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“No Choice but to Consider Limits on Speech”
So argues Eric Posner in Slate, who claims, “Never before in our history have enemies outside the United States been able to propagate genuinely dangerous ideas on American territory in such an effective way.”
Really, Eric?
Well, maybe they have, and maybe they haven’t. But I fully agree that ISIS propaganda’s a menace. I’m not discounting it.
Let’s look at his idea of a solution:
… there is something we can do to protect people like Amin from being infected by the ISIS virus by propagandists, many of whom are anonymous and most of whom live in foreign countries. Consider a law that makes it a crime to access websites that glorify, express support for, or provide encouragement for ISIS or support recruitment by ISIS; to distribute links to those websites or videos, images, or text taken from those websites; or to encourage people to access such websites by supplying them with links or instructions.
Okay.
But once you’ve conceded that foreign propaganda — if genuinely dangerous — requires rolling the First Amendment back to the age before Brandenburg v. Ohio, why stop there?
I agree that the United States is drenched in dangerous foreign propaganda. It’s warping people’s minds in ways I could never have conceived. But it’s hardly limited to ISIS, and ISIS, at least, doesn’t yet have nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver them.
If on national security grounds we should ban access to websites that glorify ISIS (and who defines what “glorifying” is?), it’s absolutely intellectually coherent, and surely more urgent, to ban access to websites that glorify or express support for Vladimir Putin. He is — as of now, and to the best of my knowledge — a far greater threat to a greater number of Americans than ISIS, not least because the Kremlin’s propaganda is so much more sophisticated.
Once we’ve settled on eviscerating the First — and there are good national security grounds for doing it, I agree — how do we deal with the precedent it sets? Most Americans truly have no idea that freedom of expression, as they know it now, really only dates back to 1969. A staggering number of the millennials are actively hostile to the underlying principle:
The Pew Research Center found that millennials were the most likely of any age group to agree that government should have the authority to stop people from saying things that offend minorities, while Democrats were nearly twice as likely as Republicans to favor such bans.
The result comes amid a growing campus movement to ban “microaggressions” and create “safe spaces” free from statements deemed offensive to “marginalized” groups, including racial, ethnic and LGBT minorities.
Thirty-five percent of Democrats supported such bans as opposed to 18 percent of Republicans, along with 27 percent of those in “Generation X,” ages 35-50, 24 percent of Baby Boomers, ages 51-69, and 21 percent of those 70 and older.
If we roll back the First — even a little bit — to keep people from looking at dangerous propaganda, what do you expect this generation to do with that legal precedent?
Posner adds, casually,
One worry about such a law is that it would discourage legitimate ISIS-related research by journalists, academics, private security agencies, and the like. But the law could contain broad exemptions for people who can show that they have a legitimate interest in viewing ISIS websites. Press credentials, a track record of legitimate public commentary on blogs and elsewhere, academic affiliations, employment in a security agency, and the like would serve as adequate proof.
So it sounds as if I could get a licence to look at it pretty easily, right? I guess Posner’s not really suggesting that his First Amendment rights be abridged. Nor mine. As long as you’re a member of a credentialed elite, you’d be able to look at foreign propaganda for yourself to decide whether it’s dangerous.
It’s a hell of a dangerous path. As I argued to my friend Mustafa Akyol in 2011 — in Turkey, a mere four years ago — “Once you begin to set legal boundaries on political speech, there is never an end to it.” That was only four years ago.
Here’s what he’s learned since then.
Andrew Wilson identifies four types of Russian propaganda:
- Propaganda as confusion: “The West’s first point of vulnerability is indeed its immediate judgment (or lack of judgment) of events. Its second point of vulnerability is Attention Deficit Disorder. In modern news cycles there is little time to actually think before the cycle moves on. For the mass audience at least, Russian propaganda only has to work until then.”
- Nudge effects: “The second type of Russian propaganda is less about creating confusion and is more about “nudge effects.” It works by finding parties, politicians, and points-of-view that are already sure of their world-view rather than confused, and giving them a nudge—so long as these views are usefully anti-systemic. For this type of Russian propaganda there is no such thing as strange bedfellows. Left or right, nationalist or separatist, jihadist or Islamophobic— all have featured on RT.”
- Propaganda at Home: Mobilizing the Putin Majority: “Russia’s propaganda is Janus-faced; though a metaphor closer to home might be the double-headed Russian eagle. If the point of pluralistic propaganda abroad is to nudge or confuse, domestic propaganda is monopolistic.”
- Alternative realities: “In the world between Russia and the West, not surprisingly perhaps, there is a fourth, hybrid type of propaganda. 89% unanimity is beyond Russia’s reach, there is relative freedom of speech, and rival narratives, both pro-Western and loyalist, already exist. So the purpose of Russian propaganda in the ‘near abroad’ is to create parallel alternative realities. Not just an alternative message, but an alternative reality, with a cast of supporting characters to deliver it. In Russia, the supporting cast is less important, the media itself is now the main event. In the West, Russian propaganda may “nudge” key actors, but it doesn’t create them. In the “near abroad” of other former Soviet states, however, the media message is accompanied by a virtual chorus of pro-Russian parties, politicians, NGOs, and even Churches.”
Number three isn’t our problem, one might argue, but 1-4 really are. Can you think of a better strategy for countering this than rolling back the First?
Published in General
Ah. That might be true in terms of political leadership, but I think folks at our level are very aware.
I don’t think we disagree. The Ohio law had “violent” but omitted “imminent.” I was saying that I am willing to listen to Posner’s ideas with both elements included, which strengthens Brandenburg.
Brandenburg reached advocacy of any imminent unlawful act, not limited to violent, imminent and unlawful acts.
It makes sense to me to balance “imminent” differently when the unlawful acts are violent than, say, advocacy of a national income tax strike (unlawful but not violent) vs a fatwa that states that every true Muslim has a duty to perform the hajj and kill an infidel during the course of their lives.
I respectfully disagree. Where it does exist it is not a percentage threat to the U.S.
I could not disagree more. We pound the table on this stuff and it is like shouting into a hurricane.
You are the exception, not the rule.
While we’re on the subject, anyone interested in the issue of free speech could do worse than read Free Speech for Me–But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other by Nat Hentoff.
It’s available from Amazon for next to nothing and well worth reading.
While the subtitle is “How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other” he especially focuses on censorship from the Left which, even at the time the book was published in 1992, had become egregious.
You are so right, John. Rather than trying to figure out a way to squelch this propaganda (and damage our commitment to free speech right along with it), we need to be creative about aggressively countering it!
If Brandenburg v. Ohio requires an imminent threat of violent action before First Amendment protections are stripped away, can we use our experience and common sense to identify when the threat is imminent? My concern is that we are not going to be able to combat the threat of jihadi violence unless we can identify what it is we are fighting. Experience has shown us that a radicalized Muslim is literally a bomb waiting to explode. It is not the same thing as a communist who believes that the government should be overthrown and is willing to join a cell of similar misfits to talk about it endlessly. The point of radicalizing a Muslim is to turn him into a suicide bomber ready to go. Propaganda that tends to radicalize Muslims is therefore different than Radio Moscow; it is more akin to shooting bullets into our country, knowing that some of them will hit.
My preference would be to let the sites stay up, trace the people who are viewing them, identify the radicals and the preachers in this country who are working to radicalize them, deport them if they are deportable, and kill the people maintaining and funding the sites. Experience has also shown us that radicalism in the Muslim world decreases when the cost of being a radical is too high. We should recognize that we are fighting a war with no political boundaries, and make that price as high as possible wherever the enemy is.
I’m for banning the book – not the reading of it. ISIS doesn’t have a country or a president in the same context as Putin – they are a terror movement that takes what they want with a trail of unspeakable crimes against humanity, millions forced to flee for their lives – the terror is not contained to a region – but is worldwide – therefore, they lose the right to freedom of speech – we have tougher laws for cyber-bullying.
This is the crux of the problem we are having in combating domestic subversion.We need leadership that will acknowledge rather than deny what and who the enemy is.
[excerpted from Ms Berlinski’s quote in OP] There’s no more dangerous-to-the-Republic propaganda than what the American Left puts out. Maybe we should limit their speech, too.
Oh, wait….
Unlike the fragile Left, I have no fear of a contest of ideas. Which takes free, unfettered speech.
Eric Hines
I consider leftist US leadership and hopefuls’ denials that Islam has anything to do with jihadists acts of violence to be at least as effective as anything Donald Trump advocates insofar as these statements and positions aid ISIS in radicalization and recruitment. Think about how a young American Muslim could interpret such from the POTUS as a call to action on behalf of a benign movement.
The nice thing about coming to these things late and reading all the comment is that someone is likely to have nailed it before I have a chance to comment. Thanks, John.
You can’t beat something with nothing. You can’t defeat a message with silence. We will have to engage in the (to some) distasteful task of countering the messages of the jihadis, the Putiniks, and their enablers here who are still useful, and still idiots.
The planted axiom here is that we must have open borders or the terrorists have won. So we continue to import those from alien cultures, on their own terms and without need for assimilation, and when some susceptible individuals succumb to the “ISIS virus” we go about demolishing American civil liberties for all.
Free speech has to go; the government must intercept and store everyone’s communications meta data or we are at risk for another 911; firearms ownership is a dangerous relic of the past. Meanwhile, checking prospective immigrants’ social media for evidence of jihadist sympathies is rejected as an invasion of privacy. And pausing immigration from countries with jihadist movements, as Senator Paul proposed, is an 89-10 loser in the US Senate.
So long as some sort of vague right to immigration remains the nation’s unstated Prime Directive, the path to security will run straight through our Bill of Rights.
Pilgrim,
I agree with you. This is why I think that it is necessary to focus on Jihad. Jihad is incitement to extreme violent-lawless action. It has a well-proven track record for doing exactly that.
By narrowing to only an organization or broadening to an entire religion, we will miss the mark with side effects. Just concentrating on a loose definition of propaganda will lose us in the confusion of trying to define it.
We have a specific problem. I don’t think to recognize it and narrowly act upon it is going to destroy the first amendment.
Regards,
Jim
The PRC is more subtle than that, the more effective maneuver is to pressure American reporters and academics to push their propaganda for them.
What message could we send that would do anything except confirm their perceptions?
We have:
We could start by showing more images of losers losing.
“Yeah, we got your martyrdom … right over by here.”
The main object is to shut down dissent that threatens the leftwing hegemony. That means tea partiers and other dissidents. Shutting down ISIS propaganda or Russian propaganda is just a pretext – a means to that end.
With the current leadership? Hold your breath.
I was figuring Cruz or Rubio. Or maybe Fiorina.
We need to find out who has the evil laugh most like Arahant.
(That was a reference to the opening of the last “Flyover Country” podcast, in case you missed it.)
When engaging the 50-cent bloggers and their equivalents on the internet, the more detailed knowledge you have of their cultures and history, the more effective you can be in derailing them and getting them to go off-script. Of course, there are always others to take their places.
Doesn’t much help with this to close the borders.
See what I just posted above. They know our culture, that’s for sure. Do we know theirs?
I try, from watching Russian movies and TV. I sometimes can mock their attempts with references from their own popular culture. Sometimes. But what I can do is pretty thin stuff compared to that example.
Interesting information.
Normally I am not a big fan of government propaganda, even if it is good counter-propaganda like RFE was. (A lot of people in Eastern Europe have told us how valuable it was, so that means the good probably outweighed the bad. And BTW (obligatory Russian film reference) I like the way RFE was featured in the 2008 Russian movie Stilagi.)
But we have pro-government propaganda like NPR and the front pages of our leading newspapers (like the WSJ). The machine comes down hard on anyone in the news business who creates difficulties for the administration. Bill Clinton was trying to get government health propaganda into American movies, and Obama has openly desired the NFL and NBA to propagandize Americans about ObamaCare.
So I don’t think there is any principled separation-of-news-and-state reason why he or his constituents would have been against the counter-propaganda operation against Russia. I suspect that he is simply reluctant to oppose authoritarian dictators because he is in general opposed to individual freedom and civil liberties and on the side of government control. (If anybody says, “But, but, NSA!!” we can talk about that, too.)
Nothing is fundamentally different today. Bad ideas have flown freely since ideas existed. They were never seriously constrained by technology nor received a disproportionate boost from it. It’s not how the message is passed; it’s the receiver that counts and the consequences he or she encounters for their actions.
Alienated men of military age in shame-driven cultures seek worldviews which give them an illusion of being something they are not now nor will ever become. The psychologically, emotionally and socially impaired are gratified by violence as a means of physical domination. They abuse the weak and dis-empowered because they are easy prey. In a huge country lacking serious border controls or sensible immigration policies for 50 years, we should expect busloads who are susceptible to ISIS’ propaganda. Let them hear the propaganda, experience Sudden Jihad Syndrome, and run off to Syria, Yemen, etc. Just don’t let them return. Surveil the susceptible; get the drop on them.
That requires an ethos which views border security as national security. It requires revoking passports if people travel places they shouldn’t. US citizenship is a cosmic gift card that never runs out of credits. Absent a worldview (powered by political will) that treats citizenship as precious gift, we will not retain our Republic.
Everyone is spun up about ISIS, but ISIS is not anything like the threat that Russia is to Americans. ISIS is — for now — a terrorist threat with a message that the overwhelming majority of Americans fear and find repulsive. They immediately recognize it as a dangerous enemy. Russia’s a nuclear threat with a message that very few Americans fear and find repulsive — and that many find seductive and appealing.
That’s a country that’s studying us very, very closely. One that knows where the fault lines are.
Any doubt in your mind about Snowden after seeing that? (Perhaps, like me, you had none before.) But why doesn’t every American know about that ad?
Claire, you must be joking. “Many” Americans find Putin’s Russia (or his propaganda) seductive and appealing? ‘Cuz droves are just pounding at the Kremlin’s gates, supplicating for Russia’s favor? Hoping to enroll in its lavish social welfare programs? Praying to find shelter amid its brilliant housing?
Only a few Russians give one rat’s backside about the crap hole that is Russia. Fewer are willing to die improving it. No outsiders have any intention of doing more than spending a few days as a tourist in the dump, taking in the Hermitage and the Bolshoi.
Kremlin leaders have fixed addresses and as philosophical materialists don’t desire martyrdom via nuclear incineration. We managed to deter the Soviets from going all Dr. Strangelove on us; we can certainly deter their poor, increasingly distant cousins. I doubt if 50,000 Americans (not of Ukrainian/Russian descent) can reliably find Ukraine on a map; fewer still could answer a pollster’s question, such as “In what continent or near which major body of water is Ukraine located?”
Really? I’ve long wanted to go bicycling in rural Russia. My wife says if I want to go so bad, I should go. But I’m not going to spend that kind of money going some place where she won’t come with me. She could come as part of an organized tour and wouldn’t have to ride, but that probably wouldn’t be as much fun for her as for me. And anti-American sentiment has grown so strong that it’s probably not a good idea, anyway. I know one woman with dual Russian-American citizenship who doesn’t think it’s safe to go back to her old home anymore.
And for urban visits, I’d love to visit the film studios where so many of the world’s greatest films were made.
Yeah, I find the propaganda seductive. I resist the seduction, though.