We are often told by progressives that unfettered free speech is somehow irreconcilable with genuine equality and social justice. Whereas the traditional view of free expression emphasizes an open marketplace of ideas, in which vigorous debate reveals the quality of competing viewpoints, the progressive approach stresses the need to limit harmful content such as misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation — fact-based information used irresponsibly. Unfortunately, the corporate news media has adopted the progressive view, which has spawned censorship and propaganda. The following examples illustrate that sad reality. This article is from The American Spectator’s summer 2026 print magazine. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive the magazine. In January 2023, then–Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy announced that he would remove Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, from the House Intelligence Committee. Both the Democrats and the legacy “news” media portrayed this decision as uncalled for, but McCarthy remained firm. When they refused to move on to a different topic, he told reporters, “If you got the briefing I got from the FBI, you wouldn’t have Swalwell on any committee.” He added that the FBI had “red-flagged” Swalwell during the previous Congress, when the Democrats controlled the House, yet then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi had kept him on the committee. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our summer 2026 print magazine. Consequently, when Swalwell dropped out of the California gubernatorial race and resigned from Congress due to multiple allegations of sexual assault, Pelosi was asked if she and other Democrats knew what he was doing and turned a blind eye to it. She vehemently denied the charge: “Absolutely not true!” The interviewer pressed, “You had no idea?” She answered, “None whatsoever.” Similarly implausible denials have been peddled by Swalwell’s close friend Senator Ruben Gallego, Democrat of Arizona: “Eric Swalwell lied to ALL of us.” Such claims directly conflict with what was clearly an open secret within the Beltway. As Politico phrased it: The broad contours of Swalwell’s alleged behavior, if not the specifics, did not come as a surprise to many working in and around politics, especially in Washington. The 45-year-old cable news darling and Trump antagonist had developed a reputation for unsavory and sometimes unwanted behavior toward women. Those warnings were shared in whisper networks but rarely traveled outside the circle of political insiders…. That is, until Swalwell sought a promotion to lead the nation’s most populous state. Note that Swalwell’s alleged actions “did not come as a surprise to many working in and around politics.” That means Swalwell’s depravity was common knowledge among political journalists, special interest groups, and virtually everyone working on Capitol Hill. Indeed, as Kevin McCarthy said on ABC News on April 12, “Every member of Congress knows not to let any young staffer get around Swalwell or Matt Gaetz.” Why does all this seem so familiar? A prominent politician running for office has a politically fatal flaw that, if known to the voters, will destroy him. And, when it is finally discovered, everyone pretends to be shocked. This seems very familiar, no? Cast your mind back to June 27, 2024. President Biden wants to be reelected, and, during a crucial debate with his GOP challenger, attempts to highlight an achievement of his first term by braying, “We finally beat Medicare.” That bizarre claim was, of course, just one of many mental misfires that confirmed the widespread public impression that he was in the midst of cognitive decline. The most disturbing revelation was that the corporate “news” media had obviously colluded with the White House and congressional Democrats to hide Biden’s true condition from the voters even after the debate. As Marc Thiessen wrote at the time in the Washington Post: One of the worst offenders was CNN’s Jake Tapper. He accused those who voiced concern about Biden’s cognitive decline of “mocking his stutter” and spreading Russian disinformation. Tapper insisted Biden was “sharp” mentally and not the way he is caricatured on Fox…. Now, Tapper has the chutzpah to publish a book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” in which he unironically investigates the very cover-up he helped perpetuate. The tawdry tales of Swalwell and Biden are by no means the only examples of collusion between the Democrats and corporate news media, of course. But they do highlight the metastasis of a disease that endangers far more than decrepit or depraved politicians: progressivism. In a 1789 letter to the British philosopher Richard Price, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “[W]herever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government.” Jefferson advocated a free press that would provide the voters with enough information about the government’s actions to accurately assess the soundness of its policies. Does the corporate media fill the bill? Art by Bill Wilson for The American Spectator Of course not. Most corporate news organizations are populated by editors and reporters steeped in progressivism, and thus they harbor doubts concerning whether objectivity in journalism has any real value. Last summer, for example, the Columbia Journalism Review ran a lengthy essay titled, “Is Objectivity Still Worth Pursuing?” The graduates of today’s journalism schools regard objectivity as “both impossible and harmful” because it impedes social justice. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decoded this nonsense in his April 15 remarks on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence at the University of Texas at Austin: The Constitution is the means of government; it is the Declaration that announces the ends of government. The Constitution achieves this purpose by protecting our natural rights…. Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government. It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from the government. It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with the Constitution. It is no coincidence that the capture of the Democratic Party by what had formerly been a fringe group of progressives occurred during the same time period that the corporate news media began focusing on “truth” over “objectivity.” This brand of “journalism” inevitably favors the policies of progressive Democrats, and it became pervasive after President Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. The legacy media became a kind of standing army of news and opinion writers who willingly colluded with the Democrats and the administrative state to invent and publish stories meant to undermine if not actually put an end to Trump’s presidency.  This was combined with a propaganda campaign meant to convince the public that any political system that permitted Donald Trump to become president was necessarily corrupt and undemocratic. Evidence for this claim often focused on the Electoral College system that elected Trump despite his failure to win a majority of the popular vote. The Supreme Court has also been targeted by progressive Democrats and journalists. They accuse the court of creating an “imperial presidency” by ruling, in Trump v. United States, that presidents are presumptively immune from prosecution for their official acts. As the New York Times phrases it: Nearly 250 years after American colonists threw off their king, this is arguably the closest the country has come during a time of general peace to the centralized authority of a monarch. Mr. Trump takes it upon himself to reinterpret a constitutional amendment and to eviscerate agencies and departments created by Congress. He dictates to private institutions how to run their affairs. He sends troops into American streets and wages an unauthorized war against nonmilitary boats in the Caribbean. This inevitably brings us to the denunciation of Trump’s war on Iran by the progressives who dominate the Democratic Party and the corporate news media. Both insist that he had no authority to attack Iran without prior congressional approval, despite the failure of four Democrat-led attempts to pass congressional legislation limiting his powers to continue military operations. Meanwhile, Trump has actually been accused of a war crime based on a social media post. The Democratic Party and the corporate news media are in a very real sense trying to undermine President Trump’s effort to protect civilization from genuine barbarians. All of this raises the following question: Does the metastasis of progressivism in the Democratic Party, the corporate news media, and countless other institutions endanger popular sovereignty? Returning to Thomas Jefferson and Clarence Thomas, the former wrote the Declaration of Independence and the latter says that document defines the legitimate ends of government. Its fundamental principles have unquestionably resonated globally for 250 years. If, as Justice Thomas maintains, progressivism cannot coexist with those principles, its rise in recent decades is a clear and present danger to free people everywhere and for civilization in general. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our summer 2026 print magazine.