E-Pluribus | April 25, 2024
How the right can avoid the left's wrongs; E(ducation) pluribus unum; and the Disinformation Czar is baaa-aaack!
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Rob Jenkins: The Right Must Avoid the Left’s Free Speech Pitfalls
Two wrongs don’t make a right, and if the right repeats the wrongs of the left, both are wrong. Right? That’s what Rob Jenkins at Minding the Campus says as he warns those on the right not to practice what they used to preach against.
Years ago. . . I observed that the left and right in this country seemed to be competing to see who could censor the most speech.
[. . .]
Under Joe Biden, the government has even pressured private companies to remove social media posts contrary to the regime’s preferred narratives on COVID-19, climate change, and election fraud. That is censorship on a large scale.
Indeed, we’ve gotten to the point where simply expressing support for the First Amendment automatically marks one as “rightwing”—can you say Elon Musk? This, of course, tells us all we need to know about the authoritarian tendencies of the left.
The dynamic has shifted somewhat, however, since the brutal terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas against Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023. The right’s collective response to that atrocity appears to reveal some cracks in our free speech armor.
[. . .]
[P]rominent conservatives have been shouted down, deplatformed, and even fired by other conservatives for the offense of appearing insufficiently pro-Israel.
[. . .]
[Texas Governor Greg Abbott] directed all Texas colleges and universities to “review and update free speech policies to address the sharp rise in antisemitic speech and acts on university campuses and establish appropriate punishments.”
Do you see the problem?
Abbott puts “speech” and “acts” in the same category, essentially equating them and thereby coopting a longstanding leftist talking point: “Words are violence.” But as conservatives understand, words are not violence. So what is Abbott decrying here—speech or actions?
If the latter, his executive order is unnecessary. Every action he describes—protests escalating into violence, physical intimidation of Jewish students, disruption of classes and campus activities—is already covered by existing laws and campus policies. As Governor, Abbott could simply direct college presidents to enforce those.
On the other hand, if the order is really about speech, then it’s clearly unconstitutional. However offensive we may find it, “anti-Semitic speech” is protected by the First Amendment—exceptions to which are, rightly, very limited—and therefore cannot be “punished” by state actors.
[. . .]
When conservatives take pages out of the left’s playbook, we essentially accept their premises: in this case, thatwords are inherently violent, and thus, one side has no right to express views the other finds abhorrent. This is not to our advantage. We will be on the losing end of that transaction almost every time.
Read it all here.
Jeremy Tate: The Secret Force Defending American Principles
America has been called everything from a melting pot to a fruit salad. So really how different are Americans from one another? Jeremy Tate at Real Clear Politics says not as much as one might think, and one of our commonalities stands out above the rest: education.
The commentary class was collectively shocked when new polling this week showed over 90% of Americans across the political spectrum share core principles. More specifically, the vast majority firmly believe in the importance of fundamental freedoms such as the right to vote, equal protection under the law, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion.
Students of history – or even of current events in most of the world – know that tribalism is the norm and broad support for the freedoms we have in the United States can hardly be presumed. That Americans agree on such fundamentals in the face of the divisive forces of social-media echo chambers, cable news hyperbole, vitriolic electioneering, and the politicization of culture and commerce is the result of the quietly unifying victory of an otherwise highly politicized force: education.
This sounds counterintuitive. When people consider education in America today, they’re likely to think of controversial book bans, vicious debates over transgender policy, or the long-running war between advocates for public schools and those who support school choice. If anything, education exacerbates our divisions instead of overcoming them, popular opinion argues.
Yet the focus on controversies can cause us to miss the unifying forest for the contentious trees.
Look across America: Teachers or administrators may have wildly divergent political opinions, but are any more than a fringe few teaching students to believe the law should be unequally applied? A district school and a charter school may be governed very differently, but does either teach that government should outlaw freedom of speech? Or ban specific religions? In reality, from the deepest blue public school in San Francisco to the conservative homeschooler in Oklahoma, when students are introduced to the greatest historical heroes and most provocative works of our civilization they learn to appreciate the foundational principles of the American experiment.
[. . .]
Great works of literature and philosophy and monumental epochs and characters from history are uniquely effective at training students to appreciate our universal principles in large part because such materials aren’t easily infected by today’s debates.
Read the whole thing.
Robby Soave: Nina Jankowicz, Disinformation Czar, Is Back in Action
“So when the cat has got your tongue, there's no need for dismay! Just summon up this word, and then you've got a lot to say! But better use it carefully or it could change your life...” Disinformation! No, that’s not actually the word Mary Poppins had in mind, but it sure has changed Nina Jankowicz’s life (who once called herself the “Mary Poppins of disinformation”) and she’s back at it again, reports Robby Soave at Reason.
Nina Jankowicz. . . has returned from exile to launch a new disinformation-tracking organization called the American Sunlight Project.
Jankowicz. . . was hired by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2022 to head its short-lived Disinformation Governance Board. The dystopian nature of that agency's title caused widespread public criticism, followed by hasty reassurances from the feds that the board would have no authority to actually police speech. Nevertheless, Jankowicz became the subject of considerable scrutiny. Just who was this singsong academic entrusted by the federal government to distinguish truth from lies?
A close look at her record gave plenty of reasons for concern. Hunter Biden's laptop is the quintessential example of the counter-disinformation industry misidentifying a true story as false: Dozens of former national security officers and experts wrongly flagged the New York Post's Hunter Biden scoop as appearing to possess malicious Russian origins. The mainstream media—led by Politico—then intensified the error, asserting the (incorrect) claim that the national security experts had definitively judged the laptop story to be disinformation, rather than simply resembling disinformation.
Jankowicz fell for it too—hook, line, and sinker. On October 22, 2020, then-President Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden engaged in a presidential debate. When Biden was asked about the laptop story, he responded that it had no legitimacy; it had been deemed false by national security experts. Again, this is not what the national security experts actually said. In any case, when Jankowicz tweeted about the exchange, she failed to make any note of this.
[. . .]
And so Jankowicz has reemerged as director of another new disinformation watchdog group, the American Sunlight Project. Its first action was to send a letter to congressional Republicans, objecting to their efforts to thwart research into disinformation.
"Your committees are using government resources to attack these researchers, deliberately misconstruing their work," says the letter.
I for one would not be surprised whatsoever if a partisan figure had misrepresented matters in order to score a political point. But the letter does not provide a single example of anti-misinformation research being misconstrued. It does claim that "the vast majority of the researchers" criticized by Republicans are women, and that they have faced "gendered, sexualized violent rhetoric" as a result. While the letter contains 10 footnotes, not a single one of them attempts to quantify the claim that female researchers are being criticized disproportionately.
[. . .]
The New York Times, by the way, noted that Jankowicz declined to release the names of the American Sunlight Project's donors.
Read it all.
Around Twitter (X)
Here’s Princeton's Robert P. George with some counsel to university presidents on campus speech:
And here’s Nico Perrino of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) with some counsel for all parties regarding campus protests and freedom of expression:
And finally, speaking of FIRE, Billy Binion of Reason with an observation on how reactions to FIRE nicely illustrate the horseshoe theory - the fringes hate FIRE: