The Silly Debate About Bannon and Free Speech and the Two Reasons That the First Amendment is So Vital

As I write this there is a bit of a furor over the fact that Steve Bannon was invited to an ideas festival hosted by the New Yorker and then disinvited, prompting a flurry of pieces like this one in the New York Times by Bret Stephens.

"The only security of all is in a free press."
- Thomas Jefferson

Steve Bannon is a white nationalist. He believes that white superiority and national economies are nonfiction. There are people who think that he deserves an audience for his tried - and spectacularly disproven - ideas. Some of these people argue that this is a free speech issue.

At some point in the evolution of science, astronomers presumably stopped inviting "scientists" who argued that the earth was at the center of the universe. Like white nationalists, geocentrists had been proven wrong and no longer deserved a hearing.

Free speech doesn't mean that any curator of content like the New Yorker owes you their audience. I wish that were the case because I would sue every major news outlet and conference host (as would every person with a set of ideas they were trying to get out into the world).

There are two reasons for the first amendment that guarantees the right to free speech, assembly, religion, and press, what is essentially freedom of thought and expression.

The first is simply because it is such a vital part of the human experience to hold beliefs and to express those. This is reason enough for the first amendment but there is more.

The second is that a community with freedom of thought and expression will make more progress. If you espouse a really dumb idea, I can refute it with a better idea. As I stand there smug and proud, another person can come along with an idea even better than mine. And as they accept their accolades for such insight and intelligence, another person comes along with an idea that refutes theirs. And so it goes in a parade of progress that all depends on people freely having ideas, sharing ideas, and refuting or refining ideas to evolve a worldview that lets them better deal with reality. The ultimate test of their ideas is whether these ideas enable them to travel across the ocean or sky or space, conquer diseases that once conquered them, feel happy and know how to make others happy, and do other things like create energy or knowledge. The first amendment is not meant as a tool for protecting old ideas but as a tool for creating new ideas that we can act on in new ways.

The real power of the first amendment is that the evolution of ideas drives progress. This evolution is driven by the free expression and exchange of ideas and animated by beliefs we're passionate about.

Old ideas like white nationalism that destroyed a country as great as Germany and resulted in 100 million deaths do not deserve a second chance or a new audience. We already know it doesn't work. The first amendment doesn't mean that it has a right to an audience. Properly understood, the first amendment means that it deserves to be discarded as we move on to something more practical and intelligent.

The Bill of Rights and the Difference Between Modern Republicans and Democrats

The first two amendments to the constitution regard freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. All you may need to know about the modern Republican and Democratic parties might be summarized in these simple stats: 31% more Republicans than Democrats think the US has gone too far in expanding freedom of the press and 32% more Democrats than Republicans think the government should ban high-capacity magazines. Republicans are threatened by free speech and Democrats are threatened by automatic weapons.

Here are the differences between Republicans and Democrats in regards to gun policy:

Here are the differences between Republicans and Democrats in regards to freedom of the press. 42% of Republicans think that freedom of the press has gone too far.

This is a wildly incoherent thought, one that is fueled by Trump's incessant attacks on #fakenews. So much about this is bizarre (how would you even regulate speech or "the press" in this modern world?) but perhaps the weirdest thing is that this isn't about the genuinely fake news of folks like Alex Jones who Donald Trump has praised (and who recently had a guest on claiming that NASA is shipping children up to Mars where they are forced to work as slaves) but instead about the real news of folks like the New York Times and Washington Post who continually reveal that Trump tells the truth only about 25% of the time. What convinces Republicans that the press has gone too far is not actual fake news but instead good reporting that reveals Trump's disinterest in facts or evidence.

Democrats think that guns are dangerous and should be better regulated. Republicans think that ideas are dangerous and should be better regulated.


First amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Second amendment:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Bernard on Free Speech, Protests at Middlebury and When It Becomes Unreasonable to Rely on Reason

It had been awhile since I'd met with my invisible friend Bernard. He sounded a little hoarse.

"What's with your voice," I asked.

"I've been shouting at my twitter feed," he said. 

"TV, Bernard. "The phrase is 'shouting at your TV.'"

"You have to change with the times Ron." He paused. "You should have never told me about Twitter. I now get a steady stream of evidence that the world has gone mad."

We ordered our usual. I ordered the Reuben and he - as he usually did - ordered something new to him from DZ Aiken's vast menu, always first marveling at the fact that the portions were so huge and then methodically finishing everything on his plate.

"Hey, you read Charles Murray," he said. "Did you see that people at Middlebury College rioted against him the other day?" He chuckled as he surveyed the vast expanse of food on his plate. "That's one advantage to books over lectures. Nobody reading a book in the corner suddenly leaps out of his chair and riots. You bring a group together, though, and no telling what will happen." And with that he popped an entire matzo ball into his mouth. I took that as an invitation to respond.

"It does seem terribly uncivilized of a university to invite some guy to speak on your campus and then threaten him with violence when he shows up," I said.

Spewing a fine spray of matzo ball as he did so, Bernard spoke. "So you're making the freedom of speech argument?"

"Well not free to chew when you're talking, but yeah. Plus Charles Murray made some really important points in his book Coming Apart about how poverty and job loss is undermining institutions like the family. That's an important conversation. If you have a process for bringing someone onto campus, you should respect it."

"Sure," Bernard said, his Adam's apple bobbing furiously either because of excitement or because he was trying to hastily swallow. "Assuming that the people on a campus are any more monolithic than a population in a country or city. But you're saying that Charles Murray had the right to speak?"

"Obviously."

"But that is very different from the right to an audience."

"What?"

"You are free to speak but that doesn't give you a right to speak on Face the Press."

"Do you mean Face the Nation or Meet the Press?"

"Meet the Nation. Whatever. Charles Murray doesn't have a right to the audience at Middlebury University."

"Well they invited him. Plus, students need to learn how to think critically about ideas they don't like. University is not a place where you go to be protected from controversial ideas. Ideas shouldn't be censored."

"Well not censored but they certainly can be mocked or belittled or demolished with data."

"Which is why they need to be brought into the open. So they can be fought. Bad ideas flourish in dark spaces like closed minds and alt-right websites," I said. My point made, I stopped to enjoy my sandwich. That proved to be a poor debate tactic because it gave Bernard time to make a little speech.

"You are so naive Ron. You think that everyone with a bad idea will suddenly abandon it when they hear a good argument? Do you really think that if you point out that every time blacks have the chance to perform in an arena where prejudice gets demolished by performance - every time they compete in a game or on a track or in music sales or making people laugh - they flourish that a racist will just stop and say, 'Oh. Good point'? Do you think that sane people didn't try to make an argument against eugenics in Germany in the 1930s? Some minds are so simple that they desperately need simple arguments. Nothing is simpler than saying that Jews are plotting to take over the world or that blacks are inferior. You're not going to argue people out of those ideas. Your only real hope is to keep them away from those ideas."

"But those college kids need to hear the arguments and hear them demolished."

"Really," Bernard look at me with a measure of pity. "Why? Why even waste the time? Should we open up our university lecture halls every time some idiot with a feeling that he's mistaken for an idea wants to tell us why women are inferior or why climate change isn't real or why dictatorships are more effective than democracies? Those ideas are toxic. They literally kill people."

"Who decides, Bernard? I think that the burden of proof lies with the people who want to shut down the debate."

"No," he said firmly. "The burden of proof lies with those who think that the idea deserves an audience. There are an infinite number of ideas. When it comes to a university, someone needs to curate those ideas, make a choice about who gets access to the audience and can later say 'I have spoken at Middlebury, Harvard, UC San Diego, and Claremont Colleges. You, too, should listen to my very important ideas.'" 

"But nowadays we don't have curators of ideas" I said. "It's a free for all. It's not like an editor will keep a community from a terrible idea. People in every community will find really bad ideas on the internet as easily as they can find porn. You can't rely on curation of bad ideas once you have the internet. Instead, you have to teach people how to defend themselves against bad ideas, have to vaccinate them with good thinking."

Bernard was quiet. "Well that's a precarious place to rest the future." He ate a little more then said, "It's the most curious thing, Ron. The older I get, the less time I have left, the more I worry about the future I won't even be part of. You'd think it would be the other way around. You're young and you have decades left, longer than you've ever experienced, and you worry about what's going to happen in the next hour or day. You get old and have days left and you start worrying about how things will play out over the next century." He ate some more. "Well, and you worry about what's for dinner."

"To me it's fascinating because really, this is a debate about what we can debate," I said.

"Yes. Or the criteria you use for judging debates." 

"So we agree," I happily exclaimed.

"This fried kreplach," he murmured "It makes me happy."

"You're not really even listening to me, are you?"

His eyes closed as he chewed, he didn't respond.

"But you know, it's a lie we tell ourselves that we got here by reason and we stay here through reason."

"What," I asked.

"In the end, all reason rests on force."

"That's quite a statement."

"Violence is at the base of every argument. At some point you conquer the other guy and say, 'Our values, our norms, our goals are going to rule from this point forward. Not yours.' In the end, we didn't argue with Nazis. We shot them."

"Well that's bleak."

"You don't win all the arguments Ron. Our founding fathers were geniuses who understood Enlightenment principles and the fact that progress was incompatible with reliance on rule by aristocracy and religion. But they didn't argue their way into independence. Middlebury University there in Vermont where your Charles Murray was run off. It was founded by Congregationalists. Do you know what they were? The descendants of Calvinists, the folks who rode over on the Mayflower. What was Calvinists' big idea? Predestination. How at odds is that with the notion of a nation of self-made men or even the ideals of a university? Predestination is at odds with the very notion of progress. Sometimes you can win an argument over generations without resorting to force, the way that the Congregationalists won the argument about predestination with their Calvinist grandparents. That's ideal. Other times, you use force against a few guys with bad ideas before they use their arguments to ruin the lives of millions."

"I don't think that we're going to see something like Nazis again Bernard." 

"I wish I shared your confidence, Ron. But regardless, there are a variety of ways to cut short a life," Bernard said. "Sometimes it is in war or concentration camps. Other times it is by acting like blacks really are inferior and there is nothing that can be done about a black man having a life expectancy ten years shorter than a white man. Any argument that suggests we simply accept that reality is already violent. You can hardly blame some people for responding to such a dangerous idea with the threat of violence. It's unreasonable to think that reason is always enough."

The Truly Bizarre Policies of Donald Trump

How abnormal is Trump?

Today Jeffrey Immelt wrote in his annual letter to GE stockholders that basic concepts like "innovation, productivity, and globalization" were being challenged and that he still believed in globalization's future.

George W. Bush called a free press indispensable to democracy. (And said that a special prosecutor may need to be appointed to investigate the connection between Russia and Trump.)

This is seen as news and - rightfully as it turns out - a criticism of Trump's policies. A CEO in favor of globalization and a president in favor of the first amendment is like a mother who loves children. It's lovely but it's hardly remarkable. And yet, with a Trump presidency, it is news.

Why the Resolution of a Centuries Old Debate Between Spinoza and Descartes Calls Free Speech Into Question

"I can't believe that!" said Alice.
"Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath and shut your eyes."
Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "One can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
- Lewis Carroll

Intriguing paper from three University of Texas researchers on belief that tests Spinoza and Descartes notions of how we come to believe. Descartes thought that we comprehend something and then choose whether or not to believe it. For him, belief was separate from understanding and came later. Spinoza did not agree. He thought that belief was integral to understanding, that we accept a statement in order to comprehend it. For him, it was un-believing that came after and required the effort and belief that came automatically. Belief did not have to be done but instead had to be undone.

Gilbert, Tafarodi, and Malone's studies give weight to Spinoza's view: believing simply happens through the act of comprehension. The act of unbelieving relies on logical capacity, correct information, or cognitive resources. No everybody has these. You can reject the notion that Smith is pregnant if you know Smith is a man (logical capacity) but you can't reject it if you have wrong information (you thought Smith was a woman). Obviously, quite a few people are lacking either the logic, correct information, or cognitive resources needed to refute lies. For these people, exposure to an idea will mean belief in it. This is obviously troubling in a world in which freedom of speech is protected.

The authors, knowing that bad ideas in circulation are likely to be embraced (by at least a few) once we've been exposed to them, still vote for freedom of speech. Their reasoning is that conversation has the potential to help people take a skeptical approach to something false they've heard, but conversation between people can't help them to believe in true statements they haven't heard. In their words,

In short, people can potentially repair their beliefs in stupid ideas, but they cannot generate all the smart ideas that they have failed to encounter. Prior restraint [e.g., censoring political dissent or pornography] is probably a more effective form of belief control than is unbelieving, but its stunning effectiveness is its most troublesome cost. 

What does this mean? Apparently we don't adopt beliefs. They, instead, adopt us. It's worth examining your beliefs from time to time to decide which ones to reject, knowing that barring this act of intentional skepticism we're likely to protect ideas that don't deserve it. If anything, their studies suggest that you're likely biased more towards beliefs that don't deserve protecting than biased towards refuting beliefs that do.

------------------
The paper:
You Can't Not Believe Everything You Read
Daniel T. Gilbert
Department of Psychology University of Texas at Austin
Romin W. Tafarodi
Department of Psychology University of Texas at Austin
Patrick S. Malone
Department of Psychology University of Texas at Austin

Town Hall Confusion

These town hall meetings in which loud crowds protest the encroachment of health care into the lives of all Americans leave me perplexed. When we invaded Iraq – a move certain to kill thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans (and, as it turns out, a move that has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans) – there were no loud protests, no town halls, no “this is not my America,” cries from an angry and disenfranchised polity.

Now that we’re moving towards health care that covers millions more Americans and promises to end the 8,000 annual deaths of those without coverage, we kick into free speech, full protest mode

The Bridge Players' Revolt of 2007

Lunch with Bernard and his sister Maddie. Again, me, the human buffer.

We were eating our salads when Maddie announced, “Her daughter has a penis allergy.”

“Peanuts?” asked Bernard.

“Yes. She has a penis allergy.”

“She’ll outgrow it,” I said.

“This is serious. When she’s exposed, her breathing becomes difficult and there’s swelling. It doesn’t take much for this to happen – even if they’re just unwrapped in the same room she has a reaction.”

“That does sound severe,” Bernard said.

“I hope you’re right,” Maddie said, looking at me, “about her outgrowing this.”

“My first wife never did,” Bernard glumly announced to his salad.

“Have you seen that George Bush’s approval ratings have gone back up?” she abruptly asked.

“Well there’s a simple reason for that,” said Bernard. “The comedy writers are all on strike so now there is no one to properly report on what he’s doing.”

“They still have newscasters.”

“Yes, but it’s one thing for a newscaster to say, ‘Today American bridge players were told they could stay on the team in spite of holding up signs that said, “We did not vote for Bush.”’ It’s quite another for writers to point out that bridge players who made a protest this mild were about to be stripped of their one source of income. And that this became a big issue when they did this in China – a country we’ve criticized for human rights violations. And further, that we’re going to model freedom on the world stage by taking away someone’s job for expressing disappointment in an elected official?”

“Well, if anyone should know how to keep their mouths shut, it should be bridge players,” Maddie said indignantly.

“They did keep their mouths shut!” exclaimed Bernard. “They held up signs!”

"You'd have thought that they were trying to defect," I commented.

“Well, you shouldn’t do that in front of communists. If they think that we’re not all in this together, they’ll just exploit our weakness.”

“Weakness?” sputtered Bernard. “We let citizens express themselves and somehow that’s a weakness?”

“The world of bridge players will never again be the same,” I said.

“That’s right,” said Maddie. “It’s getting so that you can’t go anywhere without hearing about how upset people are with our president.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Bernard sighed.

“Well, I’d like to at least have lunch without hearing about why people think he’s such a Mormon.”

“No,” I said, “that would be Mitt Romney.”

Free Speech! Arrests Included!

Here's the situation. Kerry is speaking in Florida. Young guy asks him a series of questions ("Why did you cede to Bush when there were reported voting irregularities?" "Why not impeach Bush before he invades Iran?" "Were you a member of skull and bones at Yale?"). It could be that there is more to the story, but it appears to be a typical open forum kind of impassioned, somewhat rambling sort of speech, sort of question.

This video captures what happened next. The police forcibly escort him away from the microphone and then taser him at the back of the hall. Kerry shows why he lost the election by demonstrating an apparent ignorance of what is going on to the very guy who just asked him a question - at the least demonstrating the tone deaf approach that left even his biggest supporters feeling fairly ambiguous about his candidacy. (If Bush goes down in history as the worst president, what will that say of Kerry's candidacy?)

I blame this in part on the now mindless competition to get tough on crime. We've hired a ton of police officers and they, quite simply, don't have a lot to do. The trivial becomes a big deal and even a guy at a microphone attracts a half dozen police officers.

A part of me is fairly incensed at a society that has become this intolerant of speech and this tolerant of arrests for no good reason. (The guy hollers at one point, before being tasered, that they don't need to arrest him because he'll walk out of there.) But a part of me is delighted to be living in this age of YouTube. As the public sector is made more public - as even arrests are subject to the review and scrutiny of the general public - this kind of nonsense will have to wane. And that's good news.

Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Say

This, in it's entirety, is from The Week. George, the boy in the bubble.


Free Speech
How Bush avoids dissent.
8/31/2007

The Bush administration may not know how to plan for a hurricane or a war, said The New York Times in an editorial. But never let it be said it can’t plan a political rally. As a result of a lawsuit by two protesters and the American Civil Liberties Union, the White House has been forced to release a manual that details how President Bush’s speeches and other public appearances have been “micromanaged and laboriously controlled for the past five years to weed out the merest whiff of protest.” All those attending Bush public events, the manual instructs, are to be carefully chosen, with attendees searched for concealed anti-Bush banners. Seats closest to the stage are to be reserved for “extremely supportive” fans of the president. In the terrible event that a heckler somehow gets within earshot of the media covering the speech, a “rally squad” is to surround him waving pro-Bush placards and chanting “USA! USA!” Every modern administration has stage-managed public events to some degree, of course, but this White House’s obsessive suppression of dissent is “out of place in a democracy.”

It’s even creepier than that, said Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.com. Dissent wasn’t banned at these rallies just for the sake of creating an image of a president “universally adored” by his people. It was also banned “to protect the tender sensitivities of the president himself.” Protesters, the manual commands, were also to be kept out of range of the presidential motorcade, thus sparing Bush the unpleasantness of knowing there are people who disagree with him. Now we know why Laura Bush says she doesn’t believe her husband’s abysmal poll numbers, said Tim Grieve in Salon.com. The first couple travels everywhere in a bubble of stage-managed love. Bush himself has said that one “‘amazing’ part of the presidency” is the support he gets on the road from ordinary Americans. “Amazing? Not so much.”

There’s a bitter irony here, said USA Today in an editorial. The White House’s Presidential Advance Manual was released to the public only after a lawsuit was brought by a West Virginia couple, Nicole and Jeffrey Rank, who were handcuffed, arrested, fingerprinted, and briefly jailed for wearing anti-Bush T-shirts at an Independence Day speech the president gave in 2004. After the Ranks had been hustled away, Bush told the extremely supportive crowd this: “On this Fourth of July, we confirm our love of freedom, the freedom for people to speak their minds. ... Free thought, free expression, that’s what we believe.” Too bad he forgot to tell his advance team.

It's '007and I've got a license to blog

The other day a good buddy of mine, a conservative, suggested in an email that my recent blog comments about the president and his policy towards Iran had seemed rather egregious. He's right. I did not make the attempt that the writer of an Atlantic Magazine article might make to been evenhanded, to consider the facts, to show respect to each side of the argument or respect the office of the president. And as much as I love The Atlantic for that very reason, I think that this blogging liberty is great because I don't have that burden.

A boat can be splendid. It may be beautifully designed, well crafted, based on sound principles - but it can still have a hole in it. In this case, the policy of saber-rattling towards Iran is simply unsound. We can't even conduct one war and occupation and Bush thinks that we can credibly threaten (or worse - actually attempt) to invade Iran? This is simple nonsense and the facts about Iran's threat, their movement towards nuclear weaponry, etc., are all tangential to this simple fact. I could talk about the great aspects of the boat, but it seems that the most important feature of the boat to those about to board is the hole. You don’t write an essay about a hole in a boat. You quickly point it out, shouting if you have to. I felt that way about the nonsensical noise suggesting that the Pentagon was making preparations to attack Iran.

And that is the beauty of blogs. Unlike the columnists in DC and New York, we are unlikely to censor our comments because we're afraid of an awkward moment at the country club or because we're afraid that we'll offend someone we need to interview for a future story. We have no vested interest. This allows a certain freedom to comment, unhindered by a plethora of facts and analysis, sure, but also unhindered by the need to take time making points that are ultimately irrelevant. Bloggers are free to get to the heart of an issue as we see it. We know that Howard Dean, George Bush, and Tony Blair were never going to talk to us anyway, so we’ve no fear of offending them or even pointing out how unnecessarily pompous the mainstream media have gotten, shaking our heads at how seriously people like Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs take themselves. We’ve learned a little secret – these political and media celebrities haven’t actually got any exclusive on insight or analysis. And sometimes knowing a great deal about boats is irrelevant if you fail (or refuse) to notice the hole in the boat.

Perhaps no technology better allows the individual to realize the right to freedom of speech than blogging. Freedom of speech meant something in a small burg of, say, 300 when everyone knew and could hear one another. Freedom of speech is fairly meaningless in a community of 300 million. Fairly meaningless, that is, until blogging. We now have a means to express ourselves to as many people as we can attract the attention of – and all without the need for editorial or political approval.

It's the year '007 and I've got a license to blog. And so do you.