NPR Incoherently Lashes Out at “Free Speech”

Matt Taibbi's latest article, with which I completely agree: "NPR Trashes Free Speech. A Brief Response: In an irony only public radio could miss, "On the Media" hosts an hour on the perils of "free speech absolutism" without interviewing a defender of free speech." An excerpt:

The guests for NPR’s just-released On The Media episode about the dangers of free speech included Andrew Marantz, author of an article called, “Free Speech is Killing Us”; P.E. Moskowitz, author of “The Case Against Free Speech”; Susan Benesch, director of the “Dangerous Speech Project”; and Berkeley professor John Powell, whose contribution was to rip John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech in On Liberty as “wrong.”

That’s about right for NPR, which for years now has regularly congratulated itself for being a beacon of diversity while expunging every conceivable alternative point of view.

I always liked Brooke Gladstone, but this episode of On The Media was shockingly dishonest. The show was a compendium of every neo-authoritarian argument for speech control one finds on Twitter, beginning with the blanket labeling of censorship critics as “speech absolutists” (most are not) and continuing with shameless revisions of the history of episodes like the ACLU’s mid-seventies defense of Nazi marchers at Skokie, Illinois.

The essence of arguments made by all of NPR’s guests is that the modern conception of speech rights is based upon John Stuart Mill’s outdated conception of harm, which they summarized as saying, “My freedom to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose.”

Because, they say, we now know that people can be harmed by something other than physical violence, Mill (whose thoughts NPR overlaid with harpsichord music, so we could be reminded how antiquated they are) was wrong, and we have to recalibrate our understanding of speech rights accordingly.

This was already an absurd and bizarre take, but what came next was worse. I was stunned by Marantz and Powell’s take on Brandenburg v. Ohio, our current legal standard for speech, which prevents the government from intervening except in cases of incitement to “imminent lawless action”:

"MARANTZ: Neo-Nazi rhetoric about gassing Jews, that might inflict psychological harm on a Holocaust survivor, but as long as there’s no immediate incitement to physical violence, the government considers that protected… The village of Skokie tried to stop the Nazis from marching, but the ACLU took the case to the Supreme Court, and the court upheld the Nazis’ right to march.

POWELL: The speech absolutists try to say, “You can’t regulate speech…” Why? “Well, because it would harm the speaker. It would somehow truncate their expression and their self-determination.” And you say, okay, what’s the harm? “Well, the harm is, a psychological harm.” Wait a minute, I thought you said psychological harms did not count?"

This is not remotely accurate as a description of what happened in Skokie. People like eventual ACLU chief Ira Glasser and lawyer David Goldberger had spent much of the sixties fighting the civil rights movement. The entire justification of these activists and lawyers — Jewish activists and lawyers, incidentally, who despised what neo-Nazi plaintiff Frank Collin stood for — was based not upon a vague notion of preventing “psychological harm,” but on a desire to protect minority rights . . . .

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If you are wondering whether Taibbi is accurately portraying this NPR discussion, I invite you to listen to it here. NPR's conversation is stunningly muddled and incoherent. None of the guests show any meaningful familiarity with the work of John Stuart Mill. None of the participants demonstrate a working understanding of the First Amendment or the case law interpreting it. The result is that most of the discussion is aimed at straw men. And fully in line with what NPR has done, it stirred in a discussion of the "implicit bias" test in this free speech discussion, the perfect cherry on top for NPR's increasingly woke audience. This is what passes for a meaningful discussion at NPR.

Continue ReadingNPR Incoherently Lashes Out at “Free Speech”

FIRE launches Faculty Legal Defense Fund to Defend Faculty Members for Engaging in Constitutionally Protected Speech

Scholars in higher education who were targeted for their expression have quadrupled since 2015. In response, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education ("FIRE") has launched its Faculty Legal Defense Fund to defend faculty members under attack for engaging in constitutionally protected speech. The FLDF provides free legal assistance to faculty at public colleges and universities across the country. I am proud to be one of the attorneys who will be working with FIRE on this effort.

A new report from FIRE shows an alarming 74% success rate for campaigns targeting collegiate scholars for their constitutionally protected speech — and the data suggest the worst is yet to come.

What is the focus of this effort? "Targeting Incidents," which are defined as follows:

We define a targeting incident as a campus controversy involving efforts to investigate, penalize or otherwise professionally sanction a scholar for engaging in constitutionally protected forms of speech. Our definition of a targeting incident does not include instances in which the scholar is subjected to harassment or other forms of intimidation, but does not face an attempt at being professionally penalized or sanctioned. Nor does it include cases where the individual(s) or group(s) expresses opposition to a scholar’s speech, but does not make any demands that the scholar and/or institution take action to remedy the situation.

Universities that are more likely to violate the rights of their faculty are those who have not adopted "The Chicago Statement":

Because the University is committed to free and open inquiry in all matters, it guarantees all members of the University community the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn . . . . [I]t is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.

—Excerpt from the Chicago Statement

Continue ReadingFIRE launches Faculty Legal Defense Fund to Defend Faculty Members for Engaging in Constitutionally Protected Speech

About Police Officers Aggressively Talking to Strangers. Why This has been Encouraged and What Can Go Wrong.

Matt Taibbi has reviewed Malcom Gladwell's book, published in 2019, prior to the George Floyd incdent. The title of Gladwell's book is Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know. Taibbi's article is "The Overlooked Factors in Police Abuse CasesCops take most of the blame, often deservedly, but the single-minded media furor of the last year has let other bad actors off the hook." Taibbi cautions that when things go wrong between police and those who identify as black, it's often about far more than race, and we need to consider the role of the politicians who encourage these frequent contacts between police and strangers. Sometimes, as in Ferguson, what is motivating these contacts is for profit policing.

Gladwell’s point seems to be that if you ask police to stop millions of cars and pedestrians, and instruct them to look for pretexts to conduct searches of all of them, police will override their “default to truth” and begin to see threats in innocent people everywhere. He’s trying to be understanding about scenes like the Encinia video, by asking readers to look at the policy context underneath that car stop.

The backdrop of the Ferguson, Missouri case, for instance, involved the strained finances of the city. As the Justice Department later found, “City officials routinely urge [police] to generate more revenue through enforcement,” which meant busting people not just for breaking the law but violating municipal order codes...

Individual police got most of the blame, and in some cases deserved it, but it’s politicians desperate for revenue or lower crime numbers who artificially heighten stranger contacts, jack up numbers of bogus summonses and tickets, and push people like Brian Encinia to fudge pretexts for thousands if not millions of stops and searches.

A percentage of those encounters will always go wrong, and when they do, it’s not always all about racism. It’s usually also about political stupidity, greed, and laziness, and a host of other problems our habit of reaching for simplistic explanations prevents us from understanding. Saying it’s all about race or white supremacy isn’t just inaccurate, it lets bad actors off the hook — especially city politicians and their upscale yuppie donors who vote for these interventionist policies, and are all too happy to see badge-wearing social janitors from middle-class towns in Long Island or Westchester take the rap when things go bad.

Gladwell concludes that “Sandra Bland is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers,” but I think that doesn’t put it strongly enough. Bland is what happens when police spend too much time talking to strangers, and when the rest of us talk too little about why that is.

Gladwell opens the above talk (regarding his book) with this:

I wanted to talk a little bit about it a paradox about human communication which i think is extremely important and relatively under-recognized and that is that everything that is good and meaningful and powerful about a human communication has a price as it turns out I think the price is worth paying but I think sometimes we overlook the consequences of the fact that there is this particular consequence to effective communication.
The following excerpt is from a summary of Gladwell's book.
The problem at the heart of the two puzzles is that people assume that they can make sense of others based on relatively simple strategies. But when it comes to strangers, nothing is as simple as it seems.

There are three major strategies that people use to make sense of strangers:

People default to truth. People assume transparency. People neglect coupled behaviors.

These three strategies ultimately fail because they operate under the assumption that simple clues are enough evidence of a stranger’s internal thoughts or intentions. We will look at each of these strategies separately to see where they came from and why they often result in failed interactions with strangers.

Continue ReadingAbout Police Officers Aggressively Talking to Strangers. Why This has been Encouraged and What Can Go Wrong.

Ben Franklin: It’s “a Republic, if you can keep it.”

On September 17, 1787, as delegates left the Constitutional Convention in Independence Hall, Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government do we have?

"A Republic," he replied, "if you can keep it."

I am stunned at the willingness of many on the political left to ignore the First Amendment out of convenience when it comes to their favorite issues. As I predicted several days ago, the ACLU has been silent. Many of us who used to fear government censorship are publicly warming up to that idea.  In recent days, Glenn Greenwald has commented repeatedly. For example:

Those who remember the recent past the federal government be able to declare and enforce its version of the "truth" re COVID.  Here's a few examples:

There is apparently something in the water that is causing Americans to become obtuse, unable to understand their own history, their own government and nuance. Many people who hear my opinions of these topics accuse me of liking it when malevolent and stupid people kill other people by spreading lies about COVID.  They think I like it when harmful false ideas are spread through social media. Many of them are proud Americans who wave flags and celebrate the Fourth of July, but they don't understand the function and power of the First Amendment and free speech (the latter of which is a broader issue). It's as though they don't understand that many truths are complex, making them unendingly imperfect and tentative. It's as though they don't understand that by allowing the marketplace of ideas to run its course, we will be in the best position to understand what is going on around us on every topic and every issue. It's as though they want to completely trust a government that excels in spewing out lies, year after year, administration after administration.

Is it too much to ask that Americans understand their own Constitution before willingly shredding parts of it?

Continue ReadingBen Franklin: It’s “a Republic, if you can keep it.”