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[10:05:01]
You do not have to love the modern American university to see the danger here. The state is using funding to compel political concessions from independent institutions.
The press, always the early warning system of a free society, has faced what can only be described as relentless intimidation. Media outlets are sued and regulatory powers used publicly in an apparent attempt to coerce owners to toe the party line. In August, a federal judge found that the Trump administration's Federal Trade Commission investigation into the left-wing group Media Matters likely violated the group's First Amendment rights and looked like political retaliation, not neutral regulation.
The administration is expanding state power within the economy. Less is a rule setter than as a deal maker and disciplinarian. There's a world of difference between industrial policy that works through published criteria and competitive grants, and a system where CEOs are summoned to the White House, punished, rewarded or encouraged to comply.
When regulators hint that routine approvals, renewals or reviews may depend on whether companies adopt or abandon certain policies, capitalism stops being a competitive arena and starts resembling a patronage system.
And then hovering over all of this is the administration's appetite for using security state tools not on extremists, but on dissidents. Consider the push to designate some antifa groups as foreign terrorist organizations, a concept so vague and ill-defined that even national security experts warned it could become a catchall.
Under existing law, knowingly providing material support for a designated foreign terrorist organization can carry up to 20 years in prison, and support can be construed broadly enough to include trivial assistance. That is how democracies decay, not by announcing that dissent is illegal, but by reclassifying dissent as something else.
The administration talks about the West as if it were a heritage museum, symbols, slogans, identity. But the West's real genius is institutional, law that binds all, the strong and the weak. Liberty protected not by benevolent leaders, but by constrained ones. A civil society robust enough to oppose the state without fearing that opposition will be treated as a criminal act.
The West is not a bloodline. It is a bargain. Power constrained, rights protected, coercion accountable. The greatest threat to the West is not that it is becoming too tolerant or too concerned about individual rights. It is the expansion of state power making the West just like every other society in history where the strong rule the weak.
When seen in that light, we can say plainly that civilizational erasure is indeed happening. But it's not in Europe. It is here where the American government grows comfortable with unbounded power and the country grows accustomed to living with it. ...
