Free Speech For Me, But Not For Thee

It is a truth increasingly, if not universally, acknowledged that the Democratic Party hates democracy .In fact, it absolutely loathes democracy. Its refusal to schedule any presidential primary debates is bad enough. But it's now reached the point where that most sacrosanct pillar of liberalism - the First Amendment to the US Constitution - has been rendered anathema to the experts of the liberal class.

Why? Because a trio of federal appellate court judges has ruled that the Biden administration overstepped its bounds in pressuring the social media giants of Silicon Valley to censor content  Since the lawsuit was brought by a couple of Republican states' attorneys from Missouri and Louisiana, it is dismissively described by the New York Times as a "victory for conservatives." It is not only not something to be celebrated by liberals, this upholding of speech rights is something to be chagrined about. The immediate implication in the Times article is that if Republicans support a good thing, it is automatically demoted to a bad thing, or at least a thing that is highly suspect.

Democratic critics of the court ruling say that the Biden administration and its adjacent federal bureau of investigation were only trying to suppress information about the Covid pandemic that was not based upon scientific fact. These posts contained unsanctioned discourse about vaccines, masks, medication and lockdowns which the government deemed to be false and dangerous.

It's being sold as a battle between (noble) Sanctioned Information and (malign) Unsanctioned information. But at its heart it is the class war between unfettered capitalism and any freelance discourse that threatens the profits of unfettered capitalism.

The legal skirmish is even more specifically between and among the infinite varieties of snake oil. Truth or falsity is not the issue. The issue is who gets to control the production of the snake oil.

The Ivermectin treatment for Covid, for example, may or may not be bogus. It may or may not be efficacious.  That controversy is beyond my expertise and purview - and anyway, it is not the point. The point is that alternative medicine, particularly of the unpatented or patent-expired kind, might endanger the profits of Big Pharma.

Snake oil salesmen have always been an integral part of the American landscape. Plenty of people have died over the years and the centuries by relying on the little liver pills advertised in what used to be a wealth of periodicals in this country, the magnetic gizmos to cure disease and the Goop and the blood plasma transfusions for eternal youth. And of course, there's the old standby of simply praying away whatever ails people. Nobody ever said that free speech and religious cults had to be perfectly reasonable, sane or beneficent. Bullshit has always been baked into this human-inhabited planet of ours.

Not for nothing is the Times article on the First Amendment ruling written by a reporter who works on the "Misinformation Desk."  Whether this new beat is a warning that the Times itself is misinforming you is left unsaid. But Pulitzer Prize-winner Steven Lee Myers immediately sets the desired snake oil tone, albeit one with the requisite gravitas. He is qualified to write about misinformation, insinuates a blurb appended to his article, because he once wrote a whole book about Putin. His misinformation expertise spans the entire globe, as a matter of fact.

So right off the bat,  it is incumbent to describe the First Amendment ruling as purely a Republican thing. That the liberal ACLU crowd also approves the Appellate decision only gets a brief mention several paragraphs in - only once readers already have been triggered to despise it.  Myers finally also allows that "others" besides Republicans also are not okay with government censorship. But as an example of this outlying otherness opposed to government censorship, he gives us Robert F Kennedy Jr, -  who, besides defending the First Amendment, is also described as an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist.

How do you know that journalism in the public interest has gone the way of the rotary phone? When the Paper of Record sees fit to replace its Climate Desk with a Misinformation Desk

Misinformation is a fluid word, interchangeable with Disinformation and the even more dreaded Malinformation.  It can be defined as any information, whether it be true, false or in-between, that does not pass the smell test of the delicate upturned noses of the Established Order. Information must always be disbursed from on high and never from the ground up. Brains must be well-credentialed, preferably from the Ivy League and well-funded think tanks. That is why the Times and other corporate media outlets will never, ever admit that their own Russiagate narrative was and is a huge hoax, born fully formed of the 2016 electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton. That is why the Paper of Record's own current disinformation campaign is insisting that the millions of premature deaths and the lifelong disabilities from Covid 19 are just like the seasonal flu. If their cherry-picked "experts" are unconcerned about the latest surge of new strains, then neither should you be. Cases are mild, especially if you're a celebrity with concierge health care and live-in help. Any information to the contrary makes you a mere personal anecdote-spreader. If some vulnerable people are "falling by the wayside," in the unfortunate euphemistic words of Dr. Anthony Fauci, that's just the way the eugenics cookie crumbles.

The First Amendment has been tacitly amended, you see. It may not be invoked by the lower orders or by other renegades or heretics or irresponsible people, especially those belonging to the wrong political party or refusing to join any political party at all. The only safe snake oil is the kind that is well-dressed, smells heavenly, and is bottled in expensive crystal decanters. Ir is usually only accessible to, and accepted by, those with the disposable incomes with which to unlock a Times paywall or to afford a cable subscription.

The Times article on the court ruling, what with its Pulitzer stamp of approval, therefore fairly reeks of class snobbery, as do most of the subscriber responses to it. Not only was the legal decision upholding the First Amendment rendered in the deep South (New Orleans) it was rendered by a mere three judges. The backwardness of the thing is a given.

Although the First Amendment says nothing specific about an inherent human right to free speech, and only bars the government from policing speech, the Times is having none of it. It actually euphemizes the ongoing censorship efforts as "the government's ability to combat false and misleading narratives about the pandemic, voting rights and other issues that spread on social media."

That sentence broadcasts sloppy lazy thinking and/or deliberate, misdirecting vagueness. The conflation of the various conflicting theories and studies about a misunderstood series of diseases caused by Covid with easily debunked lies about polling places and election dates is ridiculous on its face. And even if you think it's ridiculous, then you are urged to take the next suggested step and get all freaked out about all the unnamed "other issues" that spread like deadly pathogens all over the Internet!

The  newspaper does not, of course, directly critique the Biden White House, the FBI, the Surgeon General or the Centers For Disease Control for their own mal-informative actions, such as as precipitously and falsely declaring the pandemic to be over. It certainly has not examined or retracted its own mal-informative reporting about the contrived and debunked Russiagate narrative with which it explains the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the rise of Trump and Trumpism. You see, the snake oil being dispensed from the crystal vials of capitalistic media has been fully tested and approved. It atomizes the doses into a fine mist, keeping you alternately anesthetized and coked up with partisan rage. It aims to choke people into a state of atomized, isolated helplessness.

In its official response to the Appellate Court, the White House doubled down, tripled down, infinity-downed and sprayed its own snake oil with toxic abandon: 

“This administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections,” the White House said in a statement. “Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people but make independent choices about the information they present.”

Of course, congress could pass a law reversing the protections that social media behemoths currently enjoy from libel or slander suits brought by injured parties. But that might damage the government's self-assigned role as censorship police.

Whatever happened to the idea that the best weapon against bad speech is better speech? The government and the ruling class it serves, however, find it more expedient to counter what they deem to be bad speech with lies and disinformation that suits their own agenda and serves their own needs. If they spritz out their nostrums often enough, the hope is that the body politic will have no other recourse but to helplessly absorb them by osmosis, making them integral parts of their being. 

A Pox On All Their Docs

The federal indictment of Donald Trump and his valet might  have a very P.G. Wodehouse feel about  it, were it not for one humorless twist. When wealthy Bertie Wooster was  accused of a theft, as he was in every single story in the series, his faithful man Jeeves would always come to the rescue. Not in real life, though, given that Trump's own faithful valet has been indicted right along with him. The objective seems to be to pressure Jeeves into turning state's evidence against Bertie.

You didn't think that Trump would haul all those boxes of files into his MAGA-Largo bathroom himself, did you? 

If the former president had any sense, as I wrote in a previous post, he would defend his theft of the top-secret documents by claiming that he needed them for research on his memoirs, or at least that he was only storing them prior to the eventual conversion of his mansion into a very serious public presidential library. All he needed to do was to bullshit the National Archives about his pure and scholarly motivations. As it was, he was so oafish that he was caught on tape admitting that he should have declassified the papers while he was still president.

Also - has the man never heard of digitization? Has he never heard of the deficit-defeating Paperwork Reduction Act? How easily could he have spilled precious state secrets to his cronies via his smartphone. 

 And since the New York Times had once made a big  blockbuster story of his penchant for flushing papers down the White House toilet, he might even have pled that he thought the boxed bathroom stash were rolls and rolls of the Angel Soft that he'd hoarded during the Great Pandemic Toilet Paper Panic.

Then again, Trump never thought of himself as the steward of a sovereign nation. In speeches, he very often confused the words "country" and "company." As the CEO, he assumed that his golden parachute would protect him into perpetuity, or at least until such time as he could claw his way back from enforced retirement to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

But back to the indictment, coming so quickly on the heels of the Stormy Daniels court proceeding in New York and the civil liability verdict for libeling and lying about his department store rape victim. It seems obvious that despite its legal merit under the all-purpose Espionage Act. this prosecution right on the very cusp of Decision '24 is politically motivated. The Espionage Act itself was enacted out of pure political paranoia during World War I. It was  aimed not so much at the German spies allegedly infiltrating the United States, but against the thousands of  American citizens who were critical of Woodrow Wilson's entry into the war. The law's most famous victim was labor leader Eugene Debs, who spent 10 years in jail for very obliquely criticizing US foreign policy in a speech at Madison Square Garden. The very sweeping generalities implicit in the Espionage Act are precisely why it remains enshrined in law right up to the present time. The neocon, neoliberal thugs of the permanent ruling order are using the judicial system to force Trump out of the presidential race, whether he does it willingly or not. There's a reason they're going after him on document theft rather than for instigating an electoral coup.  Indicting Trump for the January 6 riot, or insurrection, or whatever you want to call it would implicate the entire ruling order itself, including the military establishment which sat on its heels for hours as the mob roamed the capitol in, let's be honest, a rather lackadaisical manner.

Trump might even be considered a sympathetic victim were it not for the fact that he himself had embraced the Espionage Act in the indictment of Wikileaks' Julian Assange. So no, we shouldn't feel sorry for him at all. This is a guy who can't even assemble a new team of lawyers let alone score a butler who's smarter than he is.

To the great disappointment of the New York Times, his fans didn't even follow through with the dire expert forecasts of violent riots in front of the Miami courthouse once he was booked and fingerprinted. The arrest of Trump sadly didn't segue into a full-scale fascist revolution, which would have justified even more surveillance and targeting of regular people.

As the Gray Lady ruefully reported, 

Twice in recent months, allies of former President Donald J. Trump have used violent language to criticize the criminal charges brought against him, calling for vengeance and encouraging Mr. Trump’s supporters to respond to the indictments as though they were acts of war.

Both times — first in April in Manhattan and then on Tuesday in Miami — police and civic leaders raised concerns that the angry rhetoric could lead to violent protests when Mr. Trump appeared in court. Both times, in both cities, the crowds that actually showed up for Mr. Trump were relatively tame and fairly small.

These regular people who've shockingly taken to using speech as a deadly weapon and a threat to the ruling order  not only include Trump supporters, they include challengers to the Democratic Party from the left,  including Cornel West and, to a lesser extent, Robert Kennedy Jr. Why else would the centrists of establishment media and the duopoly always make a point of falsely accusing the left of forging unholy alliances with the right? It's really bottom-up resistance that they fear and despise, and which they cynically accuse of being "violent."

Speech itself (First Amendment be damned) is under attack by a new breed of reactionary, repressive liberal. Their more frequent use of the term "violent speech" is ominous because it implies that words themselves might end up getting criminalized. This is, after all, exactly how the grotesquely still-extant Espionage Act was first used against dissidents and critics more than a century ago.

Some Thoughts On the First Amendment

 The First Amendment only prevents the government from censoring speech. It does not require private companies to provide a platform for all comers to exercise their rights to free speech. Twitter, Facebook and other media firms and publishing outlets are well within their legal rights to kick Donald Trump and other bad actors off their platforms.

The danger occurs when these giant media monoliths partner with the government in order to impose this censorship. A case can, in fact, be made that our corporate ultra-consolidated media and and our corporate-captured and owned government are one and the same entity. At the very least, they are partners in the exact same oligarchic enterprise. Ironically, for all the talk of Trump being a fascist, one of the key elements of fascism is the melding of government and corporations. This true coup against democracy long preceded his election to the highest office in the land. In fact, this coup is what enabled his rise to political power in the first place.

Therefore, the expulsion of Donald Trump and his followers from these private platforms, these unaccountable platforms which have forged unhealthily close ties to the CIA and the Democratic Party, might feasibly lead to the silencing of any voice that the "establishment" or the "ruling class" or the "deep state" or whatever you want to call the permanent structure of money and power, decides that it doesn't like.

Never mind the spectre of "trickle-down" censorship. This censorship is already occurring. Google, for one, has been exposed as using its secret algorithm to suppress search results on the Internet. A secretive group calling itself "Prop Or Not" arose in 2016, publishing a list of some hundred blogs and media outlets purported to be under the control of the Kremlin. There's more than one way to suppress content other than imposing outright censorship. There are smear campaigns and intimidation tactics galore to get undesirable voices to shut up, be cancelled or just ignored.

The failed Trump-enabled putsch at the Capitol last week could be just the newest, niftiest incentive that these powerful people need to clamp down on unpopular or "divisive" rhetoric and protest movements in the name of "national security." They clamped down with a vengeance after 9/11, with the Patriot Act. How ironic that Trump cultists' favorite name for themselves is "patriots" who are trying to "take our freedoms back" from the very architects of the Patriot Act.

We have to stay vigilant, especially as it now appears that there are plenty more dirty hands than Donald Trump's involved in last week's massive breach. Latest reports indicate that forces within the Pentagon itself may have been involved, and that it was Congressional leaders who balked at National Guard troops guarding the capital as a preventive measure because of the "bad optics" such militarization of the halls of "democracy" would broadcast.

Even as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi moves in a high state of emergency to impeach Trump for a second time for inciting a riot, her lieutenant James Clyburn tamps down expectations for swift justice by calling for a hundred-day delay in sending the lone impeachment article to the Senate for trial. This delay would ostensibly allow President Biden to put the Senate to better use enacting his economic agenda.

We'll soon find out what that agenda will be. Early indications are that conservative Democratic senator Joe Manchin will be the party's designated fall guy, or bad cop, for continuing Democratic inaction on a sweeping pandemic relief package. The bright spot is that more and more of us can detect ass-covering whenever we see it.

The key word is vigilance (as opposed to the top-down orchestrated vigilantism in service to a billionaire we saw last week.) We have to keep covering the ass-covering and speaking out like there is no tomorrow. 

If our elected leaders really do care about the rise of right-wing extremism in the United States, they'll emulate FDR, who stopped American fascism right in its tracks in the 1930s with the New Deal legislation.

Give people money. Give people health care. Give people jobs. With their dignity restored, maybe they won't feel so aggrieved and so prone to fall under the spell of another cult leader charlatan like Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, the private media companies arrogating to themselves the power to squelch speech should be broken up and the entire Internet should be made a public utility. That way, the entire public and its court system - not the billionaire tech CEOs - would be the final arbiters of the First Amendment.

Oh, and let's also consider restoring the Fairness Doctrine and legislate broadcasting in the public interest.

Tall orders for sure, but why stop at just one solution to the "friendly fascism" that's been operating in this country for most of our lifetimes?

Once In Love With Bernie....

 The reputation and standing of Bernie Sanders within the Democratic Party is more important to him than his delegates' First Amendment rights to free speech. Therefore, in hopes of avoiding another outbreak of democratic protest against another rigging of another primary election, the Sanders campaign is demanding that his hundreds of delegates sign a pledge to never, ever publicly "attack" presumptive nominee Joe Biden or any other party bigwig. They must also never disparage mainstream journalists, consultants, cable news shows and party spokespeople.

As a delegate who worked his or her heart out for Bernie, anything you say, or any independent thought that you publicly express, is as good as coming from the mouth of Bernie himself. As such, according to the warning salvo:

 “Before tweeting or posting from your personal social media accounts,ask yourself these questions: If this appeared on the front page of The New York Times, would it compromise Bernie Sanders’s message, credibility, or reputation? Could it potentially risk your standing as a delegate? When re-tweeting or sharing information from others, are you applying necessary skepticism?”

His team is also asking that each delegate sign a nondisclosure agreement, lest any revolution that is not a slogan be televised, live-streamed, shared on social media,  written on comment boards and Internet chat rooms in any way, shape, or form. Refusal to promise to keep your mouth shut will pre-empt your participation in the convention.  If you break the agreement by, for instance, merely talking to a reporter or tweeting a renegade thought while at the convention, you will be kicked out. You may not take candid photos backstage or at "closed press events."

These admonitions presuppose that there will be an actual physical convention as the Covid-19 pandemic rages on and Joe Biden has yet to emerge from his basement bunker.  

If you do go to the live or virtual convention and breach the agreement that you signed, you must immediately surrender to the proper authorities and fess up. To wit:

"If you believe you have made a substantive mistake, alert staff on the Delegates Team to determine a course of action. Deleting something does not make it go away. Do not take action before consulting the Delegates Team."

And you must also promise to snitch on your fellow Bernie delegates if you discover them exercising their First Amendment rights without prior approval. At the same time, you must promise not to retaliate against anyone - say, a Biden delegate - who chooses to exercise his or her own First Amendment rights by acting confrontational or rude. You must turn the other cheek and remain silent, as is your right whenever you're arrested and handcuffed.

Although he has suspended his campaign, Sanders remains on the ballot in remaining primary states in the belief that the more muzzled, cowed delegates that he can amass, the more leverage he will exert over Biden and the corporate wing of the party. Actually, with few progressives even raising an eyebrow over the most massive congressional transfer of wealth to the already wealthy under the CARES Act, is there any other wing but the right-wing, corporate one?

As the Washington Post reports, his strict rules against free speech are angering some of Bernie's delegates. One of them already broke the rules by leaking the five pages of rules to the newspaper, without obtaining the express prior permission of the Sanders campaign.

So we'll have to wait and see whether Bernie Sanders's confident prediction that "at the end of the day, they'll be voting for Joe Biden" comes to pass.

His streak of authoritarianism probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise, since earlier this month he didn't even bother showing up to be the one necessary vote to block Senate passage of an expanded Patriot Act,  which allows the FBI to search your internet search history without a warrant. In effect, it allows what Bernie calls "the most dangerous president in history" to legally spy on you for any reason at all.

Bernie Sanders is refusing to comment or even say where he was during the crucial vote, which wielded one more death blow to what is left of our democracy and the Fourth Amendment.

Maybe he signed a pledge or non-disclosure agreement.

Wink, Nod, Bump, Grind, Repeat

Initial Thoughts On the Julian Assange Arrest

The right-wing nature of the corporate Democrats was on full display today as many liberals are openly celebrating the brazen arrest in the wee hours, USA time, of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange within his legal sanctuary of the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Investors in the #Russiagate propaganda franchise may have been embarrassed and their narrative debunked, but the damage it has done survives. Here's the top-rated reader comment from the New York Times article on Assange's arrest, on one charge of criminal conspiracy to hack a computer:

A Russian propaganda tool, that's all he is, and Wikileaks as well. Assange has severely harmed the United States and other western democracies at the bidding of Russia. Read Wikileaks if you don't believe me, try to find anything other than information harmful to the west. Wikileaks may have started as a legitimate sunlight tool, but was early on compromised and subverted to Russian interests.

This person and the nearly 800 liberal readers who approved this comment apparently believe that we should not be aware of the false pretenses under which the US invaded Iraq, and that we should have remained blissfully and serenely unaware of the film footage which showed American helicopter troops shooting journalists and civilians to death, just for the sheer sadistic fun of it.

I don't know what frightens me more: the Trump administration, or the fake #Resistance to it.

Here's my own published Times comment:

The press should not be breathing its sigh of relief that the Assange indictment is limited to an accusation of conspiracy to commit computer hacking, rather than charges of publishing stolen material. It seems that journalists covering this story and printing the leaked or stolen docs were worried that they'd be called as witnesses in this case and might even be deemed culpable themselves by our authoritarian, right-wing federal justice department.

But what is to prevent the lawless Trump administration from prosecuting the New York Times or any other media outlet with a similar "hacking" conspiracy in the future, based on a similarly evidence-free accusation that said outlet was not only the publisher of stolen documents but the actual thief of same? We're in the digital age now.

If you're celebrating Assange's arrest today on the grounds of some kind of vindication of the victimized Clinton campaign, you're siding with the authoritarian Trump regime and tacitly agreeing that the First Amendment isn't worth the parchment it's written on.

This has nothing to do with Julian Assange's personality or his motives. This has to do with the death of what is still left of both domestic and global democracy.

 Be careful what you cheer for. Your reliable sources of information are not as safe from the dangerous Trump regime as you might think they are.

The Times had approvingly noted that Assange was not charged, as many had feared, under the draconian Espionage Act, which could drag everybody who cooperatively published WikiLeaks documents down with Assange, but only with "egging on" Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence private, to download them.  If the media think they;re off the hook, they should have another think coming. 

There are some silver linings to Assange's arrest. First, the US and global corporate media will be forced to admit where their true allegiances lie. Will they start raising a stink about Chelsea Manning's cruel imprisonment for refusing to implicate Assange? Will they cover the story if Assange's rights to habeas corpus and a speedy trial are infringed upon, or worse, if he is "extraordinarily renditioned" to a CIA black site prison? Assange at least has the benefit of being a high profile figure, unlike hundreds or even thousands of previous nameless and faceless "enemy combatants."

 Second, Assange will presumably finally receive the medical and dental care that he needs. His life was definitely being shortened the longer that he stayed holed up in his virtual embassy prison.

 Third, any trial will require evidence. Although the Trump campaign itself has carefully been exempt from the indictment, which stems from alleged 2010 activities during the Obama administration, propagandists might actually have to admit that there is yet to be any concrete evidence that the DNC and Clinton campaign computers were "hacked" - either by Russia or by anybody else. The documents could simply have been downloaded and then leaked. The Clintonites, remember, refused to grant the FBI access to their servers, instead using a private security company to make their claims of Russian culpability.

Fourth, it forces public attention on legalized bribery as practiced by the US government and the International Monetary Fund which it controls to enforce its privatization and austerity regimens on poor countries. The current far-right corrupt government of Ecuador sold out Assange to the United States and the United Kingdom just weeks after receipt of a hefty IMF loan.

Assange could very well end up a free man. Extradition to the United States is not even a done deal, with some British media outlets like The Guardian already editorializing against it. Justice has been known to prevail at times, especially when the whole world is watching, and especially when much of the world is already adamantly opposed to Donald Trump and all he stands for.

This isn't over. 

The Accidental Indictment of Julian Assange

What many have long suspected has finally been confirmed. Julian Assange of Wikileaks is indeed under sealed federal criminal indictment.

The secret Assange indictment was (ahem) "accidentally" cut and pasted by prosecutors on an unrelated court filing where it sat ever so passive-aggressively until some roving reportorial eye finally spotted it. Or, more likely, was tipped off by an official who was not allowed to speak publicly because of the sensitivity of the matter. Oops.

Here's my suspicion: prosecutors and the spy/police agencies have been itching for years to get their anxious claws on the most famous whistleblower of all time, but could not do so for a number of reasons.

 First, they were loath to set a precedent by going after someone who, for all intents and purposes, is a publisher, and not a hacker or a thief. If embarrassed officials in the Bush and Obama administrations had charged or seized Assange, they would rightly have been seen as the enemies of the First Amendment that they were, and still are. And then there was the pesky little matter of Ecuador then being led by a socialist government who took the concept of democracy more seriously than the US hegemon.

Second, they would have been put in the awkward position of appearing hypocritical if they did not also indict the New York Times, the Washington Post, and all the other quasi-official house organs upon whom they traditionally rely to sell their wars and to selectively leak their self-serving secrets and "narratives" explaining why, for instance, we cannot have non-profit single payer health insurance.

 Such a messy court case against the free press would have dirtied the hands of all manner of corporatists working both within and without the government and the military-industrial-media complex.

But with the advent of Trump, the aromatic bloom on Assange's rose has sufficiently faded in the sensitive eyes and mental nostrils of the public. The man once lauded by liberals as a hero for his exposure of the war crimes of the Bush administration is now anathema because of x degrees of separation from the Trump victory over Hillary Clinton. And once the Wikileaks documents (from SONY and other Hollywood bigwigs, the Democratic Party, and the sordid Clinton campaign) began to surface during the Obama years, Assange quickly morphed from the most important and successful journalistic muckraker in modern history to a Russian stooge, a traitor, and worst of all, a good pal of the Donald Trump machine.

Therefore, the punishing surveillance and carceral state will bite while the biting is still good, realizing that the public will not only not make a stink about his arrest and extradition, they will be cheering it on like the good little authoritarian subjects that they are. London, moreover, is currently in a state of chaotic disarray because of the Brexit finale, so complicit British officials can thus be held harmless in the event of a midnight raid on the embassy. It helps that Ecuador, whose embassy currently shelters Assange, itself is now controlled by an authoritarian right-wing regime anxious for US dollars and protection at the expense of its own citizens. 

And last but not least, the increasingly cornered and legally jeopardized Trump can be made to appear "serious" about going after Putin by seriously going after Wikileaks, which he once sarcastically urged to release more of Hillary's emails in the closing days of the 2016 campaign.  

The only problem is that the US government seems to have zero proof that Assange acted in concert with either Russian operatives or Trump to publish the DNC and Clinton (via her adviser John Podesta's account) emails. Even the sycophantic press can only say, with the usual obfuscatory language, that the usual anonymous officials have "a high degree of certainty" that Assange and Trump and the Russians were all in cahoots to subvert our non-existing democracy. It's nothing but a vain and dogged attempt to translate mere suspicion into absolute proof in the minds of the audience.

The government has no case. 

But I see this as a glass half-full scenario for a number of reasons.

First, prosecutors will now be pressured to outline whatever case they do have against Assange sooner rather than later. Second, the "accidental" filing brings his plight back to the forefront of public discourse, where it belongs. While Assange has been holed up in the Ecuador Embassy in London for many years, both his mental and his physical health have reportedly deteriorated. If he is extradited back to the US, he will at least (presumably) have his teeth seen to. And should he be treated as cruelly as his Bush-era source, Chelsea Manning, was, and locked up in solitary for a lengthy period without a trial, the liberal class will be forced to confront its own hypocrisy as it pertains to its outrage over Trump's own serial assaults on the rule of law.

This will be especially true if Assange is charged as a terrorist or an enemy combatant and sent to the Guantanamo gulag, a military prison and even perhaps "renditioned" to a secret CIA black site.

The liberal class will rightly be made to feel uncomfortable making a stink about CNN's Jim Acosta being barred from the White House, and not making a similar stink about Julian Assange being prosecuted - or persecuted - for simply telling the truth about corrupt government and corporate officials.

Finally, the failure of prosecutors to bring an imprisoned Assange to trial in a timely, constitutional manner might even force them to admit that #Russiagate itself has always been nothing but a big fat propaganda campaign dreamed up by Clinton operatives as a tool to absolve her of any responsibility for her own loss. 

The New York Times, in its own account of the secret indictment filing, twisted itself into a pretzel by parroting the evidence-free propaganda that it was "Russian intelligence officers" - and not another inside or outside source - who stole the DNC emails and handed them over to Assange - while at  the same time tacitly acknowledging that Assange himself was merely acting as a publisher and a journalist. If it can happen to him, it can happen to them as well.

WikiLeaks published thousands of emailsthat year from Democrats during the presidential race that were stolen by Russian intelligence officers. The hackings were a major part of Moscow’s campaign of disruption.
Though the legal move against Mr. Assange remained a mystery on Thursday, charges centering on the publication of information of public interest — even if it was obtained from Russian government hackers — would create a precedent with profound implications for press freedoms.

If Assange does go on trial, the American media and the freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights will go on trial right along with him. Publishers and reporters will be called as witnesses by both the prosecution and defense and asked to explain why they chose to disseminate stolen information. The Fourth Estate, whose traditional mantra is to "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted" will be plopped center-stage in a legal and ethical drama which, for a refreshing change, might finally force them to play themselves rather than the trite group-thinking #Resistance against Donald Trump, fighters-for-hire in the service of the corrupt neoliberal system that produced Trump in the first place.  

Of course, the biggest spanner in the works of justice for Julian Assange could be Donald Trump himself, tweeting loud and tweeting often about how unfairly he thinks the Wikileaks founder is being treated and casting him as a major player on the same victimized-by-Mueller team. That might be the ultimate kiss of death for Assange in the court of liberal public opinion, which has already turned so hypocritically against him. 

The best thing that could happen to Assange would be for the ever-contradictory and unpredictable Trump to suddenly begin bellowing  "Lock Him Up!" at his Nuremberg-style rallies. And presto-change-o, the new enemy of their enemy would morph right back into being the best friend a liberal ever had.

Liberals are a fickle bunch. And stranger things have happened. Just look at their recent miraculous rehabilitation, if not downright beatification, of George W Bush.

Hillary's Hypocrisy Will Never Cease

Hillary Clinton, who as Secretary of State once allegedly joked in a cabinet meeting that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange should be droned to death for publishing state secrets, has now morphed into her newest role: champion of free speech and press freedoms in the Age of Trump.

For some reason, Clinton was invited to give the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture at PEN America's World Festival in New York City on Sunday night. As reported by Sopan Deb of the New York Times,

 She criticized Mr. Trump, not so subtly comparing him to authoritarian leaders who had suppressed journalism in their countries.

“Today, we have a president who seems to reject the role of a free press in our democracy,” she said. “Although obsessed with his own press coverage, he evaluates it based not on whether it provides knowledge or understanding, but solely on whether the daily coverage helps him and hurts his opponents.”

After listing more examples of Mr. Trump’s attacks on the news media, Mrs. Clinton said, “Now given his track record, is it any surprise that, according to the latest round of revelations, he joked about throwing reporters in jail to make them ‘talk’?”

This is highly ironic, given that when Clinton headed the State Department, she operated with a decidedly authoritarian bent herself when it came to the freedom of the press. While calling for a free and open internet abroad, and while praising the Arab Spring and the "Twitter and Facebook revolutions" inspired by Wikileaks, she doubled down on censorship at home. She went so far as to attempt purging Wikileaks from the web after it dumped embarrassing State Department cables for the whole world to see, covering everything from US war crimes and cover-ups to dirty tricks and petty gossip. One particularly cringe-worthy cable detailed how Clinton herself had ordered that all the plastic cups used by foreign diplomats at a U.N. conference be collected for DNA testing.

Meanwhile, her official 2011 Internet Freedom Agenda stated, “the internet has become the public space of the 21st century – the world’s town square, classroom, marketplace, coffeehouse, and nightclub. . . The value of these spaces derives from the variety of activities people can pursue in them, from holding a rally to selling their vegetables, to having a private conversation. These spaces provide an open platform, and so does the internet. It does not serve any particular agenda, and it never should.”

But as Timothy Garton Ash notes, this agenda simply did not and does not apply when it comes to the exercise of free speech within the United States itself. He calls it the Clinton Paradox:

When WikiLeaks, founded to release publicly significant information not published elsewhere, published information embarrassing to the US government, Clinton helped to co-ordinate action by government, banks and internet service providers to withdraw support from the organization and (unsuccessfully) remove it from the web. Other domestic policies likewise tend away from freedom and towards control. For example, the US Federal Communications Commission has now ruled that mobile devices are not subject to the net neutrality rules that prohibit discrimination of media content based on its source or destination.  Instead, mobile operators, who now control the means through which an increasing number of people go online, can block, throttle, or degrade any kind of content they like.  Most recently, the ominously named E-PARASITE bill was introduced into the US Congress. It stipulates that an internet service provider can be liable for any content or site that it delivers that has a “high probability” of being used for copyright infringement.  Critics of the bill claim that this provision could extend to almost any site that hosts user-generated content.

(Note: thanks in large part to freedom of expression on the internet, the "e-parasite bill" ultimately went down in defeat. But then came the destruction of net neutrality under Trump. Hillary did not address net neutrality during Sunday's "press freedom" speech and refused, as Wikileaks-released emails show, to champion it during her 2016 campaign. )

So it was something of a mystery to me why PEN, an organization of writers devoted to protecting the First Amendment and standing up to government censorship, would have invited Hillary Clinton to deliver their keynote address in the first place. So I went to the PEN website in search of clues. And I immediately got my answer.

It's the anti-Trump #Resistance, stupid! Writer-members have obediently and narrowly channeled their crusade for free self-expression into the vile person of Donald J. Trump, and only Donald J. Trump. He did, after all, just obligingly confirm their worst fears by joking he'd like to put reporters critical of his regime in jail for a couple of days to keep them in line. To be fair to Trump, though, this threat was merely on the say-so of fired FBI Director James Comey, who for his own jokey authoritarian part, also thinks it would be a fine idea to "put some (journalists' and leakers') heads on pikes" in this country if they start talking and writing too un-American. 

So I guess as far as PEN is concerned, the enemy of our enemies (Trump and Comey) is our friend, regardless of whether she would love to silence Wikileaks and jokily kill its founder. No matter that the Obama administration in which Hillary served was dubbed by former New York Times reporter James Risen "the greatest enemy of press freedoms in a generation" and that Barack Obama prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous regimes combined. The PEN blurb heralding Hillary's appearance gushes:

The theme of this year’s Festival—beginning April 16 and comprising more than 60 events across New York City—is Resist and Reimagine. The line-up will draw on global experiences, perspectives, and narratives to help light the way toward surmounting current crises here at home. At a time of unprecedented threats to free speech, open discourse, and the rights of historically marginalized groups​, Secretary Clinton will draw on her experience as the nation’s top diplomat and her ​career in politics​ to underline the centrality of free speech—broadly defined and vociferously defended—in sustaining healthy democracies and vibrant societies. Clinton has shown a life-long commitment to amplifying lesser-heard voices and buttressing safeguards for free expression.

Back in 2011, however, when Hillary Clinton was strenuously engaged in trying to purge Wikileaks from the Internet, and even allegedly calling for death to Assange, the PEN organization was vigorously defending him and his organization, and encouraging media outlets not to bow to government pressure against publishing the released documents. From its statement: 

The Wikileaks issue marks a significant turning point in the evolution of the media and the sometimes conflicting principles of freedom of expression and privacy and security concerns. The culture of increasing secrecy in governments and the rise of new technology will inevitably lead to an increasing number of transparency issues of this sort. PEN International believes it is important to acknowledge that while the leaking of government documents is a crime under U.S laws, the publication of documents by Wikileaks is not a crime. Wikileaks is doing what the media has historically done, the only difference being that the documents have not been edited.
PEN International urges those voicing opinions regarding the Wikileaks debate to adopt a responsible tone, and not to play to the more extreme sections of society. In a world where journalists are regularly physically attacked, imprisoned and killed with impunity, calling for the death of a journalist is irresponsible and deplorable.

Yet only two years later, a survey by the PEN organization revealed that many of its member-writers were feeling so cowed by Edward Snowden's revelations of mass NSA surveillance on US citizens that they had begun to self-censor. 

More than a quarter of the writers reported curtailing their time spent on the Internet and deliberately avoiding writing about and talking about certain topics in email and phone conversations. Another 16 percent admitted to censoring themselves in their articles and books. The majority of respondents thought that their activities were being monitored by the US government. The topics that they reported being afraid to write or talk about included military affairs, the Occupy movement, the Middle East and North Africa, mass incarceration, drug policies, pornography, the study of "certain languages," and criticism of the US government.

Fast forward another four years, and the fear and self-censorship have apparently reached soaring new heights. PEN invites Hillary Clinton, of all people, to lecture professional writers about freedom of speech.

 Arthur Miller must be rolling in his grave. 

 And Julian Assange is still a political prisoner, his own Internet connection completely cut off under pressure from the US government. The Democratic Party is even bizarrely suing him, along with his supposed co-conspirators Trump and Russia, for a "conspiracy" to steal the election from Hillary Clinton and thereby destroy American democracy.

For such a sore loser, Hillary Clinton has certainly turned out to be one hell of a big winner. She keeps right on ticking. And sadly, PEN seems to have become just one more inmate in what Firedoglake founder Jane Hamsher so pithily called the "veal pen."

Speaking Ill of Barbara Bush Is Deemed Un-American

Randa Jarrar, a tenured creative writing professor at Cal State Fresno, is being investigated by her employer for tweeting: "Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal.”

This amazing departure from the flood of hagiography on the late Barbara Bush has evoked the wrath of decent people and Internet trolls all over America. Their belief in the First Amendment is apparently not as important in their belief in Emily Post, not to mention their belief a wrathful Old Testament God.

It is deemed improper to speak ill of the dead no matter how awful they may have been in life. And when an awfully important and powerful person dies, it is especially incumbent upon all good nonthinking Americans to pretend that they were living saints, regardless of whether you "agreed" with them or not. Death is a magical thing to magical-thinking people. It bestows upon the corpse, especially the still-warm corpse, a glow of righteousness for the mere fact that it no longer breathes. Speak ill of the dead, and you risk the dead person striking you dead, whether it be from their exalted perch in heaven and from the lowest circle of Hell. Even the most enlightened and liberal Americans can harbor an atavistic belief in ghosts and divine retribution.

And even if you don't believe in ghosts, and you have not joined in lockstep awe of Barbara Bush, you should feel ashamed of yourself for dissing her while her loved ones are still grieving. This is despite the fact that her loved ones are not so grief-stricken themselves that they canceled their previously scheduled plutocratic confab in Dallas. (see my previous post.) Just like a multi-day wake, it will end on the very day of Barbara's funeral in a Christian church.

Even though some of America's richest people are now gathered together at Dubya's presidential shrine to talk about money and power and influence instead of gathering to pray for the Matriarch, Professor Randa Jarrar and all of you heretics should at least feel ashamed of yourselves for not being in lockstep with our beloved awesome liberal ex-presidents, who are falling all over themselves in awe of Barbara Bush. 

The Washington Post leads its own smear piece on the comparatively powerless Professor Jarrar by juxtaposing her irreverent tweet with the bland words of two of the most powerful men in the country:

In the hours after Barbara Bush died Tuesday, even those who didn’t share the former first lady’s political views expressed their condolences and recounted warm memories of the Bush family matriarch.

Former president Bill Clinton, the man who once campaigned against her husband, called Bush “a remarkable woman” with “grit & grace, brains & beauty.” Another former president, Barack Obama, said she had “humility and decency that reflects the very best of the American spirit.”

The Post then goes on to compare these calm and reasonable words with the "rants" of Jarrar against the Twitter backlash. 

School officials also said they were reviewing the tenured professor’s position.

More than 2,000 people had replied to Jarrar before she made her Twitter account private, the Sacramento Bee reported.

Some were upset at what they viewed as her incivility about a woman widely regarded as genteel.

For others, the sin was more basic: She had spoken ill of the dead.

Jarrar pointed to the comments as an example of “what it’s like to be an Arab American Muslim American woman with some clout online expressing an opinion.”

“Look at the racists going crazy in my mentions right now,” she tweeted.

The Post quotes the college's president as saying that Jarrar's "taunting" remarks (including her snarkily referring Twitter critics to a suicide prevention hotline) "were beyond free speech. This was disrespectful. A professor with tenure does not have blanket protection to say and do what they wish. We are all held accountable for our actions."

Well, not so much if you started an illegal war and "tortured some folks" as did the honored and rehabilitated George W. Bush, or if you destroyed the entire global economy, as did the Wall Street bankers. This is, after all, Exceptional America. In any event, Jarrar has apparently so threatened Fresno State that officials have now put "extra security" in place in order to safeguard the safe-thinking population who harbor nothing but kind words and thoughts about Mrs. Bush.  And for further protection, in appeasement to the wrathful etiquette gods, the campus flags were lowered to half staff,  and College Republicans have scheduled a memorial service in her honor.

In case that isn't enough paranoia and superstition, the public shaming and virtual stoning of the free-thinking Professor Jarrar has even migrated to the Kingdom of Amazon where trolls have posted hundreds of harsh reviews on her books (which they haven't read) and thus lowered her ratings.

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos, who owns both the Washington Post and Amazon, will deliver a sold-out speech at George W. Bush's shrine on Saturday. This appearance has nothing whatsoever to do with honoring Barbara Bush, and everything to do with burnishing his image and instilling hope in Dallas that he will pick that Texas city as his second US headquarters, at much taxpayer expense. 

Cash-strapped municipalities are in a virtual bidding war to become part of the Bezos Empire. In exchange for his promise to create an estimated 50,000 new low-paying jobs for the winning city, the winning city will be expected to foot the bill for the infrastructure to ensure the smooth and ceaseless flow of profits to the richest man in America as well the smooth and ceaseless flow of goods to America's good-thinking citizen-consumers.

Only in America could this oligarch, whose employees are so poorly paid that they qualify for food stamps and Medicaid, enjoy the respect and a greater right to free speech than a professor whose talent and specialty is creative writing. 

She not only thinks independently, she's in the business of teaching young people to think independently and then to convey those thoughts to others via the power of the written word. Randa Jarrar is therefore deemed to be a clear and present danger.

If you still had any doubts that the USA is a full-blown fascist state with repressive religious undertones, you might as well disabuse yourself of them right now.  

Sinclair Lewis was right. Fascism arrived cloaked in the American flag, emblazoned with a cross, as evidenced most recently on the campus of Fresno State.

Corporate Media Goes Full Frankenweenie

The elite media sewing circle of neoliberalism, having spent years assembling the Trump monster, now faces the daunting task of trying to rip their creation apart at the seams. Much to their chagrin, however, the creature is poking them right back in their tender little eyeballs with their own sharp needles.

Donald Trump has had the absolute gall to call them a monstrous Enemy of the People in one of those endless Tweets that always seem to convulse them in such painful stitches.

The actual people, whose trust in the mainstream media was already at a record low before the election of Trump, are not exactly taking the side of the six major news conglomerates controlling 90% of everything we are allowed to see, hear, and read in this tawdry little turnabout.

Therefore, it's time for unraveling pundits and media stars across the centrist spectrum to gin up some outrage on behalf of themselves, to cast themselves as the latest and most important victims of Trumpism. If you listen to them talk about Trump's recent press conference instead of just watching it for yourself,  you might be under the impression that The Donald is maniacally shutting down all the networks and newspapers, rounding up all the journalistic suspects, burning a whole bunch of books, and otherwise destroying the First Amendment.

 You might forget all about the root cause of Trump's rage, which is the torrent of leaks about his chaotic administration coming out of the Intelligence Community and other government bureaucracies. You might forget that the media has aligned itself with the Deep State in order to bring Trump down in the interest of their own self-interest -- which is the continuing militarized dominance of the Exceptional USA.

You might also forget that even before Trump's dogged "war" on the media, the majority of American writers for years have reported self-censoring out of fear of Deep State government surveillance.

Although the manufactured outrage of the churnalistic class runs as wide and as deep as its characteristic shallowness allows, for now I'll just comment on two of the self-pitying screeds emanating from the august pages of the New York Times.

Frank Bruni has gone way beyond pain. The needle in his eyeballs apparently has been tipped with Novocaine, because Trump has left him feeling absolutely numb.

 He forces you to process and react to so many different outrages at such a dizzying velocity that no one of them has the staying power that it ought to or gets the scrutiny it deserves.

They blend together under the numbing banner of what a freak show he can be, of Trump being Trump. And so the show screams on.

Part of this excess is his nature. Part of it is design. Not by accident did he put on that 77-minute performance for the media — hurling insults, flinging lies, marinating in self-pity, luxuriating in self-love — just three days after the resignation of his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and amid intensifying questions about collusion between Team Trump and the Russians.

Bruni should perhaps ponder whether the media "intensification" of the Russia "questions" could be the real cause of his debilitating condition. It is so tiring to make stuff up, especially after you've already spent over a year helping to stitch together a $5 billion free advertising campaign for the monster. 

Here's my published comment:

Day after day, week after week, month after month, the media has been giving Trump exactly what he wants: nonstop attention.

He's a master provocateur and the media is an easy mark. Trump acts, media reacts, Trump counter-reacts, ad infinitum. You think you're exhausted, Mr. Bruni? Just for once, I'd love to read a column of yours that didn't have Trump or one of his fascist pals at its quaking epicenter.

He didn't have a "meltdown" at his presser - the press did. He was in absolute control of his own theater. I'm even starting to wonder whether his "mental illness" is also feigned, to keep us hopping in search of the latest diagnosis. There's a method to his alleged madness. After all, many a CEO and professional actor and politician has similar, albeit more muted, characteristics on "the spectrum."

 What if he gave a press conference or delivered a speech that media refused to broadcast or live-blog? What if only two pool reporters clambered aboard Air Force One for the weekly jaunts to his Florida club? What if Trump burped out a Tweet and we failed to get insulted, gradually weaning ourselves from the constant contest to outdo each other with the cleverest riposte?

Trump is nothing but constant belches of fetid hot air. The courts are thus far thwarting his directives. So are the people. So instead of simply reacting to him, let's be proactive and demand of the whole system the social and economic justice we deserve.

Treat Trump as a symptom, not as the disease.

Now we come to Maureen Dowd, who claims to have been so well acquainted with Trump over the past several decades that she practically had him on speed dial throughout the campaign, even dishing about the private luncheon she enjoyed with him in his Tower. The tone throughout the electoral season was that he was such a narcissistic goof, who could possibly take him seriously.

Now she's been forced to change her tune to save her own credibility. But far from being as numbed and enervated as Bruni, she finds herself melodramatically Trapped in Trump's Brain.

 It’s a very cluttered place to be, a fine-tuned machine spewing a torrent of chaos, cruelty, confusion, farce and transfixing craziness. Of course, this is merely the observation of someone who is “the enemy of the American people,” according to our president....

Like all narcissists, he doesn’t like to be told if he’s screwing up, so he surrounds himself with people who don’t tell him.

The president is still oblivious about the shudder that went through the land, beyond the base that likes seeing the press jackals flayed, during his gobsmacking 77-minute masterpiece of performance art in the White House Thursday.

It was more Norma Desmond than Norman Vincent Peale, the Trump family pastor who wrote “The Power of Positive Thinking” and influenced Donald’s thinking as a child.

There must be something wrong with me, because I didn't shudder once during his presser, despite being as far away in left field from his "base" as you can probably get. I admit that I guffawed at some parts, cringed at many parts, and gasped at other parts. But for some reason, I failed to totally freak out. I also have to admit that I enjoyed seeing some of the self-important hacks getting told off for futilely needling and "fact-checking" the guy who just can't seem to help his mendacious self. Trump knows full well that most people don't care which president got the most electoral votes in all of history.

 Dowd's attempt at wicked needlepoint, complete with the decorative Sunset Boulevard edging, fails for once to mention Hillary Clinton's role in all this drama. It just so happens, though, that Hillary met Norma Desmond in person at about the same time that Trump was delivering his own garish bravura performance.

  My published response to Maureen:

 Of course Ms. Dowd is not an "enemy of the American people." But neither has she consistently performed journalism in the public interest this past campaign season, what with her throbbing Trump soap opera disguised as an ever so clickable series of columns.

So now she's joining the pack of corporate newshounds in a ravening quest to bring down the same fox they so recently went out of their way to feed and pamper.

Oh My Poor Eyeball (Plush Frankenweenie Takes Shelter in Protective Plastic)

Speaking of Norma Desmond, there's a whole media chorus line of them, both in and out of drag, wearing identical virtue-signaling masks as they position themselves in the center of the stage.

But you know what's a real drag? For a frightened public to be so ill-served by a pack of churnalists vying for top prize in the media aggrievement sweepstakes. It's like they're lost without the cozy sycophancy they used to mistake for reportage in the pre-Trump days.

Therefore, my nomination for the Norma Desmond award goes to CNN's Chris Cuomo, who grotesquely likened Trump's "fake news" insult to being called the N word.

I watched the same presser as the pundits, but somehow missed Trump's epic "meltdown." What I saw was vintage Donald, playing the press corps like they were cardboard fiddles.

They've been out of tune and out of touch with regular people for way too long.

My Rx: cancel the annual White House Correspondents' incest-fest, wean yourselves from Trump tweets, and cover some town halls.

Maybe if the media were a little less reactionary....