Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently expressed what many felt at the reelection of Donald Trump: not triumph so much as relief. “I hope this last ten years increasingly is just going to feel like a bad dream,” he told podcast host Joe Rogan. “I can’t believe we tolerated the level of repression . . . and anger and . . . emotional incontinence and . . . cancellation campaigns.” Much of it was orchestrated or encouraged by our government.
One could say many things about Trump’s cabinet picks. At times, they seem to embody Government by Middle Finger. But they also, undeniably, represent Government by the Canceled: an assemblage that doesn’t need to be reminded of the administrative state’s ability to coerce the American public by calling in favors from Big Tech or pulling the levers of regulation, audit, or investigation. Many have experienced such treatment firsthand.
Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick to lead the intelligence community, was briefly placed on a government watch list, she says, for criticizing Kamala Harris. The Biden White House and surgeon general pressured social-media companies to censor Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya’s attempts to warn the public that the Covid lockdowns were the biggest policy error in American history; Trump named Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health. And Elon Musk, appointed to lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, knowingly overpaid for Twitter to give Americans a sphere for free speech. At takeover, Musk immediately released the Twitter Files, revealing a coordinated effort by the Biden administration to censor the speech of Americans whose views it disfavored. The Biden administration repaid Musk by targeting his businesses with unprecedented levels of regulatory harassment.
One wonderful thing about Americans: we despise being bullied by our government. Not even our Anglosphere allies share this aspect of our national character. Yet, over the last decade, for anyone with views departing from progressive orthodoxy, American life has become increasingly suffocating. Our posts have been censored on social media—or labeled “misinformation” by “fact-checkers”—as mine were, for criticizing Biden administration policy on boys participating in girls’ sports. We got booted from Twitter for opposing gender ideology or expressing skepticism about Covid vaccine safety.
Andreessen told Rogan that he personally knew of 30 tech founders who had been labeled a “politically exposed person” for building cryptocurrency or AI businesses without the administration’s blessing, or for opposing some dogma of the Left, and found themselves debanked—kicked out of the banking system. David Horowitz, a right-wing critic of radical Islam, lost access to credit cards; Mastercard also blocked Horowitz’s donors from donating to his nonprofit using their own cards. Melania and Barron Trump were told that they could not open bank accounts, according to the First Lady’s recent memoir. A troubling aspect of the last decade is how many Americans started silently accepting all this.
There were, increasingly, two Americas: one enjoyed by those with approved views; the other, for everyone else. It was always the Left that determined which views appeared on the whitelist and which on the blacklist. Supporting a border wall was definitionally xenophobic until, abruptly, Kamala Harris supported it. To claim that the vast majority of teen girls who suddenly decided that they were “transgender” were instead caught up in a vast social contagion was verboten, until the Left decided that its own outlets could concede that much. “My body, my choice,” was a sacred and undeniable maxim, unless you refused the Covid vaccine. Calling the 2016 election “stolen” was fine; claiming the 2020 election was stolen made you an enemy of democracy.
Uttering a word in Mandarin Chinese that sounded like the N word was enough to get you suspended from your university teaching job. But calling for the death of your Jewish or Israeli classmates, blocking their access to the library or large sections of campus, defacing university property—this was free speech, or rightful protest, or kids being kids. Some of us watched it all in horror; we knew it was wrong. But a country founded on freedom seemed to have lost its sense of fight.
To take only the most recent example from my own experience: WorldCat, the chief international bibliography organization, labeled Irreversible Damage (my 2020 journalistic investigation into the risks and harms of pediatric gender transition) with the rubrics “transphobia” and “transphobic.” My book is neither transphobic nor bigoted. But because the radical activists oppose any critique even of this often reckless and mendacious regime of medicalizing children, libraries around the world will continue to ensure that adult readers don’t find the book. I remain on a GLAAD blacklist for thoughtcrime, even as states, courts, and medical doctors take more skeptical views of pediatric gender medicine.
Those of us who faced cancellation feared what might happen when AI took over as an agent of our coercion—when it communicated directly with our banks or employers or the admissions office of the schools our kids apply to; and when it becomes unnecessary for human beings to pull levers on behalf of the government because progressive maximalism is embedded inside a technology that we cannot monitor, or even understand.
In February 2024, my husband asked Google’s AI: Who had “negatively impacted society more, Abigail Shrier or Mao?” Communist tyrant Mao Zedong was responsible for the deaths of between 40 million and 80 million people. The AI responded: “It is difficult to say definitively who negatively impacted society more, Abigail Shrier or Mao Zedong. Both have been accused of harming society in significant ways.” We laughed but tried not to think about what might happen when AI communicated directly with the bank assessing creditworthiness for our next home loan.
Trump’s detractors claim, through mouthfuls of sour grapes, that he is merely appointing “Trump loyalists.” But no honest evaluator could term Gabbard (until recently, a Democrat), physician and lockdown skeptic Bhattacharya (never previously affiliated with Trump or MAGA), or Marco Rubio (who ran against Trump and has harshly criticized him) “Trump loyalists.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hoped to oppose Trump in the general election until just a few months ago; he’s not exactly a Trump crony, either. Whatever else you think of Kennedy and his odd, speculative, and occasionally ungrounded views, or of Gabbard’s apparent opposition to U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, both have shown uncommon willingness to stand up to their own political tribes.
Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan recently told Free Press editor-in-chief Bari Weiss that if Trump’s advisors were “cannier or more able to control themselves,” they would be picking appointees whose names would make everyone think, “that is an impressive person.” The secretary of defense should be a man with the wisdom of George C. Marshall, Noonan said: someone “substantial and serious,” capable of running the “highly bureaucratized bureaucracy that is the Department of Defense”; a “serious diplomat”—not a “culture warrior” and Fox News host, such as Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee, a winner of two Bronze Stars who has completed tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo.
Noonan’s point will resonate especially with those who have not taken public stands that contravene the Left’s various orthodoxies. If you’re happy to stay within the current bounds of what the Left permits—to celebrate Joe Biden’s fitness long after the truth of his infirmity was plain; to be charmed by Kamala Harris’s stylized joie de vivre; to repeat the mantra “trans women are women,” or at least fail to contravene it; and to say nothing about the Covid vaccine other than that it is “safe and effective”—then you may have little reason to fear debanking. But for those of us who have run afoul of the Left’s dogma, particularly in public, it’s harder to worry over the Trump cabinet’s failure to harmonize with the views of credentialed bureaucrats.
Asking, in effect, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” might make sense in an America where parents weren’t struggling to get their children through schools that indoctrinate them to hate America, hate Jews, and hate their bodies. Or where opposing your daughter’s “gender transition” couldn’t trigger a visit by Child Protective Services. Or where many families of disabled veterans weren’t receiving less government assistance than illegal migrants. Or where refusing to get a novel vaccine wouldn’t cost you the privilege of attending the theater or get you fired from your job.
Indeed, the American military seems to have a more pressing problem than its inability to exhume George C. Marshall—one related to the fact that our airmen have been marching while carrying the Pride flag, and our sailors “educated” to announce their gender pronouns and use “inclusive language.” Recruitment across all three branches is dangerously low. Among several culprits: American families that have sent generations of their sons and daughters to fight and die for this country aren’t keen to send them into a military co-opted by leftist ideology that alternately shames and denigrates them, and that discharged 8,000 fighting men and women for their Covid vaccine status. Those of us who remember that the last administration tried to create a “Department of Misinformation” might be forgiven for waving away Trump appointees’ inadequate bureaucratic experience.
Many of Trump’s appointees are young. Some have never worked in government. Some will end up doing and saying strange—perhaps unacceptably strange—things. Some may turn out to be overwhelmed and fail and get replaced. The difference is: we’ll know about it. The media will make sure of that. This isn’t a group that has learned to play the inside-the-Beltway, under-the-table game.
At the top of the administrative state, Trump has placed people keenly aware of government’s yen for intimidating its own citizens. That alone may be enough to shake Americans out of our recent complacency over the trampling of our rights and the unfairness that so many of us have been urged to embrace. Many of our most pressing problems do not require decades of government experience so much as the will to solve them.
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