“Fascists are afraid of free speech, public gatherings and civil liberties; they’re afraid and insecure, because they know they’re wrong, so they crush it.” — Trump White House Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Dan Bongino on his former podcast
On December 27, 1963, Texas law enforcement officers knocked on the door of known communist John Stanford, warrant in hand. Issued under the pretext of the Communist Control Act of 1954, the warrant allowed authorities to search the premises for subversive literature.
In the ensuing U.S. Supreme Court case over the seizure of Stanford’s possessions, Justice Potter Stewart described the Act as “a sweeping and many-faceted law, which outlaws the Communist Party and creates various individual criminal offenses, each punishable by imprisonment for up to 20 years.”
Among the wrongthink Texas law enforcement officials confiscated from Stanford were works by Karl Marx, Jean Paul Sartre, Fidel Castro, Pope John XXIII, and even the then-sitting Justice Hugo Black.
“The Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee to John Stanford that no official of the State shall ransack his home and seize his books and papers under the unbridled authority of a general warrant,” Stewart wrote in the unanimous decision. “No less a standard could be faithful to First Amendment freedoms.”
Stanford died in 2013 at the age of 88, but the Communist Control Act remains on the books, just waiting for a resurgent McCarthyism to breathe new life into its paranoid pages.
In case anyone doesn’t recall the person McCarthyism takes its handle from, that would be U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican known for leading the anti-communist “Red Scare.” Even though many of the allegations he lobbed against Americans were spurious at best, his targets frequently lost their jobs and found themselves unable to work, their lives in shambles.
Such witch hunts seem to be in vogue again. To hear President Trump tell it, a communist just won the mayorship of our nation’s largest city.
For the record, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, whom a majority of New York City voters cast their ballots for on Nov. 4, describes himself as a democratic socialist. So too did the last century’s fiercest critic of totalitarianism, George Orwell.
In a letter to a friend sent after recovering from a near-fatal bullet he took to the throat while fighting on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell wrote, “After what I have seen in Spain, I have come to the conclusion that it is futile to be ‘anti-fascist’ while attempting to preserve capitalism. Fascism after all is only a development of capitalism, and the mildest democracy, so-called, is liable to turn into fascism when the pinch comes. I do not see how one can oppose fascism except by working for the overthrow of capitalism, starting, of course, in one’s own country.”
Big Brother comes to Texas
A radical stance by contemporary standards, to be sure, but notice that word: “overthrow.” Orwell was clearly not advocating violent coups in countries with long histories of elections like the U.S. or the United Kingdom. Yet that’s the exact same term that got Thomas Alter fired last month from his professorship at Texas State University in San Marcos for supposedly “inciting violence.”
A labor historian, Alter had spoken to an online socialist conference over the summer, only to discover months later a self-described “anti-communist cult leader” uploaded video of the Zoom meeting to YouTube. Ironically, in context, Alter had been criticizing insurrectionary anarchists who, in his view, seem uninterested in building a popular mass movement.
“Without a party organization,” Alter asked, “how can anyone expect to overthrow the most bloodthirsty, profit-mad organization in the history of the world — that of the US government?”
That mere question, not even broached in a classroom setting, resulted in Alter’s hasty firing from Texas State.
Whether or not you agree that civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 appraisal of the United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” still applies today, plenty of regimes have been overthrown through nonviolent means yet definitionally overthrown nonetheless — from the Carnation Revolution in Portugal to the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.
Had Orwell’s 1937 letter been found and published by red-baiters, would the author of classics works of literature such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm have been unable to hold down a job at Texas State University?
“It sets a very chilling and dangerous precedent,” Alter, the fired professor, told David Griscom on the Left Reckoning podcast. “Not only across the state of Texas, but across the entire country. Here, in an unprecedented manner without following any means of due process, a university president has terminated a tenured professor.”
And in an interview released just last week, Alter noted forebodingly, “this echoes fascist Italy in the 1920s and the beginnings of the Third Reich, the purging of universities of Marxist and leftist professors.”
Target-rich environment
Here in Texas, one need not be a leftie academic to find oneself abruptly canned.
After the gruesome assassination of conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk, hundreds of complaints were filed against teachers over their reactions on social media, with state investigations ongoing.
Derek Woods, for example, a football coach at Klein Independent School District in Houston, commented on Facebook, “I don’t get why anyone is sad… . Yes, he is leaving behind two beautiful little girls and I pray for them, but that man was a horrible fucking human being.” He added, “You reap what you sow.”
Crass perhaps, but isn’t Woods entitled to his own opinion? Evidently not. He was terminated immediately over his comment, according to media reports.
After ABC fired late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel over his much-misinterpreted remarks on Kirk’s murder, Republican U.S. Ted Cruz of Texas explained the danger
of targeting the comedian over his comment.
“If the government gets in the business of saying, ‘We’re going to ban you from the airwaves if you don’t say what we like,’ that will end up bad for conservatives,” he said.
Cruz compared the thinly veiled threats to ABC’s broadcast license made by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr to behavior befitting a mafia boss. Trump, Carr’s higher-up, has even suggested that disproportionately negative media coverage of him is “illegal.”
Kimmel, a well-known and deep-pocketed celebrity, at least returned to work after public outcry.
Humble educators like Alter and Woods were not so fortunate.
Sadly, getting fired doesn’t appear to be the worst fate authorities can exact on those who still act like we reside in a free country. Ask Larry Bushart, a Tennessee man incarcerated for more than a month after he posted a meme about Charlie Kirk’s death, which simply re-quoted Trump’s own response to an Iowa school shooting: “We have to get over it.”
That’s all.
And for pointing out the alleged hypocrisy, a sheriff awarded Bushart 40 days behind bars. Although charges were later dropped, he still did the time, and he lost his job too, of course.
Non-citizens have had it even worse than that.
A June story by news site Popular Information ran down the most egregious episodes: “Mahmoud Khalil, who is a legal permanent resident, was arrested in March by immigration agents for his leadership role in pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University. Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, was taken into ICE custody for his statements about Palestine. In March, Rümeysa Öztürk, a PhD student at Tufts University, was detained by ICE for writing an op-ed criticizing the university’s response to the war.”
Indeed, the State Department has revoked the visas of some 800 international students, many of whom voiced opposition to the U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza, according to the New York Times’ reporting. Not exactly a Shutterstock University of College world-inspiring example of encouraging open debate from the shining city upon a hill.
How Fascism Works
So, on the heels of Constitution Day in mid-September and Banned Books Week early last month, it’s worth asking, what’s the state of free expression today in the U.S. and Texas?
One disquieting sign may be that scholars who study fascism have been abandoning ship. In March, former Yale professor Jason Stanley, who wrote the book How Fascism Works, fled to Canada, Mother Jones reports. And in October, Mark Bray, a Rutgers professor who studied Antifa, hopped a flight to Spain after Turning Point USA, which Charlie Kirk co-founded, circulated a petition calling for his firing and his family began receiving death threats.
Closer to home, professors at three separate state universities in Texas said they’re already encountering problems recruiting qualified faculty candidates because prospective employees are worried about the state’s clampdown on academic freedom. The scholars who spoke to the Current about the hiring issues all asked not to be named for fear of being targeted by the state or administrators.
The president of Princeton University, Christopher Eisgruber, appeared on CBS Sunday Morning last week to discuss how institutions of higher learning are grappling with the myriad challenges to academic freedom.
“We’ve got an American crisis where we are having trouble talking to one another across political differences,” Eisgruber told interviewer Robert Costa. “Campuses are part of that and they’re a place where civil discussions are especially important.”
Eisgruber also expressed sorrow about the campus shooting of Kirk at Utah Valley University and what it portends.
“Whatever else is true and whatever political views one may have, we have got to be a country where people can have discussions without the threat of assassination and political violence,” he added.
Trump claims to agree, despite his mass-pardoning of cop-pummeling Jan. 6 rioters.
“It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree — day after day, year after year — in the most hateful and despicable way possible,” he said in a White House address on the day Kirk was gunned down. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
Except this is coming from the same man who promised New Hampshire rally-goers in November 2023 to undertake a purge of anyone who happens to hold political views outside his version of the mainstream.
“We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” Trump said.
Sounds like that meets the definition of “hateful rhetoric.”
Trump also repeatedly referred to beaten 2024 rival Kamala Harris as “a fascist,” in spite of the umbrage many ultra-conservatives take at being similarly labeled.
What’s more, libertarian think tank the Cato Institute found that, excluding 9/11, some 63% of politically-motivated murders in the U.S. since 1975 were carried out right-wingers. That compares to just 10% by those espousing leftist causes.
Global data of nearly 72,000 attacks analyzed by University of Maryland researchers confirms the discrepant lethality of right-wing domestic terrorism. A Department of Justice study which reached the same conclusion was tossed down the Orwellian memory-hole by Trump’s DOJ in early September, mysteriously vanishing from the government’s own website.
The ideological disparity of political violence stands in stark contrast to National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, signed by Trump on Sept. 25.
“The focus on speech is evident throughout NSPM-7,” independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported two days later. “A ‘pre-crime’ endeavor,” he wrote, referencing sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report, which sets about “retooling the counter-terror apparatus to go after Americans at home” and “monitoring political activity, or speech, as an investigative method to discover ‘radicalism’.”
Welcome home, Joe McCarthy.
In an interview with Klippenstein, Nathan Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs, warned that few of us appear safe:
“Groups like the Democratic Socialists of America might think, ‘OK, well, obviously we’re completely nonviolent so we don’t have anything to fear’,” but the list of preemptive ‘indicators’ includes “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the U.S. government, anyone who supports more liberal immigration policies, anyone who says racism exists, anyone who’s pro-transgender, or expresses hostility towards traditional American views on family, religion, or morality. Really so broad.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, co-founded by card-carrying communist Elizabeth Flynn Gurley, described the national security directive as “a fever dream of conspiracies.” Beyond that, the Brennan Center for Justice — named for Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, who helped set the Stanford precedent — stated the directive was “threatening to turn the full force of the federal government to rooting out a conjured-up left-wing conspiracy of political violence.”
In Klippenstein’s simpler words, NSPM-7 is a “declaration of war on anyone who does not support the Trump administration and its agenda.”
And we all pay
Even when culture wars amount to performative government overreach unlikely to stand up to court challenges, they’re never waged on the cheap.
In 2023, community advocate Nathalie Herpin got curious about how much money and time were spent reviewing books targeted for book bans, for instance. She filed a records request with Spring Branch ISD west of Houston and shockingly discovered that $30,119 and 226 staff hours — split between 16 district employees — were wasted on a single book, The Black Friend by Frederick Joseph, who was Comic-Con’s Humanitarian of the Year in 2018.
Couldn’t we have put those funds into, I don’t know, teaching kids to read?
Extrapolating from an estimate Lewisville ISD provided to the Texas Education Agency in 2021, EveryLibrary, the nation’s first and only 501(c)4 organization lobbying for libraries, gave a low-ball figure of “more than $3.6 million dollars to ban books in Texas.”
“Texans spent a staggering $112 million last year to manage culturally divisive conflicts in schools,” Rachel White, professor of educational leadership at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote in an op-ed in the Austin American-Statesman. “The costs include the money and staff time spent on librarians sorting through challenges to hundreds of books” as well as “turnover of school employees, triggering costs to hire and retain new staff,” which “further squeeze already cash-strapped Texas school districts.”
Upon surveying hundreds of school superintendents across the nation, White and her colleagues scored districts based on their number of culture war skirmishes. A full 28% of school districts fell into the most frequent category.
“On average, a school district serving 10,000 students and experiencing high levels of culturally divisive conflict is spending $812,000,” which included hiring additional security after threats of violence and staff time dealing with misinformed parents and right-wing activists, “funds that could otherwise be spent enriching students’ education.”
Overall, “the cost of conflict for the nation’s public schools in 2023-24 was approximately $3.2 billion,” the researchers summarized.
So, when Gov. Greg Abbott campaigns next year on returning education “back to the basics,” voters should tell him to heed his own advice. The billions saved simply by lowering the temperature on divisiveness could expand access to after-school programs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics or ensure every child receives a nutritious breakfast and lunch daily. Fiscal conservatism and the stoking of culture war nonsense are as incongruous as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Learning to discuss controversial topics peaceably is a crucial part of what it means to be a citizen in the world’s oldest democracy, so-called. But one in four teachers confided to the RAND Corp. for a recent study that school districts instructed them to curtail discussions surrounding race, gender and other social and political issues, with 2 out of 3 teachers doing so of their own accord for fear of backlash.
That’s a chilling effect.
Just as in the aftermath of the McCarthy era, what can never be precisely calculated are the opportunity costs of the more tolerant society we could have been, had the lurch rightward been averted. And none of us can be sure how deep authoritarian rabbit-holes will go.
“Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others,” the poet and author Charles Bukowski wrote when he discovered one of his collections of short stories had been pulled from the shelves of a public library in Holland, of all places.
The witch-hunters’ fear, Bukowski concluded, “is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness.”
Tellingly, many of the same right wingers in Texas and elsewhere who only yesterday touted themselves as free speech absolutists are now exacerbating this appallingly sad state repression.
As Bukowski signed at the end of his reply, “may we all get better together.”
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