The radical right legal onslaught in defense of demagoguery

This is a complex area of legal attack that is heavily shrouded in sophisticated disinformation, misdirection, spin and lies. But as the attack proceeds into laws that are challenged in courts, some of the deceit and opacity are stripped away by court filings that are public documents. The Republican radicals attacking the right of private citizens to control speech are focused on the big social media platforms. 

What is going on right now is a fascinating attack on private platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Radical right Republicans have passed laws that prevent the platform from banning people like the ex-president for bad speech. Those laws are clearly unconstitutional, but this line of attack directly challenges what had been settled law, namely the right of a private entity to control or ban whatever speech it chose for any reason or no reason. 

To try to simplify and clarify what is going on, my analysis and opinion follows:

Radical Republican neo-fascists need unfettered access to big social media to maximize the impact of their divisive propaganda. That propaganda is necessary for success of their run for neo-fascist power and kleptocratic wealth. As discussed here before, most big neo-fascist Republican online sites instantly ban critics and inconvenient truth because it weakens the power of their lies and divisiveness. They demand that the really big sites carry their propaganda without interference. The misdirection here is that the really big sites are targeted, while leaving all the smaller ones free to censor dissent and inconvenient truth. If that analysis is basically correct, and I believe it is, the Republican calculation probably is that the neo-fascist cause will be helped more than hurt by doing what they are now trying to do. 

From what I can tell, Republicans rely on, and their rank and file responds to, demagoguery significantly more than Democrats and independents. The advantage is with authoritarian demagogues over the democrats and honest speech. That is something, arguably a fact, not an opinion, that has been known since at least Plato and Aristotle. 

One troubling factor here is that some liberal judges appear to be buying into this line of attack. Apparently, they cannot see the threat of demagoguery in the form of protected free speech. The radical right myth has always been, the more speech the better. That poison dart is false. But it quite effectively denies or deflects from the fact that dark free speech can be and now is being used to attack democracy. The attack of authoritarian demagogues is not just ongoing in America. It is being applied to all democracies everywhere. Simply put, it is not always true that more speech is better. In the hands of authoritarian demagogues, more speech is worse.

The New York Times writes:

Supreme Court Blocks Texas Law Regulating Social Media Platforms

The law, prompted by conservative complaints about censorship, prohibits big technology companies like Facebook and Twitter from removing posts based on the views they express. 

The Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked a Texas law that would ban large social media companies from removing posts based on the views they express.

The court’s brief order was unsigned and gave no reasons, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications. The order was not the last word in the case, which is pending before a federal appeals court and may return to the Supreme Court.

The vote was 5 to 4, with an unusual coalition in dissent. The court’s three most conservative members — Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch — filed a dissent saying they would have let stand, for now at least, an appeals court order that left the law in place while the case moved forward. Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal, also said she would have let the order stand, though she did not join the dissent and gave no reasons of her own.

Justice Alito wrote that the issues were so novel and significant that the Supreme Court would have to consider them at some point.

“This application concerns issues of great importance that will plainly merit this court’s review,” he wrote. “Social media platforms have transformed the way people communicate with each other and obtain news. At issue is a groundbreaking Texas law that addresses the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day.”

Justice Alito said he was skeptical of the argument that the social media companies have editorial discretion protected by the First Amendment like that enjoyed by newspapers and other traditional publishers.

“It is not at all obvious,” he wrote, “how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies.”  

The law’s supporters said the measure was an attempt to combat what they called Silicon Valley censorship, saying major platforms had removed posts expressing conservative views. The law was prompted in part by the decisions of some platforms to bar President Donald J. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The law, H.B. 20, applies to social media platforms with more than 50 million active monthly users, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. It does not appear to reach smaller platforms that appeal to conservatives, like Truth Social and Gettr, the law’s challengers told the Supreme Court.  

The law also does not cover sites that are devoted to news, sports, entertainment and other information that their users do not primarily generate. The covered sites are largely prohibited from removing posts based on the viewpoints they express, with exceptions for the sexual exploitation of children, incitement of criminal activity and some threats of violence.

Keeping in mind the advantage of demagoguery over honest speech, just consider (i) how the radical far right justice Alito frame this issue for authoritarian advantage, and (ii) how the Texas law was written for partisan advantage: “It is not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies.” He conveniently leaves out medium and small social media companies. He does not define the concept of large. 

In my opinion, what is in Alito’s mind is partisan advantage for the outnumbered neo-fascists. The six Republican Christian nationalists on the court can conveniently decide such lawsuits case by case. That allows maximum advantage to the demagogues who can (1) force big social media to accept their poisonous democracy killing demagoguery, and (2) which demagoguery sites remain free to reject inconvenient honest speech. Or the radicals can simply define large to maximize benefit to radical right demagoguery while blunting benefits to honest speech as much as possible. When one (i) frames the issue like this, and (ii) considers the differences in mindset between modern radical right conservatives and most everyone else, the possibilities for radical right partisan advantage start to come into view.

Does all of this sound cynical, hyper-partisan or shockingly hypocritical? Maybe, but the scope of objective political reality can include ice-cold political cynicism, foaming at the mouth, self-serving hyper-partisanship and ghastly hypocrisy. As far as I know, no law stands in the way of any of that, just like no law stands in the way of ~99.9% of political lies and deceit. 

Obviously, the demagogues will vehemently deny cynicism, partisanship and hypocrisy. They will demagogue this as just them valiantly trying to defend free speech for the benefit of all. That propaganda conveniently ignores and denies that their speech is poison to democracy, inconvenient truth and some other good things. 

Republican Party success in advancing its climate change goals

The GOP is achieving it's goals for the climate. The New York Times writes:

For four years under President Donald J. Trump, the United States all but stopped trying to combat climate change at the federal level. Mr. Trump is no longer in office, but his presidency left the country far behind in a race that was already difficult to win.

A new report from researchers at Yale and Columbia Universities shows that the United States’ environmental performance has tumbled in relation to other countries — a reflection of the fact that, while the United States squandered nearly half a decade, many of its peers moved deliberately.

The report, called the Environmental Performance Index, or E.P.I., found that, based on their trajectories from 2010 through 2019, only Denmark and Britain were on a sustainable path to eliminate emissions by midcentury.

China, India, the United States and Russia were on track to account for more than half of global emissions in 2050. But even countries like Germany that have enacted more comprehensive climate policies are not doing enough.

The United States ranked 43rd overall, with a score of 51.1 out of 100, compared with 24th place and a score of 69.3 in the 2020 edition. Its decline is largely attributable to the bottom falling out of its climate policy: On climate metrics, it plummeted to 101st place from 15th and trailed every wealthy Western democracy except Canada, which was 142nd.

The climate analysis is based on data through 2019, and the previous report was based on data through 2017, meaning the change stems from Trump-era policies and does not reflect President Biden’s reinstatement or expansion of regulations.

The Republican Party, pro-pollution, pro-corruption, pro-Christian fundamentalism, anti-inconvenient truth and anti-democracy. What a fun party!

Would public showing of images of gun violence help?

This issue is being considered now for some reason. Maybe the fairly close timing of recent mass shootings and murders of innocents is triggering some introspection at least in the mainstream media. Vanity Fair writes: 

“WE CANNOT SANITIZE THESE KILLINGS”: NEWS MEDIA CONSIDERS BREAKING GRIMLY ROUTINE COVERAGE OF MASS SHOOTINGS

As journalists descend on Uvalde—as they did on Columbine, Newtown, and Parkland—some are questioning whether a more graphic approach is required to capture the reality of America’s gun violence epidemic. “It’s time,” suggests one industry leader, “to show what a slaughtered 7-year-old looks like.”

The Texas Tribune’s staff has felt determined to aggressively cover this week’s horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, said editor in chief Sewell Chan, even as they are “exhausted that we have to cover this at all, exhausted that we have to cover this again, and resigned to taking part in what sometimes seems like a numb, meaningless ritual.” In newsrooms across America, a country where mass shootings have become a gruesome facet of daily life, the process has sadly become routine. “We all know the playbook by now. We all know how it unfolds,” Chan added. “The grief, the announcement, the outrage. Some semblance of public debate. And then generally no action. And that has been the pattern, really, for at least two decades, going back to Columbine.”

Indeed, as NPR national correspondent Sarah McCammon put it, “I was in high school when Columbine happened. I had a kindergartener during Sandy Hook. I have an elementary school student now. And I’ve covered so many of these.” With Tuesday’s killing of at least 19 children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school coming on the heels of a mass shooting in a Buffalo supermarket—and amid decades of recurring tragedies in Newtown, Parkland, and elsewhere—journalists and academics are questioning whether the traditional coverage model is adequately capturing the carnage, and even considering whether showing more graphic footage would force the public, and political leaders, to fully confront the sickening reality of America’s gun violence epidemic.

The New York Times writes: 

WASHINGTON — After Lenny Pozner’s six-year-old son Noah died at Sandy Hook, he briefly contemplated showing the world the damage an AR-15-style rifle did to his child.

His first thought: “It would move some people, change some minds.”

His second: “Not my kid.”

Grief and anger over two horrific mass shootings in Texas and New York only ten days apart has stirred an old debate: Would disseminating graphic images of the results of gun violence jolt the nation’s gridlocked leadership into action?

“What makes this a challenging ethics call is that when you’re a photo editor, you never really do know which is the photograph that is going to seem exploitative, and what image will touch the conscience of people and move the needle on the debate.”

Mainstream news organizations sometimes show disturbing images of people who have died to illustrate the horrors of an event, like the photograph by Lynsey Addario of a mother, two children and a family friend killed in March in Irpin, Ukraine, or the image of a three-year-old Syrian Kurdish boy whose body washed ashore in Turkey in 2015. But they rarely show human gore.

“We’re always trying to balance the news value of an image and its service to our readers against whether or not the image is dignified for the victims or considerate toward the families or loved ones of those pictured,” said Meaghan Looram, the director of photography at The New York Times. “We don’t want to withhold images that would help people to understand what has happened in scenarios like these, but we also don’t publish images sheerly as provocation.” 

Noah Pozner was among the first children buried after the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which killed 20 first graders and six educators. Noah hid with 15 classmates in the classroom bathroom, a 4½ by 3½-foot space into which the gunman fired more than 80 rounds from a Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle, killing all but one child.

Bullets tore through Noah’s back, arm, hand and face, destroying most of his jaw. Mr. Pozner and Noah’s mother, Veronique De La Rosa, held a private, open-coffin viewing before his funeral service, which was attended by Dannel Malloy, Connecticut’s governor at the time. When Mr. Malloy arrived, Ms. De La Rosa took him by the hand to see her son, lying in a mahogany coffin in a room at the back of a funeral home in Fairfield, Conn.  

“I’m thinking to myself, ‘I’m going to pass out. She’s going to show me open wounds and I’m not going to handle it very well,’” Mr. Malloy said in an interview for my book “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth.”

The damage to Noah’s mouth was hidden by a square of white fabric, so Mr. Malloy was not shown raw wounds. “I wouldn’t have taken it to that level,” Ms. De La Rosa said. But the governor “was still looking at a dead child,” she said. “A child who practically the day before had been running around like a little locomotive, full of life.”  

After Sandy Hook, Connecticut passed some of the most stringent gun safety measures in the nation.

The cognitive biology of it

Human are visual creatures. The human mind is a story or narrative creating machine that operates automatically, fast and unconsciously. We respond to things we see at least as much as we do to things we hear. Without images of reality, people cannot understand that specific reality, but their minds create realities they are comfortable with. For most people, they do not conjure up images of bodies with bullet holes and blood. It is too uncomfortable to most many people to even think that, so they don't. Think of your own experiences. What images of bodies did you think of after hearing about the mass shooting in Uvalde, TX? I guarantee that your mental blankness on this point would not be nearly so blank if you had seen a couple of images of bloody, dead, bullet mangled children.

What a bullet does to living tissue

Yes, leave it to the family to decide whether to release photos or not. Some will not, some will. That would be the family's choice. But given America's gun violence situation, releasing the photos to the public is likely to be more beneficial than harmful. The families should at least have that right as an option to honor their murdered family member.

But do not leave it to the police, the NRA or the Republican Party. They will suppress all images they possibly can because they do not want the American people to see how hideous human on human violence actually is.

Firefighter carrying the body of 1-year-old Baylee Almon, who 

was fatally injured in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995

Acknowledgement: Thanks to SNOWFLAKE for raising this issue on his blog and citing the articles.

Democratic Party detachment from reality and its internal weakness

An article in The Guardian that PD cited discusses the weakness of the Democratic Party. It is weak opposition to the Republican Party neo-fascist threat now gaining power over American government and society. The Guardian writes in a review of the book, This Will Not Pass, Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future:

This Will Not Pass is a blockbuster. Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns deliver 473 pages of essential reading. The two New York Times reporters depict an enraged Republican party, besotted by and beholden to Donald Trump. They portray a Democratic party led by Joe Biden as, in equal measure, inept and out of touch. 

On election day 2020, the country simply sought to restore a modicum of normalcy. Nothing else. Even as Biden racked up a 7m-vote plurality, Republicans gained 16 House seats. There was no mandate. Think checks, balances and plenty of fear.

Biden owes his job to suburban moms and dads, not the woke. As the liberal Brookings Institution put it in a post-election report, “Biden’s victory came from the suburbs”.

Said differently, the label of socialism, the reality of rising crime, a clamor for open borders and demands for defunding the police almost cost Democrats the presidency. As a senator, Biden knew culture mattered. Whether his party has internalized any lessons, though, is doubtful.

This Will Not Pass also amplifies the disdain senior Democrats hold for the “Squad”, those members of the Democratic left wing who cluster round Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Martin and Burns quote Steve Ricchetti, a Biden counselor: “The problem with the left … is that they don’t understand that they lost.”

Cedric Richmond, a senior Biden adviser and former dean of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), is less diplomatic. He describes the squad as “fucking idiots”. Richmond also takes exception to AOC pushing back at the vice-president, Kamala Harris, for telling undocumented migrants “do not come.”

This Will Not Pass also attempts to do justice to Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona senator and “former Green party activist who reinvented herself as Fortune 500-loving moderate”. In addition to helping block Biden’s domestic agenda, Sinema has a knack for performative behavior and close ties to Republicans.

Like Sarah Palin, she is fond of her own physique. The senator “boasted knowingly to colleagues and aides that her cleavage had an extraordinary persuasive effect on the uptight men of the GOP”.

It is not clear what can be done to fix the Dems. At this point, probably nothing. They cannot see the reality of the neo-fascist threat. They are distracted by internal bickering. How the 2022 and 2024 elections will play out ought to make reasonably clear whether the Dems will remain a significant source of opposition.

 

Some history on how the gun industry came to power

This 17 minute interview with historian Heather Cox Richardson describes some the history of the rise of the NRA to power. It still exerts enough power to block federal gun regulation legislation that a vast majority of Americans support. The Republican Party is firmly in the grip of the NRA in large part because gun demagogic propaganda has a firm grip on most of the GOP rank and file. Republican politicians still fear NRA opposition. They feel they need to tow the NRA line to stay in power, contrary public opinion be damned. 

In a comment on this, PD wrote:

The NRA doesn't have as much power as it did even 5 yrs ago, due to a bankruptcy and other troubles. But the their cause, and reputation on the Right remain intact because the socialization of 2 generations of Republicans into the GOP-style gun culture described by Richardson, has been so effective that, as one expert on gun violence says, "the machine can run on auto-pilot, with or without the NRA at this point." In essence, few GOP candidates want to defy the "base" on this issue anymore than on Trump, Roe, Climate Science and other issues that have now become emblematic of the Republican Identity.  

I am just as disgusted by the foolishness and detachment from reality in the Dem party as by the (to me) well-known depravity of Trump and his sycophantic GOP. The Dems present profiles in cowardice, and have not acted on the historical truth that they are under siege by a no-compromise party intent on winning by extra and/or anti-constitutional means if necessary, and imposing its ideology on the majority of Americans. .... Add the petty infighting between moderates and progressives (even worse than it seems from the headlines) and you get a weak and amorphous Dem party not only hated by all hard core Repubs, but increasingly by those who expected them to find common cause in the face of the GOP threat, and put aside differences for later on.

I'll keep warning about the Republican Party, the power of its propaganda and lies Leviathan as long as I can. The day may come fairly soon (~4-6 years ?) that people like me will be shut up by threats or force. Opposition will be deemed national security threats or whatever other excuse that Republican Party focus group data says would work best to crush opposition while still looking be democratic. That would start in earnest after Republican neo-fascism has come into full power. The process is likely to take shape after the 2022 elections.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for his comments and bringing this interview to my attention.

A Fox News version in Canada? Is it POSSIBLE?

 

Would Poilievre fund a Fox News Canada?

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/05/27/opinion/would-poilievre-fund-fox-news-canada

It’s not often coups get planned in broad daylight, much less with coverage by the media, but that seems to be what’s unfolding in Hungary right now. In a special meeting of the U.S. Conservative Political Action Conference, better known as CPAC, America’s aspiring autocrats are taking lessons from Europe’s most successful one: Viktor Orbán.

Hungary’s prime minister, who has spent his 12 years in power transforming the country from a functioning democracy to a de facto fascist state, laid out a 12-point blueprint for how other Christian conservatives can follow in his footsteps. Chief among those points was the role the media, and Orbán’s control over it, has played in his Fidesz party’s consolidation of power.

“Have your own media. It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left,” he told the CPAC audience. “The problem is that the western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”

Orbán clearly practices what he preaches. In Hungary’s most recent election, state-controlled media outlets made it almost impossible for opposition candidates to have their message heard, much less supported. As the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe said in a report, “The campaign itself was characterized by a pervasive overlap between the ruling coalition’s campaign messages and the government’s information campaigns, amplifying the advantage of the ruling coalition and blurring the line between state and party.”

As American scholar and former assistant secretary of state J. Brian Atwood wrote in a recent op-ed, Orbán’s populist message in the recent Hungarian election blamed immigrants, universities, Muslims and the LGBT community, along with “faceless bureaucrats in Brussels,” for the country’s problems. “Orbán’s drift over time toward corrupt autocratic power and xenophobic populism is a case study of how democracies can be perverted,” he wrote.

To other European nations, Hungary’s retreat from democracy is hard to watch. But for the Trumpist right, it’s a how-to guide for the 2024 election and beyond. Orbán told the Trumpist Republicans in attendance at CPAC that they should run shows like Tucker Carlson Tonight “24-7” in order to bend the broader narrative in their favour.

That’s a lesson Canadian conservatives who are watching at a distance could also take to heart. It wasn’t that long ago, after all, that Stephen Harper was tweeting his delight at Orbán’s 2018 election victory. “Congratulations to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Hungary's Fidesz for winning a decisive fourth term! The IDU [International Democratic Union, an international alliance of conservative parties] and I are looking forward to working with you.”

Canada isn’t in any danger of embracing Hungarian-style fascism, but Orbán’s manipulation of the media could easily serve as an inspiration for our conservatives — and specifically the one poised to become leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Already, we’ve seen Alberta Premier Jason Kenney use tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to fund a “War Room” in order to shift the narrative around Alberta’s oil and gas industry and get his own call-in radio show from one of the province’s biggest radio stations. Doug Ford’s government beat him to the punch here by creating Ontario News Now, a blatant attempt to do an end-run around actual journalists and their pesky questions. And, of course, the ultra-cozy relationship between his director of media relations, Ivana Yelich, and Postmedia columnist Brian Lilley speaks for itself.

But the big prize is at the federal level, and that’s where this campaign to sideline the media will almost certainly move next. In a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, Conservative leadership hopeful Pierre Poilievre hinted he had plans to rejig the Canadian media landscape. “(Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s policies) make the entire media apparatus dependent on the goodwill of the state,” he said. “I haven’t made an announcement on exactly how I’m going to fix that problem yet, but … stay tuned.”

Defunding the CBC, as Poilievre has promised to do numerous times, might not be the hill he really wants to die on. But reviving Sun TV, the failed attempt from a decade ago to create a Canadian version of Fox News, could theoretically be on the table.

If Poilievre wanted to do that, ensuring the mandatory carriage status it was denied in 2013 by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) would go a long way towards meeting Orbán’s prescription. It would fill Canada’s airways with openly partisan — and unapologetically conservative — content and force millions of Canadians to pay for it. Poilievre has never said he would fund a right-wing media operation like this, but it’s not hard to see why he would try.

If it did ever happen, the Trudeau Liberals would have to be credited with an unintentional assist. By opening the door to government funding of media organizations and outlets, they have invited conservatives to test the limits of what does and doesn’t qualify as journalism. And while the first iteration of Sun TV was a clunky attempt at cloning Fox News, it’s hard to imagine the people behind it didn’t learn from their mistakes.

There will be no Ezra Levant in the next version, as just one example. The production values will be better, if only because they probably couldn’t be any worse. And conservative pundits and politicians have years of gaslighting practice on issues like free speech and diversity of opinion that they could easily bring to bear on the government regulators at the CRTC.

So brace yourself, Canada. We’re not at risk of backsliding away from democracy the way Hungary has and America’s Republicans clearly want to, but Harper and the IDU are almost certainly still working with Orbán in one way or another.

If they get their way, our media ecosystem may soon get even more conservative than it already is.