MSNBC - President Donald Trump has a well-deserved reputation for gaslighting, and several members of his Cabinet have taken great efforts to continue his willful duplicity. Over the course of the past week alone — in the name of academic, scientific and online “freedom” — Trump and his administration’s bigwigs have explicitly threatened free speech in at least a half-dozen different ways.
Over the course of the past week alone, Trump and his administration’s bigwigs have explicitly threatened free speech in at least a half-dozen different ways.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — who during the 2024 campaign frequently cosplayed as a free speech activist and a victim of censorship — said on a podcast Tuesday that he might bar government scientists from publishing in some of the most venerable and respected, peer-reviewed medical journals. “They’re all corrupt,” Kennedy claimed, citing the fact that they sometimes publish studies that are funded by pharmaceutical companies. Kennedy also said he’d like to create an in-house publication, a nifty way of controlling what government-employed scientists publish. Already, Dr. Kevin Hall, a nutrition scientist at the National Institutes of Health, resigned last month, citing censorship of his work “because of agency concerns that it did not appear to fully support preconceived narratives of my agency’s leadership about ultra-processed food addiction.”
In an interview with CNBC on Wednesday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon was asked about the administration’s intent to cancel all federal grants to Harvard University — upwards of $9 billion in research funding. The secretary’s reply was telling: “Universities should continue to be able to do research as long as they’re abiding by the laws and in sync, I think, with the administration and what the administration is trying to accomplish.”
The free speech tourists of the Trump administration probably know this already — which is why it’s fair to call it gaslighting — but it is not the mission of academic institutions to be “in sync” with any presidential administration. They’re supposed to be bastions of free thought and inquiry, and though many (especially Harvard) haven’t kept to those principles in recent decades, it’s hard to fathom how blackmailing colleges into ideological submission could possibly further anyone’s rights to freedom of expression.
Moreover, McMahon’s justification for sanctions on Harvard — that the university violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by insufficiently policing antisemitism on its campus — is remarkable insincerity. MORE
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