Republicans Move to Shut Down Dissent

It's not just Trump. The entire party is now out to kill free speech.

With apologies, I meant to come back from my break with a wildlife story. But I am just too angry at the moment.

by Richard Conniff

The news of the past few days is all about the Republican push to muzzle what’s left of independent thought in the American press and among American voters. “Late Night” host Stephen Colbert was talking about it just Monday in his monologue, denouncing Paramount, the parent company of CBS and his own employer.

Paaramount had agreed to a $16 million settlement with Donald Trump on a frivolous lawsuit the company knew it could easily have won. (Trump had alleged deceptive editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris during last year’s presidential campaign.) What drove the settlement was of course Paramount’s entirely realistic fear that Trump might use the power of the presidency to block the company’s $8 billion sale, which is now going forward.

Colbert, who was doing post-vacation happy dances and showing off his new there-not-there moustache, summed it up : “I believe that this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles. It’s ‘big fat bribe.’”

That bit of the monologue (above) runs about three minutes and it’s worth a look. (If you’re short on time, jump in at 2 minutes. Or if things are a bit more relaxed, carry on to Colbert’s take on MAGA outrage over the Trump Administration’s bid to bury evidence in the Jeffrey Epstein underage sex scandal.)

The Paramount deal follows Trump’s successful bid to extract a $10 million settlement from Twitter for having shut down his disinformation-prone account after the attempted coup on January 6, 2021, and another $15 million settlement plus legal costs from ABC after George Stephanopoulos used the word “rape” to characterize Trump’s conviction for sexual abusing Jean Carroll.

Those settlements, which Colbert called “payoffs,” would have led any past U.S. Attorney General of either party to appoint a special prosecutor, and the House of Representatives to launch a formal impeachment inquiry. Neither has happened, because Attorney General Pam Bondi started out in Stockholm Syndrome and is just going deeper, and Republicans in Congress are all just weeing their pants in the face of Trump’s repeated threats of a primary challenge for anyone stepping out of line.

So on Wedneday, CBS announced—and the timing was purely coincidental (or was it the moustache?)—that it was cancelling “Late Night with Stephen Colbert,” the top late night show and a longtime cornerstone of its lineup. In a press release, the formerly respected broadcaster declared that cancelling was “purely a financial decision”—possibly meaning the $8 billion financial decision by nepo baby billionare Shari Redstone of Paramount to sell out to the nepo baby buyer David Ellison at Skydance. The good news: The cancellation only takes effect in May 2026, the end of the 2025-2026 season, though Colbert’s scathing criticism of Trump will surely test the Republican-leaning owners’ tolerance.

But I see I have skipped Tuesday in this roundup of Republican attacks on the press. That’s when the Trump Administration sued to oust Democratic members of the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, despite its standing as an independent nonprofit. Then yesterday, Friday, in a pre-dawn vote, Senate Republicans agreed to end federal funding, via CPB, for the PBS television network and its radio counterpart NPR.

Republicans pretended that was also a purely financial decision. They cited the need to gut federal spending because of the massive tax cut for the very rich that they squeaked into law last month. Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts had a more honest take: “It’s all part of a plan to intimidate and control the media and how they cover his [Trump’s] presidency.”

Republicans in Congress apparently want voters back home to stick to Fox News propaganda and not hear PBS/NPR stations describing, for instance, how badly they are hurting their own constituents with cuts to Medicaid that will cost an estimated 7.6 million Americans their health insurance and cause an additional 16,660 preventable deaths every year. Or from learning what Republican attacks on federal early warning systems and FEMA could mean for their survival.

Some of those stations will now have to cut programming or close down entirely. After the vote, Trump celebrated this triumph over “atrocious NPR and public broadcasting, where billions of dollars a year were wasted.” In fact, the cut totaled just $1.1 billion, covering two years of support. A better place to look for waste might be, for instance, the extra $45 billion Republicans just handed to the Department of Homeland Security to seize undocumented immigrants—even law-abiding contributors to the American economy—and lock them in new makeshift detention centers.

How is that a free speech issue? Anybody in this country, even undocumented immigrants, enjoys the right to free speech guaranteed by the Constitution (due process, too). Also bear in mind the administration’s very targeted deployment of six masked agents to snatch a Tufts University graduate student off the street in front of her apartment for having written an opinion piece in a student newspaper urging Tufts to acknowledge Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Rümeysa Öztürk was freed by court order after more than six weeks in jail, but still faces possible deportation.

Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil likewise spent 104 days in a detention center for a student protest against the war in Gaza and now faces deportation. At the time, Trump gleefully called Kahlil’s arrest “the first arrest of many” and, having shipped randomly chosen immigrants to be tortured in a notorious prison in El Salvador, he declared in the Oval Office that “homegrowns are next.”

Also this week—and let’s go to the NPR report for this—Trump said he would sue the Wall Street Journal after its report Thursday on a 50th birthday greeting card apparently sent by Trump to his frequent companion Jeffrey Epstein in 2003.

The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.

Here, for your consideration, is Trump’s normal signature, from BusinessInsider.com:

It is a little hairy, right?

Trump called the report “false, delicious, and defamatory”—I’m sorry, I mean “malicious”— and reminded the Journal, in the third person, “President Trump has already beaten George Stephanopoulos/ABC, 60 Minutes/CBS, and others, and looks forward to suing and holding accountable the once great Wall Street Journal.” Just now, as I’m writing this late Friday, he has filed suit in Florida for defamation, naming the Wall Street Journal, owner Rupert Murdoch, and two reporters as defendants.

UPDATE July 19: In attempting to refute the Wall Street Journal piece, Trump wrote, “I don’t draw pictures.” This morning, The New York Times has published a series of his pictures with a headline noting, “Many of his sketches sold at auction.”

A Trump sketch of the Empire State Building. (Image: Julien’s Auctions)

So far, Trump is taking these lawsuits to where the money is—big corporations with business before the federal government and plenty of reason to cooperate. But smaller targets are even more vulnerable to Republican attacks. Trump has already sued the Des Moines Register over Iowa polling results before the election and the publisher Simon & Schuster over Bob Woodward’s 2020 book Rage. (A federal judge dismissed the latter lawsuit yesterday. But losses don’t matter, if it costs plenty for the target just to muster a defense.)

Other Republicans are targeting the press more generally. Tech billionaire and Trump backer Peter Thiel publicly outlined the playbook for what’s called litigation finance in 2016. He was rightly outraged after the gossip site Gawker outed him as gay. But he couldn’t claim that the report was false, an essential detail in a defamation lawsuit. Instead, he devised a Machiavellian plan to bankroll an unrelated lawsuit against Gawker for invasion of privacy after it published a sex video of Hulk Hogan. The $140 million judgement for Hogan put Gawker out of business.

All this is happening at a time when the news industry is already collapsing under internet and advertising pressure. Just since 2000, the United States has lost 2200 local newspapers. Half of all newspaper reporters have lost their jobs and are no longer reporting the news. If the ones still clinging to a paycheck are now nervously re-thinking their words, well, they have rent to pay and it’s hard to blame them. Meanwhile, internet sites like Facebook and Twitter do not care about local news unless they can monetize it, and they have opened their doors to misinformation and hate speech.

Soon all honest writing will be reduced to samizdats, and your private conversations and texts will be the business of government agents. Or is that already the reality?

POSTSCRIPT: A TIMID WORD FROM THE NEW YORKER

The tendency to fawn on the lawsuit-prone rich and powerful shows up, dismayingly, even in this week’s New Yorker, which normally takes meticulous care with its word choices. In a mildly amusing “Talk of the Town” about a Martha Stewart event with her “superfans,” the writer declares:

In 2014, Stewart, a Barnard graduate who worked as a model and a stockbroker before finding her calling, ended up serving five months at Alderson Federal Prison Camp, for alleged obstruction of justice.

I have no beef with Martha Stewart. She did her time, and even if the arc of her history bends toward precious, I still follow her advice when folding my bath towels. On the other hand, even moderately amusing journalists should know not to use the word “alleged” after a jury of eight women and four men in an American courtroom has convicted the defendant on all counts of obstructing justice and lying to the government about a shady stock sale. Even less so after a federal appeals court has sustained that conviction and the guilty party has duly served her jail time.

Hello, copy desk? Better sharpen those pencils while you are still allowed to use them!

Richard Conniff’s latest book, Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion, is now out in paperback. His other books include The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth (W.W. Norton), Spineless Wonders: Strange Tales of the Invertebrate World (Henry Holt), and Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time—My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals (W.W. Norton). He is a National Magazine Award-winning feature writer for Smithsonian, National Geographic, and other publications, and a former contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.