Fascism thrives where free speech is forbidden

Get the Point!

I know that it has become trendy to compare the MAGA movement to fascism, but as the old saying goes, "if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck!"

Late last week, U.S. Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced that the Trump administration was freezing $400 million dollars in federal grants to Columbia University. The reason? Well, the administration claims that Columbia failed to "protect Jewish students" from protests that erupted on campus after the Israel-Hamas War erupted in Gaza in October of 2023.

Peaceful pro-Palestinian protests in New York City circa ‘24

The problem with this allegation is that like so much that comes out of President Donald Trump's mouth—and drips from the pens of his high level employees—it’s a LIE!

The truth is that Columbia went above and beyond the law in my opinion with regards to stifling free speech and peaceful protests on its campus! Whether it was censoring the university's chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, or, calling in NYPD several times to raid student encampments and arrest hundreds of peaceful protesters, or, suspending and expelling hundreds of students—while threatening the tenure of professors who spoke out in favor of the Palestinian cause (or in opposition to Israel's military response)—Columbia clearly decided to exercise its prerogative as a private university to prevent its students and faculty from exercising free speech as outlined in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

In fact, just this past week, four more Columbia/Barnard students were expelled for protesting the earlier expulsion of two pro-Palestinian students who disrupted a History of Modern Israel class by handing out leaflets with slogans such as "Crush Zionism." But to let Trump and his mendacious surrogates tell it, Columbia has done nothing to establish and maintain (physical) protection of its Jewish students 😡.

So that the record is crystal clear, I have maintained from the very first that no students on any campus should ever be made to feel as if their bodies or lives are in danger—and if other students are promoting or committing acts of violence based upon someone's race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation, that those students should be removed from campus immediately and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law!

But I have also maintained that political and social dissent are protected forms of speech, and that no one should face suspension, expulsion, or prosecution just because they hold viewpoints that frustrate, anger, or hurt the feelings of other students on campus! And I am no hypocrite on this point; I personally despise alt-right groups like the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis with a passion, but if a student on campus believes in such maniacal ideologies and expresses his or her support for the same in a peaceful manner, I do not believe that such students should be removed from the university community or the public square (unless and until they foment violence).

My position on this is fixed because the historian in me realizes that suppression of speech is the sharpest knife in the totalitarian toolbox, and when the government picks and chooses what we, the people, can say or think, that isn't freedom—that is full out authoritarian repression!

Columbia University Professor Reinhold Martin, a historian and president of the university's American Association of University Professors chapter, hit this same rhetorical ball across the fence by noting last week that, "This is not about antisemitism. It is about crushing dissent. And for those who take the Trump administration’s actions at face value, remember Charlottesville..."

Lest we forget Charlottesville, the site of a bloody neo-Nazi/neo-Confederate rally in 2017 that led Trump to declare that “both sides,” including the violent racist thugs shown below, included "many fine people."

Scenes from Charlottesville 2017…

Lest we also forget that when Adolf Hitler declared himself Germany's dictator in 1933, his regime immediately began censoring journalists and shutting down newspapers that dared criticize him or his brand of nationalist socialism; Hitler, through his propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, banned (and burned) books by Jewish authors and finally, by late '33, it was illegal to criticize the Nazi government at all with offenders facing jail, forced labor in concentration camps, or summary execution!

Nazi Germans saluting while books burn circa 1933

Now, with respect to Columbia University, the withholding of $400 million will not cause the Ivy League university to shut down; Columbia has an endowment in excess of $15 billion and will keep on keeping on until the Trump administration capitulates (as it has done time and again when announcing tariffs—only to later suspend the tariffs against foreign countries), or, a new POTUS is elected in 2028.

But what happens to other private colleges and universities that cannot withstand the reduction or elimination of federal grants, when—not if—they are picked on by Trump for any number of reasons, including his quest to eliminate "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" by removing all references to race, gender, religion, sexual orientation and the like?

Earlier this morning, I took a look at the mission statement of my undergraduate alma mater, Morehouse College, and as noted on its website, it provides: "A private historically black liberal arts college for men, Morehouse realizes this mission by emphasizing the intellectual and character development of its students. In addition, the College assumes special responsibility for teaching the history and culture of black people."

Knowing that Trump and the MAGA movement constantly attack the accurate teaching of Black history, and relentlessly dismiss what it calls "identity politics" or, as the Morehouse Mission statement says, the "culture of Black people," how long will it be before Morehouse and similarly situated private liberal arts colleges find their federal grants and subsidies withheld by the Trump administration?

Again, I realize that warnings like these don't move the social media dialogue meter much because most Americans have never attended—let alone graduated—from a four year college or university. But the peril is that whether one is college educated or not, since the Trump administration is following the Fascist playbook to the letter by muzzling free speech among the academic classes who know all too well the historical and legal dilemmas this administration’s conduct creates, how long will it be before "Big Brother," to borrow a theme from George Orwell's seemingly prescient dystopian novel, each and every American is ordered to think, write, and pray according to the dictates of the MAGA regime?

If it comes to that, trust, I will constantly disobey such unconstitutional dictates and write the truth about these vile and ignorant idiots until my casket closes and they haul me off to Tallahassee's Southside Cemetery to rest with the ancestors...