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Conservatism has largely been unpopular outside of rural townships, and the nation continues to undergo a process of urbanization as young people continue to move to cities. Normally, a healthy response to this would be to realign and target a more popular set of messaging and policy objectives. Instead the American Right has decided instead that this popularity (and the reflection in media) is a threat to its ability to continue serving a shrinking pool of wealthy benefactors.

It should come as no surprise that the moment they were handed the power, they began to push the boundaries of what is acceptable when it comes to censoring media they see as a threat. Republicanism doesnt work for anyone but the wealthy, it will do everything in its power here.

People who responded as "very conservative/conservative" was 36% in 1992 and 37% in 2024. https://news.gallup.com/poll/655190/political-parties-histor...

"Very liberal/liberal" has increased though (at the expense of moderates).

Language changes over time, and I remember recent memes where a cute girl says something like "claiming you're moderate means you know conservatives don't get laid" (presumably because of abortion politics). It makes me wonder if the moderates actually became liberal or if they just don't want to use that word any more.

After all the polarism in "reality show politics", my diehard liberal friends seem less liberal to me, but they'll state which team they're on more fervently than ever.

> It should come as no surprise that the moment they were handed the power, they began to push the boundaries of what is acceptable when it comes to censoring media they see as a threat.

To be clear, they were “handed power” by decisively winning a national election, which sort of undercuts your opening statement about how unpopular they are.

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The GOP won the popular vote, all the swing states, and control of both houses of congress and the White House in the last election.

Hard to do that on just rural townships.

Is it? Citizens in Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota have ~3x the voting power as citizens of California, seems pretty easy to win many of the things you mentioned on rural townships.

For the House, Wyoming is on equal footing with California. As Hawaii is on equal footing with Texas.

But for the Senate and the White House, population matters.

So I’d say the rural townships make it easy to win one of the things, not many.

i believe you have that backwards, senate gets 2 representatives per state. house gets based on population (less gerrymandering!). but your point still stands

I stand corrected. Thank you.

Well the problem I see with this is that the population means very little in terms of national politics in comparison to most modern democratic nations.

So you can be California which in terms of population and GDP will surpass most of central America combined and it still just gets two representatives. Now I get that the idea here was to avoid a dictatorship of the majority that can just ignore smaller states, but the way it is now it is a dictatorship of the minority, even if you ignore all the blatant ways of voter disenfranchisement.

Sorry to all Republicans on here, but if your party needs to prevent people from voting to win, that also hurts you. Ideally you'd want a party to have to listen to their voters. Gerrymandering, predicting voter behavior and throwing out the ones who might not vote for you are all the shameful behavior of traitors to democracy.

This has to be stopped and punished on every political level, as long as you still have a say.

> Sorry to all Republicans on here, but if your party needs to prevent people from voting to win, that also hurts you.

Isn't their main assertion that only citizens should vote?

(something like 80% of people claiming allegiance to both parties said the same, last i saw, but numbers surely fluctuate from poll to poll)

It's an assertion not backed by data. Non-citizens voting is infinitesimally small. Between that, Noem saying out loud "we want the right people to vote", and Trump calling for nationalized elections, it's clear what the real purpose is.

Early in-person voting and making election day a federal holiday are things everyone on all sides ought to be able to rally behind, together. Idk if any of that is in the SAVE Act though

It's not.

No. There is a long history of Republican voter disenfranchisement:

- In the 1980s The RNC created the Ballot Security Task Force [1], which was a scheme to strike people off the voter rolls by sending them a mailer if they didn't respond. This led to a consent decree requiring "preclearance" for any voter roll enforcement that lasted 25+ years [2];

- Republicans lead the charge in restricting access to mail-in voting because it's used more by Democratic Party voters [3] despite there being no evidence of fraud;

- In response to Arizona turning blue in 2020, Republicans went on a massive voter suppression spree [4], which disproportionately impacts Native Americans [5];

- Nationally, the push to have a street address unfairly impacts Native Americans who often don't have an official sstreet address if they live on a reservation. That's not an accident. It's the point;

- Even the push to force people to have birth certificates is aimed at Native Americans and poor people. There are quite literally millions of Americans who don't have them [6];

- Even if you have the necessary documentation to get an ID, you may have problems getting access. Again, this is by design. For example, Louisiana closed a bunch of DMV offices in minority areas such that the only DMV in certain black-majority areas was only open one day a month [7];

- The so-called SAVE Act recently passed by the house required your birth certificate to match your ID. Well, that's a problem for married women [8].

- States such as Florida have used private firms to strike people off the voter rolls if their name sounds like a convicted felon anywhere else in the country [9].

And why are we doing all this? There is zero evidence of voter fraud on a large scale [10]. And those convicted of voter fraud are most commonly Republican anyway [11].

But let's just say that we want an ID to vote. Why don't we fund the Federal government to issue it and make sure it is readily available and cheap or free? No, we can't have that because it's never been the point.

At some point you have to realize that they don't care about "integrity". Voter suppression is the point because it's the only way they can win elections.

Lastly, I feel compelled to remind people of Lee Atwater's famous 1981 remarks [12]. Republicans went from overt racism to being ever more abstract but the goals remained the same: to disproportionately impact black and brown people.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_Security_Task_Force

[2]: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/09/rnc-ballot-securit...

[3]: https://elections-blog.mit.edu/articles/how-policy-influence...

[4]: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/ariz...

[5]: https://azmirror.com/2024/06/06/100-years-after-citizenship-...

[6]: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/mill...

[7]: https://www.naacpldf.org/press-release/one-day-a-month-is-no...

[8]: https://www.npr.org/2025/04/13/g-s1-59684/save-act-married-w...

[9]: https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2000/06/23/hundreds-of-vote...

[10]: https://www.hoover.org/research/no-evidence-voter-fraud-guid...

[11]: https://archive.amarkfoundation.org/the2020election/voter-fr...

[12]: https://www.bunkhistory.org/resources/lee-atwaters-infamous-...

Definitely excellent citations, will read them all. thanks.

As if that ever was a huge problem in the US. If you want people to vote and want to avoid disenfranchising US citizens there are ways to do that as demonstrated by the majority of countries on earth. When I vote for example in the EU (Austria), I proactively get a letter from the state (since I am in the voter register). With this letter and some ID card I can show up in the polling location on the weekend and vote after proofing I am the person on my ID card.

What if I am not home? I go to a website a month before the vote, they send me a letter and I vote whenever I like before my election.

Everybody has such an ID card since that card is what you would also show to proove your identity elsewhere. And since we have working social welfare every slice of the citizen population can also afford it.

If you want to solve that problem, it is possible. If you want to solve it, that is. Right wing parties will always use non-citizens as scapegoats that are at the same time draining the welfare state and stealing your jobs. Oh, and you votes. Believing them without citation is the problem here.

>you can be California which in terms of population and GDP will surpass most of central America combined and it still just gets two representatives

Doesn't California have 54 reps, out of 485? And 90 out of ~800 Article III judges (lifetime appointment). It also collects $858 billion a year in state and local taxes that it gets to do mostly what it wants with

Yes, but it only has two senators. The 39.5 million people in California have the same Senatorial representation as the less than 600 thousand people in Wyoming.

In what world is that fair or remotely democratic?

The people who wrote the constitution had plenty of experience with the First and Second Continental Congresses, and the Congress set up by the Articles of Confederation. And Parliament, and state legislatures. They both loved and feared democracy. Not everything in the constitution is meant to be democratic.

Senators were originally appointed by state governments to prevent the federal government from slowly weakening the states ( https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S1-2-3/A... “To further allay Anti-Federalist concerns regarding concentrated federal power in Congress, the Federalists emphasized that bicameralism, which lodged legislative power directly in the state governments through equal representation in the Senate, would serve to restrain, separate, and check federal power”). That’s not really “democratic.”

In grade school, we focused on the fact that states with small populations weren’t enthusiastic about letting larger states set national policy. Sure, New York would have been happy to have more influence in both the House and the Senate than any other state, but Rhode Island, Delaware, and Connecticut weren’t going to sign under those terms. Horse trading to get them to join wasn’t “democratic” either, but they wouldn’t have joined any other way.

Don't think it was ever supposed to be. The Senate was set up by the founders to be picked by the State Legislatures anyway, not a direct vote. Did you read the Federalist Papers?

The idea was that the House of Reps exists to represent the people of the state, and the Senate exists to represent the state itself. The 17th Amendment did away with state legislatures choosing senators, so we have this wonky system left for no good reason.

And don't get me started on freezing the rep count to 435. I certainly don't feel represented by my congresscritter.

If California was apportioned the same as Wyoming, it would have 68 or 69 representatives (depending how you round). Not to play favorites: Texas would have 50 or 51 representatives.

Even if you just count the House of Representatives, smaller states have a per capita advantage.

While I agree with much of what you say, there are a lot of urban, educated, socially left, economically right people (including myself) who complicate some of this analysis. Many economically right-wing people believe a free market is the most effective and helpful path to improve the standard of living for the working class and the poor. ("Progressive neoliberal social democracy", one might call it.)

The issues with Republicans right now go far, far, far beyond "they care more about the wealthy than the poor" (though that is definitely one of their core problems). They're basically destroying the rule of law, the country's internal and international reputation and credibility, all of our most important institutions, our ability to discern what is true, our sense of decency, our civil liberties, our basic respect of human rights... The class stuff is secondary or tertiary to the bigger issues, in my opinion.

Conservatism is a set of political principles and values, which somebody like Trump overtly does not possess, and never did. The whole Republican party feels like a country wide gaslighting operation at this point. They claim to be conservative and Christian, but are clearly neither.

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This is why I find Social Media regulation to be so dangerous.

We shouldn't give our[1] government too much leverage over any company that controls what people can say. If we do, we may be solving a very serious problem, but creating one which is even more serious. If the government can apply large fines to social media companies, and also has a large amount of discretion about which companies it prosecutes, it's very easy for them to make a deal where a company won't be prosecuted if they remove speech that the government doesn't like.

[1] Use whichever definition of "our" you like, the point is equally valid regardless of country.

I think it’s funny that while GOP supporters are investing tens of $billions to take over popular broadcast and social media brands to privilege their point of view, Brendan Carr threatens to invoke the equal time rule, which would completely negate their structural advantage.

This is kind of like when conservatives spent years wrapping their advocacy in the banner of free speech, and then Brendan Carr announced that free speech is over, actually, because Jimmy Kimmel was mean. Oops! Nevermind.

> which would completely negate their structural advantage.

You think it’s going to be enforced against their side ?

Read the room

My favorite dictator quote:

> To my friends everything, to my enemies the law

> I think it’s funny that while GOP supporters are investing tens of $billions to take over popular broadcast and social media brands to privilege their point of view, Brendan Carr threatens to invoke the equal time rule, which would completely negate their structural advantage.

Why assume the rule would be applied fairly? Carr said they would not enforce it against right wing radio.

It is unlikely Carr will be FCC chair past January 20, 2029. (If he makes it that long.)

However, all those conservative billionaires will still own their media companies. Expanding the coverage of the equal time rule would hand the next Democratic administration a big club to swing at them.

Hey maybe for his next act, Carr will revive the Fairness Doctrine that was repealed under Reagan.

[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47049426

This is higly abusive. Talks shows have been generally considered exempt from the Equal Time provision since the Regan administration. It it was applied consistently Fox News is basically violating it 24 hours a day.

Fox News is doesn't use airwaves, so it's not subject to this requirement.

Conservative talk radio hosts then. Still hypocritical and clear evidence for further politicalization by Carr

Yeah, should apply there for sure. I wonder if Democratic politicians would want to go on conservative talk shows, though.

My general understanding is that Republican politicians are more often refused speaking slots on non-Right media, whereas Democratic politicians don't want to go on Right media.

You’re saying Republican politicians are demanding to be interviewed by Steven Colbert? And even if they were, that would matter? (I would think Mr. Colbert would love to have a bunch of R politicians lined up to skewer on his show.)

I know what Colbert said, and what Colbert claims CBS said. But I feel like something is being left out.

The equal time requirement wouldn’t prevent Colbert from interviewing a political candidate. And it wouldn’t require Colbert to send invitations to anybody. It would require Colbert to allow a competing political candidate to appear if the candidate demanded it.

CBS could decide they don’t want that hassle. Colbert could decide he doesn’t want that hassle. But the law as it stands doesn’t prevent the interview.

I actually remember when Reagan’s FCC decided to stop enforcing equal time. Plenty of people complained about how the change would ruin America. Now they seem to believe Reagan was right after all.

I don't recall ever saying anything about Colbert. I made a general statement ("my general understanding is...") about politicians on the right and left and their general interest in going on news shows hosted by non-co-partisans.

Do you disagree with that general statement?

Fox News affiliates do, and the FCC also regulates cable TV, satillite, telephony and even internet (to different extents) so this could be construed to apply quite broadly.

It's worth remembering that CBS is now run by a right-wing billionaire. It's the reason 60 Minutes stories that would anger the Republican administration keep getting pulled.

This is how a country slides into oligarchy. Quiet threats, regulatory scrutiny, tax audits, license reviews aimed at TV networks and newspapers until they decide it’s safer to stay quiet. And once the media falls in line, you have to ask what else is being forced into compliance behind closed doors, long before the public realizes what’s happening. What's next? Protesters swept up under sweeping surveillance and detention policies, speech narrowed in the name of "public safety", certain narratives becoming untouchable, etc.

You copy pasted this comment[0] then when I clicked reply it was slightly edited. What exactly are you doing?

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050245

Had the wrong thing in my clipboard, my bad. Was writing the comment in notepad first

based on this users comments in a similar story from earlier, this seems like a bot.

Yeah, I think so too. I'm not sure why I'm getting downvoted. I wish HN showed an edit history because that was a 1:1 copy paste at first.

This. We are in very serious trouble people.

What're you going to do about it?

Could have just invited Ken Paxton if all he wanted to do was inform voters.

Dems haven't even had their primary yet. He'd have had to been open to all the other Dems, before even getting to the Republicans.

Use publicly owned airwaves, expect to have to abide by the campaign finance rules. Can't just donate excellent coverage to just one candidate.

It just says they have to give equal time, not prevent someone from coming on the show completely. But the other candidates have to make a request to be included and no-one made any requests.

Don’t act like this FCC’s actions should be taken in good faith.

> not prevent someone from coming on the show completely.

No, they weren't prevented from coming on, as the article poorly points out. It appears that CBS sees equal airtime as a very serious threat to their programming. This makes complete sense, if you've watched an intentionally biased show like Colbert.

edit: downvotes, please explain. This is the stated reason from TFA!:

> "CC Chairman Brendan Carr recently issued a warning to late-night and daytime talk shows that they may no longer qualify for the bona fide news exemption to the equal-time rule, and subsequently opened an investigation into ABC’s The View after an interview with Talarico."

> Colbert played audio of a recent Carr interview in which the FCC chairman said, “If [Jimmy] Kimmel and Colbert want to continue to do their programming, they don’t want to have to comply with this requirement, then they can go to a cable channel or a podcast or a streaming service and that’s fine.”

> Colbert said he “decided to take Brendan Carr’s advice” and interviewed Talarico for a segment posted on his show’s YouTube channel.

Help me understand if I'm missing something here. And the show is, clearly, intentionally biased. It targets a left wing audience, with its jokes specifically written around that (always has, that's fine), and nearly exclusively, has left wing political guests.

> It appears that CBS sees equal airtime as a very serious threat to their programming.

This seems very dubious given the recent ownership change of CBS and the lack of reason behind the decision. The point the parent comment brings up is that "equal airtime" requires that someone actually request to go on the show and be refused. There is no legitimate cover for CBS' decision as this did not occur. It seems incredibly likely to be one made in fear of political liability rather than legal.

CBS is now run by a right-wing billionaire. The equal time rule is being used as cover to kill an interview that the Republican administration doesn't like. Same way CBS keeps killing 60 Minutes reporting that does the same.

Alright, then apply the rule to talk radio as well.

They just now changed how they enforce the rules. Of course they have a legal pretense for their action; everyone has a legal pretense.

These rules have generally not been enforced this broadly because the expectation is that they wouldn't actually stand up to First Amendment scrutiny, should it make it to the Supreme Court. Of course, CBS is at no risk of suing the administration if Paramount wants any chance of buying Warner, so in this case they can restrict as they please.

This is obviously true. The real challenge here is that this rule is only going to applied to one party.

Well, see, the problem is that the race is currently at the primary election stage. So both candidates are Democrats.

So, if you give coverage to one candidate, that is favoring that candidate over the other. That doesn't seem fair.

But if you give both candidates air time, then you're giving air time to two Democratic candidates and zero Republican candidates. That can also be viewed as unfair (never mind that the Republican candidate is not in an election until November).

The only other option is to give neither candidate air time. That results in a less-informed electorate, and that's not a good outcome either.

All in all, the "give both candidates air time, even if they're both from the same party, as they will be in a primary" seems like the best answer, especially if it's applied to primary candidates from both parties. But it's not quite as straightforward a question as it appears at first glance.

Carr said they would not enforce the rule against right wing radio.

Doesn't apply to late night shows.

Reference?

This says it now does (and parent is right): https://www.mediainstitute.org/2026/01/22/fcc-late-night-sho...

To me, this seems reasonable, since I could imagine all the networks skirting the intent in any way possible.

This notice was published as a flagrant act of unlawful retaliation against late night shows for criticizing the sitting President. I think it's misleading to present it as a legitimate action, even if the Trump regime might attempt to enforce it and courts might uphold that enforcement. As the only non-regime FCC commissioner remaining has pointed out, the FCC specifically did not engage in the actual rulemaking procedure that's normally required to change these rules, because if they had their retaliatory motivation would have been a huge obstacle.

> I think it's misleading to present it as a legitimate action

Legitimate or not, the policy is what's there now, until challenged. You agree with that:

> might attempt to enforce it and courts might uphold that enforcement

And, clearly, so do their lawyers.

The problem is that the policy will not be challenged if people accept it as legitimate. Talk shows aren't common enough or important enough that a challenge is guaranteed to come. And so the ratchet of authoritarian takeover advances a little bit further, as Donald Trump works towards his quite explicit goal of making it illegal for the media to say bad things about him.

Doesn't apply to news shows. The key question is whether late night shows are news shows.

I think you were downvoted for tone, but I think your general point is valid.

I am sure, however, that we have some lawyer folks on HN. Hopefully one of them can weigh in on whether or not this is accurate interpretation of the law as it is currently written.

I find the death of 2016 conservatism and the advent of the extremist, more violent and hateful republicanism very interesting. It's like how the minority of Left-leaning people who burn cars and shoot public speakers are what most on the Right see the entire democrat party as. Now the Right has their own form of that in those who scroll on Twitter and attack immigrants behind their backs. I feel like, within the next year or so, there will be a vast swath of former republicans who are so violently radicalized that they will do the same thing those protesting George Floyd's death in 2020 did. It's just interesting how cyclical it all is.

I'm not sure this is a fair comparison.

The radicals on the far-right control three branches of the federal government. The George Floyd protestors were barely able to influence their local boards.

> It's like how the minority of Left-leaning people who burn cars and shoot public speakers are what most on the Right see the entire democrat party as.

That's the result of well known disinformation tactics by certain media in concert with police forces: wait or provoke a violent outburst in a otherwise peaceful protest, often triggered by carefully planned repetitive police charges, then be ready to film when protesters discharge their frustration against what they have nearby like shops windows and cars, make a enraging video out of it and show only that in prime time to families dining.

Not saying this is the case, but I heard an argument made about this on the other side. Saying the ICE situation is manufactured by the Democratic party by not playing ball like they did in the Obama times. Instead they encourage protests and and "wait or provoke a violent outburst" that's "often triggered by carefully planned repetitive" tactics like blocking ICE vehicles "then be ready to film when" an inevitable violent act happens then "make a enraging video out of it and show only that in prime time to families dining".

Again, not saying that's the case, I'm not from the US so I don't much care, but it's funny to me that both side accuse each other of the same strategy.

I'm not from the US as well but that's true: those tactics are used on both sides, although they may be more visible where protesting happens more often, which is the case today with the Trump administration. It's part of the way governments attempt to reduce support to protesters by painting them as all violent.