Let’s get this part out of the way early: I have little respect for Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch’s intelligence. But even he ought to have seen the silliness in his Tuesday morning newsletter.

Mr Bunch began with his very great concern that our “45th and soon-to-be 47th POTUS” would be cracking down on free speech and dissent:

Mother Jones also notes in a new piece that the anti-Gaza-protest playbook will likely inspire a Trump regime in other ways, including following through on his campaign threats to deport campus protesters. Cornell University grad student Momodou Taal — a protester whose student visa was revoked but has dodged deportation, for now — told the magazine that last spring’s crackdown set an awful precedent, saying: “I think what [President Joe] Biden has allowed for is that the clampdown is made easier for Trump now because the groundwork has already been laid.”

Indeed, Cornell’s moves to suspend Taal and other pro-Palestinian students who disrupted a job fair in September is just one part of a campus crusade against dissent and, arguably, free speech that seems to have succeeded in sharply reducing protests against the killing of civilians in Gaza — or against anything else for that matter.

Uhhh, even Mr Bunch (unwittingly?) admitted that Mr Taal “disrupted a job fair,” which means that this was beyond freedom of speech and peaceable assembly, but was infringing upon the freedom of speech and peaceable assembly of other people.

Mr Bunch then advocated the new social media site Bluesky, the anti-Twitter refuge of those who can’t stand actual freedom of speech:

Only on rare occasions do I update the same story here two weeks in a row, but I want to stress for any folks not yet on board what a phenomenon the social media site Bluesky has become over the two weeks since Trump’s reelection. Every day now, another roughly 1 million new users are joining the site — which carries both the vibe and even the look of the old Twitter before Elon Musk bought that site and darkly turned it into X, which amps up right-wing disinformation. Many new Bluesky users have deactivated their accounts on X, or at least stopped posting at Musk’s joint. People wondering what to do in response to Trump can start by having healthy conversations with like-minded souls. Join me over at @willbunch.bsky.social for a couple of blueskis.

That was the ‘tweet’ with which I was greeted when I signed up for Bluesky myself: an immediate attack on actual freedom of speech, and support for the types of restrictions on Twitter which Elon Musk ended when he bought and took over the platform. Freedom of speech and of the press includes within itself the freedom not to listen or read that which you choose to ignore, but Mr Filipkowski put it more blatantly than others: he just doesn’t want to listen to anyone but his leftist fellow travelers.

The left loved Twitter when freedom of speech was stifled by left-leaning ownership; they hate it now that conservatives could say what they wished.

Then came Mr Bunch’s greatest irony:

Backstory on how TV’s ‘Morning Joe’ chose to obey in advance

The phrase, “Do not obey in advance,” which is the first fighting-fascism rule from Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s best-selling On Tyranny, is already becoming a cliché in these first days of the Donald Trump transition. But two unlikely imperial supplicants were the MSNBC Morning Joe hosts, the married couple of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. True, the couple had once been friends back around 2015 with the then-candidate, and used to take his phone calls on the air. But their relationship became so acrimonious that Trump publicly spread an infamous conspiracy theory about Scarborough and made a snide remark about Brzezinski visiting Mar-a-Lago bleeding from plastic surgery, as the MSNBC hosts used the F-word — “fascism” — to describe Trump’s 2024 campaign.

That’s why it was more than a little shocking Monday morning when Scarborough and Brzezinski revealed their unorthodox way of dealing with a “fascist” president — that they’d gone to Mar-a-Lago Friday to meet with the president-elect, presumably on bended knee. It certainly can’t be called an act of journalism, because there were no cameras present. “Don’t be mistaken: We are not here to defend or normalize Donald Trump,” Scarborough — a firebrand conservative GOP congressman in the 1990s who now is an independent — told his presumably shocked viewers. “We are here to report on him and to hopefully provide you insights that are going to better equip all of us in understanding these deeply unsettling times.” But the MSNBC star also claimed that an “upbeat” Trump “seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues.”

Brzezinski, for her part, answered her own question of how could they meet with Trump by asking, “How could we not?” A better question and answer would have been the one way the MSNBC stars could have gone to Mar-a-Lago while retaining their integrity, and even performing a public service: by demanding that Trump only agree to speak to them on camera, unedited, with no subject restrictions, and to ask some of the tough questions that the president has avoided, like his wackadoodle cabinet picks or his plans to use the military for mass deportations.

Instead, Scarborough and Brzezinski put the exclamation point on the trend that began before the election when the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times both spiked their editorial boards’ already written endorsements of Kamala Harris, presumably not to offend the candidate on his road back to the White House. Not only was this not an act of journalism, but it was the worst form of ritual humiliation, meant to show Trump’s strongman dominance over a pliant news media — another watchdog institution meant to cower before the new regime. The worst part is that this show of submission just days after Trump’s victory makes life harder for those journalists left who do plan, in a moment of increased risk, to keep asking the tough questions in this muddled new era.

This is just hysterically funny. Mr Bunch tells us about the brave “journalists left who do plan, in a moment of increased risk, to keep asking the tough questions in this muddled new era,” but trashes two (purported) journalists who have gone to cover a story about the next President of the United States is somehow “supplicants,” showing fealty and making obeisance to him. Uhhh, you can’t “keep asking the tough questions” to Mr Trump if you are unwilling to talk to him in the first place.

I can see why Mr Bunch likes Bluesky. Their Community Guidelines state:

Don’t use Bluesky Social to break the law or cause harm to others. For example, do not:

• K – Do not engage in voter suppression or share misleading content about election processes. Do not encourage or glorify the intimidation of election participants or real-world disruption of the election processes.
• L – Do not share misleading content falsely attributed to candidates in elections.

In other words, if the content moderators believe that something might be false, they’ll censor it. Given that this is a liberal site, you know that that censorship would not have censored Mr Bunch calling President Trump a fascist, but would have censored anything referring to “Tampon Tim” during the campaign.

Treat others with respect. For example, no:

• A – Harassment or abuse directed at a specific person or group, including but not limited to, sexual harassment and gender identity-based harassment
• B – Promoting hate or extremist conduct that targets people or groups based on their race, gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality, disability, or sexual orientation

In other words, those challenging the cockamamie notion that Representative-elect Tim McBride, a male who claims to be a woman going by the name of “Sarah,” is actually a woman would not be allowed, but those claiming that he really is a chick would be just fine, thank you very much.

We noted earlier that the (purportedly) private publisher Twitter had, before Mr Musk bought it and opted for freedom of speech, determined that transgenderism, the idea that people can change their sex through a combination of drug therapy and surgical procedures, is the truth, and speech arguing differently must be prohibited. The New York Times gave OpEd space to Andrew Marantz to claim that Free Speech is Killing Us, and Chad Malloy^[1]Chad Malloy is a male who claims to be female, using the made-up name “Parker Marie Malloy”. The First Street Journal’s Stylebook notes that we always refer to the ‘transgendered’ … Continue reading to state that Twitter’s restrictions on ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering’ actually promote the freedom of speech. One side of the argument is simply to be suppressed, or, as George Orwell put it, “Ignorance is Strength.”

Mr Bunch’s newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, has gone all in on that, using the ‘preferred pronouns’ of those who claim to be a different sex from what their biology has dictated, or not even a specific ‘gender’ at all. That’s the Inquirer’s right, part of their own freedom of the press, but what Mr Bunch wants is not actual discussion, but an echo chamber, where no serious dissent is allowed. He doesn’t like the fact that Mr and Mrs Scarborough visited our former and future President, even though that’s exactly what journalists should strive to do.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized, just a few days after Joe Biden was inaugurated:

Much of American journalism, which was supposed to revert to its historic role as a check on those in power after Donald Trump left town, is now devoted to shutting down the commercial lifeline of other media. Think of the precedent for the next populist Republican President who might declare pro-choice publications “deadly.”

President Biden’s attempt to create his own Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security failed, so now Mr Bunch and his ideological fellow travelers are wanting to isolate themselves from the chatter of we unedumacated rubes. They have created their own No Nothing Party.