Im-Politic: Was Some Unpopular Speech Just Banned in Boston?

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Boston, Boston police, Charlottesville, Constitution, free speech, Im-Politic, William Evans

“Banned in Boston” was a term widely used in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries to describe the city’s habit of censoring books and plays that a powerful and puritanical group of its leading citizens didn’t happen to like. Yesterday, strong evidence emerged that an even more disturbing set of “Banned in Boston” impulses have staged a comeback: a policy of censoring political speech and the city’s police commissioner, and possibly the rest of its political leadership, doesn’t like.

The story begins with a charge made by John Medlar, an organizer of yesterday’s so-called rally held in Boston yesterday avowedly to support the idea of free speech. I only say “so-called” because rally attendance was pathetically low. In any event, Medlar claims that before the event’s scheduled end at 2 PM local time, “supporters were blocked by counter-protesters and by police from getting to their cordoned-off area….” (This phrasing is from a local radio station report.)

More important, later yesterday afternoon, Boston Police Commissioner William Evans was asked to respond. His own words (as quoted by that same local radio station):  “If they [people who want to talk about hate] didn’t get in, that’s a good thing, because their message isn’t what we want to hear.”

There’s definitely some ambiguity here. For example, is Evans saying that he heard that some who wanted to attend the rally just happened to fail to make it through the combination of massed counter-protesters and the heavy police presence stationed in the area to prevent violence (a presence that accomplished this crucial mission far more effectively than its counterpart in Charlottesville, Virginia, the weekend before)? Or is Evans agreeing that the police knowingly prevented rally supporters from reaching the rally site? Obviously, the first possibility would be much more excusable, especially if those wanting to attend the rally failed to make their identities known, than the second.

Yet even if the inevitable confusion surrounding such events was partly or mainly responsible for the inability of some to attend the rally, it’s still justifiable in my view to criticize the Boston police and the orders they may have received. For as I argued last Saturday, free speech can’t truly be protected adequately if protesters or rally-ers can be intimidated from or physically blocked from carrying out their planned activities (provided of course that these activities are peaceful).

As a result, local, state, and/or federal authorities have a legal and Constitutional obligation actively to ensure that these events go on as planned. Otherwise, even the right of unpopular causes to demonstrate despite possible threats their activity might pose to public safety and order (because of disorderly behavior from their opponentsdeeds) can too easily be turned into a hollow right. And this country would take a big step closer to mob rule.

So I propose that the federal government launch a civil rights investigation to find out what actually happened at the Boston Common. Satisfactorily accurate conclusions can’t be drawn based solely on the news coverage, or even on Evans’ statements. But Evans’ own words certainly indicate that his officers and those to whom they report dropped a major free speech ball of some kind here.

Im-Politic: Charlottesville & Trump: A Never-Ending Story?

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American South, anti-semitism, Charlottesville, Confederate monuments, free speech, hate groups, Im-Politic, neo-Nazis, racism, Trump, white supremacists

And so President Trump has stepped in it once again, and guaranteed that, unless something major changes, self-inflicted wounds will become the hallmarks of his presidency.

Of course, I’m talking about his impromptu remarks at yesterday’s press appearance, in which new, explicit denunciations of racist and anti-semitic hate groups were accompanied by descriptions of some of their individual members present in Charlottesville, Virginia as “very fine people” – along with comments that at least could reasonably be read as establishing a moral equivalence between the marchers and those who came to the region to protest their planned rally.

Among the least defensible:

>The contention that the torchlight marchers last Friday night included “people protesting very quietly the taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee”;

>The charge that supporters of removing Confederate memorials are “changing culture” – which closely resembles the specious claim that the memorials were erected to honor the American South’s distinctive “heritage.”

As per the views I expressed on Saturday, I still don’t believe that Mr. Trump is a racist or an anti-semite. I still believe that his behavior mainly reflects a “pathetically mistaken” belief that a big chunk of his largely white, working class base will take offense at overly harsh attacks on bigoted, fringe figures like David Duke and Richard Spencer.

But upon reflection, I’d add that he’s stunningly inarticulate, and terminally – and in many ways childishly – argumentative. And although I’m not concerned that his verbal indiscipline will needlessly spark a war or some other kind of domestic or global crisis, those are worrisome traits in a figure whose every syllable is (understandably) put under a microscope. Nor is much simple common sense visible on the President’s part, or at least not often enough.

After all, how difficult would it have been to draw up sometime over the weekend and deliver on TV a statement along the lines of:

“My fellow Americans [or whatever standard presidential speech introductory wording you like]. I loathe the Charlottesville protesters and everything they represent. The neo-Nazis, the white supremacists and their ilk have deliberately associated themselves with historical atrocities and injustices that are not only appalling. They are uniquely evil in nature. It is indeed infuriating to see them openly displaying their perverse and destructive views in our streets and parks and squares. In fact, I am personally infuriated that they keep invoking my name, and portraying my efforts to reinvigorate the ideal of a practical, healthy nationalism as an endorsement of racism and anti-semitism and xenophobia.

“But we also must remember something crucial about our democratic values – which of course are values that the hate groups’ evil historical idols have tried to destroy. They demand that even loathsome figures and voices enjoy the freedom to exercise their Constitutional speech rights. So in that respect, attempts to disrupt their activities, or the First Amendment freedoms of other unpopular speakers, must be condemned, too.

“Therefore, law-breakers will be prosecuted – whatever their political views and associations.

“But much more important, I hope that the vast majority of Americans angered by the disgraceful Charlottesville marchers and their supporters understand, and take to heart, that the best way to counter, and defeat, the hatred they spew is not by joining them in the gutter and resorting to violence – unless it’s a matter of self-defense. The best way is to expose their sick lies with the power of reason. The best way is to remember our love, compassion, and respect for each other, and take every opportunity to show it. The best way is to strengthen our nation’s unity of spirit. And the best way is to fulfill our sacred duty each and every day to keep our great national experiment in self-government a beacon for all of humanity.”

Now the President is reaping the whirlwind. I have no idea whether this latest uproar will simply blow over (as with the Access Hollywood video episode), or become superseded by another headline news development, or will doom Mr. Trump to a single term, or will erode his political support so drastically that his presidency becomes impossible to continue. What does seem certain is that the prospects of a successful Trump presidency, and especially of promises kept to economically struggling middle class and working class Americans, have taken a body blow, and that something on the order of a dramatic display of executive competence, an equally dramatic display of contrition and/or explanatory eloquence – plus a tidal wave of dumb luck – will be needed for even a partial recovery.

Im-Politic: First Thoughts on Charlottesville

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ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union, anti-semitism, Charlottesville, civil liberties, Civil War, Confederacy, Constitution, David Duke, Founding Fathers, free speech, Im-Politic, neo-Nazis, racism, Robert E. Lee, secession, slavery, treason, Trump, Virginia

It’s as tempting to offer timely thoughts about today’s Charlottesville, Virginia violence and the reactions it’s generated as it is difficult – for new developments keep taking place, and incontrovertible facts are hard to come by. That said, here are what strike me as as points worth making at present.

First, as I’ve previously written, the triggering complaint of the white nationalist/neo-Nazi/confederate revivalist/call-them-what-you-wish protest and the narrowest-gauge cause it represents should be unacceptable to all Americans who truly love their country. Confederate statues and other monuments to the rebellion (e.g., street and high school names) have no place in our national life. And removing them has nothing to do with erasing history. The history of the Civil War must of course be taught in the most intellectually honest way possible. But statues and street names etc are unmistakable efforts to honor and memorialize.

And whether you view the secession as motivated by intertwined racism and slavery issues (where in my view the bulk of the evidence points) or more legitimate federalist and states rights claims, the decision to revolt violently against the federal government was a simple act of treason, which should always be condemned in the harshest possible terms.

Moreover, please don’t respond with observations that the Founding Fathers’ ranks included slave-owners (like Washington and Jefferson) or that many subsequent American leaders were racists (like Woodrow Wilson). For slavery was, tragically, legal under the Constitution until emancipation. And as I’ve written (in the post linked above), most of the historical national figures with inadequate records on race were, first, to great extents products of their time and, second, known for playing many other roles and making many other contributions to the nation and its success.

As for the protesters’ broader supposed grievances about repressed and endangered white rights and even safety, I have no doubt that economic stresses and anxieties are at work in many cases. But feeling the need, or advisability, to fly the Confederate flag or wear the swastika simply signals a form of derangement that our society has rightly decided is beyond the pale politically and morally speaking. So public figures should decry this message and reject any association with those sending them.

Which brings us to the question of the Trump response. It was, as critics have charged, far too weak. What I can’t figure out is the “why”. Is the president a racist? He’s had too many African-American friends and supporters for that charge to stick. He and his advisers and aides also have too often argued for restricting immigration by pointing to the benefits U.S. blacks would reap.

Related anti-semitism make even less sense, given that Mr. Trump’s daughter married an orthodox Jew (who he has anointed as a top White House aide) and then converted herself to Judaism. I know that the “some of my best friends are….” argument can be and has been abused by anti-semites (as well as racists). But insisting that “some of my children and grandkids….” is much harder to dismiss.

The only explanation that makes even some sense to me (meaning of course that I’m not totally convinced) is that the president worries that a substantial part of his (largely white) base either covertly or (much likelier) subconsciously sees itself as racially repressed or marginalized, too, and would suddenly desert him if he went after the David Dukes and Richard Spencers of this country. In other words, Mr. Trump’s troubling words reflect a political calculation, not a shared bigotry.

If so, his position is not only timorous, but pathetically mistaken. Because for every hater he retains by his silence or anodyne words at times like this weekend, he risks losing many more moderates and independents who have no use for the identity-politics obsessed, and therefore intrinsically divisive, Democrats but who are disgusted by overt racists – much less neo-Nazis. In fact, Duke’s tweets today show that this arch-racist and anti-semite is infuriated by the president’s Charlottesville remarks.

More important, the president will earn much more durable support from independents and moderates – especially those who have actually lost economic ground or fear such losses – by keeping the campaign promises he made to restore living wage jobs than by even minimal pandering to prejudice.

Finally, the role of the Charlottesville police and any other law enforcement authorities tasked with handling the protests needs to be scrutinized thoroughly – along with our notions of protesters’ rights. I’m pretty certain that most Americans would agree with the right of Nazis and the like to stage a protest over the treatment of Confederate memorials (or any other reprehensible) cause, and to display symbols that should disgust all people of good will. And of course, these are Constitutionally protected rights.

But I’ve long thought that the right to protest also entails the right of protesters to be protected from those seeking to disrupt their events. In other words, once counter-protesters started physically interfering with the Nazis, the police force present should have stepped in and started making arrests. Even better, they should have taken much more effective measures to keep the counter-protesters physically apart from the protesters, to reduce the odds of violence breaking out to begin with. To my knowledge, law enforcement authorities have never been sued for such failures (not even by the American Civil Liberties Union, which admirably supported the Nazis’ etc right to demonstrate in Charlottesville). I hope the organization will consider bringing such a case in the wake of Charlottesville, if the circumstances merit this action.

For failing to establish protesters’ right to security could easily turn into an open invitation for harassment that could crimp free speech rights yet further. And what would induce the Nazis – and violence-prone lefties – to start licking their chops more eagerly?

Im-Politic: What I Did – & Didn’t Do – in the PC Wars

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Baby Boomers, Chile, First Amendment, free speech, hate speech, Im-Politic, junta, political correctness, Princeton University, The Daily Princetonian

Time to take a break from the terrorism wars and turn to the latest round of political correctness wars raging on many of the nation’s college campuses.  Given their seeming prevalence, it was instructive to be reminded recently that (a) I used to be a college student and (b) I was involved in some of these skirmishes back in the day myself.

The specific incident took place in November, 1974, and concerned a speaking invitation that the debating society at Princeton University extended to Chile’s ambassador to the United States. To save everyone the need to Google this, the decision was controversial because Chile’s democratically elected socialist government had just been overthrown the year before in a military coup, and the ambassador was a general who represented the junta responsible and its repressive rule.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the campus was convulsed in debate over how – or if – to respond to the planned event. (The counterculture and any major political residue of the 1960s was long gone by then from Princeton.) But the invitation certainly triggered an unusual amount of discussion and even actions by individual students and by various campus groups, including the student government.

For example, the latter voted to condemn the junta, but turned down a motion to urge students to boycott the speech. The campus Socialist Study Group (trust me – it was small), denounced the invitation itself, and also sponsored a “militant boycott.” This consisted of a protest outside the venue whose participants sought to convince others not to attend.  (This account comes from articles in the digital archives of the student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian.)

What I find especially interesting – and pertinent for today’s free speech controversies – is that I can’t find any record, and don’t personally recall, any organization or individual at the university that urged that the invitation be withdrawn, or that the speech be disrupted. In fact, the Socialist Study Group explicitly decided to oppose any attempt to interfere with the event. And I found genuinely eloquent and moving one activist’s rationale for the planned demonstration: “We want it to be impossible for someone to get inside without having to ask himself ‘why am I going inside?'”  

Of course, The Princetonian needed to weigh in, and as one of the editorial page editors, I drafted our perspective. In retrospect, the main point made seems sensible – and struck the necessary balance between tolerance and conscience. The editorial blasted Heitmann as “nothing more than a thug in formal clothing” but insisted that “The wisdom of Whig-Clio’s [the debating society] decision to invite him is both debatable and immaterial.” It continued:

“What is important is that when [Ambassador Walter] Heitmann appears, the community should expose him to the full force of its outrage and indignation. Accordingly, we strongly urge all members of the university to protest vigorously Heitmann’s presence and’the murderous nature of what he represents. At the same time, the community should remember that to disrupt the ambassador’s speech is to resort to his own gutter tactics.”

And then came the part that, in my mind, was crucial. The edit spotlighted and praised the debating society’s president for announcing that the ambassador had agreed to take questions after his speech. That, apparently, had not been a foregone conclusion. According to the editorial, this decision mattered because:

“it adheres to the spirit as well as the letter of free speech, a notion which entails much more than undisturbed presentation. At its crux lie ideas of discussion and exchange, which are by no means served by giving Heitmann a soapbox and then permitting him to make a neat, quick exit.”  

The upshot: Heitmann gave his speech. A crowd estimated at 275 protested outside. Their chants could be heard through the windows of the venue that remained open, but evidently were not loud enough to interfere with the proceedings. Inside, two students who were standing with their backs to the podium moved to the rear of the room when, according to the Princetonian, they were “told that they were blocking the view of the audience….” But no one was hurt or arrested.  And by all accounts, Heitmann was challenged vigorously.

But although preventing “neat, quick exits” and insisting on opportunities for genuine exchange still seems to be a good policy for handling speakers with arguably offensive messages, it doesn’t address another major aspect of today’s campus speech controversies: what seem to be increasingly common instances of what deserves to be called – at least unofficially – hate speech.

I imagine that it’s difficult for my baby boom peers to get a grip on this problem, because racial and homophobic and similar epithets were practically unheard of in public, on campus of off, whether in the form of slogans scrawled on walls or insults shouted at individuals or groups.

The First Amendment enthusiast in me bridles at the thought of official responses, especially when it comes to remarks made in the heat of the moment. But the rest of me believes that everyone has a right to go about their daily routines, especially in a place of learning, without being assaulted audibly or visually by words whose only purpose can be to denigrate and harm and in fact to dehumanize, but that fail to threaten physical violence (a plausible threshold in my view for legal action, along with findings of vandalism).

Any thoughts from you RealityChek readers on handling this dilemma would be most welcome. But until I figure this out, I’m left with the hitherto unimaginable thought that, at least compared with the present, my time as a student, in the ’60s and ’70s, was generally a garden party.

Making News: Podcast of Last Night’s John Batchelor Show Appearance

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censorship, China, free expression, free speech, internet, Making News, non-tariff barriers, protectionism, technology, The John Batchelor Show, Trade, trade law, World Trade Organization

I’m pleased to post the podcast of my appearance last night on John Batchelor’s nationally syndicated radio show.  Click here for a fascinating discussion among John, co-host Gordon Chang, and yours truly on China’s internet censorship and its implications for not only global commerce, but the future of the web itself.  The segment starts at about the 10-minute mark.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Let’s Fight Terrorism with a Year (or More) of Spoofing Islam

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Charlie Hebdo, France, free expression, free speech, Islam, jihadism, Muslims, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Paris, terrorism

It’s something of a relief that most of the Western and even official Arab world reaction to the Charlie Hebdo attack has been outright and strong condemnation, rather than bleating or scolding about the consequences of offending religions and their followers. (Many major Muslim organizations have expressed outrage, too.)

Not that there haven’t been prominent exceptions. Here’s one, from USAToday. I’ve encountered another type on Twitter this morning, in the form of Economist correspondent David Rennie, who protested my claim that “Islam is a big part of the problem” responsible for much and even most contemporary terrorism.

It’s also been encouraging – and courageous and important – to see cartoonists publishing works in protest, and for media and other organizations, and individuals, to post the Charlie Hebdo drawings in question. Ensuring that they go viral is an excellent way to let the terrorists know that intimidation won’t work. Other global expressions of solidarity are grartifying, too.  But much more needs to be done on this score, for much longer.  

As I see it, it’s time to ramp up satirical treatment of Islam in all media. The aim would not be to offend Muslims for the sake of offending. Rather, it would be to show the extremists that the non-Muslim world’s determination to practice and support free speech is not simply rhetorical, and that it extends far beyond relatively small circles of cartoonists and other satirists of questionable taste.

So I suggest that the media and entertainment worlds declare a “Year of Spoofing Islam.” Cartoons, opinion columns, videos, television shows (calling Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, etc.!), full-length feature films (calling Seth Rogen!), and all other vehicles of expression poking fun at the religion, and at its leading historic and current figures, should be prominently and continually created and published.  And of course they should be endlessly disseminated through every possible channel. If the attacks don’t stop, the campaign should extend into a second year. And if necessary, a “Decade of Spoofing Islam” could go into effect.

Of course, national governments need to keep trying to neutralize terrorism. But I can’t imagine a better way to teach current and potential attackers a crucial lesson – and spur stronger efforts to stop them by their moderate co-religionists – than to make sure that whenever Muslims anywhere access any media, they’ll see and hear torrents of material lampooning their faith and all of its cultural and social manifestations.

Ridicule is one of the most powerful forces not only in politics but in life itself.  It should be especially effective versus a culture (and one of its perverse sub-cultures) that attaches such importance to maintaining face and avoiding shame. Let’s weaponize ridicule and start firing it big-time.  On top of striking symbolic blows for free expression, we’ll begin ensuring Islam’s collective understanding that, whether Muslims like the modern, secular world or not, they’d better make their peace with it.

In this spirit, here’s a link to the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.