It's NOT "the left" - it's the neoliberal Democrats who serve as a bulwark against the actual left.
Also, I just saw a huge collage (montage?) of real images of one of the Canadian trucker rallies and let me tell you, I haven't seen that many swastikas and Trump banners in the same place at the same time anywhere else.
My only gripe with this piece is the idea that the activist class has actually taken over the Democratic Party.
If this were true, I think at least one demand by the activist class would have been met by now. I would say that the Democrats are very interested in vocally appeasing the activist class, but are antagonistic to actually legislating anything they want. Otherwise we would have been getting "Biden Bucks" since last January, an emergency action would've at least temporarily made healthcare free and universal, and probably Build Back Better would already be passed.
That I agree with. Which, yeah, pretty much worst case scenario for everyone. Including the Democrats facing re-election who have to both stand behind promises the party never intended to follow through on and then defend their failure to enact these promises.
I would argue that the activist class don't actually have demands they want to see implemented because if their demands were implemented they might actually be held accountable for the chaos that results. They want to look virtuous in the public discourse by sounding like the most radical person in the room. They don't actually want to see the police abolished though or any of the other insane shit they are constantly screaming about.
People have already been doing that work for a long time. The problem isn't a lack of effort in people and activists. It's the dominion of the healthcare industry over Congress that keeps this from becoming a reality.
Or to put it a different way: Congress is full of bribed cowards.
"I would argue that the activist class don't actually have demands they want to see implemented because if their demands were implemented they might actually be held accountable for the chaos that results."
Sounds to me like you're saying that the Left doesn't want to accomplish anything they vocally advocate. Maybe I'm misreading this, but it seemed clear.
Universal healthcare is wildly popular as an idea in the US. It's so wildly popular in every country that has it that even the conservative parties shy away from criticizing it.
Its the same as C MN is saying. Wanting something is different than the work of getting it done. Also, when you do things in reality, there will be compromises and criticism. Compromise and taking criticism are responsibilities. And substantial portions of the Left simply will not take that on.
Let me frame this a different way: They are cowards. And their censoriousness creates an environment that invites more cowardice. But cowards can whine and dream about the things they want every single day.
You think politicians in the US can't figure out how to enact a functioning single payer healthcare system? You know that dozens of other countries have had this in place for decades already, yes?
It's not complicated. The work has been done. The national support for this policy is overwhelming.
The problem isn't activists. It's the amount of money politicians from both parties make from healthcare lobbyists.
It’s wildly popular in the sense of “would you like free ice cream” is wildly popular. But when you start talking about the higher taxes needed to actually implement… and yes, I totally get that the final cost will likely be lower when you compare to existing premiums. I’m a supporter! But that message hasn’t been successful - see Vermont’s failed attempt to implement universal health care.
I think much of the issue with messaging has to do with the billions of dollars of profit on the line for a few industries, and their lobbying and market messaging is quite powerful.
And without the political will in Congress, it just can't happen. Which is the primary issue.
Plus, nice, middle-class people have been conditions to see not having employer-provided benefits as a disaster — which it can be in a country that absurdly tied getting good medical care not even to ability to pay, but to having the right kind of job at the right kind of employer.
I guess it hinges on the word "taken over.". The activist class, if that's what you want to call them, has been given the hollow trappings of power, enough symbolic gestures and posturing to bring them to the table but with no actual influence, like a power wheels version of an actual car. Worse than that, I think this is what most of them secretly want. All the ability to publicly complain with a high profile and signal their virtues, but with none of the responsibility that inevitably comes with making real decisions. They love their roles as outsider critics and the privilege it affords them way too much to give it up, even if they got to call the shots.
I do think they'll be scapegoated and thrown to the wolves when the time comes. I also think that's no small part of why the Democratic party brass currently tolerates them. Give them a meaningless seat at the table then blame them when it all goes to shit.
Disagree that activists just want a podium without power.
But, yeah, that's pretty much how it always goes. Democrats would rather have Republicans in office than have even someone as moderate as AOC in an actual position of power.
Why would they? Right now they can advocate for any position they want and suffer zero of the pesky consequences associated with trying to implement them. They get to keep on being noble failures, it's the role they know and love.
I guess they were given a kind of actual power, the ability to make the people they don't like on the internet shut up. I think they'd trade their whole political platform away, put it on the trash heap if it meant we kept the alt right off Twitter.
You really think all activists just want to score internet points?
Freddie talks about his activism on here frequently enough that I think it should at least demonstrate a picture of what real activism tends to look like. Do you really think Freddie and people like him are just doing this so that Rachel Maddow will retweet them?
I do believe a specific type of online-only activist fits your image. But I think it's pretty cynical to conflate the loud minority of twitter users with the many people who have spent their lives advocating for a more humane and just society.
This isn't about sincerity. I think most of them really believe in the policies and want them. They just could never stand the heat or backlash that would occur if they really changed things. I've been enough left/activist orgs to know they are a house of cards. The tiniest dispute, scandal, or ethical failing can cause a split or a collapse. If you fold that easily you will never be able to weild actual power, because you won't be able to keep your hands clean enough.
Again, this is just too cynical for me. It may be true of, like, a gender studies professor who says something like ABOLISH GENDER, but most activists on the Left are focused around healthcare, housing, the prison industrial complex, and the military industrial complex.
I think if Bernie Sanders became president and enacted his agenda in 2016 or 2020, he wouldn't cower away from bad media coverage.
People sure do hate AOC and Ilhan Omar a lot, but they don't back down when they meet pushback. They're pretty clear and straightforward and consistent with things like healthcare.
It's worth asking why radicalism became fashionable again, who benefited, and what it's consequences were. It's not just Sanders either, fashionable radicalism that considered him a milquetoast succdem embarassment when just 10 years earlier anyone expressing mild criticism of the neoliberal consensus was considered a kook. Maybe, in a perverse way such radicalism was built to fail on purpose. Channel all that outrage into a safe dead end, make sure people asked for too much and instead left with nothing...which is what happened.
This is my gripe too, for a slightly different reason.
“They cling to this right to control discourse because discourse is all they have. Later this year the Democrats are going to be on the receiving end of a political bloodletting of incredible scale, as Republicans make hay out of broken promises, tone-deaf messaging, and the Democratic party's takeover by a deluded activist class.”
Yes, discourse is all they have. By design.
The deluded “activist” class spends so much energy, takes up so much space, discussing what everyone purportedly thinks and feels, deep down; and what people did or said decades ago. By design.
There’s so much noise about, say, racism and transphobia that no one is ever talking about wages or jobs or suggesting what might benefit regular Americans.
I can’t think of a piece of legislation in recent times (“recent” being decades) that was designed by benevolent legislators to help regular Americans and had even the remotest chance of being made law. There are a few intended to appear as such, but anything that succeeds is just a giveaway to various powerful interests. Build Back Better is a joke. Obamacare was a joke. Any good that is accomplished for any regular American is completely incidental to the main agenda of giving our collective resources away to rich people.
Feature, not bug.
Being on the side of the angels has been successfully sold to millions of people to mean policing what you and others say and think. While people are busily engaged in that and calling it “activism” it means means they’re not doing anything good for anyone. It means the pillaging of our collective resources continues, while we’re distracted.
My theory is this mostly happened less from activism per se and more because the Dems and associated interest groups needed Youths to do their digital comms. This is how the politically engaged digital youths talk; so this kind of stuff gets good engagement on Twitter; so the messaging becomes a self-reinforcing one-way ratchet.
Feb 11, 2022·edited Feb 11, 2022Liked by Freddie deBoer
Noah Smith recently re-posted a blog post to the effect of "the state isn't the only one who can limit your freedom." His forward noted that it was intended as a shot at the right, who engage in the delusion that the employee-employer relationship is somehow free and consensual. He stated that it now read like a critique of the left, with idea that's it not censorship if a corporate monopoly does it.
"When I am weak, according to your principles..." etc. When the Right held the levers of power it was rare to find someone on the Right who was interested in anything beyond spouting "it's a free market!" Only once the levers were taken away from them did they start to really think about how private actors could be as restrictive - even moreso, since they're not constrained by as much law - as the State.
Still, better late than never that they notice that power dynamics don't begin and end on the Capitol steps. "Just start your own internet, brah, it's a free market" has been found wanting, and the Right - outside of Congress, at least - is now *almost* unanimous on that point.
But it wasn't existential the way it was now, and the idea wasn't that the ~Liberal Media~ was - as it is now - simply an extension of the Left's cultural hegemony. That is, the Right was against the company and not the entire system, whereas it's now discovered (again, better late than never) that the deck is stacked against them.
Big tech and the media in their current configurations are very new. Not even 20 years ago the "liberal" "progressive" "leftist" media (MSNBC) fired Phil Donahue simply for questioning the Iraq invasion. So think about it - they've clearly ALWAYS been willing to go along with censorship so long as it pleases the right people; it's just that now the corporate money bags who want to censor people generally identify as "liberal" Democrats.
Has the New York Times - an outlet that gets accused of being leftists and such all the time - EVER discovered a war of aggression waged by Uncle Scam that they won't support?
I think it's clear the Right was interested in private power over speech long before Biden became president. There are many reasons why they took up such a determined assault on Labor. The less power and fewer options employees have, the more easily a company can control even what they say in public.
For what it's worth I'm still for private actors doing as they will including in theory Spotify in practice they're no longer a truly private entity as they are backed by government power.
My particular issues are where the lines are blurring between private and state actors, that is the censorship that I do worry about.
A big one for instance is all the tech companies who are protected from certain types of liabilities as platforms as opposed to publishers, a point Spotify's CEO made a point to repeatedly reinforce in his discussions on the Rogan issue.
My take is that in providing disclaimers and pulling ~70 episodes they have crossed the line and are acting as a publisher and not a platform and as such should lose the protections offered as a publisher. This also applies to most of the big tech companies right now but especially Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook.
To be clear I'm totally fine with those companies doing what they want, I'm not okay with them doing that and being protected by the government in violation of the original deal which was host a bunch of stuff for other people and we won't hold you legally accountable for various things (an exception is made here as they are required to remove explicitly illegal things such as child porn on a best effort basis) provided it's hosted on your platform and you're not choosing/affecting the actual content.
I believe we will continue to see truly independent free speech platforms such as Substack and the pile of video sharing and social media sites (none of which have made a true impact yet) continue to gain traction. This can be sped up however with enforcing the law and removing their status/protections as publishers. This could also be sped way up by the likes of Rogan taking Rumble's offer.
We have long made exceptions through competition laws to curtail the powers of monopolies and oligopolies. Natural monopolies such as phone companies, power utilities, etc, have been recognized as being different. For example - even today I can't see anyone agreeing that a power utility would refuse to provide power to your house because you are 'alt right' or a 'socialist.' But effectively when Amazon, Google and Apple shut down Parler that is what they were doing. Or when MasterCard and Visa refuse to handle your transactions. So I don't agree for a second that Facebook can be treated like any other company. The fact that they are openly and explicitly being pressured by whoever is in power to do this or that just adds another reason why this is the case.
I'm wasted, G: I didnt' read the rest of your post. But how is spotify "protected"? What specific federal statute "protects" them? You're acting like they're just a bunch of good-headed businessmen restrained by the government. They're ruthless, bloody, uncompromisng mercenaries who will do whatever it takes to make long-run profit. one viewer does NOT equal one viewer. The neolibs are an uncompromising, totalizing entity, with a legitimately unprecedented ability to gain and keep power. You're acting like the gov't is getting in the way of the natural course of things, i.e. that Rogan should be popular and adored. That's the opposite of what is happening. Capable, powerful peple are rejecting him. Don't like it? Biuld power. But everything that american conservatism touches dies, and the short bald man will be no exception. The libs have power for a reason. Emulate the parts of them that work, reject the parts that don't. But don't act like they're cheating. They're not. They have legit power.
Leaving section 230 alone is perfectly fine, designating Spotify as a publisher instead of a platform is what we want.
I don't care if it makes them less censorious or more, it doesn't matter to me what they do as a private company without government protection. What does matter is not allowing them to have the benefits of platform while acting like a publisher. You write a law for a specific reason, one in this case that I happen to agree with, you then have to enforce that law.
In the future please read comments before replying especially as the rest of the comment explained how they were protected. While not mentioning Section 230 by name the Publisher/Platform debate is plenty of context for most and enough of a lead for anyone else unfamiliar to google.
Corporate monopolies are definitionally incapable of responding to stimuli that are not market forces. The problem is the market, and the solution is abolition thereof; trying to get LLCs to play nice will never work.
I must again protest Freddie's egregious misuse of the word "liberal".
Freddie writes "Many liberals are pretty much entirely opposed to free speech as a concept."
But this is impossible, by definition.
Liberals, by definition, are people who support civil liberties, most definitely including free speech. Anyone who does not support free speech is, by definition, not a liberal.
Here is the Oxford Languages definiton of "liberal":
>noun
>1. a supporter of policies that are socially progressive and promote social welfare.
>2. a supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.
Yeah, and in Denmark the party known as the Left - literally their name - is now center-right. The word Left hasn't changed meaning. The people labeled with it have changed. Similarly, the capital-L liberal tenets, as embodied by the old school ACLU*, are now on the way out among people with the label of liberal.
I've seen reformulations of point 2, how the safety of the community from muh COVID outweighs the individual right to speak about it. People who identify as liberal aren't going to say they're acting illiberally. They'll just reformulated liberalism to suit. And this is hardly new - hence the distinction in the US between liberals and classical liberals (who generally won't support point 1.)
*That, said, the ACLU's heel turn is in - in my view - probably deliberate. They wanted freedom for themselves, not for the rest of us.
I'm on my phone so can't dig into the crosstabs (at least not easily) - I'm sure you're correct in relative terms, but what about absolute numbers? The reason I ask is because of this Pew study -
It is improbable to me that the 65% who want government censorship and 76% who want big tech censorship don't mainly comprise liberals, simply because liberals are so much greater in number. (That is to say, 51% of liberals outnumber 75% of progressive leftists.)
Replying to myself but yes, I was right. Just 6% of the overall electorate in this study are Progressive Left; Establishment Liberals are 13% and Democratic Mainstays (I guess these are Maudes?) are 16%. Even if you fold Outsider Left in with Progressive Leftists (and I think that's highly, highly dubious) they're still a minority by a significant margin; if you leave Progressive Leftists entirely separate, they're barely a tenth of the Democratic coalition.
Long story short: anti-free speech is a majority view of Democrats, significantly so, and there's no arithmetic that can lay this even mostly at the door of the Progressive Left, let alone entirely.
I can't argue with the numbers, but I think covid has had a huge effect here. And in a general survey, most people haven't really thought through what "take steps to restrict false information online" really implies; as asked, the question sounds pretty benign. In 2018, pre-covid, both Republicans and Democrats were at about 40% in favor of such "steps".
But if we look at the activists who drive opinion, I think the story is very different. I claim that the people who are trying to get Joe Rogan canceled do not call themselves "liberals". I don't have numbers to support this, but Neil Young, for example, was an avowed Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016: https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/neil-young-open-letter-president-donald-trump-8551428/
and Bernie has repeatedly said that he is "not a liberal":
To Republicans and most conservatives, "Liberal" as in welfare liberal, is essentially Democrat. And/or "Progressive". There are (D) Dems and (R) Reps on the ballot - not liberal, not progressive, not conservative.
It's Dems who are currently backing the anti-free speech crowd that gets adults fired for politically incorrect speech.
Many Reps do want those who teach CRT or sex perversion to kids to not have a job teaching kids. This is more a kid-raising issue than a free speech issue. Those, mostly Dems, who want kids to be indoctrinated with CRT and sex, are currently driving caring suburban mothers towards supporting Reps.
"Of course the Republicans and their anti-CRT and book burning bills are a disgrace."
Anti-CRT and book burning are two different things. CRT as an underpinning of school curricula is the real disgrace, and libs are just mad that we're finally putting a spotlight on the racial hysteria they're poisoning our children with. The voters agree with me.
Removing from curricula and banning are two completely different things, as you're well aware. I get that it's a rhetorical point to call them book-burning, and were I in your cap I'd be doing the same thing since it's a very effective and emotive term, but that still doesn't make it true. Schools have always had the decision to determine what is and isn't appropriate for the classroom, and the Left - being in near-total control of education - is just mad that a small measure of that control is being taken from them. Again, I'd be doing the same thing in their shoes, but I'd be wrong to do so.
I am of one mind with the activist Left on this point: ethical curation is not censorship. CRT underpinning curricula is, on the other hand, deeply unethical. And curating textbooks, curricula, and even library stock to excise this cancer is not unethical, but rather the opposite.
Even if you disagree with me on this, what do you make of the rabid opposition to curriculum transparency? There's weak transparency: that the school boards and state boards still decide, but they have to make all reading lists, textbooks etc. public. Then there's strong transparency: PTAs and other bodies effectively act as the 'executive' here and have to approve them. Do you consider either of these to be analogous to burning?
I looked at the Florida Bill and that’s not what it seems to say. But I appreciate stuff can lurk under the surface. From my reading it bans teaching things like ‘one race is superior/inferior to another’. I suppose that could amount to banning books but it seems a stretch. Is there a decent good faith take down of the Florida bill someone can point me to?
Coleman Hughes and Kmele Foster have discussed this. Hughes was originally fine with the idea of legislation against CRT, but Kmele (who also finds CRT wanting) convinced him that the legislation has already led to insidious mission creep.
This plus the fact the bills are quite broad does give me some pause for thought - but only some. "Oh, we'd better not do this thing that's morally correct and politically popular, coz it might be sloppily written" might well be the right thing to do, but it's not the correct thing to do. You have to strike while the iron is hot, and as the recent redistricting efforts show, what matters is not the procedure or the niceties but the raw, powerful result at the end of it. I'll take an imperfect bit of mission creep ahead of the status quo without hesitation.
Just because the side you're fighting is morally correct doesn't make your tactics morally correct, though. To me, sloppily-written law that's already resulting in requests like pulling Norman Rockwell prints from the classroom is morally incorrect.
But then, I lived through a nasty Holocaust-education fight as a conservative kid of conservative parents, and I saw how well-meaning parents can be baited into demanding unnecessary curriculum changes that...
I guess I'm saying I never deserved the "Nazi" harassment I got in school just for having a Germanic last name and conservative parents interested in their kids' education. But, looking back at the changes my parents were actually requesting, those changes would have harmed a good curriculum had they gone through, and the rest of the district, including other parents, naturally wondered, why? Why are *these* parents requesting *these* changes? "Because they're Nazis" is the least charitable possible answer, of course, but I can see why, to bystanders, it fit.
Someone recommended Jeffrey Sachs's research to me on these various state bills. His article on Florida's "Stop WOKE" bill focuses on the private right of action it includes. The one on sloppy drafting uses Indiana's as an example of how these things work more broadly:
Private right of action is a big hammer and the potential for abuse is huge, even if the laws are created and passed with the best of intentions.
The American Disability Act's private right of action has given rise to ADA troll law firms that seek out small businesses to bully into settlements over fairly small violations.
Yes, but step back and consider ... what is CRT other than the soft racism of low expectations? When you strip away the dreck, CRT says "you can't expect POC to show up to work on time, properly dressed, you can't expect POC to be able to read nor write the English Language ..."
TL;DR: CRT teaches that POC lack responsibility.
And you're OK with teaching children these things?
If the anti-CRT push were limited to pushing back against soft racism, that would be one thing.
But it's not. It may not be obvious to those removed from actually-existing pushback efforts how much it's not. But I am not so removed. I'm the one getting the forwards from well-meaning loved ones saying I must investigate and stop any social-emotional learning (SEL) going on at my kid's school because it's creeping CRT.
While it's possible to find implementations of SEL addressing racial issues in ways vexing to conservative parents, that's not SEL's primary job. Its primary job is to instill self-regulation (self-discipline, essentially). Provided it's not *called* SEL, most conservative parents agree with SEL's core principles (none of which are racial):
But call it SEL and have "whistleblowers" widely publish in right-wing media instances of where SEL curricula (as all curricula may do these days) involve racial cringe? Then it's CRT and something all innocent children should be protected from!
SEL is *not* an exception. Finding weird things to call CRT and mobilize parents about is *normal* for a powerful segment of anti-CRTs. They even tell you they're doing it:
"We have successfully frozen their brand—'critical race theory'—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category." — Rufo
So, while there are many forms of DEI education I worry are toxic or even grift, it turns out I am "OK" with much of what I, as a parent with right-wing connections, am pressured to smoke out as "CRT" — since politically-influential anti-CRTs have untruthful standards for what CRT even is.
The thing that so many of us object to is kids being told that they are inherently stuck forever in a class of bad people because of immutable characteristics like skin color. I don't care whether that's called CRT or not, I oppose it. And I support legislative attempts to ban it, however clumsy and inarticulate, because the schools themselves are all-in with woke neo-racism and neo-miscogeny, and that needs to be pushed back against as firmly as possible.
Blocked and Reported's episode with Jeffery Sachs was good on this, I think. Many CRT bills are actually terrible, with potential impacts that could empower rather than weaken cancel culture by, say, over-broadly defining "discomfort". While the best don't actually make anything new illegal, they just re-iterate existing civil rights precedent (you can't force students to adopt ideological positions to graduate) and provide mechanisms for transparency and reporting.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who supports deplatforming Rogan or anyone else has no leg to stand on when complaining about CRT and book bans. (I'm not including Freddie in this of course because he's being consistent in his principles.) If you're for censoring podcasts, you've accepted censorship as a justifiable tactic in shutting down ideas so why can't we ban CRT, etc.?
As for the specifics of these controversies, I agree that there is some nuance to censoring books vs. simply leaving certain books out of the curriculum, though conservatives are being needlessly dismissive about Maus being a "picture book" (I read Maus in high school, I think, and it was excellent). Censoring CRT is trickier. I don't agree with it in principle, and the specific laws at issue may well be poorly written and riddled with flaws (though it's not like a lot of laws aren't written badly), but the thing about CRT (and by CRT I mean the New Woke Religious Dogma on Race, not the original academic texts or basic historical facts about slavery and Jim Crow) is that CRT is an inherently censorious belief system in itself. It's built on the tenets of words being violence and causing literal harm, and people being allowed to speak or not based on their identity's place in the intersectional hierarchy. The rules of CRT promote censorship of opposing viewpoints, so how do you fight it without censoring it? And, to circle back, if CRT says censoring harmful things is okay, why isn't it okay to censor CRT if CRT is harmful?
One point to add to your closing is that this is also another social signal to hold your tongue. I have stopped believing lockstep with my fellow NYT-NPR liberals for the past few years, but with few exceptions, any time something comes up around which I am not a 100% Orthodox Mainstream Good Guy Liberal, I bite my tongue. Honestly, I just don't want to lose my relationships.
I am sure it is the same way among non-Trump conservatives in their circles. I really don't think mainstream liberals understand that there are people around them with the best of intentions but who are terrified of being excommunicated from their very real life tribe.
I'm sure this varies by geography and by milieu but you can't get anti-Trump conservatives to shut up for five seconds around here about how ~bEtRaYeD~ they are and how They Didn't Leave The Party, The Party Left Them. If there's some kind of chilling effect on them, I'd hate to see them in full bloom.
It definitely varies by milieu. It's fairly normal for people to find their watering holes for venting frustration but keep pretty quiet about it otherwise.
I don't think there's much chilling effect on Never Trumpers. Pro-Trumpers don't have the clout to shut them down and the left is happy to let them have their say as long as they're complaining about Trump.
Career pundits are one thing, though even they are probably split into secret anti-Trumpers whose career depends on being pro- (or anti-^n for even values of n) Trump, and public anti-Trumpers who've chosen a different career route.
Ordinary folks, though? Plenty just do their best to act politely inscrutable in pro-Trump milieus. Some have unthink routines mentally censoring how far they'll take their frustration with Trump even in their own minds lest they become unable to contain it around those they care about.
The man cut taxes on corporations and wealthy folk in a country with 1/5 children in poverty and 100 million citizens who can't afford a medical emergency. In what world is this a "betrayal" of Cheney, McConnell, Bush...? That's their entire platform!
I agree with you. It's astonishing, looking back on it, just how pro-norm Trump actually was. On Republican tax orthodoxy, on the primacy of the administrative state, on most things.
Exactly, especially about the administrative state thing. The question that seems to remain is was this simply the extent of Trump's aspirations? Or is there something that constrained him that has the potential to restrain literally anybody? I suppose time may tell.
As someone going through the same thing: doesn't it make you sad though? If you can't talk with your friends, haven't you already lost those relationships?
I'm not trying to convince you, this is how I feel.
At the bottom of all my frustration with this is a lot of sadness about lost relationships.
Same here, though in my case the pain is mostly over friends in the MAGAverse.
For example, I have bad lungs and some general health problems, so I've been COVID-precautious, and honestly pretty steamed at anyone advocating "focused protection" without logistic specifics. I don't go out of my way to tell people who boarded the Great Barrington train that I'm steamed, but anything but the most shallow inquiry into how my life's been going since 2020 and why is likely to bring it up. I was part of a group publicly shamed, admittedly only in an extremely minor way, but in front of folks who'd become regulars, for being hypochondriacs and traitors to liberty.
There's a backstory here, with medical misdiagnosis, what's called "medical sexism" (a term I dislike but which refers to real disparities), and mental-health specialists having to convince *me* I wasn't a hypochondriac (the reverse of what they'd do if I really were). My MAGA friends with stuff like rheumatoid arthritis still kinda get me, even if their approach to COVID is different. But others?... Even if they still would, at this point I'm a bit afraid to ask.
A note of good news - let me say this. Two years ago even my wife would ask me half-or-mostly-seriously if I was secretly a Republican for taking issue with woke discourse. She was happy to go with the blue tribe flow and didn't understand why I was being disagreeable. As the nascent antiwoke paleoliberal media world has taken shape since then, however modest it may be, now she has a framework to slot me into, and has even come over to my point of view in many cases. Even she can't listen to NPR anymore since they turned the black nationalism dial up to 12.
I'm really surprised how similar people sound-- who consume the same platforms. I now listen and don't say, "o yes, Rachel was right"--just think to myself that my friend has not read enough or watched enough to see where this is all going. So, it is not lost relationships--each person needs to find their own way. Sort of like having a friend who goes on about some other thing I'm not interested in like the NBA.
To me: If share what I really think, I believe that my friends would ostracize me, so I can't really trust them. That's not a friendship. And I don't want to believe that I'm superior to them in order to not engage and be ok with how badly they would act if I could be open.
If somebody doesn't like you despite all your warts--and everybody has warts--how are they a friend? Isn't a friend by definition somebody you can be honest with?
I'm sorry, but this just sounds like a mask over isolation and loneliness to me.
Also, I finally revealed my anti-woke stance to a true friend who is very liberal. She was shocked. She has been battling cancer and not paying attention to the news (stage 4 breast but chemo worked and she is doing VERY well right now). I sent her links to catch her up and she is now anti-woke as well. She is a pretty free thinker but I will admit - it was hard, and I was scared to do it.
To me - this division is the whole point of being anti-woke. If the "cure" for past injustices is making people fear each other, how is this actually going to heal anything and allow us to move toward solutions? I want actual solutions. I want to see black culture thriving and people uplifted and free to live their lives. I want the "privileges" I enjoy to be applied universally. How do we get there?
It is partly cultural. I live in a large Canadian city now and 20 years ago when I moved here I was puzzled about how people would seem to be upset if you disagreed with them. I grew up in small town Atlantic Canada and there taking the piss out of each other was a national sport. We just argued about everything all the time. People rarely got upset - and if they did - we'd razz them about being a baby even more.
Very much so. One of the reasons I quit social media was that it was so depressing to see friends who were once willing to think for themselves and question things fall in line with dogmatic woke memethink. I have lost touch with lots of them because I figure if they ever learned what I thought, they would cancel and unfriend me, so I've quietly, pre-emptively canceled and unfriended them. That might be unfair, since you never know for sure, but I've watched them drum out others so it seems likely enough. I've decided if they're not a close IRL friend, it doesn't really matter anyway, so I've just tried to cultivate those rather than keeping in touch with everyone ever on Facebook. But even with the IRL friends I don't know what I can say. They are probably somewhat safer in that they are at least the kind of people who don't bring up politics all the time, which is as much as I can hope for, but I sure wish there was some way to find out if they are actually open-minded enough to tolerate friends who may disagree about some things. Not that I want to talk politics all the time either but I wouldn't have to worry about a stray offhand remark revealing too much. It's a stressful way to live.
Idk what would be unfair about withdrawing from friends who drum out others. I know I don’t want that kind of friendship. Though it is widely available; all you have to do to keep it is grab your pitchfork with the rest of them.
I decided a while back to post conservative views I found interesting as well as liberal ones on my FB, and the only pushback I've gotten against doing so has been from friends who used to work in the mainstream media. (Plenty of people have argued with the conservative views, but only ex-media members have tried to convince me that it's wrong to even post them.)
And I've gotten a lot of compliments on my FB page from people who don't mention just what they like about it. It could very well be the cat pictures... anyway, it's given me a much higher opinion of my friends to see that they really can cope and are much more open-minded than their own political posts might have led anyone to believe.
And here's the fucked thing -- you can't know for sure how many, if any, secretly agree. Hell, it could be all of you are lying because each doesn't know if they can safely be honest with the other.
Recently, a good friend and I realized that we're both completely fed up with social justice politics. We cautiously admitted some forbidden media consumption to each other, and then it all came out. It's such a relief.
I can come into contact with them, I'll get a drink with them, but they would fall into the category of acquaintances rather than friends. I can't be friends with somebody when deep down I am thinking "You're an idiot" when I talk to them.
Right. I was surprised at how willing advocates of "focused protection" were to judge those who thought they might actually need it idiots. In retrospect, I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was. But I cannot expect them to remain friends with people they judge are idiots, even if I know their judgment is wrong.
I am not sure what this has to do with Covid policy since it's just a statement of personal philosophy. What's the definition of a "friend' if not somebody that you enjoy being around? I'll get a beer with all sorts of people but the term "friend' is reserved for people that I both respect and feel affection for. And I just can't respect anybody that applies a political litmus test to their acquaintances.
And this is very much related in my mind to what friends are for: aren't friends there to talk to, late at night, with a drink and a cigarette, possibly out on the back porch? In that kind of milieu you discuss philosophy, politics, current affairs, how your day went. Why would anybody in that setting care to censor themselves? Friends are for interesting conversation and blowing off steam, not bottling yourself up and adding more pressure to your life.
You're right about what friendship is — although I suspect occasional "bottling yourself up and adding more pressure to your life" is inevitable even with friends. But I'm puzzled at your puzzlement that friendships might break up over the judgment I described. This particular judgment happened to involve COVID policy.
As it happens, I don't think those I know who judge those like me a "COVIDiot" for taking precautions and feeling solidarity with others who do are themselves idiots. I know these people. They're mostly smart, mostly moral, some heroically so. From my perspective, I'm not the one applying the litmus test. They are. ("Taking COVID 'too seriously' signals idiocy unworthy of friendship.") But perhaps from their perspective, I am. ("It's wrong to think those taking COVID 'too seriously' are just idiots and therefore unworthy of friendship.")
We could generalize this to conflicting litmus tests of "X signals idiocy unworthy of friendship" versus "It's wrong to think X-ers are just idiots unworthy of friendship". Both are, I suppose, litmus tests.
There's plenty of X we might find so noxious that maintaining friendship with an X-er could be tough, but not necessarily because we judge the X-er an idiot. Recovering substance-abusers might really miss their substance-using friends and not think they're idiots at all, but still need to stay away, for example.
People in my life essentially fall into two camps. People I actually have real conversations with and those I've mentally blocked into the kid's table. The kid's table folks I'm polite but bland towards (hell they probably think I'm a bit dull too but this is intentional) this includes people here by default such as work acquaintances and the like. However it also has people I've tested out with minor bits of controversy that I adjust this based on current events and what I see see as their observed political leaning as I'm just as willing to dump a conservative to the kid's table if they're not able to sustain different thoughts on an intellectual basis.
My life has been a lot more enjoyable once I recognized this difference. I've had better conversations with folks and spend less time worrying about offending small minds.
I'm going to be honest as a Trump fan I'm fine with any conservative as long as they're not rabidly anti-Trump. In my experience the rabidly anti-Trumpers are pretty much RINOs and folks who want the left including those who will always hate them regardless to like them and want to spend their careers as "good losers" instead of accomplishing anything as that might make people not like them.
There's plenty of reasons to not care for Trump but as an example when I hear Libertarians (I used to be a registered one) go on about tariffs and how wrong he was for it I can't help but be ashamed for them. Like hey dummy I would like a world without tariffs as well but tariffs were already being levied against us, fight back and let's remove them from everyone. To put it another way I generally agree with non-violence but a man who won't defend himself disgusts me. At best these people invoke pity.
I just don't get this. Trump is the embodiment of the "good loser"... he did every single thing McConnell told him to do until after he lost the election! He ran on populism and "the hedge fund guys are going to start paying more taxes" and then turned around and passed that Jeb Bush-ass 2017 bill! What in the world has he done at the policy level that has got you convinced he somehow rebelled against them?
Trump shifted the paradigm for governing to the right. The current tariffs you see that are being continued by Biden would have been unimaginable before Trump. The policy of sending people back to Mexico that you see Biden continuing would have been impossible before Trump.
The latter thing has been popular for many years; recall Romney’s infamous “self-deportation” gaffe, deemed too moderate by many republican voters. But even if trump shifted the window on those issues a tiny bit, the entirety of his economic and foreign policy cant possibly be framed as a rebellion against McConnell-Pelosiism.
What is crucial to understand about the modern era is that the class conflict is being fought on cultural, rather than economic, issues. Trump is important historically not necessarily because he is the instigator of that conflict but rather because he is the inflection point. For one obvious point, the working class is migrating to the GOP while the professional class moves to the Dems. Trump is the inflection point for that shift, among others.
Yup==tariffs are a real shift. So was Obamacare on HC. Doesn't mean Obama was a revolutionary.
I think the bit about the class war being fought on cultural rather than economic issues is something that you sort of want to be true. It's been both. Culture is just more fun to write about 😎
Trump is historically important because of the way the libs have responded to his aesthetics, but not as a policymaker. The 2017 tax bill simply matters more than the fact that he tweets mean stuff or whatever.
You're definitely right that people with little economic opportunity/genetic endowment for labor are migrating rightwards. But wokeness has played a big role in driving that, and it was a process underway several years before trump.
Ha! - my wife keeps saying 'you can't say that' to which I reply I can and I will. I've never had a functioning filter and I very rarely hold back my views on anything. The only time I do is when I am dealing with someone who I don't think is intellectually capable of really engaging in a discussion - which is exceedingly rare. Honestly - if someone can't deal with my views then that is their problem - not mine.
Freddie, I agree with you that the Rogan controversy can easily lead to a chilling effect. The one thing I note, however, is what you say about the left's new views on free speech, i.e, that censorship only applies to state action.
I'm a little older than you, but I remember in the mid-1980s until probably the early 2000s, that such an argument was made by not a few people on the right. Some even argued that the First Amendment only prohibits the FEDERAL government from abridging press and speech rights and from establishing a state religion.
While I disagree with that thinking (although in a free market society, I accept the reality that private businesses can make their own market decisions,) I think it's very much a matter of turnabout being fair play. Now that the right has more than a little skin in the free speech game, suddenly they have an expansive view of free speech and press. It's like the prisoner condemned to die suddenly "finding God."
I think he was making a more narrow point about what the word "censorship" means. Many on the left believe that it literally cannot apply to a non-government actor. The fact that a corporation is well within its rights to censor has no bearing on the fact that "censorship" is the appropriate term. When I point out that network "censors" remove profanity from live broadcasts and that usage is completely uncontroversial, they get flummoxed.
They're confused, maybe willfully. State action IS required for a claim that your 1st Amendment rights were violated, but not all censorship is a violation of 1st amendment rights, and IT CAN STILL BE BAD.
Indeed, they've come to see "free speech" as coterminous with "1st amendment." Then they think they are being so clever when they smugly point out there is no 1st amendment issue. Yeah . . never said there was . . .
"Many liberals are pretty much entirely opposed to free speech as a concept and have developed a whole weird set of made up facts about it.". By "liberals" did you mean 'woke'?
People like Jonathan Chait, Stephen Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, as far as I can know, call themselves 'liberal' but they will object to this particular accusation.
Honestly don't see how "free speech" as a concept survives this, even with a "conservative" takeover. Censorship is useful and powerful, free speech is a difficult, sometimes contradictory, and often unpopular commitment that can be dashed in a moment of weakness.
Yeah, people who think conservatives really care about Free Speech will be very unpleasantly surprised with the history of free speech cases. Too, if the GOP does take power in the next two elections, which seems a safe bet, they are not going to embrace a broader definition of free speech. Legislation like Ag Gag laws will roll out real fast, and then it will be Democrats who talk about the sanctity of free speech.
Has it ever crossed your mind, that Conservatives try to conserve things ... like human rights. Liberalism isn't Democrat anymore than its Republican. Communists are certainly not Liberals, though the donned that cap when it suited them.
If you consider the far wings of each side, the far wing of the Democrats is the Communists, certainly not for human rights, free speech, etc. The far wing of the Republicans is the Libertarians, all for human rights, free speech, leave me alone.
Despite whatever influence you may be under, only one Republican senator voted against the Equal Rights Amendment, it was Democrats who blocked it. It was the Republican President Richard Nixon who created the EPA.
That's certainly the old consensus, but I see a lot of online right wingers who reject the Enlightenment precisely because they see how useful it has been for the left. Not trying to pick a fight, only trying to point out that the right wing is much wider now than neocons/libertarians/free market fans of old. One joke I've heard: "We don't want to go back to the 1950s, we want to go back to the 950s"
This is a very skewed perspective of the edges of the GOP and DNC.
Also, most Libertarians seem to be okay with totalitarianism, as long as it's done by a corporation and not a government. And almost all Democrats are as anti-communist as any Republican.
The far wing of the GOP has always been the religious social conservatives, at least since the Reagan era. Absolutely hostile to free speech and human rights. The libertarians I know are their own club, separate from the GOP, and prefer it that way.
Consider alternative news. Then VP candidate Al Gore's wife Tipper had the charity of censoring music. Meanwhile Reagan served as President of the Screen Actors Guild.
Yes Tipper Gore wanted to censor music. But the “war on rap music” was waged primarily by conservatives. Freddie has written about this here before.
I’m not saying that Democrats have never been hostile to free speech. Clearly that’s not true. I’m saying historically social conservatives have been immeasurably worse.
" ‘Free speech’ will be just fine and will last as long as consciousness + speech lasts."
I think you're very wrong. Free speech is a rare and very valuable thing. Very few, vanishingly small numbers of people have ever lived in an environment such as ours where the people enjoy just about unlimited free speech. If this great treasure is ever lost, it most certainly won't be replaced.
Name another country where we can speak with such freedom. Even the UK and Canada would outlaw some of the speech on Freddie's blog.
To conflate "wokeness" with health misinformation and to then base a whole opinion piece on that error is disingenuous at best. How on earth is people taking a stand against misinformation "wokeness"?
I honestly didn't even know who Joe Rogan was before this controversy. I did know that Spotify is a lousy, homogenizing music streaming platform that rips off artists.
One day after pulling his catalog from Spotify, Neil Young announced that he was cutting a deal with Amazon where people could use his affiliate link to get four free months of streaming and “enjoy [his] entire catalog in the highest quality available.”
Amazon, a place that famously has never drawn any liberal activist ire, repressed any worker speech or organizing, and whose monopolistic publishing arm produces no products that contain any misinformation whatsoever. Whatever the principles of any individual Spotify customer, it’s pretty clear principle was not at the heart of the controversy.
Not true. But you (referring to Neil Young) should at least protest the even larger mega-corporation doing the *exact same thing* you started a national drama over in the smaller mega-corporation, no? You could maybe stick to *one* form of principled protest. You should at least wait more than one day before revealing that your flounce was motivated if not in whole at least in large part by everyday financial opportunism.
I think if you make your principled stance as broad as “against corporations that platform medical misinformation” you’re going to run into this problem. You’re going to end up protesting everything or protesting selectively, because speech is still actually free and people can still self-publish faith-healing manuals for public consumption and you can’t protest all of them. And when you inevitably can’t protest all of them, and still have to make a living, and have to choose the monster who pays you same as you did before, yes, that’s going to look like hypocrisy, because the underlying principle was revealed to be completely untenable within 24 hours.
Some people boycott Amazon and shop at Walmart. Some people boycott Walmart and shop at Amazon. You might argue that, to be consistent, you should either do both or neither, but individuals have their own reasons that make sense to them.
Also, I was unaware that Amazon was also hosting the Joe Rogan podcast.
The original comment I was responding to does not refer to "taking a stand against the Joe Rogan podcast." It refers to "taking a stand against misinformation."
You and David, and I think others in this debate, are switching back and forth between arguing that people like Young are protesting misinformation generally, and that they're protesting Joe Rogan specifically, as it suits you. It means that when I point out Young's immediate pivot to Amazon is hypocritical if he stands against corporations hosting misinformation generally, you can fall back on saying it was only about this one very specific instance of misinformation and not any others. And if I still find it hypocritical that Young should take that specific stand, prompt a censoring backlash on the platform he abandoned, and then start advertising for an equally-nefarious platform, you both fall back on arguing that no one can ever be expected to show any kind of ideological or moral consistency so why even get mad about it?
To reiterate the point of the essay the original comment was responding to: It's not about Rogan, it's about everybody who doesn't have Rogan's leverage. It's about the fact that in a world where increasingly our only consumption choices are between fewer, bigger, more powerful corporations, events like this just make them more and more like each other. Our choices between them become less and less meaningful the fewer viewpoints any of them are willing to host. Young did not make our choices between them any more meaningful by his actions; with his pivot to Amazon, I think he just emphasized their sameness.
All true, but Young did put the spotlight on Spotify and alleged misinformation.
My only point--in my initial posts--was to infer that Young, who has retained his artistic rights, is free to do with them what he wants. And his reasoning--even if it be flawed--does not make him part of a woke mob, as De Boer alluded to in the initial post.
Arguments as to corporate entities having too much influence on what we do see and here are actually more important than the issues addressed in the initial post. My own decision is to not frequent or pay for any streaming platform that rips off recording artists. The only "meaningful"choice we can make these days with recorded music is to buy it directly from the artist or his/her/their Bandcamp page.
Why? So nothing can ever piss a person off without that person having to take opinions on every issue under the sun? All cognitive beings must pick and choose.
To which specific principle are you referring? We all have opinions and principles. Some which cause dissonance. Neil Young, as a polio survivor, has a specific opinion concerning vaccine misinformation. That he has other opinions and behaviors with opprobrious corporate entities is irrelevant.
For the record: I frequent Amazon as little as possible, but am reduced to now and again because they now are a monopoly. I do not listen to any streaming service and buy CD's weekly. However, all these stances--including how artists are ripped off by Spotify--is merely a distraction from the controversy which, at its core, is about one artist not wanting to share a platform with another celebrity.
These things have bigger effects because of the scale on which they are happening. Neil Young is perfectly entitled to take his music off of one corporation's streaming platform because another very famous guy said stuff he disagrees with. But you cannot retreat from the point by pretending that he was *only* trying to distance his own work from that one famous guy, and everything else is incidental. Young was trying to make Spotify change who it hosts and how it evaluates content in the future based on isolated incidents of speech.
Of course, forcing change through economic disruption is the point of most protests. You just have one guy with a gajillion dollars putting on the pressure instead of a grassroots strike or boycott. Fine. But I believe it is extremely relevant to the larger conversation that a guy ready to stake hundreds of millions of dollars on shutting up one other guy then pivots immediately to shilling for a company that is identically corrupt, but just doesn't have that one other guy on it.
I agree that it was probably at least somewhat personal for Young. That's the problem. His personal issue is going to have a chilling effect on everybody who wants to be hosted by a corporation but doesn't have the money or influence to cut a short-notice affiliate deal with a more powerful corporation, and so has to toe whatever line the corporation draws. He got to make money off this; Amazon got to make money off this; Spotify is going to have to make some capitulating gesture in order to continue making money; and everybody whose back catalog is now going to be capitulatingly scoured will lose money. To say nothing of those who will, after this, be considered an unacceptable risk by any streaming platform. Young's personal stand against one specific instance of medical misinformation peddled by one guy is, in actual effect, going to shut a lot more people up, and neither he nor Spotify nor Amazon cares about them.
Agree with almost everything you write. However, there is an implication that no one should then ever speak up about something that he or she cares about because the existing and radically unfair streaming business will just end up shutting up other victims. What is the point of having a majority say in artistic rights and distribution rights and then not using veto power ever?
I take your point. I do agree with your above point that the pivot to streaming generally is awful - I avoid streaming services for the same reason. I also know full well that my tiny, individual choice not to use Amazon or Spotify is something I'm doing just for myself, in terms of its actual impact, and that if anything's going to break up the increasingly-homogenous online publication monopolies, it's going to happen as a result of much bigger forces.
But I think where the "woke mob" comes in is in terms of which tribal position the big corps are willing to put smaller voices on the chopping block for. I know there's genuine health misinformation among Joe Rogan's output; but Young's opposition to it has resulted in a censorship that a much larger political tribe applauds and sees no problem with. If we were living in a world where Young abandoned Spotify because he was a right-wing guy who was protesting Joe Rogan platforming Fauci, or something, I think Spotify would have been more than willing to go to bat for Rogan's free speech. Censorship is a beloved tool of whatever crowd's in power -- it's got to be stopped regardless of who's putting on the pressure to do it.
In my ideal world, Neil Young would still get to leave Spotify to make his statement and go work with whoever he wants. But Spotify would not then cave to liberal pressure to start culling problematic people who don't have the clout to leave voluntarily.
(Appreciate you continuing this conversation, by the way! I've found it very interesting.)
Thank you Sarah. This is my first time sucked into a debate on this Substack. I surprised myself in that I was enjoying other people taking a stand elsewhere (among musicians) and pretty much ended up in a hornets nest here once I weighed in on the side of intellectual property rights and distribution rights. All your points are taken.
A quick question, without trying search engines. I was not subscribing to this Substack (did it exist yet?) when the Blake Bailey controversy erupted in the publishing world resulting in the authorized Philip Roth biography being "canceled." I am way more apt to defend free speech when the attack comes from the liberal or progressive wing. In that case, I thought Norton behaved awfully and was countered by my more progressive friends on line for saying so. Was that situation addressed by Freddie?
I guess my points are those on which we already agree: on-line services lead to a cult of personality and an ability of each user to filter sources into an echo chamber; the "choices" are then homogenized and not really choices at all. That these sources are not held accountable, as say a straight news source or book publisher is, is a huge flaw in the system. How many more million listeners does Rogan have than people who were either reading or had on their list a 700 plus page biography by one of the more pertinent male authorial voices of the last 80 years? Point being, I get a lot more upset when woke politics cancels a book and--as a result--tarnishes the reputation of a dead man than I do when an entertainment figure runs into to trouble for giving a one-sided account of a health remedy during a global pandemic. Freedom of speech always undergoes changes during national emergencies (in whatever nation) and COVID certainly is one. However, freedom of speech or denying distribution to someone over morality charges is more problematic, at least in my book.
It may indeed have been the heart of the controversy, and Young comes out smelling like roses after a bidding war. Your point about Amazon is right on.
A lot of what is now "information" about Covid was "misinformation" until very recently. The synthesis of state and corporate power to censor open debate under the guise of protecting us from "misinformation" would be dubious on its face; the fact that the people who appoint themselves the arbiters of "misinformation" are themselves - and this isn't even close - by FAR the biggest purveyors of misinformation renders it a complete farce.
Not really. Anti-vax information has always been out there. And with very few exceptions over the years, it has always been misinformation. Do you think Neil Young would have reacted as he did if Rogan had a vaccine expert to counter the arguments presented?
"Not really" to which part, specifically? I made three separate claims, all of which are correct:
1) The emerging consensus on Covid was until recently considered dangerous misinformaiton. By emerging consensus, I mean the relative efficacy of the vaccines, the near-total inefficacy of lockdowns, the importance of natural immunity and its situational superiority to vaccine-conferred protection, and the efficacy of boosters versus emerging strains. Numerous people were banned from social media last year and even in 2020 for pointing out what is now considered sane and obvious. Are you saying "not really" to this?
2) The synthesis of state and corporate power to protect us from "misinformation" is dubious: this is because nobody has the monopoly on wisdom, and it's all too easy to see this power being used nefariously (as indeed it is, today, right now.)
3) The people wielding this power are themselves far more guilty of misinformation than anyone else: this is undoubtedly true, and item 1 spells out why nicely. Once again, for those with short memories: pointing out the obvious truth, that vaccines neither confer immunity, nor prevent the vaccinated from spreading the disease, *was grounds for complete social media removal* for almost the entire length of the pandemic, even though both of these things are undeniably and completely true.* The censors had this completely wrong, and we lost a lot of valuable time in pandemic management due to their monopoly of the discourse.
*It is also true, of course, that vaccines confer positive health outcomes - a reduced risk of hospitalization and death - and that to not point this out is to be dishonest by omission.
Which of these three is, in your view, not really true?
On your point: I think Neil Young and the other censors want to take out all opposition by any means necessary, and I don't think he's arguing in good faith. The format of Rogan's show is not a panel but an in-depth, lengthy interview, and he's under no obligation to change it for the benefit of you, Neil, or anyone else. Rogan has, on the other hand, had numerous people on the show reflecting the (incorrect) orthodoxy of Covid management from 2020 to February 2022, all of whom have been given as fair a hearing as anyone else.
I disagree with all three of your points and the vehemently dogmatic tone with which they were stated. Hence the dismissive "not really." I will answer point by point in two days when I can type on something other than my phone.
Pardon the late response. I was in Boston and can now type. I meant the dismissive "not really" because I absolutely do not agree with your major points. Since you ask for elaboration:
My initial posts merely pointed that Neil Young had childhood polio and has every right to be upset about what he perceives as disinformation. Since he is astute enough to retain his artistic rights and his distribution rights, he certainly does have a right to decide who he shares a stage or platform with, even if his reasoning be dead wrong and nothing more valid than "Stay off my lawn." An artist has a right to decide with whom he or she does business.
As to your point that yesterday's misinformation is today's valid information: The point is irrelevant in that we are not discussing valid and invalid information involving COVID and vaccines. Everyone and his uncle has an opinion here and if I want to find or discuss or make up my mind about health care related to COVID I will find it and rely on a panel of scientists (note: I won't listen to a podcast with one guest). Hence I couldn't care what exactly Rogen was promulgating because we have all read our Orwell and know well that Bad can become Good etc. If anything, we should be discussing why one man who isn't even an expert gets to propound a view he is most likely sympathetic with for XXX million listeners solely because he is entertaining and corporate streaming models limit choice. Here we have the ability to sway opinion and truth because one person reaches way more people than he should, especially in a topic that requires expert opinion and rebuttals from other experts. So I am saying "not really" because the information stated on the show is irrelevant. We are not arguing about COVID but whether an artist has a right to decide who he wants to share a stage with based on distribution rights that his own lawyers negotiated.
As for your second point. Pasted here: 2) The synthesis of state and corporate power to protect us from "misinformation" is dubious: this is because nobody has the monopoly on wisdom, and it's all too easy to see this power being used nefariously (as indeed it is, today, right now.)
This is a complete distraction that has nothing to do with the argument presented by de Boer and as commented by me. I think you and I would agree totally that condensing of media outlets, even of aggregators, on the web to a handful of billion dollar corporations who then control the content is not helpful for the average person or culture in general. We can read about the evils of FB and Google all day and be in total agreement. However, here we are discussing a streaming platform that is, in itself, exploitative, in that it pays a recording artist 0.0004 cents (perhaps one zero too many) per stream. This paltry system has been set up to get users hooked on a specific service. Now, I cannot go into the minutiae of the Spotify business plan or their intentions over the next earning quarter, but it is safe to say that they stay healthy underpaying artists and overpaying some high powered entertainers like Rogan. With this model, I see (as I stated in point 1) that Spotify and Rogan have an outsized influence on what the average person learns about any one subject. I fail to see how the State or State Power meshes with Spotify's corporate vision here unless the state is too incompetent or malicious to ever break up these conglomerates. Hence my "not really." We are probably in complete agreement that the State needs to democratize and even the playing field of where and how information is disseminated.
Finally your 3rd point: 3) The people wielding this power are themselves far more guilty of misinformation than anyone else: this is undoubtedly true, and item 1 spells out why nicely.
While people wielding the power are often more capable of misinformation, you are neglecting that Spotify and Rogen are the ones wielding the power. Their influence is outsized and Neil Young, if anything plays the part of David, not Goliath. Also, with this 3rd point, you assume nefarious intent when various state governments of the world have done their best to give accurate information concerning COVID. In this sense, Rogan is an unqualified idiot with an outsized audience on a health subject considering his own paltry credentials.
One further point. Everyone in this squabble is a corporation. Spotify is. Young is (and retains majority control in his distribution rights and artistic rights) and Joni Mitchell is. So bringing up the power of corporations to stifle speech is a bit rich. We are merely arguing distribution channels. No one is being silenced.
All I ever wanted to point out in my initial posts was that this is a personal battle for Young (and Mitchell) due to polio and that an artist has a right to take an issue personally. I don't think it is young's intention to take out the opposition or all opposing thought. He just lives with polio and has an opinion about vaccines.
I agree completely that Young has all the right - legal, artistic, moral, whatever - to take his catalog wherever he wants. But I disagree with your overall contention that he is acting - or trying to act - without power. I also agree that Spotify is, to put it mildly, hardly a platform that's friendly to the wallet of artists. I don't regard these things as important in this discussion, not particularly controversial.
He didn't merely leave Spotify. He tried to get Rogan off Spotify first. That he failed doesn't mean he didn't try. And we absolutely *are* discussing whether or not the information Young objects to is valid or invalid because that is the absolute bedrock of his argument: "I, Neil Young, accuse Rogan of misinformation. I demand that Rogan is removed from the platform." You're doing three things here that are incorrect: conflating Young's legal/artistic/moral rights with his justification; stating that his justification didn't call for censorship of Rogan; and stating that his justification has no truth-value assigned to it. The reality is this: Young wants Rogan censored due to what he believes is misinformation, and his (partial) failure to achieve this censorship doesn't negate its attempt.
(I say partial failure because undoubtedly Spotify - judging by the words of their CEO - has clearly taken the knee, and indeed 80+ episodes of Rogan have now gone dark on the platform.)
To address another one of your points: "panel of scientists" and "expert" do a lot of heavy lifting here. You can't on the one hand say that the truth-value of any piece of (mis)information is irrelevant to the argument and then appeal to the authority of those who decide these things on the other. You actually acknowledge this yourself when you state that Spotify has (in your view) an outsized bully pulpit - one they've won through the size of their bank balance and not their expertise. If the truth-value of a given statement is irrelevant then this distinction wouldn't matter, would it?
I didn't assume any nefarious attempt on the part of government at all. You assigned that position to me. I stated - correctly - that a great deal of the "fog of war" knowledge about COVID was completely wrong. That makes no judgement one way or the other about the people who had that knowledge. What I said was that as this was definitionally misinformation, any attempt to censor Rogan should be redoubled and pointed towards the government if the aim is to reduce misinformation. If Rogan's an unqualified idiot relying on the hearsay of fools, the same applies to global governments ten times over.
For what it's worth, I have a very low opinion of Neil Young as a person, due to him calling an acquaintance of mine a 'mongol' when he believed he was out of earshot. Judging him on one minor incident over a mixed-up breakfast order around fifteen years ago might be unfair, but it's also the only Dunlop-number interaction I've ever had with the man. So, I admit some bias here.
I'm going to make one last pass here because of the point that Spotify removed 80+ podcasts. You see that as censorship. I see it--without even evaluating the content--as Spotify deciding that they want some editorial control because what is stated on the show could have economic ramifications. Now we can bandy about all day long whether this is a good thing or some opprobrious overreach, but the fact remains that most media outlets do maintain editorial control and have some sort of accountability (see Palin v. NYTimes). The fact that Spotify somehow does not count as media under the law (which was addressed elsewhere in one of the better posts on this whole thread) is really a technicality at this point. Clearly a platform where an entertainer reaches XX million viewers should be held accountable to liable, slander and other standards; and if they aren't, there is a problem. If those standards are merely removing 80 plus shows from an archive, I am not going to lose sleep over it.
If Joe Rogan does not want to accept those standards, he can negotiate a contract with complete artistic freedom. Maybe he has that power. If he doesn't, he is just like most other artists and writers who have to answer for their content. I know very few writers who can just state whatever the hell they want and get away with it. Would the world be a better place if they could? Doubtful.
I'll let the other arguments go because talking about COVID at this juncture in our COVID world is tiresome and just broaches who gets to decide what is right. Since it is pretty easy to find information or misinformation all over the internet and from government sources around the world, I am only basing my argument on the outsized influence that a celebrity on a specific platform has. I have no desire to hash out and argue over public policy as it pertains to sharing information about COVID; this thread has already been enough of a hornets nest.
Finally, I just want to point out that I am no big fan of Neil Young either. "Keep on Rockin' in the Free World" really rubbed me wrong and I've never been a huge fan of his music. As an acoustic guitarist, a do have familiarity with a handful of his songs, but try to separate an artist from the music. In this whole battle, as I've made clear, I've continually emphasized that Spotify exploits artists, and for that fact alone I relish any uncomfortable situation that the corporation finds itself in. In my book, there is no excuse for any listener paying any money to Spotify when an artist gets 0.0004 cents per stream. Now that is somewhat of a diversion, but my dislike of Spotify will--in this case--help cement my opinion. That more people know this week how abusive Spotify is can only be seen as a positive aspect of the whole squabble.
The woke crowd hates Joe Rogan because he's an unapologetic white guy who mocks their principles. That's why people are protesting him instead of, say, Nicki Minaj who said the vaccine causes impotence. She's still on Spotify.
The weird thing is - and maybe *I* have the wrong impression, being only a casual and occasional Rogan listener - is that he doesn’t seem to spend that much time mocking woke principals at all. He’s not really a mocker. He does SAY a lot of things that aren’t woke, but from what I can tell actual MOCKING of wokeness is a minuscule portion of his content, if he even does it. Even when he has specifically anti work content like Abigail Shrier he doesn’t come off as mocking to me, he comes off as earnestly concerned. Or with the covid vaccine stuff (which I disagree with him on and which has really made his show unlistenable for me) he just has a bunch of opinions I disagree with and wants to talk about it all the time but I don’t remember him mocking people. Am I being overly charitable?
No, I think that is actually right on. Wokes had made great progress deplatforming Shrier when he had her on and gave her massive exposure. That is what really makes their heads explode.
No, I'm sure you're right. If you listen occasionally, you know more than I do. I've only listened to a couple of episodes. They probably just hate him because he's not woke and criticizes their positions, while remaining popular.
My point is that neither Neil Young nor Joni Mitchell count as a woke crowd. Their beef has everything to do with vaccines, probably related to their ages and that they survived major bouts with polio, and nothing to do with being "woke."
Eh you should head over to Rod Dreher’s blog today. He can rail against censorship and cancel culture in on breath and then pivot to trying to get a guy fired for liking to get his kink on in the next.
The amount of hypocrisy this debate generates is mind boggling.
Correct if I am wrong isn't it the opposition to Rogan came mainly From Medical establishment on the ground that he is adovcsting/selling covid medicines unsupported by science? If that's the case, why should he get a pass during a pandemic that is still going ?
They didn't have much juice because they were "on the same side" as Oprah. Some in the medical community spoke out against her, and those stories were not picked up.
We can slice this any way we want. How many kids under five died due to lack of basic vaccination, in the era when Oprah had Jenny McCarthy on? How many very young children have died of COVID?
Or another angle: I once watched an episode of Dr. Oz where he supported a bunch of speakers about how cell phones cause breast cancer. He never contradicted them or provided alternative accurate information. You know how many women get breast cancer in their lifetimes? 1 out of 8. Being treated for breast cancer is way more common than being hospitalized for COVID. How many women threw out their fucking cell phones, told their friends, and then didn't take recommended courses to detect breast cancer earlier because of that show?
Just because we don't have numbers, or isn't a current moral panic, doesn't mean it doesn't count.
Plus, she covered so many more pseudo-science angles, and was influential (and still is) for so much longer.
I know that a lot of people (including me) have called Rogan the "Bro Oprah", but Oprah, at the top of her game, was just so much bigger than Rogan. If she mentioned your book on her show it would become an instant bestseller, and that's from back in the day when the NYT bestseller list really meant something. She had, and still has, a huge, internationally known brand.
Cancelling her, even a little bit, would have been impossible.
"Unsupported by science" is an interesting phrase. Ivermectin is certainly discouraged by health officials, but there are scientific studies that support its use, even after you filter out fraud and poor methodology: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted . It's quite possible it doesn't work, but one cannot say that the scientific consensus is unambiguously against ivermectin.
Well, there are homeopathic 'doctors' too who swear by Nox Vomica (sic).
The point is there is a mainstream science and it is fairly well-known and even though it may not be 100% accurate, it is more accurate and effective on average than the non-mainstream ones. And Ivermectin is not mainstream, yet.
Ah, but can you pick out which studies support the "mainstream" science in a rapidly evolving field vs the ones that don't? Also, is the "mainstream" necessarily right? Semmelweis famously promoted washing hands as a disinfectant. "Mainstream" medical scientists rejected his conclusions. Figuring out which science to "believe" is not trivial, which would mean being cavalier about which science to censor is a dangerous game.
As Scott's work pointed out, though, the higher-quality studies suggesting ivermectin does something tend to come from populations where the burden of parasitic worms is high. If COVID + worms tends to make you sicker or deader than COVID alone, treating the worms "treats" the COVID by addressing a comorbidity.
Joe Rogan is not an institution, is he? He is not a scholar, not a doctor, not anything really except an ordinary giy who happens to be big at this time, that's all. What we really saying that an elected government with real institutions ( NiH, CDC etc. which employ real scholars and real doctors) behind it can't stop an average 'Joe' from speaking out even if he is spreading misinformation. Misinformation that can kill. Because that's the price of 'freeedom'.
Do you think people who listen to and agree with anti vaxx stuff are unaware of the other information? I don’t think it’s a question of ignorance. The information is out there and open to all.
They are often unaware of, for example, how the VAERS database works. Or that catching the disease itself may with a higher risk of the adverse effect that they're worried vaccines risk. In other words, they're rationally ignorant of stuff that non-specialists typically don't need to know. But rational ignorance requires trust: you trust that the people who should know the details do so you don't have to. And who do you trust?
This also revolves around the central question about the role of gvernment. Its not about the people's ability to tell truth from untruth because they, in many cases, cannot. The question is whether government has the right to stop them even if it is doing for the right reason, public health in this case.
How about this as a compromise: Spotify requires Rogan to put a disclaimer at the beginning of each anti vax episode that says government health experts/list whatever agencies or groups have contested these claims. To hear arguments, go to [insert whatever]?
This is my problem with platform discourse in general, it assumes people go into a podcast episode (for example) as totally blank slates ready to be convinced by whatever they hear, rather than having preconceived notions and looking for validation. The root cause is never addressed and it just becomes whack-a-mole, like how Alex Jones was successfully deplatformed but that whole strain of thinking just re-emerged as Qanon within a year.
Jones did things I don't think Rogan does, though. Jones used his platform to harass people who were only newsworthy by accident — in effect "cancelling" grieving families, for example. Rogan seems to have built his reputation on being way too chill for stunts like that.
With Alex Jones, even if it's just whack-a-mole, I think being fine with what Jones earns himself is consistent with being anti-cancel in general. But Rogan ≠ Jones.
Yeah I don't mean to draw an equivalence between the two, just saying the time and energy debating who should be given a platform is better spent elsewhere and that "the facts" aren't the engine that drives society. But you're right, I don't have a problem w/ Jones being kicked off the internet for harassing sandy hook families and the like.
Due to a ridiculous scientific error, the CDC gave wildly incorrect advice for over a year on how to guard against COVID (Wired covered it well here: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/). An oft-repeated "fact" turned out to be not-so-factual after all, and the CDC resisted correction from scientists who attempted to alert them that cloth masks and standing six feet apart were not appropriate or sufficient safeguards, given how viruses actually spread.
The CDC guidance has almost certainly killed more people than Joe Rogan. It has wasted billions of dollars in worthless security theater. The correct information was all available to them, as it was to everyone, and correct advice was presented by many blogs and such.
Misinformation absolutely kills. The thing is, scholars and doctors and governments are frequently wrong too. Science has been roiled by the replication crisis. Allowing "regular Joes" to speak freely is one of the few guards we have against institutional misinformation. Will they get it wrong? Yes. They're going to get it wrong more often than they get it right, by a *lot*. It is still worthwhile to let them speak.
Yeah, I sort of agree with the broader point. But the downside is that whatever faith people have in institutions will be damaged further. And if CDC, with its intellectual might, is wrong one out of hundred times, Joe Rogan types would be wrong 99 out of hundred. That's the danger because without strong institutions a state is a basket-case.
Institutions lying and refusing to admit they're wrong will damage trust in institutions for more than Rogan ever would. When CNN said Joe took horse medicine, when Ivermectin is originally and predominantly a Nobel-prize-winning human medicine that Joe got from his doctor, they did tremendous damage to their own credibility. I have a tube of Ivermectin in my bathroom, a human medicine from my human dermatologist prescribed for non-Covid reasons from before the pandemic, and yet CNN doubled down on acting like Ivermectin is always horse paste. They could have just cited whatever credible study says Ivermectin has not been proven to work on Covid, but instead they added an obvious lie that can be debunked by a tube falling out of my medicine cabinet. If they would pointlessly lie about that, why should I believe them on anything? I don't know if Rogan's guests are right or not, but at least concrete evidence of their lies doesn't stare me in the face every time I glance at my bathroom counter. That is what destroys faith in institutions. CNN and everyone who jumped on the Ivermectin-is-horse-paste train should be deplatformed for the damage that did to establishment credibility.
I am not here to defend CNN or any other 'establishment' media, those people have their own burdens to carry. What I am afraid of is the loss of faith in critical institutions, HHS, CDC, NIH etc. which, despite their occasional missteps, remain remarkably capable and far more beneficial to society than any celebrity. Nations, states, societies last as long their best institutions do. CDC is a great institution, Joe Rogan is not. I weep for the breakage in general, not for the political appointees who, for the past two years, have lied through their teeth.
Not only was the CDC and WHO wrong about all that, but Dr. Michael Osterholm was right about it when he spoke on Joe Rogan's podcast in March 2020. I learned more good info from that one episode of Rogan's podcast than from the authorities all year long. You have to take the good with the bad and trust people to process information and make their own decisions. Telling the public to shut up and listen just makes them worse at these skills.
Opposition to Rogan certainly comes from Big Pharma, Beg Med, and the Fauci cabal, but not just from them. Rogan has had several doctors on (his episode with McCullough drew an audience of 40 million. McCullough, a cardiologist, is the most published in his specialty; Rogan's episode with Malone, who is listed on several of the earliest patents related to mRNA, drew an audience even larger than that.) These doctors and scientists had the opportunity to explain their views at length, with the data to back them up. There isn't another media outlet with Rogan's following, with his format - he's a curious guy, asks good questions, and lets his guests speak without badgering. He's also had CNN's favorite doctor, Sanjay Gupta on. Rogan made sure Gupta understood that his network had flat out LIED about ivermectin, by repeatedly calling it "horse de-wormer,". Humans have taken over 4 Billion doses of Ivermectin. It won its developers the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2015. Rogan received a prescription for it from an MD. But BlueAnon (h/t Aaron Mate), serving Big Pharma, shuts down any discussion of treatments for Covid, using inexpensive, approved medications.
Glenn Greenwald has been pointing to the US Government putting pressure on "private companies" to censor. Jen Psaki did it in regard to Spotify and Rogan, from the podium in the White House, just last week. Anyone paying attention should understand this to be an unconstitutional attack on freedom of speech.
I too expect the Dems to get hammered in the November elections. We can only imagine what the congressional hearings will be less than a year from now. The worm will turn...
By that mean a free rein to promulgate any idea that MAY NOT be beneficial to public health during a pandemic and I emphasize, during a pandemic that has killed close to a million Americans and still going strong. What is the point of having a 'public health' department if the Government can't stop the public from getting killed and killing others through transmission? At the very least, there should be a disclaimer on his show, "For entertainment purpose only, consult your doctor regarding any covid medication'.
Any idea that may not be beneficial to public health in a pandemic? Like "go out and march in the streets in tightly packed groups and lower your masks while you shout in people's faces"? I feel like that may not have been beneficial to public health but for some reason there was free rein to promulgate that idea and even got a gratuitous endorsement from the health establishment.
Accurately judging what is or is not beneficial in the middle of a pandemic looks to be close to impossible when you're in the middle of it. At least that was my take on the last two years. Which is why it is good and interesting and valuable to hear all sides (I can't believe I have to write this). And sure, if a disclaimer is enough to make everyone step back from censorship than I'll take that deal. As much as I think disclaimers like this are purely theatrical.
I’m also trying to remember back when conservatives would start letter writing campaigns and threaten to boycott advertisers because there was a gay character on Maud or The Golden Girls or whatever. Or boycotting Disney for hosting Gay Days.
Was that regarded as censorship back in the day, or were letter writing campaigns and boycotts thought to be legitimate political speech?
Boycotting is totally legitimate. And if enough people put enough pressure and a company changes it’s stance, that’s fair game. But when a small amount of people with a microphone put a lot of pressure and a company caves to that pressure, it’s not the same. And I’d say considering the size of Rogans audience (I’ve never heard a show of his) Spotify will weigh the protests against how people “vote” with their attention.
“But when a small amount of people with a microphone put a lot of pressure and a company caves to that pressure, it’s not the same.”
How so? Isn’t that like the guy who parks his truck in front of the dealership with a giant lemon in the back to get them to agree to the warranty repairs? He’s just one guy but he found a way to get a lot of leverage.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you again, Freddie. The Rogan stuff is so depressing. Ever since Trump won in 2016, the left-of-center has slowly been losing its goddamn mind. It's been one moral panic after another.
With every controversy where I find myself not in lockstep with mainstream liberal opinion, I only grow more depressed and alienated. Since 2020, I've slowed way down on posting on Facebook because I'm utterly fucking terrified of getting mobbed by angry liberals over a "problematic" statement and losing friends. Holding my tongue on the Joe Rogan stuff is just the latest example. So I go underground in private forums instead. That provides a soothing lifeline. I suffer from depression and I'm very conflict avoidant. Woke politics are poison for someone like me.
The good news is that I work at a job that requires no commitments to wokeness at all. In Summer 2020, I thought we were in trouble, but DEI statements have slowed way down since then. Still, I worry that all it takes is one disgruntled SJW to get me fired. I don't share that same anxiety if some MAGA freak calls me a libcuck or whatever.
Thanks again Freddie and thank you to all the regulars here. I don't know where I'd be without you guys.
I think Robin DiAngelo style DEI is the exception. Every year at work I have to watch these videos about not judging people based on race/sex etc which is a) perfectly reasonable and b) not really intrusive
Right. We do a good amount of DEI stuff here and it's generally pretty weak tea. Some people are doing the pronoun thing, but nobody has said we have to.
I do get a little vexed having been doing this all along (not judging people based on race/sex) and finding it weird that the organization thinks I (that is everyone in the workplace) have not.
That's the problem with these training sessions. They are best suited for children, still learning basic manners, courage and humanity. During the last torture session I had to sit through, they had 2 or 3 break-out sessions where we (38 ~ 68 yr olds) had to assemble in smaller groups and recount some event where we were DEI heroes to someone being mistreated. All examples offered by the participants involved their childhood, or observing their children being heroes in school.
Oh, and one guy did boast about his principled heroism when he rejected a celebratory donut offered to him by a partner at his former firm upon Trump's election. Valiantly doing the work.
My now [thankfully] former firm had us sit through the most grotesque KenDiAngelo style DEI training. This was at a big prominent and very old firm in my city, not a fringe institution. The "atone for your whiteness and undeserved privileged" is not unusual in the very profession that pushed racial animus to new heights under the banner of doing "justice." And yet power in these institutions remains resolutely in the hands of white men. The whiter the institution, the more unhinged the DEI theater.
This is a good post. But, I think Rogan and others can be limited by private industry for particularly egregious inaccuracies. Like for most journalistic operations, accuracy should be a prime directive, and policing blatant disregard for accuracy is good and responsible.
Clearly, other agendas can be secretly validated at the same time, which is a problem. But I don’t want my platform to support hosts or participants who “talk shit” that includes pretty massive departures from reality. Hard to police that standard, but I don’t mind erring with that as the goal.
I agree that anti vaxx stuff is madness. But has Rogan ever claimed to be a journalist? Has spotify taken up the mantle of legacy media content producer?
The case with Rogan is interesting here, because Spotify does essentially function as his publisher, editor, and producer. Which does make them identical to legacy media content producers, in this specific case.
To me, this shouldn't really be much of a quandary. We have broadcasting laws already.
Or we could just think of things like Spotify the same way we think about premium cable. You can say fuck but there are consequences for saying certain things.
The problem that I keep circling back to, with all the anti-vax madness (as you put it, appropriately), is what effect does censorship have? I think I'd support it if it worked. A while back Freddie had a post about normative vs empirical claims and I keep coming back to this.
My anti-vax patients think that the government is covering up vaccine related deaths. When Facebook deletes their posts about this, it is further evidence to them that there is a cover up! And maybe the argument is you prevent the idea from spreading so new people won't be exposed, but I think it's a bit late for that. Anyone inclined to be antivax has no shortage of online content to help them along in that direction
"What effect does censorship have? I think I'd support it if it worked." Really, you'd support censorship if it "worked?" I'd really like to know how censorship is ever something anyone would want.
Rumble just offered Rogan $100 million to ditch Spotify and join them. Are you going to be okay with whatever he says on Rumble as long as he's gone from Spotify?
I was saying - it’s ok for platforms to try to promote/enforce accuracy. I am not thinking about what happens to Rogan or the fact that he has other options.
If you want to be a journalist, you may not really care if you work for the Washington Post or Breitbart. There are obviously platforms that will pay for garbage. But kudos for platforms for promoting accuracy (if/when that’s what they are doing).
Yes, I think I agree with this. It seems like this is how journalism/media has always worked--outlets strive to publish accurate information 1) because they have a values-based commitment to accuracy and 2) because being accurate over time is how they gain credibility. (These days, 2) is complicated by the fact that we have way more sources of information, which has allowed more senses of what is "accurate" to develop.)
It gets complicated when we move from facts into opinions/ideology/interpretation. I think many mainstream outlets have also traditionally avoided promoting or condemning any particular opinion/viewpoint/idea (at least within a certain range of acceptability). So (to me at least) Spotify kicking Joe Rogan off its platform for inaccuracies feels within the range of accepted legacy media practices, while Spotify kicking Joe Rogan off its platform for engaging in forbidden opinions feels potentially different.
I feel sensitive to the need for free speech in part because I think free speech is essential to free thought. But I don't think outlets are ethically compelled to host information that they've determined is factually untrue, and for me antivax stuff falls on the "facts" side of the false facts/wrong opinions dichotomy.
It's NOT "the left" - it's the neoliberal Democrats who serve as a bulwark against the actual left.
Also, I just saw a huge collage (montage?) of real images of one of the Canadian trucker rallies and let me tell you, I haven't seen that many swastikas and Trump banners in the same place at the same time anywhere else.
You're confused.
My only gripe with this piece is the idea that the activist class has actually taken over the Democratic Party.
If this were true, I think at least one demand by the activist class would have been met by now. I would say that the Democrats are very interested in vocally appeasing the activist class, but are antagonistic to actually legislating anything they want. Otherwise we would have been getting "Biden Bucks" since last January, an emergency action would've at least temporarily made healthcare free and universal, and probably Build Back Better would already be passed.
It's the worst of both worlds: activists don't set the policy, but they do control the messaging, in effect if not by rule
I experienced a brief moment of optimism when the child tax credit went into effect. But, welp.
That I agree with. Which, yeah, pretty much worst case scenario for everyone. Including the Democrats facing re-election who have to both stand behind promises the party never intended to follow through on and then defend their failure to enact these promises.
Which is balanced by the Trump tar baby the GOPers are stuck with, to their disgrace. What an inspiring election we face.
I would argue that the activist class don't actually have demands they want to see implemented because if their demands were implemented they might actually be held accountable for the chaos that results. They want to look virtuous in the public discourse by sounding like the most radical person in the room. They don't actually want to see the police abolished though or any of the other insane shit they are constantly screaming about.
You think people don't actually want universal healthcare? You think that's just a pose?
I imagine he's talking about the identarian activists.
People here seem often seem extremely fixated on aspects of the broader Left that have nothing to do with policy.
I don't think people want to do the extremely difficult work of making universal healthcare a feasible policy position.
People have already been doing that work for a long time. The problem isn't a lack of effort in people and activists. It's the dominion of the healthcare industry over Congress that keeps this from becoming a reality.
Or to put it a different way: Congress is full of bribed cowards.
Where did I say that? Where was the statement "everything that everyone on the left says is just a pose"?
"I would argue that the activist class don't actually have demands they want to see implemented because if their demands were implemented they might actually be held accountable for the chaos that results."
Sounds to me like you're saying that the Left doesn't want to accomplish anything they vocally advocate. Maybe I'm misreading this, but it seemed clear.
I think they want universal health care, but they don't want the responsibility of universal health care.
What does that even mean?
Universal healthcare is wildly popular as an idea in the US. It's so wildly popular in every country that has it that even the conservative parties shy away from criticizing it.
Its the same as C MN is saying. Wanting something is different than the work of getting it done. Also, when you do things in reality, there will be compromises and criticism. Compromise and taking criticism are responsibilities. And substantial portions of the Left simply will not take that on.
Let me frame this a different way: They are cowards. And their censoriousness creates an environment that invites more cowardice. But cowards can whine and dream about the things they want every single day.
You think politicians in the US can't figure out how to enact a functioning single payer healthcare system? You know that dozens of other countries have had this in place for decades already, yes?
It's not complicated. The work has been done. The national support for this policy is overwhelming.
The problem isn't activists. It's the amount of money politicians from both parties make from healthcare lobbyists.
It’s wildly popular in the sense of “would you like free ice cream” is wildly popular. But when you start talking about the higher taxes needed to actually implement… and yes, I totally get that the final cost will likely be lower when you compare to existing premiums. I’m a supporter! But that message hasn’t been successful - see Vermont’s failed attempt to implement universal health care.
I think much of the issue with messaging has to do with the billions of dollars of profit on the line for a few industries, and their lobbying and market messaging is quite powerful.
And without the political will in Congress, it just can't happen. Which is the primary issue.
Plus, nice, middle-class people have been conditions to see not having employer-provided benefits as a disaster — which it can be in a country that absurdly tied getting good medical care not even to ability to pay, but to having the right kind of job at the right kind of employer.
I guess it hinges on the word "taken over.". The activist class, if that's what you want to call them, has been given the hollow trappings of power, enough symbolic gestures and posturing to bring them to the table but with no actual influence, like a power wheels version of an actual car. Worse than that, I think this is what most of them secretly want. All the ability to publicly complain with a high profile and signal their virtues, but with none of the responsibility that inevitably comes with making real decisions. They love their roles as outsider critics and the privilege it affords them way too much to give it up, even if they got to call the shots.
I do think they'll be scapegoated and thrown to the wolves when the time comes. I also think that's no small part of why the Democratic party brass currently tolerates them. Give them a meaningless seat at the table then blame them when it all goes to shit.
Disagree that activists just want a podium without power.
But, yeah, that's pretty much how it always goes. Democrats would rather have Republicans in office than have even someone as moderate as AOC in an actual position of power.
Why would they? Right now they can advocate for any position they want and suffer zero of the pesky consequences associated with trying to implement them. They get to keep on being noble failures, it's the role they know and love.
I guess they were given a kind of actual power, the ability to make the people they don't like on the internet shut up. I think they'd trade their whole political platform away, put it on the trash heap if it meant we kept the alt right off Twitter.
You really think all activists just want to score internet points?
Freddie talks about his activism on here frequently enough that I think it should at least demonstrate a picture of what real activism tends to look like. Do you really think Freddie and people like him are just doing this so that Rachel Maddow will retweet them?
I do believe a specific type of online-only activist fits your image. But I think it's pretty cynical to conflate the loud minority of twitter users with the many people who have spent their lives advocating for a more humane and just society.
This isn't about sincerity. I think most of them really believe in the policies and want them. They just could never stand the heat or backlash that would occur if they really changed things. I've been enough left/activist orgs to know they are a house of cards. The tiniest dispute, scandal, or ethical failing can cause a split or a collapse. If you fold that easily you will never be able to weild actual power, because you won't be able to keep your hands clean enough.
Again, this is just too cynical for me. It may be true of, like, a gender studies professor who says something like ABOLISH GENDER, but most activists on the Left are focused around healthcare, housing, the prison industrial complex, and the military industrial complex.
I think if Bernie Sanders became president and enacted his agenda in 2016 or 2020, he wouldn't cower away from bad media coverage.
People sure do hate AOC and Ilhan Omar a lot, but they don't back down when they meet pushback. They're pretty clear and straightforward and consistent with things like healthcare.
I think they have influence. They just don't understand how to do things.
Plus, getting their hands dirty would probably influence them to change their minds about an item or two. That happens when you live in reality.
It's worth asking why radicalism became fashionable again, who benefited, and what it's consequences were. It's not just Sanders either, fashionable radicalism that considered him a milquetoast succdem embarassment when just 10 years earlier anyone expressing mild criticism of the neoliberal consensus was considered a kook. Maybe, in a perverse way such radicalism was built to fail on purpose. Channel all that outrage into a safe dead end, make sure people asked for too much and instead left with nothing...which is what happened.
it is an interesting question. I can think of a lot of possibilities, but don't really know.
This is my gripe too, for a slightly different reason.
“They cling to this right to control discourse because discourse is all they have. Later this year the Democrats are going to be on the receiving end of a political bloodletting of incredible scale, as Republicans make hay out of broken promises, tone-deaf messaging, and the Democratic party's takeover by a deluded activist class.”
Yes, discourse is all they have. By design.
The deluded “activist” class spends so much energy, takes up so much space, discussing what everyone purportedly thinks and feels, deep down; and what people did or said decades ago. By design.
There’s so much noise about, say, racism and transphobia that no one is ever talking about wages or jobs or suggesting what might benefit regular Americans.
I can’t think of a piece of legislation in recent times (“recent” being decades) that was designed by benevolent legislators to help regular Americans and had even the remotest chance of being made law. There are a few intended to appear as such, but anything that succeeds is just a giveaway to various powerful interests. Build Back Better is a joke. Obamacare was a joke. Any good that is accomplished for any regular American is completely incidental to the main agenda of giving our collective resources away to rich people.
Feature, not bug.
Being on the side of the angels has been successfully sold to millions of people to mean policing what you and others say and think. While people are busily engaged in that and calling it “activism” it means means they’re not doing anything good for anyone. It means the pillaging of our collective resources continues, while we’re distracted.
My theory is this mostly happened less from activism per se and more because the Dems and associated interest groups needed Youths to do their digital comms. This is how the politically engaged digital youths talk; so this kind of stuff gets good engagement on Twitter; so the messaging becomes a self-reinforcing one-way ratchet.
Noah Smith recently re-posted a blog post to the effect of "the state isn't the only one who can limit your freedom." His forward noted that it was intended as a shot at the right, who engage in the delusion that the employee-employer relationship is somehow free and consensual. He stated that it now read like a critique of the left, with idea that's it not censorship if a corporate monopoly does it.
"When I am weak, according to your principles..." etc. When the Right held the levers of power it was rare to find someone on the Right who was interested in anything beyond spouting "it's a free market!" Only once the levers were taken away from them did they start to really think about how private actors could be as restrictive - even moreso, since they're not constrained by as much law - as the State.
Still, better late than never that they notice that power dynamics don't begin and end on the Capitol steps. "Just start your own internet, brah, it's a free market" has been found wanting, and the Right - outside of Congress, at least - is now *almost* unanimous on that point.
Eh, the right has always whined about liberal media/Hollywood, they've just extended this the big tech companies
But it wasn't existential the way it was now, and the idea wasn't that the ~Liberal Media~ was - as it is now - simply an extension of the Left's cultural hegemony. That is, the Right was against the company and not the entire system, whereas it's now discovered (again, better late than never) that the deck is stacked against them.
“The deck is stacked against them” well yeah besides all the levers of actual power in this country sure
Are you lost? We're specifically talking about big tech and the media.
Big tech and the media in their current configurations are very new. Not even 20 years ago the "liberal" "progressive" "leftist" media (MSNBC) fired Phil Donahue simply for questioning the Iraq invasion. So think about it - they've clearly ALWAYS been willing to go along with censorship so long as it pleases the right people; it's just that now the corporate money bags who want to censor people generally identify as "liberal" Democrats.
Has the New York Times - an outlet that gets accused of being leftists and such all the time - EVER discovered a war of aggression waged by Uncle Scam that they won't support?
I think it's clear the Right was interested in private power over speech long before Biden became president. There are many reasons why they took up such a determined assault on Labor. The less power and fewer options employees have, the more easily a company can control even what they say in public.
You're right.
For what it's worth I'm still for private actors doing as they will including in theory Spotify in practice they're no longer a truly private entity as they are backed by government power.
My particular issues are where the lines are blurring between private and state actors, that is the censorship that I do worry about.
A big one for instance is all the tech companies who are protected from certain types of liabilities as platforms as opposed to publishers, a point Spotify's CEO made a point to repeatedly reinforce in his discussions on the Rogan issue.
My take is that in providing disclaimers and pulling ~70 episodes they have crossed the line and are acting as a publisher and not a platform and as such should lose the protections offered as a publisher. This also applies to most of the big tech companies right now but especially Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook.
To be clear I'm totally fine with those companies doing what they want, I'm not okay with them doing that and being protected by the government in violation of the original deal which was host a bunch of stuff for other people and we won't hold you legally accountable for various things (an exception is made here as they are required to remove explicitly illegal things such as child porn on a best effort basis) provided it's hosted on your platform and you're not choosing/affecting the actual content.
I believe we will continue to see truly independent free speech platforms such as Substack and the pile of video sharing and social media sites (none of which have made a true impact yet) continue to gain traction. This can be sped up however with enforcing the law and removing their status/protections as publishers. This could also be sped way up by the likes of Rogan taking Rumble's offer.
We have long made exceptions through competition laws to curtail the powers of monopolies and oligopolies. Natural monopolies such as phone companies, power utilities, etc, have been recognized as being different. For example - even today I can't see anyone agreeing that a power utility would refuse to provide power to your house because you are 'alt right' or a 'socialist.' But effectively when Amazon, Google and Apple shut down Parler that is what they were doing. Or when MasterCard and Visa refuse to handle your transactions. So I don't agree for a second that Facebook can be treated like any other company. The fact that they are openly and explicitly being pressured by whoever is in power to do this or that just adds another reason why this is the case.
I'm wasted, G: I didnt' read the rest of your post. But how is spotify "protected"? What specific federal statute "protects" them? You're acting like they're just a bunch of good-headed businessmen restrained by the government. They're ruthless, bloody, uncompromisng mercenaries who will do whatever it takes to make long-run profit. one viewer does NOT equal one viewer. The neolibs are an uncompromising, totalizing entity, with a legitimately unprecedented ability to gain and keep power. You're acting like the gov't is getting in the way of the natural course of things, i.e. that Rogan should be popular and adored. That's the opposite of what is happening. Capable, powerful peple are rejecting him. Don't like it? Biuld power. But everything that american conservatism touches dies, and the short bald man will be no exception. The libs have power for a reason. Emulate the parts of them that work, reject the parts that don't. But don't act like they're cheating. They're not. They have legit power.
Section 230
So the plan is to repeal it? You want to make them LESS censorious by making them liable for everything they publish...?
Leaving section 230 alone is perfectly fine, designating Spotify as a publisher instead of a platform is what we want.
I don't care if it makes them less censorious or more, it doesn't matter to me what they do as a private company without government protection. What does matter is not allowing them to have the benefits of platform while acting like a publisher. You write a law for a specific reason, one in this case that I happen to agree with, you then have to enforce that law.
In the future please read comments before replying especially as the rest of the comment explained how they were protected. While not mentioning Section 230 by name the Publisher/Platform debate is plenty of context for most and enough of a lead for anyone else unfamiliar to google.
Do you have a link to that? I can’t find it.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-liberty-of-local-bullies
Ah, thanks. I didn’t go back in his archives far enough.
Corporate monopolies are definitionally incapable of responding to stimuli that are not market forces. The problem is the market, and the solution is abolition thereof; trying to get LLCs to play nice will never work.
I must again protest Freddie's egregious misuse of the word "liberal".
Freddie writes "Many liberals are pretty much entirely opposed to free speech as a concept."
But this is impossible, by definition.
Liberals, by definition, are people who support civil liberties, most definitely including free speech. Anyone who does not support free speech is, by definition, not a liberal.
Here is the Oxford Languages definiton of "liberal":
>noun
>1. a supporter of policies that are socially progressive and promote social welfare.
>2. a supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.
Yeah, and in Denmark the party known as the Left - literally their name - is now center-right. The word Left hasn't changed meaning. The people labeled with it have changed. Similarly, the capital-L liberal tenets, as embodied by the old school ACLU*, are now on the way out among people with the label of liberal.
I've seen reformulations of point 2, how the safety of the community from muh COVID outweighs the individual right to speak about it. People who identify as liberal aren't going to say they're acting illiberally. They'll just reformulated liberalism to suit. And this is hardly new - hence the distinction in the US between liberals and classical liberals (who generally won't support point 1.)
*That, said, the ACLU's heel turn is in - in my view - probably deliberate. They wanted freedom for themselves, not for the rest of us.
"Similarly, the capital-L liberal tenets ... are now on the way out among people with the label of liberal."
That's just not correct. The anti-free-speech crowd overwhelming identifies as progressive leftists, not liberals.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology-2/
I'm on my phone so can't dig into the crosstabs (at least not easily) - I'm sure you're correct in relative terms, but what about absolute numbers? The reason I ask is because of this Pew study -
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/18/more-americans-now-say-government-should-take-steps-to-restrict-false-information-online-than-in-2018/
It is improbable to me that the 65% who want government censorship and 76% who want big tech censorship don't mainly comprise liberals, simply because liberals are so much greater in number. (That is to say, 51% of liberals outnumber 75% of progressive leftists.)
Replying to myself but yes, I was right. Just 6% of the overall electorate in this study are Progressive Left; Establishment Liberals are 13% and Democratic Mainstays (I guess these are Maudes?) are 16%. Even if you fold Outsider Left in with Progressive Leftists (and I think that's highly, highly dubious) they're still a minority by a significant margin; if you leave Progressive Leftists entirely separate, they're barely a tenth of the Democratic coalition.
Long story short: anti-free speech is a majority view of Democrats, significantly so, and there's no arithmetic that can lay this even mostly at the door of the Progressive Left, let alone entirely.
I can't argue with the numbers, but I think covid has had a huge effect here. And in a general survey, most people haven't really thought through what "take steps to restrict false information online" really implies; as asked, the question sounds pretty benign. In 2018, pre-covid, both Republicans and Democrats were at about 40% in favor of such "steps".
But if we look at the activists who drive opinion, I think the story is very different. I claim that the people who are trying to get Joe Rogan canceled do not call themselves "liberals". I don't have numbers to support this, but Neil Young, for example, was an avowed Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016: https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/neil-young-open-letter-president-donald-trump-8551428/
and Bernie has repeatedly said that he is "not a liberal":
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/bernie-sanders-is-often-called-a-liberal-hed-beg-to-differ-who-is-actually-a-liberal/2021/01/28/16e283b4-5a7d-11eb-8bcf-3877871c819d_story.html
To Republicans and most conservatives, "Liberal" as in welfare liberal, is essentially Democrat. And/or "Progressive". There are (D) Dems and (R) Reps on the ballot - not liberal, not progressive, not conservative.
It's Dems who are currently backing the anti-free speech crowd that gets adults fired for politically incorrect speech.
Many Reps do want those who teach CRT or sex perversion to kids to not have a job teaching kids. This is more a kid-raising issue than a free speech issue. Those, mostly Dems, who want kids to be indoctrinated with CRT and sex, are currently driving caring suburban mothers towards supporting Reps.
Noah got accused of sexism for criticizing a female MMT proponent. Fun times.
"Of course the Republicans and their anti-CRT and book burning bills are a disgrace."
Anti-CRT and book burning are two different things. CRT as an underpinning of school curricula is the real disgrace, and libs are just mad that we're finally putting a spotlight on the racial hysteria they're poisoning our children with. The voters agree with me.
These bills are, in every sense that matters, just book banning bills, books conservatives don't like.
Removing from curricula and banning are two completely different things, as you're well aware. I get that it's a rhetorical point to call them book-burning, and were I in your cap I'd be doing the same thing since it's a very effective and emotive term, but that still doesn't make it true. Schools have always had the decision to determine what is and isn't appropriate for the classroom, and the Left - being in near-total control of education - is just mad that a small measure of that control is being taken from them. Again, I'd be doing the same thing in their shoes, but I'd be wrong to do so.
I am of one mind with the activist Left on this point: ethical curation is not censorship. CRT underpinning curricula is, on the other hand, deeply unethical. And curating textbooks, curricula, and even library stock to excise this cancer is not unethical, but rather the opposite.
Even if you disagree with me on this, what do you make of the rabid opposition to curriculum transparency? There's weak transparency: that the school boards and state boards still decide, but they have to make all reading lists, textbooks etc. public. Then there's strong transparency: PTAs and other bodies effectively act as the 'executive' here and have to approve them. Do you consider either of these to be analogous to burning?
The article says burning.
From the post:
> Of course the Republicans and their anti-CRT and book burning bills are a disgrace.
I looked at the Florida Bill and that’s not what it seems to say. But I appreciate stuff can lurk under the surface. From my reading it bans teaching things like ‘one race is superior/inferior to another’. I suppose that could amount to banning books but it seems a stretch. Is there a decent good faith take down of the Florida bill someone can point me to?
Coleman Hughes and Kmele Foster have discussed this. Hughes was originally fine with the idea of legislation against CRT, but Kmele (who also finds CRT wanting) convinced him that the legislation has already led to insidious mission creep.
Thanks. I’ll have a listen. I like both of them.
This plus the fact the bills are quite broad does give me some pause for thought - but only some. "Oh, we'd better not do this thing that's morally correct and politically popular, coz it might be sloppily written" might well be the right thing to do, but it's not the correct thing to do. You have to strike while the iron is hot, and as the recent redistricting efforts show, what matters is not the procedure or the niceties but the raw, powerful result at the end of it. I'll take an imperfect bit of mission creep ahead of the status quo without hesitation.
Just because the side you're fighting is morally correct doesn't make your tactics morally correct, though. To me, sloppily-written law that's already resulting in requests like pulling Norman Rockwell prints from the classroom is morally incorrect.
But then, I lived through a nasty Holocaust-education fight as a conservative kid of conservative parents, and I saw how well-meaning parents can be baited into demanding unnecessary curriculum changes that...
I guess I'm saying I never deserved the "Nazi" harassment I got in school just for having a Germanic last name and conservative parents interested in their kids' education. But, looking back at the changes my parents were actually requesting, those changes would have harmed a good curriculum had they gone through, and the rest of the district, including other parents, naturally wondered, why? Why are *these* parents requesting *these* changes? "Because they're Nazis" is the least charitable possible answer, of course, but I can see why, to bystanders, it fit.
I think agonizing and scrupling over tactics is a luxury that comes with time, time that we don't have.
Someone recommended Jeffrey Sachs's research to me on these various state bills. His article on Florida's "Stop WOKE" bill focuses on the private right of action it includes. The one on sloppy drafting uses Indiana's as an example of how these things work more broadly:
https://pen.org/stop-woke-act-fits-disturbing-pattern-education-culture-war/
https://pen.org/steep-rise-gag-orders-many-sloppily-drafted/
Private right of action is a big hammer and the potential for abuse is huge, even if the laws are created and passed with the best of intentions.
The American Disability Act's private right of action has given rise to ADA troll law firms that seek out small businesses to bully into settlements over fairly small violations.
That’s a good point. I’m from the UK where the ‘loser pays the winner’s costs’ makes that less of a problem.
By the way, I got around to listening to some of your podcasts. I liked the one about Pearl Hart the best.
Thank you. It also makes me happy to hear that!
According to old-school litigators for liberty like FIRE, several bills ban considerably more from the classroom than books.
Yes, but step back and consider ... what is CRT other than the soft racism of low expectations? When you strip away the dreck, CRT says "you can't expect POC to show up to work on time, properly dressed, you can't expect POC to be able to read nor write the English Language ..."
TL;DR: CRT teaches that POC lack responsibility.
And you're OK with teaching children these things?
If the anti-CRT push were limited to pushing back against soft racism, that would be one thing.
But it's not. It may not be obvious to those removed from actually-existing pushback efforts how much it's not. But I am not so removed. I'm the one getting the forwards from well-meaning loved ones saying I must investigate and stop any social-emotional learning (SEL) going on at my kid's school because it's creeping CRT.
While it's possible to find implementations of SEL addressing racial issues in ways vexing to conservative parents, that's not SEL's primary job. Its primary job is to instill self-regulation (self-discipline, essentially). Provided it's not *called* SEL, most conservative parents agree with SEL's core principles (none of which are racial):
https://sel.fordhaminstitute.org/
But call it SEL and have "whistleblowers" widely publish in right-wing media instances of where SEL curricula (as all curricula may do these days) involve racial cringe? Then it's CRT and something all innocent children should be protected from!
SEL is *not* an exception. Finding weird things to call CRT and mobilize parents about is *normal* for a powerful segment of anti-CRTs. They even tell you they're doing it:
"We have successfully frozen their brand—'critical race theory'—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category." — Rufo
So, while there are many forms of DEI education I worry are toxic or even grift, it turns out I am "OK" with much of what I, as a parent with right-wing connections, am pressured to smoke out as "CRT" — since politically-influential anti-CRTs have untruthful standards for what CRT even is.
The thing that so many of us object to is kids being told that they are inherently stuck forever in a class of bad people because of immutable characteristics like skin color. I don't care whether that's called CRT or not, I oppose it. And I support legislative attempts to ban it, however clumsy and inarticulate, because the schools themselves are all-in with woke neo-racism and neo-miscogeny, and that needs to be pushed back against as firmly as possible.
But CRT doesn’t actually underpin any school curricula.
Great news! Then you have nothing to worry about.
Blocked and Reported's episode with Jeffery Sachs was good on this, I think. Many CRT bills are actually terrible, with potential impacts that could empower rather than weaken cancel culture by, say, over-broadly defining "discomfort". While the best don't actually make anything new illegal, they just re-iterate existing civil rights precedent (you can't force students to adopt ideological positions to graduate) and provide mechanisms for transparency and reporting.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who supports deplatforming Rogan or anyone else has no leg to stand on when complaining about CRT and book bans. (I'm not including Freddie in this of course because he's being consistent in his principles.) If you're for censoring podcasts, you've accepted censorship as a justifiable tactic in shutting down ideas so why can't we ban CRT, etc.?
As for the specifics of these controversies, I agree that there is some nuance to censoring books vs. simply leaving certain books out of the curriculum, though conservatives are being needlessly dismissive about Maus being a "picture book" (I read Maus in high school, I think, and it was excellent). Censoring CRT is trickier. I don't agree with it in principle, and the specific laws at issue may well be poorly written and riddled with flaws (though it's not like a lot of laws aren't written badly), but the thing about CRT (and by CRT I mean the New Woke Religious Dogma on Race, not the original academic texts or basic historical facts about slavery and Jim Crow) is that CRT is an inherently censorious belief system in itself. It's built on the tenets of words being violence and causing literal harm, and people being allowed to speak or not based on their identity's place in the intersectional hierarchy. The rules of CRT promote censorship of opposing viewpoints, so how do you fight it without censoring it? And, to circle back, if CRT says censoring harmful things is okay, why isn't it okay to censor CRT if CRT is harmful?
If you object to a pro-ISIS podcast, you have no right to complain when the government burns all bibles.
One point to add to your closing is that this is also another social signal to hold your tongue. I have stopped believing lockstep with my fellow NYT-NPR liberals for the past few years, but with few exceptions, any time something comes up around which I am not a 100% Orthodox Mainstream Good Guy Liberal, I bite my tongue. Honestly, I just don't want to lose my relationships.
I am sure it is the same way among non-Trump conservatives in their circles. I really don't think mainstream liberals understand that there are people around them with the best of intentions but who are terrified of being excommunicated from their very real life tribe.
I'm sure this varies by geography and by milieu but you can't get anti-Trump conservatives to shut up for five seconds around here about how ~bEtRaYeD~ they are and how They Didn't Leave The Party, The Party Left Them. If there's some kind of chilling effect on them, I'd hate to see them in full bloom.
It definitely varies by milieu. It's fairly normal for people to find their watering holes for venting frustration but keep pretty quiet about it otherwise.
I don't think there's much chilling effect on Never Trumpers. Pro-Trumpers don't have the clout to shut them down and the left is happy to let them have their say as long as they're complaining about Trump.
Career pundits are one thing, though even they are probably split into secret anti-Trumpers whose career depends on being pro- (or anti-^n for even values of n) Trump, and public anti-Trumpers who've chosen a different career route.
Ordinary folks, though? Plenty just do their best to act politely inscrutable in pro-Trump milieus. Some have unthink routines mentally censoring how far they'll take their frustration with Trump even in their own minds lest they become unable to contain it around those they care about.
The man cut taxes on corporations and wealthy folk in a country with 1/5 children in poverty and 100 million citizens who can't afford a medical emergency. In what world is this a "betrayal" of Cheney, McConnell, Bush...? That's their entire platform!
I agree with you. It's astonishing, looking back on it, just how pro-norm Trump actually was. On Republican tax orthodoxy, on the primacy of the administrative state, on most things.
Exactly, especially about the administrative state thing. The question that seems to remain is was this simply the extent of Trump's aspirations? Or is there something that constrained him that has the potential to restrain literally anybody? I suppose time may tell.
As someone going through the same thing: doesn't it make you sad though? If you can't talk with your friends, haven't you already lost those relationships?
I'm not trying to convince you, this is how I feel.
At the bottom of all my frustration with this is a lot of sadness about lost relationships.
100%. Makes me really sad.
Yeah, I pick my battles carefully.
Same here, though in my case the pain is mostly over friends in the MAGAverse.
For example, I have bad lungs and some general health problems, so I've been COVID-precautious, and honestly pretty steamed at anyone advocating "focused protection" without logistic specifics. I don't go out of my way to tell people who boarded the Great Barrington train that I'm steamed, but anything but the most shallow inquiry into how my life's been going since 2020 and why is likely to bring it up. I was part of a group publicly shamed, admittedly only in an extremely minor way, but in front of folks who'd become regulars, for being hypochondriacs and traitors to liberty.
There's a backstory here, with medical misdiagnosis, what's called "medical sexism" (a term I dislike but which refers to real disparities), and mental-health specialists having to convince *me* I wasn't a hypochondriac (the reverse of what they'd do if I really were). My MAGA friends with stuff like rheumatoid arthritis still kinda get me, even if their approach to COVID is different. But others?... Even if they still would, at this point I'm a bit afraid to ask.
A note of good news - let me say this. Two years ago even my wife would ask me half-or-mostly-seriously if I was secretly a Republican for taking issue with woke discourse. She was happy to go with the blue tribe flow and didn't understand why I was being disagreeable. As the nascent antiwoke paleoliberal media world has taken shape since then, however modest it may be, now she has a framework to slot me into, and has even come over to my point of view in many cases. Even she can't listen to NPR anymore since they turned the black nationalism dial up to 12.
I'm really surprised how similar people sound-- who consume the same platforms. I now listen and don't say, "o yes, Rachel was right"--just think to myself that my friend has not read enough or watched enough to see where this is all going. So, it is not lost relationships--each person needs to find their own way. Sort of like having a friend who goes on about some other thing I'm not interested in like the NBA.
I'm not going to argue you out of your feelings.
To me: If share what I really think, I believe that my friends would ostracize me, so I can't really trust them. That's not a friendship. And I don't want to believe that I'm superior to them in order to not engage and be ok with how badly they would act if I could be open.
Good point. It does change relationships.
If somebody doesn't like you despite all your warts--and everybody has warts--how are they a friend? Isn't a friend by definition somebody you can be honest with?
I'm sorry, but this just sounds like a mask over isolation and loneliness to me.
True friends are those you can be authentically yourself with without apology.
Also, I finally revealed my anti-woke stance to a true friend who is very liberal. She was shocked. She has been battling cancer and not paying attention to the news (stage 4 breast but chemo worked and she is doing VERY well right now). I sent her links to catch her up and she is now anti-woke as well. She is a pretty free thinker but I will admit - it was hard, and I was scared to do it.
To me - this division is the whole point of being anti-woke. If the "cure" for past injustices is making people fear each other, how is this actually going to heal anything and allow us to move toward solutions? I want actual solutions. I want to see black culture thriving and people uplifted and free to live their lives. I want the "privileges" I enjoy to be applied universally. How do we get there?
It is partly cultural. I live in a large Canadian city now and 20 years ago when I moved here I was puzzled about how people would seem to be upset if you disagreed with them. I grew up in small town Atlantic Canada and there taking the piss out of each other was a national sport. We just argued about everything all the time. People rarely got upset - and if they did - we'd razz them about being a baby even more.
Very much so. One of the reasons I quit social media was that it was so depressing to see friends who were once willing to think for themselves and question things fall in line with dogmatic woke memethink. I have lost touch with lots of them because I figure if they ever learned what I thought, they would cancel and unfriend me, so I've quietly, pre-emptively canceled and unfriended them. That might be unfair, since you never know for sure, but I've watched them drum out others so it seems likely enough. I've decided if they're not a close IRL friend, it doesn't really matter anyway, so I've just tried to cultivate those rather than keeping in touch with everyone ever on Facebook. But even with the IRL friends I don't know what I can say. They are probably somewhat safer in that they are at least the kind of people who don't bring up politics all the time, which is as much as I can hope for, but I sure wish there was some way to find out if they are actually open-minded enough to tolerate friends who may disagree about some things. Not that I want to talk politics all the time either but I wouldn't have to worry about a stray offhand remark revealing too much. It's a stressful way to live.
Idk what would be unfair about withdrawing from friends who drum out others. I know I don’t want that kind of friendship. Though it is widely available; all you have to do to keep it is grab your pitchfork with the rest of them.
I decided a while back to post conservative views I found interesting as well as liberal ones on my FB, and the only pushback I've gotten against doing so has been from friends who used to work in the mainstream media. (Plenty of people have argued with the conservative views, but only ex-media members have tried to convince me that it's wrong to even post them.)
And I've gotten a lot of compliments on my FB page from people who don't mention just what they like about it. It could very well be the cat pictures... anyway, it's given me a much higher opinion of my friends to see that they really can cope and are much more open-minded than their own political posts might have led anyone to believe.
And here's the fucked thing -- you can't know for sure how many, if any, secretly agree. Hell, it could be all of you are lying because each doesn't know if they can safely be honest with the other.
Recently, a good friend and I realized that we're both completely fed up with social justice politics. We cautiously admitted some forbidden media consumption to each other, and then it all came out. It's such a relief.
this is so 1984
Echoes of East Germany.
or any totalitarian state in all of history. I read someone was aghast that mail was being opened as if that hasn't gone on all along.
Do you have a link?
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=2770381&page=1
Thanks!
I could never be friends with somebody that small minded.
My mind is so big it can’t stand to come in contact with small minds.
I can come into contact with them, I'll get a drink with them, but they would fall into the category of acquaintances rather than friends. I can't be friends with somebody when deep down I am thinking "You're an idiot" when I talk to them.
Lol just so
Right. I was surprised at how willing advocates of "focused protection" were to judge those who thought they might actually need it idiots. In retrospect, I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was. But I cannot expect them to remain friends with people they judge are idiots, even if I know their judgment is wrong.
I am not sure what this has to do with Covid policy since it's just a statement of personal philosophy. What's the definition of a "friend' if not somebody that you enjoy being around? I'll get a beer with all sorts of people but the term "friend' is reserved for people that I both respect and feel affection for. And I just can't respect anybody that applies a political litmus test to their acquaintances.
And this is very much related in my mind to what friends are for: aren't friends there to talk to, late at night, with a drink and a cigarette, possibly out on the back porch? In that kind of milieu you discuss philosophy, politics, current affairs, how your day went. Why would anybody in that setting care to censor themselves? Friends are for interesting conversation and blowing off steam, not bottling yourself up and adding more pressure to your life.
You're right about what friendship is — although I suspect occasional "bottling yourself up and adding more pressure to your life" is inevitable even with friends. But I'm puzzled at your puzzlement that friendships might break up over the judgment I described. This particular judgment happened to involve COVID policy.
As it happens, I don't think those I know who judge those like me a "COVIDiot" for taking precautions and feeling solidarity with others who do are themselves idiots. I know these people. They're mostly smart, mostly moral, some heroically so. From my perspective, I'm not the one applying the litmus test. They are. ("Taking COVID 'too seriously' signals idiocy unworthy of friendship.") But perhaps from their perspective, I am. ("It's wrong to think those taking COVID 'too seriously' are just idiots and therefore unworthy of friendship.")
We could generalize this to conflicting litmus tests of "X signals idiocy unworthy of friendship" versus "It's wrong to think X-ers are just idiots unworthy of friendship". Both are, I suppose, litmus tests.
There's plenty of X we might find so noxious that maintaining friendship with an X-er could be tough, but not necessarily because we judge the X-er an idiot. Recovering substance-abusers might really miss their substance-using friends and not think they're idiots at all, but still need to stay away, for example.
People in my life essentially fall into two camps. People I actually have real conversations with and those I've mentally blocked into the kid's table. The kid's table folks I'm polite but bland towards (hell they probably think I'm a bit dull too but this is intentional) this includes people here by default such as work acquaintances and the like. However it also has people I've tested out with minor bits of controversy that I adjust this based on current events and what I see see as their observed political leaning as I'm just as willing to dump a conservative to the kid's table if they're not able to sustain different thoughts on an intellectual basis.
My life has been a lot more enjoyable once I recognized this difference. I've had better conversations with folks and spend less time worrying about offending small minds.
Yes, and I would add that one useful criteria is if you can argue with them and at the end of the night nobody has any hurt feelings.
Oh absolutely, I should have stated that explicitly.
I'm going to be honest as a Trump fan I'm fine with any conservative as long as they're not rabidly anti-Trump. In my experience the rabidly anti-Trumpers are pretty much RINOs and folks who want the left including those who will always hate them regardless to like them and want to spend their careers as "good losers" instead of accomplishing anything as that might make people not like them.
There's plenty of reasons to not care for Trump but as an example when I hear Libertarians (I used to be a registered one) go on about tariffs and how wrong he was for it I can't help but be ashamed for them. Like hey dummy I would like a world without tariffs as well but tariffs were already being levied against us, fight back and let's remove them from everyone. To put it another way I generally agree with non-violence but a man who won't defend himself disgusts me. At best these people invoke pity.
I just don't get this. Trump is the embodiment of the "good loser"... he did every single thing McConnell told him to do until after he lost the election! He ran on populism and "the hedge fund guys are going to start paying more taxes" and then turned around and passed that Jeb Bush-ass 2017 bill! What in the world has he done at the policy level that has got you convinced he somehow rebelled against them?
Trump shifted the paradigm for governing to the right. The current tariffs you see that are being continued by Biden would have been unimaginable before Trump. The policy of sending people back to Mexico that you see Biden continuing would have been impossible before Trump.
The latter thing has been popular for many years; recall Romney’s infamous “self-deportation” gaffe, deemed too moderate by many republican voters. But even if trump shifted the window on those issues a tiny bit, the entirety of his economic and foreign policy cant possibly be framed as a rebellion against McConnell-Pelosiism.
And the tariffs?
What is crucial to understand about the modern era is that the class conflict is being fought on cultural, rather than economic, issues. Trump is important historically not necessarily because he is the instigator of that conflict but rather because he is the inflection point. For one obvious point, the working class is migrating to the GOP while the professional class moves to the Dems. Trump is the inflection point for that shift, among others.
Yup==tariffs are a real shift. So was Obamacare on HC. Doesn't mean Obama was a revolutionary.
I think the bit about the class war being fought on cultural rather than economic issues is something that you sort of want to be true. It's been both. Culture is just more fun to write about 😎
Trump is historically important because of the way the libs have responded to his aesthetics, but not as a policymaker. The 2017 tax bill simply matters more than the fact that he tweets mean stuff or whatever.
You're definitely right that people with little economic opportunity/genetic endowment for labor are migrating rightwards. But wokeness has played a big role in driving that, and it was a process underway several years before trump.
Ha! - my wife keeps saying 'you can't say that' to which I reply I can and I will. I've never had a functioning filter and I very rarely hold back my views on anything. The only time I do is when I am dealing with someone who I don't think is intellectually capable of really engaging in a discussion - which is exceedingly rare. Honestly - if someone can't deal with my views then that is their problem - not mine.
You are afraid of your "friends"? Why are they your friends, then?
Freddie, I agree with you that the Rogan controversy can easily lead to a chilling effect. The one thing I note, however, is what you say about the left's new views on free speech, i.e, that censorship only applies to state action.
I'm a little older than you, but I remember in the mid-1980s until probably the early 2000s, that such an argument was made by not a few people on the right. Some even argued that the First Amendment only prohibits the FEDERAL government from abridging press and speech rights and from establishing a state religion.
While I disagree with that thinking (although in a free market society, I accept the reality that private businesses can make their own market decisions,) I think it's very much a matter of turnabout being fair play. Now that the right has more than a little skin in the free speech game, suddenly they have an expansive view of free speech and press. It's like the prisoner condemned to die suddenly "finding God."
Right-winger here: you're absolutely correct.
I think he was making a more narrow point about what the word "censorship" means. Many on the left believe that it literally cannot apply to a non-government actor. The fact that a corporation is well within its rights to censor has no bearing on the fact that "censorship" is the appropriate term. When I point out that network "censors" remove profanity from live broadcasts and that usage is completely uncontroversial, they get flummoxed.
They're confused, maybe willfully. State action IS required for a claim that your 1st Amendment rights were violated, but not all censorship is a violation of 1st amendment rights, and IT CAN STILL BE BAD.
Indeed, they've come to see "free speech" as coterminous with "1st amendment." Then they think they are being so clever when they smugly point out there is no 1st amendment issue. Yeah . . never said there was . . .
I got that answer from almost everybody who commented when I posted about Joe Rogan. Stuff we know that isn't so.
"Many liberals are pretty much entirely opposed to free speech as a concept and have developed a whole weird set of made up facts about it.". By "liberals" did you mean 'woke'?
People like Jonathan Chait, Stephen Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, as far as I can know, call themselves 'liberal' but they will object to this particular accusation.
agree. I call myself liberal, and I'm not against free speech, except in some very specific circumstances.
Honestly don't see how "free speech" as a concept survives this, even with a "conservative" takeover. Censorship is useful and powerful, free speech is a difficult, sometimes contradictory, and often unpopular commitment that can be dashed in a moment of weakness.
Yeah, people who think conservatives really care about Free Speech will be very unpleasantly surprised with the history of free speech cases. Too, if the GOP does take power in the next two elections, which seems a safe bet, they are not going to embrace a broader definition of free speech. Legislation like Ag Gag laws will roll out real fast, and then it will be Democrats who talk about the sanctity of free speech.
Another sacred cow will be anti-BDS laws.
Has it ever crossed your mind, that Conservatives try to conserve things ... like human rights. Liberalism isn't Democrat anymore than its Republican. Communists are certainly not Liberals, though the donned that cap when it suited them.
If you consider the far wings of each side, the far wing of the Democrats is the Communists, certainly not for human rights, free speech, etc. The far wing of the Republicans is the Libertarians, all for human rights, free speech, leave me alone.
Despite whatever influence you may be under, only one Republican senator voted against the Equal Rights Amendment, it was Democrats who blocked it. It was the Republican President Richard Nixon who created the EPA.
That's certainly the old consensus, but I see a lot of online right wingers who reject the Enlightenment precisely because they see how useful it has been for the left. Not trying to pick a fight, only trying to point out that the right wing is much wider now than neocons/libertarians/free market fans of old. One joke I've heard: "We don't want to go back to the 1950s, we want to go back to the 950s"
This is a very skewed perspective of the edges of the GOP and DNC.
Also, most Libertarians seem to be okay with totalitarianism, as long as it's done by a corporation and not a government. And almost all Democrats are as anti-communist as any Republican.
The far wing of the GOP has always been the religious social conservatives, at least since the Reagan era. Absolutely hostile to free speech and human rights. The libertarians I know are their own club, separate from the GOP, and prefer it that way.
Consider alternative news. Then VP candidate Al Gore's wife Tipper had the charity of censoring music. Meanwhile Reagan served as President of the Screen Actors Guild.
Yeah Regan was a real friend of labor /s
Yes Tipper Gore wanted to censor music. But the “war on rap music” was waged primarily by conservatives. Freddie has written about this here before.
I’m not saying that Democrats have never been hostile to free speech. Clearly that’s not true. I’m saying historically social conservatives have been immeasurably worse.
"far wing of the Democrats is the Communists"
uhh
if only
Concepts are hearty; they outlast dynasties. ‘Free speech’ will be just fine and will last as long as consciousness + speech lasts.
The punchline (per Carlin) is that the *people* are fucked: https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c
" ‘Free speech’ will be just fine and will last as long as consciousness + speech lasts."
I think you're very wrong. Free speech is a rare and very valuable thing. Very few, vanishingly small numbers of people have ever lived in an environment such as ours where the people enjoy just about unlimited free speech. If this great treasure is ever lost, it most certainly won't be replaced.
Name another country where we can speak with such freedom. Even the UK and Canada would outlaw some of the speech on Freddie's blog.
To conflate "wokeness" with health misinformation and to then base a whole opinion piece on that error is disingenuous at best. How on earth is people taking a stand against misinformation "wokeness"?
I honestly didn't even know who Joe Rogan was before this controversy. I did know that Spotify is a lousy, homogenizing music streaming platform that rips off artists.
One day after pulling his catalog from Spotify, Neil Young announced that he was cutting a deal with Amazon where people could use his affiliate link to get four free months of streaming and “enjoy [his] entire catalog in the highest quality available.”
Amazon, a place that famously has never drawn any liberal activist ire, repressed any worker speech or organizing, and whose monopolistic publishing arm produces no products that contain any misinformation whatsoever. Whatever the principles of any individual Spotify customer, it’s pretty clear principle was not at the heart of the controversy.
If you protest one thing, you must protest everything, otherwise you are a hypocrite.
Not true. But you (referring to Neil Young) should at least protest the even larger mega-corporation doing the *exact same thing* you started a national drama over in the smaller mega-corporation, no? You could maybe stick to *one* form of principled protest. You should at least wait more than one day before revealing that your flounce was motivated if not in whole at least in large part by everyday financial opportunism.
I think if you make your principled stance as broad as “against corporations that platform medical misinformation” you’re going to run into this problem. You’re going to end up protesting everything or protesting selectively, because speech is still actually free and people can still self-publish faith-healing manuals for public consumption and you can’t protest all of them. And when you inevitably can’t protest all of them, and still have to make a living, and have to choose the monster who pays you same as you did before, yes, that’s going to look like hypocrisy, because the underlying principle was revealed to be completely untenable within 24 hours.
Some people boycott Amazon and shop at Walmart. Some people boycott Walmart and shop at Amazon. You might argue that, to be consistent, you should either do both or neither, but individuals have their own reasons that make sense to them.
Also, I was unaware that Amazon was also hosting the Joe Rogan podcast.
The original comment I was responding to does not refer to "taking a stand against the Joe Rogan podcast." It refers to "taking a stand against misinformation."
You and David, and I think others in this debate, are switching back and forth between arguing that people like Young are protesting misinformation generally, and that they're protesting Joe Rogan specifically, as it suits you. It means that when I point out Young's immediate pivot to Amazon is hypocritical if he stands against corporations hosting misinformation generally, you can fall back on saying it was only about this one very specific instance of misinformation and not any others. And if I still find it hypocritical that Young should take that specific stand, prompt a censoring backlash on the platform he abandoned, and then start advertising for an equally-nefarious platform, you both fall back on arguing that no one can ever be expected to show any kind of ideological or moral consistency so why even get mad about it?
To reiterate the point of the essay the original comment was responding to: It's not about Rogan, it's about everybody who doesn't have Rogan's leverage. It's about the fact that in a world where increasingly our only consumption choices are between fewer, bigger, more powerful corporations, events like this just make them more and more like each other. Our choices between them become less and less meaningful the fewer viewpoints any of them are willing to host. Young did not make our choices between them any more meaningful by his actions; with his pivot to Amazon, I think he just emphasized their sameness.
All true, but Young did put the spotlight on Spotify and alleged misinformation.
My only point--in my initial posts--was to infer that Young, who has retained his artistic rights, is free to do with them what he wants. And his reasoning--even if it be flawed--does not make him part of a woke mob, as De Boer alluded to in the initial post.
Arguments as to corporate entities having too much influence on what we do see and here are actually more important than the issues addressed in the initial post. My own decision is to not frequent or pay for any streaming platform that rips off recording artists. The only "meaningful"choice we can make these days with recorded music is to buy it directly from the artist or his/her/their Bandcamp page.
Why? So nothing can ever piss a person off without that person having to take opinions on every issue under the sun? All cognitive beings must pick and choose.
To which specific principle are you referring? We all have opinions and principles. Some which cause dissonance. Neil Young, as a polio survivor, has a specific opinion concerning vaccine misinformation. That he has other opinions and behaviors with opprobrious corporate entities is irrelevant.
For the record: I frequent Amazon as little as possible, but am reduced to now and again because they now are a monopoly. I do not listen to any streaming service and buy CD's weekly. However, all these stances--including how artists are ripped off by Spotify--is merely a distraction from the controversy which, at its core, is about one artist not wanting to share a platform with another celebrity.
These things have bigger effects because of the scale on which they are happening. Neil Young is perfectly entitled to take his music off of one corporation's streaming platform because another very famous guy said stuff he disagrees with. But you cannot retreat from the point by pretending that he was *only* trying to distance his own work from that one famous guy, and everything else is incidental. Young was trying to make Spotify change who it hosts and how it evaluates content in the future based on isolated incidents of speech.
Of course, forcing change through economic disruption is the point of most protests. You just have one guy with a gajillion dollars putting on the pressure instead of a grassroots strike or boycott. Fine. But I believe it is extremely relevant to the larger conversation that a guy ready to stake hundreds of millions of dollars on shutting up one other guy then pivots immediately to shilling for a company that is identically corrupt, but just doesn't have that one other guy on it.
I agree that it was probably at least somewhat personal for Young. That's the problem. His personal issue is going to have a chilling effect on everybody who wants to be hosted by a corporation but doesn't have the money or influence to cut a short-notice affiliate deal with a more powerful corporation, and so has to toe whatever line the corporation draws. He got to make money off this; Amazon got to make money off this; Spotify is going to have to make some capitulating gesture in order to continue making money; and everybody whose back catalog is now going to be capitulatingly scoured will lose money. To say nothing of those who will, after this, be considered an unacceptable risk by any streaming platform. Young's personal stand against one specific instance of medical misinformation peddled by one guy is, in actual effect, going to shut a lot more people up, and neither he nor Spotify nor Amazon cares about them.
Agree with almost everything you write. However, there is an implication that no one should then ever speak up about something that he or she cares about because the existing and radically unfair streaming business will just end up shutting up other victims. What is the point of having a majority say in artistic rights and distribution rights and then not using veto power ever?
I take your point. I do agree with your above point that the pivot to streaming generally is awful - I avoid streaming services for the same reason. I also know full well that my tiny, individual choice not to use Amazon or Spotify is something I'm doing just for myself, in terms of its actual impact, and that if anything's going to break up the increasingly-homogenous online publication monopolies, it's going to happen as a result of much bigger forces.
But I think where the "woke mob" comes in is in terms of which tribal position the big corps are willing to put smaller voices on the chopping block for. I know there's genuine health misinformation among Joe Rogan's output; but Young's opposition to it has resulted in a censorship that a much larger political tribe applauds and sees no problem with. If we were living in a world where Young abandoned Spotify because he was a right-wing guy who was protesting Joe Rogan platforming Fauci, or something, I think Spotify would have been more than willing to go to bat for Rogan's free speech. Censorship is a beloved tool of whatever crowd's in power -- it's got to be stopped regardless of who's putting on the pressure to do it.
In my ideal world, Neil Young would still get to leave Spotify to make his statement and go work with whoever he wants. But Spotify would not then cave to liberal pressure to start culling problematic people who don't have the clout to leave voluntarily.
(Appreciate you continuing this conversation, by the way! I've found it very interesting.)
Thank you Sarah. This is my first time sucked into a debate on this Substack. I surprised myself in that I was enjoying other people taking a stand elsewhere (among musicians) and pretty much ended up in a hornets nest here once I weighed in on the side of intellectual property rights and distribution rights. All your points are taken.
A quick question, without trying search engines. I was not subscribing to this Substack (did it exist yet?) when the Blake Bailey controversy erupted in the publishing world resulting in the authorized Philip Roth biography being "canceled." I am way more apt to defend free speech when the attack comes from the liberal or progressive wing. In that case, I thought Norton behaved awfully and was countered by my more progressive friends on line for saying so. Was that situation addressed by Freddie?
I guess my points are those on which we already agree: on-line services lead to a cult of personality and an ability of each user to filter sources into an echo chamber; the "choices" are then homogenized and not really choices at all. That these sources are not held accountable, as say a straight news source or book publisher is, is a huge flaw in the system. How many more million listeners does Rogan have than people who were either reading or had on their list a 700 plus page biography by one of the more pertinent male authorial voices of the last 80 years? Point being, I get a lot more upset when woke politics cancels a book and--as a result--tarnishes the reputation of a dead man than I do when an entertainment figure runs into to trouble for giving a one-sided account of a health remedy during a global pandemic. Freedom of speech always undergoes changes during national emergencies (in whatever nation) and COVID certainly is one. However, freedom of speech or denying distribution to someone over morality charges is more problematic, at least in my book.
It may indeed have been the heart of the controversy, and Young comes out smelling like roses after a bidding war. Your point about Amazon is right on.
A lot of what is now "information" about Covid was "misinformation" until very recently. The synthesis of state and corporate power to censor open debate under the guise of protecting us from "misinformation" would be dubious on its face; the fact that the people who appoint themselves the arbiters of "misinformation" are themselves - and this isn't even close - by FAR the biggest purveyors of misinformation renders it a complete farce.
Not really. Anti-vax information has always been out there. And with very few exceptions over the years, it has always been misinformation. Do you think Neil Young would have reacted as he did if Rogan had a vaccine expert to counter the arguments presented?
"Not really" to which part, specifically? I made three separate claims, all of which are correct:
1) The emerging consensus on Covid was until recently considered dangerous misinformaiton. By emerging consensus, I mean the relative efficacy of the vaccines, the near-total inefficacy of lockdowns, the importance of natural immunity and its situational superiority to vaccine-conferred protection, and the efficacy of boosters versus emerging strains. Numerous people were banned from social media last year and even in 2020 for pointing out what is now considered sane and obvious. Are you saying "not really" to this?
2) The synthesis of state and corporate power to protect us from "misinformation" is dubious: this is because nobody has the monopoly on wisdom, and it's all too easy to see this power being used nefariously (as indeed it is, today, right now.)
3) The people wielding this power are themselves far more guilty of misinformation than anyone else: this is undoubtedly true, and item 1 spells out why nicely. Once again, for those with short memories: pointing out the obvious truth, that vaccines neither confer immunity, nor prevent the vaccinated from spreading the disease, *was grounds for complete social media removal* for almost the entire length of the pandemic, even though both of these things are undeniably and completely true.* The censors had this completely wrong, and we lost a lot of valuable time in pandemic management due to their monopoly of the discourse.
*It is also true, of course, that vaccines confer positive health outcomes - a reduced risk of hospitalization and death - and that to not point this out is to be dishonest by omission.
Which of these three is, in your view, not really true?
On your point: I think Neil Young and the other censors want to take out all opposition by any means necessary, and I don't think he's arguing in good faith. The format of Rogan's show is not a panel but an in-depth, lengthy interview, and he's under no obligation to change it for the benefit of you, Neil, or anyone else. Rogan has, on the other hand, had numerous people on the show reflecting the (incorrect) orthodoxy of Covid management from 2020 to February 2022, all of whom have been given as fair a hearing as anyone else.
I don’t think “emerging consensus” means what you think it means.
Can you be more specific?
I disagree with all three of your points and the vehemently dogmatic tone with which they were stated. Hence the dismissive "not really." I will answer point by point in two days when I can type on something other than my phone.
Pardon the late response. I was in Boston and can now type. I meant the dismissive "not really" because I absolutely do not agree with your major points. Since you ask for elaboration:
My initial posts merely pointed that Neil Young had childhood polio and has every right to be upset about what he perceives as disinformation. Since he is astute enough to retain his artistic rights and his distribution rights, he certainly does have a right to decide who he shares a stage or platform with, even if his reasoning be dead wrong and nothing more valid than "Stay off my lawn." An artist has a right to decide with whom he or she does business.
As to your point that yesterday's misinformation is today's valid information: The point is irrelevant in that we are not discussing valid and invalid information involving COVID and vaccines. Everyone and his uncle has an opinion here and if I want to find or discuss or make up my mind about health care related to COVID I will find it and rely on a panel of scientists (note: I won't listen to a podcast with one guest). Hence I couldn't care what exactly Rogen was promulgating because we have all read our Orwell and know well that Bad can become Good etc. If anything, we should be discussing why one man who isn't even an expert gets to propound a view he is most likely sympathetic with for XXX million listeners solely because he is entertaining and corporate streaming models limit choice. Here we have the ability to sway opinion and truth because one person reaches way more people than he should, especially in a topic that requires expert opinion and rebuttals from other experts. So I am saying "not really" because the information stated on the show is irrelevant. We are not arguing about COVID but whether an artist has a right to decide who he wants to share a stage with based on distribution rights that his own lawyers negotiated.
As for your second point. Pasted here: 2) The synthesis of state and corporate power to protect us from "misinformation" is dubious: this is because nobody has the monopoly on wisdom, and it's all too easy to see this power being used nefariously (as indeed it is, today, right now.)
This is a complete distraction that has nothing to do with the argument presented by de Boer and as commented by me. I think you and I would agree totally that condensing of media outlets, even of aggregators, on the web to a handful of billion dollar corporations who then control the content is not helpful for the average person or culture in general. We can read about the evils of FB and Google all day and be in total agreement. However, here we are discussing a streaming platform that is, in itself, exploitative, in that it pays a recording artist 0.0004 cents (perhaps one zero too many) per stream. This paltry system has been set up to get users hooked on a specific service. Now, I cannot go into the minutiae of the Spotify business plan or their intentions over the next earning quarter, but it is safe to say that they stay healthy underpaying artists and overpaying some high powered entertainers like Rogan. With this model, I see (as I stated in point 1) that Spotify and Rogan have an outsized influence on what the average person learns about any one subject. I fail to see how the State or State Power meshes with Spotify's corporate vision here unless the state is too incompetent or malicious to ever break up these conglomerates. Hence my "not really." We are probably in complete agreement that the State needs to democratize and even the playing field of where and how information is disseminated.
Finally your 3rd point: 3) The people wielding this power are themselves far more guilty of misinformation than anyone else: this is undoubtedly true, and item 1 spells out why nicely.
While people wielding the power are often more capable of misinformation, you are neglecting that Spotify and Rogen are the ones wielding the power. Their influence is outsized and Neil Young, if anything plays the part of David, not Goliath. Also, with this 3rd point, you assume nefarious intent when various state governments of the world have done their best to give accurate information concerning COVID. In this sense, Rogan is an unqualified idiot with an outsized audience on a health subject considering his own paltry credentials.
One further point. Everyone in this squabble is a corporation. Spotify is. Young is (and retains majority control in his distribution rights and artistic rights) and Joni Mitchell is. So bringing up the power of corporations to stifle speech is a bit rich. We are merely arguing distribution channels. No one is being silenced.
All I ever wanted to point out in my initial posts was that this is a personal battle for Young (and Mitchell) due to polio and that an artist has a right to take an issue personally. I don't think it is young's intention to take out the opposition or all opposing thought. He just lives with polio and has an opinion about vaccines.
I agree completely that Young has all the right - legal, artistic, moral, whatever - to take his catalog wherever he wants. But I disagree with your overall contention that he is acting - or trying to act - without power. I also agree that Spotify is, to put it mildly, hardly a platform that's friendly to the wallet of artists. I don't regard these things as important in this discussion, not particularly controversial.
He didn't merely leave Spotify. He tried to get Rogan off Spotify first. That he failed doesn't mean he didn't try. And we absolutely *are* discussing whether or not the information Young objects to is valid or invalid because that is the absolute bedrock of his argument: "I, Neil Young, accuse Rogan of misinformation. I demand that Rogan is removed from the platform." You're doing three things here that are incorrect: conflating Young's legal/artistic/moral rights with his justification; stating that his justification didn't call for censorship of Rogan; and stating that his justification has no truth-value assigned to it. The reality is this: Young wants Rogan censored due to what he believes is misinformation, and his (partial) failure to achieve this censorship doesn't negate its attempt.
(I say partial failure because undoubtedly Spotify - judging by the words of their CEO - has clearly taken the knee, and indeed 80+ episodes of Rogan have now gone dark on the platform.)
To address another one of your points: "panel of scientists" and "expert" do a lot of heavy lifting here. You can't on the one hand say that the truth-value of any piece of (mis)information is irrelevant to the argument and then appeal to the authority of those who decide these things on the other. You actually acknowledge this yourself when you state that Spotify has (in your view) an outsized bully pulpit - one they've won through the size of their bank balance and not their expertise. If the truth-value of a given statement is irrelevant then this distinction wouldn't matter, would it?
I didn't assume any nefarious attempt on the part of government at all. You assigned that position to me. I stated - correctly - that a great deal of the "fog of war" knowledge about COVID was completely wrong. That makes no judgement one way or the other about the people who had that knowledge. What I said was that as this was definitionally misinformation, any attempt to censor Rogan should be redoubled and pointed towards the government if the aim is to reduce misinformation. If Rogan's an unqualified idiot relying on the hearsay of fools, the same applies to global governments ten times over.
For what it's worth, I have a very low opinion of Neil Young as a person, due to him calling an acquaintance of mine a 'mongol' when he believed he was out of earshot. Judging him on one minor incident over a mixed-up breakfast order around fifteen years ago might be unfair, but it's also the only Dunlop-number interaction I've ever had with the man. So, I admit some bias here.
I'm going to make one last pass here because of the point that Spotify removed 80+ podcasts. You see that as censorship. I see it--without even evaluating the content--as Spotify deciding that they want some editorial control because what is stated on the show could have economic ramifications. Now we can bandy about all day long whether this is a good thing or some opprobrious overreach, but the fact remains that most media outlets do maintain editorial control and have some sort of accountability (see Palin v. NYTimes). The fact that Spotify somehow does not count as media under the law (which was addressed elsewhere in one of the better posts on this whole thread) is really a technicality at this point. Clearly a platform where an entertainer reaches XX million viewers should be held accountable to liable, slander and other standards; and if they aren't, there is a problem. If those standards are merely removing 80 plus shows from an archive, I am not going to lose sleep over it.
If Joe Rogan does not want to accept those standards, he can negotiate a contract with complete artistic freedom. Maybe he has that power. If he doesn't, he is just like most other artists and writers who have to answer for their content. I know very few writers who can just state whatever the hell they want and get away with it. Would the world be a better place if they could? Doubtful.
I'll let the other arguments go because talking about COVID at this juncture in our COVID world is tiresome and just broaches who gets to decide what is right. Since it is pretty easy to find information or misinformation all over the internet and from government sources around the world, I am only basing my argument on the outsized influence that a celebrity on a specific platform has. I have no desire to hash out and argue over public policy as it pertains to sharing information about COVID; this thread has already been enough of a hornets nest.
Finally, I just want to point out that I am no big fan of Neil Young either. "Keep on Rockin' in the Free World" really rubbed me wrong and I've never been a huge fan of his music. As an acoustic guitarist, a do have familiarity with a handful of his songs, but try to separate an artist from the music. In this whole battle, as I've made clear, I've continually emphasized that Spotify exploits artists, and for that fact alone I relish any uncomfortable situation that the corporation finds itself in. In my book, there is no excuse for any listener paying any money to Spotify when an artist gets 0.0004 cents per stream. Now that is somewhat of a diversion, but my dislike of Spotify will--in this case--help cement my opinion. That more people know this week how abusive Spotify is can only be seen as a positive aspect of the whole squabble.
The woke crowd hates Joe Rogan because he's an unapologetic white guy who mocks their principles. That's why people are protesting him instead of, say, Nicki Minaj who said the vaccine causes impotence. She's still on Spotify.
The weird thing is - and maybe *I* have the wrong impression, being only a casual and occasional Rogan listener - is that he doesn’t seem to spend that much time mocking woke principals at all. He’s not really a mocker. He does SAY a lot of things that aren’t woke, but from what I can tell actual MOCKING of wokeness is a minuscule portion of his content, if he even does it. Even when he has specifically anti work content like Abigail Shrier he doesn’t come off as mocking to me, he comes off as earnestly concerned. Or with the covid vaccine stuff (which I disagree with him on and which has really made his show unlistenable for me) he just has a bunch of opinions I disagree with and wants to talk about it all the time but I don’t remember him mocking people. Am I being overly charitable?
No, I think that is actually right on. Wokes had made great progress deplatforming Shrier when he had her on and gave her massive exposure. That is what really makes their heads explode.
No, I'm sure you're right. If you listen occasionally, you know more than I do. I've only listened to a couple of episodes. They probably just hate him because he's not woke and criticizes their positions, while remaining popular.
My point is that neither Neil Young nor Joni Mitchell count as a woke crowd. Their beef has everything to do with vaccines, probably related to their ages and that they survived major bouts with polio, and nothing to do with being "woke."
Eh you should head over to Rod Dreher’s blog today. He can rail against censorship and cancel culture in on breath and then pivot to trying to get a guy fired for liking to get his kink on in the next.
The amount of hypocrisy this debate generates is mind boggling.
Liberals spent so much time staring into the conservative abyss, the abyss looked back into them.
Correct if I am wrong isn't it the opposition to Rogan came mainly From Medical establishment on the ground that he is adovcsting/selling covid medicines unsupported by science? If that's the case, why should he get a pass during a pandemic that is still going ?
Call me when the medical establishment wants to cancel Oprah.
A lot of people in the medical community have spoken out against Oprah's nonsense. They just didn't have much juice.
Unsurprisingly, things are different when over 1000 people a day are dying from a deadly pandemic.
They didn't have much juice because they were "on the same side" as Oprah. Some in the medical community spoke out against her, and those stories were not picked up.
We can slice this any way we want. How many kids under five died due to lack of basic vaccination, in the era when Oprah had Jenny McCarthy on? How many very young children have died of COVID?
Or another angle: I once watched an episode of Dr. Oz where he supported a bunch of speakers about how cell phones cause breast cancer. He never contradicted them or provided alternative accurate information. You know how many women get breast cancer in their lifetimes? 1 out of 8. Being treated for breast cancer is way more common than being hospitalized for COVID. How many women threw out their fucking cell phones, told their friends, and then didn't take recommended courses to detect breast cancer earlier because of that show?
Just because we don't have numbers, or isn't a current moral panic, doesn't mean it doesn't count.
Plus, she covered so many more pseudo-science angles, and was influential (and still is) for so much longer.
I know that a lot of people (including me) have called Rogan the "Bro Oprah", but Oprah, at the top of her game, was just so much bigger than Rogan. If she mentioned your book on her show it would become an instant bestseller, and that's from back in the day when the NYT bestseller list really meant something. She had, and still has, a huge, internationally known brand.
Cancelling her, even a little bit, would have been impossible.
"Unsupported by science" is an interesting phrase. Ivermectin is certainly discouraged by health officials, but there are scientific studies that support its use, even after you filter out fraud and poor methodology: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted . It's quite possible it doesn't work, but one cannot say that the scientific consensus is unambiguously against ivermectin.
Well, there are homeopathic 'doctors' too who swear by Nox Vomica (sic).
The point is there is a mainstream science and it is fairly well-known and even though it may not be 100% accurate, it is more accurate and effective on average than the non-mainstream ones. And Ivermectin is not mainstream, yet.
Ah, but can you pick out which studies support the "mainstream" science in a rapidly evolving field vs the ones that don't? Also, is the "mainstream" necessarily right? Semmelweis famously promoted washing hands as a disinfectant. "Mainstream" medical scientists rejected his conclusions. Figuring out which science to "believe" is not trivial, which would mean being cavalier about which science to censor is a dangerous game.
As Scott's work pointed out, though, the higher-quality studies suggesting ivermectin does something tend to come from populations where the burden of parasitic worms is high. If COVID + worms tends to make you sicker or deader than COVID alone, treating the worms "treats" the COVID by addressing a comorbidity.
If we want to censor everyone who's spouted egregious misinformation during the pandemic, we're not going to have any institutions left.
Joe Rogan is not an institution, is he? He is not a scholar, not a doctor, not anything really except an ordinary giy who happens to be big at this time, that's all. What we really saying that an elected government with real institutions ( NiH, CDC etc. which employ real scholars and real doctors) behind it can't stop an average 'Joe' from speaking out even if he is spreading misinformation. Misinformation that can kill. Because that's the price of 'freeedom'.
Do you think people who listen to and agree with anti vaxx stuff are unaware of the other information? I don’t think it’s a question of ignorance. The information is out there and open to all.
They are often unaware of, for example, how the VAERS database works. Or that catching the disease itself may with a higher risk of the adverse effect that they're worried vaccines risk. In other words, they're rationally ignorant of stuff that non-specialists typically don't need to know. But rational ignorance requires trust: you trust that the people who should know the details do so you don't have to. And who do you trust?
Everything you’re saying makes sense. At the end of the day, you can’t force someone to put their trust anywhere. It’s up to them.
This also revolves around the central question about the role of gvernment. Its not about the people's ability to tell truth from untruth because they, in many cases, cannot. The question is whether government has the right to stop them even if it is doing for the right reason, public health in this case.
How about this as a compromise: Spotify requires Rogan to put a disclaimer at the beginning of each anti vax episode that says government health experts/list whatever agencies or groups have contested these claims. To hear arguments, go to [insert whatever]?
That works
This is my problem with platform discourse in general, it assumes people go into a podcast episode (for example) as totally blank slates ready to be convinced by whatever they hear, rather than having preconceived notions and looking for validation. The root cause is never addressed and it just becomes whack-a-mole, like how Alex Jones was successfully deplatformed but that whole strain of thinking just re-emerged as Qanon within a year.
Jones did things I don't think Rogan does, though. Jones used his platform to harass people who were only newsworthy by accident — in effect "cancelling" grieving families, for example. Rogan seems to have built his reputation on being way too chill for stunts like that.
With Alex Jones, even if it's just whack-a-mole, I think being fine with what Jones earns himself is consistent with being anti-cancel in general. But Rogan ≠ Jones.
Yeah I don't mean to draw an equivalence between the two, just saying the time and energy debating who should be given a platform is better spent elsewhere and that "the facts" aren't the engine that drives society. But you're right, I don't have a problem w/ Jones being kicked off the internet for harassing sandy hook families and the like.
Liberals think that people who listen to Rogan just uncritically lap up and follow whatever he says, because that's what they do with their media.
Due to a ridiculous scientific error, the CDC gave wildly incorrect advice for over a year on how to guard against COVID (Wired covered it well here: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/). An oft-repeated "fact" turned out to be not-so-factual after all, and the CDC resisted correction from scientists who attempted to alert them that cloth masks and standing six feet apart were not appropriate or sufficient safeguards, given how viruses actually spread.
The CDC guidance has almost certainly killed more people than Joe Rogan. It has wasted billions of dollars in worthless security theater. The correct information was all available to them, as it was to everyone, and correct advice was presented by many blogs and such.
Misinformation absolutely kills. The thing is, scholars and doctors and governments are frequently wrong too. Science has been roiled by the replication crisis. Allowing "regular Joes" to speak freely is one of the few guards we have against institutional misinformation. Will they get it wrong? Yes. They're going to get it wrong more often than they get it right, by a *lot*. It is still worthwhile to let them speak.
Yeah, I sort of agree with the broader point. But the downside is that whatever faith people have in institutions will be damaged further. And if CDC, with its intellectual might, is wrong one out of hundred times, Joe Rogan types would be wrong 99 out of hundred. That's the danger because without strong institutions a state is a basket-case.
Institutions lying and refusing to admit they're wrong will damage trust in institutions for more than Rogan ever would. When CNN said Joe took horse medicine, when Ivermectin is originally and predominantly a Nobel-prize-winning human medicine that Joe got from his doctor, they did tremendous damage to their own credibility. I have a tube of Ivermectin in my bathroom, a human medicine from my human dermatologist prescribed for non-Covid reasons from before the pandemic, and yet CNN doubled down on acting like Ivermectin is always horse paste. They could have just cited whatever credible study says Ivermectin has not been proven to work on Covid, but instead they added an obvious lie that can be debunked by a tube falling out of my medicine cabinet. If they would pointlessly lie about that, why should I believe them on anything? I don't know if Rogan's guests are right or not, but at least concrete evidence of their lies doesn't stare me in the face every time I glance at my bathroom counter. That is what destroys faith in institutions. CNN and everyone who jumped on the Ivermectin-is-horse-paste train should be deplatformed for the damage that did to establishment credibility.
I am not here to defend CNN or any other 'establishment' media, those people have their own burdens to carry. What I am afraid of is the loss of faith in critical institutions, HHS, CDC, NIH etc. which, despite their occasional missteps, remain remarkably capable and far more beneficial to society than any celebrity. Nations, states, societies last as long their best institutions do. CDC is a great institution, Joe Rogan is not. I weep for the breakage in general, not for the political appointees who, for the past two years, have lied through their teeth.
Anyways, that's it for me.
Not only was the CDC and WHO wrong about all that, but Dr. Michael Osterholm was right about it when he spoke on Joe Rogan's podcast in March 2020. I learned more good info from that one episode of Rogan's podcast than from the authorities all year long. You have to take the good with the bad and trust people to process information and make their own decisions. Telling the public to shut up and listen just makes them worse at these skills.
Opposition to Rogan certainly comes from Big Pharma, Beg Med, and the Fauci cabal, but not just from them. Rogan has had several doctors on (his episode with McCullough drew an audience of 40 million. McCullough, a cardiologist, is the most published in his specialty; Rogan's episode with Malone, who is listed on several of the earliest patents related to mRNA, drew an audience even larger than that.) These doctors and scientists had the opportunity to explain their views at length, with the data to back them up. There isn't another media outlet with Rogan's following, with his format - he's a curious guy, asks good questions, and lets his guests speak without badgering. He's also had CNN's favorite doctor, Sanjay Gupta on. Rogan made sure Gupta understood that his network had flat out LIED about ivermectin, by repeatedly calling it "horse de-wormer,". Humans have taken over 4 Billion doses of Ivermectin. It won its developers the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2015. Rogan received a prescription for it from an MD. But BlueAnon (h/t Aaron Mate), serving Big Pharma, shuts down any discussion of treatments for Covid, using inexpensive, approved medications.
Glenn Greenwald has been pointing to the US Government putting pressure on "private companies" to censor. Jen Psaki did it in regard to Spotify and Rogan, from the podium in the White House, just last week. Anyone paying attention should understand this to be an unconstitutional attack on freedom of speech.
I too expect the Dems to get hammered in the November elections. We can only imagine what the congressional hearings will be less than a year from now. The worm will turn...
What do you mean by "get a pass?" If you mean a pass on criticism, obviously he hasn't gotten one of those.
By that mean a free rein to promulgate any idea that MAY NOT be beneficial to public health during a pandemic and I emphasize, during a pandemic that has killed close to a million Americans and still going strong. What is the point of having a 'public health' department if the Government can't stop the public from getting killed and killing others through transmission? At the very least, there should be a disclaimer on his show, "For entertainment purpose only, consult your doctor regarding any covid medication'.
Any idea that may not be beneficial to public health in a pandemic? Like "go out and march in the streets in tightly packed groups and lower your masks while you shout in people's faces"? I feel like that may not have been beneficial to public health but for some reason there was free rein to promulgate that idea and even got a gratuitous endorsement from the health establishment.
Accurately judging what is or is not beneficial in the middle of a pandemic looks to be close to impossible when you're in the middle of it. At least that was my take on the last two years. Which is why it is good and interesting and valuable to hear all sides (I can't believe I have to write this). And sure, if a disclaimer is enough to make everyone step back from censorship than I'll take that deal. As much as I think disclaimers like this are purely theatrical.
I’m also trying to remember back when conservatives would start letter writing campaigns and threaten to boycott advertisers because there was a gay character on Maud or The Golden Girls or whatever. Or boycotting Disney for hosting Gay Days.
Was that regarded as censorship back in the day, or were letter writing campaigns and boycotts thought to be legitimate political speech?
Remember when Tipper Gore wanted warning labels on record albums? Good times, good times.
Boycotting is totally legitimate. And if enough people put enough pressure and a company changes it’s stance, that’s fair game. But when a small amount of people with a microphone put a lot of pressure and a company caves to that pressure, it’s not the same. And I’d say considering the size of Rogans audience (I’ve never heard a show of his) Spotify will weigh the protests against how people “vote” with their attention.
“But when a small amount of people with a microphone put a lot of pressure and a company caves to that pressure, it’s not the same.”
How so? Isn’t that like the guy who parks his truck in front of the dealership with a giant lemon in the back to get them to agree to the warranty repairs? He’s just one guy but he found a way to get a lot of leverage.
Once the appeal to economics fails because Spotify doesn't see a large financial hit then what? My thinking is:
1. The boycott attempt happens
2. The boycott attempt fails and Rogan continues to do his thing
3. Everybody should be happy
I believe Spotify is also getting intense pressure from its woke employees to cancel or muzzle Rogan.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you again, Freddie. The Rogan stuff is so depressing. Ever since Trump won in 2016, the left-of-center has slowly been losing its goddamn mind. It's been one moral panic after another.
With every controversy where I find myself not in lockstep with mainstream liberal opinion, I only grow more depressed and alienated. Since 2020, I've slowed way down on posting on Facebook because I'm utterly fucking terrified of getting mobbed by angry liberals over a "problematic" statement and losing friends. Holding my tongue on the Joe Rogan stuff is just the latest example. So I go underground in private forums instead. That provides a soothing lifeline. I suffer from depression and I'm very conflict avoidant. Woke politics are poison for someone like me.
The good news is that I work at a job that requires no commitments to wokeness at all. In Summer 2020, I thought we were in trouble, but DEI statements have slowed way down since then. Still, I worry that all it takes is one disgruntled SJW to get me fired. I don't share that same anxiety if some MAGA freak calls me a libcuck or whatever.
Thanks again Freddie and thank you to all the regulars here. I don't know where I'd be without you guys.
I think Robin DiAngelo style DEI is the exception. Every year at work I have to watch these videos about not judging people based on race/sex etc which is a) perfectly reasonable and b) not really intrusive
Right. Those are fine. I've seen my fair share of them too. No issue with them whatsoever.
Right. We do a good amount of DEI stuff here and it's generally pretty weak tea. Some people are doing the pronoun thing, but nobody has said we have to.
Yeah a lot of people put their pronouns in their signature. Not the intention but it can be helpful for people with unfamiliar names
I do get a little vexed having been doing this all along (not judging people based on race/sex) and finding it weird that the organization thinks I (that is everyone in the workplace) have not.
That's the problem with these training sessions. They are best suited for children, still learning basic manners, courage and humanity. During the last torture session I had to sit through, they had 2 or 3 break-out sessions where we (38 ~ 68 yr olds) had to assemble in smaller groups and recount some event where we were DEI heroes to someone being mistreated. All examples offered by the participants involved their childhood, or observing their children being heroes in school.
Oh, and one guy did boast about his principled heroism when he rejected a celebratory donut offered to him by a partner at his former firm upon Trump's election. Valiantly doing the work.
Valiant donut rejection. This is the kind of thing that I find diminishing of real human relations.
That is just so unspeakably gross. Ugh.
My now [thankfully] former firm had us sit through the most grotesque KenDiAngelo style DEI training. This was at a big prominent and very old firm in my city, not a fringe institution. The "atone for your whiteness and undeserved privileged" is not unusual in the very profession that pushed racial animus to new heights under the banner of doing "justice." And yet power in these institutions remains resolutely in the hands of white men. The whiter the institution, the more unhinged the DEI theater.
This is a good post. But, I think Rogan and others can be limited by private industry for particularly egregious inaccuracies. Like for most journalistic operations, accuracy should be a prime directive, and policing blatant disregard for accuracy is good and responsible.
Clearly, other agendas can be secretly validated at the same time, which is a problem. But I don’t want my platform to support hosts or participants who “talk shit” that includes pretty massive departures from reality. Hard to police that standard, but I don’t mind erring with that as the goal.
I agree that anti vaxx stuff is madness. But has Rogan ever claimed to be a journalist? Has spotify taken up the mantle of legacy media content producer?
The case with Rogan is interesting here, because Spotify does essentially function as his publisher, editor, and producer. Which does make them identical to legacy media content producers, in this specific case.
Yeah we’re back in the quandary of how to handle new media on the internet.
To me, this shouldn't really be much of a quandary. We have broadcasting laws already.
Or we could just think of things like Spotify the same way we think about premium cable. You can say fuck but there are consequences for saying certain things.
What consequences? You can go out to any porn site and find rape videos.
I think I either wasn't clear or you're misunderstanding me.
But you definitely cannot find rape porn on HBO.
Rogan is doing the John Stewart defense. "You can't take me seriously, I'm just a comedian!"
The problem that I keep circling back to, with all the anti-vax madness (as you put it, appropriately), is what effect does censorship have? I think I'd support it if it worked. A while back Freddie had a post about normative vs empirical claims and I keep coming back to this.
My anti-vax patients think that the government is covering up vaccine related deaths. When Facebook deletes their posts about this, it is further evidence to them that there is a cover up! And maybe the argument is you prevent the idea from spreading so new people won't be exposed, but I think it's a bit late for that. Anyone inclined to be antivax has no shortage of online content to help them along in that direction
Yes exactly.
"What effect does censorship have? I think I'd support it if it worked." Really, you'd support censorship if it "worked?" I'd really like to know how censorship is ever something anyone would want.
That's sorta my point. I don't think it ever does anything good. Which is why I'm against it
I get your point now. We're haggling over what we mean by censorship "working." I agree with you, it never does, in the long run.
Rumble just offered Rogan $100 million to ditch Spotify and join them. Are you going to be okay with whatever he says on Rumble as long as he's gone from Spotify?
I was saying - it’s ok for platforms to try to promote/enforce accuracy. I am not thinking about what happens to Rogan or the fact that he has other options.
If you want to be a journalist, you may not really care if you work for the Washington Post or Breitbart. There are obviously platforms that will pay for garbage. But kudos for platforms for promoting accuracy (if/when that’s what they are doing).
Yes, I think I agree with this. It seems like this is how journalism/media has always worked--outlets strive to publish accurate information 1) because they have a values-based commitment to accuracy and 2) because being accurate over time is how they gain credibility. (These days, 2) is complicated by the fact that we have way more sources of information, which has allowed more senses of what is "accurate" to develop.)
It gets complicated when we move from facts into opinions/ideology/interpretation. I think many mainstream outlets have also traditionally avoided promoting or condemning any particular opinion/viewpoint/idea (at least within a certain range of acceptability). So (to me at least) Spotify kicking Joe Rogan off its platform for inaccuracies feels within the range of accepted legacy media practices, while Spotify kicking Joe Rogan off its platform for engaging in forbidden opinions feels potentially different.
I feel sensitive to the need for free speech in part because I think free speech is essential to free thought. But I don't think outlets are ethically compelled to host information that they've determined is factually untrue, and for me antivax stuff falls on the "facts" side of the false facts/wrong opinions dichotomy.