Not just Trump: Why crushing free speech is a feature of American democracy

​American exceptionalism is a Will McAvoy speech wrapped in a Big Mac, and nowhere is this more evident than in the country's take on free speech—a delusion that is bipartisan, irrespective of whether one votes red, blue, or purple. Take a recent New Yorker piece titled The Detention of Mahmoud Khalil Is a Flagrant Assault on Free Speech, which, like all others in the same vein, operates under the assumption that Trump isn’t ceteris paribus but a unique, Agent Smith-like bug in the American simulation.