I had this thought after leaving our No Kings protest. Democrats have more free speech rights than Republicans. Hear me out.
When Joe Biden was President, many Democrats openly expressed concern about his age during an election year. I disagreed with them, but I still refrained from calling for them to be arrested, killed, or fired from their jobs. More importantly, Joe Biden also showed that kind of restraint.
Imagine if a Republican were to say “Gosh, I think Trump is having the same old age issues that Joe Biden had. Maybe it’s best that he retire. He can still share his wonderful ideas with JD Vance.” That Republican would get death threats.
Even though Trump is President again, Democrats still have more freedom to talk about Trump than Republicans do. I can say that Trump is a terrorist, a tyrant, and a pedophile, and he can’t sue me because all of those things are true. I will still have my private sector job on Monday, because Republicans don’t want to give me the publicity of getting me fired from a temp warehouse gig. (I’d probably watch my mouth more if I had a better job, but oh well.)
But when you are a Republican, typically most of your friends are also Republican. So you might risk social ostracization. Your coworkers might sabotage you on the job. And all your friends have guns, so you’ll instinctively avoid saying anything that will literally trigger them.
Trump seems to like it this way. He markets himself as the guy that liberals hate the most, so our criticism serves to enhance his branding. (and I still feel a duty to criticize him) But when Republican criticize him, he jumps on them with both feet. John Bolton and James Comey are both facing bogus federal charges because they both wrote books about Trump that he didn’t like. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris are all NOT under indictment.
To be clear, I don’t think Trump is a Nazi. I think this because he has Jewish grandchildren and he has not gotten around to murdering them yet. But for a non-Nazi, he seems awfully tolerant of Republicans who say Nazi things. To me, that seems like the only free speech Republicans have left.
