Trump will use antisemitsm as an excuse to attack basic freedoms

The return of Donald Trump will ask a hard question of the right: Do you mean it when you say that you believe in freedom of speech? Or are you all for censorship when the bully boys come from your side?

Trump will establish a right-wing version of cancel culture next year. He will use the power of the American presidency to enforce a new orthodoxy and punish non-believers.

With a combination of cynicism and sincere belief, supporters of the radical right have inflated the threat of the “woke mind virus” (to use Elon Musk’s words). So terrible is it in their imaginations, dictatorial methods must be used to crush it. For all the cries about freedom of speech, they merely want to meet the authoritarianism of the left with an authoritarianism of the right.

Trump and his allies plan to exploit the racism that Jews have received from leftists as an excuse for an attack on liberal academia. As I said when the Jewish Chronicle asked me to look at it, American Jews must watch their backs – and so must everyone else.

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Right-wing Jews, and indeed conservatives everywhere, are about to be tested. They have, quite rightly, raged against the illiberalism of woke culture and its denial of freedom of speech.