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.
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.)
Is the right to free speech real in a world in which there are so many disincentives for using it?
We already know partisanship can be toxic. It also has some overlooked side effects. Team politics — the type of partisanship in which adherents of a party excuse every act of hypocrisy and wrongdoing by their own side while exaggerating and lying about the purported evils of the other — fuels censorship.
Consider climate change, by some measures the issue about which Democrats and Republicans most disagree. During its four years in power the Trump Administration deleted more than 1,400 references to global warming from U.S. government agency and department websites. Climate scientists reacted by censoring themselves, using terms like “global change,” “environmental change,” and “extreme weather” instead.
After Biden took over, it was Democrats’ turn to suppress dissent. The new president’s top climate-change advisor pushed Silicon Valley to crack down on climate-change skeptics. Facebook, which like most social media companies is aligned with Democratic politics, now classifies posts that deviate from majority scientific opinion as “misinformation” and deletes them. In response to the change in political winds, some scientists have reversed their public stances in order to reduce their risk of losing funding.
Whatever you think about climate change or other issues, reasonable people ought to be able to agree about how to disagree: let everyone speak. Open and vigorous discussion and debate is the most effective way to arrive at societal consensus based on solid information. There’s a catch: you have to be willing to hear and listen to opinions with which you disagree expressed by people you may dislike.
We are moving away from that ideal. According to polls, we are becoming less tolerant of opposing views. 55% of Americans tell Pew Research that the federal government should restrict false information even if their censorship restricts freedom of information, up from 39% in 2018. (70% of Democrats share this view as opposed to 39% of Republicans.) 65% are OK with tech companies censoring speech, up from 56% in 2018.
Americans support free expression of views with which they agree. The other side, they think, should be neither seen nor heard. 36% think banning hate speech is more important than free speech and 35% don’t think the First Amendment should protect comedians and satirists, according to a 2021 Freedom Forum survey. Only 63% would vote for the First Amendment if it were on the ballot.
So Southern conservatives ban LGBTQ+ books while liberals turn a blind eye to Twitter shutting down accounts belonging to Donald Trump and the right-wing New York Post, the latter over the Hunter Biden laptop story—which turned out to be true. Democrats lose sometimes, Republicans lose other times, and the censors win all the time.
As a left-leaning cartoonist and writer, I have often found myself under political fire amid calls to silence me by terminating my employment or not permitting my work to be distributed. A former candidate for president even suggested that I ought to be executed. Even though I have spoken out publicly against liberal censorship campaigns directed at right-wingers like Dr. Laura Schlessinger and Rush Limbaugh, no conservative has come to my defense.
Now the cancel-culture brigade has moved from right to left and the censors are targeting conservatives. The satirical news site Babylon Bee, the social media platform Rumble and other figures on the Right have filed a court challenge to a new New York State law that prohibits social-media posts a court determines to “vilify, humiliate, or incite violence against a group” over “race, color, religion, ethnicity, national origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.” The law, backed by heavy fines and probably unconstitutional because “hate speech” is protected under the First Amendment, also requires aggressive comment moderation and mandates that angry readers be provided with a venue to report offenders.
My first reaction is to be appalled by Attorney General Letitia James’ heavy-handed attempt to curb freedom of expression. My second is to note the right-leaning politics of the plaintiffs. Conservatives are silent when their allies and fellow travelers go after people like me. Why should we speak up on their behalf? Why not zap up some popcorn, pour a glass of Chardonnay and bask in the schadenfreude?
The answer, of course, is that the enemy of my enemy isn’t always my friend. As committed as I am to my Marxist-Leninist point of view, rhetorical class war must take a back seat to the fight against censorship even when the censors identify with the left and their victims belong to the right. A society in which censorship becomes normalized is doomed to authoritarianism and dictatorship without any political debate whatsoever; odds are slim indeed that what remains will be an ideological orientation that you will personally find agreeable. Team politics divides victims of censorship and benefits the forces of repression.
Whether they know it or not, the editors of the Babylon Bee and their allies are defending people like me. I hope that conservatives will draw the same conclusion and start to form alliances of convenience with the left when we struggle for the right to be heard. As for me, I support anyone who takes on censors, liberals and conservatives alike.
(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.)
Controversy that followed race-baiting by cartoonist Scott Adams that led to the cancellation of the iconic comic strip “Dilbert” included numerous people denying the meaning of words and terms involved. Those who were angry and wanted action against him. But they didn’t want to be seen as taking action.
I have won two Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards, been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, published more than 20 books and have seen my political cartoons and columns appear in hundreds of newspapers and magazines. So why do I have Russian state media as one of my clients?
I’m on Sputnik News’ website—as a freelancer, not on staff—and a frequent guest on its radio feed for the same reason that former New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges and former MSNBC talk host Ed Schultz appeared on the now-shuttered RT America television network:
I’m a leftist.
It’s an article of faith that the United States is a conservative country. But 38% of American voters prefer socialism to capitalism. That’s a remarkable figure considering this country’s history of suppressing the Left from the Palmer raids to McCarthyism to the methodical legislative destruction of trade unionism.
The American Left is bigger than you may think, and it’s growing. Yet leftist voices—antiwar, anti-capitalist, militantly environmentalist—are nowhere to be found in the mainstream, corporate-owned print, broadcast and online news media outlets consumed by the vast majority of U.S. citizens.
It doesn’t matter how entertaining or relevant or smart or funny you are. Communists, socialists, anarchists, left libertarians, deep-green environmentalists and populist progressives need not apply as opinion columnists, radio or television commentators. There isn’t even space in mainstream media for pundits who align with establishment progressives like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, whose ideas are indistinguishable from old-school liberal Democrats like Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern.
Fortunately, some leftists found a home on RT or Sputnik. Conservative critics often accused them of being mouthpieces for the Russian government. But that’s not my experience of the Americans I know. They had their own opinions and found a platform where those opinions were welcome.
Working for Sputnik puts a target on your back. Even though I’m not on staff, Twitter and Facebook label links to my Sputnik cartoons as Russian state media. And in the current atmosphere of hysteria over the Russia-Ukraine war to which the U.S. isn’t even a party, reactionaries tar me with that 1950s Cold War classic, guilt by association. Just this week, for example, another cartoonist had the nads to call me “a traitor to American ideals and to democracy,” “Putin’s puppet, a Kremlin propagandist, and a useful idiot.” If this were the 18th century, I’d demand satisfaction from the cur.
Useful idiot, of course, is an insult popularized by fascists during McCarthyism. It is still used by the extreme right.
I’m curious: what would this neoconservative, who was in favor of invading both Afghanistan and Iraq and now wants another stupid war in Ukraine, have people like me do? Sit in silence forever?
Apparently, yes. If you’re on the “actual left,” with a worldview influenced by Marxist class analysis rather than identitarianism, no amount of talent or popularity will get you on the airwaves or into “respectable” print. Until last week, if you were a lucky leftist, you’d be invited to host a show on RT or appear as a guest, where—unlike on CNN, MSNBC or Fox—you’d be treated with respect, asked intelligent questions and given time to answer them.
Is it really possible that there are no insightful communist economics experts? No funny socialist editorial cartoonists? No sharp, telegenic, anarcho-syndicalist TV commentators? Of course such mythical creatures exist—they appeared on RT and, before it was deplatformed by Comcast and DirecTV in 2016, Al Jazeera America. The real reason for the Left’s lack of representation in mainstream media, one suspects, is ideological discrimination.
If “democracy dies in darkness,” as The Washington Post’s motto reads, why not allow all ideas to be discussed openly?
Even cable TV’s most “liberal” channel refuses to air content to the left of the center of the Democratic Party. MSNBC fired left-leaning political talk host Phil Donahue in February 2003, at the peak of the build-up to the invasion of Iraq even though he had the highest ratings of any program on the network. Bosses blamed production costs. But an internal MSNBC memo worried that Donahue presented a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war,” and provided “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
“They were terrified of the antiwar voice,” Donahue recalled.
Twelve years later MSNBC fired feisty pro-worker talker Ed Schultz. He claimed that they fired him for insisting upon covering Bernie Sanders’ 2015 campaign launch speech. “You’re not covering Bernie Sanders,” network president Phil Griffin ordered Schultz.
“I think that they were in the tank for Hillary Clinton, and I think that it was managed, and 45 days later I was out at MSNBC,” Schultz who died in 2018, remembered. Like other exiled lefties, Schultz landed at RT. “There was more oversight and more direction given to me on content at MSNBC than there ever has been here at RT,” he added.
RT’s diverse team of commentators wasn’t limited to leftists. The roster included Hedges, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, “Star Trek” actor William Shatner, ex-CNN host Larry King, leftist comedian Lee Camp and right-wing pundits Dennis Miller and Steve Malzberg. Guests included academic experts, political activists and politicians like former Green Party presidential candidates Ralph Nader and Jill Stein, both of whom were marginalized by U.S. news media and denied spots in presidential debates.
The small sliver of American viewers who gave RT a chance encountered excellent production values and high-quality news and opinion programs that didn’t talk down to the audience. RT was unpredictable, entertaining and frequently more engaging than the three major cable news channels. It was nominated for five Emmys.
Critics of RT and Sputnik, however, have complained that RT shines a spotlight on schisms in U.S. politics and society, for example “push[ing] divisive racial narratives, including stories emphasizing allegations of police abuse in the United States and highlighting racism against African-Americans within the military,” as The New York Times wrote in 2020. Since when, however, is the U.S. or any other government entitled to positive news coverage? If racism makes America look bad, don’t eliminate coverage of racism—eliminate racism.
Opponents also deride RT and Sputnik’s news coverage as Russian government propaganda. Which is, of course, objectively subjective.
On RT/Sputnik as on other outlets, bias is largely a matter of omission. In my experience what runs on Sputnik is fact-checked. But it shouldn’t be anyone’s go-to source for criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin, any more than you should look to MSNBC for harsh takes on Joe Biden or Fox for sharp attacks on Donald Trump. One could argue, and many on the Left have, that “respectable” American news outlets have frequently worn their biases on their sleeves often, and are often accused of disseminating propaganda. The absence of thoughtful antiwar voices during false WMDs claims during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and denying coverage to Bernie Sanders come to mind.
RT America shut down last week after it was deplatformed by Roku, DirecTV and cable networks in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Before it went dark on television, it had earned a sizable online audience. In 2013 the channel became the first to reach 1 billion views on YouTube, numbers driven in part by its willingness to cover third-party candidacies that no one else would touch and round-the-clock reporting on the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The leftist Australian blogger Caitlyn Johnstone has frequently remarked that RT America and Sputnik News would have become instantly unviable had left-leaning voices been invited onto mainstream American media outlets. “There’s this bizarre, stupid notion people have accepted that socialist and antiwar voices should never allow Russian media to platform them, and should instead wait until they are given a large platform by Western mainstream media, and keep waiting, and waiting, and just keep on waiting until we all die in a nuclear holocaust,” Johnstone wrote. “If you have something important to say and you know it’s a true and helpful message, then it doesn’t matter if it’s the Russian government who’s giving you your platform or anyone else, because the message itself is intrinsically valuable.”
I agree. When I tell friends that I’m on Sputnik News, an online radio service and news site accessible via the web and therefore less vulnerable to Ukraine-related cancellation in the United States than in Europe, where it is banned, some cock their heads and give that “Really?” expression. Those who check it out are impressed, surprised that the overall tenor of discussion is smarter and sharper than, say, NPR. Sputnik is still operational, with 57 million visits online in the last month. They grant me a platform for my ideas, which are discussed by an appreciative, well-informed audience. They don’t censor me. And they pay.
Until the revolution destroys capitalism, leftists must compromise their principles in order to survive. I’ve never been published by a media organization with which I shared all of my political ideals. As a realist with bills to pay, where would I find a media organization with which I share most of my political ideals? I disagree with Sputnik about various issues; I also disagree with NPR and even with Jacobin, the socialist magazine.
I would work for pretty much any media outlet that doesn’t constrain my freedom of expression beyond what I consider reasonable limits. (Sputnik has never told me what to say, which is more than I can say for many of my other clients.) But over the past 20 or so years, the media has been turning farther and farther to the right. Left voices, especially before 9/11, were occasionally allotted space alongside liberal Democrats on the opinion pages. I was one of them. Leftists sometimes appeared on cable news television. Again, I was one of them. So was Rachel Maddow. She survived, and thrived, by moving right into mainstream liberalism.
That tiny sliver of openness has vanished. Anti-interventionists rarely if ever—I would say never, but I can’t watch 24-7—appear on those panels of talking heads who discuss foreign policy crises; the acceptable range of discussion runs from pro-interventionist to more pro-interventionist. When is the last time you heard anyone on cable news suggest that the U.S. ought to stay out of an overseas hot spot entirely, that it’s not our business?
All the Left needs for a fair shot at readers and viewers is one angel investor. But millionaires tend to dislike socialism. George Soros, bête noir of the right, funds Democrats, not lefties.
This piece was submitted to The New York Times and The Washington Post. Both rejected it.
For leftists, Sputnik is still one of the few games in town.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
A judge has ordered the New York Times to exercise prior restraint in publishing materials that originated with Project Veritas, the right-wing hidden-camera organization. Newspapers and First Amendment groups are understandably concerned, but it’s hard to take them seriously about press freedom when they ignore, underplay or outright smear WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who is literally dying in a British prison awaiting extradition to the United States for espionage charges related to his journalism.
Like climate change, this is one of those problems I keep expecting people to wise up about but — because they never do — it keeps getting worse.
Thus this tutorial.
The problem is that too many Americans conflate the First Amendment with free speech.
You see it when people discuss the current social-media crackdown against controversial right-wing radio talk show host Alex Jones and his website InfoWars. Jones was banned by Facebook, YouTube (which is owned by Google), Apple and Spotify, and more recently suspended by Twitter for one week. Writing in The New Yorker Steve Coll mocked Jones for calling himself the victim of “a war on free speech.”
“Such censorship is not unconstitutional,” Coll reminds readers. “The First Amendment protects us against governmental intrusions; it does not (yet) protect speech on privately owned platforms.”
The U.S. government is rarely in a position to censor Americans’ freedom of expression. Because the vast majority of censorship is carried about by non-government entities (like the social media companies blocking Jones) the First Amendment only bans a tiny portion of censorship.
Some government agencies do censor the press. A federal judge ordered The New York Times to halt publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The LAPD, whose pension fund owned part of the parent company of The Los Angeles Times and was angry about my work criticizing its brutality and incompetence, ordered the Times to fire me as its cartoonist. They complied. Annoyed by an editorial in the local paper criticizing them for conducting random searches of high school students at basketball games using dogs, the police in Baker City, Oregon created a fake dossier of crimes committed by the editorial writer, which they used to get him fired from his job.
These cases are covered by the First Amendment. But they are outliers.
We can’t protect existing rights if we don’t understand the current parameters of the law. New rights arise from unfulfilled political needs and desires; we can’t fight for expanded protections without defining what is lacking yet desired. Schoolchildren and student journalists, both public and private, are constantly running up against censorship by teachers and administrators. Employers constrain political speech, obscenity and other forms of expression on the job. These are free speech but not First Amendment issues.
In recent decades opponents of free speech, mostly but not exclusively on the right, have relentlessly conflated First Amendment debates with those over free speech. The effect has been to reduce society’s expectations of how much freedom we ought to have to express ourselves.
Take the Jones case.
Writing for the website Polygon, Julia Alexander provides us with a boilerplate (liberal) response to Jones and his allies’ complaints that the big social media companies are suppressing his free speech. First she described some of the episodes that prompted banning Jones, such as pushing PizzaGate and Sandy Hook shooting denialism. Then she pounces: “It’s not a freedom of speech issue, nor one of censorship,” Alexander writes. “The First Amendment…gives American citizens the freedom of speech…The United States government isn’t bringing the hammer down on Jones. This isn’t a political issue, as badly as Jones might want to pretend otherwise.”
See what Alexander did? In just a few sentences she squeezes and smooshes the extremely broad practice of “censorship” into the relatively tiny box of “the U.S. government…bringing the hammer down.” I don’t mean to pick on her — I’ve seen this same exact ball of sophistry used over and over by countless other pundits.
Of course Twitter, Facebook et al. are censoring Jones. Of course the First Amendment doesn’t cover him here. Obviously it’s a freedom of speech issue. The question — the question pro-censorship folks like Alexander doesn’t want us to ask — is, is it right?
For what is right is not always what is legal (see: slavery). Alex Jones and his allies may or not be legit. Their political arguments often are not. But the question they’re asking here is legit and important: should companies like YouTube have the power to suppress speech — any kind of speech?
Alexander ends with a message you ought to find chilling: “Don’t publish vile content, and your video will probably be a-ok.”
“Probably”?
Who gets to define “vile”? Alexander? Mark Zuckerberg, apparently.
Obviously it is a political issue. But that’s not the main point here.
Free speech used to belong to the man with the means to buy ink by the barrel. Now you can buy a newspaper for pennies on the dollar, but who will read it? Much if not most of the political debate in our civic life takes place on platforms owned, controlled and censored by the companies blocking Jones’ content. They write and enforce their own rules. As private companies they are unaccountable to we, the people. We don’t know how they make censorship decisions or who makes them.
Perhaps this is a splendid state of affairs. Maybe Americans don’t mind surrendering control of political debate to faceless tech giants.
Whatever we decide, however, we deserve a transparent discussion. We ought not to let ourselves be fooled into falsely equating free speech to the First Amendment. Free speech means exactly that: everyone and anyone can say anything at all, anywhere they please, to anyone.
Every First Amendment case is a free speech issue. But only a tiny fraction of free speech issues is a First Amendment case.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Distributed by Creators Syndicate
(C) 2018 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved.
This past week more than 300 American newspapers colluded — if the word fits… — to simultaneously publish editorials declaring themselves, contra Trump, not “the enemy of the people.” Shortly thereafter the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution declaring that it too did not consider the press to be, in a phrase that evokes the rhetoric of the former Soviet Union, state enemies.
The Boston Globe organized this journalistic flash mob.
“The greatness of America is dependent on the role of a free press to speak the truth to the powerful,” the Globe‘s editorial board wrote. “To label the press ‘the enemy of the people’ is as un-American as it is dangerous to the civic compact we have shared for more than two centuries.” President Trump has repeatedly derided the media as “the enemy of the people” and purveyors of “fake news” on Twitter and at campaign rallies.
The First Amendment guarantee of press freedom, the Globe wrote, “has protected journalists at home and served as a model for free nations abroad. Today it is under serious threat.”
Is it really?
The surprise election of Donald Trump has elicited more the-sky-is-falling handwringing than any other political event in my lifetime (I will turn 55 next week). Very Serious People have warned in Big Important Newspapers that the rise of Trump harkens the transformation of the U.S., and other Western democracies, into fascist states. Even before he took office, the ACLU called Trump “a one-man constitutional crisis.”
No doubt, Trump’s rhetoric evokes the president’s authoritarian instincts: deriding his foes as anti-American, calling for and ordering mass deportations, supporting torture, and yes, press-bashing showcase the mindset of a man who doesn’t support democratic values and probably doesn’t even know much about the history or philosophy behind them.
But let’s separate Trump’s crude rally remarks and crass online rants from his Administration’s policies. What is he actually doing? How does his day-to-day governance represent a radical departure from the norms established by presidential precedents?
When you set aside Trump’s talk in order to focus instead on his walk, it is hard to conclude that he is an outlier by American standards. A better analogy, a friend observes, is Kaposi sarcoma, a cancer commonly associated with AIDS. It can kill you. But it’s not the main reason you’re having problems.
In other words, Trump isn’t — despite what 300-plus newspaper editorial boards would have us think — a root cause of American crisis. He is a symptom of preexisting conditions. This is important. Because if we delude ourselves into thinking that getting rid of Trump will fix what ails us, things will only get worse.
Running down the list of what offends people about Trump, there is nothing here we haven’t seen before — and ignored when other presidents did them.
Trump stands accused of colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 election. There is still zero evidence that this happened. It’s still just vague insinuations leaked to newspapers with histories of cozying up to the CIA-FBI-NSA by anonymous CIA-FBI-NSA spooks.
There is, on the other hand, ample evidence that Ronald Reagan colluded with Iran to delay the release of the 52 American embassy hostages held in Tehran in order to destroy Jimmy Carter’s reelection chances.
Richard Nixon colluded with a shadowy Taiwanese business executive with ties to South Vietnam in order to scuttle the Johnson Administration’s last-ditch attempt to negotiate peace between South and North Vietnam just before the 1968 election. Nixon squeaked by the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, by 0.7%. LBJ said Nixon was guilty of “treason,” but nothing happened.
Trump has been criticized for mass deportations of illegal immigrants, including separation of children from their parents, and rightly so.
But there is nothing new about Trump’s actions on immigration. Bill Clinton deported 12 million people, George W. Bush deported 10 million and Obama deported 5 million. (Obama’s numbers were lower but more robust because he ordered ICE to charge illegal immigrants as criminals. They faced prison if they returned. Previous presidents merely sent them home on buses and planes.)
As the National Immigration Law Center points out, “President Trump is exploiting the tools and infrastructure set in place by previous administrations to (1) expand the definition of who should be banned and deported and (2) militarize federal agencies and build up the deportation machine.”
Separating children from their parents at the border began under Obama, albeit in smaller numbers.
Trump has legitimized the “alt-right,” i.e. the psychotic right-wingers we used to call Nazis, Klansmen and fascists. Even after a fascist murdered a woman and injured others at an alt-right riot in Charlottesville, the president wallowed in false equivalence: “You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” Coddling racists is disgusting. But it’s not new to American politics.
During the 1990s then-First Lady Hillary Clinton called some African-American youth “superpredators.”
Reagan relied on racist dog-whistles during his 1980 campaign, which he launched in the small Mississippi town where the Klan murdered four Freedom Riders during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. “I believe in states’ rights,” Reagan said. States right was political code for supporting racial segregation.
Reagan also referred to Cadillac-driving “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks” buying T-bone steaks with food stamps on the campaign trail.
On substance, legislation and regulation, Donald Trump is virtually indistinguishable from his predecessors, many of whom are responsible for far more serious attacks on democracy.
George W. Bush alone is guilty of far more heinous crimes. He introduced the dangerous explosion of “signing statements” in which the president signs a bill into law and then crosses his fingers behind his back, secretly ordering that the law not be enforced. And he invaded Iraq preemptively, an extreme violation of international law, which states that nations may only go to war in self-defense or when faced with a grave and imminent military threat.
Where Trump differs from previous presidents is in tone. He is obnoxious and obscene. He lies — loudly. At least in public — they all swear in private — Americans like their leaders calm, deliberative and low-key.
It isn’t surprising that Trump’s trash-talking is freaking people out. But we shouldn’t conflate rudeness with an existential threat to democracy. Democracy, decency and civility were never real American values in the first place. That, not Trump, is the real problem.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s independent political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
