Category: First Amendment Freedoms

Cartoons Of The Week

The failure of the US Congress to provide aid to Ukraine in a timely manner is a massive rupture of the US’s standing both with NATO and with global democracies that implicitly count on the US to support them if shit ever hits the fan in their region. The bottom line is that the US is no longer a trusted ally or friend.

Jens Stoltenberg, a former Norwegian Prime Minister and now Secretary General of NATO reacted to the US failure to deliver by announcing he is giving Ukraine “permission” to use its soon to be delivered F-16s to launch attacks inside Russia:

“Stoltenberg believes that the death of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny and the first Russian gains on the battlefield in months should help focus the attention of NATO and its allies on the urgent need to support Ukraine.”

According to Stoltenberg, it will be up to each ally to decide whether to deliver F-16s to Ukraine, and each have different policies. But he said at the same time, the war in Ukraine is a war of aggression and Ukraine has the right to self-defense, including striking legitimate Russian military targets outside Ukraine.

The criticism of this is that it could lead NATO into a European war that might well include nuclear weapons. Above all, NATO is a defensive, not an offensive, alliance. Finally, there are no provisions in the NATO Treaty authorizing offensive, outside-the-NATO boundary operations.

The House Republicans have effectively turned the Ukraine war into a free-for-all. Without US arms assistance, there’s a substantial risk that this war could easily escalate, with the US having only a limited voice in both strategy and tactics. On to cartoons.

Republicans have reduced the US to hot air:

Putin’s now hoping for a Ukraine surrender:

Moon landing dredges up old theories:

Russia’s Congressional dupes fail to see the problem:

IVF ruling has consequences:

There’s a sucker born every minute in Trump world. The shoes are pre-order only; just another Don-con: :

Facebooklinkedinrss

America’s Coming Theocracy

The Daily Escape:

New Preston, CT – February 2024 photo by Dave King

This week, the full extent of the MAGA plan to convert America into a theocracy run by religious fundamentalists came into view. Charles Blow. writing in the NYT said:

“If you don’t think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you’re not paying attention….on Tuesday, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children, and that destruction of those embryos, even by accident, is subject to the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.”

The Alabama court’s Chief Justice Colonel Tom Parker, wrote:

“Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”

For some background on Justice Parker, Media Matters writes: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“During a recent interview on the program of self-proclaimed “prophet” and QAnon conspiracy theorist Johnny Enlow, Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker indicated that he is a proponent of the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” a theological approach that calls on Christians to impose fundamentalist values on all aspects of American life.”

We’re watching a slow motion Christian takeover of our Constitutional democracy happen right before our eyes. From the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe to plans by Trump-aligned think tanks to restructure the US government to suit Christian nationalists to the Alabama ruling, Christian Nationalism is on the march.

From Politico:

“An influential think tank close to Donald Trump is developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas in his administration should the former president return to power…”

More:

“Spearheading the effort is Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget during his first term and has remained close to him. Vought, who is frequently cited as a potential chief of staff in a second Trump White House, is president of The Center for Renewing America think tank, a leading group in a conservative consortium preparing for a second Trump term.”

From Dan Pfeiffer:

“…based on the public statements of those advisors, Trump’s Christian Nationalist Agenda will include:

  • A national abortion ban.
  • Using FDA authority to ban or greatly restrict access to abortion medication (a defacto abortion ban).
  • Undermining marriage equality.
  • Attacking the rights and freedoms of trans people.
  • Ending no-fault divorce.
  • Invoking the Insurrection Act to stop protests.
  • Making it harder to access contraception.
  • Ending surrogacy; and
  • Getting rid of sex education in schools.

This is not theoretical. All across the country, Republican extremists are implementing policies to further involve the government in people’s private decisions. Republicans want to regulate what you read, who you marry, how you procreate, and your medical decisions.”

More from Pfeiffer: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Some of you might be surprised to learn that very few voters know about the major stories that have dominated cable news and your social media feeds. The chasm between political junkies in both parties and everyone else has never been greater. You either consume a ton of political news or no news. And the no-news people will decide the election — and the fate of democracy.”

But that’s not all. The Heritage Foundation is the think tank developing Project 2025, the playbook for staffing the next Trump administration. If you haven’t heard of Project 2025, you can read up on it here.

Project 2025 is an action plan for how to use the most extreme versions of the unitary executive theory to weaponize the federal government to be an instrument of authoritarian theocratic ethno-nationalism. It’s difficult to overstate the extent to which a key element in this all-out culture war is the re-subjugation of women. Here’s a quote from a Heritage Foundation video: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“It seems to me that a good place to start would be a feminist movement against the pill, & for… returning the consequentiality to sex….Conservatives have to lead the way in restoring sex to its true purpose & ending recreational sex & senseless use of birth control pills. “

You can watch the video here. Do Conservatives ever have sex to just enjoy it?

The handwriting has been on the wall for years, but few voters seem able to read these signs of growing authoritarianism and fascism. There are only a few months for Democrats to keep enough attention on this so that voters are fully aware of November’s political stakes.

Our politics are broken. The political system no longer works – what with gerrymandered House districts, the anti-democratic rules in the Senate, the wildly corrupt Supreme Court, and the Electoral College bias in favor of small states.

This partially explains why Americans born post Bush v. Gore have a disdain for both Parties, even though they disagree much more with the Republicans than with the Dems. Telling the Gen Z kids to get out there and fix our democracy doesn’t match reality – that our system is well and truly fucked.

It can’t easily be fixed until the MAGA movement is killed, root and branch.

Facebooklinkedinrss

What America’s Nazi Period Tells Us Today

The Daily Escape:

Lenticular clouds over Mt. Washington, with Mt. Washington Hotel in foreground, Bretton Woods, NH – January 2024 photo by Terri Stinn

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.“– George Santayana

“We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.” – Gore Vidal

Wrongo and Ms. Right watched an American Experience offering on PBS called “Nazi Town USA”. The video tells the story of the German American Bund, (Bund) a pro-fascist, pro-Nazi organization that at its peak in the late 1930s, had some 100,000 US members.

The Bund (bund is German for “organization”), was founded by German immigrant Fritz Kuhn in Buffalo in 1936. His vision was to create a pro-Nazi ideology within the US. Kuhn and his people used patriotic images of George Washington and the American flag to attract Americans of German descent as members. But the organization’s goals were wider: To create a “socially just, white gentile-ruled United States” and a “gentile-controlled labor union free from Jewish Moscow-directed domination.”

He sounds nice. The US in the 1930s was a hotbed of the fascist-curious. Coming out of WWI and heading into an international economic depression, America was as polarized as it had been since the Civil War. There were racist, antisemitic, anti-Catholic, anti-immigration and anti-democratic viewpoints that weren’t quietly whispered but were yelled. America’s greatest threat, many feared, were the Communists. Millions, (including members of Congress), belonged to the KKK. Father Coughlin was on the radio. Henry Ford had financed the publication of “The International Jew,” an antisemitic tract. And in New York, the Bund was fomenting a coup, and filling Madison Square Garden with followers. In Yaphank, a town on Long Island, tract homes for Bund members were going up on Adolf Hitler Street.

According to historian Bradley W. Hart, who gives commentary in the documentary:

“This was a period of incredible turmoil in the US. You have the Great Depression, you have people who have lost everything….At this moment…you have…people like Hitler and Mussolini, who are preaching hate and preaching that they have a solution to the real pain that people are feeling, it’s inevitable, unfortunately, that some will be attracted to that message.”

The Bund was just one of hundreds of right-wing and fascist-friendly groups in the US in the 1930s. The video linked above includes a chilling clip (@12:39 minutes) of Italy’s then-Prime Minister Mussolini, reaching out to his fascist friends in America: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“I am very glad to be able to express my friendly feelings towards the American nation, my fellow citizens who are working to make America great…”

For Wrongo, that revealed a shocking throughline to 2016, and then on to America today.

The Bund had chapters all across the country. Their high point was holding a Swastika-bedecked rally attended by 20,000 at Madison Square Garden in 1939. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, despite instructions from FDR, had little interest in investigating the Bund’s head, Fritz Kuhn. Hoover was far more concerned with Communism. Back then, “Jewish Communism” was a catchphrase used by Kuhn.

The documentary uses scenes from the Academy Award-nominated short documentary “A Night at the Garden,” of the 1939 “Pro-American Rally” at Madison Square Garden held by the Bund. When Kuhn takes the stage at the rally, an announcer says:

“We love him for the enemies he has made…”

Doesn’t that sound disturbingly familiar? And you then learn that Kuhn supporters beat up a demonstrator who ran on stage, are you surprised that we see the same at Trump rallies today? Subsequently, Charles Lindbergh emerged as head of a supposedly non-partisan group, “America First” that urged the US not to oppose Hitler’s war in Europe.

Trump embraced the “America First” rubric starting right after his inauguration.

After Nazism and Fascism were defeated in Europe in WWII, there wasn’t much of a reckoning inside the US with those who were Fascists or Nazis. There was a wish to simply forget about the fractious politics of the 1930s. Kuhn was deported to Germany, and the Bund collapsed.

But the Bund members and fellow travelers didn’t disappear. They simply blended back into the social fabric of America’s towns. And the ideas certainly didn’t disappear, they’re still with us today. We’re seeing them re-emerge not just in the US but also throughout Europe. There will always be citizens who when they see a threat, prefer having a strongman around to uproot it.

Tom Nichols, a Never Trump conservative who writes for the Atlantic, offers this:

”Early last month, he echoed the…language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Nichols quotes from Trump’s talk in Claremont, NH:

“We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country….On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible…legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”

As the New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat said in the WaPo about the same speech, Trump is populating this list of imaginary villains (which she sees as a form of projection) in order “to set himself up as the deliverer of freedom. Mussolini promised freedom to his people too and then declared dictatorship.”

It’s possible that Trump doesn’t really understand what he’s saying. But when he uses terms like “vermin” and expressions like “poisoning the blood of our country”, we’re not required to spend a lot of time trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.

And you can be certain that the people around Trump completely understand what he’s saying.

Time to face up to the truth. Trump is a fascist, even if he’s too ignorant to label what he is. He’s naturally gifted at propaganda and he’s demonstrated amazing political power with his Big Lie. Others on the extreme Right have noticed and see the potential of using him for fascistic purposes.

Fascism is back in America, whether we call it by its name or not.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Poetry Banned in Florida

The Daily Escape:

Storm, Outer Banks, NC – May 2023 photo by OBXbeachbum

You may remember that 18 days after the Jan 6th attack, a 22-year-old poet named Amanda Gorman stood on the steps of the Capitol. She addressed the nation’s fresh wounds and its uncertain future:

“A nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.” What a beautiful sentiment.

But those exact words offended a Miami Lakes, Florida serial book banner named Daily Salinas. Salinas alleged that “The Hills We Climb “ included references of critical race theory, indirect hate messages, gender ideology and indoctrination, according to school district records obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project. The Daily Beast reports that Salinas is an avid supporter of Ron DeSantis. She worked as a volunteer on his “Education Agenda Tour” in August 2022.

You can read Gorman’s full poem here. A video of Amanda Gorman reciting her poem at the 2020 Inauguration is here. Gorman reacted, saying in a Facebook post:

“Unnecessary #bookbans like these are on the rise, and we must fight back…”

A review by the WaPo of complaints in 153 school districts across the country for the 2021-2022 school year found that a:

“…majority of the 1,000-plus book challenges analyzed by The Post were filed by just 11 people.”

The WaPo says that each of these people brought 10 or more challenges against books in their school district; one man filed 92 challenges:

“Together, these serial filers constituted 6% of all book challengers — but were responsible for 60% of all filings….In some cases…these serial filers relied on a network of volunteers gathered together under the aegis of conservative parents’ groups such as Moms for Liberty.”

Not surprisingly, Daily Salinas is one of them. Miami Against Fascism alleges in a tweet thread that Salinas is associated with Moms for Liberty Miami-Dade county as well as with the Proud Boys and County Citizens Defending Freedom USA (CCDF), and a Christian nationalist group. From the LA Times:

“When asked if she was aware of professional reviews of the National Youth Poet Laureate’s poem, Salinas wrote, “I don’t need it.” And when asked to list the author, she wrote Oprah Winfrey. (Winfrey wrote the forward for the book version of the poem published in March 2021.)”

Here’s the form that Salinas filled out:

Look again at pgs. 12-13 from Gorman’s poem above. If you can detect a hate message, let Wrongo know. And saying that poetry will indoctrinate students? We should be so lucky. Gorman reacted in a tweet:

“I’m gutted…They ban my book from young readers, confuse me with Oprah, fail to specify what parts of my poetry they object to, refuse to read any reviews, and offer no alternatives,”

This is the Florida of Ron DeSantis. And this is the America he wants to create. DeSantis’s campaign merchandise touts that he will “Make America Florida.” Here are some stats that show how well DeSantis is governing Florida: Florida is 34th in fatal overdoses, 26th in teen birth rates, and 31st in infant mortality.  FL ranks dead last in providing long-term care for older adults. Florida ranks 48th in teacher pay, 45th in per-pupil spending. Despite having a fairly high cost-of-living index (23rd), Florida ranks dead last in providing unemployment benefits, giving recipients just $236 a week for just 12 weeks.

Most Americans would rather their states remain free from the fascist landscape that DeSantis has given Florida.

BTW: the Bible includes: Rape, incest, torture, slavery, bestiality. But apparently, it isn’t subject to the same standards that Daily Salinas uses, despite on the surface, being one nasty book.

We can’t let today go by without thinking about Tina Turner. She was one of the most important recording artists in American history. It’s pretty hard to describe how incredible and important she was for so many decades. In my twenties, Ms. Right and I got to see Ike and Tina Turner (and the Ikettes) live at Fillmore East in January 1970.

Later in her life (and ours) it was just Tina. One thing was consistent: Tina Turner blew the lid off of any joint where she performed. You can’t say that about many acts, but Tina could do just that. Sadly, the soundtrack to Wrongo’s life is growing fainter with time. Tina Turner’s passing adds to the growing list of performers from the past 70 years that Wrongo admired.

Take a few minutes to watch and listen to Tina and Mick Jagger perform “State Of Shock / It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll” in front of 100,000 people at Live Aid in 1985 at the JFK Stadium in Philadelphia:

Let’s hope Ike is burning in Hell.

Facebooklinkedinrss

More Rights May Be Flushed By The Supremes

The Daily Escape:

Denali from Byers Lake, AK – June 2022 photo by Todd Salat

In his concurring opinion to the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, that dismantled Roe, Justice Thomas basically begged Red states to send the Court more culture war cases that they could dismantle.

The Houston Chronicle reports that Texas GOP AG Ken Paxton is ready to do just that:

“Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton last week seemingly expressed support for the Supreme Court potentially overturning past rulings on cases involving the LGBTQ community following the downfall of Roe v. Wade on Friday.”

Paxton, in an interview, said he would support the Supreme Court revisiting the cases mentioned in Thomas’ concurring opinion. Here are the decisions Thomas would like a shot at overturning:

He questioned a number of earlier Court rulings, including Obergefell v. Hodges, which established the right of same-sex couples to marry, and Lawrence vs. Texas—a 2003 decision in which the court ruled against the state of Texas regarding its 1973 law criminalizing the act of sodomy.

Thomas also mentioned Griswold v. Connecticut, which established the right of married couples to use contraception without government interference:

“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell….We have a duty to ‘correct the error’ regarding these established in those precedents.”

For those who don’t fully understand legal shorthand, the judicial theory Thomas is pursuing is that these issues should be in the hands of state legislatures, and not be decided by the courts.

Conservatives in other states have also expressed support for Thomas’s opinion, including Utah Senate President Stuart Adams, who said he would support the Supreme Court reconsidering same-sex marriage. Utah’s constitutional ban on same-sex unions still exists and could be reinstated if the high court were to overturn its earlier decision.

We shouldn’t forget that Obergefell was a 5-4 decision. Lawrence v. Texas was also a 5-4 decision. Since these cases were decided, the Court has moved three seats to the right. We should expect that both of these decisions will be overturned, assuming some state AG sends a case up to the Supremes.

After all, the Court’s Conservatives haven’t gotten more liberal on these issues in the last 10-15 years.

Some more history: Griswold v, Connecticut was decided 7-2, Loving v. Virginia was unanimous; and Brown v. Board of Education was unanimous. All of that said, while history shows that very few 5-4 decisions get overturned, in this time of Conservative Justice grievance, that’s not the way to bet. Even if those cases had been 6-3, 7-2 or 8-1, it wouldn’t matter to the current Justices on the Court.

Pundits are talking as if they would be shocked if the Court reverses Obergefell and Lawrence. That’s because they’re comforted that Thomas’s revolutionary concurrence wasn’t joined by other Justices. But all of them voted to end Roe, and Alito said:

“…abortion is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. Therefore, there is no right to an abortion.”

We should also remember that the Court used nearly word for word, the failed Robert Bork’s reasoning why there isn’t a Constitutional right to privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut.

If there’s no right to privacy because the Constitution does not explicitly state there is such a right, then according to the Court’s Conservative 6, all of the rest of our privacy rights are in play. That means nearly nothing in the Fourth Amendment may remain, because you have no right to privacy in your home or in your vehicle.

But if you bet that the Court’s Conservative majority will somehow find that the founders explicitly wanted corporations to have a right to privacy, you’ll earn some folding money.

The naked desire by the Furious Five to achieve their ideological goals as quickly as possible is most likely, uncontrollable. Chief Justice Roberts is being increasingly sidelined because he wants to (at least) try to hide their ideological agenda. But the Furious Five doesn’t have any interest in hiding what they’re doing.

No more calling “balls and strikes” as Roberts said during his 2005 Senate confirmation hearing.

In closing, the music world has reacted strongly to the Supreme Court ruling on abortion. NPR has a nice roundup of what artists are saying and doing in response. Check it out if you have time.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Wednesday Wake Up Call – June 29, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Asheville morning, June 28, 2022 – iPhone photo by Wrongo. The log house we’re renting this week is at 4,000’ above sea level.

Wake up calls by the Wrongologist rarely happen on Wednesdays, but since the Roberts Court dismantled the line between church and state in public education with Justice Gorsuch’s decision in Kennedy v Bremerton School District, on Monday, it seems right.

Voting 6-3, the Court declared that an Oregon public high school football coach’s post-game prayer sessions with students were Constitutional, whether the students wanted them or not. That made Monday part of a pretty good run for American theocracy:

“The decision came less than a week after the court ruled, by the same vote, that Maine could not exclude religious schools from a state tuition program.”

The line between church and state is being erased before our eyes. Gorsuch, cherry-picking the facts of the case, wrote that football coach Kennedy had sought only to offer a brief, silent and solitary prayer:

“Respect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse republic — whether those expressions take place in a sanctuary or on a field, and whether they manifest through the spoken word or a bowed head…”

Justice Sotomayor responded that the public nature of his prayers and his stature as a leader and role model meant that students felt forced to participate, whatever their religion and whether they wanted to or not. She gave a different account of the facts, taking account of a longer time period:

“Kennedy consistently invited others to join his prayers and for years led student-athletes in prayer…”

In an unusual move, Sotomayor’s dissent included photographs showing Mr. Kennedy kneeling with players, which debunked Gorsuch’s selective use of facts.

Do you really think that this decision would have been the same if those prayers had been offered by a Muslim?

In the process of ruling for Mr. Kennedy, the majority overturned a major precedent on the First Amendment’s establishment clause, Lemon v. Kurtzman. That ruling was decided by an 8-0 vote under Republican Chief Justice Warren Burger. As an aside, John Dean (of Watergate fame) has said that during the Nixon administration, Burger threatened to resign from the Court if Nixon nominated a woman to it.

It came to be known as the Lemon test, which required courts to consider whether the challenged government practice had a secular purpose, whether its primary effect is to advance or inhibit religion, and whether it fosters excessive government entanglement with religion.

Sotomayor acknowledged that while the Lemon test had been frequently criticized by various members of the court:

“The court now goes much further…overruling Lemon entirely and in all contexts.”

So, by tossing out Lemon and saying that Coach Kennedy was not speaking for the school because it was an extra-curricular activity, the barrier between prayer and secular school has been permanently breached.

In today’s America, outside money will fund your culture wars grievance in the courts. The longer you can keep your case moving up through the courts, the better chance you have of running into a conservative Christian judge who will find a precedent for the White people’s Jesus in the Bill of Rights.

Teachers will now feel empowered to “invite” a group to pray with them. A few kids will jump in right away, while others will look around uncomfortably and gradually agree to join in, because the social opprobrium that comes with refusing is huge for kids. And since the person inviting you to pray is an authority figure: a teacher, coach, or principal, you really risk a lot by having them decide you aren’t:  A.Good.Christian.

When given the choice between upholding traditional case law or creating de novo judicial principles, the Roberts Court is almost always going to favor the latter.

Wrongo isn’t a lawyer, but many lawyers are now pointing to the extraordinarily shoddy nature of the Court’s majority opinions, including all three of the precedent-shattering ones the Court has issued over the last week.

It’s time to wake up America! Why is it so hard for Christians in the United States to just practice their religion without involving the rest of us?

We’re getting very close to the establishment of a default Christian American religion. We know that there are many public school teachers who have been silent despite their sincere religious beliefs while at school. Now they will be actively pressured by their pastors to begin proselytizing while on the clock.

To help you wake up, let’s travel to the 2022 Glastonbury music festival, which always creates great live music. On June 25, Olivia Rodrigo and Lily Allen dedicated the latter’s song “Fuck You” repurposed to express anger at five of the six Conservative members of the court.

Rodrigo named the Justices one by one, while Allen raised alternating middle fingers to them:

These artists aren’t afraid of controversy. Millions of us now feel exactly the same.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Free Speech Is About To Get Tested

The Daily Escape:

Lupine bloom, Beeks Bight, Folsom Lake, CA – May 2022 photo by Kaptured in Kamera

We’re back from France where we had fantastic weather, wonderful food and wine, and a break from the loud drumbeat of dystopian American news. One issue that Wrongo followed from afar was the continuing assault on free speech by America’s Right Wing.

From Dan Pfeiffer:

“It seems like every week, Republicans propose, pass, or enact another outrageous, authoritarian, retrograde policy. Book bans, abortion bans, efforts to turn back the clock on marriage equality and contraception. Each is a fleeting political firestorm and then it’s on to the next….amidst this parade of retrograde lawmaking, there is a pattern…”

Despite claiming to be for small government, the Republicans want to dictate the terms of speech in America.

Consider Florida where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis had passed legislation taking away the rights of Facebook, Twitter, and others to ban people from their platforms:

“The US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit on Monday ruled it is unconstitutional for Florida to bar social media companies from banning politicians, in a major victory for tech companies….the court rejected many of the legal arguments that conservative states have been using to justify laws governing the content moderation policies of major tech companies after years of accusations that the tech companies are biased against their political viewpoints.”

The 11th Circuit court found that tech companies’ moderation decisions are protected by the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from regulating free speech. Interestingly, this comes after a different decision on the same issue by the Texas 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, that allowed a Texas law banning companies from discriminating against people based on their politics to remain in effect.

We now have completely opposite decisions by the 11th Circuit and the 5th Circuit courts on the issue of whether corporations must follow the Constitution’s First Amendment. This will invariably lead to the Supreme Court weighing in on whether private social media companies’ content moderation decisions are protected by the First Amendment. From the WaPo:

“Some lawmakers pushing for laws governing online content moderation and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas have argued that tech companies should be regulated as “common carriers,” businesses like phone companies that are subject to government regulation because of the essential services they provide.”

But Florida’s court rejected those arguments, arguing states can’t force such restrictions on private company social media platforms. While the phone companies cannot stop callers or calls that may be objectionable, or even illegal, social media companies have different rights. From the Court’s ruling:

“Neither law nor logic recognizes government authority to strip an entity of its First Amendment rights merely by labeling it a common carrier…”

The “Terms of Service” (TOS) agreements between social media platform companies and their users are a contract. When someone agrees to the TOS, they are saying that they will abide by it. Violating the TOS, whether by Trump, Musk, or some random ideologue, is a violation of contract law.

When the TOS is violated and the violator is suspended or barred from the platform, it doesn’t demonstrate bias, or a restriction in free speech. It demonstrates equal treatment. The TOS isn’t there only to restrain Conservatives, despite their protests of discrimination.

Florida passes a “don’t say gay” bill to police free speech by public educators in schools. They then pass the law to prevent private companies from policing speech on their platforms. This irony is lost on those who claim they’re against federal or state overreach unless it’s their Party that’s doing the overreaching.

The First Amendment says the government cannot punish you for speech (with some exceptions). The same Amendment also protects free association—meaning that it’s perfectly legal for private organizations to exercise their freedom of association even while excluding some speech.

Networks like Facebook and Twitter exert a lot of power over the flow of information. They are a primary method of news and expression for millions. That means they must be broadly inclusive and promote healthy discourse. Their business model includes wanting to attract as many users as possible. From Nicholas Grossmann: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“The big social networks—Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter—aim to be the online mainstream, appealing to a wide variety of users and the businesses that sell to them. That requires stopping behavior that isn’t illegal, but makes the platform inhospitable, such as hate speech.”

The large private social networks have a responsibility not to let the doctrine of free speech make them give a right of way to bad actors. There is zero reason to cede the concept of free speech to the trolls who are trying to drive people they hate off private social media platforms.

Now we wait to see what Alito, Thomas and the other Conservative Supremes have to say about the limits of Free Speech.

You shouldn’t be optimistic about the outcome.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Musk Buys Twitter

The Daily Escape:

High tide, Bandon, OR – April 2022 photo by Bobbie Shots Photography

The Boston Globe is reporting that Musk is purchasing Twitter.

Musk is one of the great entrepreneurs of the 21st Century. He’s redefining space travel with SpaceX. He’s revolutionized internet communication with his Starlink low-earth orbit satellites, having more than 2,000 satellites in orbit. And he’s made Tesla the global leader in Electric Vehicles. And that has made him very rich.

Now he’s using some of his Tesla money along with a lot of Other People’s Money (Morgan Stanley, Barclays, and Bank of America) to buy Twitter and take it private. Bloomberg says Musk’s pledging $21 billion of his own money. The Banks are going to lend him $12.5 billion, secured by an additional $62.5 billion of his Tesla shares.

The rest of the purchase price will be funded by $13 billion in debt that Twitter will take on. After the deal closes, Twitter will have about $1 billion in interest payments due on the new debt annually. Twitter’s cash flow is projected to be about $1.43 billion this year and $1.85 billion in 2023. So debt payments will now be a huge chunk of Twitter’s future cash.

Since this is America, it’s unlikely that any government agency will stand in the way of the sale, but there are two things wrong with it.

First is how Musk became so fabulously wealthy. As Ranjan Roy points out at Margins, his rapid ascent to wealth is due to his unusual compensation package at Tesla. The package set what appeared to be unrealistic goals for sales and profits.

In early 2018, when the comp package was agreed, there was plenty of doubt whether Tesla could scale its manufacturing capacity. Musk had repeatedly said Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy, yet over the next few years, Tesla both stabilized and grew. It went from producing around 90k cars/quarter in 2018, to nearly 300k in the last quarter of 2021. Revenue grew from $12 billion to $54 billion. Tesla produced nearly 1 million cars in 2021.

At the same time, Tesla’s stock price went to the moon, making Musk the world’s richest human. Not incidentally, much of that was helped by Musk’s tweeting. Ranjan Roy says:

“…since the Spring of 2013, it was clear Tesla’s business results and Musk’s tweeting could have a self-reinforcing impact, and that…cycle…became more clear in recent years. Shortly after Musk signed his giant package, the really high-volume tweeting began, and the rest is wealth accumulation history.”

Musk realizes that he’s dependent on his Twitter marketing strategy. He has 80+ million Twitter followers, and unfettered access to his account is vital to his current and future business interests. Why? His current Tesla 10-year pay package has nearly hit its maximum targets in just four years.

Musk needs to think about where he gets his next giant gain in wealth.

This is the challenge of today’s capitalism: Boards with little real vision give stupendous compensation packages that turn out to be easily achievable. And the SEC allows entrepreneurs with media savvy to pump up their own stock at little personal risk.

Yes, Musk and Tesla have both paid fines to the SEC for stock manipulation. In a September 2018 settlement, Musk and the SEC agreed that he would step down as Tesla Chair and pay a $20 million penalty. Tesla also had to pay a $20 million fine.

But these were just minor costs of doing business compared to the personal wealth he’s created.

The second problem is that Musk, (and maybe a few on Twitter’s board) think that individual users should decide who and what gets seen and heard online. Musk says he wants Twitter to be an open playing field for competitive speech.

That may be peachy in the abstract. But we all know that every unmoderated platform goes to shit because it only takes a few bad-faith users to make it miserable for everyone.

For now, Twitter has decided that Trump can’t post on its platform. It decides whether to delete a post about vaccines if it deems the post to be misinformation. Most people don’t have the time to learn what’s real and reliable, and history shows how susceptible most are to harmful misinformation campaigns. Expect this to change after Musk buys Twitter.

Scott Galloway says:

“In an unmoderated online forum, all speakers do not play by the same rules or have the same tools. University of Maryland professor David Kirsch has found that automated pro-Tesla Twitter accounts are responsible for 20% of the tweets about Tesla, and that the launching of these bots correlates with increases in the company’s stock price.”

Rupert Murdoch transformed media in order to exercise greater influence over society. Does America need Musk to become another Murdoch? There’s a good chance one of his first acts as the Tweeter-in-Chief will be to re-instate Trump’s account, something that will have very serious political consequences.

Wrongo is a capitalist, but we’ve always needed rules to reign in the worst of the market’s players. And rules require umpires. Without umpires, anticompetitive and illegal acts go unpunished. Worse, today people insist, in the name of freedom, on their right to shout down all dissenting voices.

In America, underregulated economic winners have funded think tanks. Some have bought politicians. Some, newspapers and cable news stations. Musk is buying Twitter. They’re trying to convince us that the umpire is the enemy.

Musk wants you to live in a Wild West of speech and power. Are you ready for that?

Facebooklinkedinrss

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – February 20, 2022

(The hosting service for the Wrongologist is having problems with the RSS feed that sends subscribers an email version of the column in the morning. Please go to the website to see earlier columns.)

 

Is there a better metaphor for today’s America than this?:

“A ship carrying cars from Germany to the United States caught fire in the Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday, forcing the crew’s 22 members to abandon the vessel and leave it burning and adrift.”

So, there’s a 60,000-ton cargo ship adrift off the Azores yesterday with no crew. It’s carrying an estimated 4,000 cars, including 189 Bentleys and 1,100 Porsches. Tow boats from Gibraltar and the Netherlands are on their way to the site with three expected to be there by next Wednesday. The abandoned and burning vessel is operated by the Japanese shipping company Mitsui O.S.K. Lines.

Think about America as a ship adrift, in flames. One that its essential workers had to flee to survive. And it’s loaded with Porsches and Bentleys. On to cartoons.

Putin’s always thinking ahead:

Rumors of Russia’s pullback are deceiving:

Irrational discourse is America’s brand:

When a priest says “I baptize,” instead of “we baptize,” there’s no baptism:

Trump’s CPA walks away:

Sarah Palin vs. New York Times:

Sarah Palin sued The New York Times for defamation but failed to prove her case. In 1964, the Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan, said that public figures (like Palin), have to prove a defamatory statement was made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

From Clay Jones who drew the cartoon above:

“It’s weird how Republicans claim they love the United States Constitution, refer to themselves as ‘constitutionalists’, yet hate press freedom and do everything in their power to destroy it. The Supreme Court has affirmed the right to a free press time and time again, yet Republicans like Donald Trump have argued to limit press freedom, if not outright destroy it.”

Press freedom doesn’t belong to liberals or conservatives, it belongs to everyone. Free speech is a Constitutional right and if you try to kill it because someone said something about you that you didn’t like, you’re not just killing free speech for your enemies, you’re killing it for yourself.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Saturday Soother – Conventions Are Over Edition, August 29, 2020

The Daily Escape:

The Cornish-Windsor Covered Bridge that connects Vermont and New Hampshire across the Connecticut River. Wrongo and Ms. Right crossed it many times a year when we lived in NH.

Happy Saturday, fellow disease vectors! Both presidential conventions are over, and there’s just 65 days to go until the election. In his Thursday night acceptance speech, Trump turned and pointed at the White House, saying “We’re here and they’re not.” That sums up what’s going to be all-out, house-to-house fighting for votes by both Parties.

Trump is seeking to redefine the November election as a choice between Biden and himself, not simply a referendum on his first term.

A massive Republican attempt to scramble the narrative has already begun: No one will be safe in Joe Biden’s America. If he wins the election you’ll have to lock your doors, or run for your lives, because those bad people from “Democrat-run cities” want to kill you in your beds.

They’re betting that the fear of violence in the streets will outweigh all of the other issues on the minds of a sufficient number of voters to prevent Biden from winning in the Electoral College.

But the reality is that Trump has done much to incite violence. The fact that the violence has overwhelmingly occurred in cities with Democratic municipal governments is framed as making Trump the “change candidate”, despite being the guy on whose watch all of this violence has happened. And, as presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway explained on Fox News:

“The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order…”

And facts just don’t matter. Biden isn’t for defunding the police. In reality, he has called for increasing federal funding for police departments by $300 million, while Trump has proposed nearly half-a-billion dollars in cuts to law enforcement funding.

We should have expected the emergence of vigilante violence, as more and more protests turned into riots this summer. But this week’s killings in Kenosha, WI demonstrate how sinister vigilantism is when a 17-year old Kyle Rittenhouse comes from another state, ostensibly to protect local Wisconsin property from local protesters, and kills two.

But he wasn’t alone. NYT reports that: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Mr. Rittenhouse’s gunfire is mixed in with the sound of at least 16 other gunshots that ring out during this time.”

Apparently, Rittenhouse was responsible for eight of the 24 rounds, so other vigilantes were also roaming Kenosha’s streets. And since he’s 17, Kyle isn’t old enough either to own a gun, or to be open-carrying in Wisconsin, where you can’t legally own a rifle until you’re 18.

Immediately after Rittenhouse was identified as the shooter, the right-wing media characterized his actions as those of a dutiful citizen who had no choice but to take the law into his own hands, more Republican justification of vigilantism.

Returning to the context of the next 65 days: Once again, the big question is whether you are better off today than you were four years ago?

Since life is worse, how and why should voters focus only on violence when there are already 185,000 COVID dead? When 30 million Americans are unemployed? When 50 million face eviction, and our economy is teetering on depression?

There is no question that street violence is a major issue that must be on the table right along with the others. These require simultaneous solutions, and failure to solve any one of them will weaken the country for at least a decade.

They all urgently need to be solved, not spun, and Biden better have good answers.

It is a wonder that we haven’t seen more gun fights on our city streets. The police have all the tools and protective gear money can buy, but they look the other way when it comes to vigilantes. They need to intervene when these open carry vigilantes show up at protests, and bar them from entering into the immediate area of a protest, regardless of the First and Second Amendment consequences. Public safety should override the Constitutional concerns.

Americans can’t walk around afraid of armed and unregulated militias who think they have a mandate. And those militias can’t be welcomed by our local police. That’s the easy part. Solving the COVID pandemic so people can go back to work and to school can’t be left to Trump. He’s proven he isn’t capable of solving those problems.

Time for some soothing Saturday music. Here’s Yiruma, a South Korean composer and pianist, playing a short set of original music, live at a Korean Traditional House Village:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Facebooklinkedinrss