18 Feb 2025 | Americas, News, United States
In the blizzard of announcements, statements and threats made by President Donald Trump’s administration over the past few weeks, those concerning public broadcasters should have a particular resonance for readers of Index on Censorship.
On 9 February, Richard Grenell, the U.S. presidential envoy for special missions, wrote on X that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America are “state-owned media” and “are a relic of the past.”
The billionaire Elon Musk, appointed by Trump to oversee the new advisory body, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), agreed: “Yes, shut them down. Europe is free now (not counting stifling bureaucracy). Nobody listens to them anymore. It’s just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.”
These Cold War institutions have been symbolic of American soft power since their inception. Each, in its way, was designed to counter authoritarian propaganda: Voice of America was founded in 1942 to counter Nazi ideology and Radio Free Europe in 1950 as a response to the Soviet equivalent. Radio Liberty had the specific task of broadcasting inside Russia.
These barely-veiled threats to foreign-facing broadcasters mirror similar announcements on the defunding of American broadcasters, including National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). DOGE subcommittee chair Majorie Taylor Greene has called on executives from the two organisations to give evidence to DOGE, which has accused them of “systemically biased news coverage”.
This may seem like small beer compared to the geopolitical earthquake represented by the US administration’s proclamations on the Ukraine war and the Gaza conflict, or its sabre-rattling on Greenland or Canada. But these moves are part of the same epochal shift in American foreign policy. There is much to criticise about America’s record in the post-war period. But even the worst abuses were driven, at least rhetorically, by an opposition to authoritarianism. It is no exaggeration to say that Trump and Musk are now increasingly aligned with the authoritarian heir to Stalin in the shape of Vladimir Putin, and the heirs of Hitler in the AfD (Alternative for Germany).
The irony of Musk categorising Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America as the “radical left” will not be lost on those of the European left who traditionally saw these outlets as the ideological wing of the American government or even the CIA. Indeed, they are often credited with playing a key role in providing the propaganda underpinnings that led to the dismantling of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union.
Index has always felt a close affinity with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty due to its origins fighting for dissidents in the former Soviet Union. The role of these twin broadcasters took on a renewed significance after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, something we covered in summer 2022. At the time Patrick Boehler, head of digital strategy for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty told me: “We have 23 news rooms. They are in Afghanistan and Pakistan, up to Hungary… We have fantastic teams serving Russia. And I think it’s really one of those moments where you see our journalists living up to the task and the challenge that they face. And it’s really inspiring.” His words have a sombre resonance today.
An added poignancy to the attacks on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America is given by the fact that Musk and other American authoritarians seem to be learning from the so-called “hybrid democracies” of central Europe. As we reported in November, state broadcasters were one of the first targets of the ultra-right governments of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Robert Fico in Slovakia.
In 2017, my colleague Sally Gimson also looked at attacks on Radio Free Europe from the government in Georgia and asked what role it would have in the future.
She remarked that as a young actor, future US President Ronald Reagan was proud to promote the work of the broadcaster in the early 1950s, fronting up an advertisement for it. “This station daily pierces the Iron Curtain with the truth, answering the lies of the Kremlin and bringing a message of hope to millions trapped behind the Iron Curtain,” he said.
The position the present US government takes towards such a venerated institution is a sign of how far it has drifted from what was once considered patriotic. That old cold warrior Ronald Reagan will be turning in his grave.
17 Dec 2024 | News, United States
In the name of “free speech”, Donald Trump has laid out an authoritarian plan for his new administration to radically defund and gag universities. Now with a Republican Congress, he might just achieve it all and that spells disaster for freedom of thought, critical inquiry and an informed citizenry in the USA.
Trump’s plan is based on the education chapter within the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation’s 900-page political roadmap Project 2025, a set of policy proposals that lay out a long-term ultra conservative vision. The chapter is written by Lindsey Burke, director of the organisation’s Center for Education for Policy.
First on the list is dismantling the Department of Education, a realistic threat now Republicans have both the House and Senate. Trump has put a wrestling magnate in charge of the department, Linda McMahon. She was formerly head of the US Small Business Administration and is currently chair of the America First Policy Institute, McMahon financed Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden with its notoriously bigoted speakers, according to Forbes. She will play a key role in rolling out plans that will profoundly shift power to reinforce historical social inequities in universities. These could include reversing protections for the LGBTQ+ community, privatising student loans and halting loan forgiveness.
Trump’s radical overhaul includes defunding universities that he considers to be “turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathisers of many, many different dimensions” by taxing, fining and suing private university endowments (funds or assets donated to universities to provide long-term financial support).
Trump sees Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programmes that such schools have engaged in as “unlawful discrimination” and he is seeking “restitution” through the law. He plans to “pursue federal civil rights cases” and increase the tax against these schools. During his first presidency, Trump signed a new plan that introduced a 1.4% on endowments of private universities with at least 500 students and $100,000 or more in assets for every full-time student.
America’s most prestigious universities, such as Harvard (which rely greatly on federal funds) will be prime targets. Following a wave of pro-Palestine protests – which were already subdued with arrests and brutality – there was conservative backlash. This prepared the ground for the coming lawfare aimed at punishing higher education institutions for wrong-think. For example, according to The Guardian, Steve Scalise, House majority leader, has discussed plans to punish universities that allow pro-Palestine protests by revoking their accreditation.
With the spoils raised by stripping these educational institutions, Trump will fund a new American Academy. While he describes it as “non-political”, Trump’s ideological agenda is clear: “no wokeness or jihadism allowed”. Trump explains that American Academy will “gather an entire universe of the highest quality educational content, covering the full spectrum of human knowledge and skills, and make that material available to every American citizen online for free”.
In what sounds troublingly like generative AI driven education, delivery of “content” will be through “study groups, mentors, industry partnerships, and the latest breakthrough in computing”. There is no mention of professors or teachers.
There is little detail on the curriculum – so what kind of “content” will be considered “human knowledge” worth teaching? Trump’s scientific beliefs raise concerns. For example, he has previously said: “One of the most urgent tasks, not only for our movement, but for our country is to decisively defeat the climate hysteria hoax.”
The role of “industry partners” is left vague but we should be asking whether companies delivering content through “breakthrough” technology could gain access to students’ behavioral data for training AI. Taylor Owen, Beaverbrook chair in media, ethics and communications at McGill University, forewarns of the dismantling of recent AI oversight efforts and an incoming merger of tech and state power where “the interests of select technology companies become indistinguishable from US government policy”.
With Elon Musk leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), my fear is that we could see emerging education policy influenced by the view that AI is a neutral tool for “free speech”, which can replace “unnecessary” educators.
Trump’s own past forays into the education sector don’t inspire confidence in his motives. In 2004, he set up “Trump University” as a for-profit initiative and real estate training programme, which claimed to share the secrets to being a successful entrepreneur. It faced several lawsuits, including allegations that Trump University defrauded its students through misleading marketing practices and aggressive sales tactics. Despite the organisation never admitting wrongdoing, Trump settled the lawsuits, paying 6,000 defrauded victims a $25 million settlement in 2016 shortly after being elected president.
American Academy appears to be designed to extract power from the academe and weaken education, rather than strengthen it. It will compete with universities while its free online courses will be “equivalent” to a bachelor’s degree, accredited, and recognised for federal employment – which will itself further degrade government by hollowing out expertise.
Trump sees the accreditation process as his “secret weapon” in his war on universities. In the USA, states have varying control of education, and universities have enjoyed a lot of autonomy. The practice of accreditation involves a “non-governmental, peer evaluation of educational institutions and programmes”.
However, eligibility for federal aid, grants, student loans and other funds that universities depend on is contingent on accreditation. And while the government does not control the process of accreditation itself, the Department of Education has the power to “recognise” accreditors, or withdraw this recognition.
With the new Republican Congress behind him, Trump wants to empower new accreditors with ideological standards such as “defending the American tradition and western civilisation, protecting free speech, eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs incredibly, [and] removing all Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats”.
Incoming Vice President JD Vance once proclaimed that “professors are the enemy”. This year, Vance introduced The Encampments or Endowments Bill in the US Senate which, if passed, would punish “campus disorder” by making federal funding contingent on universities removing campus protest encampments. Efforts to introduce what Pen America has called “educational gag orders” – laws, policies and bills that restrict teaching and training on certain topics such as racism, gender and American history – in colleges and universities are also “likely to disproportionately affect the free speech rights of students, educators, and trainers who are women, people of color, and LGBTQ+.”
Trump has said he will use executive orders to rescind or rewrite regulations, which could be used to undo stronger Biden-era Title IX protections against sexual harassment in universities and colleges. Executive orders are a powerful presidential tool enabling swift changes to federal policies and priorities without the approval of Congress – but they also have the potential for abuse of power. All this accompanies recent efforts to casualise the employment of professors, and weaken the tenure system, which ensures they cannot be removed easily and protects unpopular research, teaching and speech.
As university endowments are purged and their federal resources become contingent on pleasing ideological gatekeepers, it is hard to imagine brave or rigorous research can survive in the hollowed-out husks that remain. Once universities begin losing students to AI-delivered “free degrees” this will of course accelerate the roll-out of EdTech across the sector, resulting in declining educational standards and heightened surveillance in the name of “efficiency”. And should dissenters rise up, student protests will be stifled or exploited to legitimate further attacks on their institutions.
Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, recently stated that the country “is in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”.
This “revolution” is not without casualties, however: many of America’s more privileged intellectuals will flee this war to financial stability or intellectual freedom overseas, but minority, dissident and refugee academics will be most vulnerable to harassment, insecurity and displacement. It will polarise inequality in an existing two-tier education system: community colleges and non-elite universities won’t survive.
Universities specialising in specific subjects, such as disinformation, will also continue to be uniquely targeted. In 2022 Trump threatened that “within hours” of his inauguration, he would sign an executive order “banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organisation, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorise, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens. I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-’ or ‘dis-information’.
The 2024 Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court ruling may disrupt these plans somewhat, as it reaffirmed that technology researchers are independent and have First Amendment rights to carry out their work, and communicate it with the public, companies and the government. Yet, while some rights can be defended in the courts, legal battles take time, and great damage can be done in the meantime. Technology and disinformation researchers continue to face relentless political pressure, harassment, obstruction and lawfare.
The USA was once considered one of the world’s strongest defenders of academic freedom and free expression. While this was always a romanticised perception in an unequal system, Trumpism over the past decade has resulted in a significant decline in US academic freedom. Attacks on US higher education have already begun, and the USA has fallen below more than 70 other countries in the Academic Freedom Index Update. Universities are pre-emptively ditching inclusivity practices in anticipation of Trump’s policies – but they must not “obey in advance”, as historian Timothy Snyder would say.
Scholars, students, journalists, businesses and civil society must be united to defend against and communicate this threat to ordinary Americans. Given that the changes could also result in a long-term decline in the US economy, business leaders and economists should condemn these regressive plans. US academia must mobilise itself within and between sectors to defend academic freedom issues, and communicate the importance of human interaction and interpersonal communication in education.
The conservatives’ success here spells disaster for the world. Successful authoritarian capture of academia in such a powerful liberal democracy could inspire right-wing political attacks on education globally. The American moral panic over “critical race theory”, for example, became a political weapon that destabilised education policy development in Australia, and we have also seen the authoritarian takeover of education in Hungary. As Trump’s changes unfurl, the UN and its member states must take the lead in condemning measures which unpick the education system and threaten free expression globally. More broadly, we need an international movement of those who embrace low-tech alternatives and who are willing to disrupt “the machine” in sectors where lives, jobs and critical human knowledge are threatened by technofascism.
14 Nov 2024 | News, United States
Hybrid regimes, illiberal democracies, democraship, democratura: these are all slightly terrifying new terms for governments drifting towards authoritarianism around the globe. We have been used to seeing the world through the binary geopolitics of the more-or-less democratic free world on one side, and the straightforward dictatorship on the other. But what is Hungary under Viktor Orbán? Or Narendra Modi’s India? And, as the world comes to terms with the reality of President Trump’s second term, will America itself become a hybrid regime dominated by tech oligarchs and America First loyalists?
At a recent conference in Warsaw held by the Eurozine, a network of cultural and political publications, Tomáš Hučko from the Bratislava-based magazine Kapitál Noviny, told the dispiriting story of his country’s slide towards populist authoritarianism. The Slovak National Party, led by ultranationalist Prime Minister Robert Fico, drove a coach and horses through media and cultural institutions, he explained, beginning with the Culture Ministry itself. Fico then changed the law to take direct control of public radio and TV. The heads of the Slovak Fund for the Promotion of the Arts, National Theatre, National Gallery and National Library were all fired and replaced with party loyalists. A “culture strike” was met with further attacks on activists and critics of the government. “There were constant attacks on the journalists by the Prime Minister including suing several writers,” said Hučko.
Fellow panellist Mustafa Ünlü, from the Platform 24 (P24) media platform in Turkey spoke of a similar pattern in his country, where President Erdoğan’s government has withdrawn licences from independent broadcasters.
It is tempting to suggest that these illiberal democracies are a passing political trend. But the problem, according to several Eurozine delegates, was that such regimes have a tendency to hollow out the institutions and leave them with scars so deep that they are difficult to heal. Agnieszka Wiśniewska from Poland’s Krytyka Polityczna, a network of Polish intellectuals, sounded a note of extreme caution from her country’s eight years of rule under the Catholic-aligned ultra-right Law and Justice Party. Although the party was beaten by Donald Tusk’s centrist Civic Coalition in last year’s elections, the damage to democracy has been done. “There is the possibility of reversing the decline,” said Wiśniewska. “But the state media was turned into propaganda media.” In part, she blamed the complacency of politicians such as Tusk himself: “Liberals didn’t care enough,” she said.
Writing on contemporary hybrid regimes in New Eastern Europe, an English-language magazine which is part of the Eurozine network, the Italian political scientist Leonardo Morlino identifies a key moment in July 2014 when the Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán began using the expression “illiberal democracy”.
He later clarified what he meant by this: that Christian values and the Hungarian nation should take precedence over traditional liberal concern for individual rights. For Morlino, however, Hungary is not the only model of hybrid regime. He provides an exhaustive list of countries in Latin America (Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico and Paraguay) with “active, territorially widespread criminal organisations, high levels of corruption and the inadequate development of effective public institutions” where democracy is seriously weakened. Meanwhile, in Eastern and Central Europe he recognises that Russian influence has created the conditions for hybrid regimes in Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and even Ukraine.
The term “democratura” comes from the French “démocrature” and combines the concepts of democracy and dictatorship. In English this is sometimes translated as “Potemkin democracy”, which in turns comes from the phrase “Potemkin village”, meaning an impressive facade used to hide an undesirable reality. This is named after Catherine the Great’s lover Grigory Potemkin, who built fake show villages along the route taken by the Russian Empress as she travelled the country.
It is tempting to suggest Donald Trump is about to usher in an American Democratura, but none of these concepts map neatly onto the likely political context post-2025. The USA cannot be easily compared to the fragile democracies of the former Soviet Union, nor is it equivalent to the corrupt hybrid regimes of Latin America. It is true that Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon liked to talk about “illiberal democracy” but more as a provocation than a programme for government.
And yet, there is an anti-democratic tone to the language used by Trump’s supporters. In the BBC series on US conspiratorial ideology, The Coming Storm, reporter Gabriel Gatehouse noticed the increasing prevalence of the right-wing proposition that the USA is a “constitutional republic”, not a democracy. This line of thinking can be traced back to an American ultra-individualist thinker, Dan Smoot, whose influential 1966 broadcast on the subject can still be found on YouTube. Smoot was an FBI agent and fierce anti-Communist who believed a liberal elite was running America as he explained in his 1962 book, The Invisible Government, which “exposed” the allegedly socialist Council on Foreign Relations.
Such rhetoric is familiar from the recent election campaign, which saw Donald Trump attacking Kamala Harris as a secret socialist and pledging to take revenge on the “deep state”.
But there are worrying signs that Republicans under Trump will be working from an authoritarian playbook. As The Guardian and others reported this week, an attempt to pass legislation targeting American non-profits deemed to be supporting “terrorism” has just been narrowly blocked. Similar laws have already been passed in Modi’s India and Putin’s Russia.
Trump has consistently attacked critical media as purveyors of fake news. He has suggested that NBC News should be investigated for treason and that ABC News and CBS News should have their broadcast licences taken away. He has also said he would bring the independent regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, under direct Presidential Control. In one of his more bizarre statements, he said he wouldn’t mind an assassin shooting through the “fake news” while making an attempt on his life.
Whether a Trump administration emboldened by the scale of the Republican victory will seriously embark on a project to dismantle American democracy is yet to be seen. The signs that the President has authoritarian proclivities are clear and he has made his intentions towards the mainstream media explicit. Hybrid democracy may not quite be the correct terminology here. We may need a whole new lexicon to describe what is about to happen.
8 Nov 2024 | Czech Republic, Europe and Central Asia, Germany, News, Poland
There is a grainy photograph on the first page of the January 1990 edition of Index on Censorship magazine showing a group of twenty or so smiling friends of various ages. They are dressed in the non-descript shabby style favoured by most European intellectuals of the period. They could easily be mistaken for a group of academics on a field trip if it weren’t for the sign in Polish behind them which reads: State Border: Crossing Forbidden.
The picture was taken on 9 July 1988 at a secret location on the Polish-Czech border. This unruly band of comrades has been brought together by the bitter and often lonely struggle against Stalinism, their friendship formed in an underground network of Polish-Czech solidarity. The cause often seemed hopeless and at the time the picture was taken this obscure group of writers and activists could never have imagined that the whole edifice they had spent their lives opposing was about to collapse.
As it turned out, this photograph represented one of the most extraordinary gatherings of dissidents in the whole of the Cold War. Look closely and you can see Václav Havel, the Czech dissident playwright, who would become President of Czechoslovakia just 20 months after the photo was taken. Ján Čarnogurský, a Catholic anti-communist activist, who became the Prime Minister of Slovakia in 1991 is also there as is Jan Ruml, who went on to become the Czech interior minister from 1992 to 1997. Jan Urban led the Civic Forum campaign in the elections of 1990, but decided not to become Prime Minister in the new government. A year on, Jacek Kuroń, known as the godfather of the Polish opposition, would be the minister for employment in the first Solidarity government.
Mirosław Jasiński, a leading member of Polish-Czechoslovak Solidarity became a prominent Polish diplomat. Among them also are opposition journalists Petr Pospíchal and Petr Uhl, who founded the East European Information Agency and Adam Michnik, perhaps Poland’s most celebrated journalist, who became the first editor of the independent newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza in May 1989 and later an MP before returning to journalism.
The only woman in the photo is Anna Šabatová who went on to become the ombudsman of the Czech parliament and was the first East European woman to receive the United Nations Human Rights Prize.
No one predicted the events of 1989, the 35th anniversary of which, will be celebrated this year. The first signs came in the spring of that year, when the Polish government and Solidarity reached an agreement to legalise the free trade union and hold elections. In June, the Communists were humiliated at the polls and in August Solidarity’s Tadeusz Mazowiecki became Prime Minister.
A parallel process in Hungary saw the creation of independent parties in February 1989. By the beginning of May, the authorities had dismantled the barbed wire on the frontier with Austria. The borders of the old Communist bloc started to fray and then come apart at the seams. In September, Budapest announced that East Germans would be given passage through Hungary into Western Europe. Young people across Eastern Europe began to make their way in numbers to Vienna to get their first taste of western consumer goods and freedom. Then, in November, the
movement became irresistible as the Berlin Wall itself crumbled and fell under the weight of sledgehammers. In Czechoslovakia, the Velvet Revolution ushered in the peaceful transition to democracy and by Christmas, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was gone. Crucially, unlike in 1956 and 1968, the Soviet army did not intervene.
For young people across Europe, these were life-changing events. As a wide-eyed 23-year-old journalist, I travelled across Eastern Europe in December 1989. In East Berlin, I spoke to students loyal to the regime whose world had been turned upside down, who asked me to reassure them about the key role played by the Communist Party of Great Britain in the fight against racism and the National Front. In Leipzig I saw the thousands of people taking part in candlelit demonstrations around the city. In Prague I grumbled to two journalists who worked for the trade union newspaper that there would soon be a McDonald’s on Wenceslas Square and witnessed their pure delight as they looked me in the eye and said “Yes!” I remember a mixture of emotions among the people I met: hope and optimism about the future of an undivided Europe, certainly, but also a degree of fear and uncertainty about whether the transition would remain peaceful. Common to everyone though was the feeling of pure surprise. Absolutely no one had expected this, even a year earlier.
Index’s co-founder, the poet Stephen Spender, captured this feeling well in his speech to English PEN at a party for his 80th birthday on 6 December 1989, published in the February 1990 edition of Index magazine. He suggested that a motto for his kind of writer, opposed both to Stalinism and McCarthyism, should be “the politics of the unpolitical”, but asked what the role of such writers should be after the end of the Cold War.
“It is essential to ask this question because we are now entering what less than even a year ago was an almost unthinkable period,” he said. “How unthinkable is to me made vivid by recalling that at the beginning of 1989 I remarked to Isaiah Berlin, who, like me, has in 1989 reached his 80th year – he and I each other’s oldest living friend – that the one thing I wished to see was the collapse of the dictatorships in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He agreed but said that this would not happen in our lifetimes. Well, now it has happened, and the results are completely bewildering.”
How bewildered might Stephen Spender be 35 years later. No one talks about “the politics of the unpolitical” anymore. But those of us who were there in 1989 still remember the sense of surprise that everyone who thought they could predict the future was wrong and that feeling, for a short while, that everything was possible.
