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Comment by gtirloni | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a US citizen so take what I write below with a grain of salt.

I always thought the US to be a stronghold of democracy and free speech. I know, it's a naive view and we know how huge companies and corrupt politicians can subvert the system. But still, I thought it had a decent law system that, although imperfect like any other system, kept things from going back to the dark ages.

I don't believe that anymore after what I've seen this year. A few individuals can completely takeover the government, keep committing bigger and bigger crimes and nothing happens. All they get is outrage on social media, which they are happy to shrug off.

I know democracy and free speech are fragile things and we have to be constantly watching but I didn't imagine it would be this ephemeral in the US.

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> I always thought the US to be a stronghold of democracy and free speech.

Every single story and moral guidance I've ever been told from childhood, whether from movies, books, church, or culture in general is that people like those in power right now are the bad guys.

I no longer have any idea what people on the other side actually think. I don't think they know anymore either. I think they just want to exert power and control and revenge over their personal grievances and boogeymen, and seem to be under a constant bombardment of ideology to convince people to untether themselves from any moral restraint or connection with the out-group.

I am one of the scary minorities they use as a boogeyman, and their rhetoric about the group of people I belong to is so unattached from my daily life, the values that I hold, and my own attitudes that it would be comical if it didn't come out in sideways glances, scowls, and stares of people on the street. Nobody ever even bothers to ask, to even have a moment of conversation to see that there is a real person. I try to walk through life friendly, open, and interested in people. We walk around with conceptions of other people built for us, not ones that we have made ourselves.

The only thing that seems to help is to try to be offline as much as possible, to be in community with people and in real space.

> A few individuals can completely takeover the government

That's not what's happening.

When most people serving in positions of government do so in good faith, most forms of government work, including the American one. When most people serve in bad faith, most forms of government do not work, including the American one.

The American system has checks in place to keep what is happening from happening, but those checks aren't working because those who would exercise them aren't doing so, as withholding those checks benefits them personally, at least in the short term. The underlying theory of the American system is that if you distribute power enough, one or a few bad actors can't seize total power.

But, there are just too many people in elected office right now who did not take their oath to uphold the Constitution in good faith. Namely, in Congress which has simultaneously demonstrated that it is unwilling to effectively wield the impeachment check, and is unable to do effective legislative work, leading to a latent desire for a stronger executive. In this circumstance, no form of government will hold up without a correction towards replacing all the bad-faith actors.

It's been worse before in America and we've returned to normal, so I have hope as an American. See McCarthyism in the 1950's, when people like Kimmel were blackballed from working:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

Maybe before social media. I have a hard time seeing how this country will self-correct.

What's really pathetic about the current situation is that McCarthyism was at least rooted in the fear that Soviets would bomb and kill people, which given Russia's conduct in Ukraine and other places was well-founded. The current authoritarian backsliding is because... woke? Truly the dumbest of timelines.

In the Reagan years, money started to became more important than voters. Under Bush 2 and recent Supreme Court Decisions, bribes became legal. Per the Court they called them "tips".

So Congress people spend more time fund raising (taking bribes) than helping their district.

Nothing real has gotten done in many districts for multiple decades. Real wages, when compared to inflation, and has been falling for decades. When I was very young, laws where passed that actually helped people. As a very young kid, I remember waking up as a kid with coal flakes on my window sill due to its use in the mills. That ended in the 70s.

Now, to get more money the laws that cleaned up the environment are being cancelled, why, rich are "tipping" congress people.

The US is done, time for civilization advancement to be carried on by another Country. Hopefully the EU can get its act together.

It's something that's been eroding for a long time, starting mostly with the Reagan administration in the 1980s and the political desire at the time to put an end to the New deal era style of big government from the 1930s and 40s.

There have been periods of pause, and even reverse, but two terms of the Trump administration trailing on the heels of the tea party movement in the 2010s have really done a lot of damage at all levels of US government.

By now, so many politicians, lawyers, and judges, are compromised it's going to take some pretty extreme changes to the way people are voting to make an impact.

I don't see that happening in the near future, even if I do see it happening in the long term.

This is twisting history and reality, big government is exactly what's happening right now. The FCC abusing its power to silence speech is big government. The government using its power over universities to control them is big government. This is the fruit of that tree.

    big government is exactly what is happening now

I never said it wasn't.

Such is the paradox of the modern Republican party. For the last so many decades they have claimed to want a smaller government. Then went handed the keys to the kingdom they immediately increase its size and get right to abusing its power.

since the 1970s democratic backsliding is the primary origin story for todays authoritarian regimes. look at turkey, russia, the philippines, venezuela, nicaragua, poland, hungary, india... theres a playbook. you can now add usa to that list. a good counter example is what happened last year in South Korea. the president declares martial law out of nowhere but before he could consolidate power the courts and the people resisted (not easily mind you, he had significant support) but the checks and balances held things together. but in the other examples you can see how when one of those checks fails it essily cascades into a chain reaction that can be hard to stop. that's what you're witnessing in the usa: taking congressional power to the executive, control of the courts, control of the media, using the national guard domestically to control dissent. well you get the idea. it already seems too late. there won't be some red line crossed where people get out their guns to defend their "freedom" if they haven't already noticed how eroded its become. theres still voting -- just like in all those countries above.

What you have here has nothing to do with the law, and has to do with power. Disney willingly pulled Kimmel off their own networks, because a major distributor of their content(Sinclair) threatened to not air it, which accounts for about 20% of the viewership of the show.

Why did Sinclair threaten to not air it?

Maybe they were coerced by the government. Or maybe they canceled Kimmel for the same reason the Trump administration was pissing themselves over Kimmel, because Trump and Sinclair are politically aligned and therefore inclined to act in similar ways anyway...

> Sinclair's stations have been known for featuring news content and programming that promote conservative political positions. They have been involved in various controversies surrounding politically motivated programming decisions,[172][173] such as news coverage and specials during the lead-ups to elections that were in support of the Republican Party.[174][175][172]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group#Polit...

My read is they weren't coerced, but did as Trump desired because they like Trump. Either way, it should go to court.

"In recent months, both broadcasters have announced their intent to buy or sell local TV assets — Nexstar is in the process of effectuating a $6 billion merger with peer broadcaster TEGNA, and Sinclair is executing on a mixture of station acquisitions and sales — all of which require the approval of the FCC."

https://thedesk.net/2025/09/nexstar-sinclair-jimmy-kimmel-fc...

Because Sinclair needs the FCC to approve a merger for them. They read between the lines and know that to get it approved they need to apply pressure on ABC to can Kimmel to appease someone.

I wish the law that restricted the number of public stations/licenses a single entity could own was still in place. It was created to prevent what's happening now, silencing of varied and different ideas, views, and opinions.

> Disney willingly pulled Kimmel off their own networks, because a major distributor of their content(Sinclair) threatened to not air it, which accounts for about 20% of the viewership of the show.

"This is a nice merger deal, shame anything should happen to it…" does not look like a recipe for a free will / willing action to be made.

For the record, the merger is with Nexstar, not Sinclair, but the point is the same:

* https://www.nexstar.tv/nexstar-media-group-inc-enters-into-d...

The US system was strongly dependent on everyone basically behaving themselves; it has very poor defences against people willing to break the rules.

There's supposed to be checks & balances, of Congress, the courts, and the President keeping one another in check.

But the GOP holds all three. Even the court system has fallen apart, with the Supreme Court using shadow dockets with no explanation, not establishing any precedent, just overriding lower courts to rule by fiat as they please. The GOP congress is utterly maga whipped, with only very rare signs of protest; deathly afraid of provoking Trump's ire.

Even still there's constant legal losses for the administration. But the shock and awe, the endless acting bad, in bad faith, doing bad things, and disrespecting the constitution, the liberties, the democracy: it's very grinding and very hard to see such pure malice against our history and rights and decency performed so ruthlessly so regularly.

We're still a stronghold of democracy and free speech. That doesn't mean threats don't occasionally present themselves. In fact, it should be welcomed, as it gives each new generation the opportunity to re-affirm their commitment to free speech.

Free speech has been under threat at the academic and cultural level for a while now, especially in the 2010's. All of that was a good thing in my opinion, because a generation of college students were able to see firsthand what happens when we try and silence dissent.

This situation is admittedly more dangerous, as the federal government is attempting to suppress speech via governmental subsidies (as far as I can tell, I don't have all the facts).

But this is also an opportunity. It's a moment for those on the political left to see clearly why protecting speech is, in fact, a very good thing. So hopefully the sane people on both sides of the aisle can reflect on where we're at, how we got here, and how we get out of this situation. To me it's clear - we reject both explicit and implicit attempts to suppress speech we don't like, full stop. We don't kill people, we don't get people fired, we don't threaten to withhold funding. We need to collectively agree to do this across the board, for everyone in this country.

This feels like a principled, fantasy response. We're not at the "shaking fists on podiums" stage of this issue.

I don't know how to interpret "shaking fists on podiums", but it reads as "we're not at the stage where we talk these things out". The only other option is violence, so if you're saying that then say it directly.

I think they’re saying this isn’t debate club. When companies are being threatened, when universities are being told their research grants will be illegally withheld unless they punish students or faculty for exercising constitutional rights, when civil servants are being vetted by political apparatchiks for their political views, it’s not a hypothetical question about the boundaries of civil discourse.

The only "free speech" that matters is whether the government is punishing you for it.

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