Micah Beckwith's dangerous rhetoric
Any attempt to stop any student newspaper from publishing "propaganda" would be illegal under both the Indiana Constitution and the First Amendment.
This past June, I was proud to have voted for Micah Beckwith at the Indiana Republican Party's state convention. Convention delegates rejected the party establishment's pick for Lieutenant Governor and instead chose someone we trusted to be a consistent conservative voice in the office for the next four years. I was also happy to vote for Mike Braun and Beckwith in the November general election. I think he will be an excellent LG though 2028 and hopefully through 2032.
But with that said, Beckwith (like everyone else) is not immune to saying some things that are irresponsible or even outright dangerous, such as when he threatened to censor the Indiana Daily Student over their quotes of former Trump Administration appointees criticizing the former (and now future) President of these United States. And yes, this was a direct threat of censorship. Beckwith said this of a recent IDS cover: "This type of elitist leftist propaganda needs to stop or we will be happy to stop it for them."
This is dangerous rhetoric. Any attempt to stop any student newspaper from publishing "propaganda" would be illegal under both the Indiana Constitution and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
This is exactly the kind of censorship Leftists demanded from Indiana University in 2003, when "students" and others demanded the university punish economics professor Eric Rasmusen for politically incorrect statements made on his personal home page. There was another attempt to professionally punish Rasmusen for his posts on Twitter (now X) back in 2019. Professor Charles Trzcinka has also been targeted for his free speech, and others have also.
Beckwith continued:
There were two assassination attempts on President Trump's life due to inflammatory language and illustrations like what the Indiana Daily Student published.
We have a long history of inflammatory political rhetoric. I have personally been accused of murder more times than I can count because of the things I have said about the wickedness of abortion - the slaughter of innocent children. I would be shocked if Beckwith has not faced the same accusations. It used to be the case that conservatives rejected the accusation that political rhetoric is to blame for violence, when that rhetoric stops short of an explicit call for violence. Conservatives in the 1990's and 2000's understood that it is the criminal alone who is responsible for his crimes.
This does not mean that we should not all be more responsible with what we say. A great deal of criticism of Trump has been overheated, and some of it outright false. But being responsible with our rhetoric also includes people in positions of power not threatening to use the force of government to punish or silence those who make political statements that we dislike or even find inflammatory.
Circling back to censorship of conservatives, Beckwith is correct to be concerned that students and faculty are intimidated or punished. But the answer is not to threaten the student newspaper. The answer is to use state government's oversight authority to make sure that the university is not violating free speech. Some on the Right argue we need to "fight fire with fire." That is a Trumpian solution, not a conservative solution. Refusing to "fight fire with fire" is not "why we lose." Doing that, and abandoning conservative principles such as the defense of free speech, illustrates that we have already lost.
