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Refusing to Censor Speech Isn’t the Same as Agreeing with It

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Ted Rall

           If someone said something I found annoying or offensive, my mother taught me, the appropriate response was to allow them to finish speaking and reply with a calm, considered counterargument. Now you’re supposed to talk over them until they shut up.

Or, better yet, cut their mic and show them the door.

Censorship has become a bipartisan norm. Why waste the time and energy to conceive and articulate an intelligent rebuttal when you can make your opponent shut up?

            Alan Dershowitz, a nationally-known former Harvard Law professor, announced that he was leaving the Democratic Party because the party’s organizers allowed pro-Palestinian speakers to address its convention in Chicago. “They had more anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist people who were speaking, starting with [Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]–a miserable, anti-Zionist bigot,” Dershowitz said on “Talkline with Zev Brenner.” “Then of course they had [Senator Elizabeth] Warren, who is one of the most anti-Jewish people in the Senate. Then they had Bernie Sanders, one of the most anti-Jewish people in the Senate.” (Sanders is Jewish.)

            “[B]y giving them platforms, what it says is that when AOC does call Israel a genocidal country and rails against it, she now has the imprimatur of the Democratic Party,” he argued.

            On the opposite side of the ideological divide, high-profile podcaster and ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson caught flak for hosting Darryl Cooper, a Holocaust revisionist, on his show on the social media platform X. Representative Mike Lawler of New York, told The Jewish Insider: “Platforming known Holocaust revisionists is deeply disturbing.”

            I’m a leftist. Some of my fans lost their minds when I invited former Klansman David Duke to guest on my old talk-radio show on KFI Los Angeles. Feeling betrayed, they accused me of amplifying and tacitly endorsing a voice of the racist alt-right. I recall the exchange as vigorous, challenging and a rare opportunity to hear ideas on both sides of a variety of issues aired in an intelligent format.

            The way I saw it, many Americans share Duke’s far-right views whether they hear them on the air or not. This was a chance to expose the existence of these thoughts to blissfully unaware liberals and workshop arguments against them. I would do it again in a heartbeat—but I’d become the target of even more venom now.

Platforming speech is not the same as endorsing what is said.

            Platforming is the act of providing a means of public expression. A newspaper that publishes an interview with or even just a short quote by a person gives them a platform. A college that invites someone to give a speech or participate in a panel discussion is engaged in platforming, as is a cable network that decides to add a channel to its lineup.

            None of these actions is a tacit endorsement.

            Nor can it be.

            Unless it limits its opinionists to a single voice or aggressively enforces a rigid set of ideological strictures upon a group of them—no one need apply unless they are, for example, socially liberal, fiscally conservative and opposed to military adventurism except in Myanmar—any newspaper’s decision to simultaneously platform one writer who disagrees materially with a second writer (and a third and a fourth) means that, by definition, there are contrasts and disagreements. Inherently, because no institution can simultaneously endorse conflicting points of view, no endorsement has occurred

            Many news stories include quotes by both a Democrat and a Republican. If platforming the Democrat is an endorsement, how should one explain the appearance of the Republican? Most universities host speakers representing a range of views on a variety of subjects, many of them controversial. It makes no sense to imply that those institutions agree with everyone they invite on campus.

            Until fairly recently, most Americans appreciated the value of showcasing a spectrum of ideological and stylistic views in public fora. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote in 1926 that the solution to offensive speech was “more speech, not enforced silence.” Today what we call Brandeis’ counter-speech doctrine—the answer to bad speech is good speech, not censorship—is in grave danger. Rather than argue against their opponents, cultural and journalistic gatekeepers are increasingly resorting to telling those with whom they to disagree to STFU.

            Censorship drives dangerous rhetoric underground. It conveys a sense that purveyors of “mainstream” opinion are contemptuous of others, unable to defend their views, possibly intellectually feeble, and just plain bullies. Mostly, it doesn’t work.

            After the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, Twitter suspended 70,000 accounts, including that of President Donald Trump. Facebook acted similarly. A year later, in 2022, liberal censors claimed victory. “The best research that we have suggests that deplatforming is very powerful,” Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, told NPR. “It means that really prominent actors who helped stoke the Stop the Steal campaign that led to the insurrection have much less reach, get much less audience and attention. And that is very, very, very important.”

            Was it? Donald Trump, the biggest January 6er of them all, is also the undisputed kingpin of the Republican Party, in whose primaries he ran unopposed. Running neck and neck with Kamala Harris, he may easily be reelected.

            The belief that editors, producers, tech CEOs and other gatekeepers control enough outlets to deny their enemies an outlet to a significant audience is a profoundly flawed assumption. To whatever extent this was true in an era of four television news networks and cities with a morning and afternoon paper and not much else—and, even then, there were underground presses and alternative newsweeklies like The Village Voice—the Internet has blown that idea to smithereens. Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based cable news network whose American channel was shut down after the War on Terror-era Bush Administration leaned on U.S. broadcasters, disseminates live news from Gaza and other global hot spots via its website, which is one of the biggest in this country. InfoWars, Alex Jones’ “fringe” news site, gets 19 million views daily despite Jones’ epic legal defeat at the hands of parents whose children were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who were awarded $1 billion. Any government or other corporate entity that tries to control information narratives in an era of fragmented media is playing whack-a-mole with a million rodents.

            As long as there’s an audience for what someone has to say, you can’t keep a good—or bad—man down.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

The Final Countdown – 9/17/24 – The Final Countdown Show Summery: Guest Rundown 9/16/2024 – Boeing in Hot Water as Latest Strike Causes Major Economic Implications

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Ted Rall

On this edition of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discussed several topics from around the world.  Boeing employees vote to go on strike which could have serious economic impacts throughout the American economy.  To add to the political chaos in the United States there has been a second assassination attempt on the United States at a time when tensions with Russia are  increasing.  In the final hour, The Final Countdown team will analyze the Yemeni missile attack inside Israel.  Is it a game changer?
 
In the opening segment, Ted and Steve discuss the turbulent American political scene. Political commentator Scotty Nell Hughes will speak to Ted Rall about the second assassination attempt on former President Trump in just under three months.
 
Then The Final Countdown team speaks to Mark Sleboda.  Sleboda is an international relations analyst who will walk the Countdown team through the escalating tensions between Russia and the West including the counteroffensive in Kursk.
 
At the top of the second hour The Final Countdown team then speaks to financial expert Aquiles Larrea about the effect that a prolonged strike by Boeing employees could have on the entire American economy.  The final guest of the Final Countdown is Michael Maloof.  Maloof is a retired senior Defense Department analyst with over 30 years of experience.  Mr. Maloof will walk us through the collapse of the Hamas Israel ceasefire negotiations, and explain how the Houthis in Yemen were able to strike Israel with a missile.  Has the balance of power shifted in the Near East?  Michael Maloof will answer this important question.
 
 
 

The Final Countdown – 9/13/24 – Trump Rejects Second Debate With Harris as Election Approaches

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Ted Rall
On this edition of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discussed several topics from around the world.  Boeing employees vote to go on strike, the US Congress is trying desperately to avoid a government shutdown, and the black nationalist group Uhurus are found guilty of conspiracy.  To add to all  that the US will allow Ukraine to use long range missiles inside Russia. 
 
In the opening segment, Ted and Steve discuss the turbulent American political scene.  Trump doubles down on Hattians eating pets, and he rules out a third debate.  Tyler Nixon weighs in with his analysis.  
 
Then The Final Countdown team speaks to Jeremy Kuzmarov the managing editor of Covert Action Magazine. Jeremy will walk us through the conviction of the Uhurus dissident group of conspiracy in St Petersburg, Florida.
 
At the top of the second hour The Final Countdown team then speaks to Tennessee Congressman Cong Tim Burchett about the budget battle currently going on in Washington.  Is a shutdown possible?  
 
 

Millions Have No Home. You Don’t Need Two.

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Ted Rall

           Responding to polls that show that voters are worried and angry about the high cost of housing, both major parties are floating plans to make buying a home more affordable. Harris and the Democrats want to encourage new housing construction and subsidize first-time home buyers by $25,000, which economists worry would have an inflationary effect. Trump thinks that deporting illegal immigrants would reduce demand and lower prices—a logical stretch to say the least.

            As important as it is to allow middle-class and working-class people to build wealth by investing in a house or condo, however, the real need is not those who would prefer to own than to rent their residence. The real need is those who have no housing at all.

            Roughly half a million Americans are chronically homeless and nearly four million more “hidden homeless” are imposing on friends and family for a place to stay that may or may not remain available in the future. Cities are blighted, families are shattered, children are traumatized. Homelessness is both a moral and economic crisis as well as a failure of leadership.

            Homelessness impacts us all. Every person who must be treated at the emergency room as a consequence of going unhoused not only burdens the healthcare system, they live outside the workforce who contribute to productivity, fuel consumer spending and remit payroll taxes. Their deprived physical persons, their meager possessions and their vehicles are eyesores that negatively impact property values and thus reduces municipal revenues. People experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity get arrested more often than the average citizen, only for survival offenses like stealing food and clothing. Many are or become mentally ill, especially from schizophrenia, as a result of fending off hot and freezing weather; homeless people commit about thirty times more violent crimes than average.

            According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, it would cost about $55 billion, most of it spent once rather than recurring, to house both the visible and hidden homeless, who total about 4.5 million people. But where would we put all these people?

            Incredibly, that answer is easy. There’s no need to build a single new unit. We have plenty lying around completely unused.

More than 15 million homes, over 10% of the nation’s housing stock, was vacant in 2022—a record low. Three out of four are investment properties, many owned by venture-capital companies that are converting neighborhoods once comprised of local homeowners into transient rental units with algorithmically-inflated rents, particularly in middle-class areas with many people of color. Most of these are vacation homes, timeshares and hunting cabins that sit empty well over 95% of the year.

Property rights matter, but a national emergency like a war prompts the government to requisition private property in service to an important cause. During World War II, for example, the United Kingdom commandeered personal cars and paid their former owners what they determined to be fair market value, while the United States requisitioned merchant ships. U.S. occupation forces appropriated German land for military use in the late 1940s.
            Homelessness is a national emergency on par with World War II. Actually, it’s much bigger. Had the isolationists prevailed and the U.S. not joined the Allies against Japan and Germany, there is no reason to believe that the U.S. itself would ever have been invaded. For America, World War II was optional. Fighting homelessness is about saving the lives of millions of American citizens right here at home. It’s as essential as it gets.

            Florida and Hawaii, both popular vacation destinations, have more vacant second homes than other states. But the vacation-house mentality also afflicts cities with high densities—or that used to have them. In the 2005-2009 American Community Survey, 102,000 of the 845,000 apartments and houses in Manhattan were identified as vacant. One out of 25 units in the nation’s cultural, media and financial capital were occupied less than two months out of the year. “In a large swath of the East Side [of Manhattan] bounded by Fifth and Park Avenues and East 49th and 70th Streets, about 30% of the more than 5,000 apartments are routinely vacant more than ten months a year because their owners or renters have permanent homes elsewhere,” The New York Times reported in 2011. It’s worse now.

            The number of vacant units in New York City lines up almost exactly with the estimated number of homeless men, women and children: 100,000.

            Every single person who shivers on the sidewalks of the Big Apple does so within a few dozen feet of a heated, insulated, empty apartment with running water, a place that no one uses. It’s obscene. It’s piggish. And it needs to be fixed. A real estate speculator’s right to invest in a housing market is not half as important as a homeless person’s need to sleep inside. A bourgeois family’s desire to winter in Florida and summer in New York must take a back seat to the human right of a homeless person not to die.

            City and state housing authorities should be granted the right and the funding appropriations necessary to seize vacant housing units under eminent domain for conversion to housing for the homeless, with fair market compensation to be paid to those deprived of their properties.

            The United States signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which recognizes housing as a basic human right, in 1948. The UDHR was codified into a treaty, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in 1966. Because the U.S. signed the ICESCR, it is obligated to uphold its “object and purpose.” Nearly eighty years after our nation committed to ensuring that everyone has a decent and secure place to live where he or she need not fear eviction, it should make good on its commitment to international law.

            Condemn vacant investment properties and vacation homes and seize them under eminent domain.

            Until the last American citizen moves from the outdoors to the indoors, no one should be legally permitted to own more than one home.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

DMZ America Podcast #164: The post-debate debate

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Ted Rall

Political cartoonist Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) conduct an extensive postmortem on the first (and only?) Harris/Trump debate. From giving their final grades to a deep dive into what was, and wasn’t, said during the most consequential debate in our lifetimes, here’s your objective guide to this important political event.

We Need a Universal High Income

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Ted Rall

          “Get a job!” That’s the clichéd response to panhandlers and anyone else who complains of being broke. But what if you can’t?

            That dilemma is the crux of an evolving silent crisis that threatens to undermine the foundation of the American economic model.

Two-thirds of gross domestic product, most of the economy, is fueled by personal consumer spending. Most spending is sourced from personal income, overwhelmingly from salaries paid by employers. But employers will need fewer and fewer employees.

You don’t need a business degree to understand the nature of the doom loop. A smaller labor force earns a smaller national income and spends less. As demand shrinks, companies lay off many of their remaining workers, who themselves spend less, on and on until we’re all in bread lines.

Assuming there are any charities collecting enough donations to pay for the bread.

The workforce participation rate has already been shrinking for more than two decades, forcing fewer workers to pay higher taxes. It’s about to get much worse.

Workers are already being replaced by robotics, artificial intelligence and other forms of automation. Estimates vary about how many and how quickly these technologies will kill American jobs as they scale and become widely accepted, but there’s no doubt the effects will be huge and that we will see them sooner rather than later. A report by MIT and Boston University finds that two million manufacturing jobs will disappear within the coming year; Freethink sounds the death knell for 65% of retail gigs in the same startlingly short time span. A different MIT study predicts that “only 23%” of current worker wages will be replaced by automation, but it won’t happen immediately “because of the large upfront costs of AI systems.” Disruptive technologies like A.I. will create new jobs. Overall, however, McKinsey consulting group believes that 12 million Americans will be kicked off their payrolls by 2030.

“Probably none of us will have a job,” Elon Musk said earlier this year. “If you want to do a job that’s kinda like a hobby, you can do a job. But otherwise, A.I. and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want.”

For this to work, Musk observed, idled workers would have to be paid a “universal high income”—the equivalent of a full-time salary, but to stay at home. This is not to be conflated with the “universal basic income” touted by people like Andrew Yang, which is a nominal annual government subsidy, not enough to pay all your expenses.

“It will be an age of abundance,” Musk predicts.

The history of technological progress suggests otherwise. From the construction of bridges across the Thames during the late 18th and early 19th centuries that sidelined London’s wherry men who ferried passengers and goods, to the deindustrialization of the Midwest that has left the heartland of the United States with boarded-up houses and an epic opioid crisis, to Uber and Lyft’s solution to a non-existent problem that now has yellow-taxi drivers committing suicide, ruling-class political and business elites rarely worry about the people who lose their livelihoods to “creative destruction.”

Whether you’re a 55-year-old wherry man or cabbie or accountant who loses your job through no fault of your own other than having the bad luck to be born at a time of dramatic change in the workplace, you always get the same advice. Pay to retrain in another field—hopefully you have savings to pay for it, hopefully your new profession doesn’t become obsolete too! “Embrace a growth mindset.” Whatever that means. Use new tech to help you with your current occupation—until your boss figures out what you’re up to and decides to make do with just the machine.

Look at it from their—the boss’s—perspective. Costs are down, profits are up. They don’t know you, they don’t care about you, guilt isn’t a thing for them. What’s not to like about the robotics revolution?

Those profits, however, belong to us at least as much as they do to “them”—employers, bosses, stockholders. Artificial intelligence and robots are not magic; they were not conjured up from thin air. These technologies were created and developed by human beings on the backs of hundreds of millions of American workers in legacy and now-moribund industries. If the wealthy winners of this latest tech revolution are too short-sighted and cruel to share the abundance with their fellow citizens—if for no better reason than to save their skins from a future violent uprising and their portfolios from disaster when our consumerism-based economy comes crashing down—we should force them to do so.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

 

 

 

DMZ America Podcast #162: Kamala’s Big First Interview a Flop? & Trump Tries to Abort His Abortion Problem

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Ted Rall

Political cartoonists and analysts Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) take on the week in politics.

Forty days after becoming the de facto nominee of the Democratic Party, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz have finally held their first interview, with Dana Bash of CNN in Savannah, Georgia. Scott disagrees with Ted’s assessment that Harris’ performance was a disaster. Ted Scott handicap the upcoming debate on September 8th, wondering what Trump can do to counter Harris despite her interview.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is still struggling to find his sea legs regarding Harris. Most problematic for him, abortion has surpassed the economy as the number-one issue for voters in key battleground states. Desperate for votes, Trump is even endorsing federal subsidies for in vitro fertilization, which is anathema to pro-life Republicans.

Watch the Video version: here.

We Have Big Problems. The Parties Offer Tiny Solutions.

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Ted Rall

            The U.S. government wastes approximately $4.5 trillion each year. “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money,” Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, an Illinois Republican, famously said, and said often. In this case, you’re talking about thousands of billions. ($4.5 trillion is the sum total of annual military spending that exceeds what we need to defend the United States homeland, the higher interest paid on the national debt due to the Fed’s attempts to fight inflation, federal subsidies paid to people and companies who don’t qualify for them, uncollected taxes the IRS doesn’t even attempt to get and foreign aid, much of it to rich countries.)

            So much money, so little imagination.

            The 2024 presidential campaign highlights the small-bore thinking that dominates electioneering and journalistic punditry. Trump and the Republicans called for eliminating taxes on tips; Harris and the Democrats followed suit. If enacted, this change would only affect 2.5% of wage earners.

GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance suggested a $5,000 increase in the earned income tax credit; Harris called and raised to $6,000. Only 13% of taxpayers qualify for that benefit.

Harris wants to pay a subsidy to first-time home buyers. Good news: it would apply to roughly one out of four people buying a house or condo in the next few years. Bad news: the idea is dead in Congress, and not only because of intransigent Republicans.

And that’s assuming those ideas don’t wither on the vine. Americans are broke, angry, resentful and worried sick, but those who want to lead them don’t seem to have any interest in directly addressing their concerns. In their first sit-down interview with a journalist, Harris and her running mate Tim Walz refused to name a single thing they would do on day one.

            Candidates are nibbling around the edges of big systemic problems like the unaffordable rents and mortgages and ignoring others, like the existential threat to humanity presented by climate change, entirely. The political system is unresponsive to our wants and needs, and we know why. Lobbyists and big corporate donors with a vested interest in the status quo pay to install cooperative candidates who promise that nothing will fundamentally change and to oppose and remove those who resist them and their interests. Educational institutions purge and blacklist teachers who challenge the dominant corporatist narrative. The news media are loathe to challenge the half-dozen corporate leviathans that own them and do not hire new investigative reporters or rebellious outsiders who threaten to rock the boat. Citizens, surveying this bleak landscape of conformity and corruption, have concluded that the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon. Voters feel trapped, forced to choose between two nearly identically unpalatable parties; they opt out entirely or cast hate votes against the party and candidate they despise most.

            There could be a better way.

Americans consume politics passively. During election campaigns, those of us who take an interest in politics tune in to check what the two major parties and their candidates have to offer. If we’re really engaged, we volunteer to phone bank and talk to our neighbors on behalf of a contender. We may pay out a donation. But we don’t exert political pressure. Politics is a section of the newspaper, a subject link on a website or an app, a form of entertainment delivered in the same format as sports, traffic, weather and streaming movies.

It is different in many other countries. Politics are an activity, something you participate in personally. Protest marches, national strikes and other forms of direct action in the streets are not considered outlandish alternative forms of politicking outside the normal system, as they are here. These tactics, which can shut down cities and might even bring down a government, are legitimate forms of confrontation that can force changes that an ossified electoral democracy would otherwise never consider. At their best, they are so dangerous-seeming that the mere fear of provoking a riot can prompt the ruling class to yield to the people’s demands without anyone having to draw up a picket sign or throw a Molotov cocktail.

In the absence of a revolutionary leftist organization, the periodic spasms of activism we see in the United States—Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, the Battle of Seattle—rarely result in lasting improvements in people’s living and working conditions. We absolutely need such an organization. Such an organization would, in most countries, come up with a list of demands it would use to recruit members and set standards for what the elites would need to concede should they desire to remain in power with the active consent of the governed. But there are currently too many obstacles in our duopolistic political culture to allow such a formation to gain traction.

So let’s start with demands. The first step of radical organizing is to examine the structure of society and its structure as it is and to imagine how they could be reordered and the fruits of its labor redistributed in a fairer, more equitable and more just way. What and how much do we have? How are we spending and dividing these items? How could we do it better?

What should be clear to everyone is that the current rubric, in which we send billions of dollars to foreign countries at the same time American citizens sleep out in the street and go bankrupt from paying medical bills and can’t go to college because it’s too expensive is stupid, rotten and ridiculous. The fact that neither major political party and neither major presidential candidate is willing or able to even begin to think about a different set of policy priorities that addresses the everyday concerns of the vast majority of people is the ultimate evidence of their illegitimacy. Fortunately, we don’t need them. We can figure out what we want and need.

We can demand improvements that, if the system chose to grant them, are realistic and viable. And if (when!) they deny us the better lives we deserve, we can build that revolutionary party we need to seize power and make it happen.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

The Final Countdown – 8/29/24 – Harris and Walz Launch Georgia Tour Ahead of Eagerly Awaited Interview 

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Ted Rall
On this episode of The Final Countdown hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discuss top news globally and nationwide, including the kickoff of the Harris/Walz bus tour in Georgia. 
 
The show is joined by the Chairman of the New Journey PAC and author Autry Pruitt discussing the latest out of the Harris/Walz campaign, the much-awaited CNN interview, and the latest polling numbers. 
 
Then, political analyst, Host of ‘Pasta 2 Go,’ and co-host of ‘The Convo Couch’  Craig ‘Pasta’ Jardula joins the show to share his perspective on Telegram founder Pavel Durov’s charges in France and also weighs in on Brazil threatening to shut down X.  
 
Later, professional educator J.C. Bowman joins the show to weigh in on a case involving the expulsion of a 10-year-old from a Tennessee school. 
The show closes with international relations and security analyst Mark Sleboda sharing his analysis on the latest out of the battlefront in Donbass.
 
 
 
 
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