#You did that video on a “Supreme Court Justice” or “”Phantom“”

[gothamphantomgoat]

[cksmart-world]

The completely unnecessary news analysis

by Christopher Smart

June 2, 2020

COLIN KAEPERNICK & ENDEMIC RACISM

How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever,” said Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama on March 25, 1965. “How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Well, here we are in 2020 and the cities of this country are again ablaze after yet another African American was slain senselessly by police. White America, take a look around. How does Colin Kaepernick look now. Banished from the NFL for taking a knee during the national anthem, he became a pariah of team owners who feared white fans and white supremacists, like Donald Trump and Mike Pence, would boycott games because Kaepernick “disrespected the flag.” The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback knelt in silent protest against racism and the continuing killing of black men by police. It's the kind of peaceful dissent that authorities say they respect now that there is rioting in the streets. In peaceful times, not so much. To be black or brown in this country is to be a second-class citizen constantly on guard and subject to insult  and humiliation on a daily basis. That this society, particularly police, law makers, government institutions and corporate America, casts a blind eye to racism makes all white America complicit in the lynching of Gerald Floyd.

GORE AND HILLARY... WHAT IF?

Ever wonder what kind of world we'd be living in if Al Gore had been elected president in 2000 and Hillary Clinton had been elected in 2016. Both Democrats won the popular vote. In Hillary's case, a total of 88,000 votes across three states delivered the Electoral College victory to Donald Trump. The U.S. Supreme Court handed George W. Bush a questionable win over Gore. But imagine if Gore had won. Karl “Bush's Brain” Rove would now be a greeter at Walmart. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld wouldn't be war criminals. And Condie Rice wouldn't go down in history as ignoring the warnings of 9-11. The economy might not have fallen off a cliff. And George W. Bush could have gotten a head start on his new avocation, painting-by-numbers. If a perfect storm had not somehow landed Donald Trump in the White House, we wouldn't have “Fake News.” The “enemy of the people” would be taking after Hillary. And Jason Chaffetz, Mr. Ethics From Utah, would still be in Congress investigating Benghazi. The MAGA hat people would retreat to the woods in their camouflage, readying their AR-15s for the revolution. And the U.S. Office of Global Health Security and Biodefense would not have been disbanded and we wouldn't have more Covid 19 deaths that any other country in the world — and we wouldn't have that “badge of honor,” that Trump boasts about. Is it just a coincidence or are Republicans just really good at driving us into the ditch.

TILTING AT PHANTOMS & DEMOCRATS

“The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat,” said Couy Griffin, the head dude of Cowboys for Trump. His group and other would-be heroic knuckle-draggers are upset because of the coronavirus pandemic and attendant business closings, social distancing and, not least, face masks. It's all been a freedom grab by those Demon Democrats. Anti-lockdown protesters are spoiling for a fight even as states relax coronavirus restrictions. In Kentucky, a patriotic hater hanged an effigy of Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear with the slogan: “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” which means “thus always to tyrants.” It's popular with anti-government types — little surprise, that's what John Wilkes Booth shouted before shooting Lincoln. WTF. How did Democrats become responsible for coronavirus? Don't try to apply logic to Trumpers — they just need someone to hate. And the hater-in-chief is calling out Democrats because... well, because they're Democrats. Anti-lockdown patriot Adam Smith from North Carolina posted a video on Facebook saying his bunch were willing to kill people over coronavirus restrictions. “I'm not trying to strike fear in people by saying, ' I'm going to kill you, ' ” he explained. “I'm gonna say, 'If you bring guns, I'm gonna bring guns.'” That's funny, nobody said anything about guns except these mad-as-hell self-described patriots. But damnit, they need a fight. And who better to take on but those phantoms, wherever they are. F---ing phantoms.

SAME SMOKE, DIFFERENT DAY

For those who lived through the Vietnam War era, like Wilson and the band, the ugly face of America now on display has a taste of déjà vu 1968 about it. When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on  April 4, 1968, riots broke out in 125 American cities. Police had a deadly shootout with Black Panthers in Oakland. Civil rights advocate and presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy was murdered on June 5. The Democratic National Convention brought police riots to Chicago during the last week of August 1968. The country was coming apart. Those events followed the Tet Offensive in January 1968, when an all-out assault by the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong fighters on South Vietnam convinced Americans the war could not be won, despite the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans who had given their lives for the dubious cause. A disproportionate number of black Americans died in Southeast Asia. Those who did come home could not hail a cab or buy a house in certain neighborhoods. We have arrived at the tinder-box stage again here in the country that promises in God we trust and all men are created equal and boasts anthems of togetherness: America! America! God shed his grace on thee and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining seas!

Post script — Who was it who said things can always get worse. Oh man. Well, we've got the coronavirus pandemic with 104,000 dead and counting. We've got 45 million people out of work, many of whom could soon become homeless. The country's leader is insane and terrifying and has created a nationwide theater of the absurd. The Republican Party has been sucked into the delusion and its officers fall all over themselves praising the emperor's new clothes. And, of course, we have police killing black people from coast to coast for no good reason. No wonder astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken wanted to blast off in the Space X Dragon spacecraft and get the hell out of Dodge. Outer space seems so nice right about now. But we are stuck here on Earth and should make the best of it. All is not lost — people do good things for each other all the time. Each one of those acts of kindness make this a better place. As Buddha said: Our sorrows and wounds are healed only when we touch them with compassion.

Alright Wilson, tell the band to put down the hookah and take us outa here with a little something for our déjà vu:

There's something happening here / But what it is ain't exactly clear / There's a man with a gun over there / Telling me I got to beware

I think it's time we stop / Children, what's that sound? / Everybody look - what's going down?

There's battle lines being drawn / Nobody's right if everybody's wrong / Young people speaking' their minds / Are getting so much resistance from behind

It's time we stop / Hey, what's that sound? / Everybody look - what's going down?

What a field day for the heat / A thousand people in the street / Singing songs and carrying signs / Mostly saying, "hooray for our side"

It's time we stop / Hey, what's that sound? / Everybody look - what's going down?

(For What It's Worth, Stephen Stills - Buffalo Springfield)

[christiluv]

Dear President Trump

The Democrats keep blocking me from writing you at Whitehouse.gov, because they have essentially ruined my life, so now I must write this open public letter to you, because it is the only way to reach out to you.

......................... ABOUT YOU .........................

Dear Mr. President,

First and foremost, I'd just like to say that my family and I voted for you in 2016, and you are the 1st GOP presidential candidate that I myself have ever cast my vote for at the ballot box. We have GREAT respect for you, your WONDERFUL family and your PHENOMENAL empire, which you have created.

We admire your strength and intelligence, The First Lady's beauty and style, and your kids' grace and poise, following in your footsteps of greatness. We are very proud of you and all the amazing things you have accomplished. We think you're doing a FANTASTIC job!

We also hope that your party falls in line and works with you to get more done, so that you can win again in 2020 as well as in the midterms, and do more good work for "We The People".

You are most certainly-- a "winner"!!! --And we LIKE your tweets!

..................... ABOUT US ....................

~ ME ~

I'm a writer, who's been writing since childhood, won awards for both singing, songwriting, poetry and essays, and I beat out hundreds of teens, chosen to write for The Orlando Sentinel Newspaper as teen journalist and music / concert reviewer.

I studied writing and film in college, wrote, produced and directed the film short, "A Babysitter's Nightmare", and also collaborated with my writing partner / Mom, to write, produce and direct the music video "Love Dance". I've been a church youth leader, who wrote several newsletters and an advice column, and I have a strong social media presence, writing blogs, Youtube "TV" videos, audio books, and a soap opera, "The Young and The Powerful".

Between Facebook, Youtube and Twitter,  I have gained over 10K fans, with songs trending at #1 on ReverbNation for over a year now, and my video / audiobook, "@VirginLoveTV presents The Top 3 Reasons Why I Stopped Dating-- A #VirginSecrets #RealTalk Chat with Christi Luv", and GarageBand album, "@GirlPowerTV presents #CrowdfundThis Til We #RevivePOPmusic!" --An Original Song Sampler CD & MP3, out on Soundcloud and ReverbNation, and soon to be on Amazon.

Some of the novels I've authored include The Book Club Elite acclaimed YA paranormal romance mystery adventure, "Chris Taylor's Hunting Love: The Curse of The Blood Red Seductress", the MG superhero fantasy action adventure, "Chris Taylor's Angel Wars: Comet & Lady Phantom Rise", and the YA murder mystery conspiracy thriller, "The Killer Secrets of Skyler Stone: My Funny Valentine", as well as many screenplays, titles, and a catalog of hit blockbuster commercial concepts, including the inspirational YA paranormal romance mystery drama, "Love Me Tender: The Existence of Sound".

~ MOM ~

My Mom is a veteran performer of stage, tours (Marvelettes, Platters), TV, Broadway, Film ("Hair!", U. A.), and recording (Motown, CBS), with songs published ("Maybe, Maybe Not", "Smile", E.M.I. Italy), and a studio singer on film soundtracks ("The Point", "Lion King"). She's written poems, stories, and stage plays since youth, later wrote, produced, and directed many summer youth productions, and has received awards from The Orlando Bureau of Recreation, Young Adults Progressive Club, NY Chamber of Commerce & Ohio Mayor's Office Recognition Awards for her work, presented by S.T.A.A (Support The Artists of America).

She wrote, produced and directed a PBS TV documentary, "Did You Know? Well You Should!", which won wide acclaim, was a journalist and theatre / film critic columnist for 5 years with The Orlando Times Newspaper. Affiliations include ASCAP, SAG - AFTRA, WGA, and FMPTA, with her PBS broadcasted TV special, "@BlackHeroesTV presents #HEROisTheNewBLACK!"--a positive documentary film series pilot, and "@GirlPowerTV presents #SupportHiddenLegends 2 #SaveMusicLegacies" Blog Journal, coming soon to Amazon.com.

Some of the novels TP has authored include The Book Club Elite acclaimed YA psychological drama suspense mystery, "T.D. Perkins' The Boy Next Door", and the YA social human interest drama, "T.D. Perkins' In His Shoes", as well as many screenplay scripts, titles, and a catalog of hit blockbuster commercial concepts, including the YA romantic horror mystery comedy, "Bite Me!".

Together, we write both fiction and nonfiction, in multiple genres, with an eye for promoting better positive role model characters of more diverse colors, heroes, and the spiritual power and beauty of God. We also write our novels as screenplays, with the end goal of producing them as blockbuster films. We have also written and compiled over 20 blog-journals together, including, "@MySoulFireTV presents The Hi-5-IQ Homeschooler's Guide To Critical Thinking ~ An Educational Textbook Series Overview & Notebook", which will be out soon on Amazon.

......................................... ABOUT OUR FAMILY .........................................

We are The Perkins Family. We've volunteered, donated, and hosted fund-raisers for other peoples' noble causes, and given to many charities, regularly over decades. On the creative front, we have conscientiously woven important social and moral causes into all of our written works, music and productions, and seek to educate and enlighten as well as entertain. We live in a racially mixed middle class neighborhood in Altamonte Springs, Florida. Born into a blended melting pot of Native American, Black and German blood in our ancestry, we come from a great family legacy of American History.

I spring from a noted genius musician and arranger dad, who graduated from a military academy.My grandpa was a military Veteran and former Sergeant, who fought for our country in World War 2, and lost his left hand. My great grandfather William Warley-- a Black Newspaper Owner / Editor / Publisher and NAACP Leader-- fought in 1917 to racially desegregate the housing communities in Louisville, Kentucky, with the historic U.S. Supreme Court case of Buchanan vs Warley-- and WON-- which is why he named her grandma "Victoria"-- for their/our "VICTORY". My uncle served in The Air Force, and other family members have served in various positions, or are currently serving our country and faith in other powerful ways. So the work we and our family have done and still do has given back to others in multiple ways. We look forward to giving back even more in creative ways.

.......................................... ABOUT THIS LETTER ..........................................

The reason why I'm writing you this letter is because some (and perhaps many) of us over in The I-4 Corridor purple swing state of Florida are being persecuted by at least 1 of 3 organized entities-- Utilities, Inc, Duke Energy, and an unidentified biological engineering agency that has been abusing their power in our home.

Utilities Inc and Duke Energy have cut off our-- and other peoples'-- water and power, over stupid technicalities and errors that were their fault or their orchestration, and there has been no compensation for all the business, health, and sanity that was lost from it.

We have consulted lawyers and are considering our lawsuit options to sue them. But what we need from you is your attention to the fact that these companies have no competition-- and that is why they get away with murder, hurting millions of seniors, veterans, and shut-ins all over the state and country.

Many people have worked hard but are still living paycheck to paycheck because the fields that they are good at or have expertise in do not pay them well, or no one will give them a better gig than what they have-- or they're too old or too sick to matriculate in the rough and tumble job market. These people need protection from vulture monopolies-- and competitive capitalism is the answer.

Won't you stand up for healthy competition for the monopolies that control peoples' lives?

We are literally starving artists, as there is no food in our fridge right now, but we are hungry for more than just physical tangible food--

We are hungry for change.

We are hungry for truth.

We are hungry for triumph.

We're also hungry for food--

But right now, we are passionately hungry for justice.

Will you help us fight back against the tyranny of the greedy monopolies that dominate our daily lives?

Before we file an official lawsuit against these companies, preferably this month, we are asking you or your people to step in and make an example of our utilities company and power company, using our situation to show why Free Market Capitalism-- the realm that you MASTER like a KING-- and the competition that makes it work-- are all so important to our society-- and to show that people-- especially those who have health problems, disabilities, and/or are aging seniors, who've worked all their lives and deserve a break now-- should not live and die on computer glitches and stupid procedural technicalities-- or company error.

It would also prove to all the ridiculously dumb haters and lying traitors out there that you really do care about people of color too, cause you're not racist like they try to slander you as, and it also shows everyone that you're so likable and winning that you got a socially conservative Independent (me) and Democrat (mom) to vote for you in 2016-- simply because--

--you just got it like that.

Either way, you would be doing good for good people, all over Central Florida, as well as doing good for a family that just so happens to come from a historic legacy of noble American History, honorable military veteran service, and uniquely creative giftedness.

We are suffering terribly-- constantly hungry and stressed out-- and I do believe that The Agency directing such negative things in our lives is savage, vicious, inhumane, abusive, haughty and vile. The evil way they torment us is cruel and unusual punishment-- and it needs to stop, like yesterday.

Please use your power to make them STOP doing bad things to us. Please rescue us. We put our hopes in Obama and he let us down. So now it's your turn. Please be our hero and show our old liberal friends-- and new conservative ones-- why we voted for you.

We are desperate for relief-- as ANY relief is GOOD relief at this point, and if things don't let up, I will have to hitchhike at night on the highway, to the ocean-- just to escape the pain and torture of it all.

We believe in you.

And I believe that as soon as this letter meets your eyes-- or your reader's eyes-- you'll come to our rescue and save our day, like The Big Man On Campus that you are. Because you are The Leader of our FREE World, The Head of our State, The Commander In Chief who WE voted for and supported the candidacy of, from jump street. We knew you were gonna win as soon as you said you were running!

That's how much faith we had in you!

So whether you get personally involved or you delegate someone on a lower level to get involved with this case, I know in my heart, soul, and gut that somehow you will help to fix this mess-- cause God put you in power to fight for the PEOPLE and make RIGHT what all the incompetent apathetic LOSERS do WRONG.

Because THAT'S who you ARE.

We are on your side, we have always been on your side during this election cycle, and we will remain standing by your side-- if we have any legs left to stand on by the end of this summer, month and week. Cause we're falling apart at the seams and when I prayed to God to deliver us, He told me to go directly to you, surpass all others, and reach out to the one in the highest office--

--and that's you.

Our last remaining hope...

Thank you. God Bless you. And if you see fit, we also welcome you to help support our efforts to help seniors, veterans and shut-ins in our Christian, faith-based Angel Hearts Art Club crowdfund project to raise funds to help the community at Patreon.com/SoulFireTV, and our effort to cure painful issues like my medical matters at Patreon.com/CureMeTV.

Thank you for reading this. We hope to hear from you or your people soon. We know you're busy dealing with crazy psycho dictators and whatnot... Hope all is well! :) And thanks so much for saving us all from this indecent hell!

God Bless!

Sincerely, Christi Luv AKA Chris Taylor 407-227-3710 / 407-788-8986 / MyTopShelfEditing@Gmail.com ReverbNation.com/ChristiLuv / MyArtHaven.WixSite.com/Shop

OUR URGENT CAUSE CAMPAIGNS:

Patreon.com/CureMeTV (To Pay For My Medicine)

Patreon.com/ChristiLuv (To Support Other Causes Including: Angel Hearts Art Club for Seniors, Vets & Shut-Ins & Crowdfund To Turn Our Positive, Original, Inspirational Teen and Young Adult Reading Novels Into Graphic Novels)

[jscottscales]

The Note: Obamacare central to midterm races

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Add The Note as an interest to stay up to date on the latest The Note news, video, and analysis from ABC News.

The campaign can be distracted by distortions and contradictions. Attention can and will be drawn to the Supreme Court, or to a migrant caravan and maybe briefly even toward a phantom tax cut.

But somehow races across the country keep coming back to one very big issue that's been galvanizing politics all decade: The politics of health care has come full circle since 2010.

With former President Barack Obama back on the campaign trail Friday, in Wisconsin and Michigan, it's striking to see how regularly his namesake law is item one in major races.

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., is but one example of an incumbent whose re-election is pinned on the hope that voters will want to preserve protections for those with pre-existing conditions -- and that they will reject President Donald Trump's notion that Republicans are the ones who should be trusted to do so.

"Josh Hawley decided to go to court with your tax dollars and wipe out pre-existing conditions," McCaskill said of her opponent, the state's attorney general, at a debate Thursday.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

President Donald Trump arrives for a campaign rally at the Toyota Center in Houston, Oct. 22, 2018.

Strategists in both parties recognize that days consumed by talking about health care -- the issue voters seem most inclined to talk about -- is a day Democrats are gaining ground.

The final 11 days before the midterms will take wild turns. Yet, from California to Maine, this is one topic that just won't go away.

There is careful, and then there is decent and, say, presidential.

Sure, Trump was careful this week following the frightening news that explosive devices were sent to Democratic leaders across the country.

He did not name Democrats at his rally Wednesday and make them targets of personal and rowdy attacks as he usually does.

But he also did not name them at all. He spoke only generally about being worried. White House staff dodged all questions about whether the president bothered to personally call his targeted predecessor.

Since taking office, Trump has struggled to show those Americans who prefer the other political party that he has their backs, too, and this week felt like more of the same on that front, despite the careful words.

Charlie Riedel/AP, FILE

Missouri incumbent Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill talks to the media after a debate against Republican challenger Josh Hawley, Oct. 25, 2018, in Kansas City, Mo.

2016 was the year the blue wall fell.

Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania were the states that propelled Trump to the presidency, and now his predecessor is back, in the final weeks of the midterm campaign, to try to re-take what was once solidly Democratic territory.

Obama's campaign swing Friday through Wisconsin and Michigan is meant to boost Democratic Senate and gubernatorial candidates, but it's also about reclaiming a key geographical part of the party's electoral coalition.

"The last presidential turned on fewer than 100,000 votes in three states. More people go to Coachella," Obama tweeted, urging people to get to the polls.

For a president often maligned for allowing state-party infrastructure to falter during his time in office, making amends can start with 2018 victories in Midwest battlegrounds.

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Former President Barack Obama speaks during a get-out-the-vote rally for Nevada Democratic candidates, Oct. 22, 2018, in Las Vegas.

ABC News' "Start Here" Podcast. Friday morning's episode features ABC News' Deborah Roberts, who is on the ground in Georgia getting a sense of the governor's race, which Democrats eye as a key pickup opportunity. And former Acting Under Secretary of Homeland Security and ABC News contributor John Cohen tells us about the New York Times report that China is listening in on Trump's cell phone calls. He said China would be interested to hear Trump's feelings on trade negotiations. https://bit.ly/2M7OS5c

FiveThirtyEight’s Politics Podcast: The Campaign Ads Dominating 2018. In this episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew looks at the most featured topics in campaign ads in order to understand what the parties are prioritizing. Compared with the past two midterm cycles, Democrats are on the attack on health care while Republicans are playing defense. https://53eig.ht/2RbzZwC

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

Trump delivers remarks at the 2018 Young Black Leadership Summit at the White House at 11:45 a.m. The president then heads to Charlotte, N.C., for a "Make America Great Again" rally at 7 p.m. EDT.

ABC News White House Correspondent Tara Palmeri interviews Vice President Mike Pence in Roswell, New Mexico, as he campaigns for congressional candidates around the issue of border security.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen travels to Calexico, California, to view the first completed section of Trump's 30-foot border wall in the El Centro Sector. Nielsen also holds a new conference on securing the nation's borders at 12 p.m. EDT.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions hosts a forum on combating wildlife poaching and trafficking at the Justice Department at 10 a.m. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar delivers the keynote address at the University of Southern California Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy at 8:45 a.m. EDT.

This Week on "This Week": With less than two weeks until the midterms, the Powerhouse Roundtable debates the week in politics, with ABC News Political Analyst Matthew Dowd, New York Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker, co-author of “Impeachment: An American History," Washington Post National Correspondent Mary Jordan, and National Review Executive Editor Reihan Salam, author of “Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders."

The Note has a new look! Download the ABC News app and select "The Note" as an item of interest to receive the day's sharpest political analysis.The Note is a daily ABC News feature that highlights political analysis of the day ahead. Please check back Monday for the latest.

Source

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/note-obamacare-central-midterm-races/story?id=58758469

[trendingnewsb]

It’s the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech

For most of modern history, the easiest way to block the spread of an idea was to keep it from being mechanically disseminated. Shutter the news­paper, pressure the broad­cast chief, install an official censor at the publishing house. Or, if push came to shove, hold a loaded gun to the announcer’s head.

This actually happened once in Turkey. It was the spring of 1960, and a group of military officers had just seized control of the government and the national media, imposing an information blackout to suppress the coordination of any threats to their coup. But inconveniently for the conspirators, a highly anticipated soccer game between Turkey and Scotland was scheduled to take place in the capital two weeks after their takeover. Matches like this were broadcast live on national radio, with an announcer calling the game, play by play. People all across Turkey would huddle around their sets, cheering on the national team.

Canceling the match was too risky for the junta; doing so might incite a protest. But what if the announcer said something political on live radio? A single remark could tip the country into chaos. So the officers came up with the obvious solution: They kept several guns trained on the announcer for the entire 2 hours and 45 minutes of the live broadcast.

It was still a risk, but a managed one. After all, there was only one announcer to threaten: a single bottleneck to control of the airwaves.

Variations on this general playbook for censorship—find the right choke point, then squeeze—were once the norm all around the world. That’s because, until recently, broadcasting and publishing were difficult and expensive affairs, their infrastructures riddled with bottlenecks and concentrated in a few hands.

But today that playbook is all but obsolete. Whose throat do you squeeze when anyone can set up a Twitter account in seconds, and when almost any event is recorded by smartphone-­wielding mem­­bers of the public? When protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, a single livestreamer named Mustafa Hussein reportedly garnered an audience comparable in size to CNN’s for a short while. If a Bosnian Croat war criminal drinks poison in a courtroom, all of Twitter knows about it in minutes.

February 2018. Subscribe to WIRED.

Sean Freeman

In today’s networked environment, when anyone can broadcast live or post their thoughts to a social network, it would seem that censorship ought to be impossible. This should be the golden age of free speech.

And sure, it is a golden age of free speech—if you can believe your lying eyes. Is that footage you’re watching real? Was it really filmed where and when it says it was? Is it being shared by alt-right trolls or a swarm of Russian bots? Was it maybe even generated with the help of artificial intelligence? (Yes, there are systems that can create increasingly convincing fake videos.)

Or let’s say you were the one who posted that video. If so, is anyone even watching it? Or has it been lost in a sea of posts from hundreds of millions of content pro­ducers? Does it play well with Facebook’s algorithm? Is YouTube recommending it?

Maybe you’re lucky and you’ve hit a jackpot in today’s algorithmic public sphere: an audience that either loves you or hates you. Is your post racking up the likes and shares? Or is it raking in a different kind of “engagement”: Have you received thousands of messages, mentions, notifications, and emails threatening and mocking you? Have you been doxed for your trouble? Have invisible, angry hordes ordered 100 pizzas to your house? Did they call in a SWAT team—men in black arriving, guns drawn, in the middle of dinner?

Standing there, your hands over your head, you may feel like you’ve run afoul of the awesome power of the state for speaking your mind. But really you just pissed off 4chan. Or entertained them. Either way, congratulations: You’ve found an audience.

Here’s how this golden age of speech actually works: In the 21st century, the capacity to spread ideas and reach an audience is no longer limited by access to expensive, centralized broadcasting infrastructure. It’s limited instead by one’s ability to garner and distribute attention. And right now, the flow of the world’s attention is structured, to a vast and overwhelming degree, by just a few digital platforms: Facebook, Google (which owns YouTube), and, to a lesser extent, Twitter.

These companies—which love to hold themselves up as monuments of free expression—have attained a scale unlike anything the world has ever seen; they’ve come to dominate media distribution, and they increasingly stand in for the public sphere itself. But at their core, their business is mundane: They’re ad brokers. To virtually anyone who wants to pay them, they sell the capacity to precisely target our eyeballs. They use massive surveillance of our behavior, online and off, to generate increasingly accurate, automated predictions of what advertisements we are most susceptible to and what content will keep us clicking, tapping, and scrolling down a bottomless feed.

So what does this algorithmic public sphere tend to feed us? In tech parlance, Facebook and YouTube are “optimized for engagement,” which their defenders will tell you means that they’re just giving us what we want. But there’s nothing natural or inevitable about the specific ways that Facebook and YouTube corral our attention. The patterns, by now, are well known. As Buzzfeed famously reported in November 2016, “top fake election news stories generated more total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major news outlets combined.”

Humans are a social species, equipped with few defenses against the natural world beyond our ability to acquire knowledge and stay in groups that work together. We are particularly susceptible to glimmers of novelty, messages of affirmation and belonging, and messages of outrage toward perceived enemies. These kinds of messages are to human community what salt, sugar, and fat are to the human appetite. And Facebook gorges us on them—in what the company’s first president, Sean Parker, recently called “a social-­validation feedback loop.”

Sure, it is a golden age of free speech—if you can believe your lying eyes.

There are, moreover, no nutritional labels in this cafeteria. For Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, all speech—whether it’s a breaking news story, a saccharine animal video, an anti-Semitic meme, or a clever advertisement for razors—is but “content,” each post just another slice of pie on the carousel. A personal post looks almost the same as an ad, which looks very similar to a New York Times article, which has much the same visual feel as a fake newspaper created in an afternoon.

What’s more, all this online speech is no longer public in any traditional sense. Sure, Facebook and Twitter sometimes feel like places where masses of people experience things together simultaneously. But in reality, posts are targeted and delivered privately, screen by screen by screen. Today’s phantom public sphere has been fragmented and submerged into billions of individual capillaries. Yes, mass discourse has become far easier for everyone to participate in—but it has simultaneously become a set of private conversations happening behind your back. Behind everyone’s backs.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but all of this invalidates much of what we think about free speech—conceptually, legally, and ethically.

The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of censorship at all. They look like viral or coordinated harassment campaigns, which harness the dynamics of viral outrage to impose an unbearable and disproportionate cost on the act of speaking out. They look like epidemics of disinformation, meant to undercut the credibility of valid information sources. They look like bot-fueled campaigns of trolling and distraction, or piecemeal leaks of hacked materials, meant to swamp the attention of traditional media.

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Russians Posing as Black Activists on Facebook Is More Than Fake News

These tactics usually don’t break any laws or set off any First Amendment alarm bells. But they all serve the same purpose that the old forms of censorship did: They are the best available tools to stop ideas from spreading and gaining purchase. They can also make the big platforms a terrible place to interact with other people.

Even when the big platforms themselves suspend or boot someone off their networks for violating “community standards”—an act that does look to many people like old-fashioned censorship—it’s not technically an infringement on free speech, even if it is a display of immense platform power. Anyone in the world can still read what the far-right troll Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet has to say on the internet. What Twitter has denied him, by kicking him off, is attention.

Many more of the most noble old ideas about free speech simply don’t compute in the age of social media. John Stuart Mill’s notion that a “marketplace of ideas” will elevate the truth is flatly belied by the virality of fake news. And the famous American saying that “the best cure for bad speech is more speech”—a paraphrase of Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis—loses all its meaning when speech is at once mass but also nonpublic. How do you respond to what you cannot see? How can you cure the effects of “bad” speech with more speech when you have no means to target the same audience that received the original message?

This is not a call for nostalgia. In the past, marginalized voices had a hard time reaching a mass audience at all. They often never made it past the gatekeepers who put out the evening news, who worked and lived within a few blocks of one another in Manhattan and Washington, DC. The best that dissidents could do, often, was to engineer self-sacrificing public spectacles that those gatekeepers would find hard to ignore—as US civil rights leaders did when they sent schoolchildren out to march on the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, drawing out the most naked forms of Southern police brutality for the cameras.

But back then, every political actor could at least see more or less what everyone else was seeing. Today, even the most powerful elites often cannot effectively convene the right swath of the public to counter viral messages. During the 2016 presidential election, as Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg reported for Bloomberg, the Trump campaign used so-called dark posts—nonpublic posts targeted at a specific audience—to discourage African Americans from voting in battleground states. The Clinton campaign could scarcely even monitor these messages, let alone directly counter them. Even if Hillary Clinton herself had taken to the evening news, that would not have been a way to reach the affected audience. Because only the Trump campaign and Facebook knew who the audience was.

It’s important to realize that, in using these dark posts, the Trump campaign wasn’t deviantly weaponizing an innocent tool. It was simply using Facebook exactly as it was designed to be used. The campaign did it cheaply, with Facebook staffers assisting right there in the office, as the tech company does for most large advertisers and political campaigns. Who cares where the speech comes from or what it does, as long as people see the ads? The rest is not Facebook’s department.

Mark Zuckerberg holds up Facebook’s mission to “connect the world” and “bring the world closer together” as proof of his company’s civic virtue. “In 2016, people had billions of interactions and open discussions on Facebook,” he said proudly in an online video, looking back at the US election. “Candidates had direct channels to communicate with tens of millions of citizens.”

This idea that more speech—more participation, more connection—constitutes the highest, most unalloyed good is a common refrain in the tech industry. But a historian would recognize this belief as a fallacy on its face. Connectivity is not a pony. Facebook doesn’t just connect democracy-­loving Egyptian dissidents and fans of the videogame Civilization; it brings together white supremacists, who can now assemble far more effectively. It helps connect the efforts of radical Buddhist monks in Myanmar, who now have much more potent tools for spreading incitement to ethnic cleansing—fueling the fastest- growing refugee crisis in the world.

The freedom of speech is an important democratic value, but it’s not the only one. In the liberal tradition, free speech is usually understood as a vehicle—a necessary condition for achieving certain other societal ideals: for creating a knowledgeable public; for engendering healthy, rational, and informed debate; for holding powerful people and institutions accountable; for keeping communities lively and vibrant. What we are seeing now is that when free speech is treated as an end and not a means, it is all too possible to thwart and distort everything it is supposed to deliver.

Creating a knowledgeable public requires at least some workable signals that distinguish truth from falsehood. Fostering a healthy, rational, and informed debate in a mass society requires mechanisms that elevate opposing viewpoints, preferably their best versions. To be clear, no public sphere has ever fully achieved these ideal conditions—but at least they were ideals to fail from. Today’s engagement algorithms, by contrast, espouse no ideals about a healthy public sphere.

The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech.

Some scientists predict that within the next few years, the number of children struggling with obesity will surpass the number struggling with hunger. Why? When the human condition was marked by hunger and famine, it made perfect sense to crave condensed calories and salt. Now we live in a food glut environment, and we have few genetic, cultural, or psychological defenses against this novel threat to our health. Similarly, we have few defenses against these novel and potent threats to the ideals of democratic speech, even as we drown in more speech than ever.

The stakes here are not low. In the past, it has taken generations for humans to develop political, cultural, and institutional antibodies to the novelty and upheaval of previous information revolutions. If The Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will came out now, they’d flop; but both debuted when film was still in its infancy, and their innovative use of the medium helped fuel the mass revival of the Ku Klux Klan and the rise of Nazism.

By this point, we’ve already seen enough to recognize that the core business model underlying the Big Tech platforms—harvesting attention with a massive surveillance infrastructure to allow for targeted, mostly automated advertising at very large scale—is far too compatible with authoritarianism, propaganda, misinformation, and polarization. The institutional antibodies that humanity has developed to protect against censorship and propaganda thus far—laws, journalistic codes of ethics, independent watchdogs, mass education—all evolved for a world in which choking a few gatekeepers and threatening a few individuals was an effective means to block speech. They are no longer sufficient.

But we don’t have to be resigned to the status quo. Facebook is only 13 years old, Twitter 11, and even Google is but 19. At this moment in the evolution of the auto industry, there were still no seat belts, airbags, emission controls, or mandatory crumple zones. The rules and incentive structures underlying how attention and surveillance work on the internet need to change. But in fairness to Facebook and Google and Twitter, while there’s a lot they could do better, the public outcry demanding that they fix all these problems is fundamentally mistaken. There are few solutions to the problems of digital discourse that don’t involve huge trade-offs—and those are not choices for Mark Zuckerberg alone to make. These are deeply political decisions. In the 20th century, the US passed laws that outlawed lead in paint and gasoline, that defined how much privacy a landlord needs to give his tenants, and that determined how much a phone company can surveil its customers. We can decide how we want to handle digital surveillance, attention-­channeling, harassment, data collection, and algorithmic decision­making. We just need to start the discussion. Now.

The Free Speech Issue

“Nice Website. It Would Be a Shame if Something Happened to It.”: Steven Johnson goes inside Cloudflare's decision to let an extremist stronghold burn.

Everything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You: Doug Bock Clark profiles Antifa’s secret weapon against far-right extremists.

Please, Silence Your Speech: Alice Gregory visits a startup that wants to neutralize your smartphone—and un-change the world.

The Best Hope for Civil Discourse on the Internet … Is on Reddit: Virginia Heffernan submits to Change My View.

6 Tales of Censorship: What it's like to be suspended by Facebook, blocked by Trump, and more, in the subjects’ own words.

Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina and an opinion writer for The New York Times.

This article appears in the February issue. Subscribe now.

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Great Marijuana Lies Told by Trump Officials, Pt. 2: Sessions’ Crime Whopper

Donald Trump has done wonders for job creation—in the fact-checking industry.

A little more than 40 days into his first term, the race for the title of “most outrageous lie proffered by a Trump administration official” is a tight one. Tall tales about fake massacres, mythical crowd estimates and phantom voter fraud abound. Seemingly everyone in the White House, from the president himself on down, is guilty of his or her own Pinocchio moment.

This trait for mendacity extends to the Justice Department. (Always a good look.) When not conveniently forgetting when he talked to Russian officials, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is proving himself adept at spreading untruths about cannabis.

On Monday, Feb. 27, Sessions offered up one of law enforcement’s oldest weed-related canards: The notion that legal marijuana sales are somehow associated with an uptick in crime and violence. The master debunkers at Snopes didn’t even have to sweat to disprove this one.

Once more, here’s the nation’s top law enforcement officer.

“I believe [cannabis use is] an unhealthy practice, and current levels of THC in marijuana are very high compared to what they were a few years ago, and we’re seeing real violence around that,” Sessions told reporters. “Experts are telling me there’s more violence around marijuana than one would think and there’s big money involved…. You can’t sue somebody for drug debt; the only way to get your money is through strong-arm tactics, and violence tends to follow that.”

First, let’s point out Sessions’ “expert.” It’s Nebraska attorney general Douglas Peterson, who—along with Scott Pruitt, his former counterpart in Oklahoma, who now serves as EPA administrator—was on the losing end of a lawsuit filed against Colorado, alleging that that state’s recreational marijuana legalization was causing crime throughout the region. Peterson’s argument was so convincing, the Supreme Court refused to hear it. Not only is it a biased source, it’s an unreliable one.

It is true that marijuana grown in Colorado is making its way into neighboring states. This observation is incomplete without one very salient fact: That’s the black-market marijuana trade, which existed before legalization and will exist if legalization goes away tomorrow.

Peterson’s evidence for making his less-than-compelling claim was a lone document produced by the drug cops who work with the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, one of many HIDTAs of federal and local drug cops that exist throughout the country. (Now’s a good time to remember that a HIDTA analyst recently gave a presentation to New Jersey lawmakers that was almost entirely false.)

As Snopes observed, HIDTA did publish a report that noted a spike in crime across all Colorado and in Denver particularly. However, the report also have a disclaimer, in all caps: “THIS IS NOT TO INFER THAT THE DATA IS DUE TO THE LEGALIZATION OF MARIJUANA.” The very source Peterson used to make his case… doesn’t support his case.

Police have been admitting that the crime-cannabis connection simply isn’t there for almost a decade.

In 2009, Los Angeles police Chief Charlie Beck admitted that the “mantra” that marijuana dispensaries, where weed is sold legally, cause crime “doesn’t really bear out…. Banks are more likely to get robbed than medical marijuana dispensaries.” A major study examining more than a decade of crime data published in PLOSone in 2014 also found that the facts “run counter to arguments” like Sessions’s.

Sessions also declared that the only way disputes are settled in the cannabis industry is via the Pablo Escobar school of arbitration. To hold this notion is to live in a world of pure imagination.

Cannabis businesses operate like most any other business—they have lawyers, they have licenses. Even a perfunctory check of civil court records reveal small-claims suits filed—and settled—for “drug debts.” To say that recreational marijuana settles beefs with an offer of “plato o plomo” or something similar is fantastical.

But in this situation, Sessions may have felt he had to tell a wild tale. It’s the only way to distract from the findings that legal marijuana may reduce crime.

A UCLA study in 2011 looked at crime on blocks in Sacramento before and after dispensaries opened for business. The findings suggested that the presence of security guards and video cameras, de rigeur equipment for cannabis outlets, may be a crime deterrent. Another study, conducted by a researcher from the University of North Carolina, found that marijuana legalization led to a decrease in arrests and property crime—in no small part, surely, because there were fewer cannabis busts.

If we’re feeling generous, we could say that Jeff Sessions was simply led astray, that he ate up the bullshit sandwich the Supreme Court spat out. But we expect more from lawyers. We certainly expect more from the attorney general.

Good people don’t listen to Jeff Sessions.

You can keep up with all of HIGH TIMES’ marijuana news right here.

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