Tuesday, April 26, 2022

SPEECH AND THE FREE MUSK-A-TEER

SPEECH AND THE FREE MUSK-A-TEER

On July 4, 1994, I was almost arrested.

Seriously.

I was running for Congress as a Democrat in what was then New York's 19th Congressional district.  It covered the northern half of Westchester County and then ran north into Putnam and Dutchess counties while crossing the Hudson to embrace four towns in Orange County.  

On that July 4, I was in Leonard Park in Mt. Kisco, ready to meet and greet the large numbers of voters who had come to the park that day to celebrate the Fourth.  

After I left my car and starting walking toward groups of voters to hand them campaign literature, a cop stopped me and told me I couldn't do that.  I asked why and he said that a local ordinance prohibited solicitation in the park.  I explained (I am a lawyer) that whatever the ordinance said, it could not really be meant to forbid political speech given the First Amendment.  He, however, was not remotely interested in any lessons in Constitutional law and told me that either I could  stop politicking  or he would march me out of the park in cuffs.

This presented a problem.

Leonard Park was only my first of many planned stops that day and our campaign was low on cash and thus very high on my ability to meet and convince as many voters as possible before the September primary.  If  arrested, I would have to spend the better part of the day in jail (or court), waiting for the Constitution to be vindicated in the leafy precincts of northern Westchester County, while my opponents (all of whom, I later learned, had meekly submitted to the no politics ban when they showed up at the park that day) went about their task of meeting voters.

So, I decided not to get arrested.

I did not, however, meekly submit to the town's ludicrous attack on free speech.

Instead, I made a small detour to the Mt. Kisco Police Department and filed a complaint against the police.  

My complaint was not well received.  

The desk officer made a point of reiterating that there was a no solicitation rule that applied to the park, that those celebrating the Fourth did not want to be bothered by people like me, and that -- in case I had any doubt -- he would never vote for me anyway.  He explained that the town had acquired the park from a private owner and that the deed specifically included a "no solicitation" restrictive covenant.  I thanked him for the information but explained that, while the restriction no doubt precluded salesmen for hawking vacuums to joggers, dog-walkers and the tennis crowd, it could not Constitutionally preclude candidates from distributing political literature on the Fourth of July.

As is sometime the case after people are through being angry but realize the source of their anger is still standing in front of them, he thought about this for a  bit and then allowed that I "might have a point".

Done there, I then went about the day's events.

All of this became local news over the course of the next few days.  

As noted, all of my opponents had agreed to leave the park and in their comments made a point of noting how politely they had submitted to the town's restriction.  The owner of a weekly newspaper published an editorial in which he argued that it was not too much to ask that a "politics free zone" be enforced in "bucolic" Leonard Park.  This prompted a concerned citizen to wonder whether that owner would have taken the same position if the town had set up a "reporter free zone" in the park.  That same citizen also wondered why I was the only candidate running for Congress who actually understood the Constitution.  

And was willing to fight for it.

Meanwhile, the town itself was having second thoughts. 

Its manager announced in the days following my near-arrest that it was reviewing its policy,  and later that fall the City Council actually voted to repeal the restrictive covenant.  

So . . .

I didn't go to jail.

And the First Amendment was, if not saved, at least not repudiated.

Yesterday, Twitter announced that it was accepting Elon Musk's $44 billion bid to acquire the company and take it private. 

Musk, an eccentric muti-billionaire who funded and became the CEO of the  electric car company Tesla and then created SpaceX so that (rich) people (like him) could "slip the surly bonds of earth", calls himself a First Amendment absolutist.  He claims that Twitter is the 21st century's "digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated."  He also claims that he "want[s] to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans."

In truth, no one knows exactly what Musk will do with Twitter once he takes it private.

He has been called "polarizing", "reckless" and "capricious".  He has exhibited a Trumpy affinity for personal insult and sexist jokes, and while Trump himself says he doesn't want back on the site, his wing of the GOP favors the acquisition, which may be good news for them but bad news for the rest of us.  For their part, Democrats are wary.  

Both of Musk personally and of the notion that any one billionaire should own a platform as powerful as Twitter.

For the First Amendment to function properly, it requires a forum, reasonable access, and actual speech.  You can be absolutist on the First Amendment but if you are absolutist on any one of those three pre-requisites, the likely result will be anything ranging from the anarchy of Babel to the monopoly of censorship. Neither, of course,  was the Amendment's intended result.  

If everyone gets access at once, there is Babel. If no one is given access at all, there is monopoly and censorship.   If no grammar or architecture is required, there may be sounds or signs but there is no speech.  Speech communicates.  It is not and can never be a one-way street.  The First Amendment does not exist to preserve our ability to talk to ourselves.  It exists to preserve our ability to talk to each other.  

What to do?

My (very) modest proposal is to return to Leonard Park in the mid-'90s.

In 1994, Mt. Kisco wasn't wrong in stopping the Fuller Brush man from setting up shop and hawking his wares on Leonard Park's tennis courts. It was wrong in stopping a citizen on the Fourth of July from discussing why he should be that district's Congressman with anyone in Leonard Park who wanted to have that discussion. In creating a "politics free zone", however much that move might have been welcomed in an age when politics and politicians are so despised, the town  killed core speech the First Amendment protects. Worse, it did so in one of the few remaining public venues where that speech would have been person-to-person.

The biggest problems with social media today -- with Facebook and Twitter and their countless imitators -- are the algorithms that determine access and therefore govern the speech conveyed.  I mean this literally.  Those algorithms govern the speakers and the speakers' messages because they effectively determine to whom those messages are delivered.  The architecture of "shares" and "likes" drives speakers into silos of the like-minded and highly motivated.  Often, the people who occupy those silos are very angry.  At the same time, the potential for domination by bots can drive a message that the actual marketplace of ideas, the one with real people in it, rejects. 

So . . .

At the end of the day, these platforms do not enhance free speech. Rather, they enhance loud or extreme speech . . .  

Or . . .

In a word . . .

Noise.

I do not know what Elon Musk intends for Twitter and am not sure he knows either.  

Musk is of the generation that fashions itself as disrupters.  And, to his enormous financial success,  he has made a habit of it.  

With Tesla, SpaceX, AI and even tunnels.  

So, with Twitter he will disrupt.  Maybe the platform's architecture will improve.  Maybe he will be true to his word and eliminate the bots.  Or maybe the Trumps of the world will find a new home and Twitter will become noisier and less communicative than ever.

As I said, I do not know.

What I do know is that I'd feel a lot better about Musk if I thought his view of the First Amendment was grounded.  

To do that, he need not take a trip to outer space.

Leonard Park will do.

Thursday, April 14, 2022

EASTER 2022 -- THE ESSENCE OF JOE BIDEN

EASTER 2022 -- THE ESSENCE OF JOE BIDEN

It's very hard to be an optimist these days.

Inflation is as high as it's been in forty years.  Political opportunists in the Republican party are embracing that fact and sending it into battle in an effort to rid Congress of Democrats and the White House of Joe Biden.  

The media -- ever wary of being tagged as liberals and therefore ever-vigilant in making sure that GOP talking points get more than their fair share of time -- remind us of all of  this every day.  If we liberals push back, they point out that the contrary voices are being published.  

And they are . . .

Sort of.

But it's not front-page headline news.

You have to look.

For those willing to leave the front page for the distant recesses of the op-eds, Paul Krugman argues that the current inflation is more pandemic and supply-related and therefore more like the rising prices just after World War II than the endemic price hikes of  the 1970s.  The message is this is not transitory but it isn't endless either.  

For those willing to read The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner will point out the corporate profiteering helping to drive  the price side of the equation and the absence of the kind of social policies (child care, principally) needed to help combat a tight labor market. Yes, Virginia, available day care for the kids and health care for grandma will put a lot of people back to work and -- get ready for this -- increase the supply of workers, increase the supply of goods, and drive down prices.  

For those willing to subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson's substack-based Letters From an American, she'll recite the stupendous job growth over the last fifteen months, the fact that Americans survived the pandemic with more money in their bank accounts thanks to the government, and the reality that Covid could have been a personal economic catastrophe for more of us.  

The worst thing that can happen with Covid is that you die.

The second is that you get sick.

But bad as it was, second place could have been a lot worse.

Winding up sick is bad.  

Winding up sick and broke is . . .

As the toddlers say . . .

More bad.

We didn't.

And we have jobs.

Thank you Joe Biden.

Can I get an Amen for the guy?  Or a Hallelujah?  Or even some grudging respect?

Alas . . .

No.

The American memory is short.  And when its media eco-system is plagued with fact-free actors whose self-interest is advanced by forgetfulness, it becomes even shorter.  There's no sane world in which Donald Trump should beat Joe Biden in any 2024 re-match.  But in today's polls, they're even and some have Trump ahead.  So . . . 30,000 lies, "fine people" among neo-Nazis, ingesting bleach, pussy grabbing, the imminent destruction of privacy, reproductive and gay marriage rights by his three appointees to the Supreme Court, and an attempted coup on January 6 have been . . .

What?

Forgotten.

Well, that's how you get a Joe Biden stuck with an average approval rating of 41% for the past two months, notwithstanding a booming economy with the lowest unemployment rate since 1969, NATO resurrected from the prior administration's not too subtle attempt to kill it, and a war in Ukraine where the good guys are holding their own and may even beat the KGB autocrat who runs Russia and who Trump never had a bad word for.

Spare me the chorus of GOP naysayers who claim Biden didn't do enough early enough to arm Ukraine or sanction Putin and his cronies.  

Their guy froze $400 million in military aid in an effort to bribe Ukraine into investigating Hunter Biden, and regularly threatened to have the United States withdraw from NATO  and thus eliminate the only real threat restricting Putin's appetite for reconstructing present-day Russia in the model of his beloved USSR.  If Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania remain free, it will only be because they are now members of NATO.  And if Ukraine beats Russia, it will in part be because the western world united to provide the arms needed to do so.

I think it's way too premature to count Biden or the Democrats out.

In either the mid-terms or 2024.

Much of the populist energy that became wind in Trump's sails was based on their anger at a neo-liberal consensus that had led to gross inequality.  The Democrats are the only party at least trying to mitigate some of that.  The GOP is good at allowing Fox & Friends to stoke anti-Biden sentiment with the latest faux outrage over non-problems -- kindergartners aren't being groomed to change their sex and Ketanji Brown Jackson didn't go easy on pedophiles.

But that's all they have.

They can't confront inequality because they actually . . .

Are for it.

Nor has Biden exhausted his appeal.

He wasn't supposed to be a Senator in 1972 or a President in 2020.  He's stared death in the face and suffered personal tragedies that would have rendered most of us unwilling or unable to carry on.  But he did. In the words of his beloved Pope Francis spoken just this past Palm Sunday, he knows "things are never over . . . [W]e can always come back to life."  

When he spoke these words, the Pope was talking about forgiveness and redemption and preaching the faith that  his resurrected God (and mine) "can bridge every distance, and turn all mourning into dancing."

He certainly did not have Biden's political survival in mind.

But he could have.

For Biden has repeatedly come off the canvas, counted out only to return and be counted on.  

And  he is doing it again.

With NATO and Ukraine in a diplomatic coup de theatre that just might save western democracy from both the autocrats' whip and its own ennui.

And  with an economic plan that might ameliorate some of the inequality neo-liberalism created and wean its populist victims from Trump and the right wing's phony culture wars.

In their rush to judgment, the critics constantly miss the  essence of Biden:

There's always been a little Easter in him.