Charen: Greg, I think, you know, it’d be nice to see it your way as a ray of hope, but I, there’s another way to look at it, too—a little darker—which is, this is them doing their retconning where, you know, January 6th, that, didn’t happen. I mean, that was a great patriotic display. The violence that you thought you saw that was not there, you know, etc. So they’re just, you know, they’re going to rewrite reality, to suit themselves is because it didn’t, it didn’t turn out the way they wanted.
Sargent: So just let’s review what happened here. It was Trump’s use of authoritarian state censorship that provoked the massive cultural backlash—a cultural backlash that was bigger in many ways than the one that greeted Kirk and led them to think they could get away with censorship in the first place. You had these unions who represented nearly half a million workers condemning Disney for caving to Trump’s autocratic pressure, a huge range of figures with huge followings from all across the culture spoke out, including, as you pointed out earlier, Ted Cruz. So even the occasional conservative Republican. As G. Elliott Morris showed, the backlash really encompassed everyone from small investors to ordinary consumers. And then there was pressure on Disney customers, you know, some of them canceled Disney+ subscriptions, canceled Disney World Vacations in protest. I think that there’s an underlying strength in civil society here that we risk overlooking if we kind of get too doomy about it, if that makes sense. Am I being too optimistic?
Charen: No. So thank you for pointing that out and for dragging me into the light a little bit. Let me also say that in the last few weeks, remember the Trump bleat about, you know, Chicago’s about to find out why they call it the Department of War, right? And so all the talk was about he was ready to send the troops into one of our great American cities. Well, what happened? The entire political establishment of Illinois rose up and had a big press conference and denounced this and said that they would fight it. And he backed down. He said, well, maybe we’ll go to Memphis. We’ll go to Memphis.
