It is amazing to me we’re still having this conversation after 4 years. He does this every day & the partisans somehow *never* catch on. It’s as if we learned nothing from him & his singular genius at manipulation.
If you don’t see it, how do you think he survived for so long?
The Portal invited Ashley Mathews in advance of the election to discuss this specifically outside of politics. This is not about politics, but about a class that wishes to use business to impose control over other lawful human beings. We cover it directly:
Let me put this in the starkest terms. Our genius in the US is to NOT have our infrastructure nationalized. But laws like “Free Speech” don’t immediately carry over to the private sector. The idea of getting Tech-Finance-Universities-Media to shut down thought and speech is here.
These new authoritarians are trying to make commerce & the market do what the government legally cannot: make life impossible for dissenters. For the first time, to preserve freedom we will either need to regulate or nationalize. Both of which are terrible options. We’ve lost it.
The president of the United States addressed the rally on January 6th which was not a mob at the time. He did not call for violence. He exhorted them to “Stop the Steal” telling them” We will never give up. We will never concede.” This is called “Direction by Indirection” in law.
This is a situation paralleled by Henry II in his struggle with Thomas Beckett. “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” is not a call for violence in a direct sense.
A short time ago we talked of “putting people to the sword” or “heads will roll” meaning to fire people.
If one were not addressing a massive rally, such language might be seen as colloquial hyperbole. But when you exhort people to the Capitol to “stop the steal” of a US election, context matters. The courts did not support the challenge. This was’t hyperbole. Context is all here.
The coming problem is this: in an era when any tech amplifier can create an analog of “imminent harm” exemptions by removing frictions present in the pamphleteering of 1787, *any* adjustment could result in the exemption becoming the de facto rule itself —> the loss of speech.
And who would we trust to come up with these wise exemptions? What I have learned is that tech platforms tend towards three things:
A) Vagueness
B) Radical activism > Dispassion
C) Selective Enforcement
ensuring the rules never really matter. Rules are merely cover for actions.
What if, instead of modifying the 1st amendment, we decided that tech platforms had to be radically transparent by new amendment? That the public got the same look at Google/Twitter that they get at us. Like Zuck/Sundar wearing a policeman’s body cam so that we achieved symmetry?
This is where I actually am. I wrote this to a wonderful young woman I saw cloaked in Trump insignia. She had flown to DC on the 6th. She looks up to me and I have been trying to tell her she can leave Trump if she wants to without embracing Biden.
I’ve been worried sick since I saw the San Diego woman who was shot move directly towards a gun pointed at her from a few feet away. The vet who died was oblivious and in a “video game mode” like trance. She LARPEd her way to an early grave. I haven’t been able to sleep since.
I love my Millennial friends but they aren’t my kids’ generation. I don’t want to see your generation get sucked into this madness. Because you are my kids.
Sooner or later these people born in the 1940s will leave us all and we can pick up the pieces of what is left together.
We have to rebuild trust in each other. I have attempted to bridge this chasm for four years and I’m utterly torn apart from the hatred from my traditional side of the aisle and the abuse from the far right.
Trump has conceded.
Question: will you accept my outstretched hand?
I believe I am the only member of my group of podcasters who has forgone the income from contributions and merchandise to stand apart from all this until the election was over just in case anything went wrong. Likely a meaningless gesture, but it will be worth it if you join me.