Jail the reporters. Free the neo-Nazis
What explains the confounding Trump-Musk(-Vance) view of "free speech"?
The first and only time I met JD Vance, several ambitious reincarnations of himself ago, he struck me as quiet, humble, even sweet. More Pillsbury than Polished Yalie. He had the insecurity of a man who never expected to be in these spaces — these college libraries, these publishers’ offices, these television studios, these venture capital conference rooms. Maybe, if you looked closely, you would spy on that shoulder a chip, a mostly veiled contempt for “the elites” he had slogged so hard to be around.
Like Donald Trump, Vance is a manufacture of the media. We made him. We were his base. He wrote a book that people thought maybe explained American madness at the jarring hour of Trump’s first victory. He became a great unpacker of that madness for bewildered liberals. Before there was the summer of 2020’s Chardonnay-and-Ta-Nehisi book clubs, there was the winter of 2016’s tears-and-hillbillies book clubs, in both cases earnest liberals trying to understand why people are mad at them.
In that season of Vance as hillbilly whisperer, he committed a gaffe, which the great Michael Kinsley once defined as when a politician accidentally tells the truth. Vance said he went “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a–hole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”
Ultimately, Vance decided to go both “back and forth” — decided to go back on his words, renouncing them; and decided to go forth into a cynical alliance with Trump.
By then, Amazon’s return window had closed for the earnest liberals’ book purchases.
This history is worth calling back to mind because today now-Vice President JD Vance — made by the media, and an early and clear siren about Trump’s Hitlerian potential — has turned about remarkably.
As I wrote the other day, Vance truly broke new ground in American foreign policy over the past weekend when he went to Germany and Nazisplained German history to Germans, suggesting that they chill out about their Nazi past and allow a modern far-right Nazi-nostalgist party to be a full participant in German politics and governments. Free the neo-Nazis! Unmuzzle them, he pleaded.
And, at the same time, Vance — this manufacture of the media, this man who got where he got because he made himself available to journalists — appears to have no problem with, and indeed some glee for, his administration’s ever more authoritarian posturing toward journalists here at home: the expulsion of the Associated Press from the White House press room because it had the gall to stick with “Gulf of America”; the lawsuits Trump keeps using as a cudgel; and Shadow President Elon Musk’s terrifying recent advocacy of imprisoning journalists from “60 Minutes.”
It may be no surprise for a guy who has had more incarnations than a Hindu god, but Vance — once the media darling who tried to paulrevere about a Hitler on the horizon — has become the political concubine in a governing triumvirate that wants to jail American reporters and free German neo-Nazis.
It’s a lot to process. Fortunately, below the fold, we have an explainer from our own Brian Montopoli, digging into this perplexing two-track view of “free speech” and explaining what it portends for the world.
Free speech for me, fascism for thee
By Brian Montopoli
On Monday, Fox News host and Trump administration propagandist Jesse Watters laid out in explicit detail how the modern right spreads its lies. After “someone says something on social media,” Watters told Fox News viewers, “Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it, and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.”
This is the Republican version of free speech. It doesn’t matter if the “something” that “someone says” is true — it usually isn’t. It only matters that it furthers the administration’s false narrative. (Sometimes, of course, the lies come straight from Shadow President Elon Musk himself.) Trump and his allies know their power depends on the effectiveness of their propaganda, and they’ve built a network to spread it as widely as possible.
But they can’t control the flow of information entirely — and that makes them extremely upset. So they are now following in the footsteps of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and other dictators by threatening to imprison anyone brave enough to point out their lies.
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