America is fast becoming a nation of control freaks. Question is who’s controlling whom? If you guessed the traditional source of repression, the government, you’re only half right. In the last decade government has farmed out its control and command functions to its campaign donors, a well-heeled bunch of corporate hucksters whose rules for public conversation and the sharing of ideas are tightly regulated. Only the ideas they approve of are allowed in the public commons and on social media.
Social media used to be the domain where political speech from the left, right, and all the extremes in between jousted verbally in cacophonous bliss. That welcome mat has been shredded. What remains is a sterile wasteland of what the tech gestapo — censors from Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Google — have decreed “authentic” speech. Those who violate their idiotically convoluted rules are subject to banishment.
First these monsters trample on Constitutional guarantees, like the first amendment, then they brag about their “handiwork.” Here’s Parag Agrawal, CEO of twitter, that used to be the premiere site for political opinions, implying that free speech rights are “quaint.” (the word George W. Bush’s Attorney General actually used to describe the Geneva Conventions Article against torture)
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“Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation. the kinds of things that we do to work about this is to focus less on thinking about free speech but thinking about how times have changed. One of the changes today that we see is speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak but our role which is particularly emphasized is who can be heard. [from a Parag Agrawal 2020 speech] |
What manner of collective hubris would lead these corporate criminals to believe that they could get away with hijacking the constitution? Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi thinks she knows — “The Constitution does not say that a person can yell ‘wolf’ in a crowded theater. If you are endangering people, then you don’t have a constitutional right to do that.” Actually you do, since wolf attacks in U.S. theatres pose little or no threat to the public. After the January 6 banditry on Capitol Hill, she demanded that the protestors be treated as “terrorists.” We all know what that means. Off to Guantanamo!
Political Washington has always been a little squishy about the “preposterous” idea of Americans expressing views that the government or the elites they favor disagree with. In 1919, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of two American Socialists who committed the heinous act of distributing leaflets opposing the draft before the first world war and labeling military service “involuntary servitude” [Schenck v. United States]. Also in 1919, political activist Eugene Debs was convicted of committing the same offenses in public speeches [Debs v. United States]. It took almost half a century for the Supreme Court to wake up and smell the roses. In 1969 Clarence Brandenburg, a leader of the Ku Klux Klan, was convicted in state court of advocating violence in speeches and at rallies The Supreme Court overturned that ruling affirming that “mere advocacy” even that which assumed the necessity for violence or law violation was protected speech. The court’s solution to “bad” speech was more speech not less.
For many years, Brandenburg gave people the security of knowing that they could express their opinions freely and openly without fear of punishment. In the corporatocracy that exists in the U.S. today that is not possible A Ku Klux Klan member on Twitter? Perish the thought. On the government side, although Brandenburg has never been overturned, it has been nicked. In 2010, a more conservative court (Brandenburg came out of the Warren court) upheld the right of the feds to subject accused pornographers to “indefinite incarceration” often exceeding their original sentence. Anonymous authorities using never-disclosed standards target certain offenders as “likely” future offenders subject to non-judicial confinement.
A more serious attack on Brandenburg came in 2012 during the administration of the constitutional lawyer who became president in 2009. Sections 1021 and 1022 of the NADA (Defense Department’s annual budget authorization) called for the indefinite military detention of persons the government suspects of involvement in terrorism, including U.S. citizens arrested in the U.S. Later efforts to overturn those sections were unsuccessful. In case you need something to keep you up at night, indefinite military detention of civilians has never been repealed.
Making matters worse, U.S. civil society has become increasingly militarized infecting traditional democratic institutions like education, domestic law enforcement, national security, intelligence agencies and U.S. relations with the rest of the world. The inevitable corporatization and privatization of public lands, roads, waterways and public spaces is another notch in the belt of corporate hegemony. It’s what happens when “walking around money” is stuffed into the campaign war chests of virtually every elected representative in Congress and the White House. From there, a hop, skip, and a jump brought media moguls and their fellow elite travelers to their present position: control of the public marketplace of ideas.
In an increasingly militarized and corporatized nation, where democratic institutions are crumbling, conformity and obedience to the dictates of oligarchy have become the new religion, is it any wonder that the corporate behemoths who control the media are the new arbiters of what the public can say and hear with the power to enforce their free-speech-killing principles by punishing those who refuse to knuckle under.
A hundred years ago Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had a better solution to the airing of unpopular ideas— “[T]he ultimate good desired [in combatting hateful speech] is better reached by free trade in ideas…” [1919]. Is it too late to season what passes for “free speech,” in the U.S. today with a dollop of contrary opinions? Unseating an entrenched corporate mafia that has plenty of money and power and controls the government takes a lot of muscle. Mass movements and plenty of pitchforks are the best weapons the people have.
