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If nothing else, the events of recent weeks have been clarifying. “Donald Trump is using the murder of Charlie Kirk, which was tragic, as a pretext for an authoritarian crackdown,” Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political scientist who studies democratic erosion, said to me last week. The pressure that the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, put on ABC and its parent company, Disney, to suspend the late-night comic Jimmy Kimmel was the most visible manifestation of this Trumpian initiative , but Carr himself made clear that the blitz isn’t over. “We’re not done yet,” he told CNBC, alluding to further changes in the media ecosystem.

There’s another clarifying takeaway: a

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