94 Comments

“A personality disorder Boer” will go down in the history of spleen with Spy’s description of Trump as a “short fingered vulgarian.”

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Really was a delightful turn of phrase. I chuckled.

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*disordered

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Not sure how I missed "short fingered vulgarian"... but delightful. I am ashamed that I enjoy is so much.

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Trump was a particular favorite of Spy in the 80s, and the feeling was mutual. He predicted their imminent demise weekly if not daily. In response they started a regular column, “Chronicle of our Death Foretold.” Those were the days!

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Come for the cogent explanation of the First Amendment, stay for the Quinn Emmanuel shade.

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So much shade, I don’t need sunnies.

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Dan Cooper, you are the master of the aviators, at least in the sketches I've seen. I'm surprised they haven't found you by now, what with the internet commentariat and all that.

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Oh, and that Harper's letter? Bari Weiss is herself among the biggest practitioners of cancel culture that exist.

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I like how Elon got Ken to come back to Twitter

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Concur.

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Elmo, everybody's favorite unreconsructed Afrikaner apartheid enthusiast, needs to be removed from his companies for the same reason Henry Ford was removed from his in 1941 - national security. (Ford, the Elmo of the 20th Century, didn't want to produce the tools to defeat the failed artist and former paperhanger who had called him "the American I admire the most for clarifying my understanding of important issues" in a 1932 interview, was removed by the board of directors at Ford - with the government breathing down their necks - which led to producing B-24s and jeeps and tanks and other things that led to Herr Paperhanger unfortunately taking his own life. Ford Jr. - on becoming CEO - discovered dad's accounting practices were as dodgy as his socio-religious views). Get Elmo away from Space-X and Starlink and such, and let him keep Xitter (that's pronounced "shitter") and the Tinny Toy Car Company.

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Not sure I’m ok with you slandering Elmo by substitution for Elon. Who’s next? Cookie Monster? Is no one safe?

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The good Elmo will always be the good Elmo. It's been discovered that the "bad" Elmo really really hates being called that, sooo........

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So it's, Elmo Musketeer.

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good one!

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It must continue, for the sake of FREE SPEECH!

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I’m sorry Ken but I think you’re being too kind to Elon here, I mean I don’t know that he even knows what he thinks he thinks here

Advertiser’s choosing not to advertise his ‘oppression’ is such a stupid thing to say I don’t think he even knows what he is teeing say, it’s just an eruption of spite using words and concepts he doesn’t even try to understand

You’ve given way more thought to what he thinks he means in this piece than he himself has ever done in his life

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A little framing here. Elon thinks that X itself embodies the right to free speech. As usual, Elon believes he imbibes and personifies the goals of his companies, like Rogue in X-Men comics. An attack on X or its ability to attract ad revenue is therefore an attack on “free speech.” It’s a ridiculous assertion but so is the one where Bill Gates shorting Tesla is attacking the goal of clean energy, or Jeff Bezos building a rocket is attacking the goal of going to Mars. Elon is not a capitalist. He’s a corporatist fascist, with him the embodiment of the state as god-king. If you frame everything that way, “free speech” makes more sense since it’s him who grants it as an indulgence not a right.

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Ken White is a national treasure.

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Great column.

There are circumstances where "my free speech means you have to shut up" is accurate, but they have to do with literally trying to drown out the speaker by chanting/storming the stage/blowing airhorns/whistling (an HLS favorite). Once somebody has stopped speaking, it is perfectly consistent with "First Amendment values" to criticize someone or their argument.

Here is an example of how counterspeech can work, even during the offensive speech. In 1993, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell was invited to give the graduation address at Harvard, over the objections of many alumni. The objection to Gen. Powell's speech was his endorsement of "don't ask/don't tell", which barred LGBT citizens from openly serving in this US military. So, a group of industrious activists handed out helium-filled pink balloons reading "Lift The Ban" to graduating students. Thousands of students flew those balloons during Powell's speech, providing a visual counterpoint.

https://www.nytimes.com/1993/06/09/news/campus-journal-balloons-of-protest-for-powell-at-harvard.html

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And, Musk is a big fat hypocrite anyway. On Friday, he threatened to suspend any account that used "from the river to the sea," without any effort to understand exactly how it's used. That's after another round of advertisers deserted him and AIPAC scolded him.

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Yes he is a big fact hypocrite but I think it's worth noting that's not how we always treat other slogans.

I mean, I can imagine all sorts of ways one might have used the phrase "blood and soil" in a positive way. In a different world you can imagine it being used as a slogan by Ukrainians about defending their land. However, since the Nazis used it we judge it to be tainted by that use and judge it by the company it keeps.

One could quite reasonably argue that it's appropriate to do the same with "from the river to the sea." Do I believe most people who use it now in the US support the destruction of Israel, no I don't but if we stopped treating "blood and soil" as tainted I bet that would change who uses the phrase and why as well.

Either way, I think it would be a socially harmful choice for Twitter to kick people off who use the phrase but I feel the same way about blood and soil too.

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Well put. That said, I don't think THAT many Palestinians, certainly not those who are not Hamas flag-flyers, use it for "the destruction of Israel" either. And, on that, I know I stand in line with Phil Weiss and Norman Finkelstein.

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Do you mean literal residents of Palestinian or people of Palestinian origin?

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I don't know enough to put exact percentages on people inside Palestine, but in general, I think many people inside Palestine do NOT mean it as "extermination of Israel." Besides Finkelstein and Weiss, I've read others like the later Robert Fisk write on this.

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I wouldn't be surprised if many people in Palestine don't mean the extermination of Israeli Jews but I'd have thought the destruction/elimination of the state of Israel would be pretty popular.

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If you stand with Norm you stand against Israel.

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I believe the correct answer is that, if I stand with Norman, I stand against Zionism. Now, if this necessitates the "one-state solution," as I believe it does and as I think he believes, well, yes, current Israel has to be superseded.

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What a surprise!

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It does clearly mean that the whole land of what is now Israel would be subsumed by Palestine, which means eliminating Israel as a nation, though would not require killing its citizens (as Hamas has advocated in the past).

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It has many uses, as detailed with Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_river_to_the_sea

And, per some of those uses, a "one-state solution" is the only realistic solution because Israel has permanently wrecked the two-state solution.

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Shan’t

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Seems like a precise spelled-out definition of the "cancel culture" threat to free speech would count the rescinding of law student Ryna Workman's job offer (because of criticisms of Israel) as a paradigm example of "real" cancel culture.

But then what's the difference between that and advertisers cutting ties with Musk, except that Musk is rich?

(Of course I agree that Musk's stuff about criticism being cancellation is stupid.)

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1. Ryna Workman wrote their screed in their position as Student Body President in a newsletter that went out to all students, even though they had no portfolio to discuss such topics. They had a column in the regular newsletter to discuss on-campus issues. That display of no judgment and abuse of power, alone, would have been sufficient to revoke an offer.

2. The firm had been very clear, in advance, where they stood on this issue.

3. The firm's clients likely held a similar position.

4. An incoming first year associate at an AmLaw100 Firm literally has nothing to offer other than hours of service and NOT being an impediment to the firm getting business.

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There is free speech as a cultural construct and free speech as a legal principle in the US. They are obviously not the same. The latter is irrelevant here, except to point out that it is irrelevant (no state action).

As a cultural construct, I think there are ways of dealing with disagreement that foster free expression and ways that hinder it. So, thick skin fosters it, and thin skin hinders it. Ad hominem hinders and focusing on content fosters. "Canceling" by calling for firing or career destruction hinders, while keeping disagreement verbal fosters.

As a cultural construct, free speech is going to hell in much of the West because of thin skins, ad hominem ("transphobe" anyone?), and calls for career destruction that are spinelessly heeded. Mere verbal criticism--even if harsh and by large numbers of people on social media (no, they are not mobs), is a free speech virtue that is being unjustifiably undermined by a culture of victimhood (thin skin).

Advertisers pull on media is necessary to that business model--Elon is a fool for thinking that should not be the case. But it is also a powerful argument for spaces like Substack. When it comes to media types, let a thousand flowers bloom. That's where the First Amendment comes in--the govt has no right to be the gardener.

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If I employ someone and they say something that outs them as a raging bigot, I'm fully within my rights to fire them. If the company that employs someone who says something I find despicable, I'm fully within my rights to organize a boycott.

Those seem like cancelling to me, but also very strong instances of free speech. Free speech is not without social consequences. If it were, then nobody could say anything of consequence.

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I was explicitly not talking about rights—that’s First Amendment law and employment law and you are obviously correct.

I was talking about cultural practices that hinder or foster free expression. If I know I will get canned or ostracized or lose my career or business for the slightest unintended verbal perceived peccadillo then of course I will never open my mouth. This is not a rights issue but a question of what is desirable. You have made your preference clear.

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I was trying to address your comment about cultural constructs, not the First Amendment, but was unclear. I probably should have used different verbage from "within my rights." My bad.

My point was more that the social remedy to speech we don't like is social consequences, and the same remedy exists when the speech we don't like is the suggestion that someone should be cancelled.

We see this playing out in the world now. First, Musk amplifies bigots. Then public outcry leads to advertisers pulling their support for his platform. Then he whines about it in the hopes that the same public pressures will push those advertisers back. This all feels like a feature, not a bug.

I'm not sure your "slightest unintended verbal perceived peccadillo" is causing anyone to lose their careers. J.K. Rowling's books are still getting published. Things would obviously be bad if it were the case that a slight unintended slip could cause someone to lose their career, but I think that's a straw man. What is desirable, in my view, is that people consider what they say just a teensy bit before saying it. And if public outcry leads someone to actually change their mind on an issue that matters to some people, then it will have been worth all the tweets that died unsent.

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You write, "[t]hings would obviously be bad if it were the case that a slight unintended slip could cause someone to lose their career, but I think that's a straw man."

It's happening in a way that did not exist even just a dozen years ago. Look up former NYT reporter Donald McNeil Jr.

Here I am quoting from the source cited below:

"In 2010, free speech organization FIRE saw 19 attempts to get professors punished. But then came an explosion. From 2014 to mid-2023, we know of more than 1,000 attempts to get professors fired, punished, or otherwise silenced. About two thirds of these attempts are successful, resulting in consequences from investigation to termination. But even unsuccessful attempts matter, because they are more than sufficient in chilling speech.

"This many professors getting fired is truly unprecedented. It’s occurring on a scale that hasn’t been seen since the Supreme Court first established First Amendment protections of academic freedom and campus speech. In fact, we’d have to go all the way back to the 1950s to see anything even remotely on this scale.

"To give a sense of proportion, only three professors were fired or forced out of schools over something they said in the post-9/11 panic. The modern era of cancel culture (2014 to present), by contrast, has resulted in almost 200 professor terminations. That exceeds even the standard estimate of 100 professors terminated in the second Red Scare (1947 to 1957)."

See https://www.thefp.com/p/american-colleges-gave-birth-to-cancel-culture?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fcancel%2520culture&utm_medium=reader2

Documented extensively in the recent book "The canceling of the American Mind."

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The problem with cancel culture isn't the canceling – if someone says something sufficiently awful (say, "From the river to the sea" or "Heil Hitler") they should lose friends and job opportunities. People are free to dissociate themselves from the truly hateful or bigoted.

The problem is the culture portion of cancel culture – the gleeful grievance-mongering, the endless search for heretics, and the declaring of any deviation from current orthodoxy (even if it was common belief two years prior) to be worthy of social and professional exile.

There need to be limits to what society will tolerate, but they need to be set appropriately. Too far, and we become the Reason comment section. Too close, the Cultural Revolution. Successful societies operate closer to the former than the latter, but they still need taboos.

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Calling someone a transphobe when they are behaving like a transphobe is "ad hominem"? If someone is saying black people are naturally inferior to white people and I call them a racist, is that also ad hominem?

And why shouldn't I call for the firing of someone who I see behave as a bigot, racist, transphobe, whatever? It's just me saying I think they should be fired. How much impact does just my words actually have? But if the people employing them also see them as a problem, isn't it their right to fire them? And if it is a large number of people who see the person's attitudes or behavior as problematic and call their firing, causing pressure on their employee to do something about it, isn't that just cultural free speech showing that this person is behaving in ways that are not culturally acceptable?

Who exactly is the one with thin skin, here?

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See my reply to Nathan above. As for the "transphobe" accusation, it is an ad hominem approach most commonly employed to end conversations, not start them. A "transphobe" is anyone who dares to question prevailing ideology ("trans women are [literally] women") because they have blasphemous views that were almost universally thought as "fact" just 15 years ago. Maya Forstater lost her job for stating an objective fact that counters a new religion that is the epistemic equivalent of the Catholics' belief in transubstantiation via the Eucharist.

This is all totally legal, of course. So was McCarthyism.

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You have been sucked in to a right wing culture war. Are you going to say the same thing about calling someone a homophobe because they don't think gay people deserve to be able to marry? All the anti-trans stuff is happening now because the right wing lost the gay culture war, and they explicitly targeted trans people as a new focus and point of division.

The New York Times actually recently had an article about this, though there is a lot it doesn't cover about the planning behind that original 2016 attempt at targeting trans people: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/us/politics/transgender-conservative-campaign.html

You are also using a clear straw man. Nobody is saying "trans women are literally women." That is, nobody is saying trans women have XX chromosomes and are born with a uterus and such. I mean that makes no sense. What they are saying is in terms of gender identity, trans women are women. That is, in their sense of who they are, often from very early in childhood, their gender identity is that of a woman.

There is plenty of scientific research to back this up. And the growing acknowledgement of trans children comes from years of real research on trans people that shows that gender identity is a distinct thing and typically develops at a young age (around 3-4).

If you don't want to recognize that, you are arguing against fairly well established, at this point, scientific fact. If you do recognize that scientific fact, the recent stuff being done against trans children looks especially cruel.

(Also it telling that this whole discussion is always always about trans women, and trans men just don't exist. So we get an extra layer of sexism on top of everything else.)

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I beg to differ. This is not a right wing left wing thing but an epistemic sea change. I’m a lifelong liberal Democrat who is increasingly alienated by Progressive religiosity.

As for the huge distinction and contradictions between LGB and T, I refer you to Andrew Sullivan’s Substack The Weekly Dish. You can also read Steve QJ's The Commentary. They speak for me 100%. I assume you know who Sullivan is and his role in the gay rights movement. No sense in repeating what he has written.

As for the focus on trans women, it is because they are the ones making all the noise. You do not hear about trans men demanding to be in men's private spaces or on men's athletic teams or in men's prisons. And understandably so! Also, trans women seem more obnoxious than trans men ---kinda like how men are more obnoxious than women as a rule. Transition doesn't seem to affect that.

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Right, one of the points of this right-wing effort is to divide the gay community. They have been somewhat successful at it, but generally people in the gay community (which I am part of, are you?) have been recognizing this. Though there are exceptions.

Trans people are not new. Of course there is all the Stonewall background. But there was Renée Richards in 1975, at which time there was a bunch of controversy and legal suits and then she competed in the 1977 US Open. In 2003 the International Olympic Committee created guidelines for transgender athletes to compete.

There is huge sudden change here, except what it is, is conservatives deliberately picked transgender people as their new target after they lost the gay marriage war.

And now, the issue is not trans women making all the noise. You hear so

much about them because they are the ones being targeted, because they are the easiest to vilify. There is a lot of similarity to the gay rights movement, where gay men where pointed at as horrible sex perverts out to corrupt children (even just gay men kissing was an outrage), while lesbians... didn't matter. They were probably just confused, needed a good man. A whole barrel of sexism in all of this.

I mean... "do not hear about trans men demanding to be in men's private spaces" -- because nobody is keeping them out! Because they are totally ignored and just treated as men. Because there is a deep incoherence to all of this. Consider the bathroom bills: these are requiring that trans men -- like https://www.out.com/transgender/2019/9/24/tvs-first-black-trans-male-regular-cast-9-1-1-spinoff -- go to the women's bathroom. Or trans men compete against women in sports. But they just are obsessed with trans women and pretend like trans men don't exist, so this doesn't matter.

And a little hint: trans women have been using the women's bathroom for *years*. Years and year and years. And nobody knew and nobody cared until recently, because this is not a real issue.

Anyway, I am going to assume you have some specifically sensitivity to this, because someone has called you a transphobe. Sorry to say, from what you have written, there is a reason they said this, and it was not an ad hominem attack.

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You use the term "right wing" exactly like Trump uses the term "radical leftists"---to describe literally anyone who disagrees with anything he says. Can you conceive of a reality where someone may disagree with a nuance of yours without being summarily dismissed as "right wing?" It is as much of a conversation stopper as "transphobe."

Actually, I take as much flak from true right wingers as I do from you.

As for all the other stuff, I'll let Andrew Sullivan speak for me. https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/gay-rights-and-the-limits-of-liberalism?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2.

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Let me see . . . You didn’t leave progressive ideology, it left you, right?

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Defining an idea you don't care for as a religion in order to denigrate it is one of our discourse's most well-chewed clichés at this point and I'd argue mostly worthless in getting your point across.

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You see, “freedom of speech” is bestowed by god. That the constitution forbids the government from abridging it, is merely an extension of the common law that no one can abridge what god has bestowed, as adjudicated by anyone with a Twitter account.

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Musk certainly knows about "hordes of minorities," in as much as he's descended from members of one such horde that was foisted upon present day South Africa...

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If your point was only that Musk is an inconsistent thin-skin brat, well yah. But since you didn't need an article to make that point I presume you mean to critisize the many people who share many of his concerns but probably don't care about journalists being mean to him. However, most people aren't professionally trained as lawyers, mathematicians or philosophers so engaging with their arguments in a precisce way requires charitably reconstructing the best argument they could make and I don't think you've done that here.

Specifically, I think the argument would go something like this:

While it's true that a legally requiring advertisers to display their ads next to viewpoints they disagree with would violate their legal free speech rights when it's the case that people who have socially disapproved of views face a systemic barrier to expressing those views because of the economics of social media that risks societal harm in a manner that's analagous to the harm that results when the government can decide who can speak.

True, no one gets put in prison in this case but, the reason it's so important that we protect free speech is to avoid losing the social value of potentially true but unpopular speech and/or to provide a kind of systemic safety valve that ensures a large fraction of the populace doesn't feel they are being prevented from expressing themselves potentially leading to unrest or (my personal view) voting in someone like Trump as an expression of frustration.

I think that's a very reasonable argument we should take seriously and suggests that having ad supported social media companies lacking in strong norms that favor allowing unpopular speech (not necessarily literally all...but a window wider than most people would intuitively feel comfortable with) is socially harmful.

Obviously, that doesn't mean the government can intervene and demand all social media have viewpoint nuetral speech norms or the like but it might be a decent moral argument to start paying for your social media and it does have public policy implications for, eg, whether interoperability standards should be mandated for social media firms. You can't mandate Twitter display tweets they dislike but you could mandate that competitors like mastadon or truth social be given access to the feed so they can display tweets natively on their platforms (reducing network effects).

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November 20, 2023
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That's literally the opposite of what I was saying. Was I that unclear or did you mean to reply to someone else?

I said you can't (and shouldn't) legally mandate Twitter to show offensive tweets but you can make sure that I can leave Twitter if they are too heavy handed and go somewhere else and I can still see my favorite people's tweets and if they use a third party client they can reply. Ideally Twitter responds by realizing it's not in their economic interest to push people off the platform and instead just empowers users to control what they see.

(if u mean the Trump remark that was a statement of my belief that I think someone as willing to tear things down as Trump is was elected because so many voters felt they weren't even able to voice /see voices their frustrations within normal channels).

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November 20, 2023
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No worries I was just worried I was really unclear.

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