“Censorship isn’t people being mad at your take,” Hadar Harris tells Edwin Eisendrath. “It’s government deciding which speech is acceptable.” She walks through the authoritarian playbook: Executive orders that put political appointees over grantmaking, museums and national parks pushed to sanitize history, even what shows up on federal websites scrubbed to match the party line. That’s not culture-war static — it’s the machinery of power narrowing what you can say.
Edwin pushes on the courts: “The Supreme Court is hanging by a thread,” he says, wondering if Roberts will cut it. Hadar is blunt about the stakes — viewpoint neutrality is being torched in real time, and the chilling effect is landing hardest on universities: research dollars conditioned on politics, “divisive concepts” laws aimed at college classrooms, and visa screens that read like ideology tests.
They don’t spare the press. Hadar catalogs credentialed reporters shoved out of briefings, journalists targeted while covering protests, and a funding slash that kneecaps already fragile local news. Add in a politicized FCC and corporate capitulations dressed up as settlements, and you get the point: If you control the channels, you don’t have to win the argument; you starve it of oxygen.
Zoom out and the pattern gets darker. The U.S. stepping back from the UN’s human-rights review hands strongmen a talking point, and Hadar’s “zero to fascist” score lands at a jolting 7.5. But her answer isn’t despair; it’s homework. Democracy is a ground game — courts, campuses, councils, and streets — and it only survives if people make it visible and insist on it.
Tune in to this week’s It’s the Democracy, Stupid and tell us where you’d draw the line — and how you plan to defend it.
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