Kansas Republicans want to punish media for Trump stories: a recipe for tyranny | Opinion

The Kansas Republican Party wants to put an end to the First Amendment.

The evidence comes from the most recent Friday File, a weekly email newsletter put out by the Kansas GOP. The missive contains the usual stuff you’d expect: a pitch for support from congressional candidate Derek Schmidt, information about where to pick up campaign yard signs.

It also includes a conspiratorial attack on the so-called “deep state.”

“The deep state represents a shadow government that operates beyond the control of voters and it’s high time we reclaim the democratic accountability that has been eroded,” says the newsletter, which comes from the email account of Mike Brown, the state party chairman.

Things get weirder from there.

“The struggle is, deep state isn’t a monolithic entity operating in secret,” said the newsletter. In reality, it is a tantacled beast with a specific gravity. Within layers of classic bureaucracy and institutional inertia that often resist change, it always fights outsiders attempting to challenge the status quo. The challengers are deemed troublemakers and the mainstream media — the DNC’s communications department, happily begins the smear campaign never pausing to ask the next set of important questions. This sycophant and derelict behavior begs a Congressional review of the MSM’s vast protections under the U.S. Constitution.” (Emphasis added.)

If that rambling, oddly punctuated paragraph seems opaque, don’t worry — I had to read it a couple of times before it made sense.

The underlying message seems clear enough, though: The news media should be punished for truthfully reporting on Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine American democracy and enrich his family in the process.

The media’s “vast protections under the U.S. Constitution?” That’s the First Amendment we’re talking about, folks.

It shields the media from government punishment, and it protects your right to speak out. The First Amendment belongs to all of us. It has worked just fine for more than two centuries.

But the Constitution lets journalists say facts and opinions about Trump. And so — according to the official Kansas GOP newsletter — it must be “reviewed.”

It’s easy to guess how that ends.

Trump wants to jail critics

To be fair, Kansas Republicans are just following the example of Trump, who has long advocated the prosecution of his critics.

Just last week, he called for Google to be criminally prosecuted because its search results turn up too many positive stories about his campaign opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. That’s “blatant interference of elections,” Trump said.

A few days before that, Trump said “it should be illegal” to criticize the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority.

“These people should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges and our justices,” he said. (Never mind that he’s criticized judges in his own criminal and civil cases so harshly that they’ve faced actual death threats.)

Maybe that’s just words.

But do you trust a candidate with those kinds of instincts?

And do you trust a movement that cheers him on when he speaks with such clear contempt for free speech?

Overturn free speech?

It’s not just Trump, after all. The Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank at the center of the MAGA movement, has long called to overturn the Supreme Court’s free speech precedents to allow politicians like Trump to more easily sue their media critics. At least one justice, Clarence Thomas, has repeatedly signaled his interest.

And who can forget that Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey was just slapped down by a court for his retaliatory investigation of Media Matters, a lefty outlet that reported critically on Trump ally Elon Musk?

Some Republicans still talk a good game about the First Amendment. A few might even be sincere.

But it’s increasingly clear that a lot of Trumpists sincerely believe that their own speech should be protected — promoted even — while the speech of Democrats and other critics of the conservative movement should be restricted and repressed.

November’s election will determine if they get to put those ideas into action.

I hope not. The First Amendment doesn’t need to be reviewed. It needs defending. And it’s clear we can’t depend on Kansas Republicans to do it.

Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle Opinion correspondent. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.

This story was originally published October 1, 2024 at 5:07 AM.