Daily Archives: June 25, 2020

Donald Trumps sneering attitude toward freedom of speech has been a feature, not a bug, since long before he descended the golden escalator. During his presidency, he has painted journalists as the enemy of the people and, according to John Boltons new tell-all The Room Where It Happened, called for them to be executed. He has also been litigious (before and after running for president), attempting to block the publication of a number of unflattering books, likely including a forthcoming book by his niece, Mary Trump. And, of course, theres The Room Where It Happened, which was cleared for publication by a judge on June 19, though the former national security advisor might still be liable for having published without a White House sign-off.

All this has made a lot of work for 1st Amendment scholars, including Stanley Fish. A literary theorist and legal scholar associated (sometimes unwillingly) with postmodernism, Fish is most recently the author of 2019s The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump. (His publisher, Simon & Schuster, is also Boltons.) Fish spoke with The Times by phone from his home in Florida, in a conversation edited for clarity and length, on the case of Trump v. Bolton, the Twitter bully pulpit, the era of fake news and deep fakes, and the possibility that speech may be too free.

Did the president have a real case against John Bolton?

On the historical record, I would say that the case was very weak. There is a longstanding hostility, older than the United States, to prior restraint, by which we mean restraining publication rather than attacking something after it has been published. There is always a suspicion that the act of prior restraint has been committed not in order to provide safety to the commonwealth, but to avoid embarrassment.

What do you think of the judges decision so far?

Leaving open the possibility that the administration might have some recourse in putting a lien, as it were, on the potential profits of Boltons book think it was a nice judicial split down the middle. He didnt want to have his decision criticized either by political commentators or levels above him in the Judiciary. So hes being evenhanded. I think it was a perfectly OK.

Could Bolton be convicted under the Espionage Act?

No, there has to be absolute evidence that the country was somehow in imminent danger from this publication. And thats thats too high a bar to hurdle. I also dont believe the Trump administration is going to follow through on this, although I expect them to continue making lots of noise about it.

Why did the president even bother?

I think he wants to signal to his core voters that he will not allow the forces of the Deep State to harass him or prevent him from carrying out the policies he believes in. And he is confident, Im sure, that this is a posture that his fervent supporters want him to assume. They wish to see him as someone who and this is of course, a semi-technical term will not take any [crap].

John Bolton at right with his former boss and current legal adversary, Donald Trump.

(Susan Walsh / Associated Press)

Recently, the president said he will consider every conversation with me as president highly classified. Is that even legal?

That fits into another argument, under the rubric of the so-called unitary executive: The idea that some people have that the presidents powers are extraordinarily great. Richard Nixon gave voice to a version of this when he famously said that if the president does it, it cant be wrong. That turned out, in his case, not to be true. But that seems to be a point of view that is attractive to Trump. You recall that he approved the premier of China making himself, in effect, the lifetime leader of that country. So this is all of a piece. Now as political theater, this may end up being effective, because John Bolton is not the most attractive person in the public square, and never has been.

Bolton was forbidden to speak about the book during the review process, but Trump had been tweeting about it constantly. Does that present some sort of legal conflict?

Not that I can see. Does it suggest one to you?

Youre the expert! I just found it interesting that a president insisting that the entire situation is classified is going out of his way to speak about how classified it is on Twitter.

This is part of the general and in some ways extremely sophisticated strategy behind the presidents use of Twitter. At times, he and his supporters say that its just the moment-to-moment exclamations of someone reacting and that we shouldnt take them seriously. And there are other times he and his supporters insist that certain of the tweets are pronouncements of the head of state. Now, if you have these two positions firmly established, you can bounce back and forth between the two of them.

Does the power of the speaker matter when it comes to free speech?

In legal terms, probably not. The 1st Amendment does not make distinctions on the basis of the status of the person speaking. But politically, of course, it makes a huge amount of difference. Many of those who have been the targets of Trumps tweets and have spoken of how distressing it is to be excoriated by the president of the United States in public. Whereas if I excoriated that same person, he or she wouldnt care less, because Im just a guy sitting in my study in Florida, as opposed to a guy whos sitting in his luxury resort about 25 miles from where I am at this moment.

Twitter has been slapping labels on Trumps tweets, and Trump and others have been arguing that this restrains free speech. Do they have an argument, legally or morally?

The deeper issue is whether or not Twitter or Facebook are merely devices for displaying messages or whether they are more like newspapers or books. This is a battle thats been going on for a long time, around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, where it is said that servers do not have editorial responsibility theyre merely relays. Thats the position Mark Zuckerberg has long taken and the position that Twitter used to take. Jack Dorsey seems now to have turned the page. Theres now a public will, it seems to me, to somehow curb and control this hugely powerful engine of communication. And I would suspect that Congress will be increasingly sensitive to the publics unease.

(Atria / One Signal Publishers)

Which do you think is right, Twitter or Facebook?

I just published a book that expands on my longstanding position against 1st Amendment absolutism. First Amendment rights are extremely important, but they are not, I believe, to be placed in the position of a deity. Chief Justice Roberts often does this in his 1st Amendment decisions: If its free speech being infringed in any way, thats the end of the case. For me, the wise course was announced long ago by the great American jurist Learned Hand, who said that when it comes to matters of free speech, what you have to do is calculate the possible harms of allowing the speech in question to flourish and then calculate the possible harms of censoring or monitoring it. Then add up the two columns and see where the preponderance of harm lies.

When Twitter decides to be a gatekeeper, conservatives argue its biased making a fact-based move political. What does one do with that?

Well, if I were conservative, which I sometimes am in some areas, I might ask, Are they tagging the statements made by... and then you list a whole bunch of people. They have to be doing this in a way that doesnt suggest that its directed at the president or his supporters. But the president, from the beginning, has said that the press is out to get him. Hes right. The press is out to get him! Every president has had his difficulties with the press, but the designation of the press as the enemy of the people is something that we havent had before. If you declare someone to be your enemy, then its not surprising that they agree to act as your enemy.

Youve written a lot about fake news. Do stories about deepfakes and other manipulated media trouble you?

We should always fear that, we should just not believe its new. Manipulation has always been happening. Whats different now is that the institutions in which we used to repose our trust mainstream newspapers, TV networks, scientific experts, universities, the Library of Congress, etc. have in recent years been subjected to a campaign of distrust, and of course the internet abets this campaign. The result has been the possibility of many, many narratives being presented and no trusted, authoritative institution acting as a check. Fake news has been with us forever, but Im not worried about fake news. I am worried about the fact that, for example, there are people who believe that the scientists who are talking to us about social distancing and the importance of wearing masks are somehow part of a conspiracy against the president. Thats disturbing.

Is there too much speech right now?

The mantra that has for a long time ruled 1st Amendment discussions has been the more speech the better. The idea is that the more speech is free and unfettered, the less it is curated or monitored or given to us by gatekeepers, the better it is. The general word for this is transparency. And I think that that entire way of thinking is a disaster. Because if what you have is the proliferation of speech without any mechanism for determining which forms of speech are worth attending to, all you have is the proliferation of perspectives and the disinclination of everyone to make any distinction between them. And thats where the internet, to some extent, has brought us.

Theres a 1st Amendment theorist at Columbia, Timothy Wu, who wrote a really good essay last year called Is the First Amendment Obsolete, and his large point, which I agree with, is that the 1st Amendment was formulated when the opportunities for speech were scarce, and the enemy was the government, which was attempting to arrogate to itself all the opportunities for speech, as perhaps Trump is trying to do now in his conflict with John Bolton. But Wu says that now, the danger that we face is produced by the endless proliferation of speech, which acts as a kind of censornot in the heavy-handed way of government forces, but because it reduces everything to a matter of indifference and sameness. Truth has receded as an effect of the proliferation of speech, so much so that perhaps the 1st Amendment is out of date.

Read the original here:
Scholar Stanley Fish on Bolton, Trump and why there's too much free speech - Los Angeles Times

St. Louis Aldermanic President Lewis Reed oversees debate at St. Louis City Hall among aldermen expressing their support and opposition to Board Bills 215 and 2016 that deal with tax issues around the MLS soccer stadium on Friday, Feb. 21, 2020. Both bills were moved forward in the process by a 26-1. Photo by David Carson, dcarson@post-dispatch.com

ST. LOUIS Board of Aldermen President Lewis Reed and U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt are violating the First Amendment rights of constituents in the way they mute criticism on their social media accounts, according to two federal lawsuits filed Tuesday.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Washington University law schools First Amendment clinic filed the suits on behalf of Sarah Felts of St. Louis and Dennis Enloe of Union, Missouri.

The fact that a public official disagrees with you on an issue doesnt mean they can silence you, Tony Rothert, legal director of the ACLU of Missouri, said in a news release Tuesday. That holds true whether youre speaking out in a public park, at a town hall meeting, or on social media.

Felts suit filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District alleged that Reeds Twitter account, @PresReed, blocked Felts account from his page because she made a post that was critical of President Reeds actions and policies. As a result, Felts suit claimed, Reed has prevented Ms. Felts from participating in public discourse in a government-controlled public forum.

A screenshot of @sarahfelts' Twitter account included in a federal lawsuit against Board of Aldermen President Lewis Reed allegedly shows Felts was blocked by Reed in 2019.

Mary Goodman, Reeds legislative director, said neither she nor Reed were aware Felts was blocked on Twitter until a Post-Dispatch reporter called Tuesday about the lawsuit. Goodman said it seems like a minor issue that Felts was blocked and that it can literally be fixed at the click of a button.

Originally posted here:
Reed, Blunt violated users' free speech on Facebook and Twitter, lawsuits claim - STLtoday.com

EDWARDSVILLE The DREAM (Dismantling Racism through Education, Advocacy and Mobilization) Collective at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville will host a webinar featuring LaWanda Ward, JD, PhD, at 2 p.m. CDT Friday, June 26.

Ward, an assistant professor of education and research associate in the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the Penn State College of Education, will speak on the topic Still Searching for Justice: Free speech and anti-Blackness in U.S. Higher Education.

Register for the webinar at http://bitly.ws/8Q2T.

Wards commitment to social justice, equity and inclusion in higher education is influenced by her family of educators. Her research agenda centers on critically analyzing legal issues in higher education including race-conscious admissions, free speech and academic freedom.

This is the second public offering coordinated by the DREAM Collective. The Collective is committed to serving the southern Illinois and greater St. Louis area through supporting community members, educational organizations and professionals in the process of naming, addressing and dismantling racism through education, advocacy and mobilization.

Its team of faculty activists seek to create effective programming and foster cultural competency in responsive educators and community members. Members include the SEHHBs Dean Robin Hughes, PhD, and education faculty Jennifer Hernandez, PhD, Jessica Krim, EdD, J.T. Snipes, PhD, and Nate Williams, PhD.

For more information, visit the DREAM Collective on Facebook at @DREAMCollective20, Twitter at @DREAMcollect20 or Instagram at @DREAMCollective20, or email TheDREAMCollective@siue.edu.

The SIUE School of Education, Health and Human Behavior prepares students in a wide range of fields including public health, exercise science, nutrition, instructional technology, psychology, speech-language pathology and audiology, educational administration, and teaching. Faculty members engage in leading-edge research, which enhances teaching and enriches the educational experience. The School supports the community through on-campus clinics, outreach to children and families, and a focused commitment to enhancing individual lives across the region.

$10 for $20 Half Price Deals at deals.riverbender.com

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DREAM Collective To Host Webinar On Free Speech And Anti-Blackness In US Higher Education - RiverBender.com

In a 2017 New York Times column headlined "America's Best University President," Bret Stephens praised Robert Zimmer of the University of Chicago as a defender of free speech.

The column quoted speeches and letters from Zimmer and other University of Chicago administrators and professors, including a committee that, as Stephens quoted it, issued a 2015 report finding that, "Concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community."

So it was surprising to see ablog post from John Cochrane, who until recently was a professor at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Cochrane wrote on June 15, "I spent much of my last few years of teaching afraid that I would say something that could be misunderstood and thus be offensive to someone.Many of my colleagues report the same worries."

If that level of fear accurately describes the situation at the University of Chicago, where the university administration has deservedly won national attention for coming down clearly, decisively, and publicly on the "open debate" side of the campus speech wars, imagine just how bad things are in the rest of academia.

In a moment when black Americans fear being killed by police, the concern that tenured professors might be inconvenienced might seem trivial. The worry at Chicago as described by Cochrane was less that university administrators would, on their own initiative, rule speech out of bounds, and more that a student would lodge a grievance that would, in turn, generate an investigation that would then accumulate a momentum of its ownwith no due process. It could end with a teacher falsely labeled as a racist, one of the worst things a person can be called in contemporary America.

David Brooks, another New York Times columnist who is a member of the University of Chicago'sboard of trustees,tweeted over the weekend that the story of "radically shifting attitudes and awareness on race" is ten times more important than the story that "the hardcore cancel culture is losing its mind."

Perhaps. But the two stories are not unrelated. Among the people getting canceled are those whose "attitudes and awareness on race" have not shifted rapidly enough to suit the hard core's vanguard. At FutureOfCapitalism.com I have published a still-growing list of20 people who have lost their jobs in these purges. The list includes the CEO and co-founder of the Wing, a coworking community for women, Audrey Gelman, who hadconceded, "Employees were required to attend diversity and antibias trainings, but it was a one-time requirement and didn't go deep enough." It also includes thepresident of the Poetry Foundation, Henry Bienen, and its board chairman, Willard Bunn III,who resigned after issuing a George Floyd-related statement that critics said was "vague and lacking any commitment to concrete action," the Associated Press reported.

These aren't people who committed hate crimes. They are people who committed thought crimes or people who appear guilty, at most, of being well-intentioned but clumsy. They were antiracist but they were mediocre at it rather than excelling. That didn't used to be a firing offense in most places. Maybe those of us who favor excellence rather than mediocrity, in general, should welcome the expansion of high-stakes high standards to the field of diversity and inclusion.

This is complicated stuff, in part because it is a good thing that there is a stigma attached to racism, and it is a good thing that people in power, as professors are, are motivated to choose their words with care rather than without it.

But as important a value as antiracism is, there are other closely related values as well, among them the rule of law and seeing everyone as fully human and, in many cases, capable of improvement and repentance. Another recent New York Timescolumnquoted the longtime national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, bemoaning what he described as, "one wrong picture, and you are finished for life."

Zimmer is recovering from emergency brain surgery, but the University of Chicago website carries aspeech he gave at Vienna in September 2019. "As frequently the case for groups filled with self-righteousness, many simple well-meaning behaviors are given malignant interpretations followed by demands for corrective action," Zimmer said. "On some campuses there is a tone of discourse ostracizing those with currently unpopular views, faculty are concerned about bringing up certain topics and ideas for fear not of disagreement but of being demonized, and some university administrators are actually fostering an environment in which students' feelings of discomfort with ideas take precedence over the importance of actually discussing ideas."

Those words are as true now as they were then.

Read the original:
The University of Chicago Took a Stand for Free Speech. Faculty Say They Live in Fear Anyway. - Reason

Columnist Jack DeVine both warns of and greases a slippery slope in his column Can we talk?

His warning is that the current climate of students using force to keep unpopular people from speaking on campus and public pressure causing speakers to be fired or have to recant unpopular statements is undermining the U.S. Constitution's protection of free speech.

(It must be noted that government inaction failing to protect the property rights of those who host speakers is not merely a slippery slope but a direct failure to uphold the Constitutions purpose of protecting individual rights.)

Mr. DeVine greases the slope that ends free speech by writing that we should not allow government, private corporations, or popular culture to hamper unfiltered communication. Hes not worried that our government is interfering with free speech although many other governments do with their laws against blasphemy and hate speech. And because his column disparages 1984"-ish controls, he cant be serious about preventing popular culture from filtering communication.

This leaves private corporations as the target of his desire to ensure unfiltered communication. In particular, he is opposed to Twitter filtering Trumps communication." But Twitters fact-checking Trump does not interfere with Trumps free speech because he can still tweet lies there. Im glad Mr. DeVine recognizes that people are free not to deal with private corporations, and that he stops short of calling for legal force to remove their freedom to filter communication.

Unfortunately, many other conservatives slide to the bottom and call for anti-trust action to stifle the speech of large media organizations. This reveals the conservatives belief in freedom to be less than skin-deep.

Robert Stubblefield

Aiken

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Letter: Beware of slippery slopes | Opinions and Editorials - Aiken Standard

Published June 23, 2020 by Pride in Publishing

Being a book publisher comes with a set of tough moral responsibilities. You provide livelihoods for authors and booksellers, your hiring decisions can greatly influence...

Being a book publisher comes with a set of tough moral responsibilities. You provide livelihoods for authors and booksellers, your hiring decisions can greatly influence how UK culture is shaped, and youre also a company with a duty of care towards your staff. Sometimes these duties come into conflict, and when that happens - as weve seen recently with Hachettes response to some of their staff objecting to working on JK Rowlings new childrens book - the reflexive instinct is to retreat behind the defence of free speech.

Lets clarify what free speech is and is not. Free speech does not entitle an author to a publishing contract. But it does protect the right of a worker to raise the alarm when theyre asked to participate in something that can cause them or someone else harm or trauma. Transphobic authors are not a protected group. Trans and non-binary people are.

When we launchedPride In Publishingin 2017, part of our mission was to create a safe space for the queer community working across the trade, and shine a light on the lack of inclusivity and often poor provision for supporting its LGBTQ+ workforce at many publishers. We have a lot of work to do to fulfil that mission, and our urgency has only been increased by both the individual hostility of the leak that lead to the Hachette story becoming public, and the institutional indifference represented by the companys response.

Publishing a globally famous author with a controversial record is not a moral decision around freedom of speech (particularly for a billionaire well versed in self-publishing their own content), it is a commercial one driven by cold and hard P&Ls. Book publishing is, of course, a business, and each publisher has to follow its own moral compass in terms of factoring in potential reputational harm when standing by a controversial figure. But as many other big book deal collapses have shown, no-one should be immune to scrutiny.

However, employees should never have to work on content which is detrimental to their mental health or which causes them unnecessary turmoil as a spokesperson acknowledged, no-one would force someone to work on a book containing potentially harmful content such as domestic abuse, substance use or something fundamentally against their religious beliefs. LGBTQ+ staff and their allies deserve the same human decency and compassion.

We stand in total solidarity with those at Hachette Childrens Books who voiced their objections to JK Rowlings recent conduct. They are valid, their identities and sexualities are valid and HCBG has ample staff who could have been asked to work on the forthcoming title instead of creating a media circus to their detriment.No one should be mocked or dismissed for standing up for their owned experience as part of a minority community.

Please, do better, book industry we are a dedicated and passionate resource of diverse talent as part of your workforce. From pay transparency to safeguarding, acquisitions to advances, we are consistently letting ourselves down. Were still an industry where to be anything but white, straight, cis presenting and middle class is a hostile experience. Where the work to progress is happening at all, its happening far too slowly.

If publishing doesnt get better at reconciling its moral responsibilities and commercial priorities, dont blame us as valuable queer, non-white and working class talent continues to walk out of the door. Well take our stories with us and leave you with an ever more irrelevant status quo.

(If you want to delve further into the myriad ways in which Rowlings recent statements misrepresented trans people, Mermaids, the trans youth charity, wrote abrilliant and constructive response.)

Pride in Publishing

Link:
"Let's clarify what free speech is and is not": An open letter to the industry from Pride in Publishing - The Bookseller