Free speech is in the news! Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) discuss the high-profile departure of their colleague, Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist Ann Telnaes, from The Washington Post. Meta and Facebook are getting rid of their fact checkers. And TikTok is begging the Supreme Court for its life.
LIVE at 10 am Eastern time today and STREAMING whenever:
Never embarrassed to be seen blowing with the political winds, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent the last four years leading Silicon Valley’s censorship-industrial complex. Facebook openly admitted throttling all political content on the grounds that users didn’t like it. It hired an advisory panel with clear ideological blind spots. Most notoriously, Facebook turned to outsourced fact checkers who decide whether or not posts get blocked and users get banned even though they rarely had any expertise in the controversies they were asked to weigh in on, and made frequent mistakes. Now, at least, Zuckerberg says the fact checkers are no more.
Co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan are joined by guest Peter Coffin to ask: is Facebook really entering the Free Speech Zone? If so, how long will it last in the second age of Trump?
The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) are joined by Terry Anderson of the Cartoonist Rights Network International to discuss the state of political cartooning in the United States and around the world during a time of political transition and the ongoing seismic disruption in the print media ecosystem that supported the profession throughout the previous century.
Democrats centered Kamala Harris’ election campaign around the threat to American democracy posed by Donald Trump’s possible return to the presidency. The issue may not weigh on voters’ minds as heavily as the economy, but it does resonate; polls show that Americans trust Harris more to counter political extremism and preserve democracy.
When it comes to democracy, is there much difference between the two candidates? Not as far as I can see.
Yeah, Trump spews authoritarian rhetoric. “CBS should lose its license,” Trump wrote on Truth Social platform last week. “60 Minutes should be immediately taken off the air.” “We have some sick people, radical-left lunatics,” Trump said recently. “And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by [the] National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.” Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz called Trump’s comments “dangerous” and “un-American,” and of course he’s right.
But the Biden-Harris Administration is just as bad. In fact, they have already engaged in the kind of vicious censorship and suppression typically deployed by the world’s most repressive and dictatorial regimes—actions that go beyond anything Trump did or threatens to do.
The president is fascist. I know, because I’m a victim of one of his fascist actions.
On October 15 Sputnik News, where I co-hosted a radio talk show and for whom I had drawn political cartoons, was shut down. This media closure had nothing to do with market forces or funding problems. With the stroke of his pen, Herr Biden issued a set of legal and financial sanctions crafted to force the network off the air. Several dozen American journalists, consummate professionals at least as talented as many of their peers at “mainstream” outlets, are out of work. As leftists, we had been grateful to land jobs with a Russian-based company.
No American newspaper, magazine or broadcast network will consider hiring anyone among the 40% of Americans who fall to the left of the Democratic Party.
The First Amendment is supposed to protect everyone, including foreign media organizations like Sputnik, the BBC and CBC, from direct government censorship. Because the White House has frozen its bank accounts, however, Sputnik can’t hire a lawyer to fight in court.
The Administration and its media mouthpieces said that Sputnik spread propaganda. But U.S. law does not ban propaganda. Which is good, because who could define it? For my part, I have never been less censored or edited as a cartoonist or radio talker than when I was at Sputnik. And I’ve worked for scores of mainstream liberal and centrist publications and broadcast outlets.
No one, including the U.S. government, accused Sputnik of breaking American law or failing to comply with regulations. The brief against Sputnik boiled down to: Sputnik is Russian, Russia is at war with Ukraine, the U.S. supports Ukraine, Sputnik must die.
Government censorship of the news media is typically carried out by proxy. The LAPD pension fund bought controlling interest in The Los Angeles Times and ordered them to fire me as their cartoonist. Al Jazeera America, the Qatar-based news channel, was shuttered in 2016 in part because President George W. Bush had pressured major cable distributors not to carry it. Because the entities involved were private, the First Amendment didn’t apply. Trump and Biden’s persecution of Julian Assange relied on the fiction that Wikileaks was not a news media publisher.
The Democrats’ attack on Sputnik is radical and terrifying. Acting alone, the President—neither a regulatory agency like the FCC nor Congress acting as elected representatives of the voters—has shut down a news network.
Sputnik was Russian. You might not like anything it broadcast or published. (Though the few people who found it were pleasantly surprised at how little discussion there was about Russia and Ukraine, how it aired intelligent voices censored by corporate media and that it covered a lot of international news you couldn’t find elsewhere. It was by far the most prominent outlet for the real, actual, non-Democrat, U.S. Left. You can still listen to some of my old shows.)
If President Biden can close Sputnik, he can shut down CNN and The New York Times.
Censors’ first targets are always the softest targets: small, unpopular, demonized, fringe. Uptight prigs in Reagan-era America went after pornographers and edgy musicians. Politically-correct college students shout down right-wing speakers. Pro-Palestinian protesters are smeared as anti-Semites.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789, democracy cannot function without a well-informed electorate. For nearly a quarter of a millennium, Americans have preferred to have access to a wide spectrum of opinions. Whenever politicians, clerics or academics have suggested that unpopular and “extreme” ideas should be censored and that popular discourse would improve by being curated, censorship has ultimately been rejected in favor of free speech. In 2022, for example, a proposal by President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security to create a Disinformation Governance Board to combat misinformation and disinformation, headed by a woman who had previously claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was “a Trump campaign product” faked by Russia, was shot down in a rare moment of Congressional bipartisanship.
Yesterday’s conspiracy theories—Hunter’s laptop, the Wuhan lab theory, negative side effects of Covid vaccines—become today’s truths. So our cultural consensus remains: Don’t censor bad/false/disagreeable/offensive speech. Respond to it. Truth will usually out.
After the European Union banned and blocked Sputnik in response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, European Federation of Journalists General Secretary Ricardo Gutiérrez remarked: “This act of censorship can have a totally counterproductive effect on the citizens who follow the banned media.”
I’ve been thinking about Gutiérrez’s statement. Who wins and who loses as the result of Biden’s dictatorial move?
The main victims are the American citizens who followed Sputnik. They will not thank the government. They will think that all that government rhetoric about democracy and free speech is empty talk—propaganda. They’ll trust the government and corporate media less than ever.
Ex-Sputnik employees, a brave and talented group, are likely to survive and even thrive—and be even less willing to believe the government when it claims to have Americans’ best interests in mind.
As my show went off the air for the last time at noon, I waited to hear the music signaling the beginning of the next program, “Political Misfits,” with Michelle Witte and John Kiriakou. Instead, there was dead air.
The irony was rich. Kiriakou, a CIA whistleblower, spent nearly two years in federal prison for the “crime” of exposing the agency’s torture program. Once again, the government was trying to shut him up.
Biden and his fellow fascists—including Vice President Kamala Harris, whose silence here speaks as loudly as her tacit support for Israel’s wars against Gaza and Lebanon—are the big winners. Shutting down Sputnik sends a chilling message to any reporter or commentator who dares to oppose official narratives. We can and will keep you quiet, First Amendment be damned.
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.)
Cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) are back at their respective abodes in New York and Alabama. As always, Ted and Scott put friendship first in their spirited but civilized debates and discussions about the issues at hand.
First up: The University of Southern California denies this year’s valedictorian Asna Tabassum
her right to deliver the commencement address because she is Palestinian and might have had the audacity to call for Palestinians to stop being slaughtered en masse by Israel in Gaza. If ever there was cause for people of all ideological stripes to be appalled albeit for different reasons, here it is.
Next: Donald Trump becomes the first former president to face a criminal trial. Scott and Ted dissect the nature of the charges, related to the payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels, and explore the disturbing trend of prosecutors letting members of the public that they’re so out to get them that they’re willing to campaign on it.
Finally: Joe Biden imposes brutal tariffs to protect America’s steel industry, which is now owned by Japan, from China.
Watch the Video Version: here.
It’s too bad we can’t monetize censorship, because we truly live in a golden age of speech suppression. In this deeply polarized society, the one thing we can all agree upon is that people we disagree with need to shut up.
Officially, freedom of speech is a key commandment in our national civic religion. We love free speech—in the abstract. Nine out of ten Americans told a 2022 Knight Foundation/Ipsos study that “protecting free speech is an important part of American democracy” and that “people should be allowed to express unpopular opinions.” Yay, America!
When people express specific unpopular opinions, not so yay. 70% of respondents to the same study said that, for example, COVID-19 misinformation ought to be banned. Some even called for those who spread it (even though some of it may turn out to be true) to be jailed.
Young people often call for those they disagree with to shut their yaps. A College Pulse/Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression poll found that 71% of today’s college students would ban someone from speaking on campus if that person viewed transgender people as being mentally ill or they thought Black Lives Matter was a hate group. 57% said that anti-abortion activists should never be allowed to speak in public.
And if objectionable speech manages to slip through? 63% think it’s OK to shout you down if you’re saying something they don’t like.
Nowadays, though, young people are big targets of censorship too.
At my alma mater, Columbia, administrators have been coming down like a ton of bricks against peaceful student demonstrators calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and for the university to divest its financial investments in Israel-affiliated companies. Back in November, long before American college and university campuses saw the current spread of encampments and other protests, Columbia suspended two student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.
Why? No reason was given. “The university did not elaborate on how exactly the groups did that except to say they had held ‘unauthorized’ events that included unspecified ‘threatening rhetoric and intimidation,’” The New York Times reported. As an alumnus and veteran of protests there, I can attest that Columbia’s rules do not require demonstrators to obtain authorization from campus authorities.
No pro-Palestinian protester at Columbia had carried out any actual violence or violent threats. They still haven’t.
After wealthy pro-Israel alums withdrew their donations, cash-grubbing Columbia president Nemat “Minouche” Shafik went full-spectrum fascist in voluntary testimony on Capitol Hill. Calling the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” anti-Semitic (it isn’t), she cravenly groveled before a cabal of far-right Congressional goons, agreed that anti-Semitism is rampant on the Columbia campus (a lie), claimed that she had launched investigations of pro-Palestine instructors (if so, it was news to them) and when Republican lawmakers demanded that she fire a tenured professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies for allegedly saying the October 7th attack by Hamas was “awesome” (he didn’t), she agreed to get rid of and other educators him (she can’t).
To drive the point home, Shafik suspended pro-Palestinian student demonstrators (pro-Israel marchers get a free pass) and asked heavily-armed NYPD riot cops to violently arrest them and steal their personal possessions. Campus security guards shut down WKCR, the campus radio station, so student journalists could no longer report the news.
Fascist administrators ordered similar police crackdowns at protests at such institutions as Princeton, USC, UT Austin, Emerson, Cal State Poly Humboldt and Emory, where Atlanta cops tased and maced students as they held them down. Brutal tactics only serve to further inflame passions, a fact reconfirmed when the encampment at Columbia was immediately reassembled the next day. USC valedictorian Asna Tabassum, denied her right to deliver her commencement address because she is Muslim and supports the people of Gaza, has received infinitely more attention to her message because she was censored.
Not wanting to miss out on this latest McCarthyite moment, however, employers who support Israel’s slaughter of Gazans are firing journalists, teachers, athletes, editors and tech workers who disagree. Far-right Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has demanded that federal workers who oppose the bloodshed be fired while a group of pro-genocide corporate CEOs is organizing a blacklist of pro-Palestine college students to distribute to major companies so these young people won’t be able to find a job after graduation. (Student activists have taken to wearing masks and scarves to avoid being doxxed by reactionary supporters of Israel’s war.)
Those who resort to censorship do so because they don’t have a credible message of their own. When the overwhelming majority of the American public, Democrats and Republicans alike, disapproves of Israel—a longstanding ally of the U.S.—it’s clear that the usual lame “if you oppose Israel you’re anti-Semitic” trope is no longer effective. We are no longer scared.
Like the political parties who work harder to suppress the vote for the other party than to motivate and excite their own supporters, those who have nothing affirmative to say for their own position strive to make sure that those on the other side, who have a strong argument, cannot express themselves.
Censorship is a tool used by those who know they are wrong.
Censoring antiwar voices is nothing new. Columbia suspended and expelled opponents of the Vietnam War in 1968. And when the Russo-Ukrainian war broke out in 2022, the U.S. government and its media mouthpieces censored Russian media outlets, boycotted Russian culture and even attacked Russian cats. But the truth about Ukraine—its corrupt president, its official romance with neo-Nazism, its anti-democratic regime and its low chance of success—is coming out.
Yet optimism is the wrong response to this attempt to crush voices of conscience. Every spasm of mass censorship leaves a trail of cynicism, stifled voices, stunted careers and an ever-shrinking spectrum of expression. Remember Al Jazeera America? Phil Donahue’s show on MSNBC?
They were casualties of the War on Terror’s Bush-era censors; we could use them now.
Again, we are losing good people with important voices.
(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. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Angie Wong and Ted Rall discuss current events from around the world, including Trump and Biden clinching the nominations. 
Is the right to free speech real in a world in which there are so many disincentives for using it?
On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Angie Wong discussed current events worldwide, including the upcoming Fox News debate between rival governors Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis. 
