Category: Politics

An opinionated FAQ about Facebook’s censorship of the alleged “far right”

Larry Sanger

A lot of people understand neither free speech nor what the far right is. Here’s a beginner’s guide.

Yesterday, Facebook and Instagram, which are owned by the same company, announced a purge—a fair description—of accounts by a roster of famous right-wing figures as well as Louis Farrakhan. What are we to make of this?

Who was banned?

The names include

  • Alex Jones: both popular and much-reviled right-wing conspiracy theorist, previously banned from various other platforms
  • Infowars: Alex Jones’ news/info company; in addition, reportedly, 22 Infowars groups or pages were removed from Facebook, as of last month
  • Reportedly, any account that shares Infowars links will be summarily banned from Facebook
  • Paul Joseph Watson: British YouTube video star specializing in ironic take-downs of the far left; has been employed by Infowars
  • Milo Yiannopoulos: another Briton, flamboyant gay conservative/libertarian who specializes in provoking the left
  • Laura Loomer: a right-wing commentator and activist maybe best known for disrupting a production of Julius Caesar in which Caesar is portrayed by a Donald Trump lookalike
  • Paul Nehlen: an “America first” right-wing political candidate who has tweeted many anti-Semitic remarks
  • Louis Farrakhan: leader of the Nation of Islam, a black Muslim leader famous for anti-Semitic, anti-white, and homophobic remarks

One thing all of these except Farrakhan have in common is that they’ve made anti-Muslim (or at least anti-Muslim extremist) comments, but more about that below.

Why were these people/groups banned?

The specific reasons are not clear and have not been made (fully) public. The Verge reported rather cryptically, and uncritically, that Facebook said the banned accounts “violated its policies against dangerous individuals and organizations.” I wasn’t able to locate the Facebook press release.

The Verge also reported this, without naming a specific source other than “the company”:

But the company did point to some of the actions leading up to the accounts’ removal:

* First in December and again in February, Jones appeared in videos with Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. Facebook has designated McInnes as a hate figure.
* Yiannopoulos publicly praised McInnes and British far-right activist Tommy Robinson, who Facebook has designated as a hate figure.
* Loomer appeared with McInnes in December, and more recently declared her support for far-right activist Faith Goldy, who was banned after posting racist videos to her account.

This is bizarre; rather than cite specific things the banned figures said or did that are obviously bigoted, or couching their explanation in terms of specific terms of service, Facebook apparently thought it was relevant to point out that the banned people associated with or praised people like Gavin McInnes, designated as “a hate figure,” and “far-right activists” Tommy Robinson and Faith Goldy. It looks like guilt by association.

Wait. Before you go on, explain: Why is that bizarre?

Because it specifically eschews any attempt to pin a particular case to a particular objective standard. It’s fundamentally vague and thus fundamentally unfair. If you have an association with or even merely express approval of a verboten figure, you yourself can, apparently, be banned. What if I say I’ve liked some of Paul Joseph Watson’s videos? (I do.) Does that mean I should be banned? (Too late, I quit Facebook, but still.) Maybe more to the point, does it mean that I agree with everything that Watson has ever said? Of course not.

Facebook apparently called these people “right-wing.” What really does “right-wing” mean, anyway?

Prepare yourself for a brief lecture about political terms.

“Right-wing” has two very different meanings in American political discourse. On the one hand, it means “conservative”: being supportive of traditional views on social issues, especially Christian values interpreted fundamentally, of devotion to country and national interests, and of relatively unregulated free markets. In general it means traditional (formerly bipartisan) American political values of small government and individual liberty, but within some religious constraints.

By the way, libertarians are sometimes called “right-wing” presumably because they favor unregulated free markets, but sometimes they’re called “left-wing” because they also support social liberalism. Go figure.

On the other hand, “right-wing” also is taken to mean “tending toward fascism of the Nazi sort.” Thus, some progressives want you to believe that the National Socialist Party of Germany is supposed to represent the values of American conservatives, just taken to an extreme. There are a few problems with that:

  • The Nazis believed in giant, ever-present government, regulating everything, i.e., totalitarianism, as well as a massive social welfare state. It wasn’t the National Socialist party for nothing. Mussolini and Hitler both began their political careers as, and thought of themselves as, socialists. They both became strongly anti-Communist, but the conflict was an internecine left-wing one.
  • Nazis hated the idea of a free market, and many Nazi leaders were hostile to or deeply skeptical of Christianity (some were devout, to be sure).
  • Racism is not a uniquely conservative value; extreme racism of the fascist stripe is not a particularly conservative value. In the U.S., some of the most open of our racists also express conservative values, and progressives have made hay of this fact. But in the past, some of the most racist and eugenicist people in the history of the U.S. were in favor of welfare state and even socialist policies. Remember Sen. Robert C. Byrd, Democrat late of West Virginia and a former KKK member who recruited Klansmen? He wasn’t the only one. And today, anti-semitic (and anti-white, and arguably anti-Asian) racism can still be found on the left.
  • In short, fascism was a racist and nationalist perversion of an already perverted doctrine: imperialist internationalist socialism.

By the way, I’m not meaning to apologize for those American conservatives who (openly or not) are racists, who do want to wield the awesome power of the state to repress their enemies, who hate foreigners on principle, etc. Indeed such people really are like Nazis. They’re not nice and I don’t support them at all.

The problem is that most mainstream conservatives are not particularly racist—even if they support systems that happen to favor their own “white privilege,” which is another issue—they are not imperialistic nationalists, and they sure as hell could not entertain anything so horrific as a genocide. And, of course, they don’t support socialism, but then the left probably doesn’t mean to imply that they do.

So much for “right-wing.”

What does this term “far-right extremist,” that I hear bandied about so much, really mean?

Those bandying it are making a spurious accusation of guilt by association. When leftists calls a conservative “far right,” or a “far-right extremist,” they blur the distinction and commit the fallacy of ambiguity, i.e., they use word “right” in two different senses in order to tar merely strong conservatives with the brush of fascism. Their dirty little implied argument is this:

  1. Paul Joseph Watson (just for example) isn’t just conservative, he’s extremely conservative.
  2. That means he’s both far right, and extreme. So he’s a far-right extremist.
  3. The Nazis and the KKK were far-right extremists.
  4. Therefore, Paul Joseph Watson is like a Nazi or KKK, or ideologically aligned with them. (Probably punchable!)

This sort of thing is not just fallacious, it’s libelous.

When you want to refer to an American or British conservative as being unremittingly so, but not a fascist and still within the broadly classical liberal Anglo-American tradition as it has been handed down to us in the early 21st century, you can call the person an “arch conservative” or in Britain maybe a “staunch Tory.”

You would call such a person “far right” only if you wanted to falsely, libellously imply that the person is fascistic. “Far-right extremist” merely compounds the libel.

But today’s American conservatives are fascistic, right?

As my Irish friends say, go feck off. Re-read the previous two answers.

No, they aren’t. Some good friends and family members of mine, whom I love, are conservative. They hate the elements of fascism listed above as much as anyone. I personally have a lot in common with them, although being an agnostic and rather more principled on issues of liberty, I think I’m closer to the libertarian outlook. If you say conservatives are fascistic, you’re insulting my friends.

But libertarians are crypto-fascists, too. They use talk of liberty and free speech as a cover for their insidious racist views. Right?

You need to feck off even harder, you ignorant twit.

No, you can’t get any farther from a fascist than a libertarian. Libertarians favor individual rights rooted in respect for our inherent value and autonomy, love minimal government, and hate racism. Fascists favored huge, powerful governments, didn’t give a fig for individual rights, and were totalitarians and racists. Libertarians hate war generally, but they especially hate wars of aggression and even of intervention (such as in Iraq and Syria). Fascists are extremely jingoistic nationalists and imperialists. Libertarians tend to be very tolerant of foreigners and many of them support open borders, and the idea of empire-building strikes them as abhorrent.

In fact, historically straight-up socialists have had a hell of a lot more in common with socialists of the National Socialist variety. Yes, really.

Fine, but aren’t the above-listed people actually far-right in the bona fide fascist sense?

I don’t know all of them, so I can’t tell you. Here are a few comments.

Alex Jones is a conspiracy theorist type. I have met his ilk before; possibly you have as well. He lacks judgment. He does seem to be quite conservative in the American sense. He’s said some things that are extremely insensitive on almost anybody’s view. All that said, I haven’t seen much evidence that he’s a fascist per se. He’s a nut. There’s a difference. All fascists are nuts, but not all nuts are fascists.

I like Paul Joseph Watson’s videos about architecture and his pessimistic takes on demise of Western (not to say white) civilization. He’s also quite fun to watch when he takes down left-wing inanities. He pulls no punches, and he’s probably said some things that I wouldn’t approve of; but then, we all have said things I wouldn’t approve of. I see zero evidence that he’s a fascist or on the “far right” in that sense. He strikes me as being libertarian, but I’m not sure. Maybe conservative.

Milo Yiannopoulos is “provocative” and comes across as an insensitive asshole, especially to the left; he makes shocking personal attacks sometimes, which is probably the main reason he is now persona non grata. The whole incident in which he seemed to apologize for the priest who molested him was quite creepy. But beyond that, Milo is an incisive libertarian type; I don’t think it’s quite right to call him conservative. I’m quite a bit nicer than he is, but I have agreed with a lot of stuff he’s said. So have plenty of conservatives and libertarians who have come to watch him. Neither he nor they are fascists. (He’s a flamboyant British gay man with a black boyfriend, for god’s sake.)

Laura Loomer: I don’t really know who she is. Never watched or read anything by her.

Paul Nehlen: Ditto. I didn’t know of him before his ban. I read a few things like this that give what looks like rather good evidence that he’s a vicious anti-semite. He might very well be a bona fide fascist, for all I know. I’m not a fan.

Louis Farrakhan: America’s crazy black uncle. Keep America weird. Let Louis be Louis.

So maybe there’s one “far right” figure, in the sense of fascist, among them, unless you also count Farrakhan, most of whose political views are pretty close to historical fascism as far as I can tell. The rest are very loud activist types with large to enormous followings that the Establishment wants to squelch. That’s really why they were banned. Not because they really are fascist types.

Besides, I don’t think we should ban fascists from our largest platforms. Maybe from smaller ones, sure. I reserve the right to ban fascists from this blog. But when it comes to larger platforms, to “the public square,” I’m a free speech absolutist.

But wait. At least they’re Islamophobic, i.e., anti-Muslim bigots, right?

I don’t know any of their views on Islam well enough to say. Disliking mass immigration by certain people who avowedly have an “extreme” politico-religious view, i.e., those who (like maybe 44% of European Muslims) declare they want to turn European nations into religious (Sharia) states, isn’t necessarily bigoted. You can be open to friendship and cultural exchange with radically different cultures without wanting your culture to be transformed into those other cultures. Religion matters a lot. Opposing immigration by moderate Muslims (like Westernized Turks) does strike me as bigoted, though.

I think some resentful and stupid conservatives really might be personally bigoted against Muslims generally, so I can’t really say in any one case. I’ve had moderate Muslim friends and family members; I don’t support any ethnic or religious bigotry.

Official U.S. immigration policy (last time I checked) also officially excludes Communists from immigrating. Did you know that? I’m all in favor of excluding them. Communists are an influence we don’t need. But I’ve had Communist friends.

OK, then, with that background about the political labels: Did Facebook and Instagram violate the above-listed people’s free speech, or did they not? Were theycensored?

No, not in the sense in which the term is understood in American jurisprudence. As silly-clever progressives will never tire of reminding you, the First Amendment does say that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, and therefore, no company can violate your free speech rights as guaranteed by the Constitution.

But yes, in a broader moral sense. Americans seem to have a huge blind spot when it comes to the topic of free speech, forgetting that the right was discussed long before the United States existed, and that it was applied to the church as well as the state. American constitutional jurisprudence does not exhaust all there is to say about free speech. OK? So get off your high horse there.

What’s the case that Facebook did violate free speech rights in a broader sense? Well, it’s this: Facebook and Instagram have become massively powerful and influential networks, in some ways more powerful than many governments. They serve all of humanity. They are among the main fora whereby civil discourse—including political discourse—takes place. They are the public square of the 21st century.

We all ought to have the right—the moral right, if not the political right—to participate in this public square. If you’re excluded from it, how do you exercise your necessary, essential democratic rights of participating in public deliberation?

Of course, this isn’t to say that others must be forced to listen to you. I should be able to block you quickly and easily if I personally don’t want to listen to you. I have absolutely no problem about blocking people who treat me disrespectfully. I have an absolute right to block myself from hearing you, but not to block others from hearing you.

And yes, those blocked people were also censored. Not all censorship is done by government. Churches, schools, corporations, publications, libraries, and other organizations with authority over what people can say and hear can practice censorship of various kinds. Of course, the most dangerous and objectionable kind of censorship is done by the government. Never forget that. I am much more worried about censorship by governments in Europe and Canada, and future censorship by the American federal and state government, than I am by any corporate censorship.

Should we be surprised by Facebook’s action?

Hell no. Silicon Valley and Facebook in particular have been preparing us for this for a few years now, having banned many conservative accounts and repeatedly justified their stances, albeit in a dishonest, mealy-mouthed and wrong-headed way. I suppose it is surprising to a degree, however, whenever standards are shifted, as they have been. How far are these people capable of going? Pretty far. The ultimate answer might surprise even me.

Does anyone actually support these people being banned?

Oh yeah. Lots and lots. It’s rather scary just how popular the ban is among the left and much of the Establishment commentariat. Who knew just how repressive the left would be if given the power? (Answer: many of us.)

Should Facebook and other Big Tech be regulated?

No. The government dictating to them how they should run the public square entails that the government will ultimately run the public square. We should eschew that idea, as attractive as it might be as long as “our people” are in power, for the same reason we should eschew the idea of government-run news media: Anything potentially so powerful is much too easily corrupted and becomes a honeypot for would-be criminal masterminds and dictators.

At least with the free market, we have the opportunity to seek out better ways to organize ourselves if we find ourselves excluded from biased forums. How long do you think the likes of Facebook will enjoy their hegemony if they continue to behave this way? As long as the rest of us have the means and freedom to organize independently, then not too bloody long. People like freedom and fairness, it turns out.

Should the banned people sue Facebook for defamation?

Maybe. I’m not sure. It’s an interesting idea.

So what the hell should we do?

Decentralize social media and get behind a coming Declaration of Digital Independence. Don’t worry too much. It’s OK. It’ll happen. I have very good reason to think it will. It won’t happen overnight, but it’s coming. This is one reason why both Facebook and Twitter have made rumblings in the direction of decentralizing social media. They know they have to get out front of the movement. They know it’s coming.

So Larry, does this mean you’re going to delete your Facebook account?

Been there, done that.

Go and do the same. Facebook must be put out of business.

I’m serious. Please delete your Facebook account. First, urge your FB friends to do the same. If you support free speech (and privacy!) and want to send a message to our would-be corporate overlords, you must know by now that it’s the right thing to do.

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Remarks on the drug crisis

Larry Sanger

As a drug-legalization libertarian, watching this video wasn’t easy:

It’s a highly opinionated piece of propaganda; but it is also extremely persuasive. Thinking about this might make me moderate my position on drug legalization. I bear a few things in mind, which I will list simply:

  1. Cities like San Francisco and Seattle are being garbage dumps full of drug addicts.
  2. This is portrayed as a “homelessness problem,” when the vast majority of the “homeless” are in fact drug addicts.
  3. Most can’t escape addiction without help.
  4. Meanwhile, it has become fashionable for many big city and state government politicians to essentially permit all the bad behavior that enables the homelessness-due-to-drugs problem: not just vagrancy, of course, but also public drug abuse and selling, stealing, and even robbery and worse. This is all, apparently, in the name of sensitivity and compassion.
  5. If that’s true, it doesn’t seem very compassionate to me.
  6. Is this problem the consequence of legalizing drugs? Because if so, I’m not sure I’m in favor of that after all. I mean, good lord.
  7. Maybe the problem can be solved by jailing for drugs only when a person commits even a relatively petty crime (such as vagrancy on private property).
  8. Watch the video all the way to the end, when it starts talking about the Rhode Island drug rehabilitation program. I can’t say that I’m totally convinced it works as well as they say it does (this is a very biased piece of propaganda, after all), but if it does, this should be implemented nationwide.
  9. New York cleaned up its act after Rudy Giuliani started enforcing the little quality-of-life laws. We should start thinking that way about the homelessness and drug addiction problems.
  10. I have a great deal of pity for the drug addicts. Past a certain point, you can’t blame them for how they are. They really do need help. If this is what more or less free-and-legal drug addiction looks like, their lack of control becomes a problem for all of us, if it results in conditions like those San Francisco and Seattle are facing. And then it makes a lot of sense to get those people help as part of how society responds to their crimes.

Which of these claims is wrong? I’m not committed to them; but if they’re true, they’re a very serious indictment of our current systems.

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Reply to Prof. Sears’ rant against free speech defenders

Larry Sanger

Updates below.

Here’s a quickly-assembled response to this interesting Twitter thread, by a Matthew A. Sears, professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of New Brunswick. When classics professors say the sorts of things he did early morning on April 28, I think a response is in order.

(I’m not responding on Twitter, because I don’t do politics on Twitter anymore, and that’s because it’s the wrong medium for long-form thinking. Political discourse is better when it is beyond tweet length.)

Dear Prof. Sears,

In this reply, I’m going to go tweet by tweet and unburden myself of some replies. Let’s get right to it.

We should name every white supremacist. Name every writer, blogger, YouTuber, and politician that inspires them. Plaster their faces in public. Fire them from their jobs. Hound them from restaurants. Expose them and those that fuel them for the hateful pathetic wretches they are.

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When you use the phrase “white supremacist,” I seriously have to wonder whether you mean, well, me. I’m a libertarian, and I defend free speech. The problem here is that the phrase “white supremacy,” which once was understood to mean the sick world view of bona fide KKK members and Nazis, has come to be applied to the mere fact that white people are unjustly “privileged” by their race. Actually, the phrase was “white supremacism,” referring to a set of beliefs (an -ism). As it became increasingly unacceptable to progressives that white people enjoy unjust advantages, this fact came to be called “white supremacy,” which is very close to “white supremacism.” Then the “clever” progressive idea was that anyone who isn’t as outraged by this unjust advantage is a white supremacist (the phrase you used).

When the left started saying, in 2015 or so, that white supremacy was suddenly once again a growing trend, I didn’t notice any such trend. I did notice the trend of talking about the trend, though. I thought it was weird, and I wondered what the left was up to. I don’t think there are more people today who seriously hold racist views than there were, say, 10 or 20 years ago, let alone 40 or 50 years ago. I think that on the left and the right, there is more actual racial, ethnic, and religious tolerance in the West than there ever has been in the history of the West. Perhaps this progress (and I agree: it really is progress) isn’t fast enough for the left. But more likely it is the case that the left saw the increasing consensus that bigotry really is an awful thing, and it struck them as a wonderful opening to accuse their opponents of being intransigent bigots.

Anyway, if it were true that there were massive numbers of white supremacists—say, all or half or even a quarter of the people who voted for Trump (in historical terms, that really would be a massive number of people)—then I might agree with you, Prof. Sears. Then I, too, might say, “My God, look at how prevalent bona fide white supremacy is becoming. We’ve got to do something about this. Let’s try shaming them!” I really hate racism, too, and, you know, shaming can work, at least if the shamer and the shamed have some values in common.

But it’s not true; there aren’t massive numbers of white supremacists out there. They remain probably less than 5% of the population (maybe less than 1%; what the percentage would be would, of course, depend on how you define and operationalize the term). Anyway, the only way you can conclude that the rise of “white supremacism” (that -ism again) is a problem is if the vast majority of the people you want to call “white supremacists” actually do deserve to be called “white supremacists.” Of course they don’t deserve that epithet, I think, and the vast majority of people outside of the radical left think so too. You make it sound as if most or all Trump voters are white supremacists; in other words, about 25% of eligible voters in the U.S. That probably sounds plausible to you. But again, it doesn’t to me, and it doesn’t to the vast majority of people outside of the radical left. The suggestion is just bizarre.

So maybe you can see why it would be alarming to me and to many other people who might find themselves lumped in, by you, with cross-burning, swastika-wearing fascists. This is utterly bizarre for a classics professor to say. If the classics professors, of all people, are now saying we need to shame Trump voters for being white supremacists, hound them from restaurants, and get them fired, then the real problem lies with unhinged leftist agitators, not with any white supremacists who actually deserve to be called that.

And that includes every vile little shitlord in a campus “free speech” club who spends his time platforming white supremacist trolls under the banner of “free speech,” and every grifting liar that goes on about campus “censorship” and the “marketplace of ideas.”

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What a thing to say. My first reaction is this. Sir, you are a professor. When I was teaching college, I would never, ever have called any of my students, singly or collectively, no matter what I thought of him, a “vile little shitlord.” What an appalling thing for a professor to say about his potential students. How dare you?

Like it or not, this reveals that you simply cannot be trusted to teach those students who would join free speech clubs. When I was a grad student, I was in a libertarian club. If I were a student today, I’m pretty damn sure I’d join a free speech club. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to take a class from you, though, after reading these tweets, even if your research interests and papers do look very unwoke and ideologically un-edgy.

Since the appearance of actual white supremacists on campus is a rare occurrence indeed, the person “who spends his time platforming white supremacist trolls” is, one can only conclude, simply any member of a conservative and libertarian club (that invites speakers).

This says far more about you than it does about any person you’re inclined to dismiss (and, indeed, dehumanize) as a “vile little shitlord” or “white supremacist troll” or “grifting liar.” What it says is that not only do you dislike the right, i.e., anyone who advocates for conservative or libertarian ideas you disapprove of; not only are you personally intolerant of them; not only are you willing to say so publicly; but, beyond all that, you are a classics professor at a state university who passionately urges every “woke” person to shame, fire, hound, insult, and probably drive away from your university pretty much everybody on the right. And that they deserve to be called “white supremacists,” which is pretty much the worst thing that you can think of to say about a person.

How on earth can a classics professor think this way?

Did you ever believe in free speech? If so, when did you stop believing that the right should have it? Don’t you see any connection at all between free speech and intellectual tolerance? How on earth can you be a teacher of classics and and fail to see the value in being confronted with ideas that are deeply antithetical to your own? After all, left-wing intellectuals study Mein Kampf and conservative intellectuals study Das Kapital; all intellectuals in liberal countries like Canada should be able to recognize the importance of remaining open to serious discussions of ideas opposed to their own. That’s precisely why many of us are wringing our hands about free speech and censorship on campus. People who called themselves liberals were not long ago the biggest defenders of free speech, and their ideological inheritors are now, amazingly, some of its biggest opponents.

(It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around the thought that some of the censorious progressives might actually have been themselves open-minded, tolerant, free-speech advocating liberals not so long ago. How does that happen?)

And if there’s a political party that attracts the pepe the frog and “white genocide” crowd, that party should be called out – including by the mainstream press – as a white supremacist party that helps to create the environment in which Jews and Muslims are murdered.

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The people who fear a white genocide because they fear the white race being extinguished are, I’ll grant you, pretty damned problematic. Some of them really are white supremacists. But not everyone who worries about the decline of Western civilization—say, readers of National Review or students of Hillsdale College or, maybe, a few of your strangely quiet classics students—would feel comfortable couching their worries in terms of “the white race.”

Similarly, a lot of the young fools who think it’s funny to post memes featuring Pepe the Frog are not white supremacists. Some of them are black, or of other ethnicities. They post the memes to have some fun at your expense and get your goat, which they clearly have done. Young people really enjoy having fun at the expense of their self-important elders.

Now, you “wonder” if there’s a political party that goes in for Pepe and the “white genocide” theory; clearly, you think there is one, and it’s the Republicans; and “that party should be called out…as a white supremacist party”. This is weird, though. It’s like you’re in the middle of the religious wars in Europe, in a place where there are approximately equal numbers of Catholics and Protestants, and you say it’s time to “call out” your religious enemies. What does that even mean? That everyone on your side should say everyone on the other side is the worst thing you can think of, a “white supremacist”? And say it over and over again? Is that what a mass calling-out of one side by the other side would look like? What effect do you suppose it could possibly have?

And you’re a classics professor, saying this. You will never live this down, Prof. Sears. Well, either that, or society will move inexorably toward some sort of weird, new kind of civil war, in which your views will become the new norm. That after all seems to be what you’re advocating.

Because if there really are such things as “Canadian values” or “civilized values” like these dog-whistlers keep blathering on about, those values should include calling out white supremacy and calling BS on claims of “irony” or “debate” regarding racist memes and ideas.

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“Dog-whistlers” indeed. The implication is that one can’t loudly and earnestly advocate for free speech sincerely, or to worry about the decline of things like, I don’t know, the classics, because it’s really just code (a “dog whistle” that the left seems particularly good at hearing; go figure) for white supremacism.

Anyway, no. It isn’t a civilized or Western value (by now, maybe it’s a Canadian value, eh?) to agitate for what amounts to civil war, putting everyone from one ideological camp at the throats of everyone from the other. That’s not a Western value. The Enlightenment values that you, Prof. Sears, ought to stand for as a professor of liberal arts, definitely include such things as free speech, intellectual tolerance, and a little thing you might have learned once as an undergraduate but have clearly long since forgotten, namely, the principle of charity.

People are dying. And if opposing the environment in which people are dying means that some MAGA-hat- wearing wanker doesn’t feel “comfortable” on campus or out in public, then so be it. Because that wanker makes it his life’s work to make the marginalized feel unsafe.

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Look. I don’t know if there have been more attacks on Jews (by Christians) or on Muslims (by Westerners) than there were, say, four years ago, before Trump. I’d like to know, but coming to a fair judgment on such a freighted question would be difficult indeed. Let’s suppose the attacks have increased; even then, I still wouldn’t know if any part of the cause of such a problem is the election of Donald Trump. I wouldn’t rule it out. But, again, coming to a fair, unbiased judgment would be very hard.

Here’s something I do know. It is extremely unconstructive to tar people who are merely, as they have for generations, defending Christian and Western values, and who really are capable of loving people of all races and religions, with the brush of “white supremacism,” or to blame them for and lump them in with mass murderers. I would of course say the same thing to any right-winger who attempted to smear all of the left with crimes committed by leftists. In both cases, I would say that’s a ridiculously bigoted and actually dangerous thing to say. It’s very similar to the sort of thing we used to take bigots to task for, when we were growing up in the 1970s or 1980s, when those bigots implied that black men were all bloodthirsty killers. It’s profoundly unjust to blame all members of a group for the crimes of some unhinged members of the group. Don’t you agree, Prof. Sears?

The problem here is that somebody wearing a MAGA hat, or complaining about campus censorship, inspires two extremely different reactions. To the Trump voter, the hat is a declaration of allegiance to Trump’s outlook, candidacy, and policies. For them, it’s not unlike a bumper sticker or a yard sign or a political protest—it ought to be fairly innocent. But to the left, owing to breathless screeds such as yours, it has become a symbol almost as bad as a swastika or a burning cross.

When a conservative sports the hat, not only do you conclude the person is a “white supremacist,” it really freaks you out that the person actually feels empowered to wear the hat. He shouldn’t feel comfortable wearing it, you say, because it means—well, it means exactly what you say it means. It means he’s a wanker who is a white supremacist. You don’t take his self-interpretation seriously. It’s like Pepe—it can’t possibly be ironic because it means what you say it means.

Don’t be a useful idiot. And don’t think for a second that these people are actually interested in “debate.”

source

In other words, don’t practice political tolerance. Doing so makes you a “useful idiot.” The smart people are all intolerant, like Prof. Sears.

Of course, if you actually sit down with plenty people outside of the radical left and talk to them about the issues of the day, from immigration to free speech to socialism, you’ll find that they really are interested in debate. Many of us actually thirst for good debate, because honest, fair-minded, charitable political debate is so goddamn rare today.

Prof. Sears, you are clearly projecting when you say these people aren’t interested in debate. You just got done with an unhinged rant in which your main point is that these people aren’t worthy of the respect needed to have a sensible debate. It’s true of you, not them, that you aren’t actually interested in a debate with your opponents. You want to shut them down, shame them, get them fired, and probably get them expelled. After all, why on earth would you want to debate anyone so inhuman as a “white supremacist”?

–Larry Sanger

UPDATE (5/3): Matthew Sears has since removed the tweets, which makes me rather glad I quoted them rather than embedded them above. Newsweek noticed the tweets, and even quotes me in response. By the way, the tweets of mine that Newsweek quoted are gone, mainly because I’ve vowed not to use Twitter for politics other than to support and defend my blog posts. I removed them myself. Who knows, maybe Matthew Sears felt the same. Or maybe he was shamed into removing them. I doubt we’ll ever know.

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Are we becoming indifferent to freedom and democracy?

Larry Sanger

Originally posted December 19, 2015. Reposting. More relevant than ever.

I know, I know: That title sounds ridiculously click-baity. But if you’ll look at my blog, you’ll see that I don’t really go in for click-bait titles.

Unfortunately, I mean it quite literally. It’s an enormous problem that we aren’t talking about enough. And I want to propose that one reason for it is a massive failure of civics education.

Support for democracy is declining. First, let’s talk a bit about support for democracy—yes, democracy itself, as in voting for your leaders and representatives and holding them accountable in the arena of public debate. Only one in five Millennials aged 18 through 29 cast a ballot in the 2014 elections—the lowest youth voter turnout in 40 years, says the Atlantic.

As Vox recently asked, “Are Americans losing faith in democracy?” The article makes a series of points illustrating that Americans, especially younger Americans, are ignorant of and aren’t engaging in American political life. The article’s main source is a forthcoming paper by Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk titled “The Democratic Disconnect,” together with the World Values Survey. The writers summarized their own work in the New York Times last September.

Asked how much interest they have in politics (as Vox reports), Americans born in the 1930s said “very interested” or “somewhat interested” almost 80% of the time; for those born in the 1970s, the figure dropped to about 50%, and for those born in the 1980s, it was continuing to drop just as precipitously.

More sobering is the survey question about how essential it is to live in a democracy, rated from 1 to 10. The percentage of Americans responding “10,” essential, has dropped from the 70% range for those born in 1930 down to the 30% range for those born in the 1980s. A 40% drop in support for democracy itself is a momentous generational change.

In case you think that’s a mistake, compare that to a question asking whether “having a democratic political system” was a “bad” or “very bad” way to run the U.S.: while the percentage for those born in the 1950s and 60s hovered around 13%, for those born after 1970, in the surveys since 1995, the percentage rose from about 16% to over 20%.

Even openness to army rule—something we associate with banana republics—has climbed from 7% to 16% of all Americans.

Support for free speech in America is declining. This is incredibly important: the Pew Research Center found that 40% of American Millennials are OK with limiting speech offensive to minorities (up from 12% for seniors aged 70-87). A stunning 51% of Democrats want to make “hate speech” a criminal offense, and 37% of Republicans. If you have even a passing familiarity with First Amendment law, you’ll know that these things are contrary to the First Amendment.

That is how it is possible—and not implausible—that 50 Yale students could sign a petition within an hour to repeal the First Amendment, as this video of Yalies showed:

What the video shows notwithstanding, Yalies are very smart. They can compare their attitudes toward offensive and hate speech with what they learned in their elite civics and history classes about the First Amendment, and infer that they’re opposed to the First Amendment. If they’re reasonably intelligent, self-aware, and honest with themselves, as some Yalies are, they’ll recognize that their intolerance to certain kinds of speech commits them to an opposition to free speech.

The increasing hostility toward free speech among many of our future leaders at elite colleges like Yale has been frightening to many of us, and has sparked a national conversation—an example is here, summarizing some recent episodes and calling academe to return to free speech.

Here’s a possible reason why: Civics education has been weak for years and recently declining even further. I don’t pretend to know why support for democracy and free speech have been declining, but if our students for some generations have simply not been well educated about basic American civics, that must be part of the explanation.

In the National Assessment of Educational Progress—the “Nation’s Report Card”—for 2014, only 23% of 8th graders scored at or above proficient in civics. While 39 states do require a course in American government or civics, only two states require students to pass a test in American government/civics to graduate from high school. As the Civics Education Initiative reports,

[T]he Civics Education Initiative…requires high school students, as a condition of graduation, take and pass a test based on questions from the United States Customs and Immigrations Services (USCIS) citizenship civics exam – the same test all new immigrants must take to become U.S. citizens.

To date, six states…have passed legislation implementing the Civics Education Initiative, with a goal of passage in all 50 states by September 17, 2017 – the 230th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution.

But, you wonder, if new immigrants have to pass this citizenship civics exam to get in the country, wouldn’t American high schoolers be able to pass it? No. In studies, only 4% of high schoolers in Oklahoma and Arizona passed it.

The National Council for the Social Studies published a position statement summarizing the sobering truth: “Sadly, the narrowing of the curriculum that has occurred over the past several years combined with the scarce attention to civic learning in a number of state standards and assessment measures has had a devastating effect on schools’ ability to provide high quality civic education to all students.”

According to a 2011 study by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, ignorance was not rectified at the college level:

beyond mere voting, a college degree does not encourage graduates to become actively engaged in more consequential aspects of the political process. Said another way, among persons with equal civic knowledge, those having earned a bachelors degree do not demonstrate any systematic and added political engagement beyond voting. … A college degree appears to have the same negligible participatory impact as frequently listening to music, watching prime-time television, utilizing social networking sites, and emailing.

Knowledge of basic political facts among the general public is shockingly low. For example, only 40% of Americans surveyed in a recent survey by Pew knew which party controlled each house of Congress, and only about a third of Americans could even name the three branches of government.

Civics isn’t easy, and political philosophy is even harder. But both are necessary. If this purported decline of commitment to the basic American system is real, and if it’s rooted in poor civics education, it doesn’t seem surprising to me.

For all the emphasis on reading and the massive, feature-rich language arts textbooks, American public school students don’t have to read many books, period. Most of them are not prepared to read and comprehend the Constitution, much less the complex historical works such as The Federalist Papers, Common Sense, and Democracy in America that explain and defend the American system.

Education matters. It is likely that we will face more battles in higher education and, increasingly, in the public sphere over the necessity and advisability of maintaining robust democratic institutions and adherence to free speech. I fear that as we answer more and more attacks, reference to the Constitution and American political principles will not be sufficient. Part of the problem can be laid at Jefferson’s doorstep, when he wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The fact is that they aren’t self-evident, that philosophers have argued for and against them quite a bit, and in the years ahead, the better the pro-freedom side acquaints itself with those arguments, the better chance we’ll have.

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There are no NPCs

Larry Sanger

International travel drives home that insight that, contrary to a put-down used by immature people, and consistent with Jordan Peterson’s frequent observation that our biographies are all fascinating, there are no NPCs in the world: the variety of human experience is stunning.

Yesterday I was delayed (here in Tokyo) by a long, long queue of pretty young Japanese women, all dressed exactly alike (black skirt, white blouse). I was told they had been interviewing for jobs. When I asked why they dressed all alike, I was told simply “Japanese culture.” I instantly imagined someone watching the parade of future businesswomen and thinking of them as interchangeable drones, or movie extras, or “NPCs.” But I am incapable of viewing them that way.

These ladies were not “NPCs.” Each had her own story; the perspective of each would, upon sufficient examination, be fascinating. The fact that they were dressed alike, while perhaps odd to Westerners like myself, is meaningless when it comes to their real individuality.

If the error of racism is dehumanization, its opposite is to look past apparent, reductive commonalities to what is unique, contextualized, and valuable in each of us. And that ultimately comes down to our minds—to how we think things through. I don’t mean just our thought processes, but also the many products thereof, including our culture: philosophy, religion, musical tastes, how we conduct ourselves, our fundamental values. These things you must be capable of considering and tolerating, not necessarily supporting. I mean conversation of the sort that friends have, in which, while there might be some give and take and even occasional harshness, there is both sympathy, if not for position, then for common humanity, and a sincere desire to comprehend a point of view.

No one can claim to be enlightened (or “woke”) on issues of race, gender, etc., if they are capable of dismissing whole classes of other people. The problem of prejudice has as its root an inability to consider others as individuals. And you can’t claim to be tolerant if you are incapable of enjoying, without disgust, a conversation with a very different person, even a person with features you dislike or disagree with. (Of course you can’t expect to like everything about everyone.)

So let me ask some hard questions.

  • Democrats: are you capable of having such a conversation with Republicans? Republicans, can you talk seriously with Democrats without giving up in disgust?
  • Committed feminists and men’s rights activists, could you talk to each other without quitting in horror? I don’t mean you have to tolerate abuse (I don’t); but if they’re just saying stuff you dislike, but politely, can you handle it?
  • Socialists, could you have a beer with a libertarian? Libertarians, will the thought that the person you’re boozing with would love for you to be taxed at 70% (or whatever) permanently turn you off?

Etc., etc.

Even better, can you look past your disagreements and see lovely things about the other person?

You are intolerant, you are bigoted, if you are incapable of these sorts of conversations. Sorry to be harsh, but it’s an important truth a lot of people seem not to realize, and they need to start doing so.

I doubt anybody really disagrees with me, too. I’d be fascinated to hear if anybody did. Many of us just need to grow a little more, and get off our high horses, and our social and political discourse could be radically improved.

How about it?

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Gay activists and Hollywood liberals vs. traditional Muslims vs. free speech liberals

Larry Sanger

Here’s a richly ironic slice of our strange, sad old world in 2019.

Ellen Degeneres is (quite rightly) protesting the Sultan of Brunei for introducing the death penalty (stoning to death) for gay sex. He’s also executing people for adultery, but Ellen doesn’t mention that:

To this, a reply was posted by an account, “Jihyo” (apparently, the name of a Kpop singer), who claims to be a Demi Lovato fan and medical student, and who writes various pro-Muslim comments. The reply was:

This is a Sharia law in Islam. And lgbt is never okay. I am an educated person & a medical student. In gynecology, urology & dermatology departments, we often get gay patients with terrible diagnoses. They always come with complaints relate to their sexual activities.

(I’m not embedding this because it repeats that Ellen tweet also might well be removed anytime by Twitter. But that’s just a cut-and-paste quote of what “Jihyo” wrote.)

In the ensuing war of words, which you can easily imagine if you don’t look for yourself, “Jihyo” is taken to task for being “cruel and inhumane,” for being not in the “21st century,” an “offensive agitator” and “nasty,” etc.

One person more seriously responds that “there is no religious justification for this punishment.” This is an interesting formulation: does the person mean that no religions cite any justification for stoning gays to death, or that no such religious justification would succeed if attempted?

For their part, the Sultan, his people (who perhaps understandably do not criticize his policies), and this “Jihyo” clearly disagree with both interpretations, as do many other Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, Afghanistan, northern Nigeria, Yemen, and others. All have the death penalty for gay sex.

So now we have the interesting spectacle of Ellen, along with reliably progressive celebrities like George Clooney and Elton John, criticizing the Sultan of Brunei for a policy that they might or might not realize is already practiced in the most devoutly Muslim countries of the world.

And, interestingly, nobody is calling them “Islamophobic.”

Well, why the hell not? Shouldn’t they be called Islamophobic? What gives? If a conservative, or Allah forbid an alt-right conservative, were to dwell for long on the precise same facts about the modern Islamic world, if they were to call traditional Muslims “cruel and inhumane,” not in the “21st century,” an “offensive agitator” and “nasty,” etc., then what would happen to them? Well, the U.K., Canada, Austria (probably all of the E.U.), and other countries do criminalize criticism of Islam—whether such laws should, in fairness, apply to Ellen’s criticisms of Muslims seems unclear.

The weird unresolved tensions and rich ironies on display here are no doubt what caught the attention of a Paul Joseph Watson, who has worked for Alex Jones’ Infowars for many years. Once, he called himself a member of the “alt right,” before the term became much more clearly associated with fascism. He is, whatever else he is, an avowed foe of the left. Earlier today he posted an article on the kerfuffle titled, “LGBT vs Islam (Choose Your Fighter),” and wryly observed, “This one isn’t going to end well, is it?”

But is it only erstwhile “alt right” people like Watson, and free speech zealots like me, who observe the ironies involved here? Of course not. Old-fashioned Bill Maher could be counted on to notice the weirdness, too. He criticized Clooney for proposing a boycott of the Beverly Hills Hotel: “What about Saudi Arabia? If you really want to get back at them, stop driving or using oil.”

Gay conservative Andrew Sullivan made some well-placed observations on Maher’s show as well: “The nice thing about a free society is that you can have a political life and then you can have your actual life. Not everything has to be political.” He added, “We shouldn’t be dictating our lives by religion, according to the dictates of wokeness. It kills the vitality of a free society.”

Sadly, this hullabaloo will all probably disappear in a week’s time. Brunei will start executing gays, just like Saudi Arabia. Gay activists will go back to making common intersectional cause with Muslims from countries where those same gay friends would be executed. After a few years, self-righteous (but strangely unreflective) Hollywood progressives will once again start checking in at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Europeans and Canadians will keep enforcing blasphemy laws against Islamophobes who criticize Islam, even when such unwoke cretins are criticizing Islam for executing homosexuals—as long as the cretins aren’t too powerful and aligned with the left, of course. Then it’s OK. Then they’re not Islamophobes.

Attempting to make sense of all this, the beautiful people will placidly declare that they “contain multitudes.” Life will likely go on much as before.

Until this year, when I decided to lock down my cyber-life and reformed how I use social media, instead of writing the above, I would have just posted some snide remarks on Facebook or Twitter. But since I’ve quit Facebook and don’t use Twitter except in service of media I have some control over, i.e., Everipedia and this blog, now I have to consider whether the issue is worth making a whole blog post over. In this case, I thought so.

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Zuckerberg Is Wrong: Don’t Regulate Our Content

Larry Sanger

Last Sunday, Mark Zuckerberg made another Facebook strategy post. (This is his second major policy post in as many months. I responded to his March 6 missive as well.) Unsurprisingly, it was a disaster.

I want to shake him by his lapels and say, “Mark! Mark! Wrong way! Stop going that way! We don’t want more snooping and regulation by giant, superpowerful organizations like yours and the U.S. government! We want less!“

He says he has spent two years focused on “issues like harmful content, elections integrity and privacy.” If these have been the focuses of someone who is making motions to regulate the Internet, it’s a good idea to stop and think a bit about each one. They are a mixed bag, at best.

1. Zuckerberg’s concerns

Concern #1: “Harmful content”

Zuckerberg’s glib gloss on “harmful content” is “terrorist propaganda, hate speech and more.” Applying the modifier “harmful” to “content” is something done mainly by media regulators, giant corporations like Facebook, and the social justice left. Those of us who still care about free speech—and I think that’s most of us—find the phrase not a little chilling.

Let’s be reasonable, though. Sure, on the one hand, we can agree that groups using social media to organize dangerously violent terrorism, or child pornography, or other literally harmful and illegal activity, for example, should be shut down. And few people would have an issue with Facebook removing “hate speech” in the sense of the KKK, Stormfront, and other openly and viciously racist outfits. That sort of thing was routinely ousted from more polite areas of the Internet long ago, and relegated to the backwaters. That’s OK with me. Reasonable and intellectually tolerant moderation is nothing new.

On the other hand, while all of that can perhaps be called “harmful content,” the problem is how vague the phrase is. How far beyond such categories of more uncontroversially “harmful” content might it extend? It does a tiny bit of harm if someone tells a small lie; is that “harmful content”? Who knows? What if someone shares a conservative meme? That’s sure to seem harmful to a large minority of the population. Is that a target? Why not progressive memes, then? Tech thought leaders like Kara Swisher would ban Ben Shapiro from YouTube, if she could; no doubt she finds Shapiro deeply harmful. Is he fair game? How about “hateful” atheist criticisms of Christianity—surely that’s OK? But how about similarly “hateful” atheist criticisms of Islam? Is the one, but not the other, “harmful content”?

This isn’t just a throwaway rhetorical point. It’s deeply important to think about and get right, if we’re going to use such loaded phrases as “harmful content” seriously, unironically, and especially if there is policymaking involved.

The problem is that the sorts of people who use phrases like “harmful content” constantly dodge these important questions. We can’t trust them. We don’t know how far they would go, if given a chance. Indeed, anyone with much experience debating can recognize instantly that the reason someone would use this sort of squishy phraseology is precisely because it is vague. Its vagueness enables the motte-and-bailey strategy: there’s an easily-defended “motte” (tower keep) of literally harmful, illegal speech, on the one hand, but the partisans using this strategy really want to do their fighting in the “bailey” (courtyard) which is riskier but offers potential gains. Calling them both “harmful content” enables them to dishonestly advance repressive policies under a false cover.

“Hate speech” functions in a similar way. Here the motte is appallingly, strongly, openly bigoted speech, which virtually everyone would agree is awful. But we’ve heard more and more about hate speech in recent years because of the speech in the bailey that is under attack: traditional conservative and libertarian positions and speakers that enfuriate progressives. Radicals call them “racists” and their speech “hate speech,” but without any substantiation.

It immediately raises a red flag when one of the most powerful men in the world blithely uses such phraseology without so much as a nod to its vagueness. Indeed, it is unacceptably vague.

Concern #2: Elections integrity

The reason we are supposed to be concerned about “elections integrity,” as one has heard ad nauseam from mainstream media sources in the last couple years, is that Russia caused Trump to be elected by manipulating social media. This always struck me as being a bizarre claim. It is a widely-accepted fact that some Russians thought it was a good use of a few million dollars to inject even more noise (not all of it in Trump’s favor) into the 2016 election by starting political groups and spreading political memes. I never found this particularly alarming, because I know how the Internet works: everybody is trying to persuade everybody, and a few million dollars from cash-strapped Russians is really obviously no more than shouting in the wind. What is the serious, fair-minded case that it even could have had any effect on the election? Are they so diabolically effective at propaganda to influence elections that, with a small budget, they can actually throw it one way or another? And if so, don’t you think that people with similar magically effective knowhow would be on the payroll of the two most powerful political parties in the world?

Concern #3: Privacy

As to privacy—one of my hobby horses of late—Zuckerberg’s concern is mainly one of self-preservation. After all, this is the guy who admitted that he called you and me, who trusted him with so much of our personal information, “dumb f–ks” for doing so. This is a guy who has built his business by selling your privacy to the highest bidder, without proposing any new business model. (Maybe they can make enough through kickbacks from the NSA, which must appreciate how Facebook acts as an unencrypted mass surveillance arm.)

Mark Zuckerberg has absolutely no credibility on this issue, even when describing his company’s own plans.

He came out last month with what he doubtless wanted to appear to be a “come-to-Jesus moment” about privacy, saying that Facebook will develop the ultimate privacy app: secret, secured private chatting! Oh, joy! Just what I was missing (um?) and always wanted! But even that little bit (which is a very little bit) was too much to hope for: he said that maybe Facebook wouldn’t allow total, strong, end-to-end encryption, because that would mean they couldn’t “work with law enforcement.”

The fact, as we’ll see, that he wants the government to set privacy rules means that he still doesn’t care about your privacy, for all his protestations.

Zuckerberg’s declared motives are dodgy-to-laughable. But given his recommendation—that the government start systematically regulating the Internet—you shouldn’t have expected anything different.

2. Mark Zuckerberg wants the government to censor you, so he doesn’t have to.

Zuckerberg wants to regulate the Internet

In his previous missive, Zuckerberg gave some lame, half-hearted ideas about what Facebook itself would do to shore up Facebook’s poor reputation for information privacy and security. Not so this time. This time, he wants government to take action: “I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators.” But remember, American law strives for fairness, so these wouldn’t be special regulations just for Facebook. They would be regulations for the entire Internet.

“From what I’ve learned,” Zuckerberg declares, “I believe we need new regulation in four areas: harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.”

When Zuckerberg calls for regulation of the Internet, he doesn’t discuss hardware—servers and routers and fiber-optic cables, etc. He means content on the Internet. When it comes to “harmful content and election integrity,” he clearly means some harmful and spurious content that has appeared on, e.g., Facebook. When he talks about “privacy and data portability,” he means the privacy and portability of your content.

So let’s not mince words: to regulate the Internet in these four areas is tantamount to regulating content, i.e., expression of ideas. That suggests, of course, that we should be on our guard against First Amendment violations. It is one thing for Facebook to remove (just for example) videos from conservative commentators like black female Trump supporters Diamond and Silk, which Facebook moderators called “unsafe.” It’s quite another thing for the federal government to do such a thing.

Zuckerberg wants actual government censorship

Now, before you accuse me of misrepresenting Zuckerberg, look at what his article says. It says, “I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators,” and in “four areas” in particular. The first-listed area is “harmful content.” So Zuckerberg isn’t saying, here, that it is Facebook that needs to shore up its defenses against harmful content. Rather, he is saying, here, that governments and regulators need to take action on harmful content. “That means deciding what counts as terrorist propaganda, hate speech and more.” And more.

He even brags that Facebook is “working with governments, including French officials, on ensuring the effectiveness of content review systems.” Oh, no doubt government officials will be only too happy to “ensure” that “content review systems” are “effective.”

Now, in the United States, terrorist propaganda is already arguably against the law, although some regret that free speech concerns are keeping us from going far enough. Even there, we are right to move slowly and carefully, because a too-broad definition of “terrorist propaganda” might well put principled, honest, and nonviolent left- and right-wing opinionizing in the crosshairs of politically-motivated prosecutors.

But “deciding what counts as…hate speech” is a matter for U.S. law? Perhaps Zuckerberg should have finished his degree at Harvard, because he seems not to have learned that hate speech is unregulated under U.S. law, because of a little thing called the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. As recently as 2017, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down a “disparagement clause” in patent law which had said that trademarks may not “disparage…or bring…into contemp[t] or disrepute” any “persons, living or dead.” This is widely regarded as demonstrating that there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. As the opinion says,

Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express “the thought that we hate.” 

The trouble with the phrase “hate speech” lies in both the ambiguity and the vagueness of the word “hate” itself. “Hate speech” in its core sense (this is the motte) is speech that is motivated by the speaker’s own bigoted hatred, but in an ancillary sense (this is the bailey), it means speech that we hate, because in our possibly incorrect opinion we think it is motivated by bigotry (but maybe it isn’t). The phrase “hate speech” is also vague and useless because hate comes in degrees, with shifting objects. If I am irritated by Albanians and very mildly diss them, am I guilty of hate speech? Maybe. Jews? Almost certainly. What about white male southerners? Well, what’s the answer there? And what if I really strongly hate a group that it is popular to hate, e.g., rapists?

There’s much more to be said about this phrase, but here’s the point. If government and regulators took Zuckerberg’s call for hate speech legislation to heart, what rules would they use? Wouldn’t they, quite naturally, shift according to political and religious sentiments? Wouldn’t such regulations become a dangerous political football? Would there be any way to ensure it applies fairly across groups—bearing in mind that there is also a Fourteenth Amendment that legally requires such fairness? Surely we don’t want the U.S. legal system subject to the same sort of spectacle that besets Canada and the U.K., in which people are prosecuted for criticizing some groups, while very similar criticism of other, unprotected groups goes unpunished?

But precisely that is, presumably, what Zuckerberg wants to happen. He doesn’t want to be responsible for shutting down the likes of Diamond and Silk, or Ben Shapiro. That, he has discovered, is an extremely unpopular move; but he’s deeply concerned about hate speech; so he would much rather the government do it.

If you want to say I’m not being fair to Zuckerberg or to those who want hate speech laws in the U.S., that of course you wouldn’t dream of shutting down mainstream conservatives like this, I point you back to the motte and bailey. We, staunch defenders of free speech, can’t trust you. We know about motte and bailey tactics. We know that, if not you, then plenty of your left-wing allies in government and media—who knows, maybe Kara Swisher—would advocate for government shutting down Ben Shapiro. That would be a win. The strategy is clear: find the edgiest thing he has said, label it “hate speech,” and use it to argue that he poses a danger to others on the platform, so he should be deplatformed. Or just make an example of a few others like him. That might be enough for the much-desired chilling effect.

Even if you were to come out with an admirably clear and limited definition of “hate speech,” which does not include mainstream conservatives and which would include some “hateful,” extreme left-wing speech, that wouldn’t help much. If the government adopted such “reasonable” regulations, it would be cold comfort. Once the cow has left the barn, once any hate speech law is passed, it’s all too easy for someone to make subtle redefinitions of key terms to allow for viewpoint censorship. Then it’s only a matter of time.

It’s sad that it has come to this—that one of the most powerful Americans in the world suggests that we use the awesome power of law and government to regulate speech, to shut down “hate speech,” a fundamentally obscure weasel word that can, ultimately, be used to shut down any speech we dislike—which after all is why the word is used. It’s sad not only that this is what he has suggested, but that I have to point it out, and that it seems transgressive to, well, defend free speech. But very well then, I’ll be transgressive; I’d say that those who agree with me now have an obligation to be transgressive in just this way.

We can only hope that, with Facebook executives heading for the exits and Facebook widely criticized, Zuckerberg’s entirely wrongheaded call for (more) censorship will be ignored by federal and state governments. Don’t count on it, though.

But maybe, censorship should be privatized

Facebook is also, Zuckerberg says, “creating an independent body so people can appeal our decisions.” This is probably a legal ploy to avoid taking responsibility for censorship decisions, which would make it possible to regulate Facebook as a publisher, not just a platform. Of course, if the DMCA were replaced by some new regulatory framework, then Facebook might not have to give up control, because under the new framework, viewpoint censorship might not make them into publishers.

Of course, whether in the hands of a super-powerful central committee such as Zuckerberg is building, a giant corporation, or the government, we can expect censorship decisions to be highly politicized, to create an elite of censors and rank-and-file thought police to keep us plebs in line. Just imagine if all of the many conservative pages and individuals temporarily blocked or permanently banned by Facebook had to satisfy some third party tribunal.

One idea is for third-party bodies [i.e., not just one for Facebook] to set standards governing the distribution of harmful content and measure companies against those standards. Regulation could set baselines for what’s prohibited and require companies to build systems for keeping harmful content to a bare minimum.

Facebook already publishes transparency reports on how effectively we’re removing harmful content. I believe every major Internet service should do this quarterly, because it’s just as important as financial reporting. Once we understand the prevalence of harmful content, we can see which companies are improving and where we should set the baselines.

There’s a word for such “third-party bodies”: censors.

The wording is stunning. He’s concerned about “the distribution” of content and wants judged “measured” against some “standards.” He wants content he disapproves of not just blocked, but kept to a “bare minimum.” He wants to be “effective” in “removing harmful content.” He really wants to “understand the prevalence of harmful content.”

This is not the language that someone who genuinely cares about “the freedom for people to express themselves” would use.

3. The rest of the document

I’m going to cover the rest of the document much more briefly, because it’s less important.

Zuckerberg favors regulations to create “common standards for verifying political actors,” i.e., if you want to engage in political activity, you’ll have to register with Facebook. This is all very vague, though. What behavior, exactly, is going to be caught in the net that’s being weaved here? Zuckerberg worries that “divisive political issues” are the target of “attempted interference.” Well, yes—well spotted there, political issues sure can be divisive! But it isn’t their divisiveness that Facebook or other platforms should try to regulate; it is the “interference” by foreign government actors. What that means precisely, I really wonder.

Zuckerberg’s third point is that we need a “globally harmonized framework” for “effective privacy and data protection.” Well, that’s music to my ears. But it’s certainly rich, the very notion that the world’s biggest violator of privacy, indeed the guy whose violations are perhaps the single biggest cause of widespread concern about privacy, wants privacy rights protected.

He wants privacy rights protected the way he wants free speech protected. I wouldn’t believe him.

Zuckerberg’s final point is another that you might think would make me happy: “regulation should guarantee the principle of data portability.”

Well. No. Code should guarantee data portability. Regulation shouldn’t guarantee any such thing. I don’t trust governments, in the pockets of “experts” in the pay of giant corporations, to settle the rules according to which data is “portable.” They might, just for instance, write the rules in such a way that gives governments a back door into what should be entirely private data.

Beware social media giants bearing gifts.

And portability, while nice, is not the point. Of course Zuckerberg is OK with the portability of data, i.e., allowing people to more easily move it from one vendor to another. But that’s a technical detail of convenience. What matters, rather, is whether I own my data and serve it myself to my subscribers, according to rules that I and they mutually agree on.

But that is something that Zuckerberg specifically can’t agree to, because he’s already told you that he wants “hate speech and more” to be regulated. By the government or by third party censors.

You can’t have it both ways, Zuckerberg. Which is it going to be: data ownership that protects unfettered free speech, or censorship that ultimately forbids data ownership?

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Is Western civilization collapsing?

Larry Sanger

A perennial topic for me (and many of us) is the notion that there is a deep malaise in Western civilization. There are, it seems to me, three main camps on the question, “Is Western civilization collapsing?”

1. The conservative position. “Yes. And it’s a horrible thing. For one thing, elites have basically stopped reproducing. They’re inviting people from foreign cultures into their countries, and they’re reproducing faster than their elites. The result will be an inevitable cultural replacement after a few generations, although probably not before we go through a period of bloody civil wars. And Western traditions are not being passed down. We are becoming less Christian every year. Our universities are teaching less and less of the classics of Western civilization. Though they spend longer in school, our graduates are more ignorant of their cultural roots. We have no desire to create beauty any longer. We have nothing, really, to live for. Our heart is simply not in it any longer; we’re in the death throes of this civilization.”

2. The postmodern position. “Are you really even asking this question? So you think Western civilization is ‘collapsing’? Well, maybe it is. If so, good! But if we’re going to be honest with ourselves, we should recognize that there is much about Western civilization that deserves to die, and the sooner the better. What will replace it? Who knows? Who cares? But you must be a racist Islamophobe if you think it will be Islamic. But probably, you’re just an idiot because there is no reason to think Western civilization is ‘collapsing.’ It might be, however, transforming, and into something better, something more tolerant, open, and multi-cultural.”

3. The optimistic position. “Oh, not this again. Haven’t you read Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now? Look, almost all the metrics look better than they’ve ever been. People always think we’re on the brink of disaster even when things are awesome. The world is better educated than it’s ever been. People in third world countries are moving into the modern world. Look at the Internet! Look at technology! Look at all the entrepreneurship and discovery that is happening every day! How on earth can you fail to recognize that, far from being in our death throes, we are ramping up a new global civilization with, perhaps, some new values, but which enjoys radically transformative changes for the better every year.”

Here are a few notes to put these into perspective. The conservative position is a position about the health of traditional Western values and culture. It takes the view that these values and culture should be preserved, that they aren’t being preserved, and that Westerners therefore are living increasingly meaningless lives.

The postmodern position is a primarily a reaction to the conservative position. It denies that there is a problem worth solving because Western values and culture are better off dead and buried.

The optimistic position certainly appears to be about another topic altogether, i.e., not about the health of traditional Western values and culture, although it pretends to be responding to conservative worry. It equates “civilization” not so much with Western traditions and values, precisely, as with the sort of globalist system of capitalist economies and the largely Western-derived education and culture that has sprouted and flowered in the 20th and especially the 21st centuries. You can see it in most of the big cities of the world. The success of this civilization is not to be evaluated (on this view) by some subjective measures of morality, or religion of course, or using sociological metrics that go proxy for these, but instead by more objective measures of well-being such as GDP, literacy rates, and longevity rates.

These positions interact in interesting ways.

  • A very strong case can be made that it is precisely certain Western traditions (democracy, industrialism, free enterprise, science, etc.) that have enabled the global success celebrated by the optimistic position.
  • The postmodern position is, too, absolutely rooted in some Western values (such as cultural tolerance and Christian charity).
  • And the optimistic position is widely (and in my opinion rightly) regarded as too optimistic; almost all of us detect some manner of deep moral malaise in Western civilization (such as dangerous populist racism, on the one hand, or the dangerous weakening of Christian values, on the other), even if we don’t necessarily think of it as threatening civilization itself, and the happy talk does not do this justice.
  • And the postmodern position is surely right to suggest that Western civilization has undergone and is likely to continue to undergo radical transformations that have made the Western roots of American and European societies look positively foreign. But does that mean the collapse of civilization, or its transformation?
  • And if it is transforming and not collapsing, is that unequivocally a good thing?
  • Are important values, that conservatives perhaps talk about more than progressives, being lost? Put aside your political differences and ask yourself: might that be important? And what consequences might that have for the new global order?
  • Is it true that there must be some transcendent purpose and deep values that undergird our lives, or else (as conservatives suggest) civilization, that will cause not merely its transformation but its wholesale replacement with some other civilization that does celebrate some transcendent purpose? And if that’s true, what values would replace Western ones?
  • Could something like progressivism itself constitute a global value system?
  • We already know that any such progressive value system largely conflict with traditional Christianity and some other Western values, but doesn’t it also conflict with Islam?

I don’t suggest any conclusion now. I just thought that contextualizing the debate would be interesting.

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I joined a homeschooling legal defense association

Larry Sanger

Actually, I joined the Homeschooling Legal Defense Association (as a rank-and-file paying member). Authoritarianism is on the march, and while homeschooling has enjoyed a golden age in the last couple decades, having achieved both acceptance (even a measure of prestige) and legal freedom, I’m worried that that might be changing. It isn’t any particular event, just the steady, low drumbeat of left-wing concern that people might be doing something with children that isn’t closely monitored and controlled by the state. “How dare citizens educate their children independently?” they think. “Surely, the experts in our government-run education establishments know best. Why can’t we be more like Germany and Sweden, which have superior public schools, while homeschooling is illegal?”

If people are becoming so ignorant or unsupportive of basic American civil rights and freedoms such as freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, Fourth Amendment privacy rights, and basic due process—depressing, isn’t it?—then we can predict that, within the next five or ten years, a major push to control or even eliminate homeschooling will get under way in countries where it is still legal (such as the U.S., Canada, U.K., Russia (!), Poland, South Africa, and Australia).

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I am informed; you are misinformed; and the government should do something about this problem

Larry Sanger

Poynter, the famous journalism thinktank, has published “A guide to anti-misinformation actions around the world.” This sort of thing is mostly interesting not just for the particular facts it gathers but also for the assumptions and categories it takes for granted. The word “misinformation” is thrown around, as are “hate speech” and “fake news.” The European Commission, it seems, published a report on “misinformation” (the report itself says “disinformation”) in order to “help the European Union figure out what to do about fake news.” Not only does this trade on a ridiculously broad definition of “disinformation,” it assumes that disinformation is somehow a newly pronounced or important problem, that it is the role of a supernational body (the E.U.) to figure out what to do about this problem, and that it is also the role of that body to “do something.” Mind you, there might be some government “actions” that strike me as being possibly defensible; but the majority that I reviewed looked awful.

For example, look at what Italy has done:

A little more than a month before the general election, the Italian government announced Jan. 18 that it had set up an online portal where citizens could report fake news to the police.

The service, which prompts users for their email addresses, a link to the fake news and any social media networks they saw it on, ferries reports to the Polizia Postale, a unit of the state police that investigates cyber crime. The department will fact-check them and — if laws were broken — pursue legal action. At the very least, the service will draw upon official sources to deny false or misleading information.

That plan came amid a national frenzy over fake news leading into the March 4 election and suffered from the same vagueness as the ones in Brazil, Croatia and France: a lacking definition of what constitutes “fake news.”

Poynter, which I think it’s safe to say is an Establishment thinktank, mostly just dutifully reports on these developments. In their introduction, they do eventually (in the fourth paragraph) get around to pointing out some minor problems with these government efforts: the difficulty of defining “fake news” and, of course, that pesky free speech thing.

That different countries are suddenly engaging in press censorship is only part of the news. The other part is that Poynter, representing the journalistic Establishment, apparently does not find it greatly alarming about “governments” that are “taking action.” Well, I do. Just consider the EU report’s definition of “disinformation”:

Disinformation as defined in this Report includes all forms of false, inaccurate, or misleading information designed, presented and promoted to intentionally cause public harm or for profit.

This implies that if in the opinion of some government authority, some claim is merely false and, like most professional publishing operations it is published for profit, then it counts as disinformation. This means that (with an exception made for non-profit publishers, apparently) the E.U. considers anything false to be an item of disinformation, and thus presumably ripe for some sort of regulation or sanction.

Well, of course this sounds ridiculous, but I am just reading. It’s not my fault if that’s what the report says. I mean, I’m sorry, but it certainly does look as if the E.U. wants to determine what’s false and to then to ban it (or something). Of course, the definition does first say that disinformation is designed to intentionally cause public harm, but anybody who reads legalistic texts needs to bear in mind that, as far as the law is concerned, the parts that come after “or” and “and” are just as important as the parts that come before. The text does say “or for profit.” Is that because in the E.U., seeking profit is as suspect as intentionally causing public harm?

The difficulty about texts like this, aside from the fact that they are insufferably dull, is that they are so completely chock-full of bad writing, bad reasoning, false assumptions, and so forth, that it would take several volumes to say everything that needs saying about the E.U. report and Poynter’s run-down of government actions. What about all the important issues associated with what looks like a worldwide crackdown on free speech? They have been solved, apparently.

Poynter at least has the good sense to acknowledge difficulties, as they do at the end of the discussion of Italy’s regulatory scheme. The government positions are appalling, as if they were saying: “We know what fake news and disinformation and misinformation are, more or less. Sure, there’s a small intellectual matter of defining them, but no big deal there. It’s just a matter of deciding what needs to be done. Free speech, well, that’s just another factor to be weighed.”

Just imagine reading this page just twenty years ago. It would have been regarded as an implausible horrorshow. I imagine how someone might have responded to a glimpse 20 years into the future:

What are you saying–in 2018, countries all around the world will decide that it’s time to start seriously cracking down on “misinformation” because it’s too easy to publish false stuff online, and free speech and freedom of the press? That’s ridiculous. It’s one thing to get upset about “political incorrectness,” but it’s another thing altogether for the freedom-loving West, and especially for journalists (for crying out loud!) to so bemoan “hate speech” and “fake news” (really?) that they’ll give up free speech and start calling on their governments to exert control. That’s just…ridiculous. Do you think we’ll forget everything we know about free speech and press freedom in 20 years?

Well, it would have been ridiculous in 1998. Twenty years later, it still should be, but apparently it isn’t for so many sophisticated, morally enlightened leaders who can identify what is true and what is misinformation.

It’s time to push back.

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