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American Gothics | Chris Lehmann

thebaffler.com · 6,895 words · saved by 1 readers

AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL LIFE, like American life generally, finds itself under siege from a second Trump White House. Colleges, broadcast news outlets, and newspapers have knuckled under in stunning fashion before shakedowns administered by Trump’s vain and venal strongman cult as it polices speech and remakes public discourse in its preferred authoritarian image. During past institutional lurches into thuggishness—notably the McCarthy inquisition of the 1950s—American creative writers in the film industry and book publishing marshaled an oppositional response, castigating both federal goon squads and their meek enablers in the universities and the culture industry. Now, however, it’s a very different prospect, with colleges caving to MAGA extortion threats, and publishers and media executives swallowing MAGA libels and empowering in-house censorship boards as writers mostly dither on the sidelines. Where mid-century writers mustered legal defenses for red-baited colleagues and mounted p

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