Richard Stengel, a frequent contributor on MSNBC, a former editor of Time magazine, and the State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs in the Obama administration from 2013 to 2016 wrote this embarrassing, anti-free speech screed.
Observations:
1. In the past I have criticized newspapers and other publications for publishing irresponsible opinion pieces. This time, I want to thank and praise the Washington Post. Either intentionally or inadvertently, it has performed a public service by using its op-ed pages to expose the hypocrisy, intellectual bankruptcy, ethics ignorance and relentless totalitarian rot of their own ideological compatriots.
2. I might say the same about Stengal, but he really seems to think that he is making a persuasive case. Imagine: a man whom President Obama and his Democratic administration trusted as a high level State Department official can make an argument like this…
Why shouldn’t the states experiment with their own version of hate speech statutes to penalize speech that deliberately insults people based on religion, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation?
Why, Richard? Oh, gee, I don’t know…maybe because “insult” is a completely subjective standard? Perhaps because Massachusetts, Vermont,California, and Oregon might decide that arguments against climate change cant is hate speech, like Holocaust denial? Maybe because the 14th Amendment prohibits states from abridging the Bill of Rights?
3. Kudos also to the Washington Post readership, which properly and thoroughly ripped Stengel and his arguments apart with almost no one defending him . The very few that did made Stengel level statements like this one: “The solution is not to inhibit free speech; the solution is to put some controls on the communication of the free speech.”
You idiot: if the government restricts how speech can be communicated, then it is inhibiting free speech.
4. Stengel resorts to two arguments for gutting the First Amendment so juvenile, flawed and rationalization-based that the mind boggles. One is that other nations have passed speech restricting laws: “Since World War II, many nations have passed laws to curb the incitement of racial and religious hatred.” Behold the modern progressive delusion that not conforming to the cultures and values of other nations is evidence that the United States is wrong. This is all part of the modern Left’s rejection of American exceptionalism, that we’re out of step, and need to get in line. The entire American experiment is founded on extremely limited government control over what individual citizens can do, say, and think. The United States and its democracy has succeeded because of those limitations: people like Spencer deny that success, so they see nothing amiss about loosening them. His is an “everybody censors speech,” so it must be right thing to do argument.
Then there is this:
” A 2016 Stanford study showed that 82 percent of middle schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and an actual news story. Only a quarter of high school students could tell the difference between an actual verified news site and one from a deceptive account designed to look like a real one.”
Translation: “How can we indoctrinate kids with our Complete and Only Truth if they are able to be influenced by contrary information?” The casual presumption that “the truth” is so easily determined that “non-truth” can and should be banned is another watermark of the emerging totalitarian Left. Is opposing affirmative action “hate speech”? Arguing that transgendered individuals shouldn’t be permitted to compete in women’s sports? Advocating enforcement of immigration laws? How about mocking Elizabeth Warren for falsely posing as a minority for most of her career?
We now know that the progressive definition of hate speech is “speech that progressives hate.” The examples are endless. Anti-black insults are hate speech, anti-white rhetoric is just, you know, deserved. Calling President Trump a traitor, racist or a”motherfucker” is fair political discourse; his calling Warren “Pocahontas” is hate speech. Saying that the nation needs to get rid of “old, white men” in leadership positions is a valid observation; any negative reference to a female politician is hate speech. Stengel doesn’t even have the honesty (intelligence?) to address this most decisive of rebuttals against proposals such as his: who decides what is “hate speech”? You, Richard? The people who hire you and who agree with you?
Is there any doubt?
5. Stengel offers one false argument after another. Here’s one:
A century later, the framers believed that this marketplace was necessary for people to make informed choices in a democracy. Somehow, magically, truth would emerge. The presumption has always been that the marketplace would offer a level playing field. But in the age of social media, that landscape is neither level nor fair. On the Internet, truth is not optimized. On the Web, it’s not enough to battle falsehood with truth; the truth doesn’t always win. In the age of social media, the marketplace model doesn’t work.
Hilarious. Thanks to the internet, the “playing field” is more level than ever before. Before it, the biased, politically-distorted journalism that is now the norm would have no opposition at all. We have seen the new media repeatedly defeat efforts by mainstream media to warp narratives and bury inconvenient facts. The marketplace model doesn’t work for someone, like Spencer, who believes progressive ideas should have a monopoly.
6. Stengel triggered my “if this is how this writer reasons, reading the rest is a wate of my time” instinct with this howler, right at the beginning:
” [As] a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier. Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?It’s a fair question. Yes, the First Amendment protects the “thought that we hate,” but it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another. In an age when everyone has a megaphone, that seems like a design flaw.”
Ay Caramba! I may never mock President Trump for not appointing “the best people” again. This guy was stumped by THAT question? He is persuaded my Middle Eastern doubts about free speech, where citizens cane be punished by the state for blasphemy? We allow people to burn Kroan, Bibles, American flags, draft cards and effigied of the President to express dislike, opposition, contempt, and yes, hate. People have a right to hate things and to express that hate…or maybe its just dislike, or disrespect. The Stengels of the world conveniently lump them together as “hate,” all the better to muzzle us. I don’t like or respect Islam: can I say that? Can I think it? When someone burns a Koran, isn’t that simply a dramatic way of saying, “I don’t like what’s in this book, and what it stands for”?
Saying that burning the Koran “can cause violence by one group against another’ is especially disingenuous; gestures of disrespect toward Islam don’t incite violence against Muslims, it incites Muslims to do violence against the critics. Here Stengel is employing another popular anti-speech distortion that is popular on college campuses: “The speaker we judge as hateful should be silenced because his speech will make us attempt violence against him.”
To sum up, I love this op-ed. I think it should be as widely circulated as possible, and that every Democratic Presidential candidate should be asked to defend or reject it. Stengel has revealed what the Leftism of 2019 is really about: rejecting American values, restricting individual rights and liberties, rigging debate, and stifling dissent.
He’s telling the truth, but it’s not quite the truth he thinks it is.
Ethics Alarms 
My personal favorite:
“We call them hate speech laws, but there’s no agreed-upon definition of what hate speech actually is.”
And yet, he would seek to ban something he admits to having no proper definition.
Almost as if he never expects to be treated the way he wants to treat others.
hmm, I succeeded in posting a link on Facebook, wonder how long it lasts. It was in a reply to my main post…
Keep me posted on that!
If we silence speech that cause violence we will live in isolation.
If we take the idea to absurdity any comment directed at me that I do not like would give me license to act with violence against the speaker . The perpetrators of violence become victims and speakers become the criminal.
Gee what will the WAPO publish. I bet we can find hate in the funny papers if we tried hard enough.
We are in the midst of a major ideological social shift to the extreme political left. Progressives are shoving the political pendulum as hard as they can and there is no turning back. They’re going to back everyone to the right of their extremism into a corner and all hell is going to break loose.
Now you’re sounding like Zoltar!
What will be the score in the World Series tonight?
Maybe more people should sound like Zoltar. 😉
…i like Zoltar… miss his avatar, too…
Heaven help us.
When you think in pre-digested bits, and then when you pronounce, it might sound — what is the word, satisfying? — to someone, but you haven’t really said anything.
The Democrat Party, despite any appearance, is in disarray, and quite serious disarray. They hardly have a candidate, and they are divided among themselves. They could all turn on one another at any moment. Could they be said to have an ‘ideological position’? In some sense they sound like the Old Left, or they seem to occupy that seat, but they are not anti-war nor are they very much pro-worker and they are not opposed to foreign expeditions, so in what sense are they operating from an ideological position?
I’ll admit that they are making a lot of outrageous promises, but can anyone take that seriously? Will it even materialize? I think not.
If anything, the Democrat Party and the NY Intellectual Class is in reaction.
[In respect to the NY Intellectual Class: What other center is forming opinion and staging the resistance to Trump? I know of no other so can it be said that the Times is setting the narrative line? It seems so.]
All they can do is react, and all they do is react. Every day with ever-increasing tones. But no ‘ideology’ is expressed (that I can discern). There is no guiding vision and no guiding statement. So I think it fair to modify your pronouncement:
We are in the midst of an hysterical reaction to an uprising, to some degree organic, of the American working class whose location is more in the center regions than it is on the Coasts. That NY Intellectual Class and ‘progressives’ have a deep fear of organic populism and they associate it, int he public mind and in their propaganda and in their railings, with Nazism. One reason is because the awakening Forgotten and Betrayed class has a profound suspicion of ‘Jews and their machinations’. They sense they have been betrayed and *sold out* but they do not have clear enough vision to see *who* did this. In any case, and as everyone knows, the JQ always looms. How Jews as a class define their position in America, and the threat that they now feel they face, is a complex question, yet highly relevant.
[No one here can think about it or talk about it in any meaningful — or fair — way because it is an illegal topic of thought and thus of conversation. I can’t say I blame you though].
The ‘forgotten & abandoned class’ flocks to the message of Donald Trump because, fundamentally, even perhaps spiritually, they ‘resonate’ with him. Since they understand that they have no ally whatever, anywhere, and the NY Intellectual Class labeled them ‘uneducated dunces’ basically and defective persons, yet they find a champion in Donald Trump. [Whether he will serve them, or can serve them, is another matter. It is not impossible that he betray them, and that must be kept in mind. Or rather that DT be pushed aside and the betrayal that they have lived simply continues].
In some senses it seems like a shift to the ‘extreme political Left’, but you are not taking into consideration that the political Right, definitely the Dissident Right, is taking up some positions that were formerly the property of the Left. For example the resistance to ’embroilments’ in foreign wars. Or positions critical of the excesses of capital enterprises and the damage done to communities and families. Tucker Carlson says some very surprising things that are way off the standard Right-leaning chart.
But because you only seem to see through pre-fabricated tropes, you likely have not noticed this. It is fair for you to say that the Progressives (if we take the narratives formulated in the Times as an outline) are working reactive postures, but they only seem to grab whatever outrageous story that they can get their hands on. It might be associating the destruction of the country with Zuckerberg and Trump (really, there is an article about this). Or even some Kierkegaardian ruminations on the nature of *love & struggle* (there was also today such an article). I recognize that they are ‘pushing’ but they do not really have a direction. And this distinction is pretty important it seems to me.
But what will become of their reactive meltdown, that is a good question. What happened to the Screaming Girl on the university commons? What happens when one’s complaint and one’s howlings grow ever more shrill and intense, but one really has no platform? You are right to say that there might be a point where there is no turning back. But it will not be because of any defined ideological position (that I can discern).
But let them keep ‘backing their adversaries into a corner’. Though they are divided among themselves, and only have ‘entity’ because they have something to oppose (and fiercely!) let us hope that the Original Demographic of America succeeds in waking up and, somehow, reclaiming power. It should be wished in a sense that they grow ever-more outrageous . . . because many many people are seeing through the charade.
All hell should break loose. The tension is growing. Something (I suppose) must snap.
What would be really cool and different is if I could get Zoltar the Magnificent to speak in any meaningful way about what is needed at this strange juncture. That is, a positive and meaningful contribution to the developing ideological stance that is necessary.
Speak, Zoltar!
This is what I posted on Facebook immediately. Stipulated, I was stark raving mad, and this is one of the few dangerous arguments that I allowed myself to respond to in such a state….
Why does anyone think this is a good idea you ask…
One of the logical fallacies I hear from some progressives is that all these new rules will work if the “right people” are elected or put into public offices to implement and monitor such policies. Bias makes people stupid and so does utopianism.
And, once elected, will ensure that they are never removed from office, presumably.
There are articles in the Times right now — quite a number of them — that touch on this issue from the progressive angle.
See: Aaron Sorkin’s ‘letter’ to Mark Zuckerberg; and ‘Should Facebook Be Fact-Checked?’ (The Argument); Trump, Zuckerberg & Pals Are Breaking America (Thomas Friedman).
I notice a strange thing happening: since the whole question and problem of *Fake News*, if it is pursued intelligently, leads one to deeply consider what type of narrative that we regularly receive and are subjected to is true or false or somewhere in-between, I think everyone is asked to think about those narratives that they *believe* and really think are true and correct.
Media Systems — according to the dissidents who critique them — are corporations owned by other corporations. It cannot be expected that a corporation with a standard business model can accurately report on an issue or incidents in which it itself has an interest (or a conflict of interest as the case may be). That has been the basis of a critique of those businesses: they are compromised and they are complicit. We cannot really trust any Media Systems for this reason. I think people understand this.
Everybody is selling something, and at every point where something is being sold, there is complicity and interest that operates. And there is always ‘spin’. I think these are facts that average people understand very well. It is inevitable that this extends to the selling of opinion: persuasion. The Art of Persuasion is, from a marketer’s, a propagandist’s and a public relation’s perspective, is the crafting of a narrative which is designed to manipulate. In essence it it the rhetorician’s art.
Because these things I mention here are *truths* and are irrefutable, it does lead a thinking person to wonder how a person — how I — can get ‘correct information’ and proper perspective. But there is another issue: the interest of one’s own group in contrast to that of another group or power-center. It could be presented through classical class-lines. For example, the interests of average Americans and working people as-against capital interests.
It is taken for granted, isn’t it? that average people are manipulated by powerful elites through various forms of trickery, deception and manipulation to serve interests that are not their own. Is this so hard to grasp? Must grasping it involve one in spiritual pain? Take as a prime example the last 20 years of America’s destructive wars. The way that they were presented and sold was through overt lies. This is an incontestable fact. But who pays the price? Well, the people whose lands were invaded certainly (though this does not get any play at all) and then those who had to do the soldier work on the ground. But in the end an ‘unjust war’ recoils against the Nation itself: it undermines it and its legitimacy. (Not to speak of metaphysical condemnation).
The other problem with having to face the lies and distortions inherent in the Systems we live in is that our patriotic ideals are often founded on partial truths/partial lies.
The Progressives, though they seem steeped in lies and in manipulative discourse, train themselves to see their programs as ‘right and proper’. You either are with their programs . . . or you are on the side of evil. There are articles in the Times now (or were yesterday) asking:
“Are You a Moderate? Think Again: A lack of moral imagination can make deeply ethical actions seem like crimes”
You have to get with their program, or you will be utterly condemned.
Why did you specifically use people on the right as political tyrants when the writer was from the Obama administration?
I actually trust that Trump would NOT jail speakers he doesn’t like. I cannot trust that leftists that claim to be protecting the Constitution and have no problem restricting liberty would not impose punishments for not toeing the left’s line. There are numerous examples of the left silencing conservative speakers by disrupting speeches or using threats of violence resulting in cancellation from fear or ridiculous fees for security.
If we examine the language of civil rights acts we find the words are ecumenical in scope; you cannot discriminate based on gender, age, race etc but the phraseology has morphed into meaning there are protected classes of persons. That itself violates the equal protection provisions of the Constitution. You cannot create one group with power to bring a civil rights violation against another when you embrace the notion that racism and bigotry is impossible when the alleged victim is part of the white majority.
The idea that minorities are disproportionately harmed by restrictions on speech is unsubstantiated Please give some relatively contemporary evidence to that effect .
I would not trust anyone with that power. The temptation for government leaders is just too great, and I don’t think our government would be immune to it. I would hope that Trump wouldn’t do it, but I never want to see him with the power.
I agree that no one should have that power but my point was that the advocates to ban speech lie to the left of center and Rich inserted Trump’s name. It would be more appropriate to use someone advocating for punishment of speech.
Governor Wallace was a Democrat.
True, but why not use contemporary persons such as Nancy Pelosi, Schiff or AOC.
I ‘m a stickler for parallelism. Trump is to Pelosi as Wallace is to Nixon.
Why go back 50 years to find an untrustworthy politician when we have a plethora of demagogue and facists in the current crop?
Well, who do you think this argument is trying to target?
Do you know any conservatives who are at risk of being persuaded by Stengel’s argument? Do you know any liberals who would not be offended if I used contemporary Democratic politicians?
Do you know any liberals who are concerned that Massachusetts is actively passing laws to make it more difficult for minorities to vote? Do you think that using a liberal state as an example of why allowing states to experiment with laws that curtail civil rights is a bad idea would be more effective than using state that are being actively criticized for allegedly curtailing civil rights?
I now see your methodology and understand. Unfortunately, those folks who are most likely to infringe on speech already believe Trump and conservatives are facist racists. The comment above about will those advocating for hate speech legislation be willing to give the opposition the right to determine what is hateful would be avoids the inference of bias that confirms existing beliefs. My reaction to your comment initially was exactly that type of inferential bias. I read something completely different than what you just explained. I recognize in myself that I am not immune which is why I framed my response as a question seeking clarity.
Thanks Rich in Ct
To paraphrase a surprisingly wise fellow on Twitter(?!), time for him to prove his principles by agreeing that such laws should stay in place even if Republicans get to decide how they’re defined and enforced.
Tee hee. Yeah, right, of course he will.
The temptation here is to apply Hanlon’s Razor, and attribute the author’s complete willingness to defenestrate the First Amendment to incompetence and/or stupidity.
But as I have previously said, I no longer use Hanlon’s Razor when discussing the Left. Instead, I assume a nefarious purpose, and I assume one here as well.
You’ve spelled out the Left’s desire with care and precision, so I won’t repeat it. And I agree with you 100% that it is absolutely invaluable to America to see pieces like this, where the categorical rejection of freedom is expressed so nakedly and without a thought for the consequences of imprecise and incoherent rationalizations like suggesting speech is a form of violence because some emo soul may take it personally and use it as a justification for expressing themselves violently.
If we have to live in that world, what will happen when the other side takes power and applies the same rules to the Left? Suddenly, the Right gets to decide what speech is violence and what speech is allowable. It’s incomprehensible that they don’t understand how this could happen.
What all this suggests is that the Left imagines that if they are able to abrogate the First Amendment in the ways described by Mr. Stengel, that they will never lose power and they will, empowered with the ability to define who gets to say what, control the terms of communication in a way that will ensure their permanent rule.
To quote a prescient commercial, “That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works!”
Congresscritter Debbie Wasserman Schultz certainly directed some “hate speech” toward Acting Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ken Cuccinelli during his congressional hearing today.
First she said, “You and Mr. Trump don’t want anyone who looks or talks differently than Caucasian Americans to be allowed into this country.”
Cuccinelli replied, “That’s false.”
Then she went on, “You have demonstrated that you will pursue this heinous white supremacist ideology at all costs, even if it means making critically ill children your collateral damage in the process.”
Cuccinelli tried to object to her accusations but was silenced by the chair.
When she finally paused to let him answer an actual question, he began with, “After declaring that I’m not a white supremacist, as you alluded, nor is the president…”
“Facts matter,” Wasserman Schultz snapped back.
“Yes they do,” Cuccinelli said, much more calmly than I would have. “Truth matters,” he added.”
I would have refused to communicate with her AT ALL after her initial tirade.
Cuchinelli should have stated he is as much a white supremacist as the Congresswomanm
No, he actually should have been able to say that if he were concerned about such matters as the make-up of his own nation, community, and state, as it pertains to culture, ethnicity, background or any number of different factors, that there is nothing at all wrong or unethical in this.
He should have been able to have debated her on her use of the term ‘white supremacy’ and all related terms and their devious usage in the present: racist, sexist, anti-feminist, homophobe et cetera. Everyone in the chamber should have boo-ed Shultz when she used that devious term.
Instead, he is put completely on the defensive, which is the reason such a term is used: it controls discourse and limits it.
And here is another interesting element: you also seem to ‘believe’ her insofar as you accede to her use of the term. You do not question it. I would suggest that you, too, use the term largely as Shultz uses it. That is, it has *meaning* for you.
I watched that exchange.
I think one has to recognize that when *they* (Shultz in this case) control the parameters of the conversation through framing, that it is impossible for any conversation to take place.
The problem here is that it is absolutely correct, proper, ethical & moral for a given people to have concern and to be concerned about the ethnic and racial make up of their community and their nation.
That could be ‘the people of France’ or ‘the people of Australia’ or ‘the people of the Congo’ or ‘the people of Korea’.
For example, one could be genuinely concerned, and with very good reasons, if one’s state or nation were *flooded* (as the term is used) with millions of immigrants from Central America. You could make a case that it is not good, socially, politically, in any number of different ways, for your own race and cultural make-up to be diluted by another ethnic group, racial group or culture.
But if any of those *terms of consideration* as they might be called are made to seem immoral and unethical — and at the worst evil — then you wind up in the situation we are in now.
I suggest this is a defective argument on both parts. It is essentially fallacious. Why? Simply because to have a concern about racial and ethnic make-up — or ‘flooding’ as is going on in cities in Europe for example — is not in any way immoral or unethical. In fact it is immoral and unethical not to be concerned and not to think carefully through the ramifications.
However, and this is totally true and incontestable: It is not possible in today’s climate to have an open and fair conversation about this topic. Nor to rationally discuss ‘dispossession’ and ‘displacement’.
By locking the topic outside the door, and criminalizing it, it is in this way that they control the discourse.
The doors have to be broken down, and then the full scope of the conversation (and the moral and ethical questions) have to be put out on the table for fair and open conversation.
That is how I see it anyway.
I’ve recently have been reading and listening to some of Jordan Peterson talks. This one covers “hate speech” and his observations are extremely important: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlSj7L4Ws2M
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While you and I see those as undesirable outcomes, among the woke crowd all of those seem reasonable. For their addled minds, we need to come up with the examples of speech suppression that places like Mississippi and Alabama would force on leftists. Things like calling pro LGBT materials hateful of Christianity, or banning information on abortion as hateful of the unborn.
“sophisticated Arab “. Isn’t that an oxymoron?
That is what is troubling.
He is not just some random crackpot.
why shouldn’t states experiment with their own version of racial segregation in public education?
In places as varied as Paris, Lagos, and Singapore, the police can search anyone if they felt like it.
The number of sovereign nations with anti-sodomy laws exceed the number of sovereign nations that recognize same-sex marriage.
I suspect that they expect to use hate speech laws to stifle dissent.
I remember how the media distorted the issues over the Clinton impeachment saga.
You got that right!
Hell no. Do you think the leftist wont be forced to play be the same rules? The second that your successful with your “Hate” speech law is the day that we institute a burka ban and censor the gender studies professors. .