Gagged

A MAGA assault on speech and facts

A few of the spires of Vilnius

While we wait for the first and probably only Trump-Biden debate Thursday night - which I plan to watch and cover - I’m writing this newsletter today about speech.

I’m in Vilnius right now, the capital of Lithuania, attending a conference of an organization called Scholars at Risk. SAR, founded at the University of Chicago two decades ago, is a global network of university administrators and human rights experts that extracts professors and students under threat of arrest or worse by their governments and finds temporary jobs for them at institutions in safe countries. The conference is being hosted at the European Humanities University - founded at Belarus in 1992, and forced to leave in 2004 by Alexander Lukashenko, the autocrat in charge of the nation just over the border who felt threatened by the independent liberal institution. Professors, students and books moved lock, stock and barrel over a period of months, to Lithuania.

In this part of the world, as in so many, speech and ideas matter. Russia is a few hours away by car. Who gets to say what is a matter of extreme importance. People know - assume - that jobs, careers and personal security up to and including imprisonment and death can be affected by what they say.

As Americans, we understand this up to a point. We have seen professors in Florida legislated into silence for teaching uncomfortable white kids about slavery. We have seen university administrators sic riot cops on students peacefully protesting the assault on Gaza. And increasingly, we see billionaires and deep pocket corporations practice litigation terrorism to shut down journalists.

But we don’t often see ourselves or neighbors fired from jobs, dragged off and locked up, or having to flee our borders, over mere words. The First Amendment is one of the hallmarks of our national system.

As a lifelong journalist and writer, I treasure it and its protections.

That’s why the recent lunacy in the MAGA-controlled House of Representatives peeves me greatly. Last week, the MAGA Party wielded its slim majority power to forbid all mention of Donald Trump’s felony conviction and charges. The gag game started after Rep. James P. McGovern, D-Mass., said on the floor that Trump “is on trial for covering up hush-money payments to a porn star for political gain, not to mention three of the criminal felony prosecutions he’s facing.” This is a FACT, not an opinion, but a Republican from Alabama objected because the statement broke a House rule against “engaging in personalities”.

McGovern then stated: “We have a presumptive nominee for president facing 88 felony counts, and we’re being prevented from even acknowledging it. “He’s also charged with conspiring to overturn the election. He’s also charged with stealing classified information, and a jury has already found him liable for rape in a civil court and, yet, in this Republican-controlled House, it’s OK to talk about the trial — but you have to call it a sham.”

You can read those words here, and you can read them in newspapers and websites around the world. But future generations will not see the statement in the Congressional Record, because Republicans “took them down” in the parlance of the House, and refused to allow McGovern to speak on the floor for the rest of the day. All this while decrying the legal gag order New York Judge Juan Merchant has been forced to repeatedly issue against Donald Trump, for whipping up distrust of the legal system and doxxing court staff and potentially, even jurors.

The House MAGA gag on discussion of a subject about which they are embarrassed is unusual. But it has one very ugly precedent, also set by people, like the MAGAs, decidedly on the wrong side of history.

In the 1830s, slave-state Congressmen passed a resolution making verboten all discussion of issue of slavery. The resolution, which lasted until the Civil War and became known as the gag rule, stated that “all petitions, memorials, resolutions, propositions, and other papers relating in any way to the subject of slavery or the abolition of slavery should . . . be laid on the table [without discussion].”

I learned about this bit of history writing my book “The Stranger and the Statesman,” about the curious path of the great bequest that founded the Smithsonian. James Smithson, an obscure British scientist, was “the stranger” of the title. He never set foot in the U.S., but he believed, like many men of letters and science of his generation, that the new democracy would allow a great flowering of science and research, that America after the Revolution would become a new Athens. "The next Augustan Age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic," Horace Walpole wrote in the mid-18^th century. "There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico."

The “statesman” of my book’s title was John Quincy Adams, the nation’s sixth President, son of the second President John Adams. JQA, despite being a nepo-baby, was not a natural politician, but he was a great statesman and a leader who left an admirable legacy. A one-term President, he lost to the populist racist Andrew Jackson - no surprise, Jackson is one of the heroes of the (infinitesimal) literate slice of MAGA world.

JQA didn’t retreat from public life when he lost. Instead, he ran for Congress, serving the rest of his life as a relatively lowly Congressman, a position to which the people of Massachusetts elected him nine times.

Adams was an abolitionist - although he refused the label. He hated slavery and fought the gag rule, in word and deed, for the rest of his life. For his troubles he received frequent death threats, and never succeeded in overturning the rule. But he was the most prominent anti-slavery politician of his day.

He was also bookish (studied Greek and Hebrew, and astronomy) and depressed, perpetually disappointed by human greed, ignorance, and inhumanity - all of which was - as now - on vivid display in the U.S. House. Whenever I hear people bemoan the degradation of manners and civility that people like Trump, Gaetz, Jordan, Boebert and Taylor Green have inflicted on the American discourse, I think about what Washington was like in the 1830s. As I wrote in my book:

Besides the threat of disease and the city’s awkward, muddy newness, Washington had a seedy, dangerous edge. Sidearms, chewing tobacco and hip flasks were Capitol Hill accoutrements for most officeholders. Hunting dogs shared floor-space with Congressmen in the House. Fist-fights sometimes broke out at Presidential parties inside the White House. The Americans called these events “levees,” drawing out the accent on the last syllable to the great hilarity of visiting Europeans trained in proper French pronunciation. Duels were still an acceptable – if illegal – method of settling disputes involving honor, and even high-ranking national officials indulged in “rencontres” as they were delicately described in the press. Alongside the muddy streets, unkempt bands of workmen assembling the great stone buildings amused themselves getting drunk during the day. When the Smithson bequest arrived, Washington newspapers were running front-page ads desperately seeking women to come to Washington to be wives to the stoneworkers on the Treasury building.

Official shamelessness isn’t new for us, neither is official grift and thievery. Nor is officially silencing one’s opponents.

What is also not new is that grifters, thieves and racists are always on the wrong side of history. The House Republicans of 2024 will go down in history as the 21st Century version of the losers of the Civil War. JQA served out his life fighting slavery and promoting education and other salutary matters for the betterment of the people of the United States. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage on the the House floor in 1848, and died a few days later, in the Speakers room of the Capitol Building. The first term Congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, was among those at his death bed.

So much for the legacy of JQA, who used his power for the good of the people. What are House Republicans doing with their power? What passes for “leadership” in MAGA world?

Besides gagging speech and forbidding facts about their Dear Leader to be entered into the official history of their august institution, their signature achievement, such as it is, has been to introduce as their first act of this session of Congress, HR 1, a symbolic gift to one of their puppeteers, a package of giant regulatory and other breaks for the fossil fuel mega-corporations and other extractors of climate-destroying, carbon spewing energy.

The slavers of the 1840s. The dirty-fuel serving Trump-worshiping MAGA Republicans of the 2020s. Welcome to the club.

[A new John Quincy Adams biography, by Randall Woods, will be published this month. I heartily recommend learning more about this great leader, who constantly fought within himself and with the world, to cling to reason and hope against evil and despair. ]