian textbook. and the, battle is for. The The minds of ordinary American citizens and whether or not, like what will they accept, right?

will will they be willing to accept? And what they learned through January 6th is that 77 million Americans are willing to accept watching a coup happen on their television screens in their own US capitol. And then they will accept the idea that this was okay, and that the people who did it should be pardoned and that it was simultaneously an inside job by the FBI and also an a Day of Love by Patriots.

And so if they they can get 77 million people to like, be okay with that, right? Or to get get a whole people to to accept the idea that COVID vaccines killed more people than they saved if they can that out there. What else can they tell us? What else can they tell the American people that they’ll just accept?

journalist wasn’t actually a journalist, but was really a domestic terrorist. And so this is why this journalist has locked up, not because they were, taking footage that was embarrassing to to the government, rather because they were there as part of a domestic terrorist organization, so.

The Antifa terrorist designation and its origins

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and that’s what the the designation of antifa, quote unquote, as a terrorist organization is about, because of course um, as you certainly know, there is no national organization of [00:36:00] antifa and legally speaking, there is no local organization of these are anarchists. They have no organization by definition, they have no leaders.

They hate the Democratic Party. They are not funded by the donors of the Democratic Party because they despise the donors of the Democratic Party. And to the extent that anybody ever helps them from a legal basis, it’s just purely a support for individual civil rights.

And so hopefully the best case scenario that this is Jeffrey Epstein or Q Anon, as a sequel of that conspiracy theory that, they, allege there are these, there’s this giant, secret cabal that’s all running everything, and doing all these nefarious things. And then when they actually have the power to investigate it-- like they were very convinced that Patriot Front, which is a white nationalist group that holds marches across the country, they’ve been convinced since its beginning that it’s an FBI front.

Well, that means then that Ash Patel is running Patriot Front then, is that, really what you believe, guys? But you know, like, it doesn’t have make sense because it’s all about identity rather than about logic.

COTLAR: Right. So the, in terms of the, this designation of, antifa a domestic terrorist organization, I have a very Portland specific angle on So in 2019, in the summer of 2019, you probably remember this, there was A March A right far right March organized in Portland, and it was led by two guys named Joe Bigs and Enrique Terio, who who at the time were just kind of known as like, oh, maybe proud Boy adjacent and kind of right wing grifter types.

We, both of them then were eventually convicted for their actions on January 6th, kind of important organizers of 6th, but obviously we didn’t know that in the summer of 2019. So two future January Sixers organized this March in Portland and they, there’s video of of of our local Portland [00:38:00] kind of far right activists involved with a group called Patriot Prayer who were recording themselves live on Facebook Live, saying to all of the kind of rank and file people who are going to go and join far right March, take video of what’s happening, be sure that that you tweet it at Ted Cruz and at Donald Trump.

And tell them that they need to declare Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. So So is is 2019. Right. And I don’t know how they had identified. Ted Cruz as, I mean, Donald Trump makes sense, but I don’t know why Ted Cruz. But so this was the message that they sent out followers, was their goal this, action that they were taking on the street to Portland, was to record images of violence, send ‘em to Ted Cruz so that he can then pass a bill that would declare their local enemies in to to be domestic terrorists so that they could then be locked up.

And so this has been part of this kind of far right activist communities agenda for quite a long And so, yeah. Yeah, and at the time, in 2019, it didn’t go anywhere and the president didn’t, I mean, there was talk about it, but it didn’t actually kind of result in, a bill as far as I know. Is just like, much like with many things in Trump 2.0, it’s a kind of continuation and an intensification of something.

That was That was already kind of in place in Trump 1.0. But there were at also, at the time, there were guardrails, there were probably people in administration or in the Senate who were like, you can’t just just declare vague entity domestic terrorists and and go after them. Like, that’s obviously not constitutional.

But anybody who would’ve said that is now pretty much gone. Right. the the Trump administration.

SHEFFIELD: Yes, they are. this reactionary takeover of the re Republican party and the cancellation of, conservatives and moderates from within the party. This [00:40:00] has of course been a long running trend that really did begin with, Buckley and uh, the Goldwater takeover.

But of course he failed so badly that they were set back with that.

Ezra Klein and the problem of engaging with bad faith actors

SHEFFIELD: But just going back to Ezra Klein and his, friendly chit chat with Ben Shapiro, and he went to a, he’s has a conference called Abundance where he had, it’s sponsored by Marc Andreessen, a guy who hates democracy and has said as much, and Peter Thiel funded that conference, if I remember right.

And so, and so like a bunch of these right-wing oligarch billionaires are, funding Ezra Klein’s endeavors now. And I don’t, it’s hard to say what’s in his, mind or in his heart, whether he actually agrees with these people or not, or if it’s just some pathological desire to know, oh, well we have, we share America, I mean, that’s what he says publicly. He says, well, we, share this country with these people, and so we have reach out to them.

And this is the, the wrong way to understand outreach. Because the individual Republican voter. A lot of them are tremendously ignorant of what the party wants, and they don’t actually know.

and you can, anyone can see that if you talk to a regular Republican voter, they don’t know what Donald Trump stands for most of the time. But the elites absolutely do, and they want him to be even worse. So the idea that you would engage with them is just ludicrously backwards. But it seems kind of common within a lot of the mainstream media.

Like, you see CNN hiring that Scott Jennings guy some of of these other people who just constantly lie. Like Scott Jennings has nothing substantive to say about anything ever. And he doesn’t give, even, give you his own thoughts. He gives you what the talking points of the party are. So he adds nothing like engaging with these people who are the elites, gets you nowhere.

And, in fact, these Jennings types or Shapiro, [00:42:00] they’re hated by the far right. You’re not actually deradicalizing anyone by, pretending that Shapiro is smart or that Scott Jennings honest. You’re, you, accomplish nothing by doing this.

COTLAR: Yeah, no, I, mean, yeah, I think think you’re right.

I mean, it’s, such a hard situation because like theoretically Yes, indeed. Like in a democratic society, our our job is to engage agonistic with people with whom we disagree. Like that is what a healthy democratic society like. like. the other hand when you have a party that is basically kicked out of its coalition, anyone who actually is a legitimate intellectual, I mean, so then who do you engage with?

So what Curtis Jarvin. You’re supposed to like sit down and have a argument with Curtis Jarvin, who like doesn’t know anything about anything. Like I’ve read some of his stuff. It is so. Just laughable. Like if this dude was actually in conversation with people who knew things, maybe he would like have something to contribute and some insight.

But like he’s just replicating the oldest, dumbest like right-wing memes that I’ve seen a million times in this stuff in the fifties and sixties from the newspaper edited by this like, know nothing chair of the Oregon Republican party I’m writing a about Right. Like so, so, if you’re you’re Ezra Klein, like, and you want to have an engaged, want to have a conversation with like thoughtful, engaged, knowledgeable, like right winger, who is it?

Right? Like, Like, because they’ve kicked out of the party. Everyone who is like that over the last 10 Right. And And so creates just a structural problem, which is a problem that is a function of the dysfunction of the institution that is the Republican party. there’s the problem of our media e ecosystem, right? Is that if you want to reach just ordinary, voters who I agree with you are not. If you were to share with them Project 2025, most of ‘em would be like, what? They would would either read it and be able to [00:44:00] suss immediately. This is incoherent nonsense. This sense. Or they would find it repulsive, right?

But they don’t know, of the of the media that they’re imbibing as part of this Republican culture is telling them this. And so, but they’ve been so kind of ensconced into this media world where they’ve by Donald Trump not to trust anything that NPR or PBS or NNBC or any of these companies, tell them any other media outlet, the New York Times, et cetera.

It just just becomes a incredibly. Like challenging communications problem for the Democrats or for anyone on the left where huge swaths of our fellow citizens have been pre inoculated believing anything we would say, and somehow anything that they see in a reel from Tucker Carlson or whoever they’re willing to believe, right?

Or Scott Jennings, they’ll just instinctively believe what he has to say even even though he’s lying most of the time. But so I, yeah. and so this is where it, I don’t know. don’t know. I don’t know. Yeah. if you believe in democracy is I do. Right? You should believe in a culture of like open and free expression in which people with different perspectives kind of talk with each other, right?

And hash it out. the other hand, what do you do when part of the, folks who are part of your democratic culture don’t believe in a culture of open expression and want to destroy it in the name of, creating a in in which their voices are the only ones that get amplified or have any reach.

And yeah. Uh Wish I had an answer for it, but,

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I mean, it, it, certainly is tricky. I mean, I would say, as somebody who came out of that world of right-wing media and activism and intellectualism before it was purged by Trumpism, I would say that having debates with those who are in it still really is not productive.

But on the other hand [00:46:00] actually quoting their arguments at length and debunking them in a comprehensive fashion. I think that’s how you engage with these people. Because when they’re on the air and having to defend themselves, they’ll, they just lie all the time.

COTLAR: Right.

SHEFFIELD: Like, they say, oh, I don’t believe that. Oh, I didn’t say that.

Well, no, you did. And we have it on, tape right here. Um, And, like, and like with the, thing with Shapiro, like here he went on a neo Nazi podcast, like he has never been challenged in the mainstream media for, going on a podcast that argues for white nationalism and antisemitism, uh, and in fact, the podcast--

COTLAR: He signs Matt Walsh’s paychecks, doesn’t he? I mean--

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Or something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, it’s a, and yet they’re never, so they’re not asked about these things, but even if they were just lies. So you got to look at their arguments and dissect them.

I think that’s the answer. and, when you do, it reveals just how shallow, how uninformed, how uh, self-serving these arguments and these individuals are.

Thomas West and the absolute poverty of reactionary historiography

SHEFFIELD: You did a Twitter thread a number of years ago about a book that I think that still lingers with me. I loved your dissection of it Seth, of book, Vindicating the Founders.

COTLAR: Oh, god!

SHEFFIELD: Yeah! By Thomas West. and, it was, it, what’s so revealing about it though, is that right wing intellectualism doesn’t really exist. It’s an oxymoron, basically.

And so they can’t succeed. the, horrible irony, which they never get called on, is they have failed in the marketplace ideas. Their ideas, their history, their science, their governance. All, everything that they have argued, that they try to do. Whenever they come into power, they fail. So, like Oklahoma is run by, the most MAGA Republican secretary Education, they’re also the 50th in, [00:48:00] educational attainment.

And instead of doing something about it somebody just introduced a bill Oklahoma to require every higher institution of learning in Oklahoma to have a shrine to Charlie Kirk. And that’s what they’re spending their time on and apparently watching porn in their meetings. Uh, This is

COTLAR: That probably happen, or it was, I don’t know.

I, or I’ve read some stuff that suggested that it has a kind of innocent explanation. Not that I Oh, I know. Yeah, guy. But like, like, I don’t think, yeah, Yeah. But,

SHEFFIELD: But, just going back to Thomas, so like, Thomas West though, like essentially, this is why they have such a militant hatred of, affirmative policies, right.

Which in fact are not always about race. In fact, there’s lots of disadvantaged white people who benefit from affirmative action and DEI programs. But they don’t know that. And, so they hate these programs of inclusion though, because they want quotas for themselves. That’s what they want.

And when, and they’re, the things they make like Thomas West, like. And I, this is me, my very long-winded way of asking you to tell us the story of his book Vindicating Founders.

COTLAR: Man. So, so Thomas West is a, he’s a Plato scholar. I know nothing about Plato. So he, may be perfectly adept and good as a scholar of Plato.

I haven’t, assess the quality of that work, but he he did write a book that’s all about and it was published in the late nineties and I, was asked to review it in the late 1990s when I was finishing PhD and I read the first 30 pages of it and I wrote back to the journal and I said, I don’t think this is a book that’s even worth reviewing. Like there’s just nothing there. This is just I, we we didn’t have the word troll at the time, but if we we had the word troll, I would’ve said like, this is just a book trolling the entire historical profession by someone who clearly has no idea what they’re talking [00:50:00] about. So like, this isn’t even worth seriously enough to review.

And so I ended up not reviewing it but I did read it. then in the age of Trump, suddenly Thomas West became this like oracle for Hillsdale College. And as this great far seeing man who has been trying to tell the truth about American history and just no one’s been listening to him.

And I was like, wait, Thomas West, that name’s familiar. And then I looked it up and I was like, oh my God, it’s that guy. Holy cow.

And so in this book, he, I mean it just, even at the front step he refers to, and I can’t remember which historian it is, but some very mainstream conservative historian as a radical leftist.

And it was the kind of thing where it would be like someone calling Joe Manchin a radical leftist, right? Where like when you read it, you just think, okay, this person just has no idea like what they’re about. And they completely misrepresent every historian and their interpretation that they talk about.

And there’s also this very strange moment in the chapter on slavery where it seems to be suggesting that, the founders were white nationalists, but not in a derogatory way. Right? So it it seems to be saying that like in a good way hey, I’m not saying this is good, but like this is what they believed in.

They had a right to believe that, but also they hated slavery. So don’t you dare accuse them of being racist. But also they probably thought America was only for white people, but they weren’t racist. And So it’s this really. of incoherent. I mean, it all starts just from the premise that that anything a white founder did in the 18th century must have been good.

anybody who who would criticize them for anything obviously hates them and hates America, right? And be trusted to teach our And in an entire world in which historians were trying to bring and successfully did bring a ton [00:52:00] of nuance to how we understood the thinking of the founding generation and these white founders in ways that didn’t just.

They were all racist. Therefore, America is a racist country like that. That’s his presumption of what people were saying. But that’s his misreading. It has that, was, it was far more nuanced and complicated what folks were doing. So it was just propaganda, right? It was just, a guy using the dress of the fact that he had a PhD and taught at a university.

I could write a a book about Plato and show how Plato teaches us that like Donald Donald Trump is the worst person in the world and it’s our to like impeach him. I could, I could probably string together some quotes from Plato that would like, make that argument, but that doesn’t make me a Plato scholar.

That just makes me a propagandist, right? A cynical propagandist. And that’s basically what this guy did with his book. But and he is the person who trained at one, and I think a few more of the professors who now teach at Hillsdale. So, and and Hillsdale College is basically the Harvard of the Trump administration.

Now. They’re the ones who are running the one, one one of the groups running the two celebration of the 250th anniversary, producing a ton of content for effort. Prager You is another organization that, again, like if you know anything about the history and you watch PR u content, it’s so obviously misrepresenting and sometimes just outright making stuff up.

And strangely enough, always on one side of the political aisle, weirdly, it always serves only one side they when they get things wrong. But this organization is now basically driving the way the, federal government is encouraging people across the country. And so they’re, abusing the trust citizens should rightly put in their their federal government, right, to not lie to them. They’re, abusing that trust with a, an assist [00:54:00] from from the Trump administration. So they are I mean, national memory is a complicated thing. It’s not like during the all of the of the content produced the bicentennial was, rigorous and historically accurate and wasn’t saturated with propaganda so on.

So it’s as if we’re measuring it against some like perfect ideal that has existed in the past, but it’s just, just egregiously bad the way they’re approaching this now and egregiously partisan, which was not the case in with the bicentennial uh they were scrupulously bipartisan or or non-partisan in the way that they approached telling the history of the country back then.

PragerU’s bizarre AI history videos

SHEFFIELD: Which, yeah, I mean, you would think that that’s the basic standard, yeah. You had a, post recently where you noted how that one of the prager u well, PragerU has a whole series that the White House is putting out for them using absolutely bizarre, bizarre, freaky AI generated videos. One of which basically portrays John Adams as some sort of a predecessor to Ben Shapiro, actually.

Uh, these videos, you’ve got to it. So to I’ll roll clip, here for the audience for that.

AI John Adams: I am John Adams, blunt, stubborn, and the indispensable voice for independence. In the Continental Congress, it called me obnoxious and disliked. I call it telling the truth. Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes or inclinations, they cannot alter the state of facts. In other words, friend facts do not care about our feelings.

While Jefferson penned the declaration, I drove the debate, [00:56:00] won the votes, and dared to speak when others hesitated. I stood on principle even when it cost me popularity.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, so I mean, this is just bizarre stuff. And this is was what why I said earlier that, they cannot succeed in the marketplace of ideas.

Their scholarship is trash. It’s, it is childish, amateurish stuff that even many high school students would realize is bad history historiography.

COTLAR: Oh, for sure. and I I’ve, I’ve, showed several of these videos in my classes for students and asked them to kind of analyze them and, talk about them.

And yeah, it’s not It, it, is where the, I think this is connected to their fantasy that like high school teachers and college professors are brainwashing students, and I think they have, which is false. Anyone taught knows that it doesn’t work that way. And, actually anyone who’s ever been a student knows that it doesn’t work that way.

But I think they have this weird like well, because this is what leftists doing successfully brainwashing people. If If we just put out this content, we can get kids to love the founders with these incredibly boring and crappy AI videos. I think think going to work that I don’t think that is so, it’s simultaneously like embarrassing and horrible and I, don’t don’t like it and I don’t think our government should be doing it. But I’m also not sure we need to be that worried about it because they are so bad. Right. And. it’s, not good propaganda. It’s really boring and ineffectual propaganda.

But it’s, I, think they’re interesting to analyze in terms of what they are trying to accomplish with it, which, and analysis of the entire [00:58:00] project is that basically. They’ve selected pe all the people who signed the Declaration of Independence and, created a little biographical AI generated video of them.

Most of these people are, no one that anyone’s ever heard of before. They’re 50 some people who signed the Declaration of Independence. Some are famous, most are not. And for good good reason, most of them led I don’t know not particularly exciting lives.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, they signed the declaration. That’s it. Right?

COTLAR: Which is something, that’s an important historical event and, it’s worth remembering, but there’s a reason why, like, no, most people don’t recognize most of the names on there, but I think the goal is to encourage kind of ordinary rank and file Republicans identify with the American Revolution a positive way in the sense of like the violent part of the Revolution Right. And the sense and the part that involved alienating their affections from what had previously been the kind of ruling authority under which folks had lived. Right. So the brave thing to do, much like Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage said it’s we’re, in American Revolution 2.0.

That’s what Trump is, and it it will be bloodless as long as the left will allow it. Right. That was, those are his words. And there’s a lot of talk about invoking the American Revolution as seeing Trump as the continuation of it. The 3% militia stuff is kind of bound this. And so in other words, it’s, encouraging people to kind of gird their loins, put on the armor of God as JD Vance said the other day.

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