Trump's attacks on universities get darker, with shadows reaching our shores

Anyone who might dismiss this as being just a few isolated cases — or who think it is desirable to just remove political opponents from the equation — should think long and hard about what it will actually take to maintain this kind of “criminalisation of dissent” over the long term… escalation is inevitable.

There is clearly an intentional narrative being pushed that defines anyone who disagrees with the current administration’s ideology as an enemy who should be punished. Even if the risk to any one person is currently relatively small, just the threat itself will have profound effects on individual’s decisions.

A massive brain drain seems inevitable but such a war on free speech will also radicalise people, even if it starts only in whispers. That will likely necessitate further oppressive measures to “stamp it out” and so forth, creating a vicious cycle. With each iteration the stakes increase, justifying increasingly violent measures & countermeasures on both sides, further increasing the consequences of — and the need avoid — actually being held accountable for those actions…

I'm concerned about this as well. If this keeps progressing, we could see a monoculture develop among elite institutions and media where the shots are being called by three letter agencies. We could get to a place where federal agencies are working directly with social media companies to coordinate censorship of dissent and set speech guidelines. If they don't oblige they'll be threatened with arbitrary enforcement and getting dragged out in front of Congress.

Eventually there could be an entire political capture of these social media companies, universities, journalists, NGOS etc where 90%+ of its employees subscribe to one political party .

But it gets even worse. If this continues we could see activist judges try to throw political rivals in jail. They would even change the law in order to try to get them to go to prison, combining misdemeanors into felonies.

And this says nothing about the rhetoric. By casting political opponents as villains, this invites assassination attempts and general lawlessness to intimidate people perceived as not falling in line. By this point the media will be complicit so there will be no investigation into these activities. Even a failed assassination attempt would be at most a few day story with no reporting on motive or coordination.

I too am very concerned about all of this.