The Broken U.S. Press Sits Down For Cocktails And Giggles With Fascists
from the pathetic dept
This Saturday is the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner (WHCA). And there’s been ample criticism of journalists that plan to have giggles and cocktails with overt fascists, given this helps normalize of one of the most racist, censorial, and corrupt administrations in U.S. history.
This year, because an actual comedian might get somewhere close to the truth about the country’s collapse, the whole thing is being hosted by a “mentalist.”
The WHCA organizers have been largely weak-kneed about the event, stating they are “happy” Mr. Trump accepted their invitation, and are looking “forward to hosting” a guy who has murdered whatever was left of U.S. public media, filed countless baseless lawsuits against press outlets for doing journalism, and consistently threatened network broadcast licenses just because comedians made jokes.
A coalition of more than 250 journalists wrote a letter to the WHCA and attendees, begging them to demonstrate something resembling a backbone. But even these calls for action from other journalists feel pathetic:
“We understand that some journalists plan to wear pocket handkerchiefs or lapel pins with the words of the First Amendment. And continuing in that spirit, we believe the White House Correspondents Association should take stronger action by issuing — from the podium — a forceful defense of freedom of the press and condemnation of those who threaten that freedom, followed by a standing toast to the First Amendment and a pledge to continue upholding such a critical cornerstone of our democracy.”
This would all be slightly more palatable if U.S. journalism hadn’t so catastrophically failed to meet the moment during our authoritarian era. As far as the eye can see, corporate journalism (with occasional and welcome exception) has been a pathetic mess; normalizing, validating, and often even encouraging our bumbling, violent, and extremely racist kakistocracy.
It’s a little late for jokes. And a toast to the First Amendment over smoked salmon-potato chip canapés doesn’t mean much at this point, if it ever did.
The coverage of the event has been almost as pathetic as the journalists planning to attend. New York Times columnist Michael Grynbaum, for example, actually put these words down in print:
“Mr. Trump, whose instinct for crowd work and note-perfect timing have drawn comparisons to the insult comic Don Rickles, will almost certainly take a few potshots. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on social media that the evening “will be fun!”
Good times.
Brendan Carr will be in attendance. I’m sure there will be some good natured ribbing about his efforts to illegally censor critics of the administration, destroy legitimate journalism, and dismantle the First Amendment. Some real zingers about his total destruction of consumer protection and corporate oversight (just kidding, nobody in the U.S. media cares about any of that). Maybe some light guffaws at his most recent efforts to harass comedians for telling jokes.
After that, maybe some light quips about the fact this administration used a masked gestapo to murder American civilians in the street. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?
Granted there are some that correctly argue that schmoozing with the wealthy and powerful you cover was never a good idea in the first place. Especially in a country where the press is so increasingly and clearly captured by the extraction class and corporate power:
“As elite journalists wring their hands over whether it is hypocritical to attend this year’s dinner or mount a quiet protest by wearing First Amendment lapel pins and pocket squares, I would rather they acknowledge that a red-carpet schmoozefest with the powerful sources they cover was never a good idea. The annual rationalizing that it’s just a show of civility to party with the people one covers doesn’t overcome the public’s skepticism about our independence. What was once (a fairly long time ago) a well-intended night of fundraising and camaraderie among professional adversaries is now simply a bad look.”
There will certainly be some spotty (and maybe even genuinely funny) useful criticism of Trump on Saturday. He’ll probably mostly love it, because it normalizes his vile corruption and makes for good television. But there’s very little attendees could do or say at this point that can make up for the broader industry’s abject failure to meet the moment. The cost has simply been too high and the failure too great.
Give your money to worker-owned and independent media organizations (like Techdirt!) with a backbone.
Filed Under: brendan carr, correspondents dinner, donald trump, first amendment, journalism, media
Companies: whca
Comments on “The Broken U.S. Press Sits Down For Cocktails And Giggles With Fascists”
This could work! I used to be racist as fuck before the NFL started painting “End Racism” in the end zones but now I’ve come to my senses!
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Wearing pins or kerchiefs in protest is legit how some people on Techdirt think we can solve the issue of rampant fascism in the country today.
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Feel free to post alternative suggestions, and to avoid confusion be specific regarding what you want people to do.
Normalacy
Nothing about any of this is normal. Nor should it be.
QUIT PRETENDING EVERYTHING IS NORMAL and start doing something about it.
At the event discussions over how to distinguish types of Rhinoceros to report on were rampant with the explicit understanding that no one directly addresses how people are turning into Rhinoceroses.
I once opened for a band in Detroit called “Thoughts of Ionesco” and I would love to know where they are now. LOL.
Excellent. More “people” whose deaths I’ll be celebrating with a massive, shit-eating grin on my face.
Here’s hoping they each get to meet someone like me in real life before their time is up. I’d love a few minutes with each of them.
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The Left is the party of violence.
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Please cite a single leftist/liberal who, in the past thirty years, has committed an act of violence on par with that of the two Christian nationalists who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995 and killed almost 200 people. Destruction of property alone doesn’t count—you need to cite an attack that had mass human casualties.
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The right doesn’t tell the truth.
They instead say the things that ‘must’ be true to justify themselves.
They work backwards from where they plan to go, not forwards from where we currently are.
Right now the right wants to commit violence, so they insist that the left is the party of political violence.
I imagine their laughter sounds like a ‘collaboration’ of turkey noises.
‘Gobbels Gobbels Gobbels!’
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You fought for freedom of speech and freedom of the press for fascists.
What did you expect the end result to be?
Because expecting anything other than black tie galas with open nazis at the end of that short path was silly. Of course the press is taking cocktails and giggling with fascists, this is the future you fought for.
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Techdirt has been very, very clear over the years that in its view, freedom of speech necessarily must apply to even the worst actors in order to apply to anyone.
I feel like you’ve misread something.
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Which is as silly as saying if friendly pats on the back are permissible, so too must be punches to the face.
“where do you put the line? If you ban fascists saying that the election was stolen, and you ban fascists saying a bleach enema is the only way to cure autism, so too must you ban saying we need to tax the rich to improve society!” an idiot claims “We put the line where a fair trial by a court of law puts it, same as any other crime where there’s room for interpretation” a financial lawyer replies.
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Fascists absolutely want freedom of the press for fascists and for no one else.
Because of how they fight for it, society always finds it easier to open up freedom of the press to them, and harder for anyone else.
Fascism demands inequality under the law. The only effective response is to ban them from the levers of the law.
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People defending the legal right for those assholes to speak their mind while enforcing social and political consequences over the bullshit they say. Just because I think an American Nazi has the right to speak their mind doesn’t mean I think polite society shouldn’t absolutely shun those Nazis out of public life at every possible turn. What’s your solution, mass censorship by way of giving the U.S. government the power to legally punish anyone who expresses “disfavored” ideas?
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What social and political consequences? What bad things have happened to Trump and Musk? Have they been punched in public and the puncher was acquitted? Of course not!
What consequences do you expect? Without government enforced consequences they just interact with people who don’t care. Segregation didn’t end without government enforced consequences for doing segregationist things. Why would nazism and without them?
And, Honestly, the government isn’t going to give up their legal monopoly on force, so yes, fining and imprisoning people who commit speech crimes is far more workable than ‘make punching nazis legal’.
Anarchy and libertarianism don’t work if your goal is a just society.
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Neither does authoritarianism, and censorship—no matter how well-intended—is inherently an act of fascism.
I am sympathetic to the idea that we need to push Nazis, fascists, and other like-minded assholes out of polite society and make their ideologies so incredibly toxic to the average person that no one in their right mind will want to think of them positively. But if you give the government any power to censor “disfavored” ideas and speech, you are actively setting yourself up to have your ideas and speech deemed “disfavored” when the government perceives you as a threat. You think it can’t and won’t happen, and you’re free to believe that. But there’s a modern-day idiom about face-eating leopards that applies quite well to pushing for censorship, and you’d do well to remember that idiom whenever you demand the government violate someone else’s First Amendment rights in the name of social order.
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If you push for freedom of speech in all directions, instead of only pushing in specified directions, you’re giving more freedom to fascists than anyone else because they make sure to resist unequally. Equal pressure in every direction results in more movement in their direction.
How it’ll work is: A newspaper publishes something the government doesn’t like, the government issues a fine, the newspaper takes it to court with the same truthfulness standards as US libel law: If it’s truthful, the government cannot issue the fine. The judge, who is ostentatiously neutral, decides if it’s truthful or not. Or a jury does, whichever society is more comfortable with.
Boom, there’s a censorship law that will unequally affect fascists, since they tend to lie constantly. All it does is give the little guy the same protection that the wealthy already have: Safety from lies.
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By the same token, if you push for restrictions of speech, the fascists will take the power you give them—regardless of whether you intended to give it to them—and use it to restrict the speech of their enemies. You can see it now, with Trump pushing to censor (or have others censor on his behalf) people who say things about him that he doesn’t like. Give him a law that lets him legally censor his critics and he will use it to its fullest extent. That is why I don’t support censorship: “Censoring bad guys” sounds pretty fucking awesome until the government tells you “you’re one of the bad guys”, and I’d rather not risk my rights being violated because I wanted the government to violate someone else’s rights.
We shun them. We make public life uncomfortable for them by reminding them that for all their talk of power and glory and “the silent majority”, they’re still a minority and they won’t have their power forever. We cut them out of our private lives by uninviting them to our homes and gatherings, and we urge others to do the same. These assholes want to have more power than God, but they hate being told “no”—and when you tell them “no” and set that boundary, they’ll try to break it by any means necessary. All you have to do is enforce that boundary. If you gotta do it with violence, so be it.
You’re acting like it’s not. Or do you think Donald Trump, a man who’s never met a critic he wasn’t willing to sue for defamation, would use that power to only go after outright lies? Remember that any power you give to the politicians you like will eventually fall in the hands of the politicians you dislike. Even with the best intentions, censorship inevitably ends in the worst outcomes.
You know how headlines are on the front page in massive print and retractions are buried in the back pages in small print? That’s kind of how your idea would work: Even if the newspaper succeeds in getting the fine tossed, the damage to its reputation would already be done because more people will have heard about the fine than about the successful appeal. Also, what happens if a newspaper’s owner decides that fighting the fine would be a resource drain compared to paying the fine (or straight up going out of business) even if lawyers said the newspaper could and most likely would win the appeal?
Your idea is untenable on multiple levels, not the least of which is the implicit notion that such a law will never be abused by fascists once they have the ability to use it. If the past decade should have taught you anything, it’s that fascists can and will abuse the law and the power it gives them for their own selfish ends. Giving them more power to attack their political enemies isn’t going to help us any more than ignoring them or wishing on a shooting star that they’d all go away. So what makes you think they wouldn’t—couldn’t—find a way to abuse the power you would give them without intending to give them?
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I’m pushing for restrictions in a very specific direction: Restrictions on fascist speech. I’m not pushing for universal restrictions as you believe.
And you don’t really have a method to solve the problem: “What if everybody just shunned fascists”. In the history of forever, never has ‘everybody just’ without a governing structure enforcing the behavior.
The US government will not tolerate competing governing structures, which is part of why it gutted unions, and why it destroyed the first nations, and why so many black towns got wiped out.
Oscarville, Benson, Kowaliga, Rondo. These are the stories of what happens if you build a competing governing structure in the USA.
The only way to resolve this problem is to take control of the government, hopefully by voting, and use that control to pass restrictions against Fascist speech so that they become the outcast governing structure that is to be disassembled.
If you don’t use the weapons of your enemies against them, especially when those weapons are as effective as censorship and community destruction, they will win.
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And I’m telling you that even if you push for those specific restrictions, the fascists will find a way to twist them. You can come up with as nuanced a definition of “fascist speech” as possible and people dedicated to censoring antifascist speech will find some loophole in said definition that allows them to censor their political enemies.
Take a look at the old Comics Code. After the Code went into power, the people who ran it made restrictions specifically designed to put specific publishers and creators (notably EC Comics, famed for its numerous horror comics) out of business. The government didn’t do shit because they saw the Code as the industry policing itself to avoid having the government come in and censor comics. Which, hey, mostly true, but it still resulted in restrictions that stunted the growth of American comics beyond being seen as something only for children.
Every censor who thinks they’re the good guy and has the perfect plan is only ever fooling themselves because no plan is foolproof and there’s no bigger fool than someone who thinks they’ve got a perfect idea.
Well, unless you want me to say something on the level of “gut them all like fish and let the streets run red with their blood”—an idea which I’m not going to endorse or condone in any way—I don’t see any other way to do it without putting on the chopping block my right to speak without government interference. And I’m sure as shit not going to do that.
I’m well aware of that. It’s why I didn’t suggest shunning be legally enforced. I suggested that it be socially enforced, and such enforcement is never going to be widespread because most people just want to be left alone and not deal with the wider problems of the world. But if enough people make a big deal out of social enforcement by doing it themselves and demonstrating that such enforcement against bastards like Nazis is seen as good and virtuous—if they virtue signal that Nazis should be shunned, in other words—not everyone will need to carry out that social enforcement en masse.
What happens when the people you hope to squash out of public life that way get control of the government and pervert that power by using it against their political enemies via declarations that their enemies are the real fascists? And don’t tell me it can’t happen because Donald Trump won a second term as president despite being the closest thing to an American Hitler as I’ve ever seen and there are a shitload of conservatives willing to say “the left are the real fascists”.
If you use the weapons of your enemies and you don’t kill them, you’re leaving open the possibility that those weapons will fall into their hands again and be used against you again. That’s why I don’t support or endorse censorship of any kind: Why the fuck would I shoot my enemy in the foot, then leave that still-loaded gun at their feet and turn my back to them?
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He won both terms because we have such lax laws on hate speech and fascist rhetoric that he was allowed to campaign on hate and animosity and no amount of that shunning and criticism you talk about worked. You need to realize we tried your way, the centrist liberal way. It failed. Go tell you far-left people you follow and who follow you on Mastodon, the ones who are fed up with how fucked up and broken this country has become, that their attitudes will lead to fascism, and see how that goes.
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I’m sorry, but anyone who thinks Trump won because we don’t suppress speech is definitionally an idiot. Please fuck off.
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Trump ran on racial animosity against immigrants twice in a row. First time he called people coming from Mexico & the rest of Latin America criminals and assaulters. Thw second time, he and JD Vance slung lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield killing and eating people’s pets. The latter inspired hate marches and threats to the community where they had to shut down schools & parts of the community for their safety.
In an actual functioning civilized democracy, Trump would have been tossed out and ruled ineligible the first time after uttering his racist drivel. But in the interests of “free speech”, we had to let him use racism to appeal to his fans’ base primitive instincts.
Or do you still think he won because of the economy & egg prices?
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Hitler rose to power through the mechanisms of democracy. Only after doing so did he have the means to become the dictator that he became. Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that “an actual functioning civilized democracy” will always universally punish hatred. I mean, the United States has a long history of being a “functioning civilized democracy” that legally condoned slavery.
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You are almost pathetically naive to think that somehow “banning” Trump’s hate speech would have magically made his base not continue to seek to elect hateful leaders.
You are over-indexing on the results of a single winner take all election, without recognizing that to live in a free society means that sometimes the people make a bad call.
You seem to think if only “we” ban “them” from saying their worst thoughts that all gets fixed. Again, never in history has that ever been true. Instead, every fucking time, the powerful use it to suppress the marginalized.
I am sick and tired of people who can’t be bothered to think one freaking step ahead on where this leads.
You are dangerous.
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My whole point has been “if you set the law against the worst people, don’t be surprised when the government makes you one of the worst people because it wanted to set the law against you”. But apparently, thinking that way instead of supporting a government crackdown on speech said government deems “dangerous” makes me the kind of fascist upon whom the government should be cracking down.
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Trump won because your limpwristed system couldn’t manage to toss an old rich white guy in jail.
Part of the path that led there, though, was people giving him and people like him room and space to spread their shit.
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And your solution is to…what, try to start a civil war by banning the kind of speech you think led to his victory? I mean, we all saw what Trump supporters are capable of doing in his name on the 6th of January 2021. Trying to tell them their speech is outlawed under penalty of fines or imprisonment isn’t going to make them less angry about “wokeness”; if anything, it’s going to get them more pissed off and create another Timothy McVeigh.
And let’s say you manage to ban fascist speech from public spaces (e.g., public parks, government buildings) and privately owned public-facing businesses (e.g., Walmarts). That speech will still be around in private places (e.g., people’s homes), and unless you’re ready to pull some shit that would make Orwell rise from his grave and demand a new word for “Orwellian”, you’re not going to get rid of it in those places. That’s where it will fester like a tumor. And the more you push fascist rhetoric out of public life through the law, the more people who believe in it will hold onto it out of spite.
I suggest social shunning because a collective “fuck you, get out” from other people is arguably better at bringing about shame in the average person than “fuck you, go to jail”. Telling someone they’ll go to jail for saying the N-word might make them more willing to say it; telling a family member they’ll be barred from seeing their grandkids if they keep saying the N-word will probably make that family member less willing to say it.
And I was gonna ignore this, because it feels really weird for you to keep harping on this point like I’m supposed to drop to my knees in anguish over you mentioning it, but…
In case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t told/ordered/demanded you or “The Phule” to stop holding onto your attitudes and beliefs in re: censorship. My disagreement with y’all’s positions has nothing to do with whether you’re allowed to hold them—which, ironically enough, is the exact position I take with regards to people who express bigotry. If someone on Mastodon thinks banning fascist/bigoted speech is a good idea, I’d be willing to say what I said here, though I’d probably say it in a less confrontational demeanor than I would here because it’s clear you’re looking to confront me.
And since you are: If you found my Mastodon account, it’s not that hard to find my email. So whatever your personal issue you clearly have with me is—and you do have one, because why else would you bring up my mostly idle Mastodon account as an attack line?—I’m inviting you to bring it to my inbox directly instead of trying to litigate your bullshit here on Techdirt. This isn’t your site or mine; if you want to come for my throat, do it where the blood won’t stain someone else’s carpet.
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Stephen wants voting and a blue wave to be the solution, but the moment any legislator in that Democratic supermajority tries tackling the hyper-permissiveness of hate speech and more in the U.S., he’s going to screech and holler.
Stephen follows a lot of far-left people on Mastodon who would disagree with him, but he seems to keep his mouth shut over there because he knows he’d be shunned and even-more-friendless if he let his mask slip and they could see him for the centrist liberal he really is.
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My stance against censorship is non-partisan. I don’t and wouldn’t ever trust the U.S. government, regardless of who steers the ship, with the power to determine what speech people are and aren’t allowed to express. If a Democrat endorses censorship, I’d endorse primarying that Democrat in their next election.
The fact that you’re following me outside of this site and keeping track of my posting habits and follower list suggests a level of parasocial obsession that borders on unhealthy. Also: I don’t post a lot on Mastodon because I don’t use social media in general all that much any more. It’s got nothing to do with not being seen as “not leftist enough”, and I promise you that I’m aware of probably being more centrist than I’d admit out loud.
And if people on Masto would disagree with me in re: free speech, so what? I’m against fascism—and that includes the inherent fascism of wanting to control what speech is deemed acceptable enough by the government to be expressed in polite society under penalty of imprisonment/state-sponsored violence for expressing “disfavored” ideas. Banning “fascist speech” sounds all nice and dandy until the government decides antifascist speech is actually fascist speech and starts going after the antifascists.
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Then you’re naïve. And as this shit-show of a Presidential term continues for another two years, as the pogroms and ICE raids continue, as violence & harassment continues to be enacted on marginalized groups based on dog-whistles from Trump & other fascist scum, you will only be proven moreso.
There’s multiple reasons why people are leaving the country and looking to never come back. Leaving for actual functioning democracies. One of those reasons is likely they see people like you and your arguments and go “Yeah, no, this country is never coming back from this in any way that will make it safe for me to return.”
What marginalized person would want to return to a country where their fundamental right to exist is something that’s legally perpetually allowed to be questioned, and people can get successfully elected for questioning their right to exist and promising to remove their rights? And who’d want to live in a country with “allies” like you who say that they have to suck it up and tolerate it for the sake of “freedom”?
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So be it. But I’m not going to compromise my principles because you called me names.
Power can and will be abused. The power of censorship will be abused more than any other because it presents an alluring temptation many would be unwilling to pass up: “Silence the horrible! Quash awful ideas! Cleanse society of filth!” It sounds good on the surface, but it breeds fascist thinking—for once a censor has silenced one bit of “filth”, they’ll always find more ideas to quash, each “dangerous” in their own way. There’s always a new threat to find. And when all the unpopular and unpleasant ideas most people agree are “dangerous” get quashed, that’s when censors start searching for ideas that are more popular/less unpleasant to truly “cleanse” society of horrible thinking, and…well, before you know it, Newspeak becomes reality.
Nothing short of an outline of a law that can (A) knock bigoted speech out of polite society (B) while dinging as little protected speech as possible and (C) setting up guardrails to prevent any kind of abuse of this power will make me change my mind on this. I don’t defend the content of the speech of bigots and fascists and other such assholes; what I defend is their right to speak. If I can’t defend their rights, how can I plausibly defend my own when someone like you decides that my speech is just as bad as theirs and demands my rights be curtailed under the same law you’d use to silence them?
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Lol, why don’t you actually tell your followers what speech you’re willing to tolerate, Stephen? Tell them how you think we just need to legally tolerate hate speech and simply shun people who say it in order to fight back and win, in your opinion.
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And you may be even dumber than you appear if you believe that the fascists won’t use that to claim that any leftist speech is, in fact, “fascist speech” and therefore subject to the laws you pushed for. You are literally pushing for the tools to suppress your speech and empower fascists.
It’s not like we don’t have centuries of evidence for this.
My goodness, man, learn a little history.
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Oh, yes Mike. Tell me about how Canada and modern Germany are failed states. Tell me about how their hate speech laws have lead to oppression of minorities. I’m eagerly awaiting this one.
Also, once more, black tie galas between the press and monsters was a perfectly predictable outcome. This is what you want. This is the society you wanted. We have freedom of speech, here’s where it lead, enjoy it. Celebrate it. You’ve got what you want and I don’t. Be happy. Please. At least one of us should be happy with this outcome. I’d honestly be happier if you were happy with this outcome.
Because if you don’t like it, and I don’t like it, why the fuck did you help fight for it?
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Your name is more truthful than you know. You are a very foolish person.
Germany’s attempts at speech suppression, including raiding people’s homes for internet jokes sure has stopped the far right from succeeding there… oh wait.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/technology/germany-internet-speech-arrest.html
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/01/30/germany-has-built-a-firewall-against-the-far-right-in-the-fall-this-young-nationalist-may-test-it-00748999
And thankfully, in Germany, those hate speech laws are being use to stifle… [checks notes] criticism of far right politicians as hate speech:
https://www.techdirt.com/2018/05/03/german-politician-decries-censorship-follows-it-up-suing-facebook-to-have-critical-comment-deleted/
Working great, you silly person you.
Oh, and make sure you don’t satirize those in power:
https://www.techdirt.com/2018/01/08/it-took-only-three-days-germanys-new-hate-speech-law-to-cause-collateral-damage/
Make sure you don’t mock German politicians because they can throw you in jail while prosecutors laugh as they lock you up:
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/18/german-prosecutors-think-its-funny-peoples-homes-are-being-raided-and-their-devices-seized-because-they-said-stuff-on-the-internet/
And all that has done is help create a resurgence of the far right in Germany.
So, sorry, you’re a fucking naive fool.
Re: Re: Re:8
Ban JD Vance and ICE from Bluesky, you coward.
Re: Re: Re:6
Hell, the Trump regime has been trying to label “antifa” and leftists as a greater domestic terrorist threat than anyone else, even though I’ve never heard of any kind of left-wing violence that matches the level of death and destruction caused by the Oklahoma City bombing or the Ku Klux Klan’s decades of terrorism.
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How do you expect us to push Nazis, fascists, and other like-minded assholes out of polite society and out of power without some measure of legal backing or force that denies those ideologies equal footing in society? We aren’t going to media-literacy-education or social-media-dunk or corporate-boycott our way out of fascists holding the government, no matter what your brain-dead principles say. The U.S. should’ve codified hate speech laws ages ago like other civilized countries.
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Repeating what I said above: We shun them. We make public life uncomfortable for them by reminding them that for all their talk of power and glory and “the silent majority”, they’re still a minority and they won’t have their power forever. We cut them out of our private lives by uninviting them to our homes and gatherings, and we urge others to do the same. These assholes want to have more power than God, but they hate being told “no”—and when you tell them “no” and set that boundary, they’ll try to break it by any means necessary. All you have to do is enforce that boundary. If you gotta do it with violence, so be it.
You gotta try to make them realize that their ideology is toxic and it will end with them being shunted into some dank little hellhole with a bunch of like-minded assholes if they don’t fix their hearts. I imagine some of the assholes won’t mind being in that hellhole, but I also imagine there are plenty of people who’d try to fix their hearts if they’re told by their whole family “you can be here or you can be a Nazi, but you can’t be both”.
And how far should we take those laws? Once you get your foot in the door, so many options are available, all of them intentionally enticing—because once you’re blinded by the best intentions, you won’t see the bricks you’re laying on the path to Hell. The people who supported Hitler in his rise to power had the noblest of intentions: “We want to make Germany great again!” I’m not saying you’re a Nazi, but I am saying that even the best intentions can be twisted by people intent on the worst outcomes.
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Once more: Black tie galas with fascists is an entirely predictable side effect of officially tolerating their speech.
You fought for this. Own it. Celebrate it. This is what your victory looks like. If it tastes like ashes in your mouth, consider fighting for something else.
Re: Re: Re:5
No. No, it is not. Tolerating their speech is not the same as endorsing them or their speech. I tolerate Flat Earthers being allowed to speak their lunacy, but that doesn’t mean I think the Earth is flat, and it doesn’t mean I think Flat Earthers should be welcome in any spaces dedicated to credible science. To wit:
I tolerate your speech. That doesn’t mean I endorse it. And it sure as shit doesn’t mean I think you should be censored, even though I’m sure you would find some way to include me in your little “censor all the fascist propaganda!” law for not daring to agree with you that fascists should be legally prevented from speaking anything but government-approved orthodoxy.
Re: Re: Re:6
At a certain point, tolerating someone’s hateful rhetoric as legally equal and legally valid is the same as endorsing it. You’re forcing marginalized people and their allies to fight the same rhetorical battles against fascism & bigotry over and over and over and over again.
Go listen to the leftist people you follow on Mastodon, and leftist spaces on Mastodon in general. People who are struggling to keep their heads above water, unlike you and your self-professed privilege. Yeah, there are fighters in those spaces. But there are also people who are just tired of it. Maybe you can eventually realize how harassment and hatred create a tangible cost to speaking for people that lack the ability or inclination to engage in bruising discourse just to live their lives. How your ideology that all it takes is eternal collective vigilance is not sustainable.
Re: Re: Re:7
The flip side is treating rhetoric as so dangerous to the human mind—so frighteningly powerful on its own—that it must be treated like a disease and its “spreaders” must be quarantined (or worse). That doesn’t seem like a good idea to me, especially given how that “disease” could still fester in private spaces that the government can’t touch without a panopticon so widespread and so powerful that it makes the mass surveillance described in 1984 look quaint.
I don’t doubt that people feel like banning bigoted/fascist rhetoric is a good idea. For people marginalized by that rhetoric, I understand and sympathize with their pain; it sucks being on the receiving end of that, no matter what. But where they might feel like using the law to force that rhetoric out of public life is a good idea—and on the surface, it is—I know that the intent and operation of any such law can and will be abused and perverted by bigoted fascist assholes to attack those same marginalized people all over again. That’s why I can’t support the kind of proposals that you and “The Phule” bring up unless you can convince me that you have a way to prevent that abuse from happening while still dinging only the smallest possible amount of speech. The allure of censorship doesn’t hold sway over me because I know that power is capable of being abused in ways that will ultimately endanger my own right to speak freely. In case you haven’t noticed, I like being able to make use of that right.
Re: Re: Re:8
Again, you’re condemning marginalized people and their allies to fight the same battles over and over and over and over. It’s not sustainable and it’s not moral to do so.
Re: Re: Re:9
Would you prefer I give you the power to censor me because of the position I hold? After all, if you keep saying I’m fascist-adjacent because I think bigots should have the right to speak freely, why should I escape the exact same censorship—including the same punishments—you’d visit upon them for daring to think even the worst people should have their civil rights protected? Go ahead, tell me I deserve to be jailed (or worse!) for thinking what I think.
Just remember: If you do say that, you’ll only be proving me right.
Re: Re: Re:10
If you want a country where the people you supposedly “understand and sympathize with their pain” have to have their existence and rights remain an open question allowed to be discussed and debated back and forth endlessly because “freedom”, then don’t be surprised when those people you supposedly “understand and sympathize with their pain” refuse to sympathize with you and your “principles”.
Re: Re: Re:11
I’m not asking for sympathy for my principles. I’m asking you only to respect those principles by giving me an outline for how to curtail the speech of bigots and fascists that doesn’t put my right to speak freely at risk of the same censorship you would have visited upon them. If you can’t do that, don’t waste your time or mine with your transparent attempt to emotionally blackmail me into giving up my principles for your approval.
Re: Re: Re:12
“Principles” that mandate that my friends & I have to have our existence and validity as people remain open as a subject of debate and inquiry and that people can campaign for office on thinly-veiled calls to purge us from society? That’s not a set of “principles” that any civilized person should be expected to respect.
Re: Re: Re:13
I’m sympathetic to your plight, but if I abandoned my principles to make you or anyone else happy—and to be clear, that is what you’re suggesting I do every time you play the card you’re playing in your comment—they wouldn’t be principles, but positions of convenience. The whole point of having principles is that you have them even when shit gets rough. If you give them up on a whim, you’re no better than some asshole Republican who decided being on Trump’s good side was better than being true to themselves.
Let me make this as clear to you as I can: I believe that giving the government any power to censor speech, even with the best of intentions and with your favored politicians in power, will eventually bite you on the ass and tear away flesh and muscle. You cannot guarantee, in any way, that the politicians who wield that power—even the ones you favor—won’t abuse that power for selfish ends. You also cannot guarantee, in any way, that the politicians you favor will always be in office. The power to censor “disfavored” or “dangerous” speech can and will be used against marginalized groups and political dissidents; that you can’t see such a thing happening is almost as Pollyanna-ish as my bullshit elsewhere in this comments section.
As I said before, you would need one hell of an argument to convince me to drop my principles in re: free speech. I’m asking you, once more, to do exactly that by giving me an outline for how to curtail the speech of bigots and fascists that doesn’t put my right to speak freely at risk of the same censorship you would have visited upon them. And I say once more that if you can’t do that, don’t waste your time or mine with your transparent attempt to emotionally blackmail me into giving up my principles for your approval. I won’t give up my position until I’m convinced to give it up by a rational, reasonable argument. Give one to me or fuck off with your weird parasocial grudge; I don’t care which.
Re: Re: Re:6
Friend, my proposal wouldn’t harm your communication at all: Fines for malicious lies to individuals, and corporations that are structured to block legal liability may simply be silenced and forced to cease all communications if they’re found telling harmful lies.
The truth would be a defense, and those accused of spreading harmful lies would get the opportunity to present their case to a judge.
It’s reasonable, it’s workable, it would increase the caseloads on the courts but so does everything else.
Whereas your solution is “Let them have Galas.” Enjoy your Galas, Stephen!
Re: Re: Re:7
Who gets to determine what speech counts as “lies”? What guardrails would you put in place to stop that definition from expanding or prevent the censorship of more speech than you intended—i.e., to stop that power from being abused? I don’t think you have answers to those questions. I also don’t think you’re willing to stop at “lies” if it means stomping out all the speech you don’t like.
Re: Re: Re:8
The courts would decide. That’s what courts exist for, to interpret laws that have room for interpretation.
Re: Re: Re:9
Spoken like someone who is incredibly privileged and thinks that going through litigation is easy and painless.
Fool. You’re a fool.
Re: Re: Re:10
Like you have room to speak when you let JD Vance and ICE run free on your social media site after welcoming them with open arms.
Re: Re: Re:10
You recognize that litigation is expensive, difficult, time-consuming, and painful, yet fail to understand how that puts a whole lot of justice out of reach of a lot of marginalized groups who don’t have the resources (time, connections, money) to, for example, bring a lawsuit against people waging targeted harassment campaigns against them and spreading racist lies about their communities.
Re: Re: Re:11
Yes. The government itself is frequently the litigator best positioned to represent society as a whole.
There was a time, not too long in the past, where in cases of murder the family of the deceased had to litigate the case in court. Now the government takes the accused to trial on behalf of the deceased.
Likewise once upon a time any victim of lesser crimes, such as theft, had to litigate it in court. Now many cases are brought by the government on behalf of the victim.
There are acts that harm society as a whole, such as spreading anti-vax propaganda, and these are the crimes that the government absolutely should be pursuing.
Re: Re: Re:10
Yes, litigation is way less frightening than people make it out to be.
Little children are frightened by dentists, audits, and litigation.
It’s not easy, and it’s not painless, but it is something I regularly have to shepherd along as part of my job.
Everyone involved is exhausted, and the ones who aren’t being paid to be empathetic to you, which is usually me, aren’t empathetic at all.
But it sure beats the alternative of frontier justice. I’d rather the government use the courts to enforce the shunning of racist liars than trust society as a whole to handle it holistically, and I prefer these people go to prison than be shot by kids who are throwing away their future to fight trash.
And thanks for your comments about my name! I cribbed it from that song by the Beatles.
Re: Re: Re:4
Brazil realized their mistake in electing Bolsonaro tne first time and successfully jailed their wannabe supreme leader using their laws. Many of which were created after they had to revise their constitution decades back after a brutal dictatorship. They didn’t pave the bricks to hell.
Meanwhile, here in the U.S., we’re in hell right now and making the lives of people in other countries a living hell because we were too scared to do anything thanks to the slippery-slope fallacy hand-wringing from you and others like you. You love putting on a progressive mask but deep down, you’re just another centrist liberal too afraid of rocking the boat and hoping we can purely vote our way back to sanity and reason.
Re: Re: Re:5
What is something you believe people can band together and do to change anything in re: politics that is simultaneously possible, practical, and ethical?
I’m asking that because you’re asking me to endorse a position of censorship that, on a long enough timeline, would put that power in the hands of people who would most certainly love to censor people like me. I’m asking that because I’m not going to endorse political violence as a first/best/only solution. I’m asking that because I’d genuinely love to know what possible solution you have in mind that isn’t “let’s give the government more power over people’s behavior and thinking”.
I’m not claiming to be some grand political chessmaster or a godlike social collaborator or whatever you think I’m trying to say about myself here. I’m a dumb schmuck with a laptop and too much time on his hands. But I’m also someone who has deep concerns about giving the government any power to control what people can and cannot say. People bitch at me about supporting the 303 Creative ruling because it affirmed the right of people to not be coerced by the government into expressing speech with which they disagree, but my position on speech is consistent with that ruling: With incredibly few exceptions (e.g., the ones in place in U.S. law right now), the government shouldn’t have the right to decide what speech can and can’t be, should and shouldn’t be, must and mustn’t be expressed by its people.
I get that my position isn’t popular with people like you. What you don’t get is that I don’t care. You would need a much better argument than anything you’ve brought up before to change my mind, and I don’t think you’re capable of making such an argument. But if you truly think you can, by all means: Tell me why I should support giving the government enough power to censor people based on even potential support for a specific sociopolitical ideology deemed “dangerous” by the government, then tell me how you would limit that power so that it can’t be used as a tool of sociopolitical control (e.g., banning a specific religion and jailing its adherents because the government deems that religion “dangerous”).
Re: Re: Re:6
This is, what, the fifth time you’ve copy-pasted this? Get some better material and grapple with how the culture of free speech tolerance that you support has led us to this point.
Maybe you should try asking that copypasta question to the folks you follow and who follow you on Mastodon and see what happens. Oh wait, you won’t because you know that letting your mask slip and letting people over there see you for the centrist liberal you really are will net you a ton of blocks.
Re: Re: Re:7
And I will keep reposting it until I get an answer. Everyone loves talking about “the revolution” like it’s some big burst of grand action and everything changes after that and everything’s better instantly. But the revolution isn’t an event—it’s a process, and it’s one that largely takes place outside of public view. That’s why I ask that specific question: Any action that will change politics for the better will be possible, practical, and ethical because most people will want any action they take to be all three at once. Protests like the No Kings gatherings might seem pointless and all, but they’re possible (anyone can put together a protest), practical (anyone can just show up), and ethical (anyone can join a protest without generally violating laws). And protests are where like-minded people can meet each other and start coming together to organize for future actions. An event isn’t the revolution, but it can be part of the process that is the revolution.
Re: Re: Re:6
Again: Other countries have passed laws and used laws to hold fascists accountable without paving the bricks to hell. Your philosophy and the philosophy of others that we can just shun them out hard enough over time is #Resist safety-pin liberal level thinking. You’ll probably point to JD Vance and ICE being heavily blocked on Bluesky or having people in their replies mock them relentlessly as a win for the “shun them” column. That doesn’t make up for how Bluesky intentionally opened the door wide open for Vance & Co to hop on, and the government doesn’t seem to be swayed by the epic-for-teh-winrar social media dunks they’re getting, nor are they swayed by stories about how fast they rose to the top of the most-blocked charts.
Re: Re: Re:7
Every country that has hate speech laws has seen them abused in a manner allowing the powerful to suppress the speech of the powerless.
That you seem to think that sort of suppression is just fine or perhaps collateral damage, shows how much fucking privilege you have. You are willing to sacrifice the marginalized just because you wrongly think it will somehow stop the powerful from their hatred and bigotry. There is literally no historical precedent to support such a proposition. Indeed, every single bit of evidence suggests the opposite: the powerful use hate speech laws to suppress the marginalized.
You want to enable more of that. And you should stop it.
Re: Re: Re:8
Yeah, we know you cherry-pick a handful of cases in Germany to support your view that hate-speech laws are bad.
You speak like I want to “sacrifice the marginalized” when the ones who bear the brunt of impact from legally-protected-free-speech fascist rhetoric are the marginalized? Really? Do you think your stance is the one that helps protect the marginalized? The company you’re on the board of rolled out the welcome wagon for JD Vance & Company. Do something about that and then maybe you can say you’re on the right side of things.
Re: Re: Re:9
You want to put in place a power structure within the government that will censor people, but you have no way to stop that power from falling into the hands of people who would absolutely abuse that power to censor marginalized people. You can’t even guarantee that your censorship scheme would completely stomp out fascist thinking in any given society. Or do you sincerely believe that hate speech laws have accomplished that goal in any country that has them?
Re: Re: Re:10
I don’t think anyone in the U.S. right now has grounds to say ‘our commitment to letting fascists speak is what’s keeping marginalized people able to’.
Re: Re: Re:11
Okay, you want me to sign off on censorship. Fine. So tell me how you would craft a law that (A) bans the speech of fascists and bigots from the entirety of the public sphere (including the Internet!), (B) dings as little other protected speech as possible, and (C) cannot and will not be abused by any politician or lawmaker (including politicians and lawmakers you favor) to censor “disfavored” speech beyond the speech your law intends to censor. If you can do that, I’ll sign off on your little crusade—but if you can’t, I won’t. Are you a bad enough dude to make a rational, reasonable, and logical argument that could change my mind?
Re: Re: Re:8
I am unaware of that happening in Canada, unless your definition of ‘abused the powerless’ is ‘stopping a Holocaust denier from teaching his elementary class the Jews got what was coming from’, which would be a weird way to go about it.
Re: Re: Re:6
“What is something you believe people can band together and do to change anything in re: politics that is simultaneously possible, practical, and ethical?”
General strike and tax refusal come to mind.
Re: Re: Re:4
“Your way of getting people to stop espousing bigoted ideas will lead down a slippery slope of people to become isolated and bitter and let them fester and get worse, but my Hallmark Channel Original Movie method of isolating people with bigoted ideas with emotional appeals to family won’t make that happen”
Re: Re: Re:5
There’s a better chance of a bigot being convinced to change their mind by being told “fix your shit or you won’t be allowed to visit your [family/friends] again” than there is them changing by being told “fix your shit or you’re going to jail”. I’m not out here saying my bullshit is foolproof; if anything, it is Pollyanna-ish bullshit. But I’d wager the threat of government punishment for being a bigot would be less effective in changing minds than the promise of being shunned by people who would otherwise still hang with someone if that someone would just stop being a bigot.
Re: Re: Re:2
When the main recourse that marginalized people have against pervasive targeted harassment and a government that hates them and wants them dead and uses dog-whistles (or just plain whistles) to target them are expensive time-consuming civil lawsuits that paint an even bigger target on the back of those enduring harassment, then something needs to change.
When stalking kids becomes First-Amendment-protected speech, something needs to change.
Re:
Looks like Mike finally used his Super Flagging power to hide your comment so he can go back to vibe-coding more productivity widgets for himself while wondering why Bluesky, his baby and vibe-coded social media app, keeps breaking every other week.
Re: Re:
You are free to think so but in reality a majority of people who visit TD have little sympathy for people who argues for a simplistic solution to a complex problem and refuses to understand that complexity even when it is explained why the simple solution will create more problems.
It is also highly ironic that such proposed simplistic solutions to complex problems are one of the favorite tools that populists and fascists use to fool people to vote for them. Welcome to the club I guess…
'Oh yeah, a whole lot of this IS our fault...'
They can wear whatever minuscule and trivial-to-miss pins or pocket squares ‘supporting the first amendment’ that they want, if they go they’re showing that they’re bending the knee to the regime and everyone there knows it.
If they want to protest the regime then the correct response to the event is to not go and instead spend the day writing and posting articles about what an utter disaster the regime has been and continues to be for free speech in the US, and if they’re feeling super-duper brave they can maybe slip in an article or two admitting that maybe the press in the US has some responsibility for how things got this bad thanks to their constant sanewashing of Trump and acting like he and the GOP have been acting in good faith this whole time.
Having a big dinner together once a year, sure — but inviting the people they cover to it should be (should always have been!) an absolute no-go. It’s like the bar association inviting all the defendants they put in prison.
Re:
To wit: If Barack Obama hadn’t shown up that one time and mocked Donald Trump to his face, we might not have Trump as president right now.
No one has ever compared Trump to Don Rickles, neither can what he does be considered crowd work. Rickles would be incredibly insulted by the comparison.
Re:
A past thanksgiving with maga relatives I don’t talk to anymore I got trapped into watching OAN run a piece on how “funny” Trump was. Holy shit is he not; just another witless chud that thinks meanness alone is comedy gold.
And I have to say, they made the mistake of comparing clips of Trump to a clip of Reagan getting off some zinger in some old candidate debate.
Fuck Reagan, but holy crispy shit was there no comparison between him and Trump. Ronnie actually had some charisma and could actually deliver an actual joke. Trump looked like the old MIB roach-in-an-Edgar-suit next to that. I’ll never comprehend what these freaks see in him, except maybe a reflection of their own worst selves.
Re: Re:
That’s pretty much it. He gives people permission to be their worst selves without shame or remorse because he never apologizes for anything he does no matter how awful.
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Same old, same old!
I forgot why I don’t visit this site. Same old Leftist nonsense. Same old Fascist and NAZI article and comments.
Thinking the Media is on Trumps side? HAHAHA you people can’t have it both ways. You all are what you are accusing Trump of being, and then MUSK. What did MUSK do? Oh Be on Trumps side? Ya, you are the Anti free speech and the Fascist ones.
Obama by the way was going after the press all the time. You people really need to check your facts. your TDS is off the chart. You all are falling for all the Propaganda not based on any real facts.
Re:
Judging by the way you write, the primary reason you don’t visit Techdirt is because you’re, at best, semi-literate.
Re:
They’re not necessarily on Trump’s side, so much as they prefer Trump over other, more “boring” politicians. He creates chaos; news media outlets love chaos because it is newsworthy and exciting (“if it bleeds, it leads”). It’s why the news media kept focusing on Trump even after he left office: Compared to the less scandal-prone presidency of Joe Biden, Trump was (and still is) far more “exciting” as a president because you never know what he’s going to say or do next.
Re: Re:
Even the ones that aren’t outright gushing with praise for him have effectively been on his side though as sanewashing him and pretending that he is a very serious person with legitimate positions that can be articulated and nailed down is doing him a massive favor.
Re:
Are you a vampire?
Because damn, that’s a complete lack of self-reflection you have there.
Fascist regime, Mr. Bode, not administration.