Talk about your false starts. Micah Beckwith hasn’t even taken his seat in the lieutenant governor’s office and he’s already threatening a revered state institution and assailing the First Amendment.
After the Indiana Daily Student published a Nov. 7 front page article quoting criticisms of Donald Trump by staffers from Trump’s first presidential administration, Beckwith, who describes himself as a “Christian nationalist,” lashed out on the social media platform X, showing his total disregard for freedom of the press.
“This is from the Indiana Daily Student, the student newspaper at Indiana University after Trump won. Your tax dollars at work,” Beckwith wrote. “They called him (Trump) a ‘moron,’ a ‘fascist,’ and a ‘threat to democracy’ … This is WOKE propaganda at its finest and why most of America looks at higher education indoctrination centers like IU as a complete joke and waste of money. This type of elitist leftist propaganda needs to stop or we will be happy to stop it for them.”
Beckwith also chastised the Daily Student for mischaracterizing the American form of government as a democracy, demonstrating his lack of understanding of the term. While the United States is a republic, its principles are rooted in democracy.
He also misconstrues the relationship of the student newspaper to the university. The newspaper operates independently and generates its own funding. However, the university did pay off nearly $1 million in debt for the newspaper this past summer, according to an article in the Daily Student. The newspaper office is located on IU’s campus and pays a tax to the university, the article reported.
Regardless of the financial relationship between the Daily Student and the university, what kind of lieutenant governor would mislabel IU, a worldwide leader in research and several academic disciplines, as a “higher education indoctrination center” and “a complete joke and waste of money”?
Beckwith undermined one of the state’s most important assets and alienated Hoosier alumni everywhere.
But worst of all, without batting an eye, he launched a full frontal assault on the First Amendment and its guarantee of freedom of the press. And then, in an interview published Thursday on the Daily Student’s website, Beckwith doubled down on the assertions in his X post, explaining that he believes conservative political viewpoints are suppressed on the school’s Bloomington campus.
Would Beckwith have the news media controlled by the government? Evidently so. That might fly in Russia or China, but not in the land of the free.
Gov.-elect Mike Braun has surely had a serious case of indigestion since the state Republican Party forced Beckwith, an ultra-right wing pastor from Noblesville, on him as a gubernatorial running mate.
Braun must do whatever he can to rein in Beckwith. In this specific case, he should publicly defend the Daily Student’s rights and uphold the reputation of Indiana University. As of Friday, he had not commented publicly on Beckwith’s X post.
It’s sad when the governor-to-be must do such damage control, but Braun will have to get used to it with Beckwith.
Or perhaps Beckwith can be made to realize that effective leadership requires openness to criticism and to the diversity of viewpoints so critical to healthy public discourse.
Above all, to serve the state well as lieutenant governor, Beckwith must resist his primal urge to attack people and institutions that don’t agree with his extremist views.
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