REAP WHAT YOU SOW?

Outside the Beltway's James Joyner characterizes Michigan professor Don Moynihan's "we all live in a foreign country now" as a "stark observation."  Read the professor's post, and the ongoing bull session at Outside the Beltway, and recognize that once the punishment cycles begin, stopping them is hard.

For all the professors concerns about repression from the Trump administration, note how he opens his essay.

Normally I record the classes I teach. It gives students who miss class a chance to catch up. I also make space in my classes to talk about what is happening in government right now. A couple of weeks ago, students asked we keep the discussions, but stop recording the class. They worried about any record of their words that might be viewed as criticism of the current administration, and somehow weaponized against them.

It’s a small example of how fear is creeping into American life. The right to say what we want, to choose our topics of study, is essentially American. But we don’t live in America any longer.

Go through his list of abuses and usurpations, dear reader, and ask yourself how we got here.  Today it might be students in a Michigan political science or public administration class fretting about something they said about Our President going on their permanent record; a few years ago, it might have been Michigan students fretting about something they said coming to the attention of a bias response team.  "Does it come as a surprise that a Glenn Youngkin or Ron DeSantis [or latterly, a second act for Donald Trump] emerges as a corrective?"  I'll let people who pay closer attention to the nuances of law and politics work out whether Republican complaints about Democrats "weaponizing government" were the tat and Our President's "politicized Justice Department" are the tit; and his complaint that "Campus officials are trying to decide how to respond to government orders to remove ideas" is amusing in light of all the things Student Affairs types have done to remove; or failing to remove, to "problematize" or to cast as secular sins inconvenient ideas.  The professor attempts to flip the script on that history.  "For example, it seems silly to write an op-ed fulminating that some employees at a university proposed an unofficial list of words it wants people to avoid using when the federal government is formally purging a much longer list of words."

You could propose to end the punishment cycles and restore Western norms.  The professor isn't interested.

Many of those who portrayed themselves as free speech champions or classical liberals are on board with censorship and purges, and will have no difficulty dismissing the charge of hypocrisy, because they never really believed in free speech ideals. They have redefined free speech to be the speech they support, and other speech to be subject to government control.

Well, tolerance in support of dangerous ideas is repressive tolerance, isn't it?  But that's how the Michigan faculty got a Trump plurality in their state, isn't it?

Others still cling to the idea that it was wokeness that is causing the current censorship, since it fueled the reactionary forces of Trumpism. Or relabel the right to be “the woke right” to try to maintain the relevance of the trope. If you spent the last decade being fundamentally wrong about the gravest threats to speech in America, these are clever ways to rewrite history to give the impression that you were right all along.

That's for arbitrary values of "fundamentally wrong," isn't it?  Team Credentialed Elite had its "ending misinformation and disinformation" delusions, while Team Normal had enough of corona lockdowns and loose talk about "existential threats to democracy."