The symbol on his chest in photo #1 is used by neo-Nazis worldwide.

The Trump administration has spent the last month on a tear, using President Donald Trump’s newfound power in multiple departments and agencies for a goal that seems bewildering at first glance: deleting history.

Under the guise of eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, the administration has literally erased government-maintained documents honoring and remembering key figures and moments from U.S. and world history.

The Department of Defense removed a photo of the Enola Gay B-29 bomber because it contains the word “gay.” Arlington Cemetery scrapped then reinstated a tribute to Jackie Robinson, the first Black man to play Major League Baseball and an Army lieutenant.

Photos and histories of people of color, women, and the LGBTQ+ community are being purged, and nearly every day some new erasure is being uncovered. When caught in the act, the Trump administration has offered up the claim that these cases were merely mistakes—“malicious compliance” from bad actors within the government.

But the excuses don’t pass the smell test, since Trump and his allies—like multibillionaire Elon Musk and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—have well documented histories of open bigotry against anyone who isn’t a straight, wealthy, white man.

But there is one unique period in U.S. history that Trump and his cronies are very interested in preserving and promoting: the Confederacy.

Quick reminder: The Confederates, attempting to preserve the practice of enslaving Black people, illegally declared war against the government of the United States—starting the Civil War that killed hundreds of thousands—and ultimately was utterly defeated and humiliated.

The administration has most notably advocated on behalf of the pro-slavery Confederacy that rebelled against the U.S. government by reinstating the names of Confederate figures at military facilities. Under the Biden administration, it was determined that it was best to remove names honoring a racist, traitorous group that declared war on the country. Trump feels otherwise.

Trump brought back Fort Benning, named after Henry Lewis Benning—a lover of slavery—and renamed Fort Liberty to Fort Bragg, named after a Confederate general. The administration has played cute with this restoration of names and attempted to argue that the “new” names honor servicemembers, but the true intent to restore the Confederacy is quite clear.

Trump’s love of the Confederacy isn’t new. During his first term, he railed against local and state efforts to move Confederate monuments out of the public eye.

So intense is Trump’s admiration for the pro-slavery Confederacy that he has frequently attacked one of the country’s most revered leaders, Abraham Lincoln. Trump—who failed to pass an infrastructure bill or get his southern wall built—has complained that Lincoln failed to prevent the Civil War.

But this isn’t just a Trump thing. For decades, conservatives have embraced the mythology of the Lost Cause. After losing the Civil War, many Confederates and their descendants have desperately tried to rewrite the causes of the war and the treasonous actions of the Confederate military and its leaders.

They argue that the secessionists were fighting for a noble, lost cause—usually something about taxation and states’ rights—omitting the central argument behind the Confederacy: It wanted enslaved Black people pick cotton and do other jobs for free.

This is directly tied to the origins of the modern conservative movement and the Republican Party. In 1964, conservatives took full ideological control of the GOP with candidate Barry Goldwater, who was opposed to the Civil Rights Act and lost in a landslide to Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, who signed the law with Martin Luther King Jr. at his side.

King warned voters of the dangers of Goldwater, in an extraordinarily unusual step into electoral politics, highlighting his opposition to the bill.

According to Johnson aide Bill Moyers, when the president signed the bill he said, “Well, I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime—and mine,” referencing the fact that conservative southern Democrats were vehemently opposed to the bill and would turn away from the party.

And Johnson was right. Those voters became Republicans as the party moved further to the right, and their ideology forms the core of the MAGA voters who have backed Trump in the last three elections.

When the rest of the country moved forward on racial issues, resulting in the election of the first Black president, Barack Obama, in 2008, the right did not. Trump led the racist birther movement, which falsely argued that Obama was ineligible to be president.

But even after Trump won, the push for racial justice did not stop. Protests like the Black Lives Matter movement emerged with Trump in the White House, and no matter how much he fumed about it, they didn’t relent.

The right is in a quandary. It has political power, but it still cannot force millions of Americans to concede to the white supremacy that motivates much of conservative politics. That’s why it’s so driven to erase history.

When Trump and his administration push for the Confederacy and try to disappear the diverse past, they are delivering on the political primal scream that the right emitted after Obama won.

It’s doubtful that Trump will succeed in erasing the country’s collective memory, but like the men who tried to keep chattel slavery legal, Republicans are willing to give their crusade one last Confederate try.

 

Do we realize & understand & grasp that we are living in a pivotal moment of history?

The fall of the American Empire.

Throughout history there have been empires that rose and fell. I wonder, how many of their citizens at the time understood that their empire was falling? That they were living in the midst of it?

Some countries have lived through the ending of their empires and are good nations today such as the British and the Dutch with Britain and The Netherlands being fine democratic nations. I don’t believe we will be as fortunate here in the US. We may survive, but we will never be the same again. Too bad because for most of our history  we were a decent nation., although imperfect.

I’d reckon that the other free and democratic nations are amazed at how quickly our democracy was brought to its knees but I’m sure there were people who saw it coming.

But we were guilty of the sin of pride, like other empires had been, that ours would last forever. I certainly never believed I would be alive to witness its fall. After all, my family had been here for nearly 400 years and I thought I might make it through a decent retirement never believing it would all fall apart so quickly aided by the millions who voted for Trump along with others who were too complacent and over confident to vote.

Sadly, our fall here in the US will not be one of a decent transition to a good democratic nation. No, our fall will be one into a nation dedicated to evil and hate. I know there are some, many who believe my epitaph is premature but I am, honestly, out of hope. Will there be a civil war? Well, unlike our Civil War today we do not have a clear line of demarcation between slave and free states. Maybe our trouble now had its roots in the Civil War because the Slave states were not a bastion of democracy and after they destroyed Reconstruction, the South turned into an oligarchy, ruled by the former planters — all white.

But here we are now and if you feel you can do anything in the way of resistance, good luck. MAGA and the uninformed, hate-filled people who support Trump are united in their evil while we Democrats are mired in disagreements.

I’ve voted exclusive for Democratic candidates for over 60 years now and I hope I get the chance to vote again although I’m not hopeful — I suspect we have seen our last election.

Grandpa Simpson visited the Justice Department on Friday, giving a speech that must have given even his handlers pause, a campaign stump speech delivered in front of the Seal of the Department of Justice. It included both swearing—the prosecutions against him were “bullshit”—and a hate-filled screed against political rivals including Joe Biden and lawyers who have brought cases against him.

Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, started the program, sounding more like a presenter at a TV awards show than an attorney general. She lauded Donald Trump’s accomplishments fighting the war on drugs (although he’s been in office for only two months, not much time for major developments) and praised “the unsung hero Stephen Miller.” It was a political rally speech. It was not appropriate for the Justice Department.

It’s worth taking a beat to reflect on why politics and the Justice Department don’t mix. The power of the prosecutor is expansive. Prosecutors have power over peoples’ lives and liberty. An unscrupulous prosecutor could exercise that power in a fashion that inflicts damage on people who have done nothing to merit it.

Our system contains multiple checks, both internally at DOJ and in the courts, that make that sort of conduct by a rogue prosecutor unlikely and subject to severe punishment on rare occasions where they occur. Even inadvertent misconduct by prosecutors is treated seriously. But imagine a DOJ with no internal checks, a DOJ where “the boss”—the president—demands revenge, and prosecutors are instructed, either directly or, say, in the form of a speech delivered by the president, to go after people he considers enemies using all the power at their disposal. People who haven’t committed any crimes could be prosecuted, possibly jailed. They could be sued civilly. And because there would be power to shield misconduct from public view if DOJ itself has been corrupted—and we’re not talking about just a rogue lone wolf—there are far fewer limits on the damage that can be done.

Trump, for instance, called out lawyers who have brought cases against him in his speech. He has already, through executive orders, excoriated law firms he doesn’t like. He has signaled who he thinks is deserving of punishment. This could end with people in prison for no reason other than the fact that the current president doesn’t like them. And that’s no way to run a democracy. That’s not a democracy.

Typically, an event like this would have been open to employees, and anyone who was interested could have wandered by and listened from the balcony above the Great Hall if the seats down below were filled. NBC’s Ken Dilanian reported that career folks were told they could only go if they had an invite, and few of them were invited. Instead, the Great Hall was filled with Trump supporters, including red state attorneys general and people like Stephen Miller. What came next made clear why that was the case.

It was open season for petty vendettas and old wounds that are apparently still fresh for the president. It was a story in which he was the victim, condemning in others the same behavior he himself freely engages in. It was a speech that diminished both the presidency and the Justice Department in an era where there is already far too much of that going around. And he drew applause, repeatedly, from the crowd.

Trump referred to his former defense lawyers, who now occupy the key jobs at DOJ, by name as people he was with in front of “corrupt judges”—meaning judges overseeing criminal cases and civil cases against him. He referred to a senior counselor at DOJ and said he’d been “watching him on TV these last couple of weeks.” Trump’s political appointees at DOJ and their aides all get what the job is if they want to catch the boss’s attention. And he shouted out former general and former convicted (until Trump pardoned him) felon Mike Flynn “a man who went to hell.” He called Stephen Miller “something very special.”

Trump: “We must be honest about the lies and abuses that have occurred within these walls … They weaponized the vast powers of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to try to thwart the will of the American people.”

Trump rehashed old grievances: Hunter Biden’s laptop, “spying” on his campaign, unspecified persecution of his family. He claimed outrage over the execution of a lawful search warrant, signed by a federal judge, for Mar-a-Lago, even though it uncovered classified documents Trump had in his possession, precisely what prosecutors told the judge they expected to find based on probable cause. It was a diatribe of lies and grudges.

Trump had trouble staying on topic. At one point, while discussing what he characterized as anti-Christian discrimination, he wandered off into “we did very well with the Catholic vote, so I want to thank them for that.” Rank, political stuff. Trump also mentioned his “mandate”—even though he won the election with less than 50% of the popular vote. Trump attacked lawyers by name, calling out Marc Elias, Norm Eisen, and Andrew Weissman in the course of his speech. He made it clear that he is still stuck on old, unfounded political grievances.

It was a disgraceful speech to give in an institution committed to holding itself outside of politics.

It was also bizarre and meandering, a president off script and rambling. He slipped in and out of talking about Bobby Knight and Indiana basketball, telling a story about meeting Knight, whom he characterized as a fan of his. He said Knight told him to call if he ever wanted to get into politics and gave him his phone number on a slip of paper and then a couple of years later Trump went looking for it and found it in a stack of paper. “It was a miracle,” he said. And then, free association in full bloom, he said that another miracle was his ear, which he gestured to, as a reminder of the July assassination attempt. The crowd applauded. A woman, perhaps Bondi, could be heard offering up an “amen.” Trump returned to talk of Knight’s support for him.

It was every Trump rally you’ve ever seen. But it was delivered in the Great Hall of Justice. Anyone with any integrity would have walked out of the Great Hall of Justice if anyone had tried to desecrate it like that. But “integrity” is not a word associated with Trump and his followers.

Law Professor John Barrett tells the story of a very different speech coming from the Justice Department: “On Monday, April 1, 1940, Robert H. Jackson—age 48, three months into his service as Attorney General of the United States—gave one of his most important, famous, enduring speeches: “The Federal Prosecutor.” He spoke on that day to the country’s chief federal prosecutors, the U.S. Attorneys who then were serving in each Federal Judicial District across the country. They were assembled in the Great Hall at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., for the Second Annual Conference of U.S. Attorneys.”

The speech Jackson gave included these wise words: “If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor.” Jackson understood that if politics pervaded prosecution, then people could be prosecuted because their views were unpopular or they were out of favor, not because they had committed serious crimes. Jackson, unlike Trump, encouraged prosecutors to guard against this and protect democracy.

Before Pam Bondi, there was another former Florida attorney general who became attorney general of the United States, Janet Reno. In her farewell speech, she said of democracy, “It is a fragile institution. The rule of law is fragile. The rule of law is based on people, and democracy is based on people.” She told prosecutors to do their best to protect it.

A very different message from a very different era.

We’re in this together,

 

There’s a genetic condition called Pseudofolliculitis Barbae (PFB) that almost exclusively affects Black males. What it is: In people with naturally tightly-curled hair the hair can grow back into the skin. If they shave it’ll cause scarring. In the military, anyone who has this is eligible for a waiver from shaving.

In 2022, the US Marine Corps issued guidance that Marines with PFB couldn’t be discriminated against.

Yesterday, the USMC issued new guidance that Marines who couldn’t be cured of PFB within a year can be discharged for it as PFB is “incompatible with military service.”

This is what happens when you have a Secretary of Defense who is a DUI appointee.

One of the keys to the Trump era is that Trump’s increasingly demented ramblings are as a matter of routine cleaned up by not just the right wing media, but by the legacy media that pointed out a few million times that Joe Biden’s debate performance raised serious questions about whether he should continue to be president of the United States.  Trump’s demented rantings are the product of a mind that is deep into mid-stage dementia, if not worse.

Here’s the thing unfiltered:

Trump: “What if anything? What if a bomb drops on your head right now? Okay, what if they broke it? I don‘t know. They broke it with Biden because Biden didn‘t respect him. They didn‘t respect Obama. They respect me. Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia … You ever hear of that deal? That was a phony. That was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden scam. Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff, it was a Democrat scam. And he had to go through that. And he did go through it. We didn‘t end up in a war. And he went through it. He was accused of all that stuff. He had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden‘s bathroom. It came out of Hunter Biden‘s bedroom. It was disgusting. And then they said, oh, oh, the laptop from hell was made by Russia. The 51 agents The whole thing was a scam. And he had to put up with that. He was being accused of all that stuff. All I can say is this: he might have broken deals with Obama and Bush, and he might have broken them with Biden. He did maybe, maybe he didn‘t. I don‘t know what happened, but he didn‘t break them with me. He wants to make a deal…

…The problem is I’ve empowered you to be a tough guy, and I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States. And your people are very brave, but you’re either going to make a deal or we’re out, and if we’re out, you’ll fight it out. I don’t think it’s going to be pretty, but you’ll fight it out, but you don’t have the cards, but once we sign that deal you’re in a much better position. But you’re not acting at all thankful and that’s not a nice thing, I’ll be honest. That’s not a nice thing… All right. I think we‘ve seen enough…

“This is going to be great television. I will say that.”

This is morally depraved, but it’s also incoherent paranoid ranting, at a level that makes Biden’s verbal stumbling during the debate  sound innocuous by comparison.

People get used to pretty much anything over time, and what we’ve gotten used to is that, in addition to all the other things that make Trump the worst president in US history, some combination of aging and Adderall, and/or whatever other drugs he’s abusing, is gradually transforming him into a demented old man. A happy family would take the car keys away from him; our unhappy national family will apparently have to deal with this in its own idiosyncratic way.

I really don’t think anything like four years of this is sustainable, even by our sclerotic and decadent political institutions. How they will eventually rid themselves of this turbulent grifter remains to be seen.

On February 28, the same day that President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance took the side of Russian president Vladimir Putin against Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, Martin Matishak of The Record, a cybersecurity news publication, broke the story that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stop all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions.

 Both the scope of the directive and its duration are unclear.

As Stephanie Kirchgaessner of The Guardian notes, the Trump administration has made clear that it no longer sees Russia as a cybersecurity threat. Last week, at a United Nations working group on cybersecurity, representatives from the European Union and the United Kingdom highlighted threats from Russia, while Liesyl Franz, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for international cybersecurity, did not mention Russia, saying the U.S. was concerned about threats from China and Iran.  Kirchgaessner also noted that under Trump, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which monitors cyberthreats against critical infrastructure, has set new priorities. Although Russian threats, especially those against U.S. election systems, were a top priority for the agency in the past, a source told Kirchgaessner that analysts were told not to follow or report on Russian threats.

 Russia and China are our biggest adversaries,” the source told Kirchgaessner. “With all the cuts being made to different agencies, a lot of cybersecurity personnel have been fired. Our systems are not going to be protected and our adversaries know this.” “People are saying Russia is winning,” the source said. “Putin is on the inside now.”

Another source noted that “There are dozens of discrete Russia state-sponsored hacker teams dedicated to either producing damage to US government, infrastructure and commercial interests or conducting information theft with a key goal of maintaining persistent access to computer systems.” “Russia is at least on par with China as the most significant cyber threat, the person added. Under those circumstances, the source said, ceasing to follow and report Russian threats is “truly shocking.”

Trump’s outburst in the Oval Office on Friday confirmed that Putin has been his partner in politics since at least 2016. “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said. “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia… Russia, Russia, Russia—you ever hear of that deal?—that was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, scam. Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff, it was a Democrat scam. And he had to go through that. And he did go through it, and we didn’t end up in a war. And he went through it. He was accused of all that stuff. He had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bathroom.”

Putin went through a hell of a lot with Trump? It was an odd statement from a U.S. president, whose loyalty is supposed to be dedicated to the Constitution and the American people.

Trump has made dismissing as a hoax what he calls “Russia, Russia, Russia” central to his political narrative. But Russian operatives did, in fact, work to elect him in 2016. A 2020 report from the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed that Putin ordered hacks of Democratic computer networks, and at two crucial moments WikiLeaks, which the Senate committee concluded was allied with the Russians, dumped illegally obtained emails that were intended to hurt the candidacy of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Trump openly called for Russia to hack Clinton’s emails.

Russian operatives also flooded social media with disinformation, not necessarily explicitly endorsing Trump, but spreading lies about Clinton to depress Democratic turnout, or to rile up those on the right by falsely claiming that Democrats intended to ban the Pledge of Allegiance, for example. The goal of the propaganda was not simply to elect Trump. It was to pit the far ends of the political spectrum against the middle, tearing the nation apart.

Fake accounts on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook drove wedges between Americans over issues of race, immigration, and gun rights. Craig Timberg and Tony Romm of the Washington Post reported in 2018 that Facebook officials told Congress that the Russian campaign reached 126 million people on Facebook and 20 million on Instagram.

That effort was not a one-shot deal: Russians worked to influence the 2020 presidential election, too. In 2021 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded that Putin “authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President [Joe] Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical division in the US.” But “[u]nlike in 2016,” the report said, “we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts to gain access to election infrastructure.”

Moscow used “proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives—including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden—to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded.

In October 2024, Matthew Olsen, head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, warned in an interview with CBS News that Russia was bombarding voters with propaganda to divide Americans before that year’s election, as well. Operatives were not just posting fake stories and replying to posts, but were also using AI to manufacture fake videos and laundering Russian talking points through social media influencers. Just a month before, news had broken that Russia was funding Tenet Media, a company that hired right-wing personalities Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Lauren Southern, Tayler Hansen, and Matt Christiansen, who repeated Russian talking points.

Now back in office, Trump and MAGA loyalists say that efforts to stop disinformation undermine their right to free speech. Project 2025, the extremist blueprint for the second Trump administration, denied that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election—calling it “a Clinton campaign dirty trick”—and called for ending government efforts to stop disinformation with “utmost urgency.” “The federal government cannot be the arbiter of truth,” it said.

On February 20, Steven Lee Myers, Julian E. Barnes, and Sheera Frenkel of the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is firing or reassigning officials at the FBI and CISA who had worked on protecting elections. That includes those trying to stop foreign propaganda and disinformation and those combating cyberattacks and attempts to disrupt voting systems.

Independent journalist Marisa Kabas broke the story that two members of the “Department of Government Efficiency” are now installed at CISA: Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old known as “Big Balls,” and Kyle Schutt, a 38-year-old software engineer. Kim Zetter of Wired reported that since 2018, CISA has “helped state and local election offices around the country assess vulnerabilities in their networks and help secure them.”

During the 2024 campaign, Trump said repeatedly that he would end the war in Ukraine. Shortly after the election, a newspaper reporter asked Nikolai Patrushev, who is close to Putin, if Trump’s election would mean “positive changes from Russia’s point of view.” Patrushev answered: “To achieve success in the elections, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. And as a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”

Today, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a reporter: “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Simpson of the BBC noted recently that “there are years when the world goes through some fundamental, convulsive change.” Seven weeks in, he suggested, 2025 is on track to be one of them: “a time when the basic assumptions about the way our world works are fed into the shredder.”

Simpson was referring to the course the United States has taken in the past month as the administration of President Donald Trump has hacked the United States away from 80 years of alliances and partnerships with democratic nations in favor of forging ties with autocrats like Russian president Vladimir Putin.

On February 24, 2025, the U.S. delegation to the United Nations voted against a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression in Ukraine and calling for it to end its occupation. That is, the U.S. voted against a resolution that reiterated one of the founding principles of the United Nations itself: that one nation must not invade another. The U.S. voted with Russia, Israel, North Korea, Belarus, and fourteen other countries friendly to Russia against the measure, which nonetheless passed overwhelmingly.

Then, on Friday, February 28, 2025, Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance made clear their shift toward Russian president Vladimir Putin as they berated Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, publicly trying to bully him into agreeing to the ceasefire conditions that Putin and Trump want to end a war Russia started by invading Ukraine.

The abandonment of democratic principles and the democratic institutions the U.S. helped to create is isolating the United States from nations that have been our allies, partners, and friends.

After yesterday’s Oval Office debacle, democratic nations rejected Trump and Vance’s embrace of Russia and Putin and publicly reiterated their support for Ukraine and President Zelensky. The leaders of Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the European Council, the European Parliament, the European Union, and others all posted their support for Ukraine and Zelensky.

In London today, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Keir Starmer greeted Zelensky with an enthusiastic hug and in front of cameras told him: “You are very, very welcome here…. As you heard from the cheers on the street outside, you have full backing across the United Kingdom. We stand with you and Ukraine for as long as it may take.”

In the last interview that former secretary of state Antony Blinken gave before leaving office, he talked about the importance of alliances and the strong hand the Biden administration was leaving for the incoming Trump administration. Now, a little over a month later, that interview provides a striking contrast to the course the Trump administration has steered.

We are learning the difference at our peril.

How does a free press in this country die? Probably not the way Americans imagine. It’s unlikely—though not impossible—that heavily armed police are going to raid newspaper offices, confiscate computers, and haul editors and reporters off to jail. Media websites probably won’t go dark under government bans. Pro-regime militias with official backing won’t light a bonfire of anti-regime books and magazines on Pennsylvania Avenue. The demise of independent journalism in the United States will be less spectacular than the notorious examples of other times and places—as much voluntary as coerced, less like a murder than a death of despair.

The Washington Post is dying not in darkness but by the light of noon, and by its own hand. Over the past few months, the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has shed a large part of the paper’s workforce, asserted control over the management of its newsroom, spiked a presidential endorsement for the first time in the paper’s history, and driven out some of its best writers and editors. On Wednesday, Bezos announced that the Post’s opinion pages will exclude views that contradict his own libertarianism. “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” he wrote to his staff—missing the irony that he had just curtailed liberty of expression. “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Anyone wanting a different idea, Bezos added, could find it on the internet. For an argument in defense of anti-trust enforcement, stricter labor laws, tariffs on foreign goods, or higher taxes on billionaires, readers can take a dive into the online ocean and something will turn up.

Aside from the mind-numbing monotony, why does it matter that the Post’s opinion pages will no longer allow pieces from, say, a social-democratic or economic-nationalist point of view? One reason is that “viewpoint diversity”—the airing of various and conflicting ideas—prevents the onset of orthodoxy, creates an atmosphere of open inquiry, and thereby comes closer to the discovery of truth. This argument goes back to John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech in On Liberty: “Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.”

We are likelier to reach the truth and understand why it’s true if we constantly subject our ideas to criticism. I dislike the opinion pieces of the Post’s arch-conservative Marc Thiessen, but I don’t want them killed—not just for the sake of free expression and lively debate, but because they force me to see my own views in a negative light and, once in a while, revise them. Even “personal liberties and free markets” aren’t self-explanatory or self-justifying. To mean anything, these ideas need to be challenged. Otherwise, Bezos’s twin pillars will petrify into dogma and eventually crumble.

But there’s something more profoundly dispiriting about the Post making itself the predictable mouthpiece of a single viewpoint. We don’t expect publications such as First Things, The Nation, and the Daily Caller to host ideological battles—their purpose is to advance a distinct outlook. But a national newspaper like the Post should speak to a democratic public and represent public opinion, which means publishing the widest possible range of thoughtful views. When it ceases to do so, it becomes more like the narrow, partisan, mutually hostile, and uncomprehending media that create most of the noise in America today.