22 hrs ago·edited 22 hrs agoLiked by Yassine Meskhout
There's a difference between freedom of speech in the legal sense and the range of opinions or topics that someone feels comfortable discussing in polite society. You alluded to that with race and IQ, but that is one subset of a much more extensive range of subjects that become labeled racist or taboo to prevent discussion. It is not conducive to truth-seeking and congeniality when people are, I think rightly, afraid to express many right-of-center opinions in most academic or corporate settings. Perhaps you are right that this will begin to change. Still, I think Nathan Cofnas, among others, has made a good case that anti-liberal woke ideology is institutionally entrenched at this point. I'm also skeptical of Trump suppressing freedom of speech because he was already president, and that didn't happen (as far as I'm aware). As you mentioned, I don't think the president has much power in that area relative to the Supreme Court.
I acknowledge the cultural problem, but it's also difficult to analyze how bad it is. There's a ton of topics that no one feels comfortable discussing in polite society (like scat porn), and narrow it down to "right-of-center opinions" is reasonable but also begging the question.
Again, I'm not dismissing that there is a problem, I'm just wrangling with how precisely to evaluate how bad the cultural atmosphere is.
Regarding Trump, I'm far more concerned now than before because during his first presidency he hired too many institutionalists who were comfortable responding with "what the fuck" to his proposals. That won't be the case now, and a DOJ beholden to one man can do a lot of damage, in addition to the general cultural degradation Trump augurs.
"There is indeed a cultural taboo, particularly within academic circles, against discussing the heritability of intelligence."
While there may be a cultural taboo, it's not in the academic circles that actually conduct this research. The second largest genetic analysis of *any* phenotype is of educational attainment: 3 million participants and published in the highest impact journal in the field (Okbay et al. 2022 Nature Genetics) including a multi-ancestry analysis. The very first sentence of the largest genetic study of intelligence (Savage et al. 2018 Nature Genetics) is "Intelligence is highly heritable and a major determinant of human health and well-being.", again published in the highest impact genetics journal and having already garnered >1,000 citations.
You're absolutely right about this. I easily forget that the field of genetic research has been constantly re-emphasizing the heritability of intelligence for many decades now, without incident. Trying to quantify the cultural atmosphere is very difficult, and my discussion of heritability was walking a tight-rope of not dismissing taboo concerns I think have some salience. I don't know the best contours to evaluate this and I'm open to suggestions.
I really liked your post and felt like a bit of a snot commenting on the one sliver where I disagreed :) but I think it touches on the definition you outlined at the beginning regarding Galileo finding a publisher. In my opinion, the genetics of intelligence is in a weird place where (a) it is generally *easier* to find a publisher than for a comparable genetic analysis of any other behavioral trait (e.g. personality) because publishers know it will generate good controversy (again, nearly every analysis of intelligence/education has been published in flagship journals); (b) you are generally much more likely to *hear* someone ask "why are we even studying this?" or "isn't this eugenics?" then you would for any other trait. Likewise, Paige Harden can score a Perspective in any journal she wants but some academics feel comfortable calling her a eugenicist on twitter (a label that is grossly incorrect, to be clear). So, simultaneously more scientific impact and success but also more knee-jerk criticism.
No, I absolutely encourage more of this pushback. I admitted the difficulties with analyzing the "cultural atmosphere" and you're providing very relevant context that I should have included. I added a note :)
I think the caveats about woke intolerance are pretty big ones. While its media salience has died down, I'd still expect a progressive politician to have more appetite for curtailing speech, usually through hate crime law, than a conservative politician. At least in the UK the risk isn't negligible.
That said, I think you're right about this being a golden age of speech when compared to historical precedent. The technology has broken most of the old binds.
Fair points. Law enforcement on this issue seems to be all over the place in the UK. You get people jailed for quite innocuous tweets, and then a woman holding a placard with a racial slur on it was let off. Other than some spicy rhetoric, it's not clear what politicians are doing to change this in any direction.
I am utterly unqualified to opine on UK politics and their approach to free expression in general. It's baffling to me as an outsider what issues become salient.
The current Democratic party platform includes a call to overturn Citizens United, as well as multiple interim proposals to stifle campaign speech under the guise of policing special interests in the meantime.
One can dismiss all of that as rhetorical posturing (which much of it is, I'm sure), but then, so is much of Trump's bluster.
The only discussion on campaign finance is on pg 49, and there's no call to overturn Citizens United. The section is overwhelmingly focused on disclosing who pays, rather than limiting how much is paid. I would agree that agitating to overturn Citizens United would be really bad (subject, of course, to how feasible that is given current jurisprudence) but I don't have an issue with disclosing money.
From the very page you referenced: "We will keep super PACs wholly independent of campaigns and parties and pass a constitutional amendment that will ban all private financing from federal elections. Democrats will end 'dark money' by requiring full disclosure of contributors and ban 501(c)(4) organizations from spending on elections."
That is a call to overturn Citizens United, if not in name, then certainly in practice.
I skimmed way too fast, you're right. I have no idea what "ban all private financing" could actually mean, but the language about constitutional amendment doesn't augur any confidence from me.
"We will keep super PACs wholly independent of campaigns and parties and pass a constitutional amendment that will ban all private financing from federal elections. Democrats will end 'dark money' by requiring full disclosure of contributors and ban 501(c)(4) organizations from spending on elections."
Those all sound like very good things?
There's a difference between "you should be allowed to say whatever you like about a candidate" and "you should be allowed to spend millions on campaign ads boosting a president's campaign, while hiding behind a network of shell companies so the millions can't be attributed back to you".
(In fact, I think the latter should be forbidden *no matter how effective* the donations turn out to be at affecting election results.)
I don't think I have a problem with disclosing finances, but the language about constitutional amendments can only be interpreted as targeting Citizens United.
OK but the Democrats are pushing to effectively ban the "you should be allowed to say whatever you like about a candidate" part too--or at least arrogate to themselves the ability to do so if/when they want to.
Were CU to be overturned, Team D would be dead in the water.
Clinton, Biden and Harris all raised more from superpacs and from the 1% than did Trump. (Trump actually got more small-dollar donations than did Sanders.)
> Notching up on the ethereal, I can stipulate that the Great Awokening has had a terribly regressive impact on the free exchange of ideas. Unequivocally bad. But the good news is that the fever is showing signs of breaking already. Musa al-Gharbi has examined the trends and found “social justice” lingo has peaked around 2020 and 2021, and has been decreasing since. This is all hard to measure conclusively, but the best available evidence indicates that Woke intolerance is a receding episode.
You’re right that government in the US (state, local, and federal) no longer punish people criminally for disfavored speech (at least, not significantly). The threat people worry about is civil punishment for speech, i.e. the government pretextually denying you equal protection of the laws or access to government services based on your speech. For example:
1. The FBI marking Tulsi Gabbard as a security threat so she gets harassed by the TSA.
2. The IRS denying 501(c) exemptions to conservative groups while granting them to similarly-situated liberal groups.
3. The IRS bringing selective scrutiny and enforcement against Matt Taibbi because of his testimony before Congress.
4. White House officials telling social media they’ll lose Section 230 protections if they don’t suppress Alex Berenson.
5. The practice of de-banking, where the government uses banking security laws designed to go after terrorist financing to freeze or seize the assets of people who have disfavored views, who then must spend years in court trying to get them back while being unable to hire a lawyer because they’re penniless.
6. The DOJ seeking to mark parents who argued for school reopening during COVID as domestic terrorists.
Those are just the high-profile examples off the top of my head. There are zillions of everyday stories of people who criticize the town council and suddenly their building permit is denied or their grant is yanked or the health inspector comes calling or their kid is cut from the school play.
You may think these stories are exaggerated or untrue, but if we accept for the sake of argument they are true, it’s reasonable to perceive a threat to free speech from civil punishment. And because the people who make up most of the government bureaucracy are Democrats, these sorts of civil punishment weapons will be mostly employed against Republicans.
Anytime the government is using its powers to silence its critics, I will denounce it. I've already done this with some of the stories you mention that I'm already familiar with and can confirm their veracity (e.g. such as threatening §230 revocation, and selective IRS 501(c) scrutiny on conservative groups). This is still not a new story historically, and we're still in a MUCH better place today compared to the crazy tactics the FBI used to target disfavored groups in the 60s and 70s. We still have more work to do, but the State's ability to scare its critics into silence gets more and more pathetic over time. This is part of the reason we need nonpartisan advocacy groups that vigilantly denounce civil liberties violations, such as FIRE or the ACLU back before they went crazy.
I think the best argument in favor of "free speech is at risk" is the one from technology centralization. The 1st amendment was great for most of American history, since the government was the primary org that dissidents had to worry about. But nowadays we have tech overlords with no such restrictions. If Google decides they want to remove your content from their search engine and Youtube, you have no legal recourse, despite them controlling something like 90% of traffic. That's a level of power not far below that of a censorious government.
The same applies to lower-level products. "There is no freedom without the freedom to transact" (https://x.com/punk6529/status/1494444624630403083), yet banks and companies like Paypal can simply stop serving you if they don't like what you're doing, and they are using this power to censor not only right-wing views, but also sex workers. (Even Substack censors sexually explicit content, IIRC as a requirement of their payment processor.)
Same again for internet hosting companies, IPS, domain registrars, and other internet infrastructure. Stormfront is banned at the ISP level in some areas, and their domain was seized by Network Solutions in 2017. Cloudflare dropped protection of Kiwifarms in 2022. Yes you can try to get around this by relying on Russian hosting companies, encouraging your users to use a VPN, etc., but this is undeniably a crushing form of censorship that is not protected against by the 1st amendment. When you have to rely on a foreign country to distribute your material, it cannot reasonably be said that your country is allowing your speech.
In general, the more of our world is privatized, the less power the 1st amendment has. Ironically enough, free speech would become much safer if the US had a socialist revolution and put everything under government control.
I agree those are concerning, but I'd want to see concrete examples of subjects whose discussion has been hampered because of that. The sex worker problem was the result of the FOSTA-SESTA legislation that made a §230 carve-out to advertising sex services, and I disagree with that bill (and disagree with criminalizing prostitution in general). Kiwi Farms was indeed dropped but it's been back online for a long time now, and my hope is that these types of service-provider boycotts will become less prevalent given how meaningless their effects are.
"Ironically enough, free speech would become much safer if the US had a socialist revolution and put everything under government control."
I understand the rhetorical point being made here, but the implied expectation that a full-blown revolution would leave modern First Amendment jurisprudence untouched seems . . . unfounded.
Interesting article. I feel you're kind of missing the point in places, though.
We are living in a golden age in terms of access to information, and random nobodies on the internet (like me, for example) can bash away on a keyboard and reply to posts like this. In the past we didn't have this technology and so if you wanted to have your voice 'heard' it would be much more difficult - you would have to go through the 'gatekeepers' in order to get your letter to a newspaper published, for example.
This widening up of our ability to express our views has been a remarkable development and, in my view, a welcome development. However, with this we've seen (increasingly) a lot of calls for 'regulation' of this new technology-driven public square. This is quite distinct from calls for regulation of professional media outlets.
I live in the UK where we've recently seen a big clampdown on what people are 'allowed' to say on social media - and people have been jailed in some cases for what are mildly unpleasant utterances. One guy was jailed for posting 3 memes, one of which depicted a boat load of illegal immigrants with the caption "Coming to a town near you". I do not even understand why this was considered to be 'illegal'.
So the question in my mind here is whether 'regulation' of professional media represents the same kind of threat to free speech as 'regulation' of the public square? I feel that these 2 things are quite different beasts.
Taking a more charitable interpretation of Trump's views here we could say that the 'spirit' of his comments might be less dangerous than is being presented. He could be interpreted as saying something on the lines of where professional media outlets are benefitting from government in some way (licences or funding, for example) they have a duty to more faithfully represent the views of the public and to report facts more impartially. The government, after all, is an entity that represents (or should represent) the people. Not to mention that the government is, in some sense, 'owned' by its investors, the taxpayers.
One of the big problems with Trump is that he doesn't always get his facts straight and just goes off half-cocked. He plays to his base and is an inveterate showman. It's often almost impossible to distinguish the serious bit of Trump from his showman-like rhetoric on any issue. He's quite unlike any other politician.
But it's regulation of the public square that I'm *much* more concerned about - it had a disastrous and deadly effect with regards to covid, for example. The press/media/Big Tech largely acted as mouthpieces for the government and Pharma and dissenting views were quickly quashed.
It's at the point now where 'professional' media is largely untrusted and seen as massively biased. They're still influential, but becoming less and less so as the 'public-square' (as typified by things like the Joe Rogan podcast) are becoming more like the 'mainstream'.
We might have enjoyed a 'golden age' over the last couple of decades but the question is how much longer will that be allowed to continue? Who has called for regulation of this public space and who has not?
Interesting article. I can’t say i disagree with much (if any) of the examples you give. But I disagree with the conclusion that because of those things, we’re somehow in the golden age of free speech.
Yes- legally in the US, all is well with the 1st amendment. And as you note there is no shortage of platforms to broadcast your views.
But not long ago, you could easily be banned from Twitter for posting true statements like “men aren’t women”. PayPal and other financial institutions have de-banked many for wrongthink. Parents risk alienating their children, or worse, being monitored by the FBI for voicing concerns about school curriculums. Offensive comments from the past are resurfaced and weaponized like never before.
The list goes on, but the point is that “free speech” has real life consequences like never before in the US, and not in a good / golden way. This seems incontrovertible, no?
So while saying dumb shit won’t land you in jail and you can still find an audience, job, school, etc., the risk of being kicked out of “polite” society tends to not be worth it for many people, so they choose not to speak, or at least not to speak their truth. And there is nothing golden about that, IMHO.
I think the tide is turning, but only because people are fighting back against wokeness and some of these new norms of censoring the baddies. And more work is needed before we reach any type of golden age.
> has real life consequences like never before in the US
I'm sorry but this is simply not true. This is why I think a historical perspective is important with this topic. I can agree the examples you cite are indeed bad, but they're still incomparable to what governments routinely used to do to suppress speech. There's nothing today that is comparable to COINTELPRO, 1970 Kent State shooting of Vietnam war protestors, or McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee.
I think people on the right are freaking out about free speech now because the effect of Woke is just extremely emotionally salient.
We are in a golden age when it comes to freedom of the press or mass communication, but when it comes to how you talk in front of woke friends, family, and co-workers, there's a lot of non-legal consequences for stepping out of line.
So yeah, it's vibes. The thing is, vibes really matter. They're the basis of human connection and they have a serious effect on people's major life decisions.
I agree it's a problem, but then how do you fix it? The common thread I see between MAGA cultists and Woke SJW is an epistemic fortress that abhors changing opinions due to new evidence. Trump commands iron-clad control over what his entourage can disagree with him on. And there's knee-jerk blasphemy policing with MAGA on certain topics, such as whether Biden won 2020, whether vaccines are good, or whether immigrants commit more crimes.
There was a particularly interesting episode with Kyle Rittenhouse, where IIRC Kyle pointed to some of Trump's past statements about wanting to take away people's guns, got lambasted for this, and posted a public apology.
For a moment I parsed this as saying "Trump was lambasted and posted a public apology" and I thought "Holy shit, american gun lobbies are *that* powerful?", but I assume you meant Kyle had to apologize.
Indeed. It's a good example of how Trumpism has become more powerful than conservatism, and MAGA will side with Trump even when he takes a traditionally left-wing position. Only exception is vaccines and to some extent abortion; I'm not sure why.
I am relatively pessimistic in the medium term - I think generational replacement might be a major part of any eventual solution. We don't have a model for building institutions with high social trust in a diverse society in the age of social media, but I think we do need to go about building them, gatekeeping people who would corrupt them, and letting the worst elements get outcompeted.
I think that having a contingent of influential people who fiercely advocate for the truth will be important in shaping whatever rises from the ashes - I don't see Trump as doing much for any cause other than accelerating the collapse of our failing systems (or at least making them harder to salvage) - but I don't think any kind of strongly truth-seeking force will really take without some kind of unifying force which will be hard to predict.
I've been in situations where people (mostly feminists) gave me shit for not having the right political opinions, not having the same understanding of gender stuff, etc. I've been in situations where I felt like an entire group was passing the word behind my back and ostracizing me for things I said that I don't think deserved it.
(And, granted, that's not as bad as a Twitter mob, or being fired for things I said, but I think the vast majority of people who complain about Woke haven't been in a situation where it was remotely likely to happen to them either.)
In any case, it never occurred to me to think "These woke people suck so much, I should vote Marine Le Pen just to piss them off". I never had this "I should resist attempts to silence me by adopting positions that the silencers find abhorrent" mentality that the american conservatives seem to embrace more and more openly. It's a toxic, childish mentality, and we should treat it like the bad faith posture it is.
I completely agree that people should get over it. The only topic I've muzzled myself on is declaring my apostacy when I'm in Muslim countries, but at least then I can point to a credible threat of serious violence.
I agree with what you're saying, but disagree somewhat with what I perceive as the general vibe behind it and the comic.
I was cancelled a few years ago. As part of my job I have to observe my coworkers doing their job, and there were some debates about what reasonable job expectations were, so I collected anonymous statistics on everyone's performance and posted my findings on Facebook. (For reference this is a customer service job that's performed in public spaces. Any customer or even just random bystander would have had the same observation privileges that I did. The dataset contained hundreds of people, so there was no chance of de-anonymization.) I was told that since I was collecting data, this was a scientific study. And since the subjects of the study were humans, I was doing "human experimentation" and therefore in violation of the Nuremburg code. Also since I didn't ask the co-workers about this in advance, I was "violating their consent" in a manner akin to rape. As a result of this I was accused of being a Nazi (despite being jewish), and dozens of people started campaigning for my ostracization and threatening anyone who didn't ostracize me with the same.
This resulted in around 6 different employers firing and blacklisting me. (I do contract work, so I move around between a few major employers.) Not a single one continued to hire me. None gave me any chance to tell my side of the story or present a counterargument, or even to ask questions about why I was being fired; it was just immediate termination. 15+ people whom I had been on friendly terms with, staying at their houses, playing games together, mentoring for the job, etc., cut off all contact with me out of fear for their own reputations. Some of them seemed to actually begin believing that I was a Nazi or otherwise terrible person due to this. (This is despite the fact that I had standard left-wing beliefs on almost every substantive topic, had my pronouns in my bio, had admonished people for not wearing masks and being insufficiently careful about Covid, and otherwise been very obviously a progressive politically.)
At no point during this fiasco did I gain a sudden urge to vote for Trump or get a swastika tattoo. My political beliefs have always been based on what I want the world to look like and what policies the evidence shows are most likely to create that outcome, not on what party has been nicest to me personally. Anyone who is a leftist not because they want to the world to be a better place but only because their friends are leftist is pathetic.
However, what it did show me was just how bad things had gotten. Accusations that wokeness is a cult stopped seeming so ridiculous; it's false in terms of the scale and insularity, but the insanely rigid ideological conformity demanded is very similar. People who I had known for years were simply told "Isaac's a Nazi" and accepted it unquestioningly, refusing to even listen to me trying to provide overwhelming evidence against this.
Many of them blatantly lied, such as one guy who claimed to be a statistician and said that my sample size of several hundred people was too small to draw meaningful conclusions from. Others not only defied logic but openly flaunted it, such as one person who counted up the number of angry comments on my Facebook post without getting their permission and posted the aggregate statistics, thus engaging in the exact same behavior they were claiming was unacceptable from me. (When I pointed this out they simply ignored the reply.) At one point I polled a random group of unrelated people on whether what I had done was morally acceptable; my coworkers dug around the internet to find the poll, angrily posted it to all their friends in order to skew the results in their favor, then accused me of lying when I said the original results were in my favor. They also tried to justify their behavior by claiming "it's impossible to skew a poll by showing it to more people".
In a few cases, people in positions of authority told me privately that they agreed with me, but it would be too damaging to their reputations to say anything about this publicly, so they had to fire me.
Obviously, the Jordan Peterson/James Lindsey/Bret Weinstein route of becoming an insane conspiracy-theorist in response to this sort of thing is irrational. But what is rational is observing that people on the far left A) have insanely disproportional amounts of power in our current society and B) will happily abuse it against random bystanders or even people on their own side, completely destroying their lives just to get themselves some transient internet popularity.
This is not an irrelevant fact, and it is correct to update away from trusting the political left in response to realizing it. Trumpism represents basically the exact same thing but rightistly, so there's no good reason to vote for him, but if it were a normal republican politician it seems reasonable to consider them as a counterbalance to what's happening.
The same is true for becoming more open to facts that defy leftist orthodoxy. If someone grew up in a left-wing culture where everyone accepted the claim that black people score worse on the SATs entirely because of racism from the test designers and proctors, realizing that leftists actually just lie about a lot of stuff would rightly make them reconsider and perhaps look into it more deeply. It's a broken form of this reasoning that leads to conspiracy theorism; they lose *all* trust in major institutions, which means that the balance is now "zero evidence in favor of what those institutions say, nonzero evidence in favor of anything else".
There's a difference between freedom of speech in the legal sense and the range of opinions or topics that someone feels comfortable discussing in polite society. You alluded to that with race and IQ, but that is one subset of a much more extensive range of subjects that become labeled racist or taboo to prevent discussion. It is not conducive to truth-seeking and congeniality when people are, I think rightly, afraid to express many right-of-center opinions in most academic or corporate settings. Perhaps you are right that this will begin to change. Still, I think Nathan Cofnas, among others, has made a good case that anti-liberal woke ideology is institutionally entrenched at this point. I'm also skeptical of Trump suppressing freedom of speech because he was already president, and that didn't happen (as far as I'm aware). As you mentioned, I don't think the president has much power in that area relative to the Supreme Court.
I acknowledge the cultural problem, but it's also difficult to analyze how bad it is. There's a ton of topics that no one feels comfortable discussing in polite society (like scat porn), and narrow it down to "right-of-center opinions" is reasonable but also begging the question.
Again, I'm not dismissing that there is a problem, I'm just wrangling with how precisely to evaluate how bad the cultural atmosphere is.
Regarding Trump, I'm far more concerned now than before because during his first presidency he hired too many institutionalists who were comfortable responding with "what the fuck" to his proposals. That won't be the case now, and a DOJ beholden to one man can do a lot of damage, in addition to the general cultural degradation Trump augurs.
"There is indeed a cultural taboo, particularly within academic circles, against discussing the heritability of intelligence."
While there may be a cultural taboo, it's not in the academic circles that actually conduct this research. The second largest genetic analysis of *any* phenotype is of educational attainment: 3 million participants and published in the highest impact journal in the field (Okbay et al. 2022 Nature Genetics) including a multi-ancestry analysis. The very first sentence of the largest genetic study of intelligence (Savage et al. 2018 Nature Genetics) is "Intelligence is highly heritable and a major determinant of human health and well-being.", again published in the highest impact genetics journal and having already garnered >1,000 citations.
You're absolutely right about this. I easily forget that the field of genetic research has been constantly re-emphasizing the heritability of intelligence for many decades now, without incident. Trying to quantify the cultural atmosphere is very difficult, and my discussion of heritability was walking a tight-rope of not dismissing taboo concerns I think have some salience. I don't know the best contours to evaluate this and I'm open to suggestions.
I really liked your post and felt like a bit of a snot commenting on the one sliver where I disagreed :) but I think it touches on the definition you outlined at the beginning regarding Galileo finding a publisher. In my opinion, the genetics of intelligence is in a weird place where (a) it is generally *easier* to find a publisher than for a comparable genetic analysis of any other behavioral trait (e.g. personality) because publishers know it will generate good controversy (again, nearly every analysis of intelligence/education has been published in flagship journals); (b) you are generally much more likely to *hear* someone ask "why are we even studying this?" or "isn't this eugenics?" then you would for any other trait. Likewise, Paige Harden can score a Perspective in any journal she wants but some academics feel comfortable calling her a eugenicist on twitter (a label that is grossly incorrect, to be clear). So, simultaneously more scientific impact and success but also more knee-jerk criticism.
No, I absolutely encourage more of this pushback. I admitted the difficulties with analyzing the "cultural atmosphere" and you're providing very relevant context that I should have included. I added a note :)
I think the caveats about woke intolerance are pretty big ones. While its media salience has died down, I'd still expect a progressive politician to have more appetite for curtailing speech, usually through hate crime law, than a conservative politician. At least in the UK the risk isn't negligible.
That said, I think you're right about this being a golden age of speech when compared to historical precedent. The technology has broken most of the old binds.
I don't disagree there might be more appetite from a progressive politician, but I'd still want to see specific attempts rather than just speculation.
Fair points. Law enforcement on this issue seems to be all over the place in the UK. You get people jailed for quite innocuous tweets, and then a woman holding a placard with a racial slur on it was let off. Other than some spicy rhetoric, it's not clear what politicians are doing to change this in any direction.
I am utterly unqualified to opine on UK politics and their approach to free expression in general. It's baffling to me as an outsider what issues become salient.
The current Democratic party platform includes a call to overturn Citizens United, as well as multiple interim proposals to stifle campaign speech under the guise of policing special interests in the meantime.
One can dismiss all of that as rhetorical posturing (which much of it is, I'm sure), but then, so is much of Trump's bluster.
Where did you see this? Here's the 2024 platform I was able to find: https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTER-PLATFORM.pdf
The only discussion on campaign finance is on pg 49, and there's no call to overturn Citizens United. The section is overwhelmingly focused on disclosing who pays, rather than limiting how much is paid. I would agree that agitating to overturn Citizens United would be really bad (subject, of course, to how feasible that is given current jurisprudence) but I don't have an issue with disclosing money.
From the very page you referenced: "We will keep super PACs wholly independent of campaigns and parties and pass a constitutional amendment that will ban all private financing from federal elections. Democrats will end 'dark money' by requiring full disclosure of contributors and ban 501(c)(4) organizations from spending on elections."
That is a call to overturn Citizens United, if not in name, then certainly in practice.
I skimmed way too fast, you're right. I have no idea what "ban all private financing" could actually mean, but the language about constitutional amendment doesn't augur any confidence from me.
"We will keep super PACs wholly independent of campaigns and parties and pass a constitutional amendment that will ban all private financing from federal elections. Democrats will end 'dark money' by requiring full disclosure of contributors and ban 501(c)(4) organizations from spending on elections."
Those all sound like very good things?
There's a difference between "you should be allowed to say whatever you like about a candidate" and "you should be allowed to spend millions on campaign ads boosting a president's campaign, while hiding behind a network of shell companies so the millions can't be attributed back to you".
(In fact, I think the latter should be forbidden *no matter how effective* the donations turn out to be at affecting election results.)
I don't think I have a problem with disclosing finances, but the language about constitutional amendments can only be interpreted as targeting Citizens United.
OK but the Democrats are pushing to effectively ban the "you should be allowed to say whatever you like about a candidate" part too--or at least arrogate to themselves the ability to do so if/when they want to.
Were CU to be overturned, Team D would be dead in the water.
Clinton, Biden and Harris all raised more from superpacs and from the 1% than did Trump. (Trump actually got more small-dollar donations than did Sanders.)
> Notching up on the ethereal, I can stipulate that the Great Awokening has had a terribly regressive impact on the free exchange of ideas. Unequivocally bad. But the good news is that the fever is showing signs of breaking already. Musa al-Gharbi has examined the trends and found “social justice” lingo has peaked around 2020 and 2021, and has been decreasing since. This is all hard to measure conclusively, but the best available evidence indicates that Woke intolerance is a receding episode.
I assume you've seen Trace's argument to the contrary?https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1718019769872392550
Cofnas also wrote something similar a few days ago: https://ncofnas.com/p/wokism-is-just-beginning
I hadn't read Cofnas' at the time. Either/both of them could be correct, that's the pitfall with making predictions about cultural trends.
You’re right that government in the US (state, local, and federal) no longer punish people criminally for disfavored speech (at least, not significantly). The threat people worry about is civil punishment for speech, i.e. the government pretextually denying you equal protection of the laws or access to government services based on your speech. For example:
1. The FBI marking Tulsi Gabbard as a security threat so she gets harassed by the TSA.
2. The IRS denying 501(c) exemptions to conservative groups while granting them to similarly-situated liberal groups.
3. The IRS bringing selective scrutiny and enforcement against Matt Taibbi because of his testimony before Congress.
4. White House officials telling social media they’ll lose Section 230 protections if they don’t suppress Alex Berenson.
5. The practice of de-banking, where the government uses banking security laws designed to go after terrorist financing to freeze or seize the assets of people who have disfavored views, who then must spend years in court trying to get them back while being unable to hire a lawyer because they’re penniless.
6. The DOJ seeking to mark parents who argued for school reopening during COVID as domestic terrorists.
Those are just the high-profile examples off the top of my head. There are zillions of everyday stories of people who criticize the town council and suddenly their building permit is denied or their grant is yanked or the health inspector comes calling or their kid is cut from the school play.
You may think these stories are exaggerated or untrue, but if we accept for the sake of argument they are true, it’s reasonable to perceive a threat to free speech from civil punishment. And because the people who make up most of the government bureaucracy are Democrats, these sorts of civil punishment weapons will be mostly employed against Republicans.
Anytime the government is using its powers to silence its critics, I will denounce it. I've already done this with some of the stories you mention that I'm already familiar with and can confirm their veracity (e.g. such as threatening §230 revocation, and selective IRS 501(c) scrutiny on conservative groups). This is still not a new story historically, and we're still in a MUCH better place today compared to the crazy tactics the FBI used to target disfavored groups in the 60s and 70s. We still have more work to do, but the State's ability to scare its critics into silence gets more and more pathetic over time. This is part of the reason we need nonpartisan advocacy groups that vigilantly denounce civil liberties violations, such as FIRE or the ACLU back before they went crazy.
I think the best argument in favor of "free speech is at risk" is the one from technology centralization. The 1st amendment was great for most of American history, since the government was the primary org that dissidents had to worry about. But nowadays we have tech overlords with no such restrictions. If Google decides they want to remove your content from their search engine and Youtube, you have no legal recourse, despite them controlling something like 90% of traffic. That's a level of power not far below that of a censorious government.
The same applies to lower-level products. "There is no freedom without the freedom to transact" (https://x.com/punk6529/status/1494444624630403083), yet banks and companies like Paypal can simply stop serving you if they don't like what you're doing, and they are using this power to censor not only right-wing views, but also sex workers. (Even Substack censors sexually explicit content, IIRC as a requirement of their payment processor.)
Same again for internet hosting companies, IPS, domain registrars, and other internet infrastructure. Stormfront is banned at the ISP level in some areas, and their domain was seized by Network Solutions in 2017. Cloudflare dropped protection of Kiwifarms in 2022. Yes you can try to get around this by relying on Russian hosting companies, encouraging your users to use a VPN, etc., but this is undeniably a crushing form of censorship that is not protected against by the 1st amendment. When you have to rely on a foreign country to distribute your material, it cannot reasonably be said that your country is allowing your speech.
In general, the more of our world is privatized, the less power the 1st amendment has. Ironically enough, free speech would become much safer if the US had a socialist revolution and put everything under government control.
I agree those are concerning, but I'd want to see concrete examples of subjects whose discussion has been hampered because of that. The sex worker problem was the result of the FOSTA-SESTA legislation that made a §230 carve-out to advertising sex services, and I disagree with that bill (and disagree with criminalizing prostitution in general). Kiwi Farms was indeed dropped but it's been back online for a long time now, and my hope is that these types of service-provider boycotts will become less prevalent given how meaningless their effects are.
"Ironically enough, free speech would become much safer if the US had a socialist revolution and put everything under government control."
I understand the rhetorical point being made here, but the implied expectation that a full-blown revolution would leave modern First Amendment jurisprudence untouched seems . . . unfounded.
Interesting article. I feel you're kind of missing the point in places, though.
We are living in a golden age in terms of access to information, and random nobodies on the internet (like me, for example) can bash away on a keyboard and reply to posts like this. In the past we didn't have this technology and so if you wanted to have your voice 'heard' it would be much more difficult - you would have to go through the 'gatekeepers' in order to get your letter to a newspaper published, for example.
This widening up of our ability to express our views has been a remarkable development and, in my view, a welcome development. However, with this we've seen (increasingly) a lot of calls for 'regulation' of this new technology-driven public square. This is quite distinct from calls for regulation of professional media outlets.
I live in the UK where we've recently seen a big clampdown on what people are 'allowed' to say on social media - and people have been jailed in some cases for what are mildly unpleasant utterances. One guy was jailed for posting 3 memes, one of which depicted a boat load of illegal immigrants with the caption "Coming to a town near you". I do not even understand why this was considered to be 'illegal'.
So the question in my mind here is whether 'regulation' of professional media represents the same kind of threat to free speech as 'regulation' of the public square? I feel that these 2 things are quite different beasts.
Taking a more charitable interpretation of Trump's views here we could say that the 'spirit' of his comments might be less dangerous than is being presented. He could be interpreted as saying something on the lines of where professional media outlets are benefitting from government in some way (licences or funding, for example) they have a duty to more faithfully represent the views of the public and to report facts more impartially. The government, after all, is an entity that represents (or should represent) the people. Not to mention that the government is, in some sense, 'owned' by its investors, the taxpayers.
One of the big problems with Trump is that he doesn't always get his facts straight and just goes off half-cocked. He plays to his base and is an inveterate showman. It's often almost impossible to distinguish the serious bit of Trump from his showman-like rhetoric on any issue. He's quite unlike any other politician.
But it's regulation of the public square that I'm *much* more concerned about - it had a disastrous and deadly effect with regards to covid, for example. The press/media/Big Tech largely acted as mouthpieces for the government and Pharma and dissenting views were quickly quashed.
It's at the point now where 'professional' media is largely untrusted and seen as massively biased. They're still influential, but becoming less and less so as the 'public-square' (as typified by things like the Joe Rogan podcast) are becoming more like the 'mainstream'.
We might have enjoyed a 'golden age' over the last couple of decades but the question is how much longer will that be allowed to continue? Who has called for regulation of this public space and who has not?
Interesting article. I can’t say i disagree with much (if any) of the examples you give. But I disagree with the conclusion that because of those things, we’re somehow in the golden age of free speech.
Yes- legally in the US, all is well with the 1st amendment. And as you note there is no shortage of platforms to broadcast your views.
But not long ago, you could easily be banned from Twitter for posting true statements like “men aren’t women”. PayPal and other financial institutions have de-banked many for wrongthink. Parents risk alienating their children, or worse, being monitored by the FBI for voicing concerns about school curriculums. Offensive comments from the past are resurfaced and weaponized like never before.
The list goes on, but the point is that “free speech” has real life consequences like never before in the US, and not in a good / golden way. This seems incontrovertible, no?
So while saying dumb shit won’t land you in jail and you can still find an audience, job, school, etc., the risk of being kicked out of “polite” society tends to not be worth it for many people, so they choose not to speak, or at least not to speak their truth. And there is nothing golden about that, IMHO.
I think the tide is turning, but only because people are fighting back against wokeness and some of these new norms of censoring the baddies. And more work is needed before we reach any type of golden age.
> has real life consequences like never before in the US
I'm sorry but this is simply not true. This is why I think a historical perspective is important with this topic. I can agree the examples you cite are indeed bad, but they're still incomparable to what governments routinely used to do to suppress speech. There's nothing today that is comparable to COINTELPRO, 1970 Kent State shooting of Vietnam war protestors, or McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee.
I take your point. I should have said “in my lifetime”, which I’m pretty sure is true given that I’m an elder millennial?
I think people on the right are freaking out about free speech now because the effect of Woke is just extremely emotionally salient.
We are in a golden age when it comes to freedom of the press or mass communication, but when it comes to how you talk in front of woke friends, family, and co-workers, there's a lot of non-legal consequences for stepping out of line.
So yeah, it's vibes. The thing is, vibes really matter. They're the basis of human connection and they have a serious effect on people's major life decisions.
I agree it's a problem, but then how do you fix it? The common thread I see between MAGA cultists and Woke SJW is an epistemic fortress that abhors changing opinions due to new evidence. Trump commands iron-clad control over what his entourage can disagree with him on. And there's knee-jerk blasphemy policing with MAGA on certain topics, such as whether Biden won 2020, whether vaccines are good, or whether immigrants commit more crimes.
There was a particularly interesting episode with Kyle Rittenhouse, where IIRC Kyle pointed to some of Trump's past statements about wanting to take away people's guns, got lambasted for this, and posted a public apology.
For a moment I parsed this as saying "Trump was lambasted and posted a public apology" and I thought "Holy shit, american gun lobbies are *that* powerful?", but I assume you meant Kyle had to apologize.
Indeed. It's a good example of how Trumpism has become more powerful than conservatism, and MAGA will side with Trump even when he takes a traditionally left-wing position. Only exception is vaccines and to some extent abortion; I'm not sure why.
I am relatively pessimistic in the medium term - I think generational replacement might be a major part of any eventual solution. We don't have a model for building institutions with high social trust in a diverse society in the age of social media, but I think we do need to go about building them, gatekeeping people who would corrupt them, and letting the worst elements get outcompeted.
I think that having a contingent of influential people who fiercely advocate for the truth will be important in shaping whatever rises from the ashes - I don't see Trump as doing much for any cause other than accelerating the collapse of our failing systems (or at least making them harder to salvage) - but I don't think any kind of strongly truth-seeking force will really take without some kind of unifying force which will be hard to predict.
I like the concept of "epistemic fortress", by the way. It's a very striking image.
I can't take credit for it, I'm pretty sure it came from Jonathan Haidt but I couldn't track it down.
Yeah, but also... People should grow up?
I'm being reminded of the "You made me become a Nazi" meme: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/8/8/1786532/-Cartoon-You-made-me-become-a-Nazi
I've been in situations where people (mostly feminists) gave me shit for not having the right political opinions, not having the same understanding of gender stuff, etc. I've been in situations where I felt like an entire group was passing the word behind my back and ostracizing me for things I said that I don't think deserved it.
(And, granted, that's not as bad as a Twitter mob, or being fired for things I said, but I think the vast majority of people who complain about Woke haven't been in a situation where it was remotely likely to happen to them either.)
In any case, it never occurred to me to think "These woke people suck so much, I should vote Marine Le Pen just to piss them off". I never had this "I should resist attempts to silence me by adopting positions that the silencers find abhorrent" mentality that the american conservatives seem to embrace more and more openly. It's a toxic, childish mentality, and we should treat it like the bad faith posture it is.
I completely agree that people should get over it. The only topic I've muzzled myself on is declaring my apostacy when I'm in Muslim countries, but at least then I can point to a credible threat of serious violence.
I agree with what you're saying, but disagree somewhat with what I perceive as the general vibe behind it and the comic.
I was cancelled a few years ago. As part of my job I have to observe my coworkers doing their job, and there were some debates about what reasonable job expectations were, so I collected anonymous statistics on everyone's performance and posted my findings on Facebook. (For reference this is a customer service job that's performed in public spaces. Any customer or even just random bystander would have had the same observation privileges that I did. The dataset contained hundreds of people, so there was no chance of de-anonymization.) I was told that since I was collecting data, this was a scientific study. And since the subjects of the study were humans, I was doing "human experimentation" and therefore in violation of the Nuremburg code. Also since I didn't ask the co-workers about this in advance, I was "violating their consent" in a manner akin to rape. As a result of this I was accused of being a Nazi (despite being jewish), and dozens of people started campaigning for my ostracization and threatening anyone who didn't ostracize me with the same.
This resulted in around 6 different employers firing and blacklisting me. (I do contract work, so I move around between a few major employers.) Not a single one continued to hire me. None gave me any chance to tell my side of the story or present a counterargument, or even to ask questions about why I was being fired; it was just immediate termination. 15+ people whom I had been on friendly terms with, staying at their houses, playing games together, mentoring for the job, etc., cut off all contact with me out of fear for their own reputations. Some of them seemed to actually begin believing that I was a Nazi or otherwise terrible person due to this. (This is despite the fact that I had standard left-wing beliefs on almost every substantive topic, had my pronouns in my bio, had admonished people for not wearing masks and being insufficiently careful about Covid, and otherwise been very obviously a progressive politically.)
At no point during this fiasco did I gain a sudden urge to vote for Trump or get a swastika tattoo. My political beliefs have always been based on what I want the world to look like and what policies the evidence shows are most likely to create that outcome, not on what party has been nicest to me personally. Anyone who is a leftist not because they want to the world to be a better place but only because their friends are leftist is pathetic.
However, what it did show me was just how bad things had gotten. Accusations that wokeness is a cult stopped seeming so ridiculous; it's false in terms of the scale and insularity, but the insanely rigid ideological conformity demanded is very similar. People who I had known for years were simply told "Isaac's a Nazi" and accepted it unquestioningly, refusing to even listen to me trying to provide overwhelming evidence against this.
Many of them blatantly lied, such as one guy who claimed to be a statistician and said that my sample size of several hundred people was too small to draw meaningful conclusions from. Others not only defied logic but openly flaunted it, such as one person who counted up the number of angry comments on my Facebook post without getting their permission and posted the aggregate statistics, thus engaging in the exact same behavior they were claiming was unacceptable from me. (When I pointed this out they simply ignored the reply.) At one point I polled a random group of unrelated people on whether what I had done was morally acceptable; my coworkers dug around the internet to find the poll, angrily posted it to all their friends in order to skew the results in their favor, then accused me of lying when I said the original results were in my favor. They also tried to justify their behavior by claiming "it's impossible to skew a poll by showing it to more people".
In a few cases, people in positions of authority told me privately that they agreed with me, but it would be too damaging to their reputations to say anything about this publicly, so they had to fire me.
Obviously, the Jordan Peterson/James Lindsey/Bret Weinstein route of becoming an insane conspiracy-theorist in response to this sort of thing is irrational. But what is rational is observing that people on the far left A) have insanely disproportional amounts of power in our current society and B) will happily abuse it against random bystanders or even people on their own side, completely destroying their lives just to get themselves some transient internet popularity.
This is not an irrelevant fact, and it is correct to update away from trusting the political left in response to realizing it. Trumpism represents basically the exact same thing but rightistly, so there's no good reason to vote for him, but if it were a normal republican politician it seems reasonable to consider them as a counterbalance to what's happening.
The same is true for becoming more open to facts that defy leftist orthodoxy. If someone grew up in a left-wing culture where everyone accepted the claim that black people score worse on the SATs entirely because of racism from the test designers and proctors, realizing that leftists actually just lie about a lot of stuff would rightly make them reconsider and perhaps look into it more deeply. It's a broken form of this reasoning that leads to conspiracy theorism; they lose *all* trust in major institutions, which means that the balance is now "zero evidence in favor of what those institutions say, nonzero evidence in favor of anything else".