Not All Opinions Matter

By Jessica Valenti, Medium

11 June 20

The ‘both sides’ myth will end up killing vulnerable Americans

et’s say it again, once and for all: Free speech doesn’t mean that you get to say whatever you want, wherever you want, without consequence. Freedom of speech is not freedom from criticism, and whether your opinion is bad, boring, or brilliant — no one is required to listen to it, or to give you a platform.

I make this clarification because while police across the country are violently attacking peaceful protesters — actual state suppression of speech — powerful people are working hard to characterize disinterest or criticism as some kind of horrific rights violation.

In just the last week, Ivanka Trump bemoaned “cancel culture and viewpoint discrimination,” because a Kansas college rescinded their invitation for her to give a digital commencement address; Sen. Tom Cotton accused leadership at the New York Times of “surrender[ing] to a woke child mob” after editors apologized for running Cotton’s op-ed calling for the use of military force against anti-racist protesters; famed Harry Potter author JK Rowling called the backlash against a series of her transphobic tweets, “woman-hate;” and New York Magazine writer Andrew Sullivan was turned into a free-speech martyr because his editors simply weren’t interested in his take on the Black Lives Matter protests.

What these people have in common is not a moral concern that all controversial speech will be silenced — but a fear that their speech won’t be prioritized or applauded.

By mischaracterizing criticism as censorship, people with millions of followers, the ability to set national policy, or column space in some of the most renowned publications in the country are able to paint themselves as victims. But a newspaper or a school is not a statehouse: They are under no obligation to carry your column or subject their students to your speech.

While powerful people complain about their columns and speeches being censored, actual threats to speech are everywhere. On the day that Ivanka Trump tweeted about “cancel culture” to her nearly 9 million followers, a Maryland man was arrested for assaulting teenagers putting up anti-police brutality posters. And while Rowling — who makes about a million dollars a week — was complaining about criticism against her anti-trans tweets, a reporter covering the Minneapolis protests was recovering after being shot in the eye with a rubber bullet, permanently losing half her vision.

In the same way “free speech” outrage is disproportionately concerned with protecting the most powerful, the opinions deemed the “bravest” overwhelmingly seem to be those that hurt the most marginalized.

Here’s just one example: There were no frenzied columns on “safe spaces” when a Republican legislator suggested jailing librarians who carry books deemed sexually suggestive — but when The Atlantic rescinded a job offer to a man who called for women who had abortions to be executed, conservatives decried the “censorship.”

The controversy over Sen. Cotton’s piece is just the latest example of the free speech fallacy. Before top Times opinion editor James Bennet apologized and resigned, he defended the decision to run the op-ed as a commitment to show readers “counter-arguments, particularly those made by people in a position to set policy.”

The piece — which relied on false information debunked within the paper’s own pages — argued for “an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain, and ultimately deter lawbreakers” during a week when police violence was on stunning display. Dozens of Times employees tweeted that the op-ed put black staffers in danger, and the union that represents Times staffers released a statement calling the decision “likely to encourage further violence.”

In response to the controversy, Times writer and bad-opinion enthusiast Bari Weiss described the anger in the newsroom as a “civil war” and suggested that those upset by the decision were neglecting free speech in an effort to feel “emotionally and psychologically safe.” That same evening, two police officers in Buffalo, New York, shoved an elderly man so hard into the ground that he began bleeding out of his ears and is now in critical condition. (Here’s hoping he was at least emotionally safe.) It’s not that the Times shouldn’t publish conservative viewpoints — they do, often. But pieces like Sen. Cotton’s — which editors themselves admit was not up to the paper’s standards — promote violence like we’ve seen in Buffalo, Minneapolis, New York, and beyond.

Ironically, the people who bleat the loudest over free speech are often the ones most eager to suppress it when it doesn’t suit them. After Weiss tweeted about her colleagues’ supposed obsession with “safetyism,” it came out that she had reported a Black editor to Times leadership for politely declining to get coffee with her. And Bret Stephens — who has made his career in part arguing that college students are coddled for wanting break out rooms with counselors during talks on sexual assault — is apparently well-known in the Times newsroom for trying to get colleagues in trouble if they criticize him on Twitter.

It is not a coincidence that powerful white people are painting themselves as the victims at the same time Black Americans are on the streets demanding to be treated with some semblance of humanity. For the first time perhaps ever, the national conversation is solely focused on racism and anti-Black police violence. For those who are accustomed to holding all the power and attention, that shift in focus feels “oppressive.”

That’s why we’ve seen everyday criticisms of powerful people described as “Maoist” or chilling warnings of a future without freedom. But as Osita Nwanevu put it last year in the New Republic, “Perhaps we should choose instead to understand cancel culture as something much more mundane: ordinary public disfavor voiced by ordinary people across new platforms.”

No one is owed a national stage for their opinion — no matter how powerful they are, and no matter how many people may believe it right alongside them. And despite protestations from mostly white-male media leadership and conservative pundits, denying someone a platform does not quash their speech, it just declines to elevate it.

We are witnessing actual speech suppression every day: members of the press beaten and arrested and peaceful protesters gassed on American streets. Those are the violations worth fighting.

The New Cold War With China, How Will It Affect You?

By Michael Klare, TomDispatch

11 June 20

 

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In the grimmest sense imaginable, this has already been an action-packed year.

Try, in fact, to imagine a summary of this moment in historical terms: Right now, in June 2020, we’re experiencing a version of the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic; an instant rerun of the Great Depression; another round of the demonstrations and riots that occurred after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968; and the equivalent of the Vietnam War protests (though this time in relation to a war not on civilians thousands of miles away but on Americans of color here at home). And oh yes, if that wasn’t enough to sink any version of the Titanic, add in just one more piece of old history revisited, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, author of All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, points out today: a new Cold War of the kind that held the planet in its firm grip from the late 1940s until the Soviet Union imploded in 1991.

As the administration of Donald Trump, the captain of this particular Titanic (which has been smashing into icebergs for months now), ups the ante on hostilities -- economic, political, and military -- with China, I wouldn’t make any bets about which of the planet’s two great powers was going to implode this time. In fact, to the above stew of history, you need to add one more devastating factor that Klare has also written about recently, long in coming but distinctly of our moment. I’m thinking of climate change and the intensifying environmental destruction of this planet as humanity has always known it. Imagine, for instance, that, by 2100, parts of the north China plain, one of the most densely populated regions on earth, might be uninhabitable, and don’t even start me on intensifying hurricanes in the eastern U.S., wildfires in the West, a megadrought in the Southwest, or floods in the Midwest.

Maybe the very idea of the rise and fall of great powers in the usual fashion is already passé and we just haven’t quite grasped that yet. Still, let’s face it, a new Cold War, as Klare makes clear, is just what we don't need right now.

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

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merica’s pundits and politicians have largely concluded that a new Cold War with China -- a period of intense hostility and competition falling just short of armed combat -- has started. “Rift Threatens U.S. Cold War Against China,” as a New York Times headline put it on May 15th, citing recent clashes over trade, technology, and responsibility for the spread of Covid-19. Beijing’s decision to subject Hong Kong to tough new security laws has only further heightened such tensions. President Trump promptly threatened to eliminate that city-state’s special economic relationship with this country, while imposing new sanctions on Chinese leaders. Meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans in Congress are working together to devise tough anti-Chinese sanctions of their own.

For anyone who can remember the original Cold War, the latest developments may seem eerily familiar. They bring to mind what occurred soon after America’s World War II collaboration with the Soviets collapsed in acrimony as the Russians became ever more heavy-handed in their treatment of Eastern Europe. In those days, distrust only grew, while Washington decided to launch a global drive to contain and defeat the USSR. We seem to be approaching such a situation today. Though China and the U.S. continue to maintain trade, scientific, and educational ties, the leaders of both countries are threatening to sever those links and undertake a wide range of hostile moves.

Admittedly, some of the steps being discussed in Washington to punish China for its perceived bad behavior will have little immediate impact on the lives of Americans. A lot of the threats, in fact, may turn out to be little more than good old-fashioned chest thumping. Consider, for instance, the proposal floated by the top-ranking majority and minority members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe and Rhode Island Democrat Jack Reed, to fund a multibillion dollar “Pacific Deterrence Initiative” intended to bolster American forces in Asia. That effort, they avowed, will “send a strong signal to the Chinese Communist Party that the American people are committed to defending U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific.”

Well, that was easy! All we, the taxpaying citizens of the United States, need to do in this opening salvo of a new Cold War is salute Congress as it funnels yet more billions of dollars to the usual defense contractors and thereby “send a signal” to Beijing that we will “defend U.S. interests” somewhere far across the globe. (Now there’s a moment to wave your American flag!)

But don’t count on such a moment lasting long, not if a new Cold War starts in earnest. A quick look back at the original one should remind us that we’ll all pay a price of some sort for intensifying hostility towards China (even if a hot war isn’t the result). Perhaps, then, it’s none too soon to consider how such a world would impact you and me.

A Feeble Economic Recovery

For most Americans, the first consequence of an intensifying Cold War could be a weaker than expected recovery from the Covid-19 economic meltdown. Anything that stands in the way of a swift rebound -- and a new Cold War with China falls into that very category -- would be bad news.

Unlike in the original Cold War, when Washington and Moscow maintained few economic ties, the U.S. and Chinese economies remain intertwined, contributing to the net wealth of both countries and benefiting this country’s export-oriented industries like agriculture and civilian aircraft production. Admittedly, such ties have also harmed blue-collar workers who have watched their jobs migrate across the Pacific and tech companies that have seen their intellectual property purloined by Chinese upstarts. Donald Trump stoked resentments over just such issues to get himself elected in 2016. Since then, he’s sought to disentangle the two economies, claiming we would be better off on our own. (America first!) As part of this drive, he’s already imposed stiff tariffs on Chinese imports and blocked Chinese firms from gaining access to American technology.

Feel free to argue about whether China has abused international trade rules, as Trump and his allies have charged, and whether imposing tariffs (paid for by American importers and consumers, not Chinese suppliers) is the best way to address that country’s economic rise. The key thing to note, however, is that economic growth in both places had slowed in the wake of Trump’s trade war even before Covid-19 hit. As 2019 drew to a close, in fact, the prospect of yet higher tariffs and intensified economic warfare was already dragging down the whole global economy.

And while some experts believe that a relaxation of tariffs and other steps to improve U.S.-China trade would stimulate the economy in tough times, Trump and his China hawks, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, appear to view this moment as the perfect opportunity to double down on anti-Chinese measures. The president has already hinted that he’s prepared to order yet more tariffs on Chinese products and take other steps to hasten the “decoupling” of the two economies. “There are many things we could do,” he told Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business in mid-May. “We could cut off the whole relationship.”

Cut off the whole relationship? Some policymakers claim that such a decoupling would stimulate growth at home as American firms shifted manufacturing back to the United States and its close allies. This argument, however, ignores two key factors when it comes to Americans desperate for work now: first, many of the tasks currently performed by Chinese workers will be shifted to plants in Mexico, Thailand, Vietnam, and other low-cost manufacturing hubs; and second, any relocation of entire production lines to this country will take years to accomplish and, in the end, undoubtedly wind up employing more robots than workers. Bottom line: economically, an intensifying Cold War is guaranteed to scuttle any chances of a rapid recovery from the Coronavirus Depression, dampening employment prospects for millions of Americans.

Military Spending, Not Recovery Stimulus

And here’s another thing a new Cold War guarantees: a significant increase in military spending at a time of ballooning national debt and a desperate need for investment in domestic economic recovery.

By the end of June, unless Congress votes additional assistance, much of the $2.2 trillion in emergency pandemic relief voted by Congress will have been used up, leaving millions of jobless Americans and many small business owners in dire straits. Democrats in the House of Representatives did unveil a plan for an additional $3 trillion in emergency funding, including aid for struggling states and cities and another round of direct payments to citizens. White House officials and many Republicans insist, however, that any further giveaways to ordinary Americans will raise the federal debt to unsustainable levels (a problem that never worries them when it comes to tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy). So passing anything like that stimulus package appears ever less conceivable and July may leave millions of Americans unable to pay rent as well as other essential expenses.

When it comes to increased military spending, however, Republicans have no such qualms. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, for example, has introduced a $43 billion Forging Operational Resistance to Chinese Expansion (FORCE) Act. (Nifty title, huh?) Its goal, he claims, would be to “help thwart the Chinese Communist Party’s main geopolitical aim [of] pushing the United States out of the Western Pacific [and] achieving cross-strait unification with Taiwan via military force.” It includes, among other things, $3.9 billion for another Virginia-class submarine (that’s in addition to the $4.7 billion requested for such a sub in the Pentagon’s proposed 2021 budget) and $3 billion for more of one of the most expensive weapons systems in history, the F-35 jet fighter (and that’s in addition to the $4.6 billion requested for 48 of them in that same budget).

With the Democrats desperate to demonstrate their own anti-Chinese credentials, passage of the FORCE Act, or the somewhat more modest Pacific Deterrence Initiative introduced by Senators Reed and Inhofe, appears to be a sure thing. In fact, the need for yet more military funds may prove to be the Republican rationale for rejecting calls for additional pandemic relief.

But won’t higher military spending act as an economic stimulus, just as it did during World War II when it helped lift the United States out of the Great Depression?

Indeed, passage of the FORCE Act or a variant of it will pump additional money into the economy. But today’s military-industrial complex bears little relation to the one of 80 years ago when millions of workers were mobilized to churn out thousands of tanks and planes monthly in an all-out drive to defeat Nazi Germany. Nowadays, military hardware has become so complex that most of any dollar spent on a new plane, tank, or ship goes into specialized materials and computer systems, not armies of laborers. So the billions of dollars for one new submarine and additional F-35s are likely to generate only a few thousand extra jobs, while spending the same amounts on health care or elementary school education would generate many times that number.

Conscription

And then there’s the issue that should be on the minds of every young man and woman in America (along with their parents, grandparents, and loved ones): the draft.

In contrast to the original Cold War, young men in this country are no longer obliged to serve in the U.S. military, though they (and their female counterparts) may choose to do so, whether for patriotic reasons, economic need, or both. Even though the United States has been continuously involved in “forever wars” since the 9/11 attacks, the armed services have been able to use a variety of economic and educational incentives to keep the ranks filled (and avoid the public outcry over those wars that would surely have accompanied a draft). This was possible in part because the numbers of soldiers engaged in combat at any given moment was not huge in comparison to, say, the Korean or Vietnam War eras and because vast numbers of troops were no longer on tap to “contain” the Soviet Union in Europe.

A full-scale Cold War with China could, however, prove another matter entirely, even if Pentagon manpower requirements were somewhat diminished by U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq. Large force deployments will undoubtedly be needed to engage in a modern version of the “containment” of China, not to speak of deterring the further adventurism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Can this be done with an all-volunteer military? Not if tensions rise with Beijing.

Count on it: at some point, the question of conscription is bound to come up. So far, the Department of Defense has not opted for reinstating the draft -- a move that would require congressional approval and undoubtedly ignite intense political debate of the sort top officials would prefer to avoid right now. Still, the leadership’s overarching guidance, the National Defense Strategy of 2018, made it quite clear that the United States must expect to face years of intense rivalry with its “great power competitors” and that such an epic struggle could well require the full mobilization of America’s war-making capabilities. “Long-term strategic competition [with China and Russia],” it claimed, “requires the seamless integration of multiple elements of national power.” Conscription was not specifically mentioned, but given the new focus on a rising China and a reckless Russia, it will be on the table sooner or later.

Repression and Discrimination

Another feature of the original Cold War that you should expect in a new one is an environment of repression, intolerance, and discrimination. In this case, it would be against Chinese-Americans, Chinese students and researchers currently in this country, and non-Chinese viewed as in any way beholden to that power. Sadly enough, signs of this have already emerged. Officials from the FBI and the National Security Council have, for instance, been dispatched to leading Ivy League universities to warn administrators against admitting or retaining Chinese students who may be collecting scientific and technical information to share with government-sponsored institutions at home. Concurrently, some 30 Chinese professors with ties to such institutions have had their visas denied, despite a history of collaboration with American academics. In a more dramatic move, the chair of Harvard University’s chemistry department, Charles Lieber, was arrested in January for failing to report income he had received from a Chinese university.

Many American academics have criticized such actions as an assault on academic freedom. Increasingly, however, U.S. officials insist that they represent a necessary component of the new Cold War. And while those officials also insist that our adversary in this struggle is the Chinese government or people associated with it (however tangentially), many Chinese-Americans are increasingly experiencing suspicion and hostility just for being Chinese. “Chinese-Americans feel targeted, and that’s really hurtful,” said Charlie Woo, a prominent Chinese-American businessman.

The experience of the first Cold War suggests that this sort of intolerance and repression will only increase with potentially chilling effects on intellectual freedom and the already deeply unsettled racial situation in this country.

Hot War

And never forget that cold wars always risk becoming hot ones. Looking back, it’s easy enough to remember those years of the U.S.-USSR standoff as a relatively war-free era, since the two superpowers were fearful that a direct conflict of any sort between them might spark an all-out thermonuclear conflagration, leaving a planet in ruins. In reality, though, both sides engaged in a grim assortment of bloody “proxy wars” -- regional conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, among other places, involving troops from one superpower and local allies armed by the other. In addition, the U.S. and the Soviet Union nearly found themselves in direct conflict on several occasions. The most notable, of course, was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when Moscow installed nuclear-armed ballistic missiles in Cuba and the U.S. nearly went to war -- which would probably have turned into a nuclear conflict -- to remove them. Only a last-ditch negotiating effort by President John F. Kennedy and his Russian counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, averted such an outcome.

It’s easy enough to imagine that both contemporary versions of such proxy conflicts and of the Cuban Missile Crisis could emerge from a growing confrontation with China. An incident on the Korean Peninsula, no matter how it was sparked, could quickly turn into just such a proxy war. The greatest danger, however, would be U.S. and Chinese forces facing off directly, perhaps due to a naval clash in the East or South China Sea.

At present, American and Chinese warships encounter each other on a regular basis in those waters, often coming within shooting (or even ramming) range. The U.S. Navy insists that it’s conducting permissible “freedom of navigation operations” (FRONOPS) in international waters. The Chinese -- claiming ownership of, and often building up, the many small atolls and islets that dot those seas -- accuse the American ships of infringing on their national maritime territory. On occasion, Chinese gunboats have sailed dangerously close to them, forcing them to shift course to avoid a collision. As such incidents multiply and tensions increase, the risk of a serious faceoff involving loss of life on one or both sides is bound to grow, possibly providing the spark for a full-scale military confrontation. And there can be no question of one thing: an intensifying Cold War with China will only increase the odds of such a thing happening.

No one can say at what point you or any of us will begin to feel the direct effects of this new Cold War, only that, as tensions and hostile acts heighten, the consequences will prove harsh indeed. So cheer now, if you approve of measures already taken to isolate and punish Beijing, but think carefully before you embrace a full-blown Cold War with China and all that it will entail.

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Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.