Imagine sailing into the azure waters of Hawaii, the land of aloha, only to be greeted not just by swaying palms and ukulele strums, but by government-mandated posters on your cruise ship proclaiming the state's latest eco-tax triumph. Sounds like a bad dream? Well, welcome to the nightmare of Act 96, Hawaii's so-called "Green Fee" law, which doesn't just slap a hefty surcharge on cruise passengers—it's also forcing cruise lines to become unwilling billboards for the state's dubious revenue scheme.

This latest Hawaiian escapade isn't just unconstitutional; it's a tropical twist on the kind of compelled speech that would make even the most zealous censor blush. Let's break it down, because the devil is in the details, and in this case, the details are drowning in a sea of First Amendment violations.

Act 96, set to kick in on January 1, 2026, imposes an 11% surcharge on the prorated gross fares of cruise ships docking in Hawaiian ports, with counties piling on another 3% for good measure. That's potentially hundreds of millions in new fees over the next decade, funneled not toward actual port services (which cruise lines already pay for handsomely), but into general "green" projects like climate initiatives.

The Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA), along with local businesses that rely on tourism, has sued in federal court, arguing the fee violates the Tonnage Clause (which bars states from taxing ships just for showing up) and the Rivers and Harbors Act (a federal law designed to keep waterways free from such tolls). But here's the speech-chilling kicker: To enforce this mess, Hawaii requires cruise operators to plaster notices about compliance on every ship and slip similar disclaimers into every advertisement for Hawaii-bound voyages.

Compelled speech? In paradise? Aloha means hello and goodbye, but apparently, it also means "shut up and say what we tell you." The First Amendment has long protected against this exact brand of government puppeteering. As the Supreme Court reminded us in Wooley v. Maynard (1977), you can't force someone to be a "mobile billboard" for an ideological message they disagree with—like those New Hampshire license plates blaring "Live Free or Die."

More recently, in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra (2018), the Court struck down California's attempt to make crisis pregnancy centers advertise for abortion services, calling it an "unduly burdensome" intrusion on speech. And let's not forget the Ninth Circuit's en banc smackdown in American Beverage Association v. City and County of San Francisco (2019), where soda companies successfully fought a mandate to warn about sugary drinks on their ads. The court held that compelled commercial speech must be "reasonably related" to a substantial government interest—and if that interest is bogus, the whole house of cards collapses.

That's precisely what's happening here. Hawaii's "interest" in these disclosures? Administering a fee regime that's rotten to the core, built on constitutional quicksand. If the underlying surcharge is invalid—as the lawsuit convincingly argues—then the state has zero legitimate stake in forcing private companies to promote it. It's like making a restaurant post signs saying, "We're complying with our illegal health code violations—bon appétit!" The notices don't just inform; they compel cruise lines to endorse the state's narrative, turning every ship deck and ad campaign into a propaganda platform for a tax grab disguised as environmental virtue-signaling.

Critics might say, "Come on, it's just a notice—harmless disclosure." But that's the slippery slope of speech suppression. Start with forcing businesses to parrot tax compliance, and soon you're mandating ideological disclaimers on everything from hotel brochures to airline tickets. Hawaii, of all places, should know better. This is a state that prides itself on cultural openness and natural beauty, yet here it is, leveraging its island monopoly to bully out-of-state visitors and businesses.

The irony is thicker than poi: In the name of protecting the environment, Hawaii is polluting the marketplace of ideas, compelling speech that could deter tourism and hurt local economies. CLIA's members, who bring nearly 300,000 visitors annually and pump over $600 million into the state, aren't anti-green; they're anti-government overreach. And the local plaintiffs—like Honolulu Ship Supply and Aloha Anuenue Tours—stand to lose big if cruises reroute to friendlier shores.

This isn't just about cruises; it's a symptom of a broader affliction where governments treat the First Amendment like an optional luau accessory. We've seen it on campuses, where speech codes silence dissent in the name of "safety," and now it's washing up on Hawaii's beaches. If states can force companies to advertise their own unconstitutional schemes, what's next? Mandating oil companies to post climate warnings on gas pumps? Forcing tech firms to disclaimer their "addictive" algorithms? The Framers didn't enshrine free speech to let bureaucrats play ventriloquist with private entities.

The federal court in Hawaii should act swiftly to enjoin Act 96's speech mandates, reminding the state that the Constitution isn't a suggestion—it's the law of the land, even in paradise. Striking this down wouldn't just protect cruise lines; it would reaffirm a core principle: Government can tax and regulate, but it can't conscript your voice to do its dirty work. Otherwise, the aloha spirit risks becoming just another compelled slogan, fading into the sunset of forgotten freedoms.

Imagine a man who overcame poverty and serious illness to become an accomplished legal scholar and federal judge. Admired across ideological lines, he has developed a reputation for fairness, a strong sense of duty, and a commitment to mentoring disadvantaged youth. He also teaches law students in his spare time.

That’s the real story of Judge John Badalamenti, a respected jurist and educator. Yet in a recent article, the New York Times cast him in a far darker light, in a story under the deeply misleading headline: “A White Nationalist at University of Florida Wrote a Paper Promoting Racist Views. It Won Him an Award.”

The article by Richard Fausset goes beyond the presentation of facts and deals instead in innuendo and imputation—speculating, without evidence, that Judge Badalamenti sympathized with the views expressed in a controversial student paper simply because the paper received a high grade in his seminar.

Perhaps because the story is set at the University of Florida–thanks to its association with conservative figures like Ron DeSantis and Ben Sasse, a lightning rod for the culture war debates about the future of higher ed–the Times can’t help itself but to contort routine academic evaluation with ideological endorsement, in ways that have already had serious consequences for Badalamenti’s reputation, not to mention his safety.

Academic standards vs. ideological assumptions

The story centers on a paper submitted by University of Florida law student Preston Damsky in Badalamenti’s seminar on originalism, a method of constitutional interpretation focused on the text’s original public meaning. The paper argued that the phrase “We the People” in the Constitution’s preamble originally referred only to white Americans, and from this premise derived an argument for exclusionary immigration policies.

The paper’s conclusions are extreme and controversial. But as constitutional law professor Josh Blackman and others have pointed out, the academic criteria for grading law school papers are separate from the personal views expressed therein. These criteria include historical grounding, analytical rigor, and citation integrity. On those grounds, Blackman found the paper technically sound, if imperfect: “Probably a B+ or maybe an A- if I was feeling generous,” he wrote in an independent analysis.

This independent assessment of Damsky’s paper illustrates that law students–whatever their political views may be–are graded based on their ability to make arguments, analyze scholarship, and accurately deploy legal precedent. Damsky earned a high grade because Badalamenti, an eminent legal scholar, believed he met those requirements. Moreover, the book award he received is a common honor in law school routinely awarded to the student with the highest overall score in a seminar.

The Times piece implies that Badalamenti selected Damsky for special recognition because he was sympathetic to the ideology underlying the arguments in this specific paper. That implication is blatantly deceptive. “Fausset obviously has no idea how law school seminars are graded, and made no effort to learn,” Blackman added.

Nothing in the evidence presented suggests that Badalamenti offered the award because he found the paper’s views admirable. In fact, the interim dean of the University of Florida Law School, Merritt McAlister, explicitly confirmed that Badalamenti “took the paper on its face—as a student paper attempting to use originalist methodology to reach a detestable and extreme position.” More importantly, McAlister explained that:

The paper’s views also in no way reflect the views of the professor in this course. The professor had no knowledge of this student’s history at the law school or his deeply held personal views.

Badalamenti’s other students have said the same thing. "I am beyond certain from my time spent with Judge Badalamenti that he grades papers as impartially as any human possibly could,” one student said, “even if he has to hold his nose at some of the views espoused to recognize a well written, researched, and organized paper …”

This kind of detachment is not only common in academia—it’s vital. Grading ideas you disagree with is a core part of academic discourse and undergirds academic freedom. Several former students of Badalamenti attested that he took this obligation seriously and evaluated work impartially.

Misleading implications

A more troubling omission in the Times article is the timeline. Crucially, Damsky’s personal views did not surface on social media until February 2025, with the most egregious statements appearing in March 2025. Badalamenti graded his paper, two months earlier, in December 2024. The Times cites Damsky’s social media comments but omits this timeline, allowing readers to falsely infer that Badalamenti knowingly rewarded a white supremacist who was making inflammatory public statements. This omission is hard to defend as a mere oversight and looks more like a deliberate choice to sensationalize the story and fuel outrage.

That’s not just misleading—it risks undermining the very norms of fair and responsible reporting that journalists have long held sacred. At a bare minimum, the Times owed its readers simple clarity on the facts. Blackman’s own conclusion was more stark. The Times piece “represents the worst of modern-day advocacy journalism,” he noted.

Reputation and context

Perhaps more importantly, the Times piece ignores essentially everything we know about Badalamenti. The judge is a distinguished legal expert whose career is marked by high-quality scholarship and bipartisan respect. A former federal public defender, he has successfully argued a case before the Supreme Court. His seminar on originalism, co-taught at the University of Florida, attracted top scholars and jurists, including the entire Florida Supreme Court and Eleventh Circuit judges, reflecting his stature in the legal community.

Moreover, Badalamenti’s personal history unequivocally refutes any suggestion that he sympathizes with white supremacy. He serves as a mentor to young African American boys through his work with Gentlemen’s Quest, a nonprofit helping high-risk high school students gain college access. According to the organization’s website, he is the only white member of its board. His Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire further highlights his volunteer work mentoring inner-city middle school students in Tampa, Florida.

These are not incidental facts or fluff. In light of the Times’ highly inflammatory characterization, they are crucial context—and their exclusion does a disservice to readers seeking a fair and complete understanding.

A broader concern

Leaks from the Times internal battles over the extent to which its journalism should be driven by political advocacy have created their own headlines in recent years. This is the same paper that allowed its reporting staff to force a seasoned editor out of his job for publishing an op-ed by a Republican senator.

So perhaps it’s unsurprising that the real target of the Badalamenti hit seems to be originalism itself. The Times mentions the conservative-coded judicial philosophy multiple times throughout the piece, including in the very first line of the article. The term is always used to tie Badalamenti’s seminar to Damsky’s fringe views, suggesting that originalism itself is inherently flawed or sympathetic to racism. Other major news outlets framed their coverage the same way. “Originalism’s flaws include its racist underpinnings,” another recent headline averred.

Blackman predicts that the consequence of this piece will be that other originalist scholars may avoid teaching altogether to avoid reputational damage—as well as the credible death threats Badalamenti received. This would deny future lawyers any exposure to a legal philosophy that has profoundly influenced American jurisprudence. “Make no mistake, this is a feature, and not a bug about these attacks on originalism,” Blackman concluded.

A final word

None of this is to suggest that hate speech or bigotry should be ignored or minimized. But in our concern about extremism, we should be equally careful not to abandon basic principles of fairness and evidence-based reporting. The article in question invites readers to draw grave conclusions based on flimsy innuendo and outright distortion rather than fact—and in doing so, it has unfairly smeared a person whose actions, viewed in context, reflect professional integrity and an educator’s commitment to open discourse.

The Times can and should do better. So should we all.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed a troubling streak in the science community: a willingness to tolerate and even celebrate censorship, all in the name of protecting the public from “misinformation.” Now, as the dust settles, some of those same voices are rewriting history, denying that censorship ever took place—a shameless attempt to manipulate us into forgetting the very clampdowns they once applauded.

This isn’t just hypocrisy; it’s a direct assault on the free speech and open inquiry that science needs to thrive. The same crowd that once crowed about silencing dissent now wants us to believe it was all a fever dream, and that’s a problem we can’t let slide.

Science goes authoritarian

Think back to 2020. As SARS-CoV-2 spread, so did ideas: some sharp, some shaky and others downright kooky (e.g. vaccines are “spike protein bioweapons”). During this time, the lab-leak hypothesis, along with debates about the efficacy of masking and various early treatment candidates swirled online—that is, until public-health officials drunk on their newfound power undertook massive, and often successful, campaigns to shut those conversations down.

Rather than engage the public and address their concerns about the pandemic response, many scientists and their allies in academia cheered as tech giants like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube swung the banhammer at anyone who challenged the official narrative.

In fact, the science community routinely complained that the platforms were too lax in their efforts to censor contrarian perspectives, because “misinfo” (more on that loaded word below) was circulating between social media sites. For example, commenting on YouTube's October 2021 decision to tighten its moderation policies, a “misinformation researcher” at the University of California, Berkeley, complained to the Washington Post that “We had 18 months to think about these issues … why was this not [YouTube's] policy from the very beginning?”

The prestigious academic journal Nature made an even stronger case for censorship in April 2020, declaring that scientists had an obligation to help enforce online speech restrictions. “Researchers and policymakers can — and must — make sure social-media companies identify, implement and evaluate ways to curtail the spread of dangerous misinformation,” the article asserted.

Not to be outdone, the journal Science explicitly endorsed a proposal to kick certain accounts off Facebook in 2021 because they were key sources of mis- and disinformation. Quoting the Orwell-inspired Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), Science declared that “Banning these 'superspreaders' could reduce the amount of misinformation significantly.” The vibe? Censorship wasn’t just okay—it was science’s trusty sidekick.

Some media scholars even suggested at one point that the federal government hire 10,000 internet librarians to curate the content people access online—yes, literal digital hall monitors to flood your timeline with pre-approved content. “Their work would be similar to the public interest obligation already applied to radio,” said Joan Donovan, a researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School “...[W]e legally require broadcasting serve the public interest, convenience, and necessity as a condition of having access to the airwaves. Social media companies should tune into the frequency of democracy, rather than the static of disinformation.”

Backdoor internet censorship

We know the US came perilously close to enacting this authoritarian policy thanks to documents contained in the Twitter files, released by journalist Matt Taibbi after Elon Musk purchased Twitter (X). Discovery material from a lawsuit brought against the federal government, Missouri v Biden, also exposed the administration’s efforts to censor the internet by proxy via the social media platforms. A coalition of executive agencies, state-funded NGOs and universities were actively working to erode First Amendment protections in the name of public health.

Screenshot from the Fifth Circuit ruling in Missouri v Biden

In an ironic twist, one of the plaintiffs in that case, Dr. Jay Bhattahcharya, is now serving as director of the NIH, America’s premiere biomedical research institution. Under Bhattahcharya’s leadership, the federal health bureaucracy will almost certainly abandon its efforts to regulate social media. But his experiences during the pandemic confirmed just how censorious his scientific colleagues can be.

Censorship, what censorship?

Fast forward to 2025. With all this evidence readily available, the same censorship cheerleaders in science are pulling a U-turn. Dissenting views weren't suppressed during the pandemic, they claim, because there was lots of contrarian content splashed across the internet throughout the COVID-19 era. Here's a typical example of this disingenuous rhetoric from microbiologist Alex Crits-Christoph, a prominent critic of the idea that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak.

This claim requires a level of denial no self-respecting scientist should even flirt with. Crits-Christoph can count as many articles as he likes, but we know social media platforms like Facebook had explicit policies that prohibited open discussion of the lab leak hypothesis. That policy was only rescinded in 2021 when the Biden Administration ordered US intelligence agencies to seriously investigate the lab-leak hypothesis. Not only does that confirm the policy's existence, it means Facebook was crafting its moderation rules around the federal government's preferences—a vindication of the Missouri v Biden plaintiffs.

This denial isn’t just galling—it’s a lie that threatens science itself. Free speech and inquiry aren’t optional extras; they’re the oxygen science breathes. The censors assumed they already had the answers when they clearly did not. For instance, there is now significant evidence–as some experts said at the time–that the lockdowns were a deadly mistake that led to more preventable deaths and wrought devastating economic consequences. But in part because those conversations weren’t allowed to play out naturally, the livelihoods of millions of people were discounted because a few smug gatekeepers in lab coats felt entitled to reorder the world without good evidence that their recommendations would actually stop the virus.

Science needs freedom

The bottom line is that you can’t get to the right answer in science if you assume you already know it and silence anyone who challenges you. Ironically, the very same academics who celebrated censorship during the pandemic suddenly understand the value of free inquiry now that their federal funding is on the DOGE chopping block.

To cite just one example, Scientific American, which in 2020 endorsed “an aggressive” government campaign “to remove markedly false information” from social media, has found its First Amendment bona fides in 2025. In a March 31 article opposing Trump Administration cuts to federal science funding, the magazine quoted an open letter from 1,900 scientists which complained that:

The quest for truth—the mission of science—requires that scientists freely explore new questions and report their findings honestly, independent of special interests. The administration is engaging in censorship, destroying this independence.

Those sentiments are true and noble. Indeed Pluribus has previously blasted efforts to silence scientists who challenge the political establishment. But Scientific American’s fair-weather defense of free inquiry still helps illustrate our point: it’s effectively impossible to do science when the federal government is breathing down your neck, isn’t it?

Conclusion

Science progresses when it’s messy, not managed. The pandemic showed us questions—about vaccines, origins, or lockdown policies—can’t be pre-answered by a self-appointed elite. Free speech lets the fringe breathe, and sometimes, the fringe is right. By cheering censorship then dodging accountability, these scientists don’t just undermine trust; they sabotage their own field’s future, as they’re now learning the hard way. It’s time they quit the revisionism and own the mess—science deserves better than a scrubbed slate.

On June 9 this year, President Biden stopped by the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France during a European trip. This American World War I cemetery in France was skipped by President Trump in 2018 when the weather deteriorated and made flying unsafe. Trump reportedly made disparaging remarks about the veterans buried in the cemetery, charges the president and his campaign vehemently deny.

The New York Times reported President Biden’s June stop at the Aisne-Marne cemetery this way:

There is trolling. And then there is presidential trolling.

President Biden on Sunday wrapped up a five-day visit to France by making a point to visit a cemetery for American soldiers killed in World War I. That, of course, is the kind of thing that presidents typically do.

But this particular cemetery was the same one that President Donald J. Trump was supposed to visit in 2018 before canceling, citing the rain, and touching off a political furor. For Mr. Biden — running against Mr. Trump again — visiting the cemetery was meant to send a message to voters back home.

The “message to voters” was not left up to media reports, however. The very next day, the Biden campaign posted a scathing video on X (Twitter) and Facebook combining footage of Biden’s cemetery visit with harsh commentary from some veterans contrasting Biden’s and Trump’s experiences with the cemetary (including details Trump denies.) The video closes with one veteran’s remark, “A good commander-in-chief is SOMEBODY WHO GIVES A SHIT.” [uppercase in original]

A 2020 Biden ad that also used footage of military gravesites (including a 2010 photo of then vice-president Joe Biden standing at a tombstone in Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery) included a disclaimer that read “The use of U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) visual information does not imply or constitute endorsement of the U.S. military, any military personnel or the Department of Defense.” The disclaimer did not appear with the 2010 photo, however, likely indicating the photo was from a source other than the DoD. The source of the photo remains unclear (other news outlets have been unable to track it down either.)

A New York Times report pointed to the disclaimer as a factor which distinguished the 2020 Biden ad from the Trump campaign’s recent usage of Arlington cemetery footage. However, the June 2024 video posted by the Biden campaign contains no such disclaimer either.

The American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) oversees veterans cemeteries such as Arlington and Aisne-Marne. When asked about the June 2024 Biden footage at Aisne-Marne, a spokesperson for the ABMC told Pluribus:

Official White House visits have not previously required film permits by our agency. Outside of our permitting process, ABMC does not currently have an overarching policy restricting content usage nor do we fall under other federal policies covering sites managed by the Department of Defense. Our film permitting process indicates the following restrictions only:

Applicant agrees that film material and photography taken at the cemetery and/or memorial site may not be used to raise funds or to advertise, market or promote any commercial product, program or service without the express written consent of ABMC, except that applicant shall be entitled to use film material and photography of the cemetery and/or memorial in connection with promoting, advertising and publicizing the program or publication for which filming and/or photography was specified on this application and within the supporting documentation. [emphasis added]

When asked if the White House or the Biden campaign might have filmed the president’s appearance for the Biden campaign video, the spokesperson replied, “As we did not have Public Affairs staff on the ground for that event, I would have to refer you to the White House for that information.” Inquiries to both the White House and the Biden campaign’s (and now the Harris campaign’s) videographer about the source of the video footage have so far gone unanswered.

The Trump Arlington visit at the invitation of some Gold Star families blew up after a reported confrontation between a cemetery official and Trump campaign personnel over where filming was permitted in which the official was allegedly pushed. Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung later said the official was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode,” but denied the pushing accusation. The use of images of the solemn ceremonies at Arlington (including a smiling Donald Trump with veterans’ family members giving his signature thumbs-up over a row of tombstones) also raised objections. While some veterans and families have been critical of Trump, others who have criticized the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 where 13 US service members were killed have expressed appreciation for Trump’s visit and his attention to veterans.

In the wake of the Trump Arlington episode, the American Battle Monuments Commission spokesperson told Pluribus that the ABMC is currently “in the process of reviewing our guidance” regarding filming at cemeteries and memorials.

This year’s DNC convention is being held at Chicago’s United Center, home of the Chicago Bulls and Blackhawks. According to the event map of the United Center provided by the DNC organizers, there are at least 4 pairings of Men/Women restrooms on each level of the center (the “Club level” map is shown below as an example). However, one of the pairings on each floor omits a Women's restroom and includes an "all gender" restroom instead.

Based on this pre-existing map (also the Club level) provided by the United Center on its website, the restrooms labeled "all gender" on the DNC map are usually Women's rooms:

Therefore, the DNC is not simply using the facilities as the United Center usually has them designated, but has made a conscious decision to repurpose some of the Women's rooms & leave the Men's rooms alone.

After being accused of faking her report by a number of Twitter users, Susan Ferrechio posted several follow up tweets explaining that the “press filing center” referenced in her original tweet is not in the main building of the United Center.

Regardless of the exact location of the restrooms to which Ferrechio is referring, the DNC’s own map makes clear that there are more restrooms exclusively designated for men than for women.

The bottom line is that in addition to all the other “firsts” for this year’s Democratic National Convention, this DNC has the distinction of being the first public event in history where the organizers apparently said to themselves, What we really need are more men's rooms than women's!

A nationally known organization with a highly-paid CEO and three-quarters of a billion dollars in net assets publicly feuds with its employees’ union over mass layoffs, all while continuing to rake in new dollars. Sounds like a story the media wouldn’t be able to resist. But in the case of the Southern Poverty Law Center, most did just that. 

SPLC employees first voted to unionize in 2019. When management reached an agreement with the union in 2022, president and CEO Margaret Huang gushed, “This is a proud day for the SPLC — true to our work and true to our values, we are proud to be a unionized organization. SPLC has fought for, supported, and partnered with unions for decades. Union values are in our DNA.”

The honeymoon is over. Earlier in June, the union lashed out on Twitter (X): “Today, @splcenter - an organization with nearly a billion dollars in reserves, given an F rating by CharityWatch for “hoarding” donations  - gutted its staff by a quarter.” 

The union’s broadside continued: “More than 60 SPLC Union members, including five Union stewards and our Union Chair, were informed that they would be losing their jobs. We are devastated for our Union and for our colleagues.. The layoffs of all 16 staff in the Southern Immigrant Freedom Initiative and its office closure will decimate free legal representation to detained immigrants across Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi.”

Their silence on these layoffs is particularly significant given the national media’s incessant and credulous citing of the Southern Poverty Law Center as an expert, reliable source on all things hate-related (as long as the “hate” is coming from one direction, as the org’s Hatewatch makes explicit: “Hatewatch monitors and exposes the activities of the American radical right.” [emphasis added]

One might expect integrity would demand these same reporters cover the turmoil embroiling a favorite source. But one would be wrong. 

Of all the major national media outlets, only Fox News (news and opinion) and the Associated Press have covered the layoffs story thus far. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, CBS News, NBC News, and CNN have completely ignored it. The Washington Post and ABC News ran the Associated Press wire story but have no original reporting on the layoffs, or the union’s charges of “hoarding” donor funds.

This does not mean, however, that the Southern Poverty Law Center has lost its position as a media go-to source. In just the past few weeks, the New York Times cited the SPLC three times, as has NBC News. Searches of major media websites for the past year yield scores of hits for the SPLC. 

Contacted about the lack of coverage the layoffs are receiving, a spokesperson for the SPLC union told Pluribus that they “had inquiries from a number of affiliated reporters” from major news organizations. Most of these inquiries, apparently, were dead ends, producing no additional stories.

The layoff issue has not gone completely unnoticed. Christopher Mathias at The Huffington Post and Talia Jane at The New Republic both wrote articles after the news broke. But in a familiar trope, both articles primarily focused on the right’s reaction to the layoffs: Right-Wingers Rejoice Over Layoffs At Southern Poverty Law Center and MAGA Can’t Stop Celebrating Layoffs at Major Civil Rights Organization, respectively.

And what of the SPLC union’s charges in its tweetstorm? While the SPLC itself has largely been silent about the extent of the cutbacks, the union’s tweets claimed the organization “gutted its staff by a quarter” and that over “60 SPLC Union members” lost their jobs. The SPLC’s 2022 Form 990 reported a total of 469 employees at that time. When Pluribus asked about the apparent discrepancy, the union spokesperson replied:

The number discrepancy has been largely because SPLC has provided very little transparency about the total number. We know that they laid off 61 non-management staff, and estimates for how many management staff has varied, leading us to believe the number could be as high a[s] 100 total staff, including both Union-eligible and non-Union eligible. Our understanding is that our current staffing is significantly lower than 2022; closer to 400. So that 100/400 is where we got our quarter estimate from.

While the union claimed the SPLC has “nearly a billion dollars in reserves,” the actual assets as of the October 31, 2023 financial statements were closer to three-quarters of a billion. The union’s statement about the SPLC’s F rating from the Charity Watch watchdog group is borne out by the non-profit watchdog’s website. The SPLC’s initial rating of a B is reduced to an F because “CharityWatch downgrades to an F rating any charity holding available assets in reserve equal to 5 years or more of its annual budget.”

The bottom line?  This information is readily available and significant by any measure. The press is well aware of what is taking place at the Southern Poverty Law Center. The choice to not report it is deliberate.

Shielding a favored source from embarrassing publicity is a prime example of the bias of omission that plagues much of the traditional media. It is no wonder a growing awareness of this kind of selective reporting has the public seeking alternative sources of news.

On May 16th, the New York Times published a story by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jodi Kantor headlined, “At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display,” declaring that “During Mr. Trump’s quest to win, and then subvert, the 2020 election, the [inverted American flag] gesture took off as never before, becoming ‘really established as a symbol of the ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign[.]’” 

The following day, the Times published a Michael Levenson story, “How Election Deniers Claimed the Upside-Down Flag,” seeking to reinforce the narrative. Kantor (with two co-authors) was back five days later with the news that “Another Provocative Flag Was Flown at Another Alito Home.” The story claimed that “On Jan. 6, the “Appeal to Heaven” [Pine Tree] flag was prominent[.]” 

By the time the third story hit the word had gone out to Times allies and left-of-center media that the flags were A Big Deal. One needn’t be a conspiracy theorist or think the effort was planned and plotted in every last detail to see that a legitimacy-conferring institution like the Times can have powerful signaling and coordinating effects. Look no further than Wikipedia, where as the Free Beacon’s Andrew Kerr pointed out, the Appeal to Heaven flag had gone from noncontroversial to a symbol of Christian nationalism and right-wing extremism in a matter of hours.

But if Kantor and company had used their own newspaper’s contemporaneous reporting to fact-check the new narrative, they’d have come up empty.

To wit, a week after the Jan.6 Capitol riot, the Times published a “Visual Investigation” titled “Decoding the Far-Right Symbols at the Capitol Riot.” Neither the inverted American flag nor the Appeal to Heaven/Pine Tree flag were mentioned in the article–the latter despite a brief appearance in a video clip accompanying the article. 

The follow day, as part of the Times’s Learning Network, a suggested lesson for high school students was posted that promised “[i]n this lesson, students will learn about the people who participated in the violence at the Capitol as well as the flags, clothing and hand gestures they displayed and what they represent.” Neither the inverted US flag, a supposed “‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol”, nor the “provocative” Appeal to Heaven flag were mentioned in the lesson. They were apparently not worth including in the “dizzying array of symbols, slogans and images” the linked article discussed.

The more detailed Visual Investigation was preceded by an article that ran on Jan. 6 itself entitled “Stunning Images as a Mob Storms the U.S. Capitol”. It included no images of either of the purported far-right symbols either. Instead, the article included this paragraph:

Some waved banners announcing their loyalties as they entered the Capitol, including giant yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, popular among Libertarians and supporters of limited government. Others paraded through the halls waving American flags covered with pro-Trump messages (technically, a violation of how the government says the American flag should be treated). Several people brandished the battle flag of the Confederacy.

Note that the descriptions of these value-laden and in some cases loaded symbols are themselves neutral, perhaps even slightly charitable to the Jan. 6 rioters. Defaced flags are just “technical” violations of government guidelines and the “Stars and Bars” do not come in for special condemnation. And, again, the two flags later associated with Alito garner no mention at all.

In fact, from election day 2020 to the day the Times published the Alito “provocative” Appeal to Heaven flag story, there is not a single mention of the flag in the Times, much less one tying it to Trump’s bogus election claims. 

The Times’s archives reveal one mention connecting an upside-down American flag to election protests, although the item in question quotes one of the five Oregon protesters involved as saying, “We always end up losing rights, whoever’s in office.” [emphasis added] 

Other New York Times mentions of the inverted flag in news articles in the interim include at least two references to its use in George Floyd protests and rioting, but nothing else related to the January 6 or Stop the Steal.

Despite the certainty in the headline of Jodi Kantor’s initial Alito story (“a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display”,) the article nevertheless goes on to include the following paragraphs explaining the long and varied history of the inverted US flag:

Turning the American flag upside down is a symbol of emergency and distress, first used as a military S.O.S., historians said in interviews. In recent decades, it has increasingly been used as a political protest symbol — a controversial one, because the flag code and military tradition require the paramount symbol of the United States to be treated with respect.

Over the years, upside-down flags have been displayed by both the right and the left as an outcry over a range of issues, including the Vietnam War, gun violence, the Supreme Court’s overturning of the constitutional right to abortion and, in particular, election results. In 2012, Tea Party followers inverted flags at their homes to signal disgust at the re-election of President Barack Obama. Four years later, some liberals advised doing the same after Mr. Trump was elected.

Close readers will recognize the common tactic of adding nuance paragraphs deep in the body of a story–sometimes called “to be sure” paragraphs–that give plausible deniability to the overreach of the headline and lede. But in this case the unequivocal framing and headline are also undermined by the explanation Justice Alito himself provided to the Times:

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.” 

In fact, about a week after the Times article, the Washington Post revealed that its reporters had the Alito inverted flag story in 2021, but chose not to run it:

The Post decided not to report on the episode at the time because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, rather than the justice, and connected to a dispute with her neighbors, a Post spokeswoman said. It was not clear then that the argument was rooted in politics, the spokeswoman said.

It doesn’t seem the Times had any similar reservations about its own reporting.

"If PBS Doesn't Do It, Who Will?" a 1990s promotional campaign by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) asked rhetorically. As it turns out, in a world where anyone with a camera–and everyone has a camera–can broadcast content to a global audience at virtually no cost, the answer is “lots of folks.”

So what is it then about public broadcasting today that justifies continued government funding?

There was a time when public media outlets like PBS and National Public Radio (NPR) indeed filled a niche that commercial outlets tended to shun - public affairs, educational series, British TV shows, opera, classical music and other programming with a more intellectual bent. A show featuring a quirky, soft spoken artist dabbing paint on a canvas while speaking of “happy little trees” would have been laughed out of network productions offices, yet Bob Ross found a home–and a grateful audience–on PBS for years. 

When cable TV began to take off in the1980s, the guardrails slackened. But it was of course the advent of the internet and smartphones that knocked them down altogether. (It is likely no coincidence that PBS dropped its If PBS Doesn't Do It, Who Will? campaign in the year 2000.) Anyone who spends any time channel surfing today will be overwhelmed, and perhaps even a bit disoriented, by the number of choices. (Whether or not many of those choices are worthwhile is another matter.)

This proliferation of choice is not limited to television and video. While the popularity of radio has indeed declined (although not as much as one might think), podcasting has taken off in ways that may have surprised media watchers a few decades ago. And because of the internet, the number of topics and genres of podcasts dwarfs that which radio was able to offer even in its heyday. By most accounts, the number of podcasts available currently exceeds 4 million. The number of commercial radio stations, while still considerably higher than in the 1970s, is somewhere south of 16,000.

It’s true that the sheer volume of alternatives does not by itself obviate the need for the kinds of educational or “highbrow” content championed by public broadcasting. But why do so many inside that world cling to the idea that government aid is vital to this mission?  Is there another unstated reason for this resistance to break from the past?

While public broadcasters are loath to give up their government dollars, they are also given to downplaying their significance. NPR declares on its website, “On average, less than 1% of NPR's annual operating budget comes in the form of grants from CPB and federal agencies and departments.” PBS similarly acknowledges government funding is just a “small part of the funding mix.” On top of this, PBS offers this defense:

The CPB [Corporation for Public Broadcasting, funded by Congress] estimates the annual cost to each American every year is $1.35. [Y]ou can decide for yourself whether that $1.35 a year is worth it.

While $1.35 per American does not sound like a lot of money, $450 million (the 2018 CPB federal subsidy) certainly does. And sometimes principle trumps cost. Did Congress really need to appropriate $500,000 in 2007 for North Carolina’s Sparta Teapot Museum of Craft and Design? Even if it amounts to just one and a half cents per American?

But if it's not about the content and not about the dollars, what remains? New NPR President and CEO Katherine Maher tried to answer that question last week in the wake of the controversy over (now former) NPR editor Uri Berliner’s The Free Press article alleging clear left-leaning bias at the network. Maher wrote to her colleagues about her take on NPR's “aspirational mission”:

I joined this organization because public media is essential for an informed public. At its best, our work can help shape and illuminate the very sense of what it means to have a shared public identity as fellow Americans in this sprawling and enduringly complex nation.

But nothing in Maher’s 1500 words explains how a “public media” “illuminates” our shared identity any more effectively than private media. But if instead of “illuminates'' we focus on the word “shape”, then maybe we see what the game is really all about. Maher places great emphasis on understanding who NPR’s audience is and what they are looking for, and reflecting that in the organization’s makeup and content. But while Maher’s letter to the staff contains references to its “public trust” and “public interest mandate,” there is not even an attempt to justify public funding

Instead, the idea seems to be that public subsidization, even if a drop in the bucket, amounts to a kind of ratification and endorsement of the kind of content NPR produces–and the worldview that attends it. 

Rather than being just one of many fish in a big pond, public broadcasters prefer to be a very special fish in a very special pond, funded the same way that Social Security and VA hospitals are.

With the future of public funding of media once again up for debate in Congress, supporters are pulling out the big guns yet again to protect this special status, with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand warning that “the future of… beloved shows like Sesame Street… could be in jeopardy.” In a world with thousands of media options rather than just four networks, however, such threats ring hollow. And with the PBS Foundation listing its very first funding priority as “climate,” a significant segment of the population may struggle to give public broadcasting $575 million as part of a “shared public identity” that they do not share.

On Sunday, the White House released an official Statement from President Joseph R. Biden on the Occasion of Ramadan. In the second paragraph, the president raises the Israel-Gaza war and, without citing a source, states that “30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians, including thousands of children.” [emphasis added below]

The sacred month is a time for reflection and renewal. This year, it comes at a moment of immense pain. The war in Gaza has inflicted terrible suffering on the Palestinian people. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians, including thousands of children. Some are family members of American Muslims, who are deeply grieving their lost loved ones today. Nearly two million Palestinians have been displaced by the war; many are in urgent need of food, water, medicine, and shelter. As Muslims gather around the world over the coming days and weeks to break their fast, the suffering of the Palestinian people will be front of mind for many. It is front of mind for me.

The 30,000 figure is based on information provided by the Gaza health ministry, which operates in Gaza under the control of the Hamas terrorist organization. Reporting this latest milestone on February 29, the New York Times asserted that “[m]any experts say the official toll is very likely an undercount, given the difficulty of accurately tallying deaths amid unrelenting fighting, communications disruptions, a collapsing medical system and people still believed to be under rubble.” The Times acknowledged that the “figures provided by the Gazan health ministry do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.”

In the weeks following the October 7th by Hamas and Israel’s retaliation, the president was asked about the figures supplied by the Gaza health ministry and what those numbers said to him. The president replied [emphasis added]:

What they say to me is I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.

I think we should be incredibly careful. I think — well, not “we” — the Israelis should be incredibly careful to be sure that they’re focusing on going after the folks that are the pr- — propagating this war against Israel. And it’s against their interest when that doesn’t happen.

But I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.

In February, after President Biden in public remarks used a figure of 27,000 dead, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked if the White House now had confidence in the Gaza health ministry figures. Jean-Pierre did not directly answer, but when pressed, said:

We know thousands of lives have been lost. We know that. We know that. And, you know, we’re going to speak to that when asked. We’re going to say that is not okay. Right? We’re going to say that is not okay.

Obviously, we’re also going to continue to say Israel has a right to defend itself. We’re going to also have those conversation with the Israeli government on how to make sure that we cont- — that we — that they make sure that they follow the international humanitarian law and that they protect civilian lives — innocent civilian lives.

So, those conversations are going to continue to happen. But we know — we know thousands of lives have been lost.

Just a little over a week ago, Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin was asked how many Palestinian women and children had been killed since October 7th. “It’s over 25,000," his his reply. According to The Hill, the "Pentagon... issued a clarification that Austin was ‘citing an estimate from the Hamas-controlled health ministry [of] more than 25,000 total Palestinians...’"

Despite the New York Times report that most experts accept the Gaza health ministry figures, a recent article by Abraham Wyner, Professor of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, in Tablet Magazine argues that the numbers are extremely unreliable and are likely fake:

Here’s the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.

Despite using the Hamas-provided figures, President Biden’s Ramadan statement never directly holds Hamas responsible for the war and its consequences, instead passively saying that the “war in Gaza has inflicted terrible suffering on the Palestinian people.”

Image by squarefrog. Credit: Pixabay

A well-worn set of arguments underscoring the urgency of addressing climate change is familiar to any consumer of mainstream media. Less ubiquitous is the dissenting view: climate change is not the catastrophe activists have warned about for decades. While earth has warmed about one degree Celsius over the last 50 years, this counterargument goes, weather-related disasters have declined, food production has exploded, and living standards around the globe have never been higher.

Those developments are good news on their own. They’re also important context for public debates over what, if anything, governments and other institutions should “do about” climate change. Pointing out holes in climate disaster scenarios, even stridently or mockingly or rudely, should not put anyone on the wrong end of a defamation lawsuit. But a recent D.C. Superior Court case in which two political commentators were fined more than $1 million for challenging the conclusions of Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann has set that alarming precedent.

Not only has the verdict emboldened those who would happily dismantle the First Amendment, the inevitable chilling of speech that will accompany it threatens the progress of science that makes modern life possible.

Settling science in court

Michael Mann is perhaps the most well known climate researcher in the world. Creator of the infamous “hockey stick” graph depicting (misleadingly, by some accounts) global temperature increases after the industrial revolution, Mann is a prominent advocate for maximalist climate policies—including “laws that force special interest money” (i.e. his opponents) out of energy policy debates.

Though Mann is widely cited in media reports, his work has generated fierce criticism from other scientists and some journalists and commentators, such as former Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) scholar Rand Simberg and National Review (NR) contributor Mark Steyn. On separate occasions, the two writers accused Mann of committing outright fraud when building his temperature reconstruction.

Subsequently, Mann sued Simberg, Steyn, CEI and NR for libel. His 2012 complaint against the two organizations was thrown out in 2021, though a jury ruled in his favor this February against Simberg and Steyn as individuals, finding that they made defamatory statements with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm.” The jury awarded Mann $1 in compensatory damages against both defendants and $1 million in punitive damages against Steyn and $1,000 against Simberg. 

“We hope this sends a broader message that defamatory attacks on scientists go beyond the bounds of protected speech and have consequences,” Mann and his attorney wrote in the New York Times on February 15.

Open debate not welcome

Mann is correct that the verdict sends a message. But contrary to his celebratory rhetoric, it’s not a positive one. Rather, the decision signals that activists can manipulate the courts to silence their critics, no matter the consequences to open debate. This is evident from Mann’s conduct before and during the case, as well as his supporters’ reaction to the verdict.

The media has portrayed Mann as a beleaguered researcher desperately pushing back the anti-science horde of “climate deniers.” That’s a tendentious framing of the case, though, since many of Mann’s biggest critics are themselves eminent scientists and journalists who have carefully dissected his work. One study published shortly after the hockey stick graph first appeared challenged the reliability of the temperature data Mann utilized. Another peer-reviewed paper suggested “that the 20th century is not unusually warm or extreme,” undermining the trend depicted by the hockey stick. Still other researchers uncovered critical mistakes in Mann’s statistical analysis.

These examples of scholarly criticism of Mann’s research are just a sampling. As the prestigious journal Nature Climate Change reported in 2007, multiple studies “have helped to clarify that the hockey-stick methodologies lead indeed to questionable historical reconstructions.” Notably, one scientist even suspected that his work was deliberately misinterpreted by Michael Mann.

“Pathetic excuse for a human”

The technical dispute over the hockey stick’s veracity continues to this day, and it’s not the first time Mann tried to silence his critics: “Better that nothing appear, than something unacceptable to us,” Mann wrote to the editor of the journal Science in an attempt to halt the publication of a study criticizing his graph.

In its summary of the verdict, National Review highlighted some of Mann’s private comments about the case, which paint a picture of an ideological bully rather than the victim of character assassination:

“In a 2012 email, Mann wrote that he hoped to use the lawsuit to ‘ruin’ Steyn, whom he referred to as a ‘pathetic excuse for a human being.’ Mann also wrote in private exchanges that there was ‘a possibility that I can ruin National Review,’ which he referred to as ‘this filthy organization,’ a ‘threat to our children,’ and beholden to ‘greedy fat cat corporate masters.’”

Mann’s public comments about his critics were no less harsh, as National Review detailed in its petition to the US Supreme Court. Writing in the Washington Post in 2010, Mann called his opponents “anti-science,” alleging their concerns were “not good-faith questioning of scientific research.” He told HuffPost readers three years later that his critics were “professional climate-change deniers,” and that media outlets that gave them a platform were “conservative tabloids” and “fringe right-wing news sites.”

Perhaps most starkly–and seemingly hypocritically–Mann accused other researchers in a 2012 book of doing “fraudulent” science and taking “corporate payoffs for knowingly lying about the threat” of global warming. One doesn’t have to be an expert on free speech jurisprudence to wonder what makes Mann’s accusations of fraud legitimate but his critics’ accusations of fraud defamatory.

Protecting (some) scientists

Mann’s caustic rhetoric and backroom scheming demonstrate that his lawsuit was an important step forward for climate change maximalists who want to control the public discourse on the subject. Mann’s supporters in the science community and the media clearly see his victory through the same lens, though with much broader application.

Scientific American (SciAm) called the verdict “a warning to those who attack scientists working in controversial fields, including climate science and public health.” Here again there appear to be two standards, as the magazine has accused entire university departments of racism and sexism with little or no evidence. It also fired columnist Dr. Michael Shermer because his work offended the “woke” (his term) sensibilities of its editors. It seems fair to ask whether SciAm is really interested in protecting scientists as a body, or just those with the “right” opinions on controversial subjects.

Virologist Angela Rasmussen, a vocal critic of any deviation from the standard COVID narrative, understood Mann’s victory the same way. Retweeting his announcement of the verdict, she mocked “anti-science conspiracy theorists” and declared, “You lost.” Refusing to allow replies to her post, she added that “The anti-vaxxers & lab leak truthers should prepare to join their climate denialist brethren among the losers.”

Whatever the eventual conclusion of the lab leak hypothesis or the efficacy of COVID vaccines, those questions have precisely no substantive connection to climate change. Instead the argument seems to be that the “wrong kind of people” hold skeptical views in both realms--and that they should be silenced. Guilt by association on steroids.

Similarly fawning responses to the verdict were published by one major news outlet after another, including The Guardian and AP, both of which receive millions from leftist foundations to report on climate change. Not to be outdone, Democracy Now perversely declared that Mann’s suit underscored the importance of “resisting climate denialism through free scientific inquiry and expression.” Free inquiry for me but not for thee is the common refrain from climate change maximalists.

Free speech and science: the real losers

Mann’s victory is now under appeal and could be overturned. But if allowed to stand, the verdict is another serious blow to free speech and scientific progress, which are already under assault in the US.

Pluribus has previously reported that researchers working in fields ranging from climate science to tobacco control and obesity medicine are increasingly censoring themselves for fear of offending the prevailing left-wing dogma. Those courageous remaining academics and commentators brave enough to challenge “the science,” personified by influential figures like Mann, can potentially be sued into silence in politically sympathetic courts. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito anticipated such a scenario:

“When allegedly defamatory speech concerns a political or social issue that arouses intense feelings, selecting an impartial jury presents special difficulties … [A] plaintiff may be able to bring suit in whichever jurisdiction seems likely to have the highest percentage of jurors who are sympathetic to the plaintiff ’s point of view.”

The threat this scenario poses is not an idle one. When courts silence dissent–even acerbic dissent–on important public issues, there occurs a short-circuit of the process of free inquiry that has delivered the very civilization the Michael Manns of this world purport to be trying to save. Climate change maximalists are not the sole arbiters of inconvenient truths, and the public deserves to hear both sides unimpeded by heavy-handed legal tactics.

Before Joe Biden took office he committed to giving it to the American people straight, tweeting in December 2020 that the “Biden-Harris administration will always… [p]romote trust, transparency, common purpose, and accountability in our government.”

“No malarky,” in other words. Over and over, the White House has repeated a “promoting transparency” mantra in a variety of fact sheets, executive orders, and proposed legislation. To a country used to daily whoppers from the previous occupant of the White House, this sounded like a dream come true. Unfortunately it doesn’t match up with the reality of how the Biden White House reports the president’s own words.

At first glance it may appear that the White House is transparent to a fault, almost pedantic in its zeal for accuracy in correcting President Biden’s misstatements. In one stretch from August 8-15, 2023, the White House issued no fewer than 12 corrections to Biden’s various statements and remarks. In September 2023, White House transcripts of Biden appearances included a full 32 bracketed clarifications. [see Editor’s Note1]

The types of errors run the gamut. Getting numbers correct, for instance, seems particularly challenging for the president. In July 2023 in remarks about the pandemic, Biden said, “[W]e have over 100 people dead.  That’s 100 empty chairs around the kitchen table.” As the correction notes, the death toll from Covid was around one million [highlighting added here and following].

At the end of September 2023, when talking about the deficit (more on that later,) Mr. Biden made the dreaded billion/trillion error… twice. (He also picked a poor time to add the phrase “we can walk and chew gum at the same time” after making the double error.)

In August 2023, President Biden struggled to get out statistics on the help FEMA was providing after the wildfire disaster in Hawaii. 

Speaking of FEMA, another area where the president struggles is names. On three different occasions in August 2023, Mr. Biden referred to Administrator “Griswell”. However, Biden’s FEMA administrator since 2021 is named Deanne Criswell, and the transcripts dutifully, if somewhat painfully, correct the record each time.

On one of those same occasions, the president was close but no cigar when it came to naming a couple of local officials in the audience:

Even when the president inadvertently mispronounces a word, using the wrong phrase, or invents a new one (such as “uninflation,”) the unrelenting editors are right there with their virtual red pen.

And then there are instances where slips of the tongue result in dramatic changes in meaning, as in July 2023 when the president referred to Senator Tommy Tuberville’s hold on military nominations due to the military’s abortion policy as “blocking more than 300 military operations with his extreme political agenda.” While Tuberville’s actions may be considered extreme by some, blocking “military operations” is obviously not the same as blocking nominations.

Then in August 2023, the president claimed his administration had “cut the debt by $1.7 trillion.” But the fact is, the debt of the US government has not been “cut” in two decades. The White House duly noted the president’s error: he meant cut the deficit, not the debt.

The president made the claim again the following day. Again, the White House corrected the transcript. Remarkably, the president repeated his false assertion a third time on September 4, 2023.

But in this case, even the correction is disinformation. Glenn Kessler, Fact Checker of the Washington Post, in April 2023 awarded the president a “Bottomless Pinocchio” for his claims [30 times] of $1.7 trillion in deficit reduction. But correcting “debt” to “deficit” is straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel. While giving the impression of transparency, the White House is in fact promoting an alternate falsehood.

And while mispronunciations and verbal slips are routinely caught and highlighted by White House editors, deeper and glaring factual errors are ignored. In September, President Biden recalled his post-9/11 visit to New York City, telling service members, first responders, and their families in Alaska of his shock standing there at ground zero the “next day.” 

When asked for documentation of this visit to New York by FactCheck.org, however, the best the White House could do was to provide a photo of a visit by Biden and others on September 20, 2001. Despite this tacit admission that the president’s words were mistaken, his false claim remains in the transcript.

Even when President Biden makes a claim that is contradicted by a previous claim, the White House lets him slide. In June 2023, he claimed to have “appointed more African American women to the… federal bench than any other — every other president combined.”

As FactCheck.org points out, the claim is false, with the president’s actual total coming in at 31 of 88. FactCheck notes that the president’s claim is true relative to federal appellate courts which Biden has attempted to note on other occasions (again requiring clarifying statements from White House editors.) And yet the original fact-challenged statement stands.

In January 2023, CNN fact-checked a Biden speech on the economy. Among other things, the president misrepresented COVID vaccinations under Donald Trump, wildly overstated infrastructure projects, made a couple of false claims about taxes, got the year wrong when a prescription drug cost cap for seniors would take effect, and repeated his misleading claims about the federal deficit and debt. The White House, however, only managed to correct the infrastructure project number (700,000 to 7,000) and a reputed billionaire tax rate (3 percent to 8 percent, still a misleading figure.)

The following month, Politifact reviewed the president’s 2023 State of the Union address. Biden made a false claim about employee noncompete agreements, misrepresented his administration's record on job creation, once again brought out the old saw about the deficit, and made exaggerated claims about Medicare and drugs price negotiation. The speech as posted by the White House, however, contains no corrections or adjustments. The remarks are published on the website “as prepared for delivery” - the false claims were built right into the speech.

The White House’s incessant copying-editing of the president’s words and scores of trifling adjustments to his remarks merely serve to distract from the more serious problem of misinformation his administration regularly disseminates. Close observers of the large national newspapers may recognize this trick. “Corrections” and “editor’s notes” focus on a particular class of falsehoods–ages, dates, numbers, and the like. Black-and-white falsehoods are corrected when the author is caught dead to rights, but often in the narrowest way possible. And the biggest lies–of framing, of context, of assumption and insinuation, of question-begging and special pleading and so many other fallacies–are let stand, as if the fixing of mere typos is alone supposed to establish the paper’s bona fides on other, graver matters.

On the surface, this White House’s policing of the president’s remarks may seem admirable. But policing is hardly adequate if it consists largely of issuing parking tickets yet winks at grand theft auto. Partial transparency is in reality no transparency at all. And that’s no malarky.

The day after the explosion at Gaza's al-Ahli hospital, news of the blast was everywhere - facts, on the other hand, were harder to come by. However, a press conference held that very day by the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem that runs the hospital could have provided clarity to a world looking for answers but was instead widely ignored by the media. In the wake of the massive explosion and fireball, “two of our employees were injured,” the hospital said.

At the press conference streamed on Facebook, Anglican Archbishop Hosam Naoum declined to comment on possible total casualty figures, deferring to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry claims of hundreds, and would not assign blame for the explosion despite being pressed to do so. Then a reporter asked “Can you tell us how many doctors and nurses were injured or killed in this attack?” Archbishop Naoum replied (18:00 mark in video), “From the hospital, that was stuck later during the day, that’s devastating, two of our employees were injured.” The archbishop went on to say that while surgeries were being conducted at the time of the explosion, the blast was followed by in a full evacuation.

At the press conference, Naoum was not asked, nor did he say anything about injuries to patients, but an American group, the American Friends of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem (AFEDJ), which supports the diocese reports on its website that on Friday, October 20th, the archbishop told the group in a Zoom meeting that although “the surrounding buildings and chapel suffered some infrastructure damage, no buildings collapsed, and no staff or patients were killed. The hospital force-closed immediately, and all existing patients were evacuated to nearby hospitals.” [emphasis in original]

Despite the clear statement from Archbishop Naoum on October 18th that only “two of our employees were injured,” only one media outlet that reported on the press conference included that detail in its dispatch, the UK’s The Guardian. The reporting from the New York Times was typical of what the press focused on: warnings to evacuate that the Israeli military had given to humanitarian facilities throughout Gaza in the days following Hamas’s attack.

On Wednesday, Archbishop Naoum said that the Israeli military had called and texted the hospital managers at least three times since Oct. 14, asking its patients and staff to leave the hospital compound.

Archbishop Naoum said the warnings were particular to the hospital, and not part of Israel’s wider push to encourage civilians to leave northern Gaza for the territory’s south.

“There were specific warnings to get out of the building,” the archbishop said.

Despite the reporter’s obvious familiarity with the substance of the press conference, the Times included nothing of what Naoum said about the pair of injuries sustained by hospital staff and lack of damage to the buildings.

Meanwhile, early reports such as this from Al Jazeera the night before, headlined “Israeli air raid on al-Ahli Arab Hospital kills 500, Gaza officials say,” went uncontradicted and uncorrected: “The hospital attack has sparked international condemnation, as patients and displaced Palestinians number among the dead.”

Public figures around the world , such as Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, were making statements based on the initial reports, saying that “patients [and] healthcare workers” were killed:

Words fail me. Tonight, hundreds of people were killed – horrifically – in a massive strike at Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, including patients, healthcare workers and families that had been seeking refuge in and around the hospital. Once again the most vulnerable. This is totally unacceptable.

Even President Biden’s official statement included “patients, medical staff and other innocents killed or wounded”:

The United States stands unequivocally for the protection of civilian life during conflict and we mourn the patients, medical staff and other innocents killed or wounded in this tragedy.

In an article on its website, a version of which ran in print the following day on the front page, the New York Times reported [emphasis added,] “Photos and videos posted online and verified by The New York Times showed bloodied and battered bodies…,” with the next paragraph noting that a “woman shared a video she recorded as she made her way through the rubble of the ruined hospital[.]” The reader was left with the impression of devastated hospital buildings with mass casualties, presumably doctors, nurses and patients alike. The Times even accompanied the article with, both online (for a time) and in print the following morning, a photo of a collapsed building that the average reader might assume was the hospital - it was not, because as Archbishop Naoum noted, no buildings collapsed.

The Times later corrected the article, removing the phrase “rubble of the ruined,” noting that “this article described incorrectly a video filmed by a woman at the hospital after the blast. The hospital itself was not ruined; its parking lot was damaged most heavily in the blast.” Not noted in the correction is that the original sub headline included the phrase ”the explosion that devastated the hospital,” later changed to simply “the explosion at a hospital.”

Though my October 20th article for The Dispatch focused on the New York Times’ coverage, the Times was not alone in blowing this story. Less than 24 hours after the disaster, officials of the hospital reported two injuries among its personnel, yet thanks to sloppy and incomplete reporting, the world continued to react under the assumption that, whoever was responsible, medical personnel and patients, likely scores or even hundreds, were among the dead. Inexplicably, Archbishop Naoum’s statement that “two of our employees were injured” was quoted in a single news report the day of the press conference and nowhere since. The AFEDJ statement that “no staff or patients were killed” at the hospital in the blast has likewise been blacked out.

When the statements of the Hamas-controlled “Gaza Health Ministry” receive, in this case, infinitely more coverage than the clear words of the humanitarian mission that operates the hospital, something is wildly wrong with the world’s media. A lie travels halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on, the old saying goes. And at times, even with pants, the truth still gets left out in the cold.

There was not space or time to fit everything into The Dispatch article, but as it turns out, the Times’ front page story on the Gaza explosion had one error even the Times considered worth correcting:

It took until Friday for the correction to make it to the print edition:

Moving on, the Associated Press got off on the wrong foot from the get-go with these evolving headlines. Note that the third iteration includes an unqualified “hundreds killed” Hamas-provided claim:

As seen above, the AP headline eventually morphed into “After blast kills hundreds at Gaza hospital, Hamas and Israel trade blame as rage spreads in region.” The “trade blame” wording was exercised freely by other media outlets as well:

Here’s a PBS story, which, based on the URL (web address,) originally included the words “health-ministry-says.” But in updating the headline, PBS simply left in as fact “500 killed in Gaza City hospital explosion,” a “fact” originally reported by the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry and widely disputed:

Not all media outlets left their egregious misstatements posted for posterity. The night of the explosion, ABC News not only reported that “hundreds” were dead and the explosion was a “strike,” but that it was “confirmed.” The link, however, is broken - the post was apparently simply deleted.

On the night of the explosion, the Washington Post with a (most likely unintentional) misleading use of “verified by the Washington Post”:

Then, well after evidence began to emerge that the explosion was not an airstrike, the Post continued to use “strike,” with “strike on a Gaza City hospital…”

And the Post continued to use Hamas-provided death “hundreds of people” figure as well, with no qualifier as to where the number came from.

And finally, New York Magazine's Eric Levitz with horrifying pedantism for the ages, suggesting that “beheaded” means different things to different people:

So will anything be learned from this debacle? Based on a recent Times article musing on “difficulties” of reporting such fast-moving stories, it’s not looking good:

And today’s New York Times confirms no lesson was learned. Despite a Monday morning editor’s note acknowledging “early versions of the coverage… relied too heavily on claims by Hamas,” Monday evening’s home page website proclaimed, context-free, “More Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank than at any point in the last 15 years.” The source in the article for the claim? You guessed it: the very same “Palestinian health authorities.”

In November 2022 the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published a study purporting to show that mask mandates reduce the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19). The research was unremarkable; however, the way the authors framed their results demonstrated the progressive lens that now dominates the publication and its peers.

Apparently, universal masking was not necessary only because it reduced the harmful effects of COVID-19 (overlooking the secondary effects of such mandates). Rather, the authors particularly backed the policy because the effects of COVID-19 "have been disproportionately borne by groups already made vulnerable by historical and contemporary systems of oppression, including structural racism and settler colonialism.”

This emphasis on race as a risk factor for COVID-19—noting "Black and Latinx students and staff"—came across as forced for several reasons. After three years of the spread, we know the virus is most adept at harming the elderly and patients with comorbidities such as heart disease and obesity. Moreover, from the Census Bureau, “Provisional 2022 data show declines in mortality for all race groups between 2021 and 2022.” While there is some association between race and disparate health outcomes, there is a dearth of evidence showing racial discrimination primarily causes these disparities, including those related to COVID-19.

The NEJM study's authors went even further and highlighted “settler colonialism” for the same reason that academics in almost all scientific disciplines have been incentivized to politicize their work: publishing research that does not serve the reigning progressive dogma in some way is a serious offense. Scientists who commit this intellectual sin risk losing their careers.

In fields ranging from infectious disease epidemiology and climatology to tobacco control and obesity research, scientists are censoring themselves to appease ideologues who wantonly discard inconvenient evidence and punish their political opponents. This progressive confirmation bias has spread throughout academia, and it motivated Loretta Breuning, a former professor with a doctorate from Tufts University, to leave and write How I Escaped Political Correctness And You Can Too (2018).

This perverse development has undermined our ability to resolve public health threats. It has also cornered academics into functioning as apologists for censorship and ever-increasing government intrusion into the marketplace and our private lives.

Climate Scientist Censors Wildfire Study to Get Published

Wildfires have been on the decline for many years, and “[t]here is increasing evidence that there is less fire in the global landscape today than centuries ago,” the authors of a 2016 review article concluded. Nevertheless, climate scientists face immense pressure to publish studies exaggerating the risk posed by extreme weather events and to blame this phenomenon on global warming.

“I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like,” climatologist Patrick Brown wrote in an eye-opening story for the Free Press. While acknowledging that climate change can contribute to wildfires, Brown observed that “it isn’t close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus.”

The recent blazes in Hawaii, for example, stemmed from invasive grasses that have grown unchecked since the 1990s. Proper land management is pivotal to preventing the next wildfire on Maui or anywhere else in the United States. Scapegoating oil companies will divert resources and attention away from the preparation that should be underway right now.

Brown knew what the major science journals wanted to hear. That is exactly what he told them:

[W]e didn’t bother to study the influence of these other obviously relevant factors. Did I know that including them would make for a more realistic and useful analysis? I did. But I also knew that it would [ . . . ] decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers.

Brown’s experience is but one example of a troubling trend in climate science. Projections of carbon emissions have already overshot the amount of carbon dioxide we actually emit into the atmosphere. Yet “voluminous amounts of research have been and continue to be produced based on the outdated scenarios,” climate researcher Roger Pielke, Jr. wrote in 2020. Policymakers are trying to mitigate global warming based on science that is critically flawed.

In his book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (2021), Steve Koonin, a physicist and top scientist in President Barack Obama’s Department of Energy, argues that prevailing models have failed to capture the current and future effects of climate change. His book is a plea to the scientific community and the media to strive for accuracy rather than alarmism.

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The Unfavored but Safer Vaping Alternative

The same phenomenon is undermining the field of tobacco control in the United States.

A growing consensus affirms that nicotine vaping is effective as a smoking-cessation tool. A Public Health England review has noted that vaping, although not without problems, is "95 percent less harmful" than combustible tobacco. Public health experts and federal regulators would best be on board with adult smokers switching to vaping, but they are not.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) appears to have rigged its review process for vaping products, allowing it to ban more than 99 percent of the devices and e-liquids on the market. When some agency scientists opted to authorize several flavored vaping products, agency leadership overruled them. Meanwhile, the federal government continues to subsidize the production and authorize the sale of new brands of combustible cigarettes.

The FDA’s punitive and irrational prohibition by regulation has chilled vaping research in the United States. Many scientists decline to conduct proper studies of the product “to avoid controversy by appealing to popular opinion,” a team of researchers from New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine reported last year. “[L]eadership at potential study sites has shown hesitancy in allowing [vaping] intervention research to occur within their patient populations,” the study found.

It gets worse. Researchers affiliated with the vaping industry have been barred from attending scientific conferences and publishing in medical journals. Even publicly-funded research that documents the clear benefits of vaping maligns the product as a threat to public health. For example, the American Heart Association’s (AHA) 2023 “scientific statement” on vaping reported that:

Studies have shown lower blood pressure, lower heart rate, and markers of improved vascular function in combustible cigarette users who switch to ENDS [vaping] products.

However, AHA’s press release and the abundant media coverage it generated amplified a very different message: “Research increasingly reveals health risks of e-cigarette use, and more studies are needed about the long-term impact e-cigarettes may have on the heart and lungs.”

To date, no US public health institution—the American Cancer Society, American Lung Association, American Heart Association, Food and Drug Administration, or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—has backed vaping for smoking cessation. Several policy experts have suggested that these institutions are perversely incentivized to discourage vaping because it threatens their funding.

Political patronage poisons honest dialogue, and there is compelling evidence to support this explanation. Three wealthy, politically connected nonprofits—Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Gates Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation—have collectively given more than a billion dollars to public health groups, activist organizations, media outlets, and even universities to bemoan nicotine vaping. Johns Hopkins is home to the Bloomberg School of Public Health, which has been a consistent source of anti-vaping messaging for many years.

Obesity as Everyone Else's Fault

After smoking, obesity is one of the greatest public health threats to the United States. More than 20 percent of US children are obese today—going by body-mass-index measurements—a substantial increase from 5 percent in the 1970s. The statistics do not improve with age; roughly 40 percent of US adults are also seriously overweight.

Obesity stems from a variety of causes, but it is relatively simple to prevent and treat. Lifestyle changes to diet, exercise, and stress levels—especially when accompanied by professional support—have demonstrated their efficacy.

However, to placate those who resist lifestyle changes we see the rise of so-called fat acceptance. Proponents claim obesity is not a critical health threat but an identity that should be respected. To the extent that overeating is a problem, the argument continues, it is an addiction driven by food companies that make “hyper-palatable” snack foods and peddle them with persuasive marketing.

Obesity researchers, like their counterparts in climate science, have reacted to this ideological contamination of their field by . . . endorsing it. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) now ties itself in knots trying to discourage childhood obesity while lecturing its members “to uncover and address their own attitudes regarding children with obesity.”

The AAP declares that “Racism experienced in everyday life has also been associated with increased obesity prevalence.” Nature Medicine, one of the world's most prominent medical journals, similarly asserts that “Substantial research has demonstrated that weight stigma and discrimination are pervasive, global issues.”

Lost in all this postmodern confusion is the health and welfare of patients. Although overweight and obese people need not be shamed for their size, they should know the serious diseases they are courting and how to take better care of themselves. Unfortunately, many physicians are too busy avoiding “stigmatizing language” to treat them.

Science Serving Authoritarianism

The examples of perverted science go on forever, and there are books dedicated to documenting how thoroughly politics has warped academic research over the years. Beyond the intellectual derailing, political manipulation inevitably empowers the political class and favors established lobbies over newcomers.

Epidemiologists want to display their supposed antiracism, so they justify school mask mandates, whether or not they actually benefit children. Climate change has become the go-to justification for all manner of interventions, especially those impeding gas-powered vehicles. Combustible tobacco gets a pass while busybodies stand in the way of vaping. If you are overweight, the state will have to get involved and punish those who supplied the food you demanded.

The notion that these unscientific endeavors are altruistic and well-meaning rings hollow. They are part of a progressive crusade, backed by self-interested cronies. The Lancet, another prominent medical journal, put it bluntly in 2018:

To avoid the catastrophic consequences of [ . . . ] capitalism, we propose a new global sociopolitical framework that is urgently needed to protect and cultivate human health.

[ . . . ]

Karl Marx was concerned about the health of our planet and has interested us in a way to nurture the environment and an equitable world with improved social conditions.

This anti-capitalist nonsense is not science at all. It is mere ideology dressed up in the veneer of intellectual credibility.

As physicist Freeman Dyson wrote in The Scientist as Rebel (2008), "Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions [ . . . ] But there is one common element in these visions. The common element is rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture."

In other words, scientists exist to challenge established dogma with empirical evidence—to follow the evidence wherever it leads. The sooner they return to that pursuit, the better off the world will be.

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Fergus Hodgson (@FergHodgson) is director of Econ Americas, a financial and economic consultancy, and publisher of the Impunity Observer, a geopolitical intelligence service. A native of New Zealand, he resides in Fort Collins, Colorado, and holds an MBA in finance from Rice University and a BA in economics from Boston University.

It happened to be the 247th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence when U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty handed down a preliminary injunction in Missouri v. Biden, a suit brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, among other plaintiffs, arguing that the Biden administration’s attempts to coerce social media companies into suppressing purported misinformation violate the First Amendment. 

And while the Biden administration’s objectionable actions as enumerated in the ruling do not approach the list of horribles the authors of the Declaration cited against King George, Judge Doughty’s 162 pages detailing government abuse of free speech are scathing nonetheless.

That’s true regardless of the fact that just days later, a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals three-judge panel put the injunction on hold at the request of the Biden Justice Department. 

While media coverage has focused on the attempted suppression of COVID “misinformation,” Doughty calls out a number of other incidents of the administration pushing social media companies to censor speech on various controversial topics, including climate change, gender identity, and economic policy.

Plaintiffs have shown that not only have the Defendants shown willingness to coerce and/or to give significant encouragement to social-media platforms to suppress free speech with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic and national elections, they have also shown a willingness to do it with regard to other issues, such as gas prices,  parody speech, calling the President a liar, climate change, gender,  and abortion.

[ . . . ]

At an Axios event entitled “A Conversation on Battling Misinformation,” held on June 14, 2022, the White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy (“McCarthy”) blamed social-media companies for allowing misinformation and disinformation about climate change to spread and explicitly tied these censorship demands with threats of adverse legislation regarding the Communications Decency Act.

On June 16, 2022, the White House announced a new task force to target “general misinformation” and disinformation campaigns targeted at women and LBGTQI individuals who are public and political figures, government and civic leaders, activists, and journalists. The June 16, 2022, Memorandum discussed the creation of a task force to reel in “online harassment and abuse” and to develop programs targeting such disinformation campaigns. The Memorandum also called for the Task Force to confer with technology experts and again threatened social-media platforms with adverse legal consequences if the platforms did not censor aggressively enough.

On July 8, 2022, President Biden signed an Executive Order on protecting access to abortion. Section 4(b)(iv) of the order required the Attorney General, the Secretary of HHS, and the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission to address deceptive or fraudulent practices relating to reproductive healthcare services, including those online, and to protect access to accurate information.

On August 11, 2022, Flaherty emailed Twitter to dispute a note added by Twitter to one of President Biden’s tweets about gas prices. [citations excluded]

The plaintiffs provide additional details of the administration’s meddling in their motion’s Proposed Findings of Fact. For instance, on the June 16 Memorandum creating the “misinformation” task force mentioned above, the plaintiffs note the following:

The Memorandum again threatens social-media platforms with adverse legal consequences if they do not censor aggressively enough to suit federal officials: “the Task Force shall … submit periodic recommendations to the President on policies, regulatory actions, and legislation on technology sector accountability to address systemic harms to people affected by online harassment and abuse.”

Relatedly, on May 27, 2022, HHS Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine demanded that social-media platforms censor “misinformation” about “gender-affirming care.” In a public address to health officials, Levine “spoke about the need for government to ‘address health information directly’ and specified that includes encouraging Big Tech to combat health misinformation ‘beyond COVID-19.’” Levine stated: “So I’d like to just talk briefly about another area of substantial misinformation that is directly impacting health equity in our nation, and that is the health equity of sexual and gender minorities. There is substantial misinformation about gender-affirming care for transgender and gender diverse individuals… The positive value of gender-affirming care for youth and adults is not in scientific or medical dispute … And we need to use our clinicians’ voice to collectively advocate for our tech companies to create a healthier, cleaner information environment.” [citations excluded]

HHS Assistant Secretary Levine’s assertion that “[t]he positive value of gender-affirming care for youth and adults is not in scientific or medical dispute” is a risible statement that serves as a perfect example of why the government cannot and must not serve as the arbiter of truth and misinformation. No less than the newspaper of record has been reporting for some time now that the medical community is “deeply divided” over the gender therapy issue, particularly where minors are involved.

Levine’s confidence notwithstanding, the assistant secretary provides no evidence to support the case that there is “substantial misinformation that is directly impacting health equity in our nation.” But as Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum points out, “even "verifiable misinformation" is protected by the First Amendment, which means the government has no business trying to suppress it.” Sullum notes elsewhere that even some non-governmental, self-proclaimed arbiters of misinformation have embraced a disturbing level of comfort with the government flexing its censorship muscles:

"Most misinformation or disinformation that violates social platforms' policies is flagged by researchers, nonprofits, or people and software at the platforms themselves," the [New York] Times notes. But "academics and anti-disinformation organizations often complained that platforms were unresponsive to their concerns." The paper reinforces that point with a quote from Viktorya Vilk, director for digital safety and free expression (!) at PEN America: "Platforms are very good at ignoring civil society organizations and our requests for help or requests for information or escalation of individual cases. They are less comfortable ignoring the government." [emphasis added]

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While plenty of bad actors inhabit the public square, the founders recognized the greatest danger to liberty was an authoritarian government trying to control the speech of its citizens. This is why the First Amendment lacks an exception clause. The New York Times’s Bret Stephens recalls the words of Justice William Brennan in a 1963 Supreme Court ruling involving similar circumstances.

“People do not lightly disregard public officers’ thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around,” noted Justice William Brennan, a fierce liberal, in his opinion. “It would be naïve to credit the state’s assertion that these blacklists are in the nature of mere legal advice, when they plainly serve as instruments of regulation independent of the laws against obscenity.”

Stephens goes on to warn that government censorship cuts both ways and unless both left and right are willing to take lumps when the “other side” appears to be racking up victories, sooner or later it will be republican values themselves that end up on the mat.

Still, the order is a triumph for civil liberties. It also ought to be considered a victory for liberals, insofar as liberals have historically been suspicious of Big Tech and the big national-security state — cooperating, as alleged in this case — to suppress the speech of people whose views they deem dangerous.

But in one of the stranger inversions of recent politics, it’s mostly conservatives who are cheering — and liberals who are decrying — the ruling.

[ . . . ]

Critics of last week’s ruling may claim that, at the height of the pandemic, with thousands of Americans dying of Covid every day, the government had an urgent interest in curtailing what it saw as misinformation. Similar claims were made about communists at the height of the Cold War and antiwar activists during World War I. Yet the actions of government and powerful media companies against them shock us to this day.

Responsible people across the ideological spectrum, and anyone with a passing familiarity with the relevant history, should take heed.

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In January, four months after President Biden let slip in an interview that “the pandemic is over,” the White House denounced two pieces of congressional legislation declaring an end to the pandemic, calling them “a grave disservice to the American people” that could cause hospitals and nursing homes to be “plunged into chaos” and result in “thousands of migrants per day” entering the country as Title 42 provisions ended. 

The very next month, the same White House via the Department of Health and Human Services announced that, due to current COVID-19 trends, the pandemic Public Health Emergency would end in May. But 24 hours later, the administration seemed to reverse course yet again, and released a “Notice on the Continuation of the National Emergency Concerning the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-⁠19) Pandemic.” And after all that, in mid-April, President Biden actually signed legislation declaring an immediate end to the pandemic.

To be fair, President Biden included in the Continuation document the same assumption that the pandemic emergency would officially end in May, but because a federal statute requires annual renewal of emergency declarations (in this case, March 1), an extension was necessary. In any event, ordinary folks unaccustomed to the ways of bureaucracy could be forgiven for finding it odd that the government would schedule the end of an “emergency” three months in advance. 

Emergencies are by nature unpredictable, “emerging” suddenly. They are also by nature transitory. A calamity occurs requiring immediate and often drastic action, but relatively quickly a transition occurs to more measured responses, mitigation efforts and recovery. 

But that’s often not so when the government is involved.

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"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," Rahm Emanuel famously told an audience days after Barack Obama was elected, during the financial meltdown that became the Great Recession. The words of Obama’s soon-to-be chief of staff were cited as a classic Kinsley gaffe, and indeed the attitude he expressed is as old as politics itself. While the Annenberg Center’s FactCheck.org later wrote that Emanuel got a “bum rap” for the aphorism, because he expressed it in bipartisan terms, it isn’t partisan bias that gives the adage its sinister ring– but the long history of insidious authoritarian powers governments acquire and retain in the wake of crises.

The current case before the Supreme Court involving President Biden’s student loan forgiveness edict is a prime example. While President Trump invoked the COVID emergency to pause payments on student loans, Biden wants to outright erase $400 billion in loans due to the COVID emergency that his administration has now officially declared to be over. 

In August 2022, less than a month after the loan forgiveness scheme was announced, COVID conditions had settled enough to prompt the gaffe from the president, and conditions in January 2023 were such that the administration foresaw ending the emergency in May. But that didn’t stop them from wheeling it out to enact a long-held progressive policy goal.

Extraordinary governmental actions during times of crisis are certainly not a new phenomenon. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, and Franklin D. Roosevelt notoriously sent thousands of Japanese-Americans to internment camps shortly after Pearl Harbor. 

In the 1970s, with the Vietnam War dragging on and Congress fretting about executive usurpation of its own power, a yearslong process eventually produced the National Emergencies Act, signed into law by President Ford in 1976. According to a 2021 report by the US Senate’s Historical Office, the “law ended four existing states of emergency and instituted accountability and reporting requirements for future emergencies.” The intervening near-half century casts doubt on the efficacy of the law.

In fact, the very first emergency declaration under the 1976 law, issued by President Carter in 1979 in response to the Iranian takeover of the US Embassy, is still in effect almost 44 years later. During that time, American presidents have declared another 72 national emergencies, and perhaps even more remarkably, 42 of those “national emergencies” remain in place today. 

Some national emergencies seem to start and stop depending on who sits in the Oval Office. President Trump found the immigration situation on the southern border to be an emergency in February 2019. President Biden disagreed and ended the emergency less than two years later. In June 2020, President Trump declared a national emergency to try to limit the actions of the International Criminal Court related to the attempted prosecution of “US or US-allied personnel in connection with the War in Afghanistan.” Less than a year later under President Biden, the emergency was called off.

Most national emergencies, however, have transcended partisanship. Though President Biden ended two Trump-declared emergencies, nine others remain active. For all his criticism of Barack Obama, President Trump continued every one of the 11 Obama era emergencies for his entire term (Biden has since ended two of Obama’s). And before Trump, President Obama continued 11 of 13 George W. Bush emergencies. 

While some emergencies certainly seem to live up to their billing (preventing the “Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction,” 1994), others sound decidedly anodyne (“Continuation of Export Control Regulations,” 2001) or obscure (“Blocking Property of Certain Persons Undermining Democratic Processes or Institutions in Belarus,” 2006), relating to a part of the world many Americans would struggle to find on a map.

Emergencies that are clearly not emergencies undermine the public’s confidence that the government really has its best interests at heart. Masking requirements, school closures and other draconian measures taken in the name of public health during the last three years are coming under increasingly strident criticism. Even the editorial board of the Washington Post, generally supporters of progressive policies, recently called for a second look at so-called emergency powers in the context of the student loan case: 

In this dispute, the proper answer is for Congress to revisit the Heroes Act, clarifying it does not permit presidents to offer such poorly targeted loan forgiveness. While they are at it, federal lawmakers should review the long list of emergency powers they have given the executive branch over the decades, curbing or eliminating those that are unclear or unneeded. [emphasis added]

Governments need to be able to respond effectively to unforeseen events, to be sure. But a government that can declare open-ended emergency powers, however, is a government that is slowly but surely acquiring a taste for authoritarian control that it will be loath to surrender. Sooner or later, that will lead to a real national emergency.

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The Chick-fil-A “buycott” of August 2012 in response to mayors planning to block franchise locations was a moment of unity for the normally silent majority. Americans en masse enjoyed chicken sandwiches on "Appreciation Day," organized by former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, and told politicians to stop targeting businesses for their political and cultural positions.

Since then, however, the problem of political retribution against businesses has worsened, along with a broader decline in respect for the rule of law. The growing urge to use censorship to promote or quash a particular viewpoint has enticed members of both parties to wield the levers of power, requiring both electoral accountability from the public as well as judicial oversight. As more businesses feel compelled to adopt political initiatives and positions, epitomized by ESG ratings, politicians and regulators are attempting to exert more influence over them.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, has punished the Walt Disney Company for opposing his state’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law. On February 27, he revoked Disney World's self-governing status after more than 50 years. Rather than hand 25,000 acres to a local municipality with elected representation, DeSantis put Reedy Creek under state-level management. With his handpicked board already throwing its weight around, one can see why the Walt Disney Company quieted down and replaced the CEO that tussled with DeSantis.

For the First Amendment to be meaningful, it must protect speech that offends or causes discomfort. Unfortunately, that tends to be forgotten when it contravenes populist and interventionist sentiments, especially when the speech in question comes from businesses through advertisements or executive statements. 

Commercial speech that contravenes the sensibilities of some environmentalists has become the latest target of lawsuits around the country. Energy companies that advertise investments in renewable energy and technology that lowers carbon emissions now find state attorneys general jumping down their throats. Progressive attorneys general contend that reductions cannot be touted while these companies are still producing significant carbon emissions. Apparently, the threat to the environment overrides free speech.

The goal of these lawsuits at the municipal and state levels is to use every legal trick available to get energy companies to pay for their alleged responsibility for global warming. Some suits, for example, are asking courts to decide whether to expand the scope of public-nuisance torts. This would essentially allow states to legislate climate policies from the bench.

One might think that federal dismissals of state-based cases would be the end of the story on the grounds that federal law takes priority on environmental policy. Whether those rulings are correct or not, from the New York Supreme Court and a US District Court in San Francisco, they have failed to dissuade the activists in attorneys-general clothing.

Their new strategy to circumvent the federalism question is to sue energy producers under state securities and consumer protection laws. Even if company statements are true, new lawsuits allege that energy companies touting their environmental bona fides is greenwashing.

In its lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Massachusetts admits it is “technically true” that the company’s newer gasoline and motor oil products reduce emissions compared to standard oil and gas products. However, the state claims that placing this in an advertisement—without mentioning that fossil-fuel consumption is a threat to humanity—misleads consumers. 

Similarly, a lawsuit filed in New Jersey in late 2022 claims that a Shell campaign in the Washington Post promoting its investments in lower carbon fuels and alternative energy misleads consumers. It does not matter that the company is investing in alternative energy and lower carbon fuels; the contention is that the claims could imply a magnitude beyond the reality.

These legal actions are thinly veiled excuses for punishing companies for promoting their activities that rub some environmentalists the wrong way. Shell and ExxonMobil are not primarily in the renewable-energy business, nor are the two companies trying to trick anyone. By any measure, fossil fuels will remain crucial economic inputs for decades to come.

Especially in low-profile cases, lawfare is a tactic that harms political targets without alerting the electorate. Lawfare, which works through litigation, forgoes laws passed in a transparent manner. It favors motivated environmentalists because the electorate needs fossil fuels and will resist impediments to their supply. In other words, arrogant political insiders are bending other policy instruments to their own narrow ends.

The situation is precarious because, should some of these cases prevail, they will undermine decades of First Amendment jurisprudence on commercial speech. This would have far-reaching constitutional implications for companies in other sectors and open the floodgates for more overt regulation of what companies can and cannot say.

At present, commercial speech does not receive precisely the same First Amendment protection as pure political speech. However, the Supreme Court has recognized, particularly in Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, Inc (1976), the importance of free-flowing commercial speech in communicating information to consumers. The notable exception is the Central Hudson test, from a 1980 case, which allows the prohibition of “communication more likely to deceive the public than to inform it” or “commercial speech relating to illegal activity.”

Environmental protection, when it respects property rights, is a legitimate role of government. However, it must be subject to the rule of law and constituent accountability. Lawfare and censorship of commercial speech fall into the illiberal trap of the ends justifying the means.

Commercial speech needs to be protected precisely when it involves controversial political issues. That includes when energy companies and their shareholders petition the government or address consumers on global warming and other environmental concerns. Open debate fosters a prudent outcome that balances conflicting interests and respects the needs of consumers. The censors among us want their way or the highway, and they are weaponizing governmental power against those who disagree.

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Niccolo Machiavelli, in Discourses on Livy, remarked that fortunate were the states that could hark back to “the virtue and the methods” of their Founding Fathers. The political thought of the Framers has long served as a kind of blueprint for the United States, forming the basis of the country’s national heritage, foundational ideals that united Americans and guided them during times of tumult. 

And yet, few today would argue that Americans are united by a common national idea. Polarization is at its highest since the 1970s, and partisan animosity is reaching new extremes. While many hoped that the Biden presidency would “lower the temperature” and make American politics less divisive and partisan, culture wars and societal polarization have not abated. This is hardly surprising, considering that cultural wedge issues are embedded in ideological differences, being too broad in scope and scale to be addressed by government action — let alone executive fiat.

Such conflicts cannot be resolved by appealing to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, as Machiavelli hoped, because the tension-ridden synthesis of republican and liberal strains in the Framers’ political thought broke down in the postmodern age. The decoupling of liberty from the republican conception of civic virtue and the individualization of the satisfaction of one’s pursuit for meaning, purpose and recognition in life away from a common national idea are behind the fragmentation of American society into identitarian groups, which have become the key outlet for the assertion of one’s thymos. In harmony with these alterations in the structure of societal fabric, commensurate institutional changes such as greater “indirect rule” and limitation of the power of the central government may be warranted. 

In the context of this discussion, virtue means civic virtue, a set of prescriptions and ideals that shape an individual’s behavior in relation to his fellow citizens and government rather than morality (e.g. patriotism, sacrificing one’s individual interests for the sake of the common good, etc.). When conformity to virtue is enforced by the coercive apparatus of the state, the government is said to violate liberty. If, however, an individual behaves according to virtue voluntarily, those external standards become internalized, and he can be considered free. For the Framers, virtue first and foremost meant public spiritedness, “an exercise in self-righteousness” that was an indication of the people’s capacity for self-government, as Irving Kristol put it.

The twin requirements of liberty and virtue led to what Stephen Macedo called the conflict between “the desire to promote a civically healthy society on the one side and, on the other side, the desire to respect freedom and diversity.” While there have certainly been many other doctrines that influenced the Framers’ thinking, such as work-ethic Protestantism and “state-centered theory of power and sovereignty,” the interaction between the liberal idea of liberty and the republican conception of virtue came to define many of the issues still on the agenda (even though as John Argesto demonstrated, the idea of virtue began to fade in the minds of Americans following the end of the Revolutionary war), such as abortion, financing of faith-based institutions, mandatory prayer and the study of critical social justice theories at school. 

For example, the Declaration of Independence is thoroughly Lockean in its focus on God-given natural rights. This liberal vision of sources and ends of government is narrower than the one postulated by republicans, who place considerable attention on the necessity of virtue. According to the Declaration, “Governments are instituted among Men” to “secure … rights” to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and the government is legitimate as long as it has the consent of the governed. “All men are created equal,” and individuals possess rights, including the right to behave in ways that do not necessarily contribute to the common good. That is why the U.S. Constitution has no mention of God, in spite of the immense religiosity of Americans at the time. The Founders’ limited government as envisioned in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is a Lockean “umpire,” a neutral arbiter whose function is what James Madison in Federalist No.10 referred to as “the regulation of these various and interfering interests” of property holders. 

However, following the victory in the War of Independence and in prelude to the Constitutional convention, the Framers departed from the “social contract liberalism” of the Declaration of Independence. For unlike Locke, the Founders often called attention to the importance of virtue in the operation of a republican government. For example, when writing about what would restrain the House of Representatives “from making legal discriminations in favor of themselves and a particular class of the society,” Madison points to “the vigilant and manly spirit which animates the people of America — a spirit which nourishes freedom, and in return is nourished by it.” While both sides of the debates surrounding the adoption of the Constitution highlighted the importance of virtue in the functioning of a republican government, the Federalists were Lockean liberals at their core; their preoccupation with liberty led them to reject cultivation of virtue promoted by republicanist Anti-Federalists – for them, not even the necessity to foster “general welfare” trumped individual freedom. 

As Madison writes, “as long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.” The diversity inherent to human society means that “giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests” is “impracticable,” and “the protection of these faculties is the first object of government.” In contrast, for the Anti-Federalists, such as Samuel Adams, an ideal America was a “Christian Sparta.” For instance, Charles Turner from the state of Massachusetts argued that education  “shall be adequate to the divine, patriotick purpose of training up the children and youth at large, in that solid learning, and in those pious and moral principles, which are the support, the life and the soul of republican government and liberty, of which a free Constitution is the body.” 

The Anti-Federalist support for cultivation of virtuous mores in the population by means of religion and law did not find its way into the formal documents such as the Constitution — ultimately, the Federalists’ position prevailed in the “great national discussion,” and Lockean liberalism became embedded in the institutional structure of the American political system. How then did the Federalists aim to sustain virtue in the populace that, as they acknowledged, was becoming increasingly unvirtuous as the memory of the collective struggle against a common enemy began to wane? 

In order to address this conflict between liberalism and republicanism inherent in their political philosophy, the Federalists introduced institutional arrangements, such as an extended republic and mixed government. These were essential to curbing the populace’s unvirtuous conduct: their aim was to “refine and enlarge public views” so as to restrain the tyranny of the majority. However, these institutions were not tasked with a positive goal of instilling virtue — they were created to prevent undesirable behavior, not cultivate a virtuous one. The task of fostering and sustaining virtue in the populace was left to the people themselves, in particular, families, schools, local Churches, etc. Reconciling virtue and liberty, the Federalists rejected imposition of virtue on the people from the top — virtue was to be sustained from the bottom, in line with Locke’s liberal vision as opposed to republicanism. 

The Federalists assumed the existence of virtue in the American people. Publius writes that in America there exists that 

“honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government, [ . . . ] qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.” 

By depersonalizing cultivation of virtue in the institutions and decentralizing in the multiplicity of societal actors, the Federalists managed to protect individual liberty. At the same time, the American political system came to rest on a particular kind of virtue — public spiritedness, faith and love for the newfound government, sustained by society rather than the government. 

For a long time, Americans aligned themselves with the ideals of virtue required of a citizen of a republic, with the United States staying a relatively homogenous society with fairly uniform standards of behavior prescribed by Christian religion. The conflict between liberty and virtue did not manifest itself because there was no need to impose restrictions on individual liberty to foster virtuous behavior as Americans were already virtuous. Even though the republican idea of virtue eventually came to be replaced by Protestant work ethic, its widespread presence in American society meant that it need not be fostered coercively by the state — thus, Americans’ need for recognition was satisfied through a national idea first rooted first in republican virtue and then Protestant faith. 

The pursuit of recognition is one of the fundamental forces behind human action. Many thinkers pondered, in one way or another, the problem of thymos or the part of the soul that craves honor and recognition. Indeed, as Steven B. Smith argued in his lecture on Hobbes’ political philosophy, it is by controlling pride that the emergence of modern civilization was made possible.  For G. W. F. Hegel, recognition is the “fabric of sociality,” a stage in which consciousness is transformed into self-consciousness on its path towards Spirit. The struggle for recognition leads to the master-slave dialectic that marks the beginning of "history" — and reaching full mutual recognition constitutes its end. And more than a thousand years before Hegel, Plato introduced the concept of thymos, along with epithymia (lowly pleasures) and logos (intellectual pursuits). 

Thomas Hobbes succinctly summarized the challenges thymos poses for a society in his Leviathan: because “men are continually in competition for Honour and Dignity,” “there ariseth on that ground, Envy and Hatred, and finally Warre...” Ultimately, the variety of views on this issue can be broadly categorized as follows: humans are either left free to seek recognition (and, by extension, meaning) on their own as in a liberal vision, or the problem of thymos is addressed via the coercive apparatus of the state (an “authoritarian” perspective). 

This distinction is well-illustrated by Thomas Hobbes in Chapter XIV of Leviathan, when he writes that though “the force of Words” is “too weak to hold men to the performance of their Covenants,” “there are in man’s nature, but two imaginable helps to strengthen it”: “a Feare of the consequence of breaking their word; or a Glory, or Pride in appearing not to need to breake it.” In accordance with an “authoritarian” outlook, Hobbesian Leviathan, according to the Scripture (Job 41:34), is a “king over all that are proud.” Sovereign’s absolute power was a constraint necessary to control people’s destructive craving for thymos, which is why “to the Soveraign is committed the Power of Rewarding with riches, or honour.” 

In contrast, republicans relied on “Pride in appearing not to need to breake it” in holding men to the “performance of their Covenants.” That is why one of the most prominent republican thinkers to influence the Founding Fathers’ political philosophy, Charles Montesquieu, maintained that in monarchies, aristocracy’s “code of honor” served as a check on monarch’s absolute power. Likewise, in democratic republics, virtue, understood as public spiritedness — the willingness to put aside one’s factional interests for the sake of common good — satisfies individual craving for thymos without engendering violent struggles between societal actors. Pride is derived from being patriotic and acting in the name of the collective. 

For in a republic, individuals associate their own good with that of the collective, and individual interest thus becomes aligned with societal interest. In the republican vision, glory and recognition are gained by sacrificing oneself for larger causes or for the common good of the collective, such as a national idea. National identity proved to be a great substitute for the equal recognition of one’s worth thanks to its universal applicability, playing the role of a political religion in the United States. The uniqueness of the attitude of the Federalists consisted in their synthesis of liberal and authoritarian approaches to the problem of thymos: their vision rested on virtue, but a virtue that is not cultivated by the state as a rule. 

Realizing the importance of higher ideals in orienting an individual in his quest for meaning, the Federalists embedded in their foundational documents the ideal of virtue that revolved around faith in the American system to guide citizens’ behavior. This regularity is absent in the Lockean liberal society, which fails to fulfill people’s thymos and thereby leads to the fragmentation of society into identity groups. As reflected in the famous maxim “ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” the system created by the Founding Fathers provided outlets for the satisfaction of thymos, just like in republicanism, redirecting the power of human ambition in a way that facilitated protection of individual liberty. 

The American people also had a collective sense of identity forged by the struggle for independence that connected each person to the nation. Such strong identification of one’s own good with that of the nation and emotional loyalty were possible because many Americans at that time actively participated in the creation of the republic, investing their efforts and even sacrificing their lives for their country’s sake – a country of the people, by the people, and for the people. People are more likely to support a government that is at least partly a product of their endeavors, which is why active citizen participation in the political life of their country is such a crucial prerequisite of a republican government. By creating a system that rested both on self-interest and virtue as well as ambition and dedication to higher ideals and common good, the Federalists managed to overcome the limitations of Locke’s liberal political philosophy. As Leonard R. Sorenson put it, “the success of the Constitutional order depends equally upon the action or restraint-producing passion of ambition and upon the direction-giving sentiments of virtue.” 

Deep down, the Founding Fathers fulfilled humans’ fundamental need for regularities by the “power of their example.” For the political project of the Federalists was, in a way, a manifestation of an insight made by Machiavelli: in republics, reliance on institutions was possible because of virtuous Founding Fathers who established them in the first place, “obviat[ing] the need for future men of their kind.” Thus, liberalism’s problem of factionalism that results from the lack of higher values provided by the government was alleviated because factions at least had common values and impersonal institutions to regulate their behavior, a national idea that could be evoked during disputes. 

In pre-industrial and industrial America, economic security was the end goal of the majority of the citizens. Even in the twentieth century, politics still centered on economic issues — the rights of workers and welfare programs on the left, promotion of the private sector on the right. Thus, seemingly irrational and rudimental satisfaction of thymos through “tribal” attachment to a nation or a political system could work as most citizens sought to realize themselves primarily through economic success.

The people could not stay virtuous forever, however. Over time, the collective memory of the War of Independence began to wane, and a unifying American national idea became sidelined by the issue of slavery. And republican virtue, as Isaac Cramnick argued, became replaced with a Protestant work ethic that emphasized “industry, frugality and simplicity” rather than public spiritedness, leading to the economization of the public sphere. This way, the conflict between liberty and republican virtue turned into a synthesis of individual liberty and Protestant virtue, which involved self-interested pursuit of wealth, destroying whatever remained of republicanism in the United States. The Anti-Federalists’ worries about capitalism’s effects on public virtue materialized when Protestant religion provided an ethical basis for the liberal state. 

Already in the middle of the nineteenth century, Abraham Lincoln lamented the fading of national memory, histories that “were the pillars of the temple of liberty,” “a fortress of strength; but, what invading foe-men could never do, the silent artillery of time has done; the levelling of its walls.” Still, the national idea, even though it began to fade in the memory of Americans, was not completely sidelined by group identities. But following the Second World War, American society underwent fundamental changes in its system of values and goals that dealt a mortal blow to the national idea. 

In this postmodern age, the quest for economic security no longer dominates American’s day to day lives due to dramatic increases in standards of living. Survival was superseded by self-expression. Indeed, as writers like Steven Pinker in his book Enlightenment Now and projects such as Our World in Data have demonstrated, the world, including the West, have undergone unprecedented growth in standards of living following the end of the Second World War. Even in America, seen by many as an exemplar of “rogue capitalism” in which “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer”, between 1979 and 2015, the poorest 20 percent of Americans experienced, on average, an 80 percent increase in their incomes in spite of increasing economic inequality. 

As the desire for self-realization and recognition of one’s worth replaced the struggle for economic survival, thymos replaced epithymia as the primary motivating force behind our actions and the relative importance of materialist values declined. However, as Anthea Roberts and Nicholas Lamp write, “[e]ven if disability payments, welfare handouts and cheaper products mean that laid-off manufacturing workers are materially better off than their parents, what they have lost in pride and status will likely outweigh any material gains.” Thus, it is no coincidence that in the second half of the twentieth century, the first significant movements centered around group identity formed. People became insulated in identity groups, while virtue from a collective good turned into one man’s (or group’s) idea of what is right — a kind of moral relativism that became one of the defining features of postmodernity. 

The Cold War and the existential struggle against the Soviet Union to an extent filled the gap left by the retreat of religion and classical republican virtue. When contrasted with Soviet communism, it was easier to unite the people around American national identity — just as in Rome, external threats forced Americans “to lay aside their private quarrels to rally to the defense of the patria.” The collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States as the only superpower — and polarization worsened dramatically in the 1990s. As Machiavelli so acutely observed, in a republic, factional strife and societal challenges are the prerequisite to the preservation of freedom and “the source of supply which enabled it to acquire the greatness at which it arrived.” Without challenges and conflicts, society’s mores soften, and stoic, “awful” virtues (as Adam Smith called them) turn into “amiable” ones that characterize commercial societies.

While there are many factors at work behind the surge in polarization, from socio-economic ones such as increasing inequality and demographic changes to the digitalization of the discourse space, (and there is still much disagreement among researchers as to the ultimate causes of polarization in the United States) the emergence of postmodernity and the disappearance of a common national ideal may be considered one of the determinants. For example, a recent paper found a correlation between rising ethnic diversity and polarization (“the increase in the non-white share has been twice as large in countries with rising affective polarization as in those with falling affective polarization”) — and heterogenization of the American society is one of the characteristics of a postmodern society.

The waning of a collective national identity laid ground for the emergence of identity politics and the resurgence of populism, accompanied by the decline of virtue. Virtue — like everything else in a postmodern society — became relativized, depending upon the perspective of the individual rather than reflecting universally accepted truths. Postmodernity emerged as the ultimate realization of the ideas of liberalism: nowadays, America is characterized not just by economic liberty, but also moral liberty. 

Indeed, in our day and age, the very idea of virtue may seem conservative and even reactionary. It no longer has the same sway in discourse it once had in America’s early days. With the destruction of common values and socially constructed self-imposed restraints on one’s behavior, “state-centered language of power and sovereignty,” not just in economics but also politics, has started to play an increasingly influential role. This is why, from both left and right, we can hear calls to constrain individual liberty, be it for the sake of “social justice” or the preservation of the morals of American society from the malignant influence of immigrants. Those new visions of what constitutes virtue, however, are actively being promoted by activists through regulations and statutes, undermining America’s Lockean state that the Federalists created to protect individual rights and liberties. 

Liberty without constraints is self-defeating, and controls on human action are thus inescapable. Something has to curb our worst impulses — for the alternative to an internal “Guardian,” voluntary adherence to a socially accepted idea of virtue and conformity to formal and informal rules of the game, is an increase in the potentially tyrannical powers of the government. Reduced reliance on the national government, combined with decentralization that leaves more decision-making power on the local and state levels, may help adapt the political system to the realities of postmodernity. In a multiracial, pluralistic nation of three hundred million, commonalities are rare, but in more homogenous states or municipalities, citizens are more likely to have similar worldviews and agree on shared values. 

Some observers, including Francis Fukuyama, suggest that it could be possible to cultivate a sense of belonging to a single nation in Americans by reinstating mandatory national service, which would “serve as a contemporary form of classical republicanism, a form of democracy that encouraged virtue and public-spiritedness rather than simply leaving citizens alone to pursue their private lives.” 

However, today’s problems cannot be addressed simply by turning to the paradigms of the past. Efforts to cultivate virtue, be it on the level of the country or the states, should be avoided, for we can already witness the danger such power in the hands of the government poses to individual liberty (as the Framers recognized all too well), from the attempts to ban speech that “facilitates” abortion to imposition of Critical Race Theory on students. While the institution of mandatory national service is definitely not equivalent to the introduction of “woke” curricula to schools, it still constitutes a restriction of individual liberty that should be eschewed; what’s more, bringing together members of different factions espousing opposing worldviews could be counterproductive. 

We live in a society in which, in Jurgen Habermas’s words, “comprehensive worldviews and collectively binding ethics have disintegrated” and “the surviving post-traditional morality of conscience no longer supplies a substitute for the natural law that was once grounded in religion or metaphysics.” We should avoid imposing universal solutions to challenges that are bottom-up in nature, reflecting fundamental forces out of our control. 

Attempting to build “the tower of Babel … without God … to set up Heaven on Earth” is a recipe for catastrophe as the utopian political projects of the 20th century have demonstrated all too well. Instead of trying to change the course of such large-scale societal phenomena, we should adapt our political system to the realities of a postmodern society. The object of institutional engineering should be piecemeal reform of the political system, not a wholesale reshaping of the social fabric. 

The author would like to thank Ilya Lokshin, Associate Professor at HSE University, and Sanzhar Akayev, Assistant of the School of Politics and Governance of HSE’s Faculty of Social Sciences, for their feedback on this essay.

Sukhayl Niyazov is an independent author and researcher. His work has appeared in The National Interest, The American Conservative, City Journal, Public Discourse, Starting Points Journal, Law and Liberty, The Federalist, among other publications.

Critics of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter have been quick to call out his hypocrisy over free speech. Given that Musk’s professed adoration of liberal principles appears to cease where his foreign investments begin, the critics may have a point.

Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has been characterized as everything from a move that “puts our democracy at stake” to part of the effort to “save… democracy.” A writer at Foreign Policy went so far as to say “Twitter’s destruction would be a geopolitical catastrophe not only for the United States but also for the democratic world.” For Musk’s part, in early 2022 he said buying Twitter demonstrated his concern for the “function of democracy” and the “future of civilization.” 

During the first few months of Musk’s control of Twitter, however, several incidents have already called into question his commitment to his self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” position.

When Musk believed his family had been threatened — a claim many found to be a stretch — several prominent journalists and other critics of Musk were suspended. Twitter also implemented a short-lived ban on accounts promoting Twitter competitors. And although Musk often mixes jokes with serious commentary, some have found his “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci” Tweet to be an inexcusable call for the political prosecution of a government official for policy disagreements. 

But while these mini-dramas captured the attention of the obsessives who dominate political Twitter, in terms of potential for hypocrisy, they are dwarfed by the one area where Musk’s financial interests and professed reverence for freedom most clearly and rather awkwardly intersect: China. 

Musk’s Tesla began selling cars in 2014 in China and it quickly became the company’s second largest market. Four years later, Tesla announced that it would begin making vehicles there.

But when it comes to China’s human rights record, Musk has been mostly mum. Aside from a 2022 observation about China’s birth rate potentially leading to an eventual population collapse in the country, the public record is devoid of Musk criticism of China’s authoritarianism, its draconian Covid policies and restrictions, the lack of free speech and expression in the country, the cultural genocide of the country’s Uygher Muslims, or even China’s longtime ban of Musk’s latest acquisition, Twitter.

While a 2012 Tweet by Musk tweaks China (and Russia) for its anti-democracy stance at the United Nations, most of Musk’s public statements since have been markedly positive regarding the oppressive Communist regime.

Some of these could be categorized as merely broad and perfunctory. For instance, a 2019 response to a question about foreign ventures of Tesla in which Musk noted:

But at times, Musk has given the Chinese government the kind of boosterism in touting its accomplishments that would be at home in a Thomas Friedman column. In May 2022, Musk Tweeted:

It didn’t go unnoticed. In a reply, Chen Weihua, identified by Twitter as “China state-affiliated media” and widely known as a mouthpiece and apologist for the regime, bragged:

Earlier, in July 2018, Musk Tweeted even more unequivocally pro-China:

Musk followed this up with a photo of himself with Communist Chinese Party officials:

One can’t help wondering if part of the discussion of philosophy Musk had with his Chinese partners involved Musk’s take on socialism. In June 2018, Musk explained:

That same sentiment under various glosses is of course regularly used by the Chinese Communist Party to justify its control of its people and their economic, political, and social freedom.

So, we’re left with a rather glaring cognitive dissonance between Musk’s professed love for free speech and democracy and his lack of criticism of the CCP. Rather than call out the Chinese government for its despotic ways, Musk seems inclined on at least some occasions to mimic the CCP’s illiberal instincts. 

Musk may altruistically claim that he is a free speech absolutist and that, when it comes to Twitter, he doesn’t “care about the economics at all,” as he claimed at the time of his purchase. But his apparent reluctance to irritate his Communist Chinese minders and put his financial interests in jeopardy speaks louder. 

But perhaps worse than mere grubby hypocrisy for financial gain, there remains an even more disturbing possibility that Musk, among the richest and most powerful private citizens in the world, actually believes what he says about China. 

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Which of the following two statements is more likely to result in or encourage violence? 

Statement 1, made in the wake of widespread rioting and vandalism across American cities:  “One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.” 

Statement 2, a call to fight climate change with large scale, violent sabotage aimed at fossil fuels facilities: “When activists… smashed gas stations in April this year, they hit the nail on the head… When governments refuse to undertake this work, it is up to the rest of us to initiate it. That is the rationale for sabotage: to aim straight for the bags of coal.”

The first statement resulted in a New York Times staff revolt that led to the dismissal of the page’s opinion editor and a 325-word editor’s note that said, among other things, that the “tone of the essay in places is needlessly harsh and falls short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate” and “should not have been published.” (This, as many pointed out at the time, came from same the newspaper that published an essay by an FBI-wanted terrorist entitled, “What We, the Taliban Want,” presumably written with that elusive “thoughtful approach that advances useful debate.”) 

The second statement is by Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, and appeared in a recent New York Times Opinion essay under the new leadership, with no editor’s note and no newsroom drama. 

To be clear, neither Malm’s statement nor the title of his book are metaphorical. This man wants the oil industry to get wrecked. Literally.

The recent tomato soup attack by climate-activists (or, in the spirit of the Times’s Taliban essay, eco-terrorists) on Van Gogh’s masterpiece Sunflowers gave rise to Malm’s essay. Malm professes to being dismayed initially at news of the souping, but once he realized no harm was done to the painting, he had a change of perspective, deciding that such attacks on priceless cultural artifacts might “further the cause”, much like the other acts of property destruction already in his arsenal. Threatening “something innocent and beautiful,” after all, gets you headlines.

This is not the first time a mainstream publication has leant its platform to Malm. In September 2021, The New Yorker’s David Remnick hosted him on a podcast, in which Malm “insists that the environmental movement reconsider its roots in nonviolence.” While Malm says he is “in favor of destroying machines, property—not harming people,” what’s less clear is how Malm proposes to make sure no one is harmed when blowing up pipelines, “smash[ing] gas stations,” and “storm[ing] a construction site” to “utterly wreck machinery and other equipment.” Especially given the scale required for such actions to actually stop oil and gas production in wealthy countries within 12 years, Malm’s stated goal.

While Vox’s entry in the genre does not mention Malm by name, the Sunflowers incident inspired eco-terror cheerleading at that publication as well. Aja Romano, a Vox culture writer, penned an article asking “How many van Goghs is one Earth worth?”, and sub-headlined, “We’re still contemplating the thorny brilliance of throwing soup on Sunflowers.” Romano even managed to spin this act of vandalism into a form of art appreciation.

“This seems to be the ultimate utility of throwing tomato soup on van Gogh’s Sunflowers: not to grab attention or cause mayhem, but to activate our love of art, our sense of wonder and awe and reverence,” Romano writes. 

Here’s also a Tweet from Vox’s culture editor:

The soup attack on Van Gogh has already inspired copycats: mashed potatoes on a Monet in Germany and more soup and superglue on The Girl With the Pearl Earring at The Hague. So with any luck (and a healthy arsenal of vegetables and canned soup), perhaps the Renaissance, as it were, that Vox is pining for is in the offing.

Or, more likely, one of these attacks will permanently damage or destroy a masterpiece and, if Andreas Malm gets his way, attacks on fossil-fuel facilities will escalate and spread until one day, it’s not just machines that get destroyed.

The media has been, to say the least, equivocal in its concern over the spread of violent rhetoric. In August, the New York Times published an article entitled “As Right-Wing Rhetoric Escalates, So Do Threats and Violence.” As the headline indicates, most of the article focused on one side of the ideological divide, but did note that “Republicans have often criticized Democrats for paying scant attention to the Kavanaugh incident [assassination attempt], and for only caring about aggression when it comes from the right.” 

Ironically enough, the Times itself has run but one article on the Kavanaugh incident, not even reporting the indictment of the suspect by a grand jury a week after his arrest. But in the wake of the heinous attack on Nancy Pelosi’s 82-year old husband Paul, the Times was again in the mood for sweeping generalizations with: “Pelosi Attack Highlights Rising Fears of Political Violence.”

Vox, which has has run zero articles on the Kavanaugh assassination attempt, also chimed in, Tweeting a link to the Times piece with “The attack against Nancy Pelosi’s husband isn’t an outlier, but part of a growing wave of right-wing threats against political officials.”

The coarsening of political rhetoric on the right surely reflects the significant influence of Donald Trump and his often flippant and promiscuous attitude about violence, including his initial encouragement of the January 6th takeover of the Capitol and subsequent tepid calls for protesters to “go home” after the damage had been done. 

Trump also certainly brought out the worst of his adversaries, with comedian Kathy Griffin’s bizarre and grisly image of herself holding Trump’s severed head — just the first of a series of incidents in which prominent leftists gave themselves special dispensations to celebrate violence against the then president. (The New York Times ends up on this list, as well, with its publication of a snuff fantasy by a writer commissioned by the paper for a counterfactual feature about Trump’s Secret Service detail aiding and abetting his assassination).

But in the end, arguments about which side advocates violence more often or more egregiously are less important than rejecting outright the dubious principle underlying those rationalizations: that the ends justify the violent means. 

Our political, cultural and social disagreements should be hashed out with debate and peaceful actions, not guns, punches, or soup cans. If institutions such as the New York Times are willing to give advocates of violence an open platform in an attempt to attract others to adopt their destructive tactics, lives will be in danger and the temperature of the discourse will continue to rise. 

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