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Btw the subtext here where republicans are the principled free speech party is historically incorrect. There were a long series of religious right-motivated censoring movements in the 90s (and not to mention the Dixie Chicks and Freedom Fries stuff following 9/11). If you came of age during the late 2010s or early 2020s you won’t have the visceral memory of what this was like but I assure you this was a major thing at the time.
The only consistently free speech people have been the centrist democrats (Liberals who want higher taxes) and centrist republicans (Liberals who want lower taxes).
The Dixie Chicks can barely even be called a boycott, let alone censorship, and "freedom fries" is just a way of saying "fuck France", again I fail to see how it prevented anyone from speaking their mind.
The moment you start criticizing the core ideas of liberalism, liberals start doing the same deplatforming campaigns that the far left does, using the exact same arguments.
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I dunno, Al Gore was a southern democrat and his wife was pretty clear about how she felt about naughty song lyrics.
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To be frank, I'd probably still consider myself on the left if the Dems were the same as they were in the 90s. Back when they were against racism (instead of for targeted racism/sexism against, well, me), somewhat areligious (instead of cheering on Islam, of all things), and enthusiastically for free speech (without the mile-wide "except for hate speech" loophole). Yes, I disagreed with them on the size of government, but it's not like Republicans were much better on that front.
An argument can be made that they still are as they were in the 90's, because that's when critical theory was being born; it was also the last major push for censorship in the universities.
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The Dixie chick's were never censored. Bush said they are free to speak their mind. Their label kept selling their albums, their concert tours continued, and major media gave them plenty of press to explain themselves and get their ideas out.
Some of their fans didn't buy more CDs. That's not censorship.
Renaming French fries to freedom fries in the congressional cafeteria isn't censorship either.
That's not how I remember it; I recall that '
Clear Channel' EDIT: 'Cumulus' radio removed them from the airwaves, many people sent them nasty letters, and one pundit told them to "shut up and sing" (how would that work, even?).So a single struggling group of radio stations decided to stop playing the Dixie chick's. The big one (clear channel) did not.
Certainly not a situation like, e.g., Kanye getting cut off by his record label, radio, social media, streaming and his bank.
I'd definitely call the latter censorship, particularly given that we know the govt is often pressuring these "private" companies behind the scenes. (I am not aware of Bush doing that, though Obama + Biden definitely did.)
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Rashomon is bullshit; there is an objective truth. Clear Channel did not ban the Dixie Chicks, though a different company called Cumulus Media took them off the air for 30 days. There was a congressional investigation into this.
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2010s and 2020s Democrats are not 2000s and 1990s Democrats. If they were, we'd all be calling antifa a terrorist organization, and we'd all be putting tremendous pressure on universities to deal with the mouthy brats and unqualified professors picking at the scabs of the past, and we'd all recognize that the collective campaign to demonize certain "intersectionalities" is unacceptable and we'd all (at least superficially) be demanding border security, and we'd all be drawing the line at compelled speech surrounding transgenderism. If we had 2000s and 1990s Democrats, we would still have a coherent identity and a purpose and an agreement about the American experiment. We would bitch and complain about taxes and healthcare, and there would be problems to contend with, but those problems would be debatable and reconcilable.
In the limited scope of history you reference, yes, Republicans were actually quite bad in some ways. Democrats had their issues too, but they were culturally sane. 2010s Democrats shifted on a fundamental and cultural level to win an election, and they hitched their wagon to progressives that hijacked the Overton window and took America's culture hostage and irrevocably (thus far) changed it. Mitt Romney never had a chance. He was a racist to the Democrats. Clearly, Democrat behavior is not the only factor for why things changed, but it is the most salient to the average American who has not been heavily captured by progressivism.
It’s my eternal disappointment that Romney ran in 2012 and not 2016. He would have been fantastic in that moment in my opinion. Not a realistic hypothetical because he also ran in 2008 primaries, but Obama was a monster and I think Romney would have done pretty well in most other times and against most other candidates (maybe even 2008, ironically! I could see people trusting him more to handle the financial meltdown that was just starting to happen in the middle of election season than McCain was, who didn’t really seem to have a clue)
In hindsight, yeah I think that would have delayed cultural division, but this would have played into the left's hands. My doubts about Romney in 2016 is that he wasn't the type to directly or effectively challenge the exploding Wokeism that was sweeping across the country. He was probably a much better choice on bread and butter issues, but he was no match for Woke culture. Trump's election created massive division, but the only two real choices in my opinion were division caused by the right putting their feet down, or the left gaining an even more powerful stronghold over our institutions in the long term.
Romney was preference, whereas Trump was necessary.
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