Why Victorious Ideas Don't Always Win

Victor Joecks on Sep 30, 2025

Winning the war of ideas isn't enough.

Consider government-sanctioned racial discrimination. There's a reason the left hides behind acronyms like DEI. Judging people on their skin color, not their character, remains unpopular. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits racial discrimination in employment and education. In 2023, the Supreme Court even struck down affirmative action in higher education admissions. Both in 1996 and 2020, California -- yes, California -- rejected affirmative action in public university admissions.

Here's an idea that has been thoroughly defeated among the public, at the ballot box and in the law. The war of ideas was won, yet many universities didn't care. They simply created a workaround to produce the same result. They also allowed students to openly torment Jewish students.

Many Republicans would have simply thrown up their hands and urged conservative legal groups to return to court. Not President Donald Trump.

His administration told colleges to stop treating students differently based on race or lose federal funding. Many have since eliminated their DEI offices. His administration is investigating dozens of universities for violating federal laws against racial discrimination. His team has frozen federal funding to Harvard and other universities over civil rights violations. Cases against some top universities are ongoing. Columbia and Brown Universities have settled. Trump's big, beautiful bill has new limits on graduate student loans.

This is what winning looks like. And note this: Trump isn't acting outside the law. He's simply enforcing existing law and signing a new law. This is why so many rank-and-file Republicans passionately support him.

This is worth keeping in mind amid the hubbub over Jimmy Kimmel. On his show, he implied that the assassin who murdered Charlie Kirk was part of the "MAGA gang." Even though many liberals believe it, that isn't true. Kimmel should be ashamed and apologize.

After the remarks, FCC chair Brendan Carr said on a podcast, "When you see stuff like this -- I mean, we can do this the easy way or the hard way."

ABC then briefly suspended Kimmel. This led to a flurry of outrage directed at Carr for supposedly violating Kimmel's First Amendment rights. But there's nuance here because Carr was referencing the obligations ABC has as part of its FCC license.

ABC has since reinstated Kimmel. Trump slammed his return on Truth Social. He suggested it may be an illegal campaign contribution. "I think we're going to test ABC out on this," he wrote.

"This is a test of democracy," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said about Trump's remarks. This "is what dictatorships do. That is what autocracies do."

Yet, Schumer and other Democrats have no principled objection to using governmental power to silence and coerce their opponents in far worse ways. On Tuesday, Google's parent company, Alphabet, sent a letter to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan.

"Biden Administration officials continued to press the Company to remove non-violative user-generated content," the letter stated.

The left yawned. Just like it did in 2021, when former President Joe Biden told social media companies they were "killing people" by not censoring users opposed to COVID-19 vaccines. Just like it did when the "Twitter files" showed the Biden White House pressuring the social media company to censor users. Just like it did when Mark Zuckerberg admitted that it happened to Facebook, too.

Free speech has won the war of ideas and is losing in the real world. That won't change if Democrats always get to hide behind the First Amendment while freely censoring their opponents. Credit to Trump and Carr for trying a strategy that could actually lead to victory.

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Victor Joecks is a columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and host of the Sharpening Arrows podcast. Email him at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or follow @victorjoecks on X. To find out more about Victor Joecks and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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