Seeing Red? Think Blue

By Bill McKibben, The New York Review of Books

15 August 18

n Friday evening, the Democratic National Committee reversed a decision it had made two months ago: the committee would now welcome money from fossil-fuel corporate PACS. In the same resolution, the DNC saluted “forward-looking employers” who are “powering America’s all-of-the-above energy economy.”

My heart sank when I read the news. I’d spent a good deal of time and effort in 2016, as one of the Democratic Party’s fifteen platform-writers, removing the “all-of-the-above” energy language that was code for “fossil fuels” from the party platform, and replacing it with a straightforward commitment that America would be “running entirely on clean energy by mid-century.” Now that work has been undone—and in a summer week in which the smoke from wildfires covers most of the lower Forty-Eight. I suppose I had as much right as anyone to feel undercut.

Actually, if anyone had that right, it was the young people of the Sunrise Movement, who have spent this election season encouraging candidates to sign a pledge not to accept money from the fossil-fuel industry. These kids have been exemplary activists, risking time in jail for their civil disobedience and dedicating months of their lives to getting dirty money out of politics. They have signed up nearly a thousand election candidates, and the DNC ban, passed two months ago, had been a high-water mark of their achievement. Now they will have to fight this backsliding—and knowing their organizing skills, they will do it with verve. Here’s the online petition they’re circulating, and I imagine there will be protests outside the next DNC meeting in late August.

Still, I can only imagine that they must feel deflated, too. And in truth, that’s the main reason my heart sank. The fossil-fuel decision is a stupid setback. I think it will eventually be reversed because the physics of climate change makes clear which direction we, as a nation, must go. But the deflation is a mortal peril headed into the fall election. Immediately, my Twitter feed filled with dismayed reaction, some sad and some cynical and some both: “Tell me again how the parties are different?” “The final straw—Bye Bye Dems.” “Can’t even say I’m surprised.”

As much as I sympathize, this scares me. We desperately need a huge Democratic turnout for the midterm elections. So let me explain why I’m laying my own anger aside and hoping everyone else will do the same—why it’s important to distinguish between “the DNC” or “the Democrats,” on the one hand, and whoever is running for office in your local district, on the other. And, in the process, let me explain how this one activist, at least, thinks about electoral politics.

The first reason is obvious: the Republicans are worse by an order of magnitude, on environmental issues as well as many others. Fifty years of environmental progress, established and maintained under administrations of both parties, are now being undone in a single presidential term—protections that millions of people fought for over decades are simply disappearing. In this case, it’s less the responsibility of Donald Trump than it is of the Koch brothers, who have long lobbied against regulations in the fossil-fuel industry. On these questions of regulation, as with tax policy, the Kochs are reaping a return on their long-term investment in the GOP—and at precisely the moment when the planet can least afford it. The Democrats may move more slowly on climate change and environmental protection than they should—and with climate change, going too slow is a huge problem—but at least they don’t go backwards. If they were in power today, we would not be seeing these shameful regressions.

Still, this goes beyond any particular field of policy. The Republicans under Trump are a crazy-eyed threat to the constitutional order. Their leader is a corrupt racist who clearly seems willing to bring down our democracy. I listen every week to the former high-level Obama staffers who run the podcast “Pod Save America.” The environment is not one of the issues they spend time on, and my guess is they don’t have much use for activists like me—they were serious insiders, after all. But the basic point they repeat in each segment is undeniable: if the Democrats don’t regain control of at least one wing of Congress at the next election, there will be effectively no check of any kind on Trump. He will be able to fire the prosecutors investigating him without interference; his plunder of the government will continue without oversight. A GOP win in the mid-terms would further engorge his ravening narcissism, with ramifications from which the country may never recover.

Though that’s the main reason for voting Democratic, it’s not the only one. The Republicans in their current form are detestable,while the Democrats—though compromised at the top, chummy with corporations, frustratingly split on crucial issues, and notoriously unwilling to stand their ground—are, in certain ways, sort of great. I don’t say this as some party lackey—in fact, I helped organize what I think were the largest demonstrations outside the White House during the Obama years, to protest the Keystone pipeline—and I don’t say it as some kind of party insider. Actually, I’d never been to a party meeting or paid any attention to its inner workings until Bernie Sanders named me to that platform-writing team at the end of the primaries in 2016.

The first day of our work, the fifteen of us gathered in some miserable hotel ballroom and spent a solid eight hours listening to nonstop earnest testimony from different groups that wanted their viewpoints represented in the platform. I was sitting next to Representative Barbara Lee of Oakland, California, who was quick, sharp, and quite delightful. After the first forty witnesses, I leaned over to whisper: “You know what’s interesting: we haven’t heard from a white guy yet.” She took a minute to look up and down her agenda to make sure I was right, and then she flashed me a wide grin. “Now you know how it feels,” she said.

My sense, after many days of such hearings, was that the Democratic Party at its best operated as a kind of support network for the decent people who get pushed around in America—people of color, working people, disabled people, gay people, people who have to breathe the fumes from refineries. It’s highly imperfect: one wants to distinguish between the party and the DNC, because self-interested (and not all that competent) campaign consultants and pollsters clearly infest the upper reaches of the machine. And even many of the groups with which one wants to feel solidarity are compromised and short-sighted. It appears, for instance, that the DNC reversed its decision on fossil-fuel funding less to please the oil companies than to appease a couple of the labor unions that have aligned themselves with the industry they serve by building pipelines and refineries, and who work hard to keep the party from having a whole-hearted commitment to a clean-energy future.

For all that, there was something very moving about sitting there day after day in those hotel ballrooms and hearing from voices like Rev. William Barber’s, and from civil rights icon Bob Moses. Or, even more, the women of color who are clearly the party’s backbone. At its most compromised, the Democratic Party nonetheless remains a bulwark of America’s minimal efforts to support the vulnerable, efforts that would otherwise disappear. If you don’t depend on food stamps or Medicaid or Head Start or free school lunches, it’s easy to forget how important this is.

And the third reason is that—on election day—there is no alternative. If you don’t vote for the Democrats, or the Republicans, then, in effect, you don’t vote, and if you don’t vote, then, for practical purposes, you vote for the Republicans, too, since in our gerrymandered nation they have a built-in advantage. This is only true in America—I’ve given grateful speeches, for instance, at Green Party gatherings in Europe and Australia and Canada, and I count my colleagues there among the most astute and capable politicians I know. But in their political systems—parliamentary, for the most part—you can vote for the Greens without being a spoiler. In fact, sometimes, they end up holding the balance of power. Here, you simply can’t. We have plenty of evidence, between Ralph Nader’s and Jill Stein’s runs, that it doesn’t result in building an important or useful third party; it just makes it easier for the right to rule. Longtime Green Party member Ted Glick—a veteran activist I greatly admire—recently made a powerful case that though there may be local races in which the Greens could safely and usefully run, they should stop fielding a national candidate.

Still, I think I understand the impulse to support such a third party. In 1980, I wrote my college newspaper endorsement of a man named Barry Commoner who was running for president. He was the candidate of the Citizens’ Party, a kind of precursor to the Greens, and since I was disgusted with both Carter and Reagan, and because he was an environmentalist well ahead of his time, I thought it made sense to back him. It made emotional sense at the time—though it’s hard for me to remember why I was so righteously indignant about poor Jimmy Carter—but it made no logical sense. Since this was a college paper, and since it was in reliably Democratic Massachusetts, it didn’t really matter—but my self-absorption did teach me a lesson I haven’t forgotten.

That lesson wasn’t: do not disrupt the political status quo if there is a risk of making it worse. Instead, it was figure out how to disrupt the status quo in other ways. I can think of three ways, immediately.

The first is: make use of primaries. The only real way to introduce new ideas into our political system is during primary season, in the narrow window when the otherwise entrenched have no choice but to listen. It was crucial that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ran in her New York congressional district primary, not because her opponent Joe Crowley was a bad guy (on roll call votes, I imagine they’d come out in the same place 98 percent of the time), but because a new, different, loud voice pressing new priorities had emerged.

It’s tricky—you need to run a vigorous primary campaign without so weakening your opponent that the Republican can then pick them off, and given human nature (and Russian bots), campaigns routinely get overly intense and personal. It helps, I think, if you emphasize programs over personalities, and it helps even more to have a sense of both humor and humility. When the Bernie-ish candidate Abdul El-Sayed lost his primary bid for governor in Michigan last month, he told the crowd, “Do not walk out of here saying anything like ‘Abdul or Bust.’ Tomorrow, we turn around and we turn this into a movement,” to beat the Republican in November. (Props to Crowley, too, who picked up a guitar during his concession speech and dedicated a reasonably rocking version of “Born to Run” to his opponent.)

The second way is to change the system so that outsider parties aren’t automatic spoilers. This is less impossible than it sounds: virtually the only good result of the 2016 election was that Maine adopted a ranked-choice voting system, which could potentially revolutionize politics in America. Under this system, you’ll be able to vote for, say, a Green, but without wasting your vote: if they don’t win, your ballot will pass to whomever you marked second—a Democrat, say. The change would mean everything to the way we think about election, opening up the system to a much wider range of views, while simultaneously encouraging people to be civil. (If you’re the Democrat who wants the number two votes of the Green Party candidate, then you don’t disparage them or their ideas, and vice-versa). The group Represent.Us, which helped win the Maine fight, is trying to bring ranked-choice voting to many more places: anyone who cares about a vibrant democracy should be helping the effort in some way.

Third, and most important, we need to remember that elections are not synonymous with politics. Yes, in the autumns of even-numbered years, elections offer a high-leverage opportunity to make one’s voice heard. But election day is just one day in the political calendar: if you care about climate change or medical care or mass incarceration, all the other days are just as important, because it’s then that you build the movements that really shift the Zeitgeist.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can’t, on her own, go to Congress and make huge change: she’ll be stuck in a system that needs us to keep pushing it. Some of her Democratic colleagues will be as progressive and dynamic as she is, and others will be mediocrities, and still others will be annoyingly conservative. For all of them, though, the most consequential vote they could cast next year would be to elect a member of their party as the Speaker of the House. If the Democrats win a House majority, then they will get to form committees, approve hearings, organize investigations, and schedule votes. The world will be different—mostly in the sense that those of us currently shut out of the system will have a chance to take part again. It’s both unfair and unwise to elect people, even very good ones, and then consider our part of the job done.

If you think about it this way, it’s a little easier to swallow your hurt and disappointment when the DNC does stupid stuff. Elections are not about electing saints, or giving power to parties who will then automatically do the right thing. Elections are about electing people whom you can then push effectively to do more. As FDR is said to have told labor leaders: “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”

Hillary Clinton would have been far, far better as a president than Trump not just because she’s sane and competent, but because she would have been susceptible to pressure from those who care about, say, the planet’s future. Bernie would have been great, too—but as I told him at the start of his primary campaign, “I’m happy to stump for you, but if you’re elected you’ll doubtless find me chained to the White House gate six months later, pushing you to do more.”

The moral choices are: Do I get arrested to take a stand? Do I devote many hours of this day to making phone calls when I’d rather be making dinner? Election day, oddly, is the only day not to make moral choices. It’s the day for clear-eyed logic to rule. Which of these people makes it easier for us to make progress? And this fall, even more than most, the answer couldn’t be clearer. Even if you’re seeing red, think blue.

ALSO SEE: Twitter Suspends Conspiracy Theorist Alex Jones for 1 Week

Censorship Does Not End Well

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

15 August 18

How America learned to stop worrying and put Mark Zuckerberg in charge of everything

ilicon Valley is changing its mind about censorship.

Two weeks ago, we learned about a new campaign against “inauthentic” content, conducted by Facebook in consultation with Congress and the secretive think tank Atlantic Council — whose board includes an array of ex-CIA and Homeland Security officials — in the name of cracking down on alleged Russian disinformation efforts.­ As part of the bizarre alliance of Internet news distributors and quasi-government censors, the social network zapped 32 accounts and pages, including an ad for a real “No Unite the Right 2” anti-racist counter-rally in D.C. this past weekend.

“This is a real protest in Washington, D.C. It is not George Soros. It is not Russia. It is just us,” said the event’s organizers, a coalition of easily located Americans, in a statement.

Last week, we saw another flurry of censorship news. Facebook apparently suspended VenezuelaAnalysis.com, a site critical of U.S. policy toward Venezuela. (It was reinstated Thursday.) Twitter suspended a pair of libertarians, including @DanielLMcAdams of the Ron Paul Institute and @ScottHortonShow of Antiwar.com, for using the word “bitch” (directed toward a man) in a silly political argument. They, too, were later re-instated.

More significantly: Google’s former head of free expression issues in Asia, Lokman Tsui, blasted the tech giant’s plan to develop a search engine that would help the Chinese government censor content.

First reported by The Intercept, the plan was called “a stupid, stupid move” by Tsui, who added: “I can’t see a way to operate Google search in China without violating widely held international human rights standards.” This came on the heels of news that the Israeli Knesset passed a second reading of a “Facebook bill,” authorizing courts to delete content on security grounds.

Few Americans heard these stories, because the big “censorship” news last week surrounded the widely hated Alex Jones. After surviving halting actions by Facebook and YouTube the week before, the screeching InfoWars lunatic was hit decisively, removed from Apple, Facebook, Google and Spotify.

Jones is the media equivalent of a trench-coated stalker who jumps out from from behind a mailbox and starts whacking it in an intersection. His “speech” is on that level: less an idea than a gross physical provocation. InfoWars defines everything reporters are taught not to do.

Were I Alex Jones, I would think Alex Jones was a false-flag operation, cooked up to discredit the idea of a free press.

Moreover, Jones probably does violate all of those platforms’ Terms of Service. I personally don’t believe his Sandy Hook rants — in which he accused grieving parents of being actors in an anti-gun conspiracy — are protected speech, at least not according to current libel and defamation law. Even some conservative speech activists seem to agree.

And yet: I didn’t celebrate when Jones was banned. Collectively, all these stories represent a revolutionary moment in media. Jones is an incidental player in a much larger narrative.

Both the Jones situation and the Facebook-Atlantic Council deletions seem an effort to fulfill a request made last year by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Last October, Facebook, Google and Twitter were asked by Hawaii Senator Mazie Hizono to draw up a “mission statement” to “prevent the foment of discord.”

Companies like Facebook might have balked before. They have long taken a position that’s very Star Trek, very Prime-Directive: We do not interfere. Mark Zuckerberg, as late as 2016, was saying, “editing content… that’s not us.”

Part of this reluctance was probably ideological, but the main thing was the sheer logistical quandary of monitoring published content on the scale of a firm like Facebook. The company now has 2.23 billion users, and experts estimate that’s more than a billion new entries to monitor daily.

Although it might have seemed minor, undertaking what Facebook did prior to 2016 — keeping porn and beheading videos out of your news feed — was an extraordinarily involved technical process.

This was underscored by fiascoes like the “Napalm Girl” incident in 2016, when the firm deleted a picture of Kim Phúc, the nine-year-old Vietnamese girl photographed running from napalm in 1972. The iconic picture helped reverse global opinion about the Vietnam War.

Facebook ultimately put the photo back up after being ripped for “abusing its power.” This was absurd: The photo had been flagged by mostly automated processes, designed to keep naked pictures of pre-teens off the site.

As a former Facebook exec tells Rolling Stone: “Knowing that ‘Napalm Girl’ is one of the icons of international journalism isn’t part of the fucking algo.”

It would seem like madness to ask companies to expand that vast automated process to make far more difficult intellectual distinctions about journalistic quality. But that has happened.

After Trump’s shocking win in 2016, everyone turned to Facebook and Google to fix “fake news.” But nobody had a coherent definition of what constitutes it.

Many on the left lamented the Wikileaks releases of Democratic Party emails, but those documents were real news, and the complaint there was more about the motives of sources, and editorial emphasis, rather than accuracy.

When Google announced it was tightening its algorithm to push “more authoritative content” last April, it defined “fake news” as “…blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information.”

Soviet-era author Isaac Babel once said the only right Stalin had taken away was “writing badly.” He was joking. Google was apparently serious about targeting “low quality.” What exactly does that mean?

It isn’t clear, but within short order, a whole range of alternative sites (from Alternet to Truthdig to the World Socialist Website) started complaining about significant drops in traffic, apparently thanks to changed search processes.

Within a year, Google bragged that it had deleted 8 million videos from YouTube. A full 6.7 million videos were caught by machines, 1.1 million by YouTube’s own “trusted flaggers” (we’re pre-writing the lexicon of the next dystopian novels), and 400,000 by “normal users.”

Subsequently, we heard that Facebook was partnering with the Atlantic Council — which, incidentally, accepts donations from at least 25 different foreign countries, including United Arab Emirates and the king of Bahrain, in addition to firms like weapons manufacturer Raytheon and my old pals at HSBC — to identify “potential abuse.”

Now that we’ve opened the door for ordinary users, politicians, ex-security-state creeps, foreign governments and companies like Raytheon to influence the removal of content, the future is obvious: an endless merry-go-round of political tattling, in which each tribe will push for bans of political enemies.

In about 10 minutes, someone will start arguing that Alex Jones is not so different from, say, millennial conservative Ben Shapiro, and demand his removal. That will be followed by calls from furious conservatives to wipe out the Torch Network or Anti-Fascist News, with Jacobin on the way.

We’ve already seen Facebook overcompensate when faced with complaints of anti-conservative bias. Assuming this continues, “community standards” will turn into a ceaseless parody of Cold War spy trades: one of ours for one of yours.

This is the nuance people are missing. It’s not that people like Jones shouldn’t be punished; it’s the means of punishment that has changed radically.

For more than half a century, we had an effective, if slow, litigation-based remedy for speech violations. The standards laid out in cases like New York Times v. Sullivan were designed to protect legitimate reporting while directly remunerating people harmed by bad speech. Sooner or later, people like Alex Jones would always crash under crippling settlements. Meanwhile, young reporters learned to steer clear of libel and defamation. Knowing exactly what we could and could not get away with empowered us to do our jobs, confident that the law had our backs.

If the line of defense had not been a judge and jury but a giant transnational corporation working with the state, journalists taking on banks or tech companies or the wrong politicians would have been playing intellectual Russian roulette. In my own career, I’d have thought twice before taking on a company like Goldman Sachs. Any reporter would.

Now the line is gone. Depending on the platform, one can be banned for “glorifying violence,” “sowing division,” “hateful conduct” or even “low quality,” with those terms defined by nameless, unaccountable executives, working with God Knows Whom.

The platforms will win popular support for removals by deleting jackasses like Jones. Meanwhile, the more dangerous censorship will go on in the margins with fringe opposition sites — and in the minds of reporters and editors, who will unconsciously start retreating from wherever their idea of the line is.

The most ominous development involves countries asking for direct cleansing of opposition movements, a la China’s search engine, or Tel Aviv’s demands that Facebook and Google delete pages belonging to Palestinian activists. (This happened: Israel’s justice minister said last year that Facebook granted 95 percent of such requests.)

Google and Facebook have long wrestled with the question of how to operate in politically repressive markets — Google launched a censored Chinese search engine in 2006, before changing its mind in 2010 — but it seems we’re seeing a kind of mass surrender on that front.

The apparent efforts to comply with government requests to help “prevent the foment of discord” suggest the platforms are moving toward a similar surrender even in the United States. The duopolistic firms seem anxious to stay out of headlines, protect share prices and placate people like Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who just said deleting Jones was only a “good first step.”

Americans are not freaking out about this because most of us have lost the ability to distinguish between general principles and political outcomes. So long as the “right” people are being zapped, no one cares.

But we should care. Censorship is one of modern man’s great temptations. Giving in to it hasn’t provided many happy stories.