Some time ago, I attended a Boston Pops concert. It had a patriotic theme, and ended with John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever. As the march hit its stride, a huge flag unfurled on the stage over the musicians. Members of the audience responded enthusiastically. The person next to me made a remark about how patriotism felt different when we were younger, to which I responded, “The music is good.”

We know that patriotic sentiments have deep roots, just as love and loyalty toward family members do. We love our country without knowing exactly why. The flag symbolizes both our country and our love for it, so we respond with positive sentiments when it unfurls during Stars and Stripes Forever. So why does patriotism feel different now – why is it the source of such mixed feelings?

The problem is that the government appropriates the country’s flag as its own emblem. The government identifies itself with the country so closely that you can’t tell the difference between the two. For example, treason is a crime against your country. It occurs if you conspire with a foreign army to help it invade your homeland. When you act to replace your government, that’s not treason. That’s firing a group of employees who no longer serve you well. Government, of course, doesn’t make that distinction. From its perspective, acting against your government and betrayal of your country are the same thing.

We can see that government is not the only entity to make this kind of mistake. We saw this confusion in the 2004 presidential campaign. John Kerry joined the army, then protested the Vietnam war out of love for his country. The swift boaters attacked him because they saw his criticism of our government as a betrayal of his country. They attacked him as a scoundrel because he criticized his government during wartime. You can’t elect a traitor as president, the swift boaters implied.

Right now citizens have to choose whether to follow a government that has become unconstitutional. When the flag unfurls to Stars and Stripes Forever, our question should be: how can we protect this symbol of our union and our beloved land from a criminal government? The flag doesn’t symbolize our government. It symbolizes our commitment to each other. It’s kind of like the country’s wedding ring. The fact that our country has made our flag hated around the world shouldn’t lessen our love for it here. Abroad, it symbolizes Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Fallujah, Guantanamo. Here it evokes the sentiments in Woody Guthrie’s anthem: This land was made for you and me. If we keep the distinction between country and government alive, we’ll separate our flag from our government’s crimes.

How can we restore our flag’s significance? Strip it from all government buildings and installations, including military installations and national parks. If the government wants a symbol, let it hoist the Don’t Tread on Me yellow flag. Strip the government of the legitimacy and honor it receives because it parades a symbol that does not belong to it. This exchange of symbols, the red, white, and blue for a threat and warning, would remind us all that the government acts for itself, not for us. Young men and women would not want to volunteer to fight for it anymore. People would recognize what a parasite it has become, a tapeworm in our bowel. We would have our wedding ring back.

Free speech rights of students and faculty

Fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent Community School District arrives on February 24, 2019.

Chicago 1968 and free speech

I have a question. Why did the Berkeley Free Speech Movement call itself that, when it was an anti-war movement? Well, Berkeley administrators prohibited any kind of political activity on campus, as the Vietnam war protests heated up.

Answer and conclusion: schools cannot interfere with your right to free speech. That was a main argument of the movement at Berkeley. It was the Supreme Court’s argument, when it decided Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, argued before the court on November 12, 1968.

Mr. Krohn, my ninth-grade civics teacher at Callanan Middle School in Des Moines, criticized the protesters in Chicago, who fought police in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention in August. We returned to school just a week after the street battles. We would call it a civil disturbance today, but it was a lot more than that! It was also on everyone’s minds, as students returned to school at the beginning of September.

Scenes from Chicago disturbed onlookers, to be sure. Police beat protesters wantonly. The standoff between protesters and police lasted eight days. The convention took place from August 23 – 28, with most of those days marked by violence. What is the relationship – favorite academic question, because then you can do regression analysis! – between attitudes about free speech, and what happened during the Chicago riots in August 1968?

Three-word answer: nothing at all. Longer answer: everything.

Free speech in Texas schools

Talk about a case that involves you in circularity right from the start. India Landry sits during the Pledge of Allegiance because, she argues, the flag is a false symbol. That is, it pretends to stand for certain things, such as liberty and justice for all, but it does not actually stand for those things. So you sit down while others stand, to draw attention to that. Then the principal throws you out of school, proving not only that he is a moron, but also that the flag does not in fact stand for free speech.

Of course, the principal might say, “You have free speech out there in the rest of the world, but you certainly do not have it here inside my school.” Who could possibly find this argument – or any argument that advocates restriction of rights inside a public school – convincing? Numerous cases have protected students’ free speech rights inside schools. So when the Texas attorney general backs the principal, you have to wonder if they plan to form the TSFSMM: Texas Schools Free Speech Mighty Mites. If you want to change the law, you have to find support from like minded people.

Landry will win this case. Tinker, argued before the Supreme Court in 1968, established the principle that students do not lose their rights of citizenship merely because they have stepped inside a school. I cannot think of a single case since then that has gone the other way. Yet I suppose the TSFSMM hopes that even if students can wear black armbands to protest a war, they still have to participate in coerced pledges to the flag. Let’s keep our priorities straight.

Zachary Wood vs. Adam Falk: leadership and free speech

How many college presidents would join Williams College president Adam Falk in saying that shutting down a speaker invited to campus is a success? In a democracy that depends on free speech, advocates for coercive limitations on speech are nuts. Note briefly that calling someone nuts is not coercive. Shouting people down when a group has invited them to speak is coercive. Barring people who want to hear a speaker is coercive. Criticizing people is not.

Of course, disruptors say that all speech related to power is disruptive: their methods are no more disruptive than the hate speech they want to suppress. Not so. What they call hate speech does not aim to coerce or silence anyone else. It does not threaten violence, though many fear its implicit effects. Most of it is deliberately provocative. Most speakers love approval, but they’ll take hate if that’s all they can get. Richard Spencer’s white supremacist speech fits that description.

Spencer’s case is an interesting one. He and his fellow supremacists went to Charlottesville to provoke a response, and they got one. Counter-protesters tried to shut him down. Spencer did not plan blood and mayhem in advance, but both sides appeared on the scene ready to fight. A supremacist used a car to run down nineteen people in the street, killing one of them. Afterwards Spencer called the Charlottesville demonstration ‘a success’.

Now Adam Falk uses Richard Spencer’s words, one assumes deliberately, to praise students who shut down a speaker on campus. I would avoid that phrase: why would you want to use the same standards of judgment as Richard Spencer? President of a prominent college promotes campus practices where college leaders determine who gets to speak and who doesn’t, and calls that a success?

Constitutional protections

We don’t have a lot of absolutes in our Constitution, but free speech is one of them. You cannot abridge speech of any kind, period. Crying fire in a crowded theater does not apply as a category: Justice Holmes uses that example to illustrate an instance that does not apply. The Supreme Court holds the Constitution does not protect direct incitement to violence. Incitement to violence is the only restriction in nearly 230 years the Court has upheld. You cannot, for example, rile up a mob to the point where they lynch someone. That would not be a success.

Every other instance of unfettered speech is a success. Every abridgment of speech is a failure. In fact, every abridgment of speech is a profound failure of – and attack on – self-government. Yet college presidents like Adam Falk at Williams, who set policy for institutions that prepare young men and women for leadership in a democracy, say they want to abridge speech on their campuses. They target specific types of speech as impermissible. Then they and students who agree with them follow through to make sure people who might utter objectionable thoughts cannot speak.

Do not let restrictions on speech take hold. It is the most insidious form of control, as it requires no laws, no punishments, no formal court proceedings. It requires only disruption, which amounts to imaginative forms of street fighting, electronic finagling, or simply shouting. Informal, extra-legal restrictions on speech give you ability to curtail other people’s freedom drastically, at minimal cost. When you shut down your opponents’ speech, you have much more latitude on your own side to do what you like.

Leadership at Williams College

In light of the movement to abridge free speech on campuses, congratulations to Zachary Wood, leader of Uncomfortable Learning, a Williams College student group devoted to opportunities for open discussion. A pattern has developed at Williams where Wood’s group invites a speaker, and President Falk acts to deny the invited speaker access to any audience at all – especially students who want to hear the speaker’s thoughts – based explicitly on anticipated content.

Wood, a black student, has extended invitations to several controversial speakers, who accept the opportunity to speak to his group, as well as others on campus who want to listen. Then President Falk and his student accomplices, who practice coercive suppression under cover of various arguments that sound reasonable, move in. They either veto the engagement, or disrupt the speaker if he or she dares to deliver any remarks at all.

The same pattern has developed at campuses all over the country. The difference at Williams is that Zachary Wood does not give up. He recognizes his opponents, and resists them on principle. The First Amendment’s foundational principle is sound, tested over time, and clearly under attack. It is essential to our republic, and needs active defense. Thank you, Mr. Wood. Make sure Uncomfortable Learning continues after you leave Williams, if you can. Also, tell the Board of Trustees the college needs a new president. The college would do a lot better with you in that office.

Free speech is offensive speech: you cannot police it

In the conflict between Uncomfortable Learning leader Zachary Wood and Williams College President Adam Falk, Wood holds all the high cards. His position that all arguments, however offensive, have a place at the table is so obvious, you wonder why one has to argue the point. Yet you do have to argue it, urgently and repeatedly, because people suddenly seem to think free speech isn’t all that important, by comparison with other values. Educated people say, of course we need it, but we have to consider other factors.

If you want to list activists’ reasons to restrict discourse, start with speech that offends. Work your way to other restrictive rationales from there. The offensive speech standard gives you endless, fertile grounds to shut people up. In a democratic republic, based on liberal principles of live and let live, free speech is the principle you cannot let go. No political principle takes precedence. We do not even need to raise a slippery slope argument here, though one might find such a caution fitting. Free speech has absolute priority at the top of a republic’s pyramid of values. No other value can possibly displace it.

Yet somehow we find ourselves in discussion with apparently smart people who want to police what you can say. We are most aware of these discussions on college campuses, since colleges exist to promote open discussion, but disagreements about free speech diffuse into all arenas of politics and social interaction. The most obvious one concerns the ability of football players to express solidarity about the way police treat people, black men in particular. Even the right to burn the country’s flag in public, an issue the Supreme Court settled decades ago, comes into question again.

Concluding thoughts

What happened? Some would say strains of self-righteousness infect our minds. Others say the safe-space movement, where students cuddle up with kittens and cookies during a controversial speech, signifies a form of infantilism that can only have bad results. When adults seek shelter from intellectual discomfort, they intentionally demonstrate weakness. A sense of threat also justifies the movement’s other, more dangerous arm, which forces unwelcome speakers off campus. Disapproval transforms into retreat, and into abusive, violent attacks.

We have to find leaders who defend free speech unequivocally. To keep people quiet, to deny them opportunities to express their views, requires methods inconsistent with the existence of a free republic. A college president may think, “You are free to state your ideas elsewhere. Just don’t come to my campus with your offensive thoughts.” Students, however, don’t read the president’s reasoning the same way. They aim to eliminate offensive speech, everywhere. This vision of tight control over who gets to speak signifies a republic already split, into more than two pieces. How many people want to repair it?

Free speech on the field and everywhere else

During our latest round of free-speech wars, I wrote some posts at Twitlonger on the subject. In the past I would have left them there, or tried to integrate them into a single essay. Now I will try a simple method: publish them sequentially, internet style, in reverse chronological order. The first post below appeared October 12. The last one appeared October 10.

Relationship between free speech and freedom

The disturbing thing, noted by FCC chair Amit Pai in the article below, is opponents of free speech seem to be everywhere. One group after another adopts the position, ‘free speech for me but not for you’. This stance comes out most clearly when campus gangs – they are not hecklers – use force and coordinated action to silence speakers they do not like. The president weighs in regularly with invective designed to demean the ideal of free speech, and therefore free thought. This president is highly conscious of his popularity with certain groups. He would not attack the First Amendment if he thought his loyalists would desert him as a result.

Journalists regularly say, freedom of the press is essential for democracy. They are right. The principle reaches further still. Free speech is essential for thinking: any kind of worthwhile thought. If you lose your ability to speak and write freely, you have lost all your liberty. Animals, who have their own languages and whose speech is not regulated, have more freedom than you do, if you cannot express yourself as you like. If you want to suppress freedom of thought, you want to place yourself and all your brethren beneath the animals.

‘Freedom of speech for me but not for you’ has never worked anywhere, for anyone. If you deprive one group of their freedom in this respect, you remove that freedom for everyone. Even if you count yourself among the overlords in a society that disallows freedom of speech to underlings, you will never have freedom of thought. The entire society becomes like a school of fish, where every member of the school follows unseen signals. They all respond instinctively to signals outside themselves.

To take a simple example. Campus activists want to eliminate hate speech from their community. They regard certain kinds of speech as too objectionable to tolerate. We can readily see the consequences of activism in this vein. Have you listened to college students who talk about why they pursue this aim, to extinguish certain kinds of speech? They all sound the same, like automatons. They think the same way. They use the same vocabulary. They seem to have attended a totalitarian sleep-away camp, to use one person’s description of current educational institutions. How can you go away to college, and come out thinking like everyone else?

Free speech and open minds go together. Open minds support every kind of discourse, no matter how objectionable. People open to many viewpoints do not feel any obligation to attend to every other viewpoint, but they definitely want to choose from every possibility. In an open culture, you can sort high quality thought from low quality thought quite easily. That is why you go to college, to learn how to do that. In a closed culture, this sorting process is harder to accomplish. As our culture closes up and divides into like minded groups, we find colleges participate in this pattern. You may well feel isolated if you do not adopt dominant modes of thought.

We do not depend on our leaders to teach us about free thought. We do depend on them to leave us alone. Our expectations for people who lead us in the public sphere are low right now. People of every political label feel a sense of distrust and betrayal. When the president excoriates people who disagree with him, we note it. It makes us feel uneasy. More disturbing still is recognition that so many among the president’s enemies and adherents agree with his fundamental argument: get in line. We cannot tolerate people who do or say things we have ruled out. When we rule certain things out, however, the group in power abandons any pretense of principled behavior. Group members know that when people in another group grab more power than they have, the other group will rule them out. You utterly lose your freedom when your only assurance of keeping it rests on superior power and coercive practices.

‘Freedom of speech for me but not for you’ has never worked anywhere, for anyone. If you deprive one group of their freedom in this respect, you remove that freedom for everyone.

Donald Trump vs. the media

Today Trump said journalists have to stop writing whatever they want to write. I thought that was free speech.

Here’s the quotation, delivered in public with Candadian Prime Minister Trudeau: “it is frankly disgusting the press is able to write whatever it wants to write.”

He went further and said news outlets should lose their license to broadcast if they don’t produce news he likes. Fortunately, several people who know the law better than Trump does said, it doesn’t work that way.

Well of course it doesn’t, but Trump does not care what the law says. We are in for some interesting battles here.

NFL players: kneeling shows respect for your country and defeats the president’s insidious tirades

Here we go, NFL players: the league’s chief goat, Roger Goodell, says you have to stand.

Goodell’s latest announcement is absolutely consistent with his craven approach to league discipline. His first response to the president’s demand that any ‘son of a bitch’ who kneels should be fired was correct. We do not listen to that kind of language, nor do we bend to that kind of demand around here. Two and a half weeks later, after Pence pulls his own little protest in Indianapolis, Goodell joins owners Jerry Jones and Adam Gase in the basement of self respect.

I said it yesterday, and I’ll say it once more: men and women who bend to Trump’s will abase themselves. In their own hearts, they can never live down their shame. They show themselves they have no self-respect, just has Trump himself has no self-respect. People who respect themselves, and who expect others to have the same self regard, do not talk the way Trump talks. Bullies and belittlers hate themselves even as they are full of narcissistic self-congratulation. The poisonous gas that billows from their mouths, their hearts and their unhappy souls affects everyone who contacts them. If you want to understand how this psychology operates for someone who is powerful but not president, think of the current stories about Harvey Weinstein.

We used to call people who act like Trump and Weinstein pigs. Unfortunately the name insults an animal recognized to have high intelligence and a friendly disposition. I have heard Trump called an oaf, a clown, a bully, and insane, but I have not yet heard anyone call him a pig. That is exactly what he is: cartoonists have no trouble giving his face and head a piggish look when they draw him. Why does this collection of horrendous traits seem to coalesce in people like Weinstein and Trump? Do we just let them get their way often enough that they can’t see how rotten they are?

NFL players, please don’t let Trump get his way this time. To a person, you share a warrior’s solidarity all of your fellow players. If all of you refuse to play over this issue – all it takes is that everyone kneel together – Trump, Goodell, and the owners will back down. They may not back down immediately, but Trump picked the wrong fight this time. His position has no foundation except in his own hobbled mind, a mind infested with ugly pustules and overflowing contempt. Do not give in to him. Do not give in to people who side with him. You can afford to take a stand and kneel on this one. Please do it.

‘Freedom of speech for me but not for you’ has never worked anywhere, for anyone. If you deprive one group of their freedom in this respect, you remove that freedom for everyone.

Discover whether team owners will actually forfeit games to please the president

Mr. Trump disrespects himself, his office, the people he leads, and his country. Why would we care to listen when he talks about respect?

Time for every football player to kneel during the anthem. Let them meet in advance to decide what they will do. Let Jerry Jones forfeit every game. If the players show unity on this issue, they will win.

The president has picked a fight that takes this issue beyond police mistreatment of black people. By calling every player who kneels a son of a bitch, he coarsely deploys his personal authority to intimidate others. He calls upon team owners to carry out his threat for him. All players should respond to a threat like that. They can expect support from every American who loves freedom. If team owners want to lock them out for their stand, let them.

Give President Trump the dummy test

I show up at work today and see we now have a loyalty test for playing football. Jerry Jones threatens his players because the president threatened to take away his tax breaks. Or perhaps Jones can give a better reason for making his players pawns in Trump’s great game, rather than regarding them as the assets they are?

I would say Jerry Jones, Joseph McCarthy, Donald Trump, and all the other tub thumpers show equivalent respect for the First Amendment, the Bill of Rights in general, and for our republic. Trump and his allies talk about disrespect and patriotism. In fact, thumpers give us the best example of disrespect for our country and its traditions any ignoramus could possibly conjure.

Interestingly, the Fox News article shows Jerry Jones kneeling with his players before the Cowboys’ game on Monday, September 25, three days after Trump profanely attacked the NFL and its players on Friday, September 22. Only two weeks passed before pressure applied by the White House reversed Jones’ position.

We have seen a lot of attacks on free speech during our country’s history, mostly during wartime. I suppose the latest from our government shows how far our civil conflict has progressed.

Let’s review one more time the significance of a few key concepts that President Trump apparently does not understand. First, when you, as president, call a fellow American a son of a bitch in public, that is not okay. It is especially not okay when you call him that because he exercised his right of free speech in a way you don’t like. You disrespect him, you disrespect what your flag stands for, and you disrespect the Constitution. President Trump does not understand any of that.

Let’s review one more time the significance of a few key concepts that President Trump apparently does not understand.

We do not love our country, or honor our flag, because people with power tell us to do that. We love our country because it is home, and because we respect our fellow citizens. We honor our flag as a symbol of our home. It stands for mutual respect. When people stand during the national anthem, citizens express respect for their country. They may stand out of habit or early training, but teachers and parents all told us from early in our lives that this public rite is important.

That does not mean that sitting or kneeling during the national anthem is a sign of disrespect. If someone kneels to call attention to police mistreatment of black people, that’s what it means. You cannot impute another motive to the kneeler, or another meaning to the kneeler’s posture, just because you want to. One’s behavior during a public rite is entirely up to each person. If one intentionally deviates from custom, the significance of the departure also depends entirely on the actor. No one can force a particular meaning onto someone else’s behavior, or blame another person for an action that does no harm.

Moreover, even if people who kneel do intend to disrespect the flag and other national symbols, the Constitution and the law firmly protect their right to do so. No one doubted what protesters meant when they burned the American flag during Vietnam war protests in the 1960s. They meant to say, ‘I hate my country because it fights a hateful war, and I’m burning this flag in public to let you know that.’ People reacted strongly against that public demonstration, but few could doubt, when the question came before the Supreme Court, how the justices would decide. Their decision did not need a lot of legal reasoning. Of course you can burn the flag in public. How could you prohibit it? Why does this question even come up?

It comes up because some people apparently can’t tolerate the idea they may have to share their country with people who don’t feel the same way about it they do. That’s the source of ‘love it or leave it.’ If you don’t love your country, we don’t want you here. If you are not a patriot, get out. If you disrespect our flag, we will disrespect you.

Without a doubt, social cohesion depends on mutual respect. Yet public demonstrations directed against national symbols does not signify disrespect toward fellow citizens. It typically expresses dissatisfaction with some controversial element of public policy. Opposition to the Vietnam war grew gradually through the sixties, until the country underwent an incipient revolution from the Chicago riots in 1968 to Kent State in 1970. Opposition to government’s actions grew into public demonstrations that, from one point of view, appeared unpatriotic.

Protesters now say violence against black people by police has to stop. Police mistreated black people long before Rodney King was beaten nearly to death in 1991, and they continued to mistreat black people in the decades after. As police forces became more militarized and more concerned with self-protection, the mistreatment became more lethal. Moreover, video evidence brought this violence into people’s homes, just as television crews brought the Vietnam war into people’s homes.

That brings us back to our current president. If you need an example of disrespectful, demeaning treatment, look to a leader who refers to a fellow citizen with whom he disagrees as a son of a bitch.

Why would people say free speech stops with the flag, or with the national anthem? Why would we disallow expressions of dissent if they touch symbols of national unity? Yet attacks on people who demonstrate their dissatisfaction in this way is an act even more divisive than provocative expressions of dissent. You cannot force people to be patriotic in the way you demand. Many would regard the courage required to call attention to police mistreatment with the highest respect. It actually shows a devotion to country, and to our common ideals, that few of us have. To denigrate these demonstrations as unpatriotic completely misses their point. Negative, abusive responses are just as destructive, and demeaning, as the terrible expressions of disrespect and contempt toward soldiers that occurred during the 1960s.

That brings us back to our current president. If you need an example of disrespectful, demeaning treatment, look to a leader who refers to a fellow citizen with whom he disagrees as a son of a bitch. I’m not going to say the president ought to set a good example, though he or she should. Trump’s behavior goes way beyond any possibility of an example one would want to follow. Further, no one would argue this or any other president should forgo controversial statements, disagreements, or criticism. Controversial statements are not the problem here. Trump’s expressions of disagreement show profound disrespect for individuals, for law and custom, and in this case, for rights of free speech.

Honestly, to be criticized by this president brings you more honor now than you could accrue with a lifetime of good deeds.

Why he has found any support at all for the fight he picked with the NFL is more than a little troubling. To see Jerry Jones travel a full 180 degree turn in just two weeks is almost inexplicable. What leverage could the president possibly have over someone like Jones? I’m going to raise your taxes? I’m going to call you a son of a bitch, too? Honestly, to be criticized by this president brings you more honor now than you could accrue with a lifetime of good deeds. Colin Kaepernick was already a hero. In a few words, President Trump showed everyone what kind of treatment heroes receive from strongmen. Trump drew attention to Colin’s friends, too, heroes who follow his bold example.

Jerry Jones does not see things that way, but he will see soon enough that he has brought shame on himself, and on his team. That’s unfortunate for the players he employs, since he pays them to play a game people want to watch, and to play it well. If he wants to force them to behave a certain way during public rites like the national anthem, why doesn’t he simply line up a bunch of dummies at the sideline during the music? If he puts helmets on his dummies, television cameras and fans can’t tell the difference. Of course, one person would gladly stand with the dummies, and also not know the difference: Donald Trump.

Subtlety slithers its way into campus arguments about free speech

“These efforts are a lot more subtle. Just as becoming a terrorist is a gradual, step by step process, people do not become part of the alt right overnight. These events represent a kind of soft recruitment into more extremist ideas.” ~ Dawn Nowacki, dean of faculty at Linfield College in Oregon, commenting on events sponsored by the campus chapter of Young Americans for Liberty to promote free speech.

First we lure them with honeyed free speech, then we turn them into white supremacists and terrorists. How do we protect ourselves from these villains? I wonder what Ms. Nowacki thinks about her own pattern of thought, and of those who agree with her. When did free speech become a pretext for recruiting terrorists and racists? She did not reach a position like that overnight. How do you account for processes – rational or otherwise – that lead to reasoning like this? They must be subtle.

End of freedom at Reed

I wish I could stay away from this subject, but I cannot. Something has gone seriously wrong when a professor and dean of the faculty – a classics professor no less – at Reed College can be so dishonest, he drags down the reputation of his school and everyone associated with it.

Having started with a statement like that, I have to add two qualifiers. First, Reedies Against Racism brought disgrace and infamy to the school, not Dean of the Faculty Nigel Nicholson. College administrators’ response to RAR – from former President John Kroger and Dean Nicholson in particular – compounded this disgrace. John Kroger has to find a new job. Nicholson apparently keeps his job as dean.

The second qualifier is a little more difficult to state, as I cannot tell from Nicholson’s statements whether his defense of the school derives from a set of fluid moral commitments that enables him to be slippery whenever it suits him, or if he willfully wants to present himself in the wrong on this issue. Either way, his defense casts ugly campus protests over two years as part of the college’s natural growth, where it tries to teach freshman students “skills of critical reading, analysis, and respectful discussion.”

You cannot imagine the specious ring of these words, unless you read accounts of what actually happened at Reed during this period. Nicholson focuses only on the content of the revised core humanities course, with a claim that curricular changes “do not pick a side in any culture wars.” Nicholson bases his defense on a completely irrelevant point: course content. Course content counts only if Reed’s constitution as a faculty-led community for free inquiry remains intact. What happened at Reed is indefensible, no matter what books wind up on the reading list for Humanities 110.

What did happen? Reedies Against Racism invaded classrooms while class was in session, intimidated professors, and used every tactic they could find to shut the freshman humanities course down. President Kroger and Dean of the Faculty Nicholson did nothing effective to end this thuggish behavior. We know that because it continued for about two years, until RAR triumphed. Kroger and Nicholson tut-tutted about inappropriate behavior, rather than promptly expel students who violated Reed’s unwritten constitution. Administrators should never have allowed any student who invades a classroom to do it a second time.

President and dean missed this important principle of time and tradition: many faculty spend their careers at the college. Students spend only four years, at the most. All the college’s traditions rest with faculty members: they develop and nurture the curriculum, standards of excellence, freedom of academic inquiry and speech, as well as pedagogical methods that support all the rest. Students come to study at the school because they appreciate what faculty have created there. All benefit from the amazing care and attention faculty give to their college and its students.

President and dean have a number of jobs to perform as college leaders. By far their most important contribution is to sustain and inspire a community where faculty can do their jobs, and where students can learn and develop as a result. In these basic requirements, president and dean utterly failed professors who thought they worked in a community where college leaders would protect their classrooms from immoral, destructive intimidation. Turns out, college leaders had no idea why they were there.

Free speech for students does not include depriving anyone else of the same freedom. The first time RAR shuts down a classroom, Dean Nicholson should have called RAR leaders into his office, one by one, to tell them they are out of there. Stop by the bursar’s office to pick up your tuition refund. And here’s a letter you can show your parents, to tell them why you don’t attend Reed anymore. The second time RAR shuts down a classroom, show the entire group to the door. Make sure to slam it.

Moreover, ensure word gets around. That is, explain why you have expelled the students. Clearly explain how this policy protects faculty in their teaching roles. Students can advocate for change in any way that does not interfere with other people’s freedom: freedom of thought and action for faculty, students, and administrators. Violation of these traditions, which includes norms of hospitality to be shown toward campus guests, will earn you a visit to the dean’s office, and a letter of expulsion.

Reedies Against Racism undertook a mutiny, and succeeded. Consequently, they destroyed in twenty-four months, a set of traditions that developed over more than a century. They turned a respected college into a symbol of shame. College leaders could have stopped the mutiny, but they did not. No measure they took prevented the disaster. Even now, they do not recognize what a serious mistake they made.

Articles on this issue show how protesters managed to focus discussion on course content, just as Dean Nicholson does. RAR’s activities do not primarily concern course content. They concern power. Class invaders won because no one – except other students – stood up to them. Campus leaders with authority to act effectively, to expel invaders from classrooms and campus, decided to go to the washroom.

End of freedom at Reed College

The latest issue of Reed magazine, sent to alumni several times a year, contains an article that defends curriculum reform at the college. The college’s spokesperson, Dean of the Faculty Nigel Nicholson, overlooks what actually happened on the campus. Everywhere in politics self-serving language replaces accuracy. We understand dishonesty, but we do not expect it from a professor and dean of the faculty – a classics professor no less. It drags down the reputation of his school and everyone associated with it.

Eliot Hall at Reed College Credit: WikiMedia Commons

Nicholson bases his defense on a completely irrelevant point: course content. Course content counts only if Reed’s constitution as a faculty-led community for free inquiry remains intact.

Kroger and Nicholson tut-tutted about inappropriate behavior, rather than promptly expel students who violated Reed’s unwritten constitution.

Class invaders won because no one – except other students – stood up to them. Campus leaders with authority to act effectively, to expel invaders from classrooms and campus, decided to go to the washroom.

The campaign against hate speech

Scott Shackford’s article about Portland mayor Ted Wheeler deftly defines the difference between hate speech and incitement to violence. After two people died in a knife attack on a Portland train, Wheeler wants to deny two alt-right groups permits to assemble for rallies. He says bigots have no place in Portland, that their ability to promote their views must be stopped.

In politics, only incitement to violence is unprotected speech. To take a simple illustration, “I hate white Christians” and “Kill white Christians now” do not signify the same thing. First Amendment rights protect the first statement because it expresses an individual’s state of mind. The Constitution does not protect anyone who advocates murder, because you cannot urge others to commit violent crimes.

Strong voices on college campuses and elsewhere urge the use of violence to stop what they call hate speech. The student riot at Middlebury College exemplifies this confusion about what the Constitution protects and what it does not. Student thugs claim that because Charles Murray’s ideas amount to hate speech, wanton behavior that culminated in physical attacks on Murray and his host was justified to prevent his talk.

That turns the relationship between use of force and free speech on its head. Under our Constitution, we invest the state with authority to prevent violent suppression of speech. To quote Shackford: “Protecting these rallies is one of the reasons taxpayers are asked to fund the police. Making sure violence cannot be used to suppress our rights to speak freely and to practice our various religions is one of the reasons we have a government police force.”

We’ve already seen, at UC Berkeley, what happens when university security services decline to do their jobs. They turn the campus over to rioters. Wheeler ought to consider what happened at Berkeley, and prepare his police forces to head off violence at political rallies in his city. To do otherwise is, as Shackford points out, lazy. The Oregon ACLU’s succinct summary of the case against Mayor Wheeler puts it another way: “The government cannot revoke or deny a permit based on the viewpoint of the demonstrators. Period.”

Hate speech, and its cousin hate crime, have distorted our thinking about permissible and impermissible behavior for a long time. Activists insist hate speech deserves no protection. Moreover, hate crimes deserve extra severe punishment. Both arguments are spurious. The First Amendment does not distinguish between hate speech and other kinds of speech. I’ll leave hate crimes alone for the moment, except to say that when a mob lynches somebody, the crime speaks for itself.

People who want to suppress hate speech – violently if necessary – apparently believe transitions between hateful expressions and incitements to crime are clearly drawn. Criminal and constitutional courts do not care to deal in these kinds of ambiguities. Political speech – except for incitement to violent crimes – receives unqualified legal protection. By contrast, perpetrators of violent acts against other people are prosecuted. The law does not care to prevent speech merely because it sounds hateful. That is why activists – whether on campus or in the mayor’s office – want to act against disfavored speech outside the law. They cannot shut it down any other way.

Speech enforcers at Reed College and Middlebury College

Events at Reed College in November 2016, then at Middlebury College in March 2017 made me think more about illiberal sentiments at liberal arts colleges than I usually do. I graduated from Reed College several decades ago, then after graduate school taught politics at Carthage College, a small school in Wisconsin. My family now lives in New England, one state over from Middlebury in Vermont.

Reed College

I arrived at Reed as a transfer sophomore shortly after the Vietnam war ended. The campus had just settled down after a period of unusual turmoil that centered around the war. Today different issues affect campus politics, including questions about free speech. I have tended to discount the significance of these conflicts, as collegiate restrictions on speech have not seemed to spill into our larger political culture. Then the conflicts became violent.

The perversions of intellectual freedom we have seen on campuses during the last decade or two have gradually devolved into Maoist struggles, complete with self-appointed enforcers to indoctrinate, intimidate, and if those don’t work—assault. How did we reach a point where efforts to stop speech exceed efforts to promote it?

The operative principle of campus speech activism appears to be: my own right of free speech—that is, the space I need to think freely—requires me to keep you quiet. This principle applies to people who disagree with me, but it does not apply to me. In this respect, campus speech activism represents an instance of asymmetric power.

Think of how principles of asymmetric coercion and power work in other settings. They are so obnoxious in democratic institutions that we do everything we can to preserve open interactions, as well as equal rights for everyone involved in those interactions. Why should we accept asymmetric coercion and power rather than egalitarian interactions on college campuses?

The Greenburg Distinguished Scholar Program at Reed College invited Kimberly Peirce to visit the campus in order to speak with students and faculty about her film, Boys Don’t Cry. Read about her November visit to the campus in Robby Soave’s account titled, Leftist Students Shouted ‘Fuck You Bitch’ at the Gay Director of a Pro-Trans Movie, Boys Don’t Cry. The intimidating ugliness of free speech enforcement actions comes through in Soave’s report:

The students’ unbelievable rudeness crossed the line into a kind of censorship when Peirce tried to speak: the students simply shouted over her. Eventually they let her talk, but some students continued to yell things like “fuck your respectability politics” and “fuck you scared bitch.”

By now you want to ask, why weren’t these students disciplined? If you talk to guests that way – visitors to campus who deserve the highest possible courtesy – what does that say about the college who invited you to study there? Why would any graduate of the college ever want to donate another penny to such a school? Do you actually want people everywhere to regard your school as home to filthy-mouthed, closed-minded Red Guards?

A little over fifty percent of Reed students receive financial aid. Proportionally and by probability, roughly half the protesters at Peirce’s November visit had support from generous donors among the school’s alumni. How many donors, would you guess, are happy to see their money spent to support would-be Maoist enforcers, who patrol the campus to descend on visitors with signs and epithets calculated to intimidate anyone who crosses them?

Suppose a fraternity or sorority invited a black scholar or filmmaker to speak to their group about transgender issues, and members of the audience shouted down their guest with epithets like “Fuck you cis bitch!” Would that Greek organization be permitted to stay on campus? If not, why are students at Reed who did the same thing allowed to stay?

Consider then the college deans’ main response to students’ enforcement action. Dean of the Faculty Nigel Nicholson published a letter in the college’s newspaper, the Quest, addressed to the entire Reed community. He admonished members of the community that we do not treat guests this way, then concluded: “I was deeply embarrassed and ashamed of our conduct, and I hope that as a community we can reflect on what happened and make a determination not to repeat it.”

Dean Nicholson’s letter represents a more vocal and literate defense of liberal values on campus than we have seen elsewhere. Yet higher education administrators, including Dean Nicholson, seem ready to soften their response to currents of suppression they encounter on their campuses. Nicholson’s hope “that as a community we can reflect on what happened” sounds a little like a mild parental scolding: “you may have misbehaved, but we still love you.” Nicholson is not addressing his children, however, and students who address the college’s guests this way ought to expect the college to disown them.

Without a reprimand that includes a clear determination to expel students who repeat the offense, slightly soapy admonishments mean that people on campus become ultra-careful about who they invite to speak. If ill treatment of a guest is at all possible, scratch the person from the list of candidate speakers. The enforcers will have their way, so long as they remain on campus.

Yet before the beginning of each academic year, college leaders decide which students are worthy to participate in the school’s academic life. Deans and other leaders also set standards for who remains on campus to receive a degree, which is the college’s endorsement of their character. Why would extreme inhospitality to a guest not be cause for suspension or dismissal?

From Reed to Middlebury

When I first read the news about treatment of Kimberly Peirce during her visit to Reed in November, my response was, “Great, now my own school has fallen victim to the ugliest kinds of campus speech suppression.” After that I let it go: too many things to think about during the run-up to the holidays. Then last week, Middlebury College had an even uglier episode, where students attacked a female faculty member who moderated – or tried to moderate – Charles Murray’s on-campus lecture. They sent her to the emergency room.

Reed and Middlebury are like sister schools on opposite sides of the country. Both stand not only for liberal thinking in arts, sciences, and humanities, but also for high standards of scholarship and personal behavior. When masked thugs set fires and smash windows at Berkeley, you find yourself saying, “What do you expect? That’s Berkeley.” That’s not fair to students of good character at California’s largest university, but Berkeley has a history. Reed and Middlebury have their own histories of activism, but efforts to suppress free speech have not generally been part of their traditions.

Let’s return for a moment to the nature of Professor Nicholson’s letter. He admonishes the entire student body in his letter, especially in his conclusion. Earlier he refers to speech enforcers as some students. Reed hosts a small number of young scholars. If Nicholson did not know the enforcers’ names, he might have asked them to identify themselves. Alternately, he could have learned their leaders’ names. Yet he decided to let them stay anonymous. Given the letter’s concluding sentence, it effectively asks all students to do their part to prevent uncivil treatment of campus guests in the future.

Does that seem fair to you? I’m going to estimate the number of militant enforcers at a little over a dozen. In a student body of approximately 1,400, that equals one percent. Most of the remaining 99%, some of whom came to hear Peirce speak, are already appalled, disturbed, and ashamed of their fellow students’ behavior. They wonder how they wound up on a campus where people treat guests that way. They suddenly wonder how the enforcers will treat them if they step off the PC reservation.

Yet the dean lets the enforcers work their ways of intimidation – via handwritten signs and obscene threats – behind the veil of anonymity that all coercers crave. That’s why selected thugs at Berkeley and Middlebury wore masks. They want to draw attention to the violence they inflict, but they do not want their victims to identify them. Enforcers at Reed, and most at Middlebury did not wear masks – neither did they introduce themselves to their victims. Allison Stanger, injured faculty member at Middlebury, said the enforcers would not even look her in the eye. Mobs seldom do.

Colleges like Middlebury and Reed go through careful selection processes to determine who becomes a member of their communities. Some conditions of membership – most of them academic expectations – are written down. Most of the social expectations for community members are customary. You won’t find a rule in the student handbook that says, “Don’t call guests a fucking bitch.” Yet it’s still a rule. Deans who lead the community ought to identify students who violate this standard of behavior, then have a talk with each one, individually. Pointedly ask if the student wants to remain a part of the community, after having betrayed the college and the ideals of free exchange that it represents.

A student who walks out of the dean’s office after such a talk would know that the next time they participate in an enforcement action, they are gone. Their friends would know it, too. Word would circulate that other enforcers who practice intimidation on campus may find the deans less lenient the next time around. They would understand that if you breach unwritten rules, expectations that underpin the college’s reputation across the country, you can take the academic credits you’ve earned to some other college that welcomes your Maoist proclivities. Reed has plenty of applicants on its waiting list who understand how to treat guests.

Everyone recognizes that our civic culture is in trouble. Eric Liu writes in The Atlantic about civic engagement in our country, especially since the November election. He argues that our interest in citizenship and participation informs a sense of how to behave in political groups:

Citizenship in a republic requires not just literacy in power but also a grounding in character. Power literacy means understanding systems of law, custom, and institutions—and acting with skill to move those systems. Civic character is more than personal virtue. It is about character in the collective—mutuality, reciprocity, respect, service, justice—and the prosocial ethics of being a member of the body.

All of these qualities apply to college communities as well as a whole republic. Schools claim to shape the whole person, within a healthy community. That means they prepare students for citizenship, first as members of a campus body, then as members of other groups they may join after they graduate. I would say, based on student behavior, that leaders of Reed, Middlebury, and hundreds of other colleges and universities across the country do not know how to develop these qualities of character in the students who come to their campuses. If they do understand how to develop these qualities, they ought to get moving, fast.

Middlebury College

On March 2, 2017, Charles Murray visited Middlebury College to discuss his book, Losing Ground. The event had the standard format: an address, with discussion of his remarks and the book to follow. Speech enforcers at Middlebury College shut down the event, and in a riot that followed, injured Allison Stanger, a member of the faculty at Middlebury. She suffered a twisted neck and a concussion.

I’m not sure Laurie Patton, president of Middlebury College, understands what happened at her institution during this progression from a visiting scholar standing on an auditorium stage to a riot outside the student center. The relatively small but mobile riot that occurred on her campus placed Middlebury, and higher education in general, in a state of emergency. The emergency is not principally about matters of free speech, though it begins there. It is about use of violence against faculty members who stand for free speech. If students on any campus can attack faculty members with impunity, colleges and universities may as well close their doors. Their enterprise is finished.

You should read both of President Patton’s letters addressed to the Middlebury community. I will not try to parse them in a lot of detail, but I will draw attention to a one-sentence paragraph halfway through her March 3 letter: “We will be responding in the very near future to the clear violations of Middlebury College policy that occurred inside and outside Wilson Hall.” She would not declare her intention to respond in the ‘very near future’ if she intended to respond. She would just do it. Many days have come and gone since the riot, and she has still not done anything except write two letters.

Watch for more news from the school. You may hear more expression of concern about the tension between inclusivity and free speech. What you will not hear is news that students responsible for the attack on Professor Stanger have been booted off the Middlebury campus forever. You will not see a list of their names on the Middlebury website, so people can identify those who brought so much discredit on themselves and their college. The president may respond that outside agitators harmed Professor Stanger, not Middlebury students. If that is the case, let’s have a look at the video evidence. Let’s have a look at the eye witness reports. Apprehend the people who assaulted Allison Stanger, whether students or not.

As I read President Patton’s first letter, I don’t see anger or indignation in her words. Students have just assaulted one of her faculty members. Yet consider her response:

Today our community begins the process of addressing the deep and troubling divisions that were on display last night. I am grateful to those who share this goal and have offered to help. We must find a path to establishing a climate of open discourse as a core Middlebury value, while also recognizing critical matters of race, inclusion, class, sexual and gender identity, and the other factors that too often divide us. That work will take time, and I will have more to say about that in the days ahead.

Last night we failed to live up to our core values. But I remain hopeful. Last evening, several students, faculty, and staff representing a large spectrum of political perspectives remained in Wilson Hall to discuss the events and to talk about building bridges. Their ability to reach across differences in a rigorous but respectful way was a stark contrast to the events that preceded it. I firmly believe these are the Middlebury values that we have lived so long and that we must strive to embody in the future.

It sounds rather like college president-speak to me. Do they have a workshop where college presidents learn to write like that? She wants to “discuss the events and to talk about building bridges.” What good does that do when she has criminals running around her campus, smug and filled with false remorse because they could assault a professor and give her a concussion without getting caught? More than a week later, they sit in their dormitories, eager to plan their spring breaks so they can get out of Dodge until things cool down. When they return for the last several weeks of the academic year, who do you suppose will expel them then? The people who wanted to discuss their assault and build bridges right after the riot occurred?

Now let’s turn to President Patton’s second letter to the Middlebury community, dated March 6. Packed with more president-speak, she refers early in the letter to an investigation that will take some time. Then she says the college will cooperate with the Middlebury police department. Don’t cut your toe nails too short while you wait for investigators to report their findings. When people in authority tell you they want to conduct a thorough investigation, you know what that means.

Students are not going to cooperate with local police. College investigators will do what college investigators do: take care to protect Middlebury’s reputation. In this case, the college’s reputation is already in ruins, so people appointed to bring violent students to account have little motivation to act expeditiously. They can only hope Middlebury’s reputation gradually recovers as memories of the March 2nd riot fade.

After her anodyne discussion of accountability, President Patton warms to her favorite topic: building community. Why would she want to talk about community immediately after she declares justice for students who attacked a faculty member will be slow and uncertain? Local police generally do not want to get involved in campus troubles, nor do college leaders want them to. Let’s move on to discussions of community before people notice the missing element of punishment.

If I’m a student at Middlebury and see a faculty member attacked with impunity, I just want to get out of there. I’m not that interested in community at that point, because I know I’m part of an institution that harbors bands of rabid students who threaten everyone who disagrees with them. Moreover, the president herself seems willing to let them remain part of the so-called community.

In that atmosphere, President Patton has this to say: “This was an extremely difficult episode, especially because in the last year we have worked so hard to affirm that Middlebury is committed to unlocking the potential and brilliance of every student…. If you are here, it is because you earned your way here, and you belong.” Well I’ll be. The rioters earned their way here, so we’re going to accept them because they belong. Let me tell you something, this episode disturbs people on and off campus not because Middlebury’s president and faculty work so hard to unlock the potential of every brilliant student who comes under their care. It disturbs people because students attacked a faculty member, and you have not apprehended them yet.

Even worse, given that apprehension can be difficult, the president gives no indication in her letters that she cares to lead those charged with apprehension, or take personal responsibility for the job. Instead we read apparently endless reflections on community, free speech, balancing interests among diverse groups, and on and on and on. Meantime students who violated every principle of civility that defines the college’s existence think, “My goodness, they’re not going to do anything! We’re going to sit on our pillows and talk about community while Dr. Stanger recovers from her concussion. Mental note: send Professor Stanger a get well card.”

The college may yet come up with a plan to punish members of the mob who attacked Professor Stanger. It looks doubtful to me right now. One report from a student already says that Professor Stanger’s neck injury was an accident, due to jostling in the crowd. Look for more excuses. I predict the president will not expel one student from campus for the events of March 2. Nor will the president name the students who attacked Professor Stanger. Lastly, President Patton will not try to explain why she withheld punishment and identification. If college leaders cannot identify the attackers, they appear incompetent or lazy. If they can identify the attackers, pressure from parents and others, plus shame will keep them from publicizing their names.

Concluding Thoughts

Andrew Sullivan, in his article on intersectionality, may invest the violence at Middlebury College with more meaning than it actually has. He does a deep analysis of people who don’t know how to think. That is honestly where political discourse on campuses like Middlebury has arrived. When you encounter an idea that makes your brain turn to mush, it is either meaningless or poorly expressed. In either case, don’t waste your time with it.

Student leaders infuse their political justifications with language so dishonest and self-serving, no one cares what it means anymore. Think of chief pig Napoleon, and his audacious self-justification in Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Speech enforcers use similar nonsense to explain why their actions do not constitute suppression of speech.

Sullivan analyzes the incredible state of Middlebury enforcers’ reasoning. They seem ready to justify their actions with mere excuses. Small children can offer better reasons for their intemperate behavior. Instead, enforcers seem to act from astringent ideologies and obtuse states of consciousness. Their ideology seems in a constant search for concepts and arguments to justify their immoderate persecutions.

So far from unlocking enforcers’ brilliance, as Middlebury’s president Laurie Patton claims, a few determined but deluded students at Middlebury seem to create an arcane shelter for untethered thought. When their thoughts encounter unwelcome disturbance from outside – a guest speaker the enforcers do not like – the evil spirit must be exorcised, to use Sullivan’s words, just as Puritan enforcers had to exorcise evil spirits from Salem in pre-modern New England.

More sobering still, these tides of primeval sentiment would not influence enforcers so thoroughly without leadership from faculty. Melissa Click’s “I need some muscle over here!” and its organizational equivalents become essential conditions for suppression of speech on campuses across the country. Remarkably, few consider campus suppression of speech out of the ordinary now. That is the way colleges and universities do business. We need a college president to stand and say, “This has to stop. It’s not going to happen on my campus.”

A similar stand occurred in Britain during the late 1970s. Violent industrial strikes racked Britain through most of the decade. When Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, she said, “This is going to stop.” And it did. The violence did not stop immediately. Her efforts to restore peace roused substantial opposition. Yet the stand she took against labor violence lasted through her ten years in office, and indeed, has held until today. Impatient students and many others have waited a long time for stiff, principled resistance to enforcers who appear ready to rule one campus after another.

No leader in America’s academy has had courage to rebuke campus speech enforcers in a way that says, “You are on notice. You violate our institution’s code of civil behavior, and you are out of here.” Students would test the threat soon enough. Then the president ought to make good on it. Campus security officers ought to escort uncivil or violent students directly from the scene to the dean’s office. Call students’ parents to let them know an interview to initiate expulsion is underway. When you warn students ahead of time, you can act with dispatch. The faster you remove uncivil students from campus, the better.

If faculty protest, tell them they can take the matter up at the next faculty meeting. Then come prepared. Ask other faculty members to speak up for you.

If parents protest, direct them to the college’s counsel. Make sure they have received the correct tuition refund.

Explain your position to the college’s trustees. Tell them why you have acted as you have.

If students protest, apply the same rules of civility you used in the first instance.

Stake your job on the issue, and fight the battle alone if you have to. Possibly the right of free speech in the whole country depends on the outcome. Thatcher had few allies at the beginning of her fight. As her cause found some success, more people became willing to stand by her. Politics works that way.

What is the alternative? To go the way of Middlebury College, an institution that used to stand for academic integrity.

Commitment to freedom

The “claim that Trump is uniquely selfish or malevolent is not only dubious but irrelevant. The point of checks and balances is that they protect us against liberty-threatening power grabs, regardless of the motives behind them. As Louis Brandeis observed, ‘The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.’ If the Trump presidency reawakens progressives to the importance of limiting executive power, that would indeed be a positive development. It would be even better if they remembered that lesson the next time a Democrat occupies the White House.” ~ Jacob Scullum

Progressives like Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept understand this danger: threats to liberty do not come from one party. Every president and every politician has his or her own weaknesses and strengths. That makes them human. Moreover, we should not look for super-human qualities in our leaders, any more than we would accept sub-human qualities. What we can look for is a moral commitment to freedom, to Jefferson’s concept of liberty based on natural rights, as an essential qualification for any person who wants a position of leadership in our democracy.

People understood that Reagan had that commitment. That’s one reason they admire him so much now. He combined a moral commitment to liberty with love of country in a way we have not seen since. That’s why people regard his leadership as special. We have not seen it since.

Commitment to freedom supersedes all other political commitments because it presupposes moral equality under God.

Since 9/11, presidents don’t bother with liberty. The exception was George W. Bush in his second inaugural, a speech loaded up with dangerous thoughts about bringing democracy to the rest of the world. The subtext, dressed up in Wilsonian language, was: “We started a war in the Middle East to create client democracies friendly to U. S. interests. Let’s keep rolling!” Just as cynically, Bush preached freedom against a dark domestic backdrop, where the Patriot Act, unlimited domestic surveillance, and militarized police forces all built on a stew of fears and anxieties the feds stirred together during Bush’s first term.

Commitment to freedom supersedes all other political commitments because it presupposes moral equality under God. One secures the other, as freedom and equality do not exist separately. These conditions of democracy mean that other problems of public policy – especially issues related to how government officials interact with citizens – resolve themselves in favor of citizen control over officials. That resolution must hold because officials must obey the people. That’s what we mean by government of the people, by the people, and for the people. If you ask people of all persuasions if they agree we have that kind of government now, how many do you think would say ‘yes’?

Trump’s election bears one loud message to Washington: stop! Stop what you are doing. Turn back. Donald Trump, however, is not the right leader for the message. He does not even understand it.

Though I’m rather pessimistic about renewed commitments to democracy at the moment, Jacob Scullum’s hope still resides in the right place. Trump’s behavior may remind all of us about the correct balance between consent of the governed on one side, and actual power exercised by the executive branch on the other. Right now, government has skewed that balance far from its roots in Jefferson and Madison. We are losing our democracy, fast. Election of Trump does not signify consent to that process. It merely signifies that the federal government, long before Trump took office, ceased to act in the interests of people who pay government’s bills.

Trump’s election bears one loud message to Washington: stop! Stop what you are doing. Turn back. Donald Trump, however, is not the right leader for the message. He does not even understand it. Our president has no commitment to freedom, no grasp of how citizens ought to oversee and limit government’s activities, and no ability to restrain himself or anyone else in use of government’s considerable powers. We might hope we have hit bottom here, but we had a long way to fall. The hole may be pretty deep.

Wikileaks and press freedom

Historians of the First Amendment, and of press freedom in the United States, will see Washington’s effort to shut down WikiLeaks as a pivotal case. When WikiLeaks published information obtained from Chelsea Manning in 2010, it did what a journalistic organization is supposed to do. It did what the New York Times did when it published information it obtained from Daniel Ellsberg in 1967. It did not commit espionage, and it certainly did not violate the Espionage Act. Government routinely keeps information secret not to protect the country’s interests, but to protect itself. Disclosure of that information does not betray the country’s interests. It places the country’s interests before government’s.

– Compare condemnation of Chelsea Manning after WikiLeaks’ disclosures, with admiration and gratitude accorded Daniel Ellsberg after the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers.

As the New York Times did for the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks published government secrets to expose accurately Washington’s management – and mismanagement –of foreign and military policy. To counter, Washington hammered WikiLeaks: they aimed to shut it down. Most significantly, it persuaded, or forced, all online payment processors to stop donations to the organization. No individual or institution among the country’s established media stood up for it – not the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, or anyone else. No major outlet objected, saying that if government can shut down one news organization, it can do the same to others. Most institutions appeared to agree that Julian Assange, WikiLeaks‘ leader, and Chelsea Manning were traitors and spies.

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks

Back in 2010 and 2011, no one in the mainstream press covered government’s campaign against WikiLeaks with anything but an approving eye. No one suggested government might be in the wrong. The New York Times, which collaborated with WikiLeaks to publish damning information, joined the loud chorus of voices that condemned WikiLeaks for betrayal and espionage. Nor did the New York Times object to the Pentagon’s unconstitutional treatment of Chelsea Manning, held in solitary confinement without trial for three years. It opted to bury coverage of Manning’s trial under other stories. Years later, the Times apparently believes PFC Manning can spend most of what remains of her life in Leavenworth.

Chelsea Manning, portrait by Alicia Neal

Meantime, Washington’s campaign against WikiLeaks deters other news organizations from doing their job. In its treatment of WikiLeaks, the feds communicated: “Here’s what happens to people and organizations who cross us. Here’s what happens when you embarrass us, or publish information we want to keep secret. We will squeeze you until you give up or disappear.” Julian Assange, effectively under house arrest at the Ecuadoran embassy in London since 2012, knows what happens when you cross the national security state in Washington, as does Chelsea Manning, serving thirty-five years in federal military prison. As for deterrence, consider the way media organizations defer to governmental power on almost every issue, and judge whether the campaign against WikiLeaks has not had its intended effect.

The end is coming

See what appears on Vox in connection with Alex Jones:

Twitter’s CEO doesn’t get how conspiracy theories work, by Zack Beauchamp

Beauchamp’s article has so many errors in it, I think, “Just leave it alone.” So I won’t try to take his article on, point by point. Have you noticed, though, how the swift condemnation of Alex Jones, and his near banishment from the public square, has brought another adjective attached to theory? Before, critics called them conspiracy theories. That was enough to discredit them. Now we call them vile conspiracy theories.

That leads you to understand the three key requirements for a ban, from the censors’ point of view. First, the theory must be false. Second, the lie is not harmless: the theory is vile because its effects are dangerous. Third, people believe it. That spreads the danger, like a cognitive disease. If a theory meets these three requirements, people who control channels of communication feel justified in shutting off microphones and speakers used to amplify the theory.

I hardly need to recall that exactly these arguments met the original theorists who claimed Jack Kennedy’s assassin was not Lee Oswald.

Beauchamp even cites Sunstein and Vermeule’s article, Conspiracy Theories, in support of his claims. How anyone who supports free speech can appeal to this article is beyond comprehension. I assume Beauchamp favors free speech, because he is a writer and a journalist. Yet he argues that if a claim has these three qualities – false, injurious, widely accepted – the rest of us who recognize truth and want to prevent injury are justified to remove the theory and its proponents from the public square.

I hardly need to recall that exactly these arguments met the original theorists who claimed Jack Kennedy’s assassin was not Lee Oswald. Defenders of the Warren report said that if this belief became widespread – that some conspiracy lay behind events in Dallas – it would undermine trust in the FBI and the federal government in general. Our whole country could collapse.

To protect institutions of order, media did everything in their power to squash these theories, as they did with Jim Garrison’s investigations in New Orleans. False because they contradicted Warren’s twenty-two volumes of evidence, injurious because they undermined faith in our democratic institutions, and dangerous if they became credible, media felt no restraint in their attacks on people who advanced accusations that the FBI had lied.

Look at the situation fifty-five years later. The FBI did lie about who murdered the president. The belief that Lee Oswald did not fire the fatal shot from behind the president’s limousine is now widely accepted. Moreover, the results have been exactly as predicted: no one believes the FBI, or virtually any other federal law enforcement or intelligence agency, as a result of the lies they propagated after November 22, 1963. The people who attacked Garrison and others turned out to be the liars, with predictable effects: citizens completely lost faith in those who lied to them.

Historians and researchers who develop true accounts of events in Dallas do not argue beyond their evidence.

The road from Dallas to these conclusions has been long. A lot of people lost their lives and their reputations along the way. Now they are heroes and heroines. In 1963, the widely accepted, safe belief was that J. Edgar Hoover was a guardian of the republic, a man whose agency kept America safe. Now we regard him as one of the greatest villains in American history. His role in President Kennedy’s assassination, and its aftermath, is the main reason we see him now as the republic’s traitorous, manipulative Rasputin, not its guardian.

I’ll add one other point. Historians and researchers who develop true accounts of events in Dallas do not argue beyond their evidence. They do not use inflammatory words like ‘hoax’. They have the same motive that truth-tellers always have: expose people who make false claims, and most pointedly expose what motivates their lies. These methods and this logic characterize James Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. It also characterizes David Ray Griffin’s work on the 9/11 attacks, including his thoroughly effective critique of Sunstein and Vermeule, Cognitive Infiltration.

I will not claim that Alex Jones ought to be a hero someday. Yet if our republic survives – it is in serious trouble at the moment – no one will defend the decision to silence him a hundred years from now. Jack Dorsey at Twitter takes the correct stand. Journalists and citizens may not have an obligation to refute Jones, but if Jones is wrong, valid refutations will come. If Jones is partially wrong, partial refutations will come. If Jones is right, or nearly so, recognition that he is right will come in part from unsuccessful efforts to refute him. No claim that the rest of us must silence Jones holds up, no matter how you ground the argument.

I will not claim that Alex Jones ought to be a hero someday.

Closing comments about specious grounds for coerced silence ought to be unnecessary in a democracy. Mark Zuckerberg says he wants people who visit Facebook to feel safe. That is an absurd standard for a site where people discuss politics. If you go to recipe site, you want to feel confident that contributors do not slip poisons into their lists of ingredients. I would not want to fix a up a loaf of bread for my family that makes everyone sick. But politics? In a democratic republic? How in heaven’s name can you say you want your readers to feel safe in that area? Politics broadly conceived is the most dangerous human activity possible, by far, because it includes war as well as the potential for all kinds of violence and mischief. To say you want your visitors to feel safe means you do not want them to think about politics.

Alex Jones is not safe. His opponents perceive his rants as hate speech. People rightly recognize Father Coughlin’s anti-semitic radio broadcasts as hate speech, too. What would we think now if Congress had pressured radio stations to take Father Coughlin off the air, just as Congress and other groups pressured Facebook, Apple, and Google to take Alex Jones off the air? Would we think, eighty years later, that Congress had done the right thing? Of course not. Hate speech is protected speech. Hate speech that does not incite violence requires protection, independent of social pressures that try to obliterate it. Arguments to safety have nothing to do with the matter. If you want to feel safe, do not think about politics, period. If you think about politics as a participant, not entirely as a spectator, you will feel threatened.

For years, as we witness our republic deteriorate, we could say, “Well, at least we still have free speech.” Now we cannot say even that. To echo the bearded guy in robe and sandals who walks city streets with a placard in the old New Yorker cartoons: ‘The End Is Coming.”

Augsburg the latest to buckle

If events at Augsburg in the Twin Cities don’t trouble you, you have not thought enough about implications of shutting down free speech, especially in classrooms. If you cannot discuss an essay by James Baldwin without students who secretly record your words having you kicked off the faculty, we have reached the end of free thought.

Students, colleagues, and administrators recognized Professor Philip Adamo, chair of the honors program at Augsburg, as one of the best teachers on campus. The Carnegie Foundation recognized him as one of the best in the state, and nation. Yet when students complained to Provost Karen Kaivola that Professor Adamo made them feel unsafe, the provost said to Adamo, in effect, “You’re done here.”

Augsburg has an anonymous bias reporting system, so students can make their own college into a Kafkaesque hell-hole with a few clicks.

She should have dismissed the students’ complaint, with prejudice. She could not do that, because students can register their unhappiness online. Augsburg has an anonymous bias reporting system, so students can make their own college into a Kafkaesque hell-hole with a few clicks. Students ought complain about anything they like, including food in the dining hall. When they accuse a professor of using the forbidden word in class, they want the professor’s head.

Such accusations about speech in the classroom violate the school’s norms and ideals. The provost should say, “Where to you get off? Well, get off here, because we do not welcome your self-righteous agitation on our campus. Send me your apology for the damage you have done to Professor Adamo’s reputation, by close of business.” Augsburg’s president Paul Pribbenow should back her up.

Students who claim to fight for inclusion look for every excuse they can to exclude people who make them feel uncomfortable! If you cannot tolerate discomfort, you cannot tolerate anything.

Free speech is free thought. Free thought requires free speech, and everything we associate with free speech. If we have to hide our responses to James Baldwin’s ideas – or anyone else’s ideas – because we fear consequences of openness, we have lost one of our most valuable gifts in our life together. God made us for connection, not exclusion. Connection means we can talk about a great essayist like James Baldwin without fear.

Note the most galling quality about students’ agitation to fire professors who run afoul of campus thought control. Students who claim to fight for inclusion look for every excuse they can to exclude people who make them feel uncomfortable! Baldwin wanted to make people feel uncomfortable. If you cannot tolerate discomfort, you cannot tolerate anything.

To shut down free speech makes everything else about our life together worthless. To ostracize a person who violates your own sense of propriety makes everyone feel threatened. We cannot connect with each other when we have lost freedom of thought or speech. We are lonely, isolated, and at loose ends – as sociologists like to say, atomized. This condition of disconnection, enforced upon us by people who want to dominate and control, removes hope and eats our souls, until it kills every individual. Do not let it happen.

Rights and the law

I thought about rights and the law this week, as items in the news lead to those subjects these days.

Birthright citizenship

Everyone says the president does not have power to deny birthright citizenship to children of immigrants. Do not fool yourselves. The president can do what he likes. Since Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the president and executive branch have acquired authority to fight wars independent of Congress. Since 9/11, the president and executive branch have acquired authority to deny immigrants equal protection of the laws, even though the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits this policy.

As its name suggests, an executive order applies only to the executive branch. When the president says he wants to deny birthright citizenship, he means that executive agencies who enforce his immigration policies will no longer treat possessors of birthright citizenship as citizens. He wants to deport at will, with no constraints. This desire for unrestricted deportation authority in the executive branch has built since 9/11. Since many citizens agree that immigration enforcement agencies ought to have unrestricted power, and Congress cannot act to check executive power in this area, power has grown.

It’s gratifying to see so many people say the president has no constitutional authority to end birthright citizenship.

It’s gratifying to see so many people say the president has no constitutional authority to end birthright citizenship. Yet these arguments highlight the political, extralegal nature of questions like this one. Constitutional limits on the president’s authority no longer take shape due to balancing powers in the legislative and judicial branches. Rather, the president tests these limits in the political sphere, and usually succeeds. If you want to know how we created a police state, especially for non-citizen immigrants, look to expansion of executive power in enforcement of immigration policies – policies executive agencies make up as they go.

To take one more example of political testing, recall Franklin Roosevelt’s Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, his attempt to increase the number of Supreme Court justices on the bench. Both Congress and Court resisted. That is the last time either branch took a clear-cut stand against expansion of executive authority in a significant area. First the fight against Communism, then the so-called Global War on Terrorism, which spawned the war on immigrants, have given the president and executive agencies as much power as they want.

Given the way this president operates, you could say his signature on the executive order is immaterial. He has already signaled to his enforcement agencies that they can do what they like.

Thus when President Trump says he wants to deny birthright citizenship to children of immigrants, he merely extends what three presidents have already done for seventeen years. Given the way this president operates, you could say his signature on the executive order is immaterial. He has already signaled to his enforcement agencies that they can do what they like. That includes removal of children from their families, illegal detentions, unjustified deportations that break up families, and other policies that violate Fourteenth Amendment rights of non-citizens. Most of these policies started under George W. Bush, continued and expanded under Barack Obama, and intensified under Donald Trump.

Resistance to these policies has developed locally – witness the safe communities movement and sanctuary cities – but no resistance has developed that would constrain ICE, CBP, or any of the other agencies involved in immigration enforcement. They still treat every non-citizen immigrant as a threat to national security. Administrators even call uniformed authorities in to arrest people who arrive at their local immigration office to have their documents validated. These are signs executive branch authorities are out of control. They are. Virtually nothing constrains their activities. We should watch to see how often the agencies detain and deport people born in the United States.

Rights and mob action in practical democracy

How is Maxine Waters similar to Donald Trump? Both politicians have no appreciation for the way rights secure liberties in a democracy. Without rights, you have no liberties. Rights secure liberties because they bind individuals, groups, and governments to act non-aggressively. Non-aggression no person or group can ever use coercion against another person or group, and that all coercion under the law follows due process.

Both Waters and Trump encourage mob action in their public speech. Mob action brings group force to bear on other individuals or groups: to silence them, intimidate them, deprive them of their ability to participate in public life, ostracize them, or harass them so as to provoke an aggressive response in return.

Do rights of free expression protect mob action, so long as the mob does not assault the targets of its action? That question is a little difficult, because the word assault covers both physical violence, as well as non-physical attacks:

As a verb, assault means:
1. make a physical attack on.
2. attack or bombard, someone or the senses, with something undesirable or unpleasant.

As a noun, assault means:
1. a physical attack.
2. in law, an act that threatens physical harm to a person, whether or not actual harm is done.
3. a strong verbal attack.

By these definitions, the Trump-Waters mode of incitement counts as encouragement to assault other people. They and their followers want to achieve political ends with aggressive means that – under a democratic constitution that protects individuals’ rights to live in peace – violate our social contract.

The superhero films – Stan Lee’s Spiderman in particular – popularized the adage, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Rights give citizens great power, especially relative to each other. The defining quality of a mob is disregard of rights: that is to say, irresponsible, illegal use of power. The self-appointed vigilantes who hanged an innocent man in The Ox Bow Incident congratulated themselves on their swift execution of justice, but they were nothing more than a lynch mob. They would have been a lynch mob even if their victim had been guilty.

When Trump and Waters urge their followers to assault people, when they justify their incitements with foul accusations and hateful speech designed to make demons of our brothers, why should we listen to them?

So when Trump and Waters urge their followers to assault people, when they justify their incitements with foul accusations and hateful speech designed to make demons of our brothers, why should we listen to them? They deal in fear and lies. Each side insists, “we must destroy our enemies before they destroy us.” If you fall for arguments like that, I suppose you deserve what you get. Meantime, assaults mount day by day, until civil violence becomes a bad habit, as it has in the great city of Portland, Oregon.

Once again, to secure liberty, people in societies must have rights. To protect rights, people cannot appoint themselves guardians of the good, then initiate aggression against fellow citizens, who have a right to live in peace. Our right of free speech means we can, and ought to, criticize opponents in the strongest possible language – in words some might call hateful – but we cannot act out these attacks in a mob. To do so means we have given up living together.

End of democracy

The Atlantic has articles about the coming end of democracy in the United States. I think, “How could we pull so long, and not think or write about what we pull?” We have these constructs that do not die. Anti-Iranian riots break out among Shiites in Basra, and journalists write about Iraq as if it still exists. Iraq ceased to exist as a country the moment the United States disbanded its army in 2003. That was a long time ago, but we still pretend it is a country.

Our democracy ceased to exist on November 22, 1963. To be more precise, it died on November 24, 1963, when U. S. intelligence had a mobster whack Lee Oswald, and no one with power or influence uttered, “Wait a second,” or, “Wait just a minute…,” or some other phrase to indicate something seriously wrong. Instead, the president himself calls Oswald on the phone while he expires in Parkland hospital, to extract a confession from him! I suppose he thought a confession would be just the thing, to give his new position in the White House a little spit and polish.

You cannot overlook the details, you know, especially if people call you commander-in-chief. That’s how you get to be powerful: pay attention to details. Do that, and commit crimes whenever circumstances require.

We see a similar willingness to overlook basic reality in the way we regard our political institutions. Even if democratic ideals come under assault from people who want to remove citizens’ ability to direct their own lives, we still see the Capitol dome standing, so we think circumstances must be okay. It took Trump’s accession for many to see they are not.

Trump’s predecessors did not attack democracy as such. They defended torture, then tortured people. They defended slavery, then enslaved people. They defended aggressive war against those they wanted to subjugate or exterminate, then attacked people. These and other crimes made people wonder what kind of democratic government would do things like that. Yet we still said the Pledge of Allegiance in school every day, and flew the flag on the Fourth of July. We tried to overlook crimes and other misdeeds. Then Trump comes around with a box full of little brown bottles and colorful hats, to say he’ll make you feel great again. You think well, maybe this guy is not as bad as the others.

Another phenomenon in our political life is readiness to oversell threats. Someone always comes around to tell us we are in danger, we have to protect ourselves, our freedoms and our way of life will disappear if we do not do A or B right away. Our democratic institutions have always seemed in trouble, under threat from one quarter or another. Our usual response has been, “Yeah, what do you want from me? My vote? More money? Look away when you do something wrong?”

After a couple of hundred years of that, you see the dome still standing, and you think, “Just leave me alone. I vote. I pay my taxes. I pretty much let you politicians do what you like. Why do you keep bothering me?” They keep bothering you because every generation of power mongers has to return to the watering hole: the Constitution says they have to do that.

Now they see a chance, at last, to stop doing that. We all want to act without restraints. We value autonomy. Politicians are no different. They tell themselves they are public servants, but they want to govern: to set rules and means of obedience. That is how you maintain an orderly way of life – you rule some things out, you rule some things in. That is not service. It is enforcement.

If autocracy is the best way to achieve an orderly way of life, then so be it. The paradox of politics is that politicians have a strong interest in creating a sense of disorder. When people turn to politicians for help, they grant power to restore the sense of security we always seek. The safe spaces we hear about on campuses? We see those safe spaces everywhere. We call them our homes. The rights of free speech we have always protected? Not if your speech makes me feel unsafe.

Politicians recognize all of that. They know they sell the one thing people place at or near the top of their list of needs: security. If they do not feel safe, they know they can turn to so-called public servants for help. If they perceive public servants can give them what they want, they will tolerate a certain amount of abuse and corruption, as long as public institutions come through with the services they promise. That is part of the contract: you make us feel safe, and we citizens will leave you alone.

Then 9/11 comes along, and the public’s sense of fear and insecurity shoots off the charts. That’s a gift from heaven for politicians, if they can manage it properly. They can start wars, spend money, spy on people, and most of all, act autonomously. They can do what they like, as long as they restore expectations of safety and predictability. Predictability means you do not arrive at your desk one sunny morning, and find the next moment a cruise missile has blown you out of a ninetieth-story window.

Politicians act quickly after the attacks, but they do not manage things well at all. They start endless wars they cannot win. They torture and assassinate enemies, to no clear purpose. They oversee multiple shocks to economic activity that supplies them with revenue, but their main remedy is to save the people who ruined the rest of us! If blowing up skyscrapers creates a sense of fear, losing your job when you have nowhere to go – and endless taxes to pay – finishes the job of making you feel hopelessly insecure, vulnerable, and disoriented.

Now a strongman arrives on the scene. Chaos is his middle name. He respects no one – least of all other politicians. He denigrates democratic institutions. He reveals the politicians and institutions we watch so closely as shadows on the wall. We thought we watched a real show. Instead we see a bunch of dishonest, self-seeking, incompetent, preening and over-confident performers who have no substance. Trump comes on the stage and says, “You know what, I’m all of those things, but I’m real.” A few million voters in the right states say, “We’ll give you a try.”

Those people do not care if he is an autocrat. They do not care if the speech enforcers on campus act like Maoist Red Guards. They want a job and a home. They want to send their children to school, without a school resource officer arresting their boy or girl for getting in a fight. They expect their workplaces, their homes, and their schools to be safe. If they see these outcomes, they pay their taxes willingly enough. If not, they become angry, cynical, and disillusioned. Disillusionment means you no longer see the shadows on the wall as real.

The people who brought us 9/11, and who responded to it, acted out an astonishing series of self-destructive blunders. They essentially said, “Look man, now we have this much power, who cares how incompetent and murderous we look? We’ll send your sons and daughters off to war in Iraq or Afghanistan, and they won’t come back. Or they’ll come back without their legs. Do you think we care? Here’s a gold star.” Along with that, you had to put up with endless propaganda, as well as “See something, say something” campaigns. It all amounted to the same thing: support the power mongers.

If that is the best a dying democracy can do, people think, why should we try to save it? A self-absorbed autocrat who swaggers and preens may be anti-democratic, but he can hardly do worse. So far, what you call democracy has led to nothing but death and depression. Yes, and poverty, as government agencies leech away every nickel the tax collector can find. No extraction device is too low. We will exploit poor people with fines, judgments, and tax liens. We will even raise the minimum wage, the agencies say. Now you can lose your job, or you will have more to pay us.

Worst of all, democratic institutions do not recover from neglect or abuse so easily. Ronald Reagan observed decades ago that “democracy is not a fragile flower; still it needs cultivating.” Democracy seemed strong enough at the time, especially in our own country. His speech to the British parliament in 1982 reminds all of us, however, that you cannot rip plants out of your garden by the roots, and plan for them to grow back next season with no effort. You can destroy in a short time what requiresd several generations to cultivate.

People say Trump is a symptom, not a cause. You can read the causes as you like. I have tried to lay out one pattern of causation here: a new willingness to dispense with democracy, if autocracy gives individuals, families, and neighborhoods what they need. We all want to be left alone. In the past we valued democracy, because it seemed the best path to a good life. We tolerated politicians, because they did not come around that often. The contract we had with them seemed to work well enough. This round seems different. This time, democratic institutions could continue to wane for several generations.

Muzzle mad dog Jones?

The FCC went after Alex Jones’ radio station, and I expect a lot of people will say, “It’s about time.” In line with that, the Washington Post has its slogan posted all over its website: “Democracy dies in darkness.” I’d like to see how vociferously the Post defends Alex Jones, unpopular journalist that he is. Does the capital’s newspaper of record care a twit what happens to him? Speaking of power, no matter how deceitful people would like to be, the truth still always comes out. Take Lyndon Johnson: virtually every lie he ever told, every crime he committed has come to light.

So let us turn to Jones’ most infamous charge about an infamous crime, that the Newtown massacre was a hoax. That’s a poor choice of words, because we do not know what happened there. How do we know that we don’t know? Because all the accounts of what happened there are official ones. We know how trustworthy official accounts are.

Now let’s say non-official, independent accounts of events in Newtown begin to emerge. By account, I mean a story, not a collection of questions, doubts, hypotheses, inconsistencies, and such that arise from the official version. These challenges to the official version do not assemble the evidence in an alternate narrative. We only know that the official version of events does not add up. That is, the official version does not present evidence in order to tell a coherent story. In fact, it assembles hardly any evidence at all.

To begin with, local authorities did not investigate the crime scene, then publish a full report of what they found. Similarly, the Connecticut coroner did not publish a full autopsy report for each of the twenty-six victims he and his staff examined. Thirdly, no one explained why first responders did not follow standard protocol – in fact, they departed radically from normal procedures – or why all responders left victims’ bodies in the school until almost twenty-four hours after they were shot. Lastly, no one explained why some mysterious person had the whole school building torn down, with no report or analysis of forensic evidence gathered from multiple crime scenes in the building.

Officials have no claim on our attention, let alone our faith.

How do you account for all that evasion, so many official stories that are almost content free? Why do we perceive skepticism about these stories as vile? Do people inherently trust medical authorities, law enforcement authorities, school authorities, local government authorities, mainstream media authorities, and authorities who oversee authorities? That’s doubtful. Most of us distrust authorities of every category now, as we should. The safest rule for interpretation of authoritative announcements is that authorities do not tell the truth. Persistent and widespread skepticism about official versions of events in Newtown attests to this attitude: that you cannot trust anyone who speaks in an official capacity. Officials have no claim on our attention, let alone our faith.

You can call that cynical, but why would you conduct your life in any other way? No one I have read has answered that question satisfactorily. In fact, you could lay the question down as a challenge: why would you give benefit of doubt to anyone who speaks in an official capacity? The question has no reasonable answer. Indeed, the opposite premise holds. Any reasonable person would not give benefit of doubt to people who speak in an official capacity. You would be skeptical at every turn.

That does not mean Alex Jones is correct to call everything that happened in Newtown a hoax. You persuade few when you brazenly accuse parents of participating in the hoax by faking the deaths of their own children. You start to think he cannot distinguish between self-promotion and rational skepticism. You can say with assurance that his manner of speech does not encourage sober analysis of evidence, or of alternate hypotheses.

As with so many other crimes, independent investigators do not have access to evidence about what happened, because public officials control every valuable piece. They made it clear from the morning of December 14, 2012, that they would not share any of it. Once the building came down, you knew that was the end. No one could enter the building before that, and of course no one could enter it afterward. That is how authorities wanted it.

You do not need to appeal to crisis actors to make your case that the Newtown narrative is fishy. You do not send everyone to a nearby firehouse and leave the bodies in the school building till three in the morning, if you have a regular school shooting. Though rare, school shootings occur often enough that everyone knows what to do. First responders train so they’ll be ready. Significantly, no one at the Newtown school shooting behaved as if the whole event was anything but a training exercise.

A detractor might say Alex Jones just wanted to be a blowhard, someone people listened to because he’s a loud talker.

Today Alex Jones joins the storied company of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden as champions of free speech and transparency. Actually, Jones does not make a point of transparency, though he does argue for truthful accounts of crimes like 9/11. The others pointedly disclosed and published what feds call classified material, also known as state secrets. They went to jail, house arrest, or exile for their trouble.

A detractor might say Alex Jones just wanted to be a blowhard, someone people listened to because he’s a loud talker. You wonder if he thought Rush Limbaugh would be a good mentor. Yet accusing the state of a false flag attack in 9/11, and winning a following to boot, places Jones in a category not so far from Jesse Ventura, former governor of Minnesota. Admittedly, Ventura is rather less abrasive than Jones. In his commitments, Jones also resembles Paul Wellstone, senator from Minnesota, who had his plane brought down mysteriously, resulting in his death and that of his entire family. Wellstone was open about his 9/11 skepticism, but most politicians learn to keep quiet about matters like that. Prominent people who challenge the state openly can expect bad things to happen to them.

So I suppose you could say Jones is fortunate: he is alive, he goes home to his own house in the evening, no one has tried to poison him. Significantly, however, the FCC shut down his radio station after all the major platforms removed his material. They found some kind of antenna violation they could hang on him and his broadcasters. Now, the platforms can decide not to carry Jones’ content without depriving him of his First Amendment rights, although they effectively deprived him of his First Amendment rights. When the government shuts down your radio station because they don’t like you, that’s more disconcerting. Jones has been broadcasting for years, yet the FCC picks now, a couple of days after the platforms de-platformed him, to shut down his broadcast? Where are you, Ajit Pai, when we need a solid defender for freedom of thought?

People call Jones a purveyor of ‘vile conspiracy theories’. So what?

Nothing about Jones’s speech justifies these actions. To take the reason most cited – his remarks about Newtown: parents cannot argue curtailment of Second Amendment rights in the public square, then object or call it libel when someone else says what he thinks in response. That is not how free speech works. When you exercise your rights, you cannot try to suppress others who try to do the same. Alex Jones has the same rights as everyone else, no matter what you might think of him.

People call Jones a purveyor of ‘vile conspiracy theories’. So what? They say we should not have to listen to his rants. I say again, “So what?” If you don’t like to listen to him, don’t. Truly troubling is a movement to prevent everyone else from listening to him, when he has not advocated or threatened violence against any person or institution. He has said nothing illegal, nor does anything he says qualify as hateful, that other category speech suppressors like to call upon to quell language and thoughts they don’t like. Significantly, no one has suggested Jones’s speech qualifies as illegal. If your worst charge against Jones is that his conspiracy theories are vile, why aren’t you out there trying to silence every Holocaust denier you can find? Hell, President Trump’s speech almost every day is more objectionable than anything Jones has said.

Some say we’re just following the EU’s example in our efforts to regulate objectionable speech. If you want to be like Europe, go for it: cameras everywhere, dress codes, speech codes, business codes, gun codes, tax codes, and every kind of rule to make sure we’re all happy, free, protected, and secure. We do not need to emulate Europe to insulate ourselves from culture wars. We can simply not pay attention to speech we don’t like.

Of all the people one might select to be a symbol of free speech, Alex Jones may not appear the most attractive candidate. He is no Thomas Paine. He does not have John Brown’s good looks, nor does he play the prophet. Yet our heroes and exemplars do not need to look pretty, sound pretty, bear the truth, or speak anything close to the truth. They certainly do not need to be likeable. They simply need to respect others’ rights to be secure from violence. As soon as you try to silence someone you don’t like, or who says things you don’t like, what does that say about you? It says, about you and your state of mind, “I’ll shut you up while I’m on top, and I don’t give a fuck what you think.”

That sounds a lot less civil than anything Jones has said. It also gives Jones’s followers a genuine grievance. Someday people who consider Jones and his opinions vile will not be on top. Then their freedom to write and speak and publish what they think will feel threatened, and they will feel marginalized. What will they say then?

The end is coming: prologue

The authoritarian left took another scalp this week. Alex Jones may be on the phone with Roseanne, both wondering what happened to all their friends. The pattern was the same in both cases: years of ugly-provocative, politically incorrect language, then the boom lowers, the hook comes out, and off the stage they go. In an age when college students can force Jerry Seinfeld off their campuses, you wonder what took so long.

Everyone wonders whether our democracy can survive Trump and Trumpism. Fewer people ask whether our democracy can survive authoritarians who appear to hate anything that does not fit their conception of the way you ought to behave. Both questions have an underlying problem: do we have a democracy worth saving anymore? Perhaps the aquarium just needs some new fish, as the ones in it are already dying on the bottom. Once a fish lies dying on the bottom, you know you can’t save it.

Trumpists and Red Guard leftists share this important mentality: utter contempt for democratic institutions and rights.

Trumpists and Red Guard leftists share this important mentality: utter contempt for democratic institutions and rights. Both groups want to use the state’s power to impose their vision on you. One learns quickly in politics that procedure and process matter. If you let people who harbor contempt for procedure and process have power, you find soon enough they don’t give a damn about your rights. They use intimidation and other blunt instruments to obtain power, and they do not put those instruments down after they have it. Their vision does not include forgiveness or compassion, only coercion, aggression, and implicit threats.

Hannah Arendt observed the violent, often deadly battles between Communists and National Socialists in Germany during the 1920s and 30s. The two sides hated each other. Moreover, Socialists and Fascists advanced markedly different visions for economic and social organization. Yet Arendt perceived how similar these two groups were. No matter who won the struggle, a lot of people would wind up in slave labor camps. Others would die of starvation, disease, or warfare. No matter which vision you picked, Hitler or Stalin, they led to the same place: hell.

Not to overstate the case, that is what we have on offer in the United States. If you want to see what happens when leftist thugs succeed in what used to be a microcosm of free speech, observe Reed College, where Reedies Against Racism bagged a college president, and pretty much held the campus captive off and on for two years until administration and faculty gave them what they wanted. They acted like the pigs in Animal Farm.

The Charlottesville battle occurred one year ago this weekend. I’m not sure anyone believes that confrontation will be the last one.

If you want to see what happens when white supremacist thugs succeed in what used to be a microcosm of free speech, observe Charlottesville, where under Richard Spencer’s leadership, Heather Heyer died as a sacrifice to torch-bearing racists who appear to love violence as long as it’s fun and promotes racial purity. Spencer, apparently calculating the number of people who showed up over the number of people who died, called the event a success.

The Charlottesville battle occurred one year ago this weekend. I’m not sure anyone believes that confrontation will be the last one. We can take a key lesson from it, though. Both sides want to fight, just as Communists and Brown Shirts wanted to fight in the streets of Berlin, Stuttgart, Munich, Cologne, and other German cities. Both sides want as much freedom as they can get for themselves, which means no freedom for anyone else. Both sides know they have to fight dirty to win. So watch carefully, and see if you don’t agree the two sides have a lot in common. Democracy in our republic cannot survive either party.

Reed buckles, president resigns

The article below deceives its audience with what it leaves out. It says nothing about why Reed changed its freshman humanities course.

I used to have a filter labeled ‘marketing bullshit’. I still do. You would not believe how much language out there qualifies. Now a new one has developed, labeled ‘propaganda’. It used to be called ‘government bullshit’, but Reed now shows we need a category for ‘academic bullshit’, and who knows how many other labels to cover all the genres. Of course, Reed Magazine is simply a marketing voice for the college, so I suppose you could just put the article about Humanities 110 under ‘marketing bullshit’.

Reed caved in to latter-day Maoists on campus, who barged into classrooms, humanities classrooms in particular, until Reed’s president, John Kroger, decided to let them win. To suggest that college faculty decided on their own to ‘modernize’ the curriculum for Humanities 110 is total trash. Reedies Against Racism employed tactics straight from the Red Guards’ Cultural Revolution in China, except they didn’t murder faculty members and dump their bodies in the Columbia River.

Now we read that John Kroger has decided to resign as president of Reed. My first reaction to the news in my search results was, ‘What a coward. He not only fails to stand up to student gangsters, he leaves campus after he gives them what they want.’ Then I read the article, and see the board of trustees probably told him goodbye. One way or another, he likely could not keep the board, faculty, or alumni happy, which means people stop giving money to the school.

Join a community of friends and scholars who value your contributions because you treat them with dignity, a community your family believes in because they believe in you. To be a part of this community, treat everyone here with respect.

At the first sign of Red Guards roaming Reed, the president should have gathered faculty and students together, as did the superintendent of the Air Force Academy when racial epithets appeared on a dorm room door, and said to the Guards:

“You are out of here! You will never threaten or intimidate my faculty. You will never disrupt another classroom. We will not initiate a misconduct process, we will not keep your tuition, we will cut off contact with you. If your family does not like that policy, let them find another school for you. We made a mistake when we let you come here, and now we will correct it.

“Not one word I say here contradicts ideals of free speech we hold here at Reed. Free speech means free speech for everyone. That’s why I’m kicking you out: your protests show that you value only free speech for yourself. You shut down what other people want to say in order to gratify your own sense of power.

“Let me repeat what I said at the beginning. You will never mistreat or intimidate a faculty member here at Reed, and get away with it. You will never shout down, disrupt, threaten, disrespect, assault, or publicly act in an uncivil manner toward anyone on this campus. If you do, we will escort you off campus, and you will never return.

“Try me. Does anyone want to heckle me right now? I encourage you to speak up now, to test whether I mean what I say. If you do not care to test me now, I will assume that faculty and students, who want to conduct classroom discussions according principles of education we value here at Reed, can do so free of interference.

“To those of you who disagree with me: you knew Reed’s curriculum before you chose to join our community. You knew Reed’s absolute commitment to free speech for every community member. If you did not know, you know it now. If you find you made a mistake, we will help you find another school. If you came here with your eyes open, but something about our community makes you want to disrupt it now you are a member, leave. If disruption of free speech is your method, we never want to see you here again.

“I have laid down a vision of Reed’s future that is unequivocal. We have always been open to change here. We have always encouraged students to speak their minds. We know we are one of the best colleges in the country, largely because we open our community to every point of view, every well spring of experience. If Red Guards barge into our classrooms, that threatens our faculty, and our commitments to open, free speech. A closed community will not happen here.

“Let me tell a story to close. When I went to Reed, I had a philosophy professor named Marvin Levich for aesthetics. He sat on my thesis board. He was provost of the college, a position that made him leader of both faculty and administration. He stood for free speech, and for Reed’s other commitments to academic freedom. He kept Reed open for business during a time when other schools effectively closed.

“Do you know why he won respect, shortly before I came to campus? He stood up to violent intimidators who tried to shut down the campus in response to the Vietnam war. All across the country, from Berkeley to Columbia, students disrupted academic communities with tactics that Reedies Against Racism have revived. These tactics are not Martin Luther King’s tactics. King fought racism with civility and respect. RAR’s tactics are Mao Zedong’s tactics, a leader who practiced and promoted deadly coercion, threats, and fear.

“When you sit in the front of a bus, or walk into a lunch counter and sit with everyone else, that is not the same as using force to shut down a classroom. A sit-in that forces staff to leave private workspaces is a tactic of intimidation, not civil disobedience. Civil disobedience takes place in public spaces, and has something to do with the change you want to effect. When you shut down a freeway to make a point, that is not civil disobedience. It is simple obstruction. It does not work on a freeway, and it certainly does not work at a private college.

“Defenders of free speech and civil discourse, and the entire country observe what happens here. College leadership would not tolerate attacks on Reed’s ideals during the Vietnam war, and I am sure I and the rest of the faculty will not stand for them now. This institution will not buckle and fail.

“I will conclude with an invitation, to end this shabby but destructive mutiny, and to balance expulsions that follow from uncivil conduct. I do not care to expel anyone who wants to study and grow here according to our customary but firm academic traditions. Join the community you learned about when you decided to come to Portland to study. Join a community of friends and scholars who value your contributions because you treat them with dignity, a community your family believes in because they believe in you. To be a part of this community, treat everyone here with respect.”

Afterthoughts

The more I think about John Kroger’s position as head of Reed during this time, and about how he tried to handle students who aimed to wreck his college’s moral foundations, the more sympathy I feel for him. His last letter to the community, posted at Reed College President’s Office, is dated October 31, 2017. Before that, he wrote about Reedies Against Racism, and their campaigns of uncivil disruption, with some frequency. For the last six months, he has been silent, until this week’s announcement that RAR won the curriculum change they demanded. It feels as if he gave up.

I wonder if he found any backing at all among faculty and the trustees. He must have. His letters show a president who dithered: Reedies Against Racism should have a voice, but they should not disrupt. Did he agree at bottom with their main point, that the traditional freshman humanities course reflects white supremacy? Did other powerful voices on the faculty and board of trustees agree with RAR?

By their victory, Reedies Against Racism have destroyed Reed.

For me, RAR’s aim to modify the freshman humanities curriculum does not matter at all. That is, once they intimidated faculty members in pursuit of their aim, the rightness or wrongness of their point has no weight. Their presence on campus indicated a diseased community: in fact, a mortal threat. Leaders of learning communities have to remove students who practice intimidation immediately. If one group threatens other groups – in this case, if students threaten faculty – college leaders must excise the group. More accurately, they must excise the group’s methods. After you cure this disease, you can return to discussions of substance.

By their victory, Reedies Against Racism have destroyed Reed. They may believe their tactics worked, but people who value freedom no longer want to join the community. Prospective students and their families observe what happened there and conclude, why would I join a group of people like that? I’m going to spend four years among other students who successfully shut down free discussion on a campus that used to value it? What kind of an education is that? If I want a totalitarian training camp, I’ll go to North Korea, where they have the real thing.

Having caved, Reed cannot recover for a long time, if ever. If you do not protect your faculty, if you do not respect students who join your community to learn, you have no more community. You just have gangs of people who roam around with signs and chants. They pretend to stand for diversity and what they call marginalized groups, but in fact they stand for no more than what you see in front of you: force. If you do not do as they say, the gangs will destroy you. Gangs at Reed demonstrated they can get their way, and destroy the college, the college’s president, and the college’s ideals in the process.

Defense Distributed and the Second Amendment

Is software speech? My first response was skeptical: just another legal theory to win a case, to extend First Amendment protection to something that did not exist when the First Amendment was written. Yet free speech never meant merely words formed in your mouth. It meant free expression. Thus it covers written materials of all kinds, photographs and other images, every kind of art, music – all products of the human mind. Under that definition, of course software qualifies as expression. Of course it qualifies for protection under the First Amendment, for the same reasons other kinds of expression do.

These thoughts come to mind because I read an excellent interview with Cody Wilson, engineer who designed the first 3D printable firearm. His perspective rightly reminds us the founders did not have a national defense establishment in mind when they wrote about a ‘well regulated militia’. They thought of local self-defense organizations.

A national defense establishment did not exist before the Civil War. A ‘well regulated militia’ referred to any kind of military organization with weapons at its disposal. The example of the Minutemen at Concord and Lexington, and all the other militias that participated in ejection of the British from the colonies, was still fresh when the founders wrote the Bill of Rights, only thirteen years after the Declaration of Independence. All the rights listed in the Declaration, and in the Bill of Rights, need protection. How do you protect them, if you do not have means to defend yourself, your property, and your family?

Thus the name of Wilson’s company: Defense Distributed. The well-developed theory of deterrence developed for all kinds of military weaponry applies to citizens’ firearms. We have these weapons so we do not need to use them. It’s true that our own Department of Defense, and the CIA, practice aggressive war, but aggressive war invites aggression in return. It does not deter it. I have never heard advocates of an armed citizenry argue, or even suggest, that initiation of armed resistance against the state would be a good idea, or that it would have a good outcome. Advocates of an armed citizenry want the state to know that people can defend themselves if they have to. No citizen cares to be forced into that position.

A disarmed citizenry creates the insecure, unfree state the Second Amendment wants to avoid:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Without a doubt, drafters of the Second Amendment regarded a disarmed citizenry as a condition favorable to tyranny, and a threat to individual freedom.

Years ago, standard arguments in favor of gun control contended that the nation already has a well regulated militia to secure our state, and our freedoms. We do not need distributed firearms to accomplish that purpose, so the Second Amendment does not apply. It is out of date. We can leave it on the books if we like, but we need not observe the plain meaning of the words. The Constitution has to evolve with the times.

You do not hear that argument anymore. First of all, it is a weak argument. You cannot ignore a key provision of the Constitution because you think it is out of date. You have to change the Constitution. Secondly, many people recognize serious threats to our freedoms emanate from the state itself. These threats concern actual conditions in our country. They do not originate overseas, where we focused our concern for most of the twentieth century. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, we recognize that our own state threatens us. It is the proximate source of power, the threat we have to protect ourselves against.

The U. S. model was entirely different. It flipped the historical pattern, and redefined democracy’s legal foundation.

Remember this simple principle, one we can easily forget after September 11. Through most of history, governments granted rights to the people. Those grants are embedded in the story of democracy: the king’s powers diminished as representatives of the people forced concessionary proclamations. They extracted rights that would protect them from bad laws state power could enforce, including the right to be free from taxes they had no say about. In that way, freedom expanded.

The U. S. model was entirely different. It flipped the historical pattern, and redefined democracy’s legal foundation. It founded a free state not on a grant of rights from the king or any other body. It founded a free state on enumerated powers that citizens granted to government. Government could not do anything not permitted in the Constitution. The Second Amendment expressly reserves the power to defend yourself with weapons to the people. It denies that power to the state: that is to say, it denies the state a monopoly on the use of force.

That is about as radical a theory of the state as you can find. It makes our Constitution a Lockean document, not a Hobbesian document. That should not be surprising, as Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration as a Lockean testament from the start. You could even call Jefferson’s work the first draft of the Bill of Rights, listing as it did all the complaints the colonists had against British tyranny. Significantly, it plainly stated and endorsed Locke’s right of revolution.

The Second Amendment plainly states a necessary condition for this right of resistance and revolution: you cannot undertake a revolution without arms. No state that denies access to means of self-defense can possibly be free. Thus the requirement that a well-regulated militia is ‘necessary to the security of a free State’. Notably, British regulars initiated use of force at Lexington and Concord, when they marched out of Boston to confiscate the local militia’s weapons. The revolution germinated in a conflict over taxes, then matured in a struggle over self-defense.

The Second Amendment plainly states a necessary condition for this right of resistance and revolution: you cannot undertake a revolution without arms. No state that denies access to means of self-defense can possibly be free.

The last point to make is that Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed do not sell firearms. If they did that, the state would not challenge their ability to do business. Defense Distributed makes code freely available on the internet. It is an open source project. In that sense, it is not even a business. Yet the State Department has taken Defense Distributed to court, to block its ability to distribute code. It wants to deny individuals capabilities to design or manufacture their own weapons.

It’s obvious why a state that wants to maintain a monopoly on the use of force would want to do that. Ability to make your own weapons assures the integrity of the Second Amendment, and undermines the state’s desire to regulate weapons of all kinds, firearms in particular. No tyrant, or would-be tyrant, tolerates software that aids do-it-yourself gun manufacturers. No state concerned with its own security cares to deal with an armed citizenry.

Meanwhile, Defense Distributed continues to improve its designs and materials. It sells unfinished parts that hobbyists and many others can use to extend and improve the firm’s innovations. The State Department and its attorneys cannot put this cat back in the bag, as Wilson, hobbyists, and the state all recognize. The state’s desire to control people never keeps up with technology, or with people’s ingenuity as they try to remain free.

If I want to build my own bicycle, or kayak, the state will not interfere. Individuals who want to build their own firearms operate in a dicier environment. They have the technology, parts, and skills to build weapons, but the state is not happy with their hobby. Nevertheless, the state and internet platforms cannot legally shut down Defense Distributed. Even if you do not own a gun, or do not want to acquire one, applaud Cody Wilson’s resolve and vision. He needs backing from every one of us. He understands what freedom requires. When we back Defense Distributed and its aims, we protect our own liberty, as the Second Amendment intends.

Role of money in politics

Citizens United still comes up in conversations, almost eight years after the Supreme Court decided that restrictions on political donations abridge First Amendment rights. You can say a lot about that decision, or more precisely, about reactions to that decision. Here are two questions that come to mind when we recall the way President Obama scolded the justices seated in front of him at his 2010 State of the Union address, shortly after the court handed down its decision. First, if Democrats oppose the decision on principled grounds, why do they not denounce union donations to political parties, along with corporate donations? Second, why would Democrats want to forego substantial corporate donations to their own party? In the last presidential campaign cycle, their candidate benefited handsomely from corporate donations. Congratulations, and more power to her.

Consider a simple example, not of corporate or union donations, but individual donations to super PACs. If Koch brothers money counts as ‘dark money’ donated by evil people for evil purposes, why does Tom Steyer’s and the Pritzker family’s money count as sunshiny money donated by good people for worthy purposes? All these examples, and others, illustrate that individuals and corporations make contributions to super PACs, which have no limits if they don’t coordinate their activities with campaigns, and to non-profit foundations. Steyer, the Pritzker family, and the Koch brothers all manage their donations so as to avoid campaign finance regulations, as they should. They all believe, correctly, that they can use their money as they like. If they want to use it to promote points of view and candidates they favor, why would we want to stop them?

Because one side is evil and the other side is not? That does not sound right to me. Why would I believe someone is evil because they support positions I do not like? If the Koch brothers switched their allegiance, and gave millions to a Democratic super PAC, and Tom Steyer did the same for the Republicans, whose money would be dark then? Would Democrats decline to accept the Koch brothers’ money? Of course they wouldn’t. They would welcome it, just as Republicans would welcome Tom Steyer’s money. The difference is that Republicans don’t currently denounce Steyer as the Darth Vader of American politics, out to destroy the republic. Well, I suppose Breitbart does.

The Koch brothers support what we now call classical liberalism, political traditions that trace their heritage to Adam Smith. In today’s political atmosphere, these tested ideas are intolerable. People who pay out money to promote these ideas are excoriated as evil.

Moreover, if you take a look at the positions the Koch brothers promote, they are not so controversial. They support organizations like Cato Institute and Reason Foundation, both of which say free markets yield more prosperity for all participants than regulated markets. These arguments sound a lot like arguments we heard from Ronald Reagan, or farther back, from Thomas Jefferson. The Koch brothers support what we now call classical liberalism, political traditions that trace their heritage to Adam Smith. In today’s political atmosphere, these tested ideas are intolerable. People who pay out money to promote these ideas are excoriated as evil.

One more question to consider before leaving this subject: we have a long history of campaign finance regulation in our country. You notice two things about this regulation. First, it has not limited the flow of money into politics. Second, advocates of campaign finance reform think that if only we can find the right set of regulations, we’ll be able to limit the flow, and thereby remove corruption from our political system. They accept Unruh’s suggestion that money, as the mother’s milk of politics, is a corrupting influence, but they do not accept his more obvious meaning: that money is an inherent part of politics, just as it is of banking, international trade, securities markets, or corporate growth. A purist will say that money – especially unregulated money – is a corrupting influence wherever it appears, but that position is hardly defensible in a capitalist economy.

Democrats regard Citizens United as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever, yet they were hardly happy with campaign finance regulation before the court decided in 2010, by a 5-4 vote, that ‘freedom of speech prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for communications by nonprofit corporations, for-profit corporations, labor unions, and other associations.’ From their point of view, the court did not overturn a satisfactory set of regulations, certainly not an effective set. It overturned one regulation that permitted Satan inside the gates: the prohibition on corporate donations for political purposes.

As soon as you regulate political activity in one political, economic, or social sector, you no longer have an answer for anyone who comes along to say, ‘Well, I want to regulate your speech, too.’

Dating all the way back to progressive and populist politics in the late 1800s, a basic division in American politics has disagreed about whether or not business corporations are pernicious or benign, sources of prosperity and freedom, or of oppression and poverty. If the latter, they are a necessary evil in democratic capitalism that the people’s representatives must regulate. That includes, most particularly, their political activity. Without a doubt, twenty-first century Democrats side with nineteenth century progressives and populists on this question. Corporations require regulation.

As soon as you regulate political activity in one political, economic, or social sector, you no longer have an answer for anyone who comes along to say, ‘Well, I want to regulate your speech, too.’ That is what happened to Citizens United. The Federal Election Commission applied a rule that limited the ability of a non-profit to produce, distribute, and show a political film. The Supreme Court said, you can’t do that, and by the way, you can’t limit political activity for other kinds of organizations, either. Free speech applies everywhere, or it applies nowhere. If campus activists have taught us anything during the last few years, it teaches that free speech rights are indivisible. You can’t grant these rights by degrees, depending on who the speaker is.

Most destructively for democracy, attempts to regulate speech squash every attempt to launch anything new. Yet launching something new is what we mean by free speech. You can’t have free speech if the only speakers are those who already have money to purchase what they need to get their message out. The sound stage has to be open to everyone. That’s all the Supreme Court said. The speakers corner has to be open to everyone.

The same logic that would deny Exxon or Pfizer a voice in the political arena, also denies Charles Murray a voice at Middlebury College, or Ann Coulter a voice at Berkeley. Anticipatory attempts to limit speech, based on expected outcomes or anxiety about its effects, always violate the First Amendment.

Most importantly, it does not matter, under the Bill of Rights, where the money comes from. All that matters is that everyone can talk, persuade, and listen. Every participant can sort good ideas from bad, unless you act to restrict the conversation. At certain pressure points, you can shut down the conversation altogether. The sound stage goes quiet if you cut the electrical supply and remove the megaphones. With that kind of pressure you remove the mother’s milk of self-promotion, as well as the ability to promote other people’s ideas.

The Supreme Court’s decision affirms no one is evil merely because he or she wants to participate. No one is evil because our administrative law grants advantages to some organizations who decide to incorporate. No one is evil because some people or organizations decide to devote funds to public causes, and others do not. The desire to participate in public discussion validates itself, no matter how poorly reasoned or pernicious one’s ideas might be. The same logic that would deny Exxon or Pfizer a voice in the political arena, also denies Charles Murray a voice at Middlebury College, or Ann Coulter a voice at Berkeley. Anticipatory attempts to limit speech, based on expected outcomes or anxiety about its effects, always violate the First Amendment.

Imagine how taxpayers, let alone my local election commission, would react if I claimed, ‘I just started a new political party. Now I qualify for campaign support. My candidate for office is my dog, and I’m his campaign manager. His campaign slogan is “My bite is worse than my bark.” He wants to be dog-catcher, and he needs $20K to win.’

To work around First Amendment issues, the system of campaign finance opponents of Citizens United might favor is not regulation, but blanket public support for all campaign finance expenditures. We often think of public disbursement of funds as fair distribution, one open to oversight, and governed by inclusiveness. In practice, public funding of political candidates would comprise none of these qualities. In the public world, you have to qualify for support. To start, only existing parties qualify. Imagine how taxpayers, let alone my local election commission, would react if I claimed, ‘I just started a new political party. Now I qualify for campaign support. My candidate for office is my dog, and I’m his campaign manager. His campaign slogan is “My bite is worse than my bark.” He wants to be dog-catcher, and he needs $20K to win.’ Imagine how my neighbors, who pay property taxes to fund local elections, would feel about that.

As soon as you try to answer the question, ‘Why can’t animals run for office?’, you understand why you would not want to restrict funding of electoral candidates to approved parties or nominees. How will you persuade someone who thinks his dog is smarter than Donald Trump? Or who thinks dogs would round up other dogs better than a man in a truck? Do not dismiss these questions too quickly. Their point is that you cannot determine a way to decide who qualifies for public funding that people in general will find fair. The only people who might like public funding of elections are the same people who create safe seats from gerrymandered congressional districts. Even they have not liked the idea. Presidential candidates, party leaders, no longer accept federal funds due to the onerous restrictions they carry.

If you rule out public funds to support political candidates because you cannot identify deserving recipients, you run into the same practical difficulty as you try to identify permitted sources of campaign funds. If you cannot determine a standard of fairness to decide who qualifies as a recipient of funds, how do you determine a standard of fairness to determine who qualifies as a donor of funds? Let’s say you dislike Betsy DeVos, and you especially dislike all the money she has donated to foundations to promote charter schools. Let’s say you like public education, and therefore support the general aims of the American Federation of Teachers. Why would anyone in that position want to restrict AFT’s ability to support political candidates who believe public schools are essential to American ideals of equality?

Progressives appear to hold that unfettered politics are inherently corrupt, since money and power are inherently corrupt. Untidiness and honesty can actually coexist quite comfortably, as free-for-all politics creates a lot of checks on deceit. For all its ugliness, the last year or two of American politics demonstrates at least that much.

These examples suggest that as soon as you try to control democratic electoral processes, you also control means of democratic expression and persuasion. We know you cannot control economic activity without controlling people who want to make a living. The same goes for political activity. When you try to control who gives money and who receives it, you also control who gets a voice. Why should the people who made the film, Hillary: The Movie, be silenced, any more than someone who makes a film titled Donald Trump: The Clown?

Citizens United, the organization that made Hillary: The Movie, was a non-profit, but the Federal Election Commission said it could not screen the film. The organization said, ‘Of course we can show this film,’ and the Supreme Court agreed with them. The court affirmed the principle that money is money, speech is speech, and politics is politics. If you don’t like the mess that occurs when all three get together, you don’t like democracy. To tidy up democratic processes, you can create a sanitized version of politics that does not look like democracy at all. Progressives appear to hold that unfettered politics are inherently corrupt, since money and power are inherently corrupt. Untidiness and honesty can actually coexist quite comfortably, as free-for-all politics creates a lot of checks on deceit. For all its ugliness, the last year or two of American politics demonstrates at least that much.

“The revolution will not uphold the Constitution”

We have seen a loss of integrity in educational leadership. Leaders and administrators appear to lack energy, vision, commitment, or even the moral wherewithal to stop the bad things we have seen happen on college campuses. A sort of sickness in college culture has taken hold. You can see it everywhere as colleges and universities both magnify and fall victim to invidious currents of violence and hate. That is why one feels emotional to encounter one educator – in this instance Lt. General Jay Silveria – defend foundational values of the school he leads, the United States Air Force Academy:

Air Force Academy

Silveria speaks in response to racial slurs written on students’ white boards at the academy’s prep school. To oppose racial slurs is not a controversial position. What draws your attention to Silveria’s speech is his forceful manner, his emphasis on dignity and respect for all, and his emphatically repeated command to anyone at the academy not willing to treat others with dignity and respect: “Get out!” “Get out!” We do not want you here, you do not belong here, and we want you out as fast as possible.

These words are so sorely missed from leaders at other colleges. At my own alma mater, Reed College, students shouted at guest speaker Kimberly Peirce, “Fuck you cis white bitch!” They wrote similar words on posters placed around the auditorium. Dean of the Faculty Nigel Nicholson admonished student protesters in a letter published online and in the student newspaper. Significantly, you did not hear the president say that students who treat guests that way are out. Not surprisingly, campus activists have worked successfully this fall to shut down the college’s freshman humanities course, by invading professors’ classrooms.

All around the country, activists use violence, threats, and intimidation to scare people they do not like away. These tactics are not different from the behavior of racists who want to intimidate and scare black students at the Air Force Academy or anywhere else. The broad application of Silveria’s words – treat others with dignity and respect, or you are out – is so welcome. Until now, we have heard nothing clear and forceful on this matter from any college president. Instead they let Maoist protesters – whose tactics are indistinguishable from those of neo-Nazis – have the run of the place.

What do you suppose made prep school students at the Air Force Academy think they should do something like that? Has academic culture reached a point where any type of intimidation on campus appears to be worth a try? Do academic leaders want to see self-destructive bigotry and moral intolerance flourish on their campuses? Every college president in the country should watch General Silveria’s talk. If they cannot see a connection between his emphasis on dignity and respect, and aggressive hatred that spreads from group to group among our students due to poor leadership, they should watch it again. Find your voice. Make a difference. Remove students from your communities who aim to intimidate and create fear. To tell those students to get out shows moral courage we have not heard from anyone until now.

Reed College

Let me tell you why behavior of students at Reed, Middlebury, William and Mary, and other colleges dismays me. I enrolled at Reed as a transfer sophomore in fall 1973. Earlier that year, in January, the U. S. ended its involvement in the Vietnamese civil war with a prisoner exchange. For several years shortly before I arrived, Reed’s campus underwent a period of disruptive anti-war protests. They became so serious, protesters threatened to take over the campus. The normal activities of learning and study at Reed became difficult to carry out.

Provost of the College Marvin Levich, Professor of Philosophy, said, “Not at my school.” He led faculty, students, and administrators in opposition to the protesters. Many credit him with holding the school together, mindful of its mission, at a time when institutions large and small failed to do so. It cannot have been easy for him, as his position excited virulent criticism from other people on a small campus. I had Professor Levich for a class in aesthetics my senior year. He sat on my thesis committee. I wish I had seen the role he took at Reed several years before, when I was a senior in high school, but in the end I’m glad I arrived on campus after its time of trouble.

As an introduction to my remarks about Reed’s situation now, have a look at some of these open letters from the college’s president, John Kroger:

President Kroger Responds to Reedies Against Racism, November 16, 2016

A statement from President Kroger on racism, January 16, 2017

President’s Statement on Charlottesville, August 16, 2017

President’s statement on HUM protests, August 28, 2017

President’s update on HUM 110, September 1, 2017

President’s statement on RAR’s Day of Boycott, September 25, 2017

President Kroger has been busy on the subject of racism, I’d say. Reedies Against Racism won’t let him rest. No wonder. President Kroger’s first response in the list above is dated November 16, 2016, only five days after the appalling demonstration of abusive tactics at Kimberly Peirce’s talk. Every student who participated in that demonstration should have been out the door by that time. Instead, they occupied the admission office! President Kroger politely asks that they leave:

Finally, I respectfully request that you discontinue or relocate your protest from the admission office. It is not fair to our staff to prevent them from doing their important work with prospective students and their families. We must engage with inclusive governance practices to make changes and allow the educational program and the business of the college to move forward.

Can you believe this? College presidents all over the country imitate this kind of language. Do they pick it up in the processed food section of the grocery store? Of course not. They pick it up from each other. No one wants to stand out. We hear forceful words only from a general in the United States Air Force. The only difference between the intimidation practiced by racists at the Air Force Academy and the anti-racists at Reed is that, with strength in numbers and fair winds of a putatively good cause behind them, Reed’s anti-racists dare to come out of the woodwork.

They also dare to challenge Reed’s president – his office, his reputation, and his authority – but he does not seem to recognize it. Listen to Jay Silveria’s remarks. Beneath the surface you hear, “Get out now, because when I find out who you are, you are really not going to like it.” When John Kroger writes out his mumbo jumbo to campus activists, they deride him behind his back, snicker at him and plan their next outrage.

How do we know that is their reaction? Because a year after students shouted at Kimberly Peirce, Fuck you cis white bitch! – a guest invited on behalf of all Reedies – President Kroger still deals with the same kind of disruption, except now his own faculty members are targets. Did he think his pusillanimous response after the first round would somehow transform his proximate enemies into civil students who would honor his leadership, his college, or his professors? For nearly a year, he has written one letter after another that sounds off-the-shelf from the processed food section. At last on September 25, 2017, he declares:

The college will use Reed’s established honor process to respond to today’s protest in the Vollum lecture hall. This process will determine what disciplinary measures are appropriate. The goal of the honor process in this—as in all matters—is to hold community members accountable for their actions while seeking to restore and maintain an inclusive living and learning environment that helps all students to be successful at Reed.

Even when he decides to take action against his adversaries, he sounds weak. He is the president. If he had gathered the entire Reed community to give a speech like Silveria’s on November 12, 2016, the day after students attacked Peirce, do you think President Kroger would have the situation he has now? Of course he would not. Student protesters challenged him, openly. Let him demand – not request – that students who use obscene language to attack a guest speaker Get out! I am not sure what militant students would have done, but I can say this confidently. He would not write to inform them politely, nearly a year later, that he plans to initiate the honor process to “determine what disciplinary measures are appropriate.”

Reedies Against Racism have to be saying, “Good God, we’ll graduate before he kicks us out!” We disrupt, abuse and threaten faculty members until they cancel their classes, we trash his school and make it a by-word for academic weakness across the nation, and he politely informs us about his response to “today’s protest in the Vollum lecture hall.” After all the protesters have done, do you think they care about the honor process? For people who adopt thuggish tactics and practices, honor processes look like an ironic joke.

Conclusion

One thing to say about Jay Silveria’s remarks: they are not polite. Think carefully before you say, of course, Silveria speaks against racism, and so do students at Reed. Think carefully before you argue that Jay Silveria and Reedies Against Racism both line up on the same side: the anti-racist side. Reedies Against Racism inhabit the same mental and emotional spaces – and use the same practices – as racist groups that claim allegiance to Richard Spencer. Hannah Arendt pointed out in Origins of Totalitarianism that Nazis and Communists came from the same cloth. So it is today for white supremacists and anti-racists. They love to fight each other because their hate and moral vacuity run so deep.

Nothing in President Kroger’s letters expresses consciousness of the threat to liberalism posed by students on his own campus. In fact, Reedies Against Racism declared themselves enemies of liberalism quite a while back. Now they aim to bring down one of the nation’s premier liberal arts schools. I would like to see Marvin Levich address those students. He would tell them, “We made a mistake when we invited people like you into our community. Now we intend to correct our mistake.”

Social conflict, interview on pernicious activities

Difference leads to conflict only if people start to mind each other’s business. ‘Live and let live’ is the only sure way to get along. As soon as you depart from that principle, in favor of ‘I am my brother’s keeper,’ you not only lose your privacy and your freedom. You lose your ability to live at all. Every war ever fought, civil or international, would never have occurred if people had simply left their neighbors alone.

Believe me, I don’t want to offer a simple solution for war, a sure path to world peace. We are wired not to leave each other alone, since humans are strongly social creatures. We cannot live a solitary existence. Therefore we have to figure out how to deal with conflicts that arise from living together. Still, ‘live and let live’, among people who want fraternity but not murder, forms the only social foundation we know will work.

If we crave security and freedom – security of living with people we trust, and freedom to live without interference from others – why do we not gravitate toward institutions that embody live and let live principles? Do we need to dominate others in order to achieve security? Do we perceive control of others as necessary for our own freedom? Or do we just believe a certain degree of control yields benefits we should not forego?

If we crave security and freedom – security of living with people we trust, and freedom to live without interference from others – why do we not gravitate toward institutions that embody live and let live principles?

Thoroughgoing adherence to these principles would mean that no one exercises authority over anyone else, except by voluntary contract. This statement does not deal with the problem of crime. It addresses only the matter of authority. People who commit aggressive acts, you might say, voluntarily place themselves under social authority for punishment. By definition, aggressive acts violate the principle of live and let live. Every society has to deal with the issue of aggression.

Outside of aggressive acts, social interaction still comprehends a wide field of activity where people can decide whether or not they want to mind someone else’s business. If you tell people they cannot buy a sugary drink that weighs more than twenty ounces, that is minding someone else’s business. If you let live, people can consume whatever they like, and take responsibility for the consequences. No one supervises their bodies or their souls, nor does the question of uninvited intervention ever arise.

Bonus interview

Face the Nation interviewed Kellyanne Conway about the Hatch Act, and what she does for a living.

FN: So how are things at the White House lately?

KC (smiling): A little frazzled. You know the Donald likes to keep us jumping.

FN: You call him ‘the Donald’?

KC: He likes that nickname.

FN: But it’s his real name!

KC: Not when you put the in front of it.

FN: So how did you get into so much trouble over Roy Moore?

KC: You tell me. Since when is a presidential spokesperson not supposed to talk about politics?

FN: What do you think made this case different?

KC: People don’t like child molesters.

FN: Do you believe that’s what it comes down to? Accusations that Roy Moore molested teenage girls?

KC: Well look, I comment on political matters every day. That’s why the president wants me on his staff. He has his Twitter account, he has me and Sarah, and who knows how many other sad sacks to speak for him. That’s what we do. Most of the time we don’t talk about specific candidates, but then we haven’t had many elections during the last year. Do you think we’re not going to talk about candidates during the midterms coming up?

I comment on political matters every day.

FN: You’re right that we we’re about to enter a campaign season.

KC: The Hatch Act says you cannot use federal employment to promote a party or a candidate. That’s what people figured the Democrats were doing during the Depression. It’s intended to prevent patronage. Like Governor Blagojevich: I’ll appoint you to the Senate, and you give me a contribution to the state party. Except Blago wasn’t a federal employee.

FN: Do you think you violated the Hatch Act?

KC: Depends on how you read it. If you want to limit the president’s ability to back certain candidates, or oppose others, then you use legal tools at hand to muzzle people who speak for him.

FN: Like Obama used the Espionage Act?

KC: That’s different, of course, but a good example. If you want to muzzle whistleblowers, you charge them as spies and traitors. I guess speaking up for a child molester doesn’t count as treason.

If you want to muzzle whistleblowers, you charge them as spies and traitors. I guess speaking up for a child molester doesn’t count as treason.

FN: Does it count as patronage?

KC: The act covers more than patronage per se. Federal employees aren’t supposed to do certain things, like join the Communist Party, or make political speeches. Look at the list of recent Hatch Act cases. Harry Reid even wanted James Comey investigated for checking into Hillary Clinton’s email server. You can use a law for anything you want.

FN: Does that make the law useless?

KC: It makes the government lawless.

FN: How so?

KC: Suppose you operate in an environment where your political opponents will cook up anything they can to make you look bad. Those schemes may or may not involve legal actions. Do you suppose that creates respect for legal constraints? No, you know opponents will go after you, no matter what you do. If the Hatch Act helps to silence a White House spokesperson, of course you’ll do it.

Suppose you operate in an environment where your political opponents will cook up anything they can to make you look bad.

FN: The law’s official title is An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities. Do you think your support of Roy Moore was pernicious?

KC: If you want a situation where people who work in the White House can’t talk about political races, then picking a candidate who constantly hit on young women supplies a good example of pernicious activity. I’d say we want more freedom in our political speech than that.

FN: How do you mean?

KC: If you can’t speak up for a child molester, you can’t speak up for a presidential candidate who mishandles classified information. From there, you can’t endorse the local dog catcher if you deliver mail for the postal service. Federal employees and political races cover a lot of acreage in a democracy.

FN: So you think we should protect political speech, wherever it comes from?

KC: Of course we should. Voters should know where the president stands on an Alabama Senate race. If the president sends a representative to a television interview to tell people where he stands, shouldn’t he be able to do that?

FN: Not if it’s a pernicious activity.

KC: Politics is pernicious. You’ll have to rename the act.

FN: What do you think of An Act to Get the Donald’s Goat?

KC: The Donald’s goat is always got.

FN: Thanks for talking with us today, Ms. Conway.

KC: Thanks for having me!

Safety issues

Safety has become a social issue, especially on college campuses. “I feel unsafe.” No one can argue with that. In the old days, you might think about safety under well defined conditions related to fear: a so-called friend hangs you over a railing as a prank, the driver next to you accelerates to 120 miles an hour, a criminal pulls a gun and points it at your head. Now people utter these words whenever it suits them, even if no unsafe condition exists. We would not be surprised at this point to hear a five-year-old say, as his mother threatens to withhold dessert if he does not eat his brussels sprouts, “This micro-aggression makes me feel unsafe.”

So we call them snowflakes, not recalcitrant children, but the rhetoricians on campus who maneuver to get what they want. The technique seems to work, so why should they not say it? Call me a snowflake all you want. We’re the ones who can make anyone back down with the drop of one word. If an appeal to safety turns any situation to your advantage, why would you demur?

People in power want to demonstrate their empathetic side. No administrator wants to appear callous, inconsiderate, least of all belligerent.

Both sides know safety is not an actual issue. Snowflakes want recognition of their vulnerability, particularly by people in power. People in power want to demonstrate their empathetic side. No administrator wants to appear callous, inconsiderate, least of all belligerent. So you agree. “Yes, yes, if you feel unsafe, it must be so. We know how you feel only because you tell us your state of mind.” If I say the Holy Spirit told me to start a war, no one can contradict me. “I took the matter to God in prayer.” How can you argue against that? The claim that unpleasant or uncomfortable situations make you feel unsafe is no less absurd.

I have to say, I thought the bubble of deference toward the rhetoricians might collapse by now. People that manipulative do not usually get such a long run. Then again, politically correct speech has had a run of at least twenty-five years at this point. It is so well established now that activists threaten speakers who do not conform to their norms about permissible speech. I suppose we should expect that people so conscious of their own safety, so willing to gin up threats to advance their political aims, would also threaten others to make them feel unsafe. However your opponents respond, they lose.

Do you think I’m stupid? Social affiliation based on beliefs

“The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure it is right.” ~ Learned Hand

I had dinner with friends over the weekend. One of them said, “At school I have difficulty finding people to hang out with. We don’t share interests, or they’re Republicans who love guns.” Later on, to another friend who was at the gathering, I said, “That doesn’t seem like a good reason to exclude someone from your acquaintance. I knew a guy at work who owned guns. I liked talking to him about his interests, even if I don’t own them.” My friend replied, “It’s what being a Republican who loves guns stands for. It stands for someone who puts Second Amendment rights ahead of students’ safety in schools.”

I wasn’t satisfied with that line of thought, and remarked, “The main thing you want to find in people you meet is intelligence, intellectual curiosity.” He responded immediately, “That’s what I mean! No one who has those beliefs can be intelligent.” I stopped there: you cannot judge a person’s intelligence from beliefs, any more than you can judge a person’s intelligence from education. Yet you frequently hear people say, in our super-charged political atmosphere, “Anyone who believes that is an idiot.” Talk about upping the ante. Not only do I disagree with you, I don’t want to associate with you because you’re ignorant. If you want to have friends who think like you do, that’s the way to do it.

People do not want others to think they are stupid.

People do not want others to think they are stupid. We calibrate what we say to avoid that judgment. We defend an unpopular point of view with extra care, because we do not want our listeners to think, “We reject you because you are beneath us. We cannot stand to be with you, because we cannot tolerate your beliefs.” When a dominant group succeeds in that exclusionary project, when it makes an outgroup of people who hold unacceptable beliefs, you have the divisions you see around you.

When you practice the principle that intelligence is independent of beliefs in your personal relations, you realize something quickly enough. All people are intelligent, but they have different kinds of intelligence, or talents. Some people have mechanical intelligence, others have social intelligence, others analyze well, others have artistic intelligence, and so on. Most people have more than one kind, no one has all kinds to the same degree. Moreover, relative to the time we have to become acquainted with people, it takes a long time to discover what kinds of intelligence a person has.

When you practice the principle that intelligence is independent of beliefs in your personal relations, you realize something quickly enough.

The most we can do is be open to those discoveries, as we become better acquainted with a person. If we say we don’t want to become acquainted with Republicans who like guns, where does that leave you? It leaves you in the same place as people who declare they don’t like Democrats who abjure firearms. What kind of a place is that? Isolation. When you start to feel that people respect you and like you primarily because of what you believe, you are going to feel lonely. Unconditional love is the only kind worth having, or giving.

Types of hate speech and the future of politics

Hate speech has become a legal concept, political concept, even a linguistic artifact. We know hate means intense or passionate dislike, yet I have not seen analysis that distinguishes types of hate speech: types that help us make useful distinctions. Let’s identify three types to start, and call them simply Type I, Type II, and Type III.

Type I examples

Type I examples are inconsequential politically:

“I hate you.”

“I hate so-and-so because he is X,” where so-and-so is the person’s name, and X is the race, occupation, social class, ethnic group, nationality, religion, or any other quality that makes the speaker hate the individual.

“I hate all X,” where X represents the same categories mentioned above, and where, as in the first statement, the hater does not give a reason.

In all of these examples, speaker merely reports an internal state of mind or state of heart. Hater has no response if a listener asks, “So what?”, and sees no need to answer that question. The individual’s internal state and willingness to report that state are all that matter here.

Type II examples

Type II examples occur in the political arena:

“All of you ought to hate so-and-so because he is X,” where so-and-so and X mean the same as above, and where the speaker assumes X as a sufficient reason.

“All of you ought to hate X because [reasons follow].” Speaker does not assume reasons for intense dislike are self-evident, so explains why all individuals in X deserve hatred, or why haters will benefit from adopting this position.

“Follow me in this fight against [corruption, bad people, whatever evil or threat must be eliminated].”

Type II hate speech is politically, socially, and rhetorically significant. Speaker tries to persuade others to join in hatred toward an outgroup or individual. Reasons for hatred may be poor, logic may be flawed, arguments may be weak, accusations may be false, but all of these persuasive techniques exist. Something beyond speaker’s internal state motivates speaker’s desire to persuade others.

Targets of hatred in this second case obviously would not feel safe or secure, especially if speaker’s persuasive efforts succeed.

Type III examples

Type III examples also occur in the political arena, but occur outside the law:

“Go fetch your pitchforks and Molotov cocktails, friends!. Tonight we plan to [do harm to people and property], because we hate X.”

“If members of X do not do as we say, we will make them regret their disobedience.”

“Hang him.”

The first example is a well-recognized incitement of a mob to violence. The second example illustrates an extra-legal threat of violence against members of a group, based on a perceived power relationship. The third represents a lynching, or frontier “justice”. In all cases, speaker has no concern for legal constraints.

Implications for politics

This analysis is useful, because it contrasts two simple cases with a more difficult one. Type I speech is obviously protected speech, whereas Type III speech is obviously not protected. Type II speech has, to this point in our history, always been protected. Since the 1980s or so, college campuses have adopted norms and even codes that discourage or prohibit arguments or other kinds of speech that make others feel uncomfortable. These norms have now begun to affect non-academic arenas.

Thus many want to eliminate hate speech from public discourse, because it makes some listeners feel threatened and unsafe. Consider though that a great deal of political speech is designed to threaten people, remove protection or power, or place people in positions they would never choose themselves. These arguments make strong distinctions between people who are good, and people who are not.

If you empty political discourse of these persuasive efforts, you no longer have politics. You only have power.

Many of these arguments rely on the same logic and categories we have seen in our analysis of hate speech. I have a friend, for example, who observes that Republicans are evil. I say, “Not all Republicans are evil.” She replies, “You’re right, but their leaders are.” This description, that Republican leaders are evil, is intended to arouse intense dislike for these individuals, based on their group membership. It qualifies as Type II hate speech, when you add reasons for partisan dislike.

So we have to ask, does our desire to ban hate speech from public discourse mean we want to banish all political speech that tries to make us dislike members of another group? In that world, Republicans and Democrats would have little to say about each other. Every participant in politics would have to watch every word. That is why we protect all instances of Type II speech.

Efforts to persuade like-minded people to form intense antagonism toward non-like-minded people – indeed, to fear them and hate them – underpin most political campaigns. Political arguments in general often tend toward this kind of emotional divisiveness. If you empty political discourse of these persuasive efforts, you no longer have politics. You only have power.

Culture wars devolve to street fights and bloody murder

One year and thirty-six days after Micah Johnson shot five white police officers to death in Dallas, we witness Charlottesville. How, after all our nation has experienced for over one hundred fifty years, could we have a second civil war based on the wicked, false belief that people with light colored skin are superior to people with darker skin? If you add suspicions, ignorance and resentments nurtured in regional cultures, religious beliefs and prejudices, and ethnic origins, you have enmities that will not die.

Everyone needs to belong. Families and friends, community and work groups, neighborhoods and clubs don’t seem to be enough. We want to be part of groups larger than those. How do you define a group? By being aware of the people outside it. How do you know who is outside your group? The people you hate: those are the people outside your group. How do you know the people you should hate? The people who don’t look like you do, who have a dissimilar culture.

I know, we lament simplified, sociological explanations like these for conflicts we can’t resolve. We even joke about them. Kingston Trio’s Merry Minuet ends its chorus: “And I don’t like anybody very much!” The rest of the song refers to the misery we cause ourselves because no one likes anyone very much, except naturally if they look like you do. Then you can say, “I like you, because you like me. I like you, because we both know who we don’t like.”

Look, let’s take for granted that large numbers of us will hate each other. That’s how people are. If familiarity breeds contempt in families, it apparently does so in whole societies as well. Moreover hate comes easier than love – you need not work so hard at it. In fact, when you feel put upon, betrayed, ignored, ridiculed and mocked, your natural response after a while is to seek some sort of redress, which means motivation for revenge, which means hate. Yet hate does not entail violent behavior, unless you lack discipline. Nor does it warrant violent behavior, unless you lack reason.

Interestingly, people most likely to mock white nationalists are also white: educated, upper middle class whites who did not wince or object when Clinton made her now infamous remark about her opponent’s supporters. Notably, protesters in Charlottesville did not denounce Clinton or any other political person when they came to Virginia. They denounced Jewish people, black people, brown people, any people without European ancestry. They even mocked the white woman they murdered. Richard Spencer, leader of this mob, pronounced the whole operation a success.

Significantly, this second step in our progress toward civil war, thirteen months after Johnson’s revenge massacre of police officers in Dallas, arrives in another southern city. On a height of land outside Charlottesville, a revered founding father built his home, a Virginia aristocrat who owned slaves and stood for freedom. He wrote that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” A man of his time, he eloquently wrote ‘all men’, but he would not have included his own slaves in their number.

Whatever you might say about the groups who skirmished on Saturday, they do not stand for freedom. They both reject that fundamental value and principle of our republic. Only one side committed murder, then celebrated it.

Prospective removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee from Emancipation Park occasioned this confrontation. Movements exist to remove all commemoration of the Civil War from every public space throughout the South. To be consistent, activists have to remove every mark of honor for every soldier who fought to defend the Confederacy. That represents a lot of statues and monuments.

I’m sure if Atlanta’s city council wanted to remove a large statue of General William Tecumseh Sherman from Atlanta’s public square, groups north and south, left and right would line up around that issue rather differently. A more analogous situation would occur if the South today charged the North with aggressive war, and insisted Lincoln’s statue be removed from his tomb in Springfield, Illinois. If activists say we must remove all monuments that honor leaders who defended slavery, why should we not remove all statues of leaders who waged aggressive war on the South?

From Lee’s point of view, Virginia had a perfect, meaning a legal right to secede. It merely wanted the North to leave it alone. Lee reluctantly left the United States Army, to defend his home against invaders. Just as Lincoln aimed to preserve the union above all, Lee aimed to preserve Virginia’s freedom to break from the union. Slavery indeed served as the war’s moral kernel. Social justice warriors insist on removal of all monuments to the Confederacy and its leaders. They maintain no defender of slavery deserves any kind of honor at all. By this argument, all defenders of slavery deserve only defamation and denunciation.

In practice, the movements to remove rest on power, on who won the war. Winners punish, and no one compels them to justify their severity. If you want to reopen wounds of the first civil war – wounds that have obviously not healed – I cannot think of a better way to do it. Mixed with Unite the Right’s ugly, hate-filled, divisive and dangerous language is another sentiment: “Just leave us alone. You weren’t satisfied to mock us in private. Now you want to humiliate us in public. We used to be proud, though you will not leave off telling us how deplorable we are.”

The country is super-divided. The same culture of political correctness that campaigned to have Cecil Rhodes’ statue removed from Oxford, wants to go after statues of General Lee, and every other Confederate soldier commemorated in bronze. The social justice movement has had its opponents on the defensive for decades. Some, though not all of their opponents are sympathetic to the white nationalists who came to Charlottesville. Now, at last, these groups feel an opportunity to shove back. Both sides want a showdown, and they will have it if they want it. They do not mind the cost. For white nationalists, movements to take down the statues amount to a second invasion.

As for President Trump, he needed to say something different after Heather Heyer’s death in Charlottesville. If Lyndon Johnson had said on November 23, 1963, “There’s plenty of blame to go around,” he would have been right, but the nation would not have appreciated his sentiment. Similarly, Trump might point out that both sides – not many sides, but both sides – have inclined toward violence as they pitch toward their showdown, but no one appreciates that kind of “let’s settle down” sentiment when a woman lies dead in the street, with many others injured, some critically. Once again, do not look to this man for leadership.

When Trump finally comes out with some traditional words of sorrow and unity-in-grief two days later, Richard Spencer calls it a lot of “kumbaya nonsense”. Mainstream media may with indignation expect a man like Trump to act presidential, but people fighting this conflict know what they are about. They want blood. Micah Johnson wanted blood. Both sides in Charlottesville wanted blood. Death did not seem imminent, until James Fields ran Heather Heyer down at high speed. As soon as his car hit the crowd, we had a vision of more mobs, more death. Whether the killer is a black army veteran in Dallas, or a white neo-Nazi in Charlottesville, the people who lose their lives have been innocent.

We have a long way to go in this war. Media pressured and persuaded Trump to talk about healing and unity, but they must know the conflict has progressed way beyond statements about who we are as Americans. As we have proven many times, we are not “better than that.” The 2016 election did indeed roil our unhappy melting pot. Feelings, ideology, and a strong impulse toward anger driven action outweigh words. We do not have leaders present who can alleviate this anger.

To close: if I sound like a person who preserves more even handedness toward this conflict than seems justified, consider that moral superiority almost always warns of danger. Each side may declare we have reached a time for choosing, but if we make our decisions based on rallying cries, or even on our need to belong, we compound all of our social and political mistakes. To understand sources of my own beliefs, sample from my other articles on coercion and conflict, violent or otherwise. I have no use for restrictions on speech, or for any kind of unnecessary interference with individual autonomy. I have no sympathy with any group who wants to use coercion, intimidation or violence for political or any other aims.

In the 1980s and 1990s, I saw political correctness grow on campuses where I taught. Its foremost aim is to control speech, and therefore thought, though I’m entirely aware it claims ends higher than that. It uses proven tools of social control, similar to those used in Mao’s China. When talk turns toward culture wars, now an almost anodyne phrase, the current maelstrom reveals both sides know their strongest weapons. Those weapons do not include persuasion. Both sides favor coercion and its companion, hate, in all their pernicious manifestations.

Because of my background, I believe forces of political correctness have had the upper hand for a long time, that they have misused their advantages, and that their ideology is mistaken. That does not make me sympathetic to bigoted white nationalists. Both sides in this conflict seem bitter, which foreshadows a bitter fight. White nationalists may think they have elected a fellow traveler to the White House, and likely they have. Pity our culture wars should have taken a turn this deadly, this irreversible, and this fundamentally based on feelings of superiority.

Secrecy and National Security

Where Anonymity Breeds Contempt by Julie Zhuo tells about the kind of behavior we observe on the internet when people act in the dark. When Nicole Catsouras died in a car crash in 2006, someone sent a picture of her badly disfigured body to her parents with the subject line, “Daddy, I’m Still Alive.” Other rats joined in. Plato’s parable about the ring of Gyges, Zhuo writes, has it right. The parable suggests that anonymity gives people license to act immorally:

That mythical ring gave its owner the power of invisibility, and Plato observed that even a habitually just man who possessed such a ring would become a thief, knowing that he couldn’t be caught. Morality, Plato argues, comes from full disclosure; without accountability for our actions we would all behave unjustly.

Acting in secret, under the cloak of invisibility, becomes a key goal for people who don’t want to be caught. People see the results of your actions, but they don’t see you. A hit and run driver may kill someone, but no one knows who did it. Anonymous posts may push a person to suicide. Racists burn down a church at night to avoid what daylight would reveal. Government agencies build secret prisons so others can’t see what they do there. In every case, people who commit crimes do not have to account for what they’ve done.

That’s why openness is an elemental feature of good behavior, in government and out. Daniel Ellsburg is correct when he states that Wikileaks’ disclosure of government’s secrets must have good effects. During the last ten years, people acting in our name felt they could torture people, kidnap them and transport them to secret prisons, waterboard them and beat them to death, because it didn’t think anyone would find out about it. We’ve all observed the short time horizon, willingness to go along, and resolute ignorance of their own conscience in individuals who act immorally. “You tell me this dirty business will come out in the news two years from now? I doubt it. Besides, I’m acting under orders and I have a job to do. Stand aside.”

Every citizen should regard every public servant as his or her personal representative. When a CIA man plans to strap someone to a waterboard, he should post it at the CIA’s website, www.torture.gov: Waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed until he talks. Then we can all check to see who we plan to torture that day:

Time: 10:00 – 10:30 AM, December 1, 2010
Location: Room 3C – Rayburn Office Building
Subject: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
Agenda: Interrogation, torture
Method: Waterboard, other EIT as required
Interrogator: T. L. Bush, GS-15

Note: Open to the public

Let’s also put the preamble to the Constitution at the head of the waterboard, to remind the interrogator and the prisoner that we the people paid for the board and the straps. We the people sanction this act. We the people want you to suffer.

That’s the astonishing thing about a democracy: citizens actually take responsibility for what their government does. Either we’re not a democracy any longer, or we could be the first democratic republic in history to torture people systematically. Take your pick. Theocrats, autocrats, and tyrants don’t make any apologies about torture. You have to give the medieval church’s inquisitors this much: they burned their heretics in public. The inquisitors wanted others to hear their victims’ screams as they died. To intimidate people, you have to tolerate a certain amount of public suffering. But then, the inquisitors didn’t pretend to be democrats.

Don’t believe all the reasons government officials give to justify their secret actions. Our representatives in government aren’t different from the rest of us. They can’t claim special privileges, exemptions, or rights to privacy on the presumption that these things are necessary to accomplish their work. If they can’t accomplish the work in public, they should not undertake it. Only one exception exists: real time military information about troop movements, battle plans and the like.

We all swim in the same ocean. Most of us work in cubicles, where we can’t make a phone call without being overheard. We deal with issues of privacy on the internet, off the internet, in our families, with our friends, where we work, and in our public affairs. People in government, from the president on down, serve under the same constraints. For public servants in a democracy, our default assumption is that information must be open, not confidential. In the national security state, we have flipped that position: information is confidential unless you can show a good reason that it should be public.

The United States government’s whole system of classifying information is an abomination for a democracy. The practice of stamping every document with its classification originated in the military and intelligence agencies, and permeated every other part of government. “That’s classified,” became the government’s stock response for anything it didn’t want to reveal. Acting and communicating in secret became a habit. The classification system became the government’s ring of Gyges.

You can get away with a lot when you’re invisible. The government claims that to protect us, it has to act under a cloak of secrecy. Now we’ve seen what the country does for the sake of national security. It undertakes illegal wars, sets up secret prison camps, and turns prisoners over to foreign powers for torture. It puts a leash around a beaten man’s neck to drag him around a concrete floor. It piles naked bodies into pyramids. It detains and demeans people, kidnaps them, mutilates and burns them. It waterboards them, electrocutes them, forces them to perform sexual acts before prison guards, sets dogs on them, hangs them on rings in a wall until they asphyxiate, or just shoots them. Then it claims that it’s all an aberration – Americans don’t do things like that.

We know the truth. We commit those acts. Until we remove our government’s ring of anonymity and secrecy, we will always commit them.

Julian Assange, Wikileaks and the New York Times

The New York Times just published another article based on a trove of documents it received from Wikileaks. This one details diplomatic efforts to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. As usual, the Times is happy to trumpet the special access it has to Wikileaks documents as it publishes another extraordinary scoop.

How does the Times benefit so much from its special access to Wikileaks, but it doesn’t do anything to defend Julian Assange against the United States government’s threats and invective? In fact, it joins the government’s drive to discredit Assange. The Times highlights all the accusations and bad news it can find about Assange – the rape charges, the blood on his hands, the indiscriminate revelation of state secrets – as if he ought to be thrown in jail. It publishes long pieces about Wikileaks that make Assange look like a treasonous, intemperate freak. Then it publishes another big scoop based on documents that Wikileaks has turned over to the Times.

What explains the Times‘ double dealing? I don’t have special access to the Times‘ editorial decisions, but it looks like the paper gladly benefits from Wikileaks’ disclosures, even as it avoids Washington’s displeasure by publishing every negative item it can about Assange. How craven can you get?

So far the Times has kept the government at bay, kept Assange on the suspect list, and kept itself in the limelight. It eagerly publishes articles that would be impossible without Wikileaks’ support. How could the Times help overturn the government’s compulsive dictate to keep practically every communication except its propaganda secret? What would it do if it actually wanted to break the government’s secrecy habit?

First, it would give Julian Assange a break. Make him a hero despite his faults and explain why his efforts are invaluable if we want to keep our democracy. It would stop its unattractive effort to make him look bad.
Second, it would challenge the government to make so-called secret communications available on the government’s own websites. We shouldn’t have to wait for Wikileaks to publish them. The information does not belong to the government. It belongs to us.
Third, it would support Bradley Manning and other brave individuals who sacrifice their freedom to release information that the government should release on its own account. We may not see them as heroes now, but we will.

Do you think the Times has courage to take these steps? I don’t.

Poo Poo Head School Administration

Parents seek removal of book containing language they blame for 6-year-old son’s school suspension

Is this an Only in America story?

Six-year-old boy calls a girl in his class a poo poo head.
Brown Elementary School in Channelview, Texas, suspends the boy for one day for unacceptable language.
The boy’s mother discovers later that a book from the school’s library, The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby, has the same language in it. She rightly asks the school, how can my son be suspended for using the same language that students can read in one of your library books? She requests the book be removed from the shelves.
Brown Elementary forms a committee to study the matter. The school’s response:

The review process will involve the appointment of a committee to determine the appropriateness of the material in question. School district policy also states that access to the challenged material shall not be restricted during the reconsideration process.

Now you have to ask here, where did the school go wrong: when it allowed The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby in the library, or when it suspended a student for calling a classmate poo poo head? You’d want a teacher to correct a student who calls someone else a name, but a suspension?

Rather than remove the library book, let Brown Elementary form a committee to discuss the following resolution:

Whereas the school district’s policy on name calling – which mandates a one-day suspension for all violators – is a poo poo head policy, Brown elementary requests that the district pardon Johnny and vacate last year’s one-day suspension. Until the district reaches its determination, Johnny’s permanent record will not reflect the punishment administered.

Oh, and perhaps Johnny should apologize to his classmate, which he probably couldn’t do the first time around because he was suspended.

Vermin

Tonight as I drove home I thought I’d check the AM radio band to see if I could pick up the seventh game of the World Series. Instead I landed on Michael Savage’s talk radio show. I had heard of Michael Savage, but I had not heard him speak. He spoke about the Occupy Wall Street protesters. I cannot repeat all that he said, but I can say that his words were profoundly immoral and malevolent. Profoundly immoral and malevolent define evil.

Again and again, Savage called the protesters vermin. In case anyone might misunderstand him, or think he spoke figuratively for effect, he pronounced them rats who must be cleared from the gutter. He said they deserved to be beaten with police batons for their beliefs and their behavior. He spoke with more contempt for his fellow humans than I have ever heard anyone speak before. In fact, Savage does not regard the protesters as human. Therefore, he suggested, we should not treat them as such.

People who have heard Michael Savage know how he speaks. If you have not heard him, you cannot imagine it. You have not heard a man express vile hate in words or tone so even and deliberate. He actually wove discussion of Christian values into his thoughts, as he considered whether Jesus would have joined the protesters on Wall Street. His conclusion: no, Jesus would not, because Jesus was not a Communist. Case closed.

We are familiar with malevolence from Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney. They skillfully express their hate in a kind of understated, slightly euphemistic language that seeks a sympathetic reaction in their listeners. Savage’s speech is more direct and consequently more obscene. You cannot express hatred and repugnance, cold hatred for fellow humans, without becoming repugnant yourself. If you swim in an ocean of hate, you will yourself become hateful.

I’d like to clarify one thing. I don’t respond to Savage this way because I agree with the protesters’ political aims. I do not think their ideas about how to mollify their anger or right their grievances are helpful. Their ideas do not lead in a direction that is attractive, promising, or constructive. I do admire their courage and commitment. I do believe we must use our public spaces to speak up, to challenge fellow citizens to participate, to object vigorously to institutions that have become plainly corrupt.

More observers say now that the United States no longer has the shared consensus that a democracy requires. Here is Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal:

But there is a broad fear out there that we are coming apart, or rather living through the moment we’ll look back on as the beginning of the Great Coming Apart. Economic crisis, cultural stresses: “Half the country isn’t speaking to the other half,” a moderate Democrat said the other day. She was referring to liberals of her acquaintance who know little of the South and who don’t wish to know of it, who write it off as apart from them, maybe beneath them.

Magnify those sentiments of contempt in the last sentence a hundred fold, and you have Michael Savage, except the targets of his contempt are young people from across the country who cannot find work, or who observed the huge fraud committed by Wall Street financiers and saw them get away with it, saw them paid off with our tax money no less. When you hate someone that much, you don’t feel any obligation to figure out why so many protesters have joined this movement. You just want the offensive detritus removed.

Compare the way Savage speaks of the protesters with the way the protesters speak of Wall Street financiers. The protesters don’t like the financiers or what they have done, but the protesters don’t regard them as sub-human rats who deserve to be beaten with police batons. No citizen of a healthy democracy would ever adopt a stance like that toward a fellow citizen.

Savage says the protesters threaten America, a Savage nation he loves. They do threaten his beloved vision. The protesters cherish an America where Michael Savage speaks his mind, and we ignore him. Michael Savage cherishes an America where we unite with him in contempt for people he chooses to hate, where police beat people who do not please him, where no target of his contempt would ever be safe.

Censorship By the Back Door

We value free speech in the our country. The First Amendment has a hallowed place in our homes next to apple pie a la mode and our parents. When anything threatens our family or our favorite dessert, we react vigorously. The same goes for our civil and political rights.

Now we see attempts to erode those rights not through overt acts of censorship, but through backdoor methods where the government does not even acknowledge its actions. It uses its ability to regulate financial institutions to control what people can publish. It knows it cannot attack First Amendment rights head on, so it figures out sneaky methods to accomplish the same ends.

News about the latest example of this kind of censorship comes via Mark Coker, head of Smashwords and advocate for independent authors and publishers. Authors use Smashwords to publish and distribute ebooks through all the various channels that have developed during the last few years. PayPal is the platform’s primary payment processor. PayPal instructed Smashwords to remove certain kinds of content from its site, or lose its business relationship with PayPal. For details, see Mark Coker’s updates on the issue at the Smashwords press room.

Now, why would a payment processor care about the content of the books available at Smashwords? The fact is, it doesn’t. PayPal says it must comply with rules that credit card companies and banks have promulgated. Banks and credit card companies don’t care about ebook content any more than PayPal does. The people who care about ebook content are public servants, paid to protect First Amendment rights, who use their regulatory authority over financial institutions to take away those rights. Essentially, they arrogate to themselves the role of morality police, and use their regulatory authority to control ebook content by whatever means they can find.

The invisible moralists for Smashwords are not payment processors. The moralists are people who regulate the payment processors. When PayPal refers to compliance with existing rules, they do not refer to rules that PayPal, credit card companies, or banks make themselves. PayPal refers to rules that grow out of new post-crash legislation designed to stipulate what banks and payment processors can and cannot do. In the uncertain, clamp-down atmosphere that Dodd-Frank created, payment processors do not care to take chances. They do not want to provoke displeasure in their federal masters.

To take another example of First Amendment rights under attack, government used its tight grip on payment processors to shut down Wikileaks in 2010. The technique worked extremely well. In just a few days, it strangled off the flow of donations to Wikileaks. It threatened companies who process those donations, and they immediately buckled. The whole operation took about two weeks. Now regulators look around to find other groups they can strangle. Authors who write about immoral acts look like good targets. Few stood up for Wikileaks when so-called patriots urged that Julian Assange be prosecuted as a traitor and a spy. The government counts on the same hesitation to defend people who write about immoral sexual acts. Who will speak up for them?

The government figures that anyone who stands up for literary accounts of rape and other sexual crimes is going to lose. Their aim is to isolate, regulate, and attenuate a targeted group’s ability to resist. First federal regulators targeted the publisher of leaked military reports and diplomatic cables in the Wikileaks case. Now they a small group of fiction writers with the same confidence and power. If you are a regulator who wants to enforce your idea of what people can read, you’ll go after people who can’t rally much support.

The morality police go after people who can’t rally support, because others are afraid to stand up for them. First the government went after the whistleblowers. I wasn’t a whistleblower, so I let it go. Then they went after the Occupy protesters, but I wasn’t camping out with the Occupy movement, so I let it go. Still later they went after authors, pornographers, publishers and bloggers who violate community standards of decency. I wasn’t an author, pornographer, publisher or blogger, so I let it go. In they end they came after me, but no one was around anymore to stand up for me.

That is how we lost our democracy.

Star and Stripes Forever

A few nights ago, I attended a Boston Pops concert. It had a patriotic theme, and ended with John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever. As the march hit its stride, a huge flag unfurled on the stage over the musicians. Members of the audience responded enthusiastically. The person next to me made a remark about how patriotism felt different when we were younger, to which I responded, “The music is good.”

How can we restore our flag’s significance? Strip it from all government buildings and installations, including military installations and national parks. If the government wants a symbol, let it hoist a strip of soiled toilet paper. Strip the government of the legitimacy and honor it receives because it wears a symbol that doesn’t belong to it. This exchange of symbols, the red white and blue for soiled toilet paper, would remind us all that the government acts for itself, not for us. Young men and women would not want to volunteer to fight for it anymore. People would recognize what a parasite it has become, a tapeworm in our bowel. We would have our wedding ring back.