The Harper’s letter (7/7/20) decried “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.”
A short and rather vaguely worded open letter published in Harper’s Magazine (7/7/20) earlier this month caused an unlikely media storm that continues to rumble on. Glossing over right-wing threats to the First Amendment, the letter, signed by 150 writers, journalists and other public figures, decried a new intolerance to dissent and a threat to freedom of speech coming from the left.
The vagueness of the letter was both its genius and its shortcoming, allowing people of all political persuasions to put their names to it, but also for others to read into it virtually anything they wanted. As the Los Angeles Times (7/9/20) described it, the letter became a “Rorschach test of subtext.”
Far Greater Threats
The letter generated an explosion of takes and counter-takes, hailed as everything from a “welcome and long overdue” triumph (Washington Times, 7/13/20) to a “collective wallowing in self-pity” (In These Times, 7/7/20), leading to a debate about open debate and a great deal of speech complaining about speech.
However, much of the public discussion of the Harper’s letter misses the fact that it is the powerful, not the masses, who inordinately have the ability to “cancel” individuals for their actions, and that it is the left and those challenging power who consistently suffer the brunt of the consequences.
Chief among the threats to the First Amendment is the president himself. The Trump administration is currently suing a small news station in northern Wisconsin for running a political ad it (and countless others) aired but did not produce. They are not suing the well-funded Democratic Super PAC who paid for it, but instead are going after the messenger. While legal experts suggest that they have no case, Wisconsin has no laws against frivolous lawsuits, meaning the station will likely be bankrupted defending itself, something that appears to be exactly the point of the exercise: intimidating other media outlets into silence.
The makers of a documentary on ICE say they were “warned that the federal government would use its ‘full weight’ to veto scenes it found objectionable” (New York Times, 7/23/20).
The federal government is using the same tactic, using its full weight trying to suppress a Netflix documentary about ICE. The New York Times (7/23/20) reports that the government demanded the removal of scenes that showed the department terrorizing communities and breaking the law during arrests. Notably, the government is deliberately targeting the film’s small production company, not the giant streaming service, which has the resources to fight back. (“Several times, the filmmakers said, the official pointed out that it was their ‘little production company,’ not the film’s $125 billion distributor, that would face consequences,” the Times reported.)
Yet these direct attacks on the First Amendment received scant coverage in comparison to the Harper’s letter, or Times columnist Bari Weiss’ resignation from her newspaper, citing a stifling liberal atmosphere. Weiss’ leavetaking has been the subject of four CNN articles and over a dozen on Fox News, whereas the attempt to suppress the ICE documentary has not been covered by Fox, and has been the subject of only one CNN piece (7/29/20)—a TV review that mentions the attempted suppression.
The Trump administration has also contravened the First Amendment in attempting to ban the release of material critical of the president. The Department of Justice is currently suing Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton for the publication of his memoir, The Room Where It Happened, claiming that Bolton’s embarrassing anecdotes represent a national security violation. “He must pay a very big price for this, as others have before him. This should never happen again!!!” Trump tweeted (6/20/20). Bolton faces possible criminal charges, as well as having any profits seized.
Similarly, the Trump family, represented by Donald’s brother Robert, used the courts to try to block the publication of Mary Trump’s book, Too Much and Never Enough, wherein the president’s psychologist niece diagnoses him as a narcissist with possible antisocial personality disorder.
The ‘Enemy of the People’
Perhaps most worryingly, a significant portion of the public is strongly supportive of Trump’s destruction of the First Amendment. A plurality of Republicans (43%) believe he should close news outlets engaged in “bad behavior,” and 13% of Americans (including a quarter of Republicans) think he should immediately close the Washington Post, New York Times and CNN.
The media, who President Trump infamously labeled the “enemy of the people,” have been subject to a generalized nationwide government assault in recent weeks. According to the US Press Freedom Tracker, there have been at least 585 incidents, including at least 84 journalists arrested, 137 shot by police or National Guard, 80 tear-gassed and 36 pepper-sprayed while covering the George Floyd protests. Some, like photojournalist Linda Tirado, have been left permanently disfigured from police attacks. The onslaught against the press is so bad that the United Nations has gotten involved, its human rights office condemning the arbitrary arrests, and the disproportionate and discriminatory use of force.
If you get fired for saying something like this (Twitter, 7/23/20), opponents of “cancel culture” won’t come to your defense.
But when 9News Denver meteorologist Marty Coniglio also condemned the state’s repression, he faced immediate consequences. After tweeting, “Federal police in cities…now where have I seen that before?” accompanying it with a picture of Nazi troops, he was promptly fired. James Bennet’s resignation from the New York Times for soliciting and printing an op-ed (that he admits he hadn’t read before publishing) calling on the military to crush the protest movement drew worldwide condemnation (even being obliquely mentioned by the Harper’s signatories as their primary piece of proof of an intolerant left). But Coniglio’s case, where he challenged power, not indulged it, has barely been reported outside of Colorado.
Coniglio’s case is indicative of the fact that the primary victims of “cancellation” tend to be the left and those challenging power. Earlier this year, David Wright, a longtime political journalist for ABC News, was suspended and permanently pulled from political reporting after he was secretly filmed, in private, criticizing his network and admitting that he is a socialist who likes Bernie Sanders (a popular position among Americans, but not among journalists at corporate outlets—FAIR.org, 3/8/16, 2/8/19, 7/26/19).
Those displaying insufficient enthusiasm for state violence from the US or its allies can also suffer immediate consequences. In February, journalist Abby Martin was barred from speaking at Georgia Southern University after refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the state of Israel (something 28 states already make anyone receiving public money do). CNN fired its contributor Marc Lamont Hill in 2018 for criticizing Israel, and for calling for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea.” Going further back, Chris Hedges was forced out of the New York Times for his opposition to the Iraq invasion, a fate that also befell MSNBC’s Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura.
Thomas Chatterton Williams, the organizer of the Harper’s letter, specifically warned that “Donald Trump is the Canceler in Chief,” and that his letter only addresses a small part of the threat to a pluralistic public discourse. Unfortunately, most of the debate in elite circles has ignored these far greater dangers in favor of focusing on overzealous Twitter users—perhaps because privileged journalists in corporate media have come to accept objections to their reporting from the powerful as inevitable, if not legitimate, whereas popular challenges to their reporting make them bristle with indignation. While the dangers of leftist “cancel culture” can be debated, there’s no denying the dangers of the government’s assault on the core American value of free speech.
Featured image: A scene from the Netflix documentary Immigration Nation.
While there may be instances of excess, or just more effective ways to achieve goals, I’m not going to excoriate those who seek to cork the toxic well of venom spewing from the hatemongers out of some perverted fealty to “open intellectual debate”.
Such a stance ignores the deadly consequences of allowing that poison to pollute our all too susceptible body politic.
So are you gonna force people to watch or buy something from someone they don’t like? What you see online is a reflection of the population, suppressing their speech won’t make them go away.
It amazes me that people exercising their right to not watch or buy something is conflated with free speech suppression. The customer is always right. Your public opinions therefore must fall in line with the customers consuming your product. It’s called capitalism!
“CNN fired its contributor Marc Lamont Hill in 2018 for criticizing Israel, and for calling for a free Palestine ‘from the river to the sea.'”
Except “from the river to the sea” is absolutely calling for the end of Israel. So do you really expect CNN to have continued to employ Lamont Hill any longer?
No, in fact it is not “absolutely” calling for anything which you would know if you were actually familiar with the situation.
https://temple-news.com/what-does-from-the-river-to-the-sea-mean/
Go figure. It’s not as simple as you make it sound.
“from the river to the sea” is about the end of Israel as we know it – the end of the Jewish state. Sorry, you can’t tap dance around that one.
Would he have been fired for supporting Israeli annexation of the West Bank?
The Harper letter in my view is long overdue. “Vague” so what? Is that even relevant here? The message resonates for me. Moral stances across the board have dumbed us down and even made some of us fearful of publicly dealing with complexities so we can better understand the forces at play and then enter into conversations with others toward truth to power. Unfortunately, this purpose is lost as soon as the terms “left” and “right” are introduced. These terms are not needed here.
I agree with Susan.
I emphatically agree with Harry and Susan
I’m just finishing up Karl Popper’s book The Open Society & Its Enemies. The first part is on Plato. This ancient thinker, in his day, sought to cancel Athenian democracy. He saw present strife as decadent, and looked back to an older tribal and patriarchal time, in which his family held position, and saw Sparta as preferable to his Athens. Thucydides, the early historian, was a member of the oligarchic faction as well. Plato, for Popper, is foundational to modern totalitarianism, and the Austrian exile was violently attacked by scholars of the ancient Greeks. The second volume is a criticism of Hegel and Marx. I guess you can see what happened to Jeremy Corbyn as a canceling, and also the selection process that the Democratic party has for choosing its candidate is right out of Plato’s book for “arresting change”. Popper believes that it is vitally important to leave open the possibility of peaceful change.
I tell people that if tech companies have the right to shut down your internet content, they also have the right to shut down your connection. And other companies have the right to shut off your electricity since you use that to produce hateful comments.
I agree with Susan and Harry–the Harper letter is long overdue! I know something about the first amendment, yet cancel culture was new to me, but I’ve heard it from friends who are active on social media who get ‘shamed’ for their positions and removed from the platform they are participating. And usually it is a platform dominated by the left; by those who supposedly believe in the first amendment and science.
Soon as you question anything about the “official” WHO, CDC, Fauci narrative regarding anything about SARS-CoV-2 you are canceled, deplatformed.
I’ll cut to my chase. We are about to witness, (will see to what degree FAIR participates) in the psychological shaming (canceling) of those who exercise their medical-ethical rights to decline any of the vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 that are headed our way. As a listener to NPR they have been spending a significant amount of time laying the ground work for this shaming and their corporate sponsors FaceBook, Google, Bill and Melinda Gates, are active in cancelling those who don’t subscribe to the official narrative.
There is a clinical trial to see what message will work to shame those who decline a vaccine. The clinical trial is testing whether guilt, anger, embarrassment bravery, etc will shame those into vaccinating. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04460703
“Citizens are given sham choices: either participate in the war effort or side with “the enemy.” Psychological shaming is used to coerce naysayers into participating; after all, who wants to be on the “pro-disease side?” Efforts to destroy the threat are prioritized as the most important consideration. Central to public health is the weapon of vaccines, and it has a sacred status in public health.
Vaccine fundamentalism is the belief that vaccination is the most important public health intervention, that it is above criticism, and that increasing the metric of vaccination uptake rate is the core purpose of public health agencies.” https://medium.com/@doromaln_50113/vaccine-fundamentalism-7c4fa705aec2
That is my take on the application of cancel culture to SARS-CoV-2.
For vaccines that have not been proven over years to be effective in eliminating serious disease, I am with you. COVID vaccines will probably only be 40% effective, max, and not cheap. Has there ever been another coronavirus for which a vaccine was successfully created? I am genuinely not sure. But for things like polio, herpes, hepatitis, and all of that type of thing – or disfiguring illnesses that spawn other illnesses, I think mandatory vaccines for children entering public school should be the norm. Flu? COVID? That should be by choice only, but we already know it’s not the government that will be using the shame tactics you describe – it’s our corporate masters.
Please put your newsletters on your web as webpages, Linked to as something like: Read-on-the-WEB as: fair.org/newsletter-yyyy-mm-dd , This gives us to store it for later or go back to previous newsletters.
I thought this article was going to focus on the censorship by the technocracy and the so-called “left”. I was wrong.
Going against Harpers and lefties who critique “cancel culture” isn’t helpful. The Harpers editorial was aimed at the widespread use and therefore necessarily includes left leaning cancelers. Seems that pretty much everybody, at this moment, is riding their high horse.