E-Pluribus | April 24, 2024
NPR's CEO - a liberal, or illiberal? Australia takes on misinformation; just because speech should be free doesn't mean everything is worth saying.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Andrew Sullivan: Katherine Maher Is Not A Liberal
So far, NPR’s new CEO Katherine Maher is weathering the storm created by former NPR editor Uri Berliner’s The Free Press article, along with her tweet history. Writing at The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan points out that while Maher has been called a “liberal” by the media, she’s anything but.
[W]hen I read the NYT story about the new NPR CEO, Katherine Maher, being criticized for past tweets that were “embracing liberal causes,” it felt like a blast of ‘90s nostalgia. Who running the MSM doesn’t “embrace liberal causes”?
[. . .]
But of course, the MSM is lying — by obfuscating Maher’s politics and her tweets to make her views seem far milder than they are. She is not, in fact, a liberal of any kind. She is — as the tweets and the record prove — a near-parody of an illiberal leftist, dedicated to replacing open and free debate with benign censorship, and to constructing a journalistic regime rooted not in the pursuit of truth but in the urgent task of dismantling “white supremacy.”
[. . .]
If you want to understand why NPR is now cringe, look no further. If you want to understand why social justice is best understood as a religious cult, ditto. Body and soul? The journalist sounds like a revivalist.
Maher’s tweets perfectly define our new cultural overlords. And I’m not just talking about tweets like this typical one, as cities burned and countless small businesses were destroyed in the mayhem of the summer of 2020: “I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive. But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property. Also, reporting on extinguished shoe store fires is just lazy reporting. … Cheesecakes are insured; the right to be black and breathe is without measure.”
Maher’s full tweetage is a deep dive into the successor ideology. First and foremost, it means an end to the Enlightenment idea of empirical truth, discoverable by a curious human being, regardless of his or her identity. This idea is, in fact, a “white male Westernized construct,” as Maher once explained in an interview. “Seeking the truth, and seeking to convince others of the truth, might not be the right place to start,” Maher argued in her TED talk. “In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction … We all have different truths. They’re based on things like: where we come from, how we were raised, and how other people perceive us.”
That’s why, in Maher’s woke mind, you have to start not with an individual but with an identity. A white reporter is not interchangeable with a black reporter, or a female reporter with a male reporter, and only black reporters know the truth about race, just as only “nonbinary” or trans people can speak about gender. There is no objective truth; there are only narratives based on unfalsifiable “lived experiences”; and the job of NPR is to elevate the narratives that help dismantle the racist, heterosexist, patriarchal, transphobic regime of “whiteness” — and suppress those that don’t.
Read it all.
Toadworrier [pseudonym]: Stifling Free Speech Online: Australia’s Misinformation Bill
Australia is famous for the fierce independence of its people, but the Australian government seems intent on helping its citizens cope with “misinformation” anyway. An Australian software engineer writing under the pseudonym “Toadworrier” at Quillette exposes the proposed legislation for what it is - a tool to silence dissent.
Every censorship regime in history has claimed to be simply protecting the public. But in fact, no regime can have privileged, prior knowledge of what is true or good. It can only know what the approved narratives are and uphold the status quo. As is usual in democratic politics, Western governments are being steered down this path less by a simple lust for power than by the efforts of an activist industry: in this case, a network of individuals and organizations that earn their keep by warning of the dangers of harmful information and taking it upon themselves to determine what information is “harmful” and what is “safe.”
[. . .]
Like all such laws, Australia’s new bill pays lip service to free speech. Authorities are asked politely to consider the importance of freedom of expression when making their judgements—but no actionable limits are set on their censorship, nor are there any penalties for silencing people. The bill delegates decision-making power to platforms that can already block content at their discretion, without having to show that it violates any law. That discretion will be exercised in the context of laws that punish them for permitting speech of which people disapprove, and do not punish them for censoring truthful, legal speech. Decisions to censor any individual are left up to risk-averse corporations, who will be anxious not to attract the ire of a regulator.
These laws are not simply an expression of countries’ own constitutional norms. They are a dodge around those norms. Free speech traditionally flourishes in democracies because their citizens can’t be muzzled at the mere say-so of some censor appointed by a theocrat, strongman, or authoritarian. Even in democracies with nothing like America’s First Amendment, speech can traditionally only be limited by specific laws. But on the Internet, none of this applies. Posts can be quietly downranked or deleted at will. The platforms are not accountable to anyone and the censored have no legal recourse. Civil servants, government officials, security forces, and other agencies of the state can exploit this by pressuring platforms to mute their critics.
Luckily, people are beginning to challenge this ability to censor by proxy. As usual, Americans are taking the lead. In Missouri v. Biden, various plaintiffs, including the US states of Missouri and Louisiana, alleged that “numerous federal officials coerced social-media platforms into censoring certain social-media content, in violation of the First Amendment.” The US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed[.]
[. . .]
Liberalism in Australia is also showing a few belated signs of fighting spirit. New civil society organisations, such as the Free Speech Union of Australia, are cropping up. Also, the government’s new misinformation law has not yet passed and is looking increasingly friendless. It has been denounced by Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner, by the Victorian Bar Association, and by prominent scholars and publications.
[. . .]
With luck, liberal forces from both left and right can hold back Australia’s Misinformation and Disinformation Bill. But there’s no need to just stay on the defensive. If there is a political will to hold Big Tech to account, it should be harnessed to entrench free speech and open discourse and to introduce legislation that guarantees neutrality, transparency, and procedural fairness in content moderation.
Read the whole thing.
Steven Lubet: Free antisemitic speech is still antisemitic and indefensible
Regardless of who said it (Voltaire or his paraphrasers), “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” is an expression of free speech absolutism. While government may not silence anyone for unpopular words, Steven Lubet at the Boston Globe argues that just because people have the right to make antisemitic statements, doesn’t mean anyone else has to defend them.
One of only two Muslim women in the U.S. Congress, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) has always been a vehemently outspoken critic of Israel. She explained her recent vote against the Israel Security Supplemental Bill, for example, as a refusal to “support unconditional military aid that further escalates the already horrific humanitarian situation” in Gaza.
Often accused of antisemitism, Omar has maintained, as many others do, that she strongly condemns Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, while accepting the nation itself as “America’s legitimate and democratic ally.”
There can indeed be a valid distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism — with the first aimed at the policies and actions of Israel’s government, and the latter directed against Jewish people and institutions. Although anti-Israel activists, often echoing Omar, typically assert that their protests are leveled only at Zionism, some have lately demonstrated a shocking inclination to employ classically antisemitic themes and images.
One appalling instance recently surfaced at the University of California’s Berkeley Law School, when Dean Erwin Chemerinsky announced a series of three dinners for graduating students, to be held at his home. Although the event had nothing to do with Gaza’s agony, the Berkeley chapter of Law Students for Justice in Palestine seized on Chemerinsky’s Jewish identity to call for a boycott of the celebration.
They placed posters throughout the law school, as well as on their Instagram account, featuring a grotesque caricature of Chemerinsky holding a bloody knife and fork, with the caption “No Dinner with Zionist Chem While Gaza Starves.” Chemerinsky and I are friendly acquaintances, having coauthored a short essay on judicial ethics in 2004.
Chemerinsky recognized the image as “blatant antisemitism,” invoking the “horrible antisemitic trope of blood libel” and attacking him for “no apparent reason other than I am Jewish.”
He wasn’t exaggerating.
The portrayal of Jews as leering blood drinkers — historically known as a “blood libel” — dates back to Medieval times, and it has been used ever since as an excuse for pogroms, expulsions, and worse. It was a staple of Germany’s Der Stürmer in the Nazi era and can be seen today in its American descendant, the far-right, neo-Nazi publication The Daily Stormer. Louis Farrakhan antisemitically refers to Jews as blood-suckers and the myth of evil Jewish vampires — not the moon children of “Twilight” — has been widespread in Europe and the Middle East.
Other campuses have also seen antisemitic imagery. At Harvard, for example, the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and the African and African American Resistance Organization posted a drawing depicting a hand bearing a Star of David and a dollar sign holding nooses around the necks of two Black and Arab men. Even worse, a group called the Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine shared the post on its social media account.
Read it all here.
Around Twitter (X)
Via Aaron Sibarium, “obesity” is now a slur at UCLA medical school. Click for the full thread.
From the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a long-form tweet on protesting, free speech, violence and arrests on college campuses:
And finally, still thinking about writing that book someday? You might want to just keep it a thought. Here’s a tidbit via Elizabeth Nolan Brown from an antitrust case involving Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster: