#but in focusing so heavily on social justice it loses a lot of heart

[fictionadventurer]

After very little research into the other writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane, my hypothesis about the Little House authorship question is that the writing is mostly Rose's, but the heart is Laura's.

In Laura's newspaper columns, the parts that sound most like Little House mostly come from the extracts she shares from Rose's letters (incidentally, it's kind of adorable how proud she is of Rose: "My daughter's in France!", "My daughter's in Albania!", etc.) The prose of Old Home Town, Rose's inspired-by-my-childhood-home novel, has some of the same concise descriptive prose that I've come to associate with the Little House style (I could hear passages in the voice of the Little House audiobook narrator).

Yet the Little House soul is all over Laura's columns. She's fascinated by the simple tasks of life, believes in home and family and hard work, believes in holding onto the goodness of childhood and looking forward with hope toward the future. There's an optimism, almost a romanticism, about life. The children's series that bears her name clearly comes from the same woman.

Rose, by contrast, is much more pessimistic. When writing about childhood, she's almost cynical about the life of a small town. She highlights the dark stories underlying the wholesome exterior, is extremely sensitive to the pitfalls of the social scene around her. Part of the difference is that Rose is writing for adults, but there does seem to be an essential difference in the personality behind the pen, despite the stylistic similarities to Little House.

(At the risk of pop psychoanalyzing people long dead, Rose seems much more neurotic and introverted and sensitive than her mother. In her writings and in the books about her childhood in Missouri, she comes across as child of a fairly comfortable modern life, with all the modern anxieties, in contrast to a woman who grew up starving on the prairie and knows that there are much worse things to endure than small-town gossip).

It's not much of a thesis, but I'm just fascinated by the fact that the Little House series can share so many stylistic similarities with Rose's writings, yet feel so much more like Laura.

[madisonacampbell]

Via the ACLU: The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America

The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America

No one expected their words to be enlightening or their tone harmonious. Hatred rarely comes in such flavors. It spills out as an ugly, incoherent mess infused with the rotten odor of willful ignorance. And so it was with the Nazi wannabes — self-styled white supremacists determined to make their mark on the world, committed to convincing anyone who might listen that their superiority was both evident and inevitable. The setting was downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, August 2017. Their mission was unity — of like-minded hate mongers. Their leader, Jason Kessler, was a 33-year-old who lived with his parents and had once supported Barack Obama. He had learned that many demographers thought whites would eventually become a minority race in the United States. That news was so unsettling that Kessler remade himself into a white-rights activist. He styled himself as “a civil and human rights advocate, focused on the Caucasian demographic” in the mode of “Jesus Christ or Mahatma Gandhi.” His “Unite the Right” rally, observed the Christian Science Monitor, “was supposed to be the movement’s coming out party, an emergence from the shadows of internet chat rooms into the national spotlight.” Kessler was inspired in part by fellow University of Virginia graduate and white supremacist Richard Spencer who, in May 2017, led a band of racists in Charlottesville chanting “Russia is our friend” and “Blood and soil,” a Nazi-inspired slogan. Why they were enamored of Russia is anyone’s guess; I presume it had something to do with President Trump. The reason for the Nazi chant was evident; they thought it allowed them to channel the spirit of General Robert E. Lee, who had abandoned the U.S. Army in a doomed quest to preserve race-based slavery in the South. Charlottesville’s leaders recently had voted to remove Lee’s statue from the downtown park that no longer carried his name. Spencer and his crew opposed that effort and everything they thought it implied, including hostility to the legacy of whiteness. The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were similarly motivated by the perceived threat to American whiteness. Its members — 50 strong — converged on Charlottesville that July to march around and shout “white power” as hundreds of counter protesters responded with “racists go home.” How did the mad ravings of a bunch of intellectually confused, racially paranoid misfits end up spurring a national debate over the limits of free speech, the meaning of the First Amendment, and the moral obligation of the president of the United States? One reason is that — despite Kessler’s efforts to cast himself as the Martin Luther King Jr. of white rights — the rally engendered fears of made-for-TV-scale violence. As news of the event spread, and some sense of its size became clear, several local businesses announced they would temporarily close out of concern for the safety of their customers and employees. The University of Virginia, located in Charlottesville, asked students to stay away. Many rally participants showed up armed with rifles and other deadly weapons (thanks to Virginia’s open carry laws). Indeed, even before the rally’s scheduled noon start time, Kessler’s congregation had ignited so much hostility and ugliness that local authorities labeled the gathering an “illegal assembly” and ordered participants to leave. In the end, the racist, anti-Semitic hate-fest caused three deaths. Two of the dead were state troopers. Berke Bates and H. Jay Cullen, assigned to monitor the gathering from the sky, died when their helicopter crashed. The third victim was Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal. James Alex Fields Jr., a 20-year-old Adolf Hitler fanatic from Ohio, killed Heyer by intentionally plowing his car into a crowd of counter protesters — injuring some 19 people in addition to Heyer, who died from blunt-force injury to her chest. Following the tragedy, Donald Trump famously condemned the “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” His words provoked a controversy that went on for months as Trump proved incapable of criticizing the racist mob without also condemning those who opposed it. Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, was so sickened by the president’s words that she refused to take his condolence call. “I’m sorry. After what he said about my child,” Bro told CNN, and added, incredulously, “I saw an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the [counter] protesters … with the KKK and the white supremacists.” James Fields’ lawyers sought mitigation by stressing his history of mental illness. A psychologist testified that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 6 and later with schizoid personality disorder. His lawyers also delved into his childhood traumas, which included coping with the murder of his grandmother by his grandfather, who had subsequently killed himself. “James’s mental illness causes him to lose emotional and behavioral control in stressful situations,” said his attorneys, who claimed he had taken himself off his meds when he was 18, meaning he was medically untethered when he murdered Heyer. After pleading guilty, Fields received two life sentences — one in state court and the other in federal court. Even with Fields confined to prison, questions raised by Heyer’s murder — and the rally that caused it — reverberated. Trump’s troubling insistence on calling bullying bigots “very fine people” was perhaps inevitable given his need to placate a base that contains more than its share of people like David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who promoted the rally as an effort to “take our country back” and who, after Heyer’s murder, thanked Trump via tweet for his “honesty & courage.” Duke also tweeted, “This is why WE LOVE TRUMP and WHY the FAKE NEWS MEDIA HATES TRUMP. He brings to light what the lying, Fake News Media Won’t. The truth is the media covers up horrific numbers of racist hate crimes against White people!” But putting the president and his behavior aside for the moment, what about the free speech community — the civil libertarians who successfully fought in court for Kessler’s right to hold his rally in downtown Charlottesville? The city had wanted to move Kessler’s parade of bigotry to another park, one farther from the heart of town that officials claimed would be easier to police. But Kessler had said no; and the American Civil Liberties Union, along with a local outfit called the Rutherford Institute, had sued the city on Kessler’s behalf. Following the event, the ACLU was heavily criticized — and also lauded — for standing up for the racist rabble-rousers. Glenn Greenwald, best known for reporting on U.S. surveillance programs brought to light by whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcefully defended the ACLU. Civil liberties advocates, he argued, “defend the rights of those with views we hate in order to strengthen our defense of the rights of those who are most marginalized and vulnerable in society.” Others were not so sure. The Guardian reported on an erosion in “the belief that the KKK and other white supremacist organizations are operating within the bounds of acceptable political discourse — rather than as, say, terrorist organizations — and therefore have a moral right to be heard.” Jessica Clarke, a law professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, pointed to studies showing that bigots routinely hid behind free speech arguments as a cover for racism. Highly prejudiced people, she noted, “were less likely to voice First Amendment objections when the threatened speech was race-neutral, suggesting their free speech concerns were more about the freedom to express racist prejudice than free speech in general.” Legal scholar Laura Weinrib noted that the ACLU had never blindly supported free speech but had done so in the fight for a better society; and she wondered whether “a dogged commitment to free speech” was still the best strategy for an organization pursuing social justice: “The balances have shifted dramatically since the 1930s. In recent years, nearly half of First Amendment victories have gone to corporations and trade groups challenging government regulation. Free speech has served to secure the political influence of wealthy donors. Labor’s strength has plummeted, and the Supreme Court is poised to recognize a First Amendment right of public sector employees to refuse to contribute to union expenses. Long-settled principles of American democracy are newly vulnerable, and hate has found fertile terrain.” Even Susan Herman, president of the ACLU, questioned whether old assumptions about free speech still applied: “We need to consider whether some of our timeworn maxims — the antidote to bad speech is more speech, the marketplace of ideas will result in the best arguments winning out — still ring true in an era when white supremacists have a friend in the White House.” Leslie Mehta, the young black attorney who was legal director of the ACLU of Virginia when it took the Kessler case, seemed confident, when I interviewed her in the aftermath of Heyer’s death, that she had made the right decision. “There were certainly lots of conversations between myself and the executive director. There were a lot of revisions back and forth with briefs and having discussions about potential implications, but nobody has a crystal ball and no one [knew] exactly what [would] ultimately happen. I do think that the First Amendment has to mean something. And at the time, it was my understanding … that there was no evidence that there would be violence.” Mehta, a native of Woodland, North Carolina, is intimately familiar with the South and with the United States’ legacy of brutal racial oppression. She went to historically black Howard University School of Law because of its reputation for creating lawyers devoted to “social activism and social justice.” But she also is adamantly committed to the idea of free speech. “I think one of the reasons why free speech is so important to me is because … it exposes what you disagree with. And for me, I think it’s important to hear things like our president saying … ‘Well, there are good people on both sides.’” Mehta also thought it was important to consult with her mother and her 92-year-old grandmother as she proceeded with the Kessler case. Her grandmother, she confided, “never said that she fully agreed or disagreed [with Mehta taking the case], but she did not think that I was wrong.” As anyone trying to understand the Charlottesville fiasco quickly discovers, the issue of speech — particularly in a society polluted by racism and largely defined by economic inequality — is endlessly complex. So let me begin this journey with a brief exploration of how the U.S. came to embrace such a broad notion of free speech, and let’s look at some decisions made in its name. ••• We tend to think our current conception of free speech has been around essentially since the beginning of the republic. In truth, our firm and collective embrace of the First Amendment is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Constitution was drafted at a time when the Founders had rejected foreign tyranny. They were wary of the potential power of a centralized state. So the Bill of Rights was a balancing act, weighing not only the rights of individuals versus government in general but also the rights of states versus the federal government. Indeed, at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified, the First Amendment did not apply to the states. As legal scholar David Yassky has pointed out, the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech was “quite weak — at least to contemporary eyes. A citizen in 1800 had no absolute right to free speech; if the speech-restricting law was a state law, the Constitution was silent.” Eventually that changed, and that had a lot to do with the Civil War, the end of slavery, the 14th Amendment, and assorted court decisions. But even after the Reconstruction era, free speech, as we understand it today, was nothing but an aspiration, which is one reason that Southern states could effectively outlaw agitation for abolition. Free speech is very much an invention of the 20th century. And that concept of speech is very idealistic, inextricably linked to the notion that in the competition of ideas, good ideas generally crowd out bad. That argument received its most famous articulation in a 1927 case: Whitney v. California. At its center was Charlotte Anita Whitney, a wealthy California blueblood convicted of joining the Communist Party. She argued that her prosecution violated the Constitution. The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed. But even in disagreeing with her position, Louis Brandeis (joined by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.) produced a brilliant and eloquent exegesis on the potential of free speech to enact social change: “Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine.” As Brandeis saw it, free speech was virtually a sacred right and an awesomely powerful force that would expose “falsehood and fallacies” and “avert … evil by the processes of education.” Hence, the remedy to bad speech was “more speech, not enforced silence.” That piece of writing has been deemed one of the most important commentaries ever crafted on the First Amendment. But Brandeis assumed something that has not been borne out by facts, which is that the better argument would generally win. He also assumed that relevant people on all sides of a question were equally capable of being heard and that skeptics were interested in listening. That fallacy continues to inform the thinking of those who see speech as inherently self-correcting. Much as many of us admire Louis Brandeis’s mind and spirit, the society he envisioned has never existed. Instead, we have created a society in which lying is both endemic and purposeful. We have brought the worst values of advertising into the political sphere and wedded that to long-established tactics of political propaganda, even as our political class has learned to use social media to spread disinformation that propagates at a breathtaking rate. The very idea that political speech would expose and therefore vanquish “falsehood and fallacies” now seems incredibly naïve. Free speech always had limits. But because of our new technological reality, because of the unexpected weaponization of speech, we are having to consider those limits in a new light. We live in a world where it is far from clear that the answer to bad speech is more speech; and where a foreign power, thanks to our freedom of expression, may well be responsible for the election of a U.S. president. We live in a time when a frightened white minority within the larger white majority fights to maintain control of our country; and when large corporations and cynical functionaries — eager to exploit fear — have a bigger megaphone (including their own television news networks) than anyone speaking for the powerless and dispossessed. We live in an era when the U.S. awarded its presidency to a man who lost the election by roughly 3 million votes, and who, with the cooperation of a submissive Senate, has appointed judges determined to thwart the will of the public; has proposed policies, supported largely by lies, designed to further divide an already polarized nation; and caters to an irrational mob whose most fanatical elements want to refight the Civil War. All of this raises a host of difficult questions: If the Brandeisian view of speech is fatally flawed, what is a better, or at least a more realistic, view? Is it possible to reverse these trends that are destroying our democracy? How do we balance an array of important societal values that compete with the value of free speech? How, in short, do we enable a relatively enlightened majority to rescue our country from an embittered, backward-looking minority? And what happens to speech — which has never been totally free — in the process?

Excerpt adapted from The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America by Ellis Cose. Published by Amistad. Copyright © 2020 HarperCollins.

Published September 21, 2020 at 01:40PM via ACLU (https://ift.tt/3iRPsAm) via ACLU

[nancydhooper]

The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America

No one expected their words to be enlightening or their tone harmonious. Hatred rarely comes in such flavors. It spills out as an ugly, incoherent mess infused with the rotten odor of willful ignorance. And so it was with the Nazi wannabes — self-styled white supremacists determined to make their mark on the world, committed to convincing anyone who might listen that their superiority was both evident and inevitable. The setting was downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, August 2017. Their mission was unity — of like-minded hate mongers. Their leader, Jason Kessler, was a 33-year-old who lived with his parents and had once supported Barack Obama. He had learned that many demographers thought whites would eventually become a minority race in the United States. That news was so unsettling that Kessler remade himself into a white-rights activist. He styled himself as “a civil and human rights advocate, focused on the Caucasian demographic” in the mode of “Jesus Christ or Mahatma Gandhi.” His “Unite the Right” rally, observed the Christian Science Monitor, “was supposed to be the movement’s coming out party, an emergence from the shadows of internet chat rooms into the national spotlight.” Kessler was inspired in part by fellow University of Virginia graduate and white supremacist Richard Spencer who, in May 2017, led a band of racists in Charlottesville chanting “Russia is our friend” and “Blood and soil,” a Nazi-inspired slogan. Why they were enamored of Russia is anyone’s guess; I presume it had something to do with President Trump. The reason for the Nazi chant was evident; they thought it allowed them to channel the spirit of General Robert E. Lee, who had abandoned the U.S. Army in a doomed quest to preserve race-based slavery in the South. Charlottesville’s leaders recently had voted to remove Lee’s statue from the downtown park that no longer carried his name. Spencer and his crew opposed that effort and everything they thought it implied, including hostility to the legacy of whiteness. The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were similarly motivated by the perceived threat to American whiteness. Its members — 50 strong — converged on Charlottesville that July to march around and shout “white power” as hundreds of counter protesters responded with “racists go home.” How did the mad ravings of a bunch of intellectually confused, racially paranoid misfits end up spurring a national debate over the limits of free speech, the meaning of the First Amendment, and the moral obligation of the president of the United States? One reason is that — despite Kessler’s efforts to cast himself as the Martin Luther King Jr. of white rights — the rally engendered fears of made-for-TV-scale violence. As news of the event spread, and some sense of its size became clear, several local businesses announced they would temporarily close out of concern for the safety of their customers and employees. The University of Virginia, located in Charlottesville, asked students to stay away. Many rally participants showed up armed with rifles and other deadly weapons (thanks to Virginia’s open carry laws). Indeed, even before the rally’s scheduled noon start time, Kessler’s congregation had ignited so much hostility and ugliness that local authorities labeled the gathering an “illegal assembly” and ordered participants to leave. In the end, the racist, anti-Semitic hate-fest caused three deaths. Two of the dead were state troopers. Berke Bates and H. Jay Cullen, assigned to monitor the gathering from the sky, died when their helicopter crashed. The third victim was Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal. James Alex Fields Jr., a 20-year-old Adolf Hitler fanatic from Ohio, killed Heyer by intentionally plowing his car into a crowd of counter protesters — injuring some 19 people in addition to Heyer, who died from blunt-force injury to her chest. Following the tragedy, Donald Trump famously condemned the “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” His words provoked a controversy that went on for months as Trump proved incapable of criticizing the racist mob without also condemning those who opposed it. Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, was so sickened by the president’s words that she refused to take his condolence call. “I’m sorry. After what he said about my child,” Bro told CNN, and added, incredulously, “I saw an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the [counter] protesters … with the KKK and the white supremacists.” James Fields’ lawyers sought mitigation by stressing his history of mental illness. A psychologist testified that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 6 and later with schizoid personality disorder. His lawyers also delved into his childhood traumas, which included coping with the murder of his grandmother by his grandfather, who had subsequently killed himself. “James’s mental illness causes him to lose emotional and behavioral control in stressful situations,” said his attorneys, who claimed he had taken himself off his meds when he was 18, meaning he was medically untethered when he murdered Heyer. After pleading guilty, Fields received two life sentences — one in state court and the other in federal court. Even with Fields confined to prison, questions raised by Heyer’s murder — and the rally that caused it — reverberated. Trump’s troubling insistence on calling bullying bigots “very fine people” was perhaps inevitable given his need to placate a base that contains more than its share of people like David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who promoted the rally as an effort to “take our country back” and who, after Heyer’s murder, thanked Trump via tweet for his “honesty & courage.” Duke also tweeted, “This is why WE LOVE TRUMP and WHY the FAKE NEWS MEDIA HATES TRUMP. He brings to light what the lying, Fake News Media Won’t. The truth is the media covers up horrific numbers of racist hate crimes against White people!” But putting the president and his behavior aside for the moment, what about the free speech community — the civil libertarians who successfully fought in court for Kessler’s right to hold his rally in downtown Charlottesville? The city had wanted to move Kessler’s parade of bigotry to another park, one farther from the heart of town that officials claimed would be easier to police. But Kessler had said no; and the American Civil Liberties Union, along with a local outfit called the Rutherford Institute, had sued the city on Kessler’s behalf. Following the event, the ACLU was heavily criticized — and also lauded — for standing up for the racist rabble-rousers. Glenn Greenwald, best known for reporting on U.S. surveillance programs brought to light by whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcefully defended the ACLU. Civil liberties advocates, he argued, “defend the rights of those with views we hate in order to strengthen our defense of the rights of those who are most marginalized and vulnerable in society.” Others were not so sure. The Guardian reported on an erosion in “the belief that the KKK and other white supremacist organizations are operating within the bounds of acceptable political discourse — rather than as, say, terrorist organizations — and therefore have a moral right to be heard.” Jessica Clarke, a law professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, pointed to studies showing that bigots routinely hid behind free speech arguments as a cover for racism. Highly prejudiced people, she noted, “were less likely to voice First Amendment objections when the threatened speech was race-neutral, suggesting their free speech concerns were more about the freedom to express racist prejudice than free speech in general.” Legal scholar Laura Weinrib noted that the ACLU had never blindly supported free speech but had done so in the fight for a better society; and she wondered whether “a dogged commitment to free speech” was still the best strategy for an organization pursuing social justice: “The balances have shifted dramatically since the 1930s. In recent years, nearly half of First Amendment victories have gone to corporations and trade groups challenging government regulation. Free speech has served to secure the political influence of wealthy donors. Labor’s strength has plummeted, and the Supreme Court is poised to recognize a First Amendment right of public sector employees to refuse to contribute to union expenses. Long-settled principles of American democracy are newly vulnerable, and hate has found fertile terrain.” Even Susan Herman, president of the ACLU, questioned whether old assumptions about free speech still applied: “We need to consider whether some of our timeworn maxims — the antidote to bad speech is more speech, the marketplace of ideas will result in the best arguments winning out — still ring true in an era when white supremacists have a friend in the White House.” Leslie Mehta, the young black attorney who was legal director of the ACLU of Virginia when it took the Kessler case, seemed confident, when I interviewed her in the aftermath of Heyer’s death, that she had made the right decision. “There were certainly lots of conversations between myself and the executive director. There were a lot of revisions back and forth with briefs and having discussions about potential implications, but nobody has a crystal ball and no one [knew] exactly what [would] ultimately happen. I do think that the First Amendment has to mean something. And at the time, it was my understanding … that there was no evidence that there would be violence.” Mehta, a native of Woodland, North Carolina, is intimately familiar with the South and with the United States’ legacy of brutal racial oppression. She went to historically black Howard University School of Law because of its reputation for creating lawyers devoted to “social activism and social justice.” But she also is adamantly committed to the idea of free speech. “I think one of the reasons why free speech is so important to me is because … it exposes what you disagree with. And for me, I think it’s important to hear things like our president saying … ‘Well, there are good people on both sides.’” Mehta also thought it was important to consult with her mother and her 92-year-old grandmother as she proceeded with the Kessler case. Her grandmother, she confided, “never said that she fully agreed or disagreed [with Mehta taking the case], but she did not think that I was wrong.” As anyone trying to understand the Charlottesville fiasco quickly discovers, the issue of speech — particularly in a society polluted by racism and largely defined by economic inequality — is endlessly complex. So let me begin this journey with a brief exploration of how the U.S. came to embrace such a broad notion of free speech, and let’s look at some decisions made in its name. ••• We tend to think our current conception of free speech has been around essentially since the beginning of the republic. In truth, our firm and collective embrace of the First Amendment is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Constitution was drafted at a time when the Founders had rejected foreign tyranny. They were wary of the potential power of a centralized state. So the Bill of Rights was a balancing act, weighing not only the rights of individuals versus government in general but also the rights of states versus the federal government. Indeed, at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified, the First Amendment did not apply to the states. As legal scholar David Yassky has pointed out, the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech was “quite weak — at least to contemporary eyes. A citizen in 1800 had no absolute right to free speech; if the speech-restricting law was a state law, the Constitution was silent.” Eventually that changed, and that had a lot to do with the Civil War, the end of slavery, the 14th Amendment, and assorted court decisions. But even after the Reconstruction era, free speech, as we understand it today, was nothing but an aspiration, which is one reason that Southern states could effectively outlaw agitation for abolition. Free speech is very much an invention of the 20th century. And that concept of speech is very idealistic, inextricably linked to the notion that in the competition of ideas, good ideas generally crowd out bad. That argument received its most famous articulation in a 1927 case: Whitney v. California. At its center was Charlotte Anita Whitney, a wealthy California blueblood convicted of joining the Communist Party. She argued that her prosecution violated the Constitution. The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed. But even in disagreeing with her position, Louis Brandeis (joined by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.) produced a brilliant and eloquent exegesis on the potential of free speech to enact social change: “Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine.” As Brandeis saw it, free speech was virtually a sacred right and an awesomely powerful force that would expose “falsehood and fallacies” and “avert … evil by the processes of education.” Hence, the remedy to bad speech was “more speech, not enforced silence.” That piece of writing has been deemed one of the most important commentaries ever crafted on the First Amendment. But Brandeis assumed something that has not been borne out by facts, which is that the better argument would generally win. He also assumed that relevant people on all sides of a question were equally capable of being heard and that skeptics were interested in listening. That fallacy continues to inform the thinking of those who see speech as inherently self-correcting. Much as many of us admire Louis Brandeis’s mind and spirit, the society he envisioned has never existed. Instead, we have created a society in which lying is both endemic and purposeful. We have brought the worst values of advertising into the political sphere and wedded that to long-established tactics of political propaganda, even as our political class has learned to use social media to spread disinformation that propagates at a breathtaking rate. The very idea that political speech would expose and therefore vanquish “falsehood and fallacies” now seems incredibly naïve. Free speech always had limits. But because of our new technological reality, because of the unexpected weaponization of speech, we are having to consider those limits in a new light. We live in a world where it is far from clear that the answer to bad speech is more speech; and where a foreign power, thanks to our freedom of expression, may well be responsible for the election of a U.S. president. We live in a time when a frightened white minority within the larger white majority fights to maintain control of our country; and when large corporations and cynical functionaries — eager to exploit fear — have a bigger megaphone (including their own television news networks) than anyone speaking for the powerless and dispossessed. We live in an era when the U.S. awarded its presidency to a man who lost the election by roughly 3 million votes, and who, with the cooperation of a submissive Senate, has appointed judges determined to thwart the will of the public; has proposed policies, supported largely by lies, designed to further divide an already polarized nation; and caters to an irrational mob whose most fanatical elements want to refight the Civil War. All of this raises a host of difficult questions: If the Brandeisian view of speech is fatally flawed, what is a better, or at least a more realistic, view? Is it possible to reverse these trends that are destroying our democracy? How do we balance an array of important societal values that compete with the value of free speech? How, in short, do we enable a relatively enlightened majority to rescue our country from an embittered, backward-looking minority? And what happens to speech — which has never been totally free — in the process?

Excerpt adapted from The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America by Ellis Cose. Published by Amistad. Copyright © 2020 HarperCollins.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/the-short-life-and-curious-death-of-free-speech-in-america via http://www.rssmix.com/

[dr0wning-in-hell]

Introduced - Grant Gustin

Summary : After Grant breaks up with his girlfriend, he’s torn apart but then introduced to the reader by a mutual friend, where they just click, but then his ex has to come in and start spreading lies and rumors.

Requested : yes by anon

Word Count : 2113

Warnings : cheating, sad Grant, angry reader, fluff??

Pairing : Grant Gustin x youtuber!reader

Prompt : Can you do a grant gustin imagine where he just broke up with a girl who was really bad to him and his friends and is kind of upset about it then he is introduced to the reader by a mutual friend she is a youtuber and they start dating and he and his friends like her a lot better and then his ex starts causing problems and they all defend the reader

A/N : maybe a few parts to this? Idk, but thank you to the anon for sending this in to me! I hope I did justice with your request! And sorry about the title, I literally did not know what to name this imagine so that was the best I could come up with.

Master list | Requests | Prompts | my wattpad

Grant thought they were doing great, he thought that he was making his girlfriend happy, but apparently he was wrong since he had caught her with another guy. This wasn't the first time either. Whenever he saw pictures of her in the tabloids or online, he never wanted to confront her about it because he didn’t want to lose what they had; but it was already lost. Grant had walked into his home at just the right time, catching his girlfriend and yet another man undressing themselves in the hallway. Dropping his bag with a loud thud, he caught the couples attention. His girlfriend’s mouth hung open, the guy behind her looking down.

“Grant,  I-I... it’s not what it looks like!” She stammered as she ran over to him. He took a step back, his eyes holding back tears.

“I wasted three years with you, Bella. Three fucking years. If I knew that you’d cheat on me, I would have never asked you out.” Grant wasn't yelling at her, he didn’t like to yell, but his voice showed just how much pain he was in. Bella’s lower lip quivered. “Get out, I want you and him out now. I’ll pack your stuff up tonight and leave it on the front porch for you tomorrow.”

“Grant-”

“Get out.” His jaw clenched as he fought back to hold his tears. Bella’s head hung low as she dressed. The man in his home was already dressed and waiting for Bella. The two of them left in silence after that. Grant wiped his eyes, tears now free falling down his pale face. He gave her everything, everything. He sniffled, grabbing his bag and walking up to his bedroom.

That little fiasco happened a week ago, and a week later everyone knew that him and Bella were done. His friends and cast members from The Flash called and texted him, saying how sorry they were, but he didn’t want their apologies all he wanted was to forget the last three years he spent with the girl who broke his heart.

A Grant walked onto his set, he was greeted by his friends Danielle, Candice, and Carlos- also known as Caitlyn Snow, Iris West, and Cisco Ramon. He gave a weak smile to them as he walked over to his friends. When he reached the group his eyes landed on an unfamiliar face.

It was a girl (a very pretty girl as well), her Y/H/C pull back in a messy bun, her Y/E/C sparkling as she smiled and laughed with the cast. Grant’s breath was taken away by her beauty. The girl turned to Grant, flashing him an amazing smile that made his heart do backflips in his chest. Danielle looked between Grant and the girl, a smile spreading across her face.

“Grant, this is Y/N, Y/N this is Grant.” Danielle said, gesturing between the two of them. Y/N stuck out her hand to the actor, the smile not leaving her face once.

“It’s nice to finally meet you Grant, I’ve been wanting to meet you since I saw you on Glee.” Grant’s cheeks flushed red as memories from his other show flooded his mind. Y/N chuckled, tucking back a stray piece of hair. Candice looked over Grant, a small smile on her pink lips.

“Grant, why don’t you show Y/N around, and Y/N why don’t you tell Grant what you do as you two walk.” Candice grabbed her hand, pulling the girl forward and nearly making her coffee spill out of her hands. Y/n was confused as to why Candice was doing this, she had already ben shown around the set.

“But I was already shown-” Y/N was cut off with a shove that sent her flying and nearly ramming into Grant. She scoffed as some of her coffee spilt onto her bag, but thankfully it was closed so none of her belongings were damaged. Grant shrugged, smiling and starting to walk around the set. Y/N caught up with him, still wiping her beverage from her bag. Grant coughed awkwardly as he scratched the back of his neck.

“So, Y/N what do you do?” Chuckling, Y/N took a sip from her cup.

“I’m s youtuber.” She said, smiling with pride. Grant rose an eyebrow.

“Really? What kind of videos do you make?”

Y/N shrugged. “A mix of everything really. Makeup tutorials, hair tutorials, drawing tutorials, dance videos, covers of my favorite songs...” Grant smiled as he listened to Y/N go on about what she did with her YouTube channel. Y/N stopped talking, looking up at Grant who had a smile glued to his face. “What?” Y/N asked, tilting her head. Grant blinked, looking down at you. Y/N chuckled at Grant as his cheeks flared up and he looked down in embarrassment. The two walked back to where everyone was, most of the cast now in their clothes for the show. One of the makeup artists ran over to Y/N and Grant, breathing heavily as she pushed up her glasses.

“Y/N, we gotta get you into makeup and costume.” She breathed out. Y/N nodded, setting her stuff behind the camera crew. Grant looked at her with a confused look.

“What are you doing?” He asked Y/N. She smirked slightly as she began to walk with the makeup artist.

“Did I forget to mention I’m also playing your new villain?”

Over the course of the next three weeks Grant and Y/N were filming together and becoming close friends. Y/N was starting to gain feelings for the brunette, but she didn’t say anything about it to anyone. As Y/N and Danielle sat in makeup getting ready, Danielle spoke up.

“So, has Grant asked you out yet?” You nearly choked on thin air as you heard her question. You shook her head slightly, not wanting to mess up your makeup artist.

“No, why would he? It’s not like he likes me or anything, he did just get out a relationship.” Y/N stated. Danielle shrugged. “Wait, does he like me?” The actress laughed at her friend, standing up and smoothing out her dress. She left without another word, leaving the youtuber and actress confused.

The cast filmed like they did every other day, taking a few breaks  every once in a while to fix the actors hair or makeup or talk to them about something. Y/N recited her lines to herself, just to make sure she had them memorized before they started filming again. A tap on her shoulder made her spin around, her eyes going upwards to make eye contact with whoever was wanting her attention. Her black painted lips twisted upwards in a smile as she saw Grant standing in front of her in his Flash suit.

“Hey Grant, what’s up?” Y/N asked, crossing her arms over her chest. Grant smiled nervously, ringing his hands through his gloves.

He licked his chapped lips before talking, “Hey, so um... I was kind of wondering if maybe you’d like to go to this award show with me? You don’t have to of course! Only if you want to.” Grant spoke fast, but Y/N caught every word loud and clear.

“Are you asking me out on a date, Mr. Gustin?” Y/N teased, smirking a bit. Grant gulped, nodding slowly. Y/N chuckled. “I’ll go out with you, Grant.” The boy’s face bursted into a grin. The two actors were called onto the set, grins plastered onto their faces that they couldn’t get rid of.

It had been a little over a month since Y/N and Grant started dating, but they hadn’t gone public with things just quite yet. The only people that knew were the cast and crew of The Flash, and maybe a few of the cast from Arrow and Supergirl.

It was like any other day on the set, going over lines, getting hair and makeup done, and going over the days events.  They were filming a fight scene outside, a fight scene between The Flash and Y/N’s character Thorn. Y/N loved playing her character, especially since the power of creating plants was the power Y/N had wanted since she was a little girl.

Grant and Y/N stood close together as their director went over what he wanted from the two actors. Grant slipped his gloved hand into Y/N’s squeezing softly. No one noticed the paparazzi that were swarming the back of the scene, and no one noticed that they were all focused on Y/N and Grant. They filmed like they were supposed to, ignoring the photographers. By the end of the day Y/N and Grant were worn to the bone, tired mentally and physically. Y/N changed into sweats and a tank top while going through her social media, but stopped when she saw the photo of her and Grant that was taken earlier that day. She clicked on the photo and read the description.

‘Wow, so after three years together and only being broken up for a month, Grant and this Y/N chick are already fucking each other. Looks like those three years meant nothing to him.’ Y/N’s jaw clenched as she read through the comments. All of them were about the same, some people saying that Grant and Y/N could do what they wanted with their lives, other were just bashing Y/N completely. Clicking on the profile of the user who posted the picture, Y/N saw that it in fact was Grant’s ex-girlfriend Bella who had posted the photo and started all this drama. Y/N growled, screen shotting the photo and posting it on her own page.

‘@officialbellaa don’t go posting shit abut my relationship with Grant, it is none of your business if you’re not even involved in his life any more. And for your information, Grant and I have been together in a very a happy relationship, unlike yours where all you did was cheat on him when he was away.’ Posting the photo, YN walked out to where her friends and boyfriend were waiting for her, talking and smiling until they all noticed the angry look on her face.

“Y/N? Babe, what’s wrong?” Grant asked, furrowing his eyebrows.

“Your ex Bella? Yeah she started talking shit abut our relationship -which she has no clue about- and how the three years you two spent together meant nothing to you.” Y/N shook her head, laughing in anger. “She’s making herself out as the victim when she’s the one who hurt you.” The group’s faces fell.

Candice gave Y/NN and Grant a reassuring smile. “If it makes you feel any better Y/N, we like you more than we could ever like Bella.” Y?N smiled back at her friend. They all went their separate ways. Y/N going back to Grant’s with him. As he drove the two of them to his place, he held her hand and placed a gentle kiss to her knuckles.

“Don’t listen to what Bella says, Y/N. She’s just looking for attention, it’s what she does.” Y/N nodded slightly, giving a small smile to her boyfriend. “And by the way, I love you more than I did her, and we’ve only been together for a month.”

Y/N grinned. She had wanted to tell Grant she loved him for some time now, but didn’t want it to seem like she was rushing it. “I love you too, Grant.”

Grant went straight to his social media accounts when the two of them got back to his place. He started to defend his wonderful girlfriend, saying how much he loved her and that Bella needed to stop spreading lies about people. Y/N and Grant were made for each other, they were there for each other and got one another better than Grant and Bella ever could.

[thebookbeard-blog]

December is for Star Wars.

At least that's what I decided at the end of 2015 after watching The Force Awakens, a movie that re-kindled a love and passion that had been dormant since my teenage years. I went back to the theater three more times. I left each showing feeling like a kid, in the best of ways. I was, at almost thirty years old, Star Wars trash once again -- a label that I happily and readily accepted. I began to consume more SW-related pop culture. I started watching Star Wars Rebels, which in time I came to realize captures the spirit of the original trilogy better than almost anything else. I started reading some of the comics being put out by Marvel at the time, chiefly Kieron Gillen's Darth Vader run, a brilliant piece of storytelling on its own. Then I started to explore some of the books set in the Star Wars universe. 

The trash of the thing.

The first SW book I ever read was Claudia Gray's Lost Stars. My expectations were low: Star Wars is such a visually rich setting, after all, and I had doubts as to how well it would translate to the written word. If anything, I only expected a fun romp through the Star Wars universe. I certainly didn't expect it to be an arresting and heart-wrenching piece of fiction. But it turned out to be both. I loved it enough that it was the first book I picked as a favorite read for last year. And I loved Gray's writing enough that I would eagerly pick up whatever she wrote for the expanded universe next. The fact that this happened to be a story that focused on Leia increased my interested only by a hell of a lot.

Bloodline features and older, wiser, slightly weary Leia, still serving in her function as a Senator for the New Republic. At the beginning of the story, tired of all the ceremony and hypocrisy of politics, she's determined to retire from it all, but not before engaging in one last diplomatic mission which she hopes will do some actual, genuine good for the galaxy -- not to mention serve as one final adventure. That this adventure should prove to uncover a vast and deep conspiracy that threatens not only her personal safety and reputation but the fate of the entire galaxy should really come as no big surprise -- this is a Star Wars story, after all.

Gray's portrayal of Leia is beautifully nuanced, and balances the political and personal aspects of the character with grace and aplomb. This is a Leia that is a brilliant and savvy politician, as well as a bad-ass who knows how to handle a blaster and is ready to throw down at a moment’s notice.

Leia lifted her blaster, losing her sights on Rinnrivin’s guard — and targeting the central strut of the tunnel support directly overhead. One bolt held the entire thing together. That bolt was no larger than a child’s fist. At this range, in semi-darkness, perhaps one shot in a thousand might be capable of destroying that bolt. But Leia made the shot.

In short, the very same Leia that we all know and love. The same Leia that the late, great Carrie Fisher brought to life. Gray's capable prose does her more than enough justice.

The story is made all the more interesting by the fact that it deals heavily with politics, something that the prequels tried to do with very mixed and muddy results. It’s one of the more fascinating aspects in Bloodline however, and the intrigue and West Wing-like drama of it all carries the story through. That the political landscape of the novel happens to look very much like our own just adds a more surreal and slightly ominous layer to it all. 

Gray has gone on record to say that Bloodline wasn’t written as commentary, but it's pretty hard, especially after the events of last November, not to view the story as a reflection of our current reality. Part of the reason that Leia wants to retire has to do with the Senate devolving into a two-party system -- parties that are themselves fragmented into conflicting fractions. She laments how "every debate on the Senate floor turns into an endless argument over ‘tone’ or ‘form’ and never about issues of substance." And try to read this bit of dialogue and tell me it doesn't sound like something you’d find on a recent think piece.

“Surely you won’t deny the New Republic is committing mistakes of its own.”

“Not the evils of tyranny and control.”

“No. The evils of absence and neglect.”

And, of course, there’s the now viral quote at the close of the book that has gained new relevance in light of yesterday's marches:

“The sun is setting on the New Republic," Leia said. "It's time for the Resistance to rise.”

Indeed. 

Bloodline is both a brilliant character portrait and relevant social commentary. Claudia Gray can write Star Wars like no other and I will read anything she writes in this universe.

After dealing with the heady but heavy themes of Bloodline however, I figured I was due some for some warmth and comfort. At which point I usually turn to a Rainbow Rowell book.

I love Rainbow Rowell. I love her quirky and clever and passionate writing (if there was a book equivalent to Gilmore Girls, it would be a Rowell book). I love her amazing and uncanny ability to make you fall for a character in almost no time at all.

This same talent is brilliantly showcased in Kindred Spirits, a slim novella that, over the course of sixty-two pages, manages to have more character development than most sprawling, brick-sized novels.

It's an unfair gift, really.

This is a story about three Star Wars geeks camping out in desolate line in front of an Omaha theater for the premiere of The Force Awakens. It is lovely, and it is charming, and it is so wonderful. I finished the story in one sitting, desperately wishing there was a full-length novel featuring these characters that I could immediately pick up. Heartwarming and beautiful.

And so December rolled around once more, and with it another Star Wars film, because Disney will never be stopped.

But of course I loved almost everything about Rogue One: I loved its beautiful and beautifully diverse cast, I loved its relentless and brutal pace, I even dug its CGI missteps. It's a dark, dark film, to be sure, but it also seems very apt and timely. Rebellions are built on hope, etc.

I picked up the Rogue One: A Star Wars Story novelization by Alexander Freed because I kept coming across good reviews. I was skeptical -- I had tried to read Alan Dean Foster's adaptation of The Force Awakens and found the writing style so tedious that I couldn't get past the first chapter. Thankfully though Freed doesn't seem to suffer from this: his writing style is relatively spartan and straightforward, which serves this kind of story well. Even so I was still very much surprised at how much I enjoyed reading this, and even more surprised at how much more depth it managed to add to the story. 

One of the main criticisms about the film is that we don't spend enough individual time with the characters too feel much of anything when they meet their ultimate fate. Which is fair: movie's are all about the external after all, whereas in books and comics you can delve more into the character's feelings and motivations -- literally get inside their heads. This is what Freed does in the novelization, and to great effect. We get so many details regarding each character's background, personality, and motivation.

Cassian stashed his paranoia in the back of his brain -- out of the way but within easy reach.

Jyn knew the sounds of occupation well. They were the sounds of home.

Baze did not limit his targets to those who might spot the blind man, but he kept Chirrut under observation nonetheless; where the Force would fail Chirrut, Baze would not.

And it does affect how you feel about the characters as the plot happens to them. This is made most evident in K-2SO's final scene, an already heartbreaking moment in the film, but here Freed adds one last final touch that makes is all the more tragic and all the more beautiful. Totally evil stuff, but good nonetheless.

This device isn't limited to the characters either: for the more technical aspects of the plot we get things like communiques and log entries interspersed throughout the story, and they are also used to great effect. In a particularly brilliant entry, we get to find out just how Galen Erso, with the help of sheer bureaucratic nonsense, ensures the flaw he engineered in the Death Star reactor remains in place. A detail that is both morbidly hilarious and also incredibly realistic.

I do think that one of the things that makes the movie such a visceral experience gets totally lost in the translation, however, and that is much of the action. Freed does a serviceable job, but the action still very much slows down and lack urgency and tension. Darth Vader’s big scene is an absolute show-stopper in the movie, for example, whereas here it reads as very much anticlimactic. 

But that is admittedly a minor criticism that applies mostly to the third act, and I do think that the material and information that was added to the story more than makes up for it.

Highly recommend reading this before you watch Rogue One for the eight time.

It was raining. It didn’t rain in L.A. It was raining in L.A. and I was Princess Leia. I had never been Princess Leia before and now I would be her forever. I would never not be Princess Leia.

And then there's Carrie. Oh Carrie.

December was a particularly tough month in a particularly tough year. Too many artists I admired passed away, and then halfway through December I went a personal loss that left me dazed and numb. Then Carrie Fisher died, and it all struck me as once, and I was just sad for a long while.

I had downloaded The Princess Diarist shortly after finishing the Rogue One novelization. It seemed like an appropriate follow up, and I've been meaning to read Fisher's stuff for years anyway. It stayed unread on my tablet for a bit (the aforementioned personal loss took any desire I had to read much), but I picked it up immediately after learning of Carrie's death. It seemed like the appropriate thing to do.

The Princess Diarist is about Fisher looking back on diary entries she had penned in the late seventies, during the filming of Star Wars. It's a meditation on fame and growing up in Hollywood and being young and growing old. It's a wonderful read. Raunchy and hilarious and clever; whimsical and melancholy. Brutally honest and full of life truths. I highlighted a great many passages:

The crew was mostly men. That’s how it was and that’s pretty much how it still is. It’s a man’s world and show business is a man’s meal, with women generously sprinkled through it like overqualified spice.

I looked at her aghast, with much like the expression I used when shown the sketches of the metal bikini. The one I wore to kill Jabba (my favorite moment in my own personal film history), which I highly recommend your doing: find an equivalent of killing a giant space slug in your head and celebrate that.

Back then I was always looking ahead to who I wanted to be versus who I didn’t realize I already was, and the wished-for me was most likely based on who other people seemed to be and the desire to have the same effect on others that they had had on me.

I don’t just want you to like me, I want to be one of the most joy-inducing human beings that you’ve ever encountered. I want to explode on your night sky like fireworks at midnight on New Year’s Eve in Hong Kong.

Because what can you do with people that like you, except, of course, inevitably disappoint them?

I wish that I could leave myself alone. I wish that I could finally feel that I punished myself enough. That I deserved time off for all my bad behavior. Let myself off the hook, drag myself off the rack where I am both torturer and torturee.

I was sitting by myself the other night doing the usual things one does when spending time alone with yourselves. You know, making mountains out of molehills, hiking up to the top of the mountains, having a Hostess Twinkie and then throwing myself off the mountain. Stuff like that.

Trying relentlessly to make you love me, but I don’t want the love -- I quite prefer the quest for it. The challenge. I am always disappointed with someone who loves me -- how perfect can he be if he can’t see through me?

I call people sometimes hoping not only that they’ll verify the fact that I’m alive but that they’ll also, however indirectly, convince me that being alive is an appropriate state for me to be in.

I had feelings for him (at least five, but sometimes as many as seven).

Time shifts and your pity enables you to turn what was once, decades ago, an ordinary sort of pain or hurt, complicated by embarrassing self-pity, into what is now only a humiliating tale that you can share with others because, after almost four decades, it’s all in the past and who gives a shit?

This is a joy of a book, but it still made me sad. Sad that I never got to read and appreciate her written work while she was alive. Sad because the beautiful gem of a person who wrote these true beautiful things was now gone, drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra, and we'll never, ever see her like again.

“Carrie?” he asked. I knew my name. So I let him know I knew it. “Yeah,” I said in a voice very like mine.

Good night, Space Momma. Thank you for you voice. Thank you for being so unabashedly you.                                                                                           

[lodelss]

ACLU: The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America

The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America

No one expected their words to be enlightening or their tone harmonious. Hatred rarely comes in such flavors. It spills out as an ugly, incoherent mess infused with the rotten odor of willful ignorance. And so it was with the Nazi wannabes — self-styled white supremacists determined to make their mark on the world, committed to convincing anyone who might listen that their superiority was both evident and inevitable. The setting was downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, August 2017. Their mission was unity — of like-minded hate mongers. Their leader, Jason Kessler, was a 33-year-old who lived with his parents and had once supported Barack Obama. He had learned that many demographers thought whites would eventually become a minority race in the United States. That news was so unsettling that Kessler remade himself into a white-rights activist. He styled himself as “a civil and human rights advocate, focused on the Caucasian demographic” in the mode of “Jesus Christ or Mahatma Gandhi.” His “Unite the Right” rally, observed the Christian Science Monitor, “was supposed to be the movement’s coming out party, an emergence from the shadows of internet chat rooms into the national spotlight.” Kessler was inspired in part by fellow University of Virginia graduate and white supremacist Richard Spencer who, in May 2017, led a band of racists in Charlottesville chanting “Russia is our friend” and “Blood and soil,” a Nazi-inspired slogan. Why they were enamored of Russia is anyone’s guess; I presume it had something to do with President Trump. The reason for the Nazi chant was evident; they thought it allowed them to channel the spirit of General Robert E. Lee, who had abandoned the U.S. Army in a doomed quest to preserve race-based slavery in the South. Charlottesville’s leaders recently had voted to remove Lee’s statue from the downtown park that no longer carried his name. Spencer and his crew opposed that effort and everything they thought it implied, including hostility to the legacy of whiteness. The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were similarly motivated by the perceived threat to American whiteness. Its members — 50 strong — converged on Charlottesville that July to march around and shout “white power” as hundreds of counter protesters responded with “racists go home.” How did the mad ravings of a bunch of intellectually confused, racially paranoid misfits end up spurring a national debate over the limits of free speech, the meaning of the First Amendment, and the moral obligation of the president of the United States? One reason is that — despite Kessler’s efforts to cast himself as the Martin Luther King Jr. of white rights — the rally engendered fears of made-for-TV-scale violence. As news of the event spread, and some sense of its size became clear, several local businesses announced they would temporarily close out of concern for the safety of their customers and employees. The University of Virginia, located in Charlottesville, asked students to stay away. Many rally participants showed up armed with rifles and other deadly weapons (thanks to Virginia’s open carry laws). Indeed, even before the rally’s scheduled noon start time, Kessler’s congregation had ignited so much hostility and ugliness that local authorities labeled the gathering an “illegal assembly” and ordered participants to leave. In the end, the racist, anti-Semitic hate-fest caused three deaths. Two of the dead were state troopers. Berke Bates and H. Jay Cullen, assigned to monitor the gathering from the sky, died when their helicopter crashed. The third victim was Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal. James Alex Fields Jr., a 20-year-old Adolf Hitler fanatic from Ohio, killed Heyer by intentionally plowing his car into a crowd of counter protesters — injuring some 19 people in addition to Heyer, who died from blunt-force injury to her chest. Following the tragedy, Donald Trump famously condemned the “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” His words provoked a controversy that went on for months as Trump proved incapable of criticizing the racist mob without also condemning those who opposed it. Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, was so sickened by the president’s words that she refused to take his condolence call. “I’m sorry. After what he said about my child,” Bro told CNN, and added, incredulously, “I saw an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the [counter] protesters … with the KKK and the white supremacists.” James Fields’ lawyers sought mitigation by stressing his history of mental illness. A psychologist testified that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 6 and later with schizoid personality disorder. His lawyers also delved into his childhood traumas, which included coping with the murder of his grandmother by his grandfather, who had subsequently killed himself. “James’s mental illness causes him to lose emotional and behavioral control in stressful situations,” said his attorneys, who claimed he had taken himself off his meds when he was 18, meaning he was medically untethered when he murdered Heyer. After pleading guilty, Fields received two life sentences — one in state court and the other in federal court. Even with Fields confined to prison, questions raised by Heyer’s murder — and the rally that caused it — reverberated. Trump’s troubling insistence on calling bullying bigots “very fine people” was perhaps inevitable given his need to placate a base that contains more than its share of people like David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who promoted the rally as an effort to “take our country back” and who, after Heyer’s murder, thanked Trump via tweet for his “honesty & courage.” Duke also tweeted, “This is why WE LOVE TRUMP and WHY the FAKE NEWS MEDIA HATES TRUMP. He brings to light what the lying, Fake News Media Won’t. The truth is the media covers up horrific numbers of racist hate crimes against White people!” But putting the president and his behavior aside for the moment, what about the free speech community — the civil libertarians who successfully fought in court for Kessler’s right to hold his rally in downtown Charlottesville? The city had wanted to move Kessler’s parade of bigotry to another park, one farther from the heart of town that officials claimed would be easier to police. But Kessler had said no; and the American Civil Liberties Union, along with a local outfit called the Rutherford Institute, had sued the city on Kessler’s behalf. Following the event, the ACLU was heavily criticized — and also lauded — for standing up for the racist rabble-rousers. Glenn Greenwald, best known for reporting on U.S. surveillance programs brought to light by whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcefully defended the ACLU. Civil liberties advocates, he argued, “defend the rights of those with views we hate in order to strengthen our defense of the rights of those who are most marginalized and vulnerable in society.” Others were not so sure. The Guardian reported on an erosion in “the belief that the KKK and other white supremacist organizations are operating within the bounds of acceptable political discourse — rather than as, say, terrorist organizations — and therefore have a moral right to be heard.” Jessica Clarke, a law professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, pointed to studies showing that bigots routinely hid behind free speech arguments as a cover for racism. Highly prejudiced people, she noted, “were less likely to voice First Amendment objections when the threatened speech was race-neutral, suggesting their free speech concerns were more about the freedom to express racist prejudice than free speech in general.” Legal scholar Laura Weinrib noted that the ACLU had never blindly supported free speech but had done so in the fight for a better society; and she wondered whether “a dogged commitment to free speech” was still the best strategy for an organization pursuing social justice: “The balances have shifted dramatically since the 1930s. In recent years, nearly half of First Amendment victories have gone to corporations and trade groups challenging government regulation. Free speech has served to secure the political influence of wealthy donors. Labor’s strength has plummeted, and the Supreme Court is poised to recognize a First Amendment right of public sector employees to refuse to contribute to union expenses. Long-settled principles of American democracy are newly vulnerable, and hate has found fertile terrain.” Even Susan Herman, president of the ACLU, questioned whether old assumptions about free speech still applied: “We need to consider whether some of our timeworn maxims — the antidote to bad speech is more speech, the marketplace of ideas will result in the best arguments winning out — still ring true in an era when white supremacists have a friend in the White House.” Leslie Mehta, the young black attorney who was legal director of the ACLU of Virginia when it took the Kessler case, seemed confident, when I interviewed her in the aftermath of Heyer’s death, that she had made the right decision. “There were certainly lots of conversations between myself and the executive director. There were a lot of revisions back and forth with briefs and having discussions about potential implications, but nobody has a crystal ball and no one [knew] exactly what [would] ultimately happen. I do think that the First Amendment has to mean something. And at the time, it was my understanding … that there was no evidence that there would be violence.” Mehta, a native of Woodland, North Carolina, is intimately familiar with the South and with the United States’ legacy of brutal racial oppression. She went to historically black Howard University School of Law because of its reputation for creating lawyers devoted to “social activism and social justice.” But she also is adamantly committed to the idea of free speech. “I think one of the reasons why free speech is so important to me is because … it exposes what you disagree with. And for me, I think it’s important to hear things like our president saying … ‘Well, there are good people on both sides.’” Mehta also thought it was important to consult with her mother and her 92-year-old grandmother as she proceeded with the Kessler case. Her grandmother, she confided, “never said that she fully agreed or disagreed [with Mehta taking the case], but she did not think that I was wrong.” As anyone trying to understand the Charlottesville fiasco quickly discovers, the issue of speech — particularly in a society polluted by racism and largely defined by economic inequality — is endlessly complex. So let me begin this journey with a brief exploration of how the U.S. came to embrace such a broad notion of free speech, and let’s look at some decisions made in its name. ••• We tend to think our current conception of free speech has been around essentially since the beginning of the republic. In truth, our firm and collective embrace of the First Amendment is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Constitution was drafted at a time when the Founders had rejected foreign tyranny. They were wary of the potential power of a centralized state. So the Bill of Rights was a balancing act, weighing not only the rights of individuals versus government in general but also the rights of states versus the federal government. Indeed, at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified, the First Amendment did not apply to the states. As legal scholar David Yassky has pointed out, the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech was “quite weak — at least to contemporary eyes. A citizen in 1800 had no absolute right to free speech; if the speech-restricting law was a state law, the Constitution was silent.” Eventually that changed, and that had a lot to do with the Civil War, the end of slavery, the 14th Amendment, and assorted court decisions. But even after the Reconstruction era, free speech, as we understand it today, was nothing but an aspiration, which is one reason that Southern states could effectively outlaw agitation for abolition. Free speech is very much an invention of the 20th century. And that concept of speech is very idealistic, inextricably linked to the notion that in the competition of ideas, good ideas generally crowd out bad. That argument received its most famous articulation in a 1927 case: Whitney v. California. At its center was Charlotte Anita Whitney, a wealthy California blueblood convicted of joining the Communist Party. She argued that her prosecution violated the Constitution. The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed. But even in disagreeing with her position, Louis Brandeis (joined by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.) produced a brilliant and eloquent exegesis on the potential of free speech to enact social change: “Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine.” As Brandeis saw it, free speech was virtually a sacred right and an awesomely powerful force that would expose “falsehood and fallacies” and “avert … evil by the processes of education.” Hence, the remedy to bad speech was “more speech, not enforced silence.” That piece of writing has been deemed one of the most important commentaries ever crafted on the First Amendment. But Brandeis assumed something that has not been borne out by facts, which is that the better argument would generally win. He also assumed that relevant people on all sides of a question were equally capable of being heard and that skeptics were interested in listening. That fallacy continues to inform the thinking of those who see speech as inherently self-correcting. Much as many of us admire Louis Brandeis’s mind and spirit, the society he envisioned has never existed. Instead, we have created a society in which lying is both endemic and purposeful. We have brought the worst values of advertising into the political sphere and wedded that to long-established tactics of political propaganda, even as our political class has learned to use social media to spread disinformation that propagates at a breathtaking rate. The very idea that political speech would expose and therefore vanquish “falsehood and fallacies” now seems incredibly naïve. Free speech always had limits. But because of our new technological reality, because of the unexpected weaponization of speech, we are having to consider those limits in a new light. We live in a world where it is far from clear that the answer to bad speech is more speech; and where a foreign power, thanks to our freedom of expression, may well be responsible for the election of a U.S. president. We live in a time when a frightened white minority within the larger white majority fights to maintain control of our country; and when large corporations and cynical functionaries — eager to exploit fear — have a bigger megaphone (including their own television news networks) than anyone speaking for the powerless and dispossessed. We live in an era when the U.S. awarded its presidency to a man who lost the election by roughly 3 million votes, and who, with the cooperation of a submissive Senate, has appointed judges determined to thwart the will of the public; has proposed policies, supported largely by lies, designed to further divide an already polarized nation; and caters to an irrational mob whose most fanatical elements want to refight the Civil War. All of this raises a host of difficult questions: If the Brandeisian view of speech is fatally flawed, what is a better, or at least a more realistic, view? Is it possible to reverse these trends that are destroying our democracy? How do we balance an array of important societal values that compete with the value of free speech? How, in short, do we enable a relatively enlightened majority to rescue our country from an embittered, backward-looking minority? And what happens to speech — which has never been totally free — in the process?

Excerpt adapted from The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America by Ellis Cose. Published by Amistad. Copyright © 2020 HarperCollins.

Published September 21, 2020 at 06:40PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/3iRPsAm from Blogger https://ift.tt/32P6FVf via IFTTT

[lodelss]

The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America

No one expected their words to be enlightening or their tone harmonious. Hatred rarely comes in such flavors. It spills out as an ugly, incoherent mess infused with the rotten odor of willful ignorance. And so it was with the Nazi wannabes — self-styled white supremacists determined to make their mark on the world, committed to convincing anyone who might listen that their superiority was both evident and inevitable. The setting was downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, August 2017. Their mission was unity — of like-minded hate mongers. Their leader, Jason Kessler, was a 33-year-old who lived with his parents and had once supported Barack Obama. He had learned that many demographers thought whites would eventually become a minority race in the United States. That news was so unsettling that Kessler remade himself into a white-rights activist. He styled himself as “a civil and human rights advocate, focused on the Caucasian demographic” in the mode of “Jesus Christ or Mahatma Gandhi.” His “Unite the Right” rally, observed the Christian Science Monitor, “was supposed to be the movement’s coming out party, an emergence from the shadows of internet chat rooms into the national spotlight.” Kessler was inspired in part by fellow University of Virginia graduate and white supremacist Richard Spencer who, in May 2017, led a band of racists in Charlottesville chanting “Russia is our friend” and “Blood and soil,” a Nazi-inspired slogan. Why they were enamored of Russia is anyone’s guess; I presume it had something to do with President Trump. The reason for the Nazi chant was evident; they thought it allowed them to channel the spirit of General Robert E. Lee, who had abandoned the U.S. Army in a doomed quest to preserve race-based slavery in the South. Charlottesville’s leaders recently had voted to remove Lee’s statue from the downtown park that no longer carried his name. Spencer and his crew opposed that effort and everything they thought it implied, including hostility to the legacy of whiteness. The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were similarly motivated by the perceived threat to American whiteness. Its members — 50 strong — converged on Charlottesville that July to march around and shout “white power” as hundreds of counter protesters responded with “racists go home.” How did the mad ravings of a bunch of intellectually confused, racially paranoid misfits end up spurring a national debate over the limits of free speech, the meaning of the First Amendment, and the moral obligation of the president of the United States? One reason is that — despite Kessler’s efforts to cast himself as the Martin Luther King Jr. of white rights — the rally engendered fears of made-for-TV-scale violence. As news of the event spread, and some sense of its size became clear, several local businesses announced they would temporarily close out of concern for the safety of their customers and employees. The University of Virginia, located in Charlottesville, asked students to stay away. Many rally participants showed up armed with rifles and other deadly weapons (thanks to Virginia’s open carry laws). Indeed, even before the rally’s scheduled noon start time, Kessler’s congregation had ignited so much hostility and ugliness that local authorities labeled the gathering an “illegal assembly” and ordered participants to leave. In the end, the racist, anti-Semitic hate-fest caused three deaths. Two of the dead were state troopers. Berke Bates and H. Jay Cullen, assigned to monitor the gathering from the sky, died when their helicopter crashed. The third victim was Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal. James Alex Fields Jr., a 20-year-old Adolf Hitler fanatic from Ohio, killed Heyer by intentionally plowing his car into a crowd of counter protesters — injuring some 19 people in addition to Heyer, who died from blunt-force injury to her chest. Following the tragedy, Donald Trump famously condemned the “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” His words provoked a controversy that went on for months as Trump proved incapable of criticizing the racist mob without also condemning those who opposed it. Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, was so sickened by the president’s words that she refused to take his condolence call. “I’m sorry. After what he said about my child,” Bro told CNN, and added, incredulously, “I saw an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the [counter] protesters … with the KKK and the white supremacists.” James Fields’ lawyers sought mitigation by stressing his history of mental illness. A psychologist testified that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 6 and later with schizoid personality disorder. His lawyers also delved into his childhood traumas, which included coping with the murder of his grandmother by his grandfather, who had subsequently killed himself. “James’s mental illness causes him to lose emotional and behavioral control in stressful situations,” said his attorneys, who claimed he had taken himself off his meds when he was 18, meaning he was medically untethered when he murdered Heyer. After pleading guilty, Fields received two life sentences — one in state court and the other in federal court. Even with Fields confined to prison, questions raised by Heyer’s murder — and the rally that caused it — reverberated. Trump’s troubling insistence on calling bullying bigots “very fine people” was perhaps inevitable given his need to placate a base that contains more than its share of people like David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who promoted the rally as an effort to “take our country back” and who, after Heyer’s murder, thanked Trump via tweet for his “honesty & courage.” Duke also tweeted, “This is why WE LOVE TRUMP and WHY the FAKE NEWS MEDIA HATES TRUMP. He brings to light what the lying, Fake News Media Won’t. The truth is the media covers up horrific numbers of racist hate crimes against White people!” But putting the president and his behavior aside for the moment, what about the free speech community — the civil libertarians who successfully fought in court for Kessler’s right to hold his rally in downtown Charlottesville? The city had wanted to move Kessler’s parade of bigotry to another park, one farther from the heart of town that officials claimed would be easier to police. But Kessler had said no; and the American Civil Liberties Union, along with a local outfit called the Rutherford Institute, had sued the city on Kessler’s behalf. Following the event, the ACLU was heavily criticized — and also lauded — for standing up for the racist rabble-rousers. Glenn Greenwald, best known for reporting on U.S. surveillance programs brought to light by whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcefully defended the ACLU. Civil liberties advocates, he argued, “defend the rights of those with views we hate in order to strengthen our defense of the rights of those who are most marginalized and vulnerable in society.” Others were not so sure. The Guardian reported on an erosion in “the belief that the KKK and other white supremacist organizations are operating within the bounds of acceptable political discourse — rather than as, say, terrorist organizations — and therefore have a moral right to be heard.” Jessica Clarke, a law professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, pointed to studies showing that bigots routinely hid behind free speech arguments as a cover for racism. Highly prejudiced people, she noted, “were less likely to voice First Amendment objections when the threatened speech was race-neutral, suggesting their free speech concerns were more about the freedom to express racist prejudice than free speech in general.” Legal scholar Laura Weinrib noted that the ACLU had never blindly supported free speech but had done so in the fight for a better society; and she wondered whether “a dogged commitment to free speech” was still the best strategy for an organization pursuing social justice: “The balances have shifted dramatically since the 1930s. In recent years, nearly half of First Amendment victories have gone to corporations and trade groups challenging government regulation. Free speech has served to secure the political influence of wealthy donors. Labor’s strength has plummeted, and the Supreme Court is poised to recognize a First Amendment right of public sector employees to refuse to contribute to union expenses. Long-settled principles of American democracy are newly vulnerable, and hate has found fertile terrain.” Even Susan Herman, president of the ACLU, questioned whether old assumptions about free speech still applied: “We need to consider whether some of our timeworn maxims — the antidote to bad speech is more speech, the marketplace of ideas will result in the best arguments winning out — still ring true in an era when white supremacists have a friend in the White House.” Leslie Mehta, the young black attorney who was legal director of the ACLU of Virginia when it took the Kessler case, seemed confident, when I interviewed her in the aftermath of Heyer’s death, that she had made the right decision. “There were certainly lots of conversations between myself and the executive director. There were a lot of revisions back and forth with briefs and having discussions about potential implications, but nobody has a crystal ball and no one [knew] exactly what [would] ultimately happen. I do think that the First Amendment has to mean something. And at the time, it was my understanding … that there was no evidence that there would be violence.” Mehta, a native of Woodland, North Carolina, is intimately familiar with the South and with the United States’ legacy of brutal racial oppression. She went to historically black Howard University School of Law because of its reputation for creating lawyers devoted to “social activism and social justice.” But she also is adamantly committed to the idea of free speech. “I think one of the reasons why free speech is so important to me is because … it exposes what you disagree with. And for me, I think it’s important to hear things like our president saying … ‘Well, there are good people on both sides.’” Mehta also thought it was important to consult with her mother and her 92-year-old grandmother as she proceeded with the Kessler case. Her grandmother, she confided, “never said that she fully agreed or disagreed [with Mehta taking the case], but she did not think that I was wrong.” As anyone trying to understand the Charlottesville fiasco quickly discovers, the issue of speech — particularly in a society polluted by racism and largely defined by economic inequality — is endlessly complex. So let me begin this journey with a brief exploration of how the U.S. came to embrace such a broad notion of free speech, and let’s look at some decisions made in its name. ••• We tend to think our current conception of free speech has been around essentially since the beginning of the republic. In truth, our firm and collective embrace of the First Amendment is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Constitution was drafted at a time when the Founders had rejected foreign tyranny. They were wary of the potential power of a centralized state. So the Bill of Rights was a balancing act, weighing not only the rights of individuals versus government in general but also the rights of states versus the federal government. Indeed, at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified, the First Amendment did not apply to the states. As legal scholar David Yassky has pointed out, the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech was “quite weak — at least to contemporary eyes. A citizen in 1800 had no absolute right to free speech; if the speech-restricting law was a state law, the Constitution was silent.” Eventually that changed, and that had a lot to do with the Civil War, the end of slavery, the 14th Amendment, and assorted court decisions. But even after the Reconstruction era, free speech, as we understand it today, was nothing but an aspiration, which is one reason that Southern states could effectively outlaw agitation for abolition. Free speech is very much an invention of the 20th century. And that concept of speech is very idealistic, inextricably linked to the notion that in the competition of ideas, good ideas generally crowd out bad. That argument received its most famous articulation in a 1927 case: Whitney v. California. At its center was Charlotte Anita Whitney, a wealthy California blueblood convicted of joining the Communist Party. She argued that her prosecution violated the Constitution. The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed. But even in disagreeing with her position, Louis Brandeis (joined by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.) produced a brilliant and eloquent exegesis on the potential of free speech to enact social change: “Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine.” As Brandeis saw it, free speech was virtually a sacred right and an awesomely powerful force that would expose “falsehood and fallacies” and “avert … evil by the processes of education.” Hence, the remedy to bad speech was “more speech, not enforced silence.” That piece of writing has been deemed one of the most important commentaries ever crafted on the First Amendment. But Brandeis assumed something that has not been borne out by facts, which is that the better argument would generally win. He also assumed that relevant people on all sides of a question were equally capable of being heard and that skeptics were interested in listening. That fallacy continues to inform the thinking of those who see speech as inherently self-correcting. Much as many of us admire Louis Brandeis’s mind and spirit, the society he envisioned has never existed. Instead, we have created a society in which lying is both endemic and purposeful. We have brought the worst values of advertising into the political sphere and wedded that to long-established tactics of political propaganda, even as our political class has learned to use social media to spread disinformation that propagates at a breathtaking rate. The very idea that political speech would expose and therefore vanquish “falsehood and fallacies” now seems incredibly naïve. Free speech always had limits. But because of our new technological reality, because of the unexpected weaponization of speech, we are having to consider those limits in a new light. We live in a world where it is far from clear that the answer to bad speech is more speech; and where a foreign power, thanks to our freedom of expression, may well be responsible for the election of a U.S. president. We live in a time when a frightened white minority within the larger white majority fights to maintain control of our country; and when large corporations and cynical functionaries — eager to exploit fear — have a bigger megaphone (including their own television news networks) than anyone speaking for the powerless and dispossessed. We live in an era when the U.S. awarded its presidency to a man who lost the election by roughly 3 million votes, and who, with the cooperation of a submissive Senate, has appointed judges determined to thwart the will of the public; has proposed policies, supported largely by lies, designed to further divide an already polarized nation; and caters to an irrational mob whose most fanatical elements want to refight the Civil War. All of this raises a host of difficult questions: If the Brandeisian view of speech is fatally flawed, what is a better, or at least a more realistic, view? Is it possible to reverse these trends that are destroying our democracy? How do we balance an array of important societal values that compete with the value of free speech? How, in short, do we enable a relatively enlightened majority to rescue our country from an embittered, backward-looking minority? And what happens to speech — which has never been totally free — in the process?

Excerpt adapted from The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America by Ellis Cose. Published by Amistad. Copyright © 2020 HarperCollins.

Published September 21, 2020 at 11:10PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/3iRPsAm

[lodelss]

The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America

No one expected their words to be enlightening or their tone harmonious. Hatred rarely comes in such flavors. It spills out as an ugly, incoherent mess infused with the rotten odor of willful ignorance. And so it was with the Nazi wannabes — self-styled white supremacists determined to make their mark on the world, committed to convincing anyone who might listen that their superiority was both evident and inevitable. The setting was downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, August 2017. Their mission was unity — of like-minded hate mongers. Their leader, Jason Kessler, was a 33-year-old who lived with his parents and had once supported Barack Obama. He had learned that many demographers thought whites would eventually become a minority race in the United States. That news was so unsettling that Kessler remade himself into a white-rights activist. He styled himself as “a civil and human rights advocate, focused on the Caucasian demographic” in the mode of “Jesus Christ or Mahatma Gandhi.” His “Unite the Right” rally, observed the Christian Science Monitor, “was supposed to be the movement’s coming out party, an emergence from the shadows of internet chat rooms into the national spotlight.” Kessler was inspired in part by fellow University of Virginia graduate and white supremacist Richard Spencer who, in May 2017, led a band of racists in Charlottesville chanting “Russia is our friend” and “Blood and soil,” a Nazi-inspired slogan. Why they were enamored of Russia is anyone’s guess; I presume it had something to do with President Trump. The reason for the Nazi chant was evident; they thought it allowed them to channel the spirit of General Robert E. Lee, who had abandoned the U.S. Army in a doomed quest to preserve race-based slavery in the South. Charlottesville’s leaders recently had voted to remove Lee’s statue from the downtown park that no longer carried his name. Spencer and his crew opposed that effort and everything they thought it implied, including hostility to the legacy of whiteness. The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were similarly motivated by the perceived threat to American whiteness. Its members — 50 strong — converged on Charlottesville that July to march around and shout “white power” as hundreds of counter protesters responded with “racists go home.” How did the mad ravings of a bunch of intellectually confused, racially paranoid misfits end up spurring a national debate over the limits of free speech, the meaning of the First Amendment, and the moral obligation of the president of the United States? One reason is that — despite Kessler’s efforts to cast himself as the Martin Luther King Jr. of white rights — the rally engendered fears of made-for-TV-scale violence. As news of the event spread, and some sense of its size became clear, several local businesses announced they would temporarily close out of concern for the safety of their customers and employees. The University of Virginia, located in Charlottesville, asked students to stay away. Many rally participants showed up armed with rifles and other deadly weapons (thanks to Virginia’s open carry laws). Indeed, even before the rally’s scheduled noon start time, Kessler’s congregation had ignited so much hostility and ugliness that local authorities labeled the gathering an “illegal assembly” and ordered participants to leave. In the end, the racist, anti-Semitic hate-fest caused three deaths. Two of the dead were state troopers. Berke Bates and H. Jay Cullen, assigned to monitor the gathering from the sky, died when their helicopter crashed. The third victim was Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal. James Alex Fields Jr., a 20-year-old Adolf Hitler fanatic from Ohio, killed Heyer by intentionally plowing his car into a crowd of counter protesters — injuring some 19 people in addition to Heyer, who died from blunt-force injury to her chest. Following the tragedy, Donald Trump famously condemned the “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” His words provoked a controversy that went on for months as Trump proved incapable of criticizing the racist mob without also condemning those who opposed it. Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, was so sickened by the president’s words that she refused to take his condolence call. “I’m sorry. After what he said about my child,” Bro told CNN, and added, incredulously, “I saw an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the [counter] protesters … with the KKK and the white supremacists.” James Fields’ lawyers sought mitigation by stressing his history of mental illness. A psychologist testified that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 6 and later with schizoid personality disorder. His lawyers also delved into his childhood traumas, which included coping with the murder of his grandmother by his grandfather, who had subsequently killed himself. “James’s mental illness causes him to lose emotional and behavioral control in stressful situations,” said his attorneys, who claimed he had taken himself off his meds when he was 18, meaning he was medically untethered when he murdered Heyer. After pleading guilty, Fields received two life sentences — one in state court and the other in federal court. Even with Fields confined to prison, questions raised by Heyer’s murder — and the rally that caused it — reverberated. Trump’s troubling insistence on calling bullying bigots “very fine people” was perhaps inevitable given his need to placate a base that contains more than its share of people like David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who promoted the rally as an effort to “take our country back” and who, after Heyer’s murder, thanked Trump via tweet for his “honesty & courage.” Duke also tweeted, “This is why WE LOVE TRUMP and WHY the FAKE NEWS MEDIA HATES TRUMP. He brings to light what the lying, Fake News Media Won’t. The truth is the media covers up horrific numbers of racist hate crimes against White people!” But putting the president and his behavior aside for the moment, what about the free speech community — the civil libertarians who successfully fought in court for Kessler’s right to hold his rally in downtown Charlottesville? The city had wanted to move Kessler’s parade of bigotry to another park, one farther from the heart of town that officials claimed would be easier to police. But Kessler had said no; and the American Civil Liberties Union, along with a local outfit called the Rutherford Institute, had sued the city on Kessler’s behalf. Following the event, the ACLU was heavily criticized — and also lauded — for standing up for the racist rabble-rousers. Glenn Greenwald, best known for reporting on U.S. surveillance programs brought to light by whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcefully defended the ACLU. Civil liberties advocates, he argued, “defend the rights of those with views we hate in order to strengthen our defense of the rights of those who are most marginalized and vulnerable in society.” Others were not so sure. The Guardian reported on an erosion in “the belief that the KKK and other white supremacist organizations are operating within the bounds of acceptable political discourse — rather than as, say, terrorist organizations — and therefore have a moral right to be heard.” Jessica Clarke, a law professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, pointed to studies showing that bigots routinely hid behind free speech arguments as a cover for racism. Highly prejudiced people, she noted, “were less likely to voice First Amendment objections when the threatened speech was race-neutral, suggesting their free speech concerns were more about the freedom to express racist prejudice than free speech in general.” Legal scholar Laura Weinrib noted that the ACLU had never blindly supported free speech but had done so in the fight for a better society; and she wondered whether “a dogged commitment to free speech” was still the best strategy for an organization pursuing social justice: “The balances have shifted dramatically since the 1930s. In recent years, nearly half of First Amendment victories have gone to corporations and trade groups challenging government regulation. Free speech has served to secure the political influence of wealthy donors. Labor’s strength has plummeted, and the Supreme Court is poised to recognize a First Amendment right of public sector employees to refuse to contribute to union expenses. Long-settled principles of American democracy are newly vulnerable, and hate has found fertile terrain.” Even Susan Herman, president of the ACLU, questioned whether old assumptions about free speech still applied: “We need to consider whether some of our timeworn maxims — the antidote to bad speech is more speech, the marketplace of ideas will result in the best arguments winning out — still ring true in an era when white supremacists have a friend in the White House.” Leslie Mehta, the young black attorney who was legal director of the ACLU of Virginia when it took the Kessler case, seemed confident, when I interviewed her in the aftermath of Heyer’s death, that she had made the right decision. “There were certainly lots of conversations between myself and the executive director. There were a lot of revisions back and forth with briefs and having discussions about potential implications, but nobody has a crystal ball and no one [knew] exactly what [would] ultimately happen. I do think that the First Amendment has to mean something. And at the time, it was my understanding … that there was no evidence that there would be violence.” Mehta, a native of Woodland, North Carolina, is intimately familiar with the South and with the United States’ legacy of brutal racial oppression. She went to historically black Howard University School of Law because of its reputation for creating lawyers devoted to “social activism and social justice.” But she also is adamantly committed to the idea of free speech. “I think one of the reasons why free speech is so important to me is because … it exposes what you disagree with. And for me, I think it’s important to hear things like our president saying … ‘Well, there are good people on both sides.’” Mehta also thought it was important to consult with her mother and her 92-year-old grandmother as she proceeded with the Kessler case. Her grandmother, she confided, “never said that she fully agreed or disagreed [with Mehta taking the case], but she did not think that I was wrong.” As anyone trying to understand the Charlottesville fiasco quickly discovers, the issue of speech — particularly in a society polluted by racism and largely defined by economic inequality — is endlessly complex. So let me begin this journey with a brief exploration of how the U.S. came to embrace such a broad notion of free speech, and let’s look at some decisions made in its name. ••• We tend to think our current conception of free speech has been around essentially since the beginning of the republic. In truth, our firm and collective embrace of the First Amendment is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Constitution was drafted at a time when the Founders had rejected foreign tyranny. They were wary of the potential power of a centralized state. So the Bill of Rights was a balancing act, weighing not only the rights of individuals versus government in general but also the rights of states versus the federal government. Indeed, at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified, the First Amendment did not apply to the states. As legal scholar David Yassky has pointed out, the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech was “quite weak — at least to contemporary eyes. A citizen in 1800 had no absolute right to free speech; if the speech-restricting law was a state law, the Constitution was silent.” Eventually that changed, and that had a lot to do with the Civil War, the end of slavery, the 14th Amendment, and assorted court decisions. But even after the Reconstruction era, free speech, as we understand it today, was nothing but an aspiration, which is one reason that Southern states could effectively outlaw agitation for abolition. Free speech is very much an invention of the 20th century. And that concept of speech is very idealistic, inextricably linked to the notion that in the competition of ideas, good ideas generally crowd out bad. That argument received its most famous articulation in a 1927 case: Whitney v. California. At its center was Charlotte Anita Whitney, a wealthy California blueblood convicted of joining the Communist Party. She argued that her prosecution violated the Constitution. The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed. But even in disagreeing with her position, Louis Brandeis (joined by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.) produced a brilliant and eloquent exegesis on the potential of free speech to enact social change: “Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine.” As Brandeis saw it, free speech was virtually a sacred right and an awesomely powerful force that would expose “falsehood and fallacies” and “avert … evil by the processes of education.” Hence, the remedy to bad speech was “more speech, not enforced silence.” That piece of writing has been deemed one of the most important commentaries ever crafted on the First Amendment. But Brandeis assumed something that has not been borne out by facts, which is that the better argument would generally win. He also assumed that relevant people on all sides of a question were equally capable of being heard and that skeptics were interested in listening. That fallacy continues to inform the thinking of those who see speech as inherently self-correcting. Much as many of us admire Louis Brandeis’s mind and spirit, the society he envisioned has never existed. Instead, we have created a society in which lying is both endemic and purposeful. We have brought the worst values of advertising into the political sphere and wedded that to long-established tactics of political propaganda, even as our political class has learned to use social media to spread disinformation that propagates at a breathtaking rate. The very idea that political speech would expose and therefore vanquish “falsehood and fallacies” now seems incredibly naïve. Free speech always had limits. But because of our new technological reality, because of the unexpected weaponization of speech, we are having to consider those limits in a new light. We live in a world where it is far from clear that the answer to bad speech is more speech; and where a foreign power, thanks to our freedom of expression, may well be responsible for the election of a U.S. president. We live in a time when a frightened white minority within the larger white majority fights to maintain control of our country; and when large corporations and cynical functionaries — eager to exploit fear — have a bigger megaphone (including their own television news networks) than anyone speaking for the powerless and dispossessed. We live in an era when the U.S. awarded its presidency to a man who lost the election by roughly 3 million votes, and who, with the cooperation of a submissive Senate, has appointed judges determined to thwart the will of the public; has proposed policies, supported largely by lies, designed to further divide an already polarized nation; and caters to an irrational mob whose most fanatical elements want to refight the Civil War. All of this raises a host of difficult questions: If the Brandeisian view of speech is fatally flawed, what is a better, or at least a more realistic, view? Is it possible to reverse these trends that are destroying our democracy? How do we balance an array of important societal values that compete with the value of free speech? How, in short, do we enable a relatively enlightened majority to rescue our country from an embittered, backward-looking minority? And what happens to speech — which has never been totally free — in the process?

Excerpt adapted from The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America by Ellis Cose. Published by Amistad. Copyright © 2020 HarperCollins.

Published September 21, 2020 at 06:40PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/3iRPsAm