It’s worse than you thought.

Opinion journalism is like shadow boxing. Step forward: one-two; anticipate the straight right; slip, left hook–right uppercut. An encounter with an intelligent imaginary friend. Ping-pong against the wall. Laser tag in a mirror maze. Keep up, and maybe it’s worth letting somebody else into the game. This is why Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s motor-handed blogging is so bizarre: it’s wholly unaware of counterpoints, counterparts, even word counts.

The chronicler of tyranny keeps a wide stance, feet bolted on the quaking ground of partisanship, and throws jabs in the same direction. The frequency is metronomic and his stamina serious. The writing rote and relentless and robotlike. He punches out product as though he’s battery-operated. He says the Washington Post’s new editorial line is — what else, in these dog days of democracy? — tyrannical. Here’s the play-by-play.

The Post’s newfound commitment to personal liberties and free enterprise is a restriction on what can be published and therefore, per Snyder, oxymoronic and authoritarian. Jab-jab: No editor can be trusted to decide whether an article is in favor of personal liberties. Jab-jab-jab: “Liberty” shouldn’t be qualified or pluralized (there goes half of the ACLU’s name) or “personal” because humans are social beings (and there goes any concept of privacy you think you had). Et cetera, et cetera. Seven more variations: for the stray novice, Snyder has numbered his deductions. A few root fancies — the “fiction” of the free market; liberty as an “open meadow” — produce wild branches of unripe reasoning, malformed offshoots. A sequoia of non sequiturs.

You’ve already imagined the counter-shots you could easily land, and you’re wondering how Snyder hasn’t foreseen them: All editorial lines are restrictive, by definition. Many editors obviously can and do apply classical liberal tenets to determine what’s fit to print, without antinomy. (See this humble publication.) You can defend another’s right to speak his mind without committing yourself to publishing it. A liberal newspaper can refuse to editorialize in favor of Malthusian agricultural policy just as the Catholic Church can affirm the individual’s freedom of conscience as a natural right and ban from its pulpits the Gospel of Valiant Verethragna. Same goes for other individual freedoms (how’s that for a singularized pluralization?). To associate freely is to exclude: Most people aren’t invited to my book club (they can form their own), and the government may not dissolve it — though I can. None of this is tyrannical. None of it seems to enter the professor’s field of vision.

Never mind the Post. If Snyder accepts his own facile conception of liberty, he must believe that there’s no such thing at all. Naturally, he announces that there are no free markets because markets require government’s enforcement of property rights, which is a form of state intervention (a view better articulated by the Israeli scholar Hanoch Dagan). Murray Rothbard wouldn’t grant the point, but let’s. Would Snyder be satisfied had a newspaper espoused not free markets but freer markets? He might as well argue that, since as a matter of course we begin to decay irreversibly the moment we’re born, health is a fiction and Health magazine a fraud.

Semantics can mean serious business, but Snyder is dizzied by misnomers. He’s as convinced of the Washington Post’s fascism as he was last month that Elon Musk is executing a “coup.” A month before that, Donald Trump’s assembling of his cabinet — Pete Hegseth’s nomination especially — meant “regime change.” He comfortably beat to the punch Anne Applebaum’s abuse of that term in The Atlantic. Progressive prizefighters’ moves are the same, telegraphed and unguarded. And groupthink is a hazardous sport.