But that distracting description of the history of a word wasn’t in good faith, was it, Walter?
You need a refresher course on what Freedom means.
In my country a few days ago, a synagogue was selling stolen Palestinian property, pro-Palestinian Americans were outside protesting.
The cops and Zionists beat the American protesters. No Zionist abusers were arrested.
The Future of a Far Right Planet
What can we glean about the future of a far-right planet?
Before our very eyes, we have a sad example, which is Britain. It used to be one of the world’s pre-eminent liberal democracies. And then, for a combination of reasons, from disinformation to just sheer folly, it turned against liberal democracy, with a greater vengeance than we’ve seen in any rich, modern society. And today, of course, it’s a shattered wreck, wracked by poverty, its economy shrinking, its once-great systems and institutions ruined.
Britain teaches us a lesson, about what the future of a far right planet holds. A series of them, in fact.
Let’s begin with timing. How long will the devastating consequences of a far-right planet last? They’ll be generational, at least, as they are in Britain today. Britain chose this path of illiberalism fifteen years ago—and so that teaches, us, too, just how fast you can wreck one of the world’s most successful societies. For it, though, the consequences of these horrific choices, from Brexit to austerity and beyond—they’ll last easily another decade, if not two. That’s over twenty-five years, which, in social science, is a generation, and so: the consequences of a far right planet are at least generational.
But even that’s understating it. Britain is now—and Brits still don’t quite grasp this—permanently worse off. The same jobs in America now pay up to triple or quadruple the salaries, for example, and that gap is simply too big now to ever close. This is what it means to become a poorer society—you fall behind your peers.
On a far right planet, of course, there are few peers. What happens is that economies begin to underperform relative to their potential. And that potential is lost permanently, just as British salaries will now never rise to American or even European levels. Zoom that out to a globe, and you begin to get the picture—but let me now shade it in.
Economics on a Far Right Planet
There’s no question that neoliberalism’s failed, and failed catastrophically. These days, you’ll hear even its once-ardent proponents begin to admit it. But the retreat to a far-right planet will have severe consequences economically.
Let’s take Trump’s idea to replace taxes with tariffs. Sounds like a great idea, if you don’t think about it very much. If you do, it’s just…a regressive tax. Worse, whose benefits flow to already mega-rich mega-corporations and hedge funds and their owners. Taxes are at least in some loose sense equitable, even if we all know Jeff Bezos pays less than a teacher. But tariffs? Across the board? They’d hit the poorest hardest, and they’d fail to raise any real level of necessary investment in public services.
A far right planet would be a place of isolationism, nationalism, and barriers, economically speaking. And that’d hit people incredibly hard. Much, much harder than they understand right now. At the moment, everyone’s angry about inflation, rightly so. But on a far right planet? Prices would spike even higher, because of course now barriers of all kinds would be in the way, from tariffs to red tape—and that’s exactly what Britain’s experienced after Brexit, too, a far higher than average level of inflation.
Meanwhile, people would grow poorer, fast, just as in Britain. That’d happen for a combination of reasons. Lower public investment would end plenty of public sector jobs, and even in America, land of “small” government, the government’s by far the largest employer in the economy—it always is. At the same time, as prices rose, growing poorer, people would have less left over to fund anything resembling a modern social contract.
So the economics of a far right planet? They’re even worse than this one. I know that people don’t understand, and sadly, nobody much tries to teach them, but that task, which is going to be a thankless one, must be undertaken. If you want even higher prices, more inflation, even more shrunken public services, fewer jobs, lower incomes—then by all means, the far right’s the way to go.
The problem arises in the form of the next natural question, which is: well, so what does liberalism have to offer? The truth is: these days, not much.
Society on a Far Right Planet
Economically? Liberalism—neoliberalism—is a failure now on an almost Soviet scale, a world rebelling against it, thanks to long run stagnation compounded by perpetual shocks like inflation and financial crises and inequality.
So liberalism desperately needs a new economic proposition to take to people, beyond, hey, the rich will get super rich, and you, you suck it up, the pain is good for you.
But liberalism is also going to need a new social proposition. The far right shell game at the moment is simple, as it always is, and precisely the same as it was in the 1930s. Blame the woes of the average person on the other, foreigners, immigrants, what have you.
And here the picture grows murkier. To understand the future of far right societies, we can look at any number of examples. Let’s place them on a spectrum from Britain to Russia. Russia’s the extreme example, of course, and who’d want to live in a society like that if they had the choice, apart from a handful of fanatics? Freedoms are severely limited, opportunities are curtailed, and life is pretty bleak.
The other end of the spectrum, though, is Britain—there, though it clings to the idea that it’s a modern society, in truth, it’s one now gripped by Dickensian poverty, and social ills. The water’s full of ****, for heaven’s sake. Child poverty’s endemic. Medicine’s in such perpetual shortage it doesn’t even make the headlines anymore. Jobs pay shockingly little—a senior exec can expect to make less than a plumber would in America. And norms of fairness, decency, truth, and equality have all gone out of the window, as demagogues, fanatics, crooks, and lunatics have risen to power. It’s not a pretty picture—and as one person put it memorably on national TV, how can a Prime Minister who’s “richer than the King” relate to the average person, or care about them?
Society on a far right planet is ugly. And we shouldn’t need to remember that, but somehow, we do. Think back to the 1930s. The ugliness and obscenity of those times, which has been memorialized in countless works of art, from the hatred to the persecution to the violence. What’s less often thought of is what it’s actually like to live in such a society, even for those who once proudly backed it. It becomes a fearsome thing, because having handed control over a society’s basic functions to its most brutal and venal, of course, life quickly descends into the inferno. This is the lesson too many societies had to learn the hard way the last time around.
Culture disintegrates. Persecution becomes the central focus. Human life is reoriented around great projects of self-destruction—cleaning the impure, curtailing the rights of the subhumans, women and minorities, elevating the superhumans, the demagogues and their cronies. Instead of being oriented towards anything constructive. Authoritarianism creeps towards totalitarianism, and people are watched closely for any deviation from the new social missions of self-destruction.
Modernity begins to die, at first slowly, and then faster and faster. In America, of course, this process is already advanced, thanks to the Supreme Court. But now imagine a whole planet dedicated to these kinds of senseless projects of self-destruction. What kind of fate does a civilization like that have?
One road out of this mess is…time, perhaps. We’ve discussed how the effects of a far-right planet will be generational, at least. Let me now put that in plain English: if these worst-case scenarios come true, we’re looking at up to twenty five of the worst years in modern history.
Maybe nations will come to their senses sooner, but in a way, even if they do, the problem is that the damage lingers far beyond that moment. At a bare minimum, we’re looking at a decade that easily rivals the 1930s for title of Worst in Modern History.
The problem of a far right planet is that it all happens at once, and in that way, everything compounds on itself. Think back to the 1930s. There was an Axis, and an Allies. But this time? If America, France, Holland, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Russia, China, India…I could keep going…have all gone far right…at the same moment in history…who does that leave? To take up the mantle of global leadership?
Certainly, it leaves little room for an “Allies” sort of force in the world. What it leaves, in more realistic terms, is a kind of archipelago of surviving islands of democracy, and a core of the world blown apart by a supervolcano, which doesn’t really exist as a modern democracy anymore. That sort of world? It doesn’t have leaders.
And it also doesn’t have much of the following. Cooperation. Peace. Justice. Truth. Decency. Goodness. What it has is factions, fighting to be the purest or truest of blood and soil, contesting resources, each scapegoating the next, and that’s precisely the way that great and historic conflicts, right up to World Wars break out.
Those are the problems of a far right planet, and they shouldn’t be simplified to just “it’s one heading for World War.” That much is true, certainly, especially as we look at China, Russia, and America—but the problems are more subtle, still. Global cooperation dies. The International rule of law, already becoming a mockery, withers. Levels of investment and trade, already falling, plummet. A vicious cycle ensues, just as isolationism and nationalism made the Great Depression worse, and sparked World War II—precisely the same cycle. And as people grow that much poorer, faster and faster, the anger, rage, and hatred only swells and grows towards a crescendo.
This is the path we’re on right now. I’m not saying it’s written in stone, just yet. We can change it, still. But to do so, we must begin understanding the danger of this moment, much better, deeper, truer. We are playing with fire now, in history’s greatest terms. Let us not repeat its most foolish and tragic mistakes, any longer, just for the sake of spite, which is only ever another name for the folly of self-destruction.
Lash wrote:But that distracting description of the history of a word wasn’t in good faith, was it, Walter?My response was to what Lash wrote:When there is no compulsion, there is freedom. If you can decide for yourself what you do, you are free.You need a refresher course on what Freedom means.
So certainly you have the freedom to disqualify what I wrote and call it "distracting".
Two key advisers to Donald Trump have presented him with a plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine - if he wins the presidential election - that involves telling Ukraine it will only get more US weapons if it enters into peace talks.
The United States would at the same time warn Moscow that any refusal to negotiate would result in increased US support for Ukraine, retired Lt Gen Keith Kellogg, one of Trump’s national security advisers, said in an interview.
Under the plan drawn up by Kellogg and Fred Fleitz, who both served as chiefs of staff in Trump’s national security council during his 2017-2021 presidency, there would be a ceasefire based on prevailing battle lines during peace talks.
They have presented their strategy to Trump, and the former president responded favorably, Fleitz said. “I’m not claiming he agreed with it or agreed with every word of it, but we were pleased to get the feedback we did,” he said.
However, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said only statements made by Trump or authorised members of his campaign should be deemed official, Reuters reported.
The strategy outlined by Kellogg and Fleitz is the most detailed plan yet by associates of Trump, who has said he could quickly settle the war in Ukraine if he beats President Joe Biden in the November election, though he has not discussed specifics.
The proposal would mark a big shift in the US position on the war and would face opposition from European allies and within Trump’s own Republican party.
The Kremlin said that any peace plan proposed by a possible future Trump administration would have to reflect the reality on the ground but that Russian president Vladimir Putin remained open to talks.
“The value of any plan lies in the nuances and in taking into account the real state of affairs on the ground,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told Reuters.
“President Putin has repeatedly said that Russia has been and remains open to negotiations, taking into account the real state of affairs on the ground,” he said. “We remain open to negotiations.”
These days, reality is undermining the political power of the mythological image of the American cowboy. In the years after World War II, that image helped to sell the idea that a government that regulated business, provided a basic safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights for Black and Brown Americans and for women was cruising perilously close to communism. The cowboy image suggested that a true American was an individualist man who worked hard to provide for and to protect his homebound wife and children, with a gun if necessary, and wanted only for the government to leave him and his business alone.
The cowboy image dominated television in the years after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board decision, first with shows like Bonanza, Gunsmoke, and Rawhide showing cowboys imposing order on their surroundings and then, by 1974, with Little House on the Prairie showing a world in which “Pa” Ingalls—played by the same actor who had played Little Joe from Bonanza—was a doting father who provided paternal care and wholesome guidance to his wife and daughters.
But that image was never based in reality. Constructed during Reconstruction after the Civil War to stand against government protection of Black rights, it was always a political narrative. In reality, the federal government provided more aid to the American West than to any other region.
Success in the American West depended as much on access to capital as it did in the American East, and western entrepreneurs struggled constantly against rich men monopolizing resources and political power, just as in the East. The wages, dangers, and upward mobility of cowboys, miners, and other western wage workers paralleled those of urban workers in the same period. Western women provided the kinship ties that facilitated trade in the region, and they—including the Ingalls girls, on whose income Pa’s family depended—worked outside the home for wages.
UCLA law professor Adam Winkler explained that “[g]uns were widespread on the frontier, but so was gun regulation.… Wild West lawmen took gun control seriously and frequently arrested people who violated their town’s gun control laws.” Political scientist Pierre Atlas noted that famous frontier town Dodge City, Kansas, prohibited guns altogether.
Modern-day Americans could embrace the cowboy myth so long as our laws addressed conditions in the real world. But as extremist lawmakers and judges have removed those guardrails by legislating around ideology rather than reality—incidentally, the very scenario true political conservatism was designed to avoid—they have ushered in conditions that are badly hurting Americans. This moment in our history feels chaotic in part because the gulf between reality and image can no longer be hidden with divisive rhetoric, and ordinary Americans are reasserting their right to laws that protect equality, community, and opportunity.
A study published yesterday in the pediatrics journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA Pediatrics) shows that the idea of returning women to roles as wives and mothers by banning abortion has, in Texas, driven infant death rates 12.9% higher. The rest of the country saw an increase of 1.8%. Infant deaths from congenital anomalies increased almost 23% in Texas while they decreased for the rest of the nation, showing that the abortion ban is forcing women to carry to term fetuses that could not survive.
When the Texas ban went into effect, Governor Greg Abbott said there was no need to make an exception for rape, because Texas was going to “eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas.” Instead, in a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers estimated that in the 16 months after the Texas ban, 26,313 rape-related pregnancies occurred in the state.
Earlier this month, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to oppose in vitro fertilization (IVF), and today, Representative Matt Rosendale (R-MT) announced he would file an amendment to the 2025 defense appropriations bill stripping it of funding for IVF, saying “the practice of IVF is morally wrong.”
Trump advisors behind Project 2025 want to enforce the 1873 Comstock Law to ban medical abortion and contraception nationally. Yesterday the Biden-Harris campaign released a tape in which Jeff Durbin, a Trump ally who is pastor of the Apologia Church in Tempe, Arizona, and the founder and head of End Abortion Now, says that abortion is murder and those who practice it deserve execution: “You forfeit your right to live.”
But for Americans, particularly American women, reality trumps the Republicans’ fantasy, and they are demanding that their right to reproductive health care be protected. Liz Crampton of Politico noted that yesterday, on the second anniversary of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that protected abortion rights, Republicans were silent. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) didn’t post about it on social media, those vying to be Trump’s vice-presidential pick kept quiet, and Trump himself didn’t boast about it (although his former vice president Mike Pence did say in a National Review op-ed that the Dobbs decision had made the U.S. “a more compassionate nation”).
Republicans in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Texas determined to reestablish patriarchy have now taken on the cause of eliminating no-fault divorce. Eric Berger of The Guardian explains that right-wing opponents of no-fault divorce note that women, especially educated, self-supporting women, file for divorce more often than men and that no-fault divorce means men can’t fight it. They claim divorce hurts families and, by extension, society.
Berger points out that it was then–California governor Ronald Reagan, who had been divorced, who signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law in 1969. Other states followed, with New York last in 2010. Berger also notes that in states that approved no-fault divorce, domestic violence rates dropped about 30%, the number of women killed by an intimate partner fell by 10%, and women’s deaths by suicide dropped by 8–16%. It’s hard to imagine American voters are going to embrace an end to no-fault divorce.
Constructing a society around the myth of free individual gun possession has also met reality. Today, for the first time in U.S. history, Surgeon General Doctor Vivek Murthy issued a Surgeon General's Advisory calling firearm violence a public health crisis. Guns have now outpaced car accidents and drug overdoses to become the number one cause of death for American children and adolescents. That violence ripples outward to those injured, to witnesses, and to traumatized communities. Fifty-four percent of American adults say they or a family member have experienced a gun incident.
“All of us, regardless of our background or beliefs, want to live in a world that is safe for us and our children,” Dr. Murthy said.
The national mood about gun violence appears to be changing. A trustee for a U.S. bankruptcy court has said they will liquidate the assets of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s Free Speech Systems, the media platform for his InfoWars website, in order to begin to pay some of the $1.5 billion he owes to family members of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. The shooting took the lives of 26 people, 20 of them children between the ages of six and seven, but Jones told his audience that the event was a hoax designed to push gun safety laws. The victims’ families successfully sued Jones for defamation.
Another part of the individualist myth that has met reality is that cutting taxes and slashing business regulation would boost the economy. Yesterday the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget compared the $8.4 trillion debt approved by Trump to the $4.3 trillion approved by Biden. It estimated Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and corporations cost $4.8 trillion, which as Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote pointed out, is more than the $4.3 trillion cost of Biden’s “Infrastructure bill, Inflation Reduction Act, American Rescue Plan, CHIPs [and Science Act], PACT [expanding health benefits to veterans exposed to toxic substances and burn pits], student debt forgiveness, and funding the IRS COMBINED.” Under Trump, Congress also passed $3.6 trillion in COVID relief.
On the other side of the ledger, Trump’s tariffs relieved only about $443 billion, while Biden’s Fiscal Responsibility Act, Inflation Reduction Act, and deficit-reducing executive actions relieved close to $2 trillion in debt.
The Biden administration has returned to the idea of leveling the nation’s economic playing field and has invested in manufacturing and clean energy. A new study released yesterday by Climate Power, which has been tracking clean energy jobs in the private sector, says that U.S. companies have added “more than 312,900 new clean energy jobs for electricians, mechanics, construction workers, technicians, support staff, and many others” since Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022.
On June 11, David Lynch reported in the Washington Post that U.S. economic growth has been so strong this year that it is helping to stabilize the global economy, while Hans Nichols of Axios reported today that 16 Nobel prize–winning economists have warned that Trump’s economic plans will spike inflation and hurt the global economy. "While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies,” the economists wrote, “we all agree that Joe Biden's economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump.”
Restoring reality to the center of our political debates would protect the rights stolen from us by ideologues in government. Curiously, it would also do a better job than the cowboy myth of reflecting real people and communities in the historic American West.
Jamaal Bowman has decided to close out his race for the Democratic nomination in New York’s 16th Congressional District by running as if his opponent is named “AIPAC.” At a weekend rally, he shouted, “We’re going to show ******* AIPAC the power of the motherfucking South Bronx” (which is where the rally was held, but it’s not part of his district).
One explanation for this peculiar strategic choice is that Bowman is trying to boost his base by heightening its ideological and socioeconomic fault lines to the point that it would propel him outside its geographic boundaries. Another is that Bowman, who was found in the last poll to be trailing by 17 points, grasps his imminent defeat and is already positioning himself for a job at a professional protest organization by branding AIPAC as the author of his defeat.
But the theory that makes the most sense to me is Bowman has simply gotten so carried away with the logic of progressive-movement politics that he’s lost all sight of the practical opportunities to build an electoral coalition rooted in the liberal side of the intra-Jewish debate. (This is also the broad theory of the case suggested by Daniel Marans in his outstanding reported analysis of the race.)
The role of AIPAC, a pro-Israel lobbying organization, has dominated coverage of the race between Bowman and current Westchester county executive George Latimer. And it is true that AIPAC has ploughed a fortune into the race in hopes of defeating Bowman, who has staked out increasingly hostile positions since October 7.
But AIPAC also spent heavily against Bowman when he first ran and won, unseating longtime Israel champion Elliot Engel in 2020. The same reason Bowman overcame the impact of AIPAC spending four years ago, but faces an uphill struggle to do so now, is that he has moved significantly to the left on Israel. As a result of that continued shift, he drew an attractive challenger, Latimer, into the race, compounding his challenge.
The easiest way to measure the change is that in 2020, Bowman had J Street’s endorsement. J Street is a liberal pro-Israel group that has a fraction of AIPAC’s budget and also lacks its decades of institutional ties to the Jewish community. But J Street, which believes in the two-state solution and assigns Israel’s government a large share of the blame for its failure to materialize, represents a significant and growing share of Jewish opinion.
This year, J Street withdrew its endorsement of Bowman. That devastating move followed a series of comments Bowman had made that aligned himself with left-wing protesters rather than with liberal Zionists. The final straw was Bowman’s appearance with Norman Finkelstein, a hyperbolic critic of Israel and author of The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. That episode, which Bowman did apologize for, followed a long string of comments, including a podcast where he stated, “The money to Israel is part of supporting another settler colonial project, which Israel is.” The phrase “settler colonial project” evokes an antisemitic left-wing theory.
The tragedy of Bowman’s alienation from liberal Jewish opinion is that he squandered what was once a viable opportunity to recast the community’s political orientation.
Despite its budget, AIPAC’s claim to represent Jewish opinion is truly vulnerable. Many American Jews, like a vocal minority of Israel Jews, consider Benjamin Netanyahu’s one-state project a threat to Israel’s long-term survival. AIPAC supports the position of whatever government is in power in Israel, a method that definitionally excludes the possibility that Israel’s own government might pose a threat to itself. In the past, when Labor and Likud regularly traded power in Israel, AIPAC’s ecumenical stance made it somewhat agnostic on whether Israel should pursue peace with the Palestinians. The right’s grip on the Israeli electorate over the past 15 years has turned AIPAC into a functionally conservative organization.
The political opportunity Bowman seized four years ago, and has now squandered, was to position himself as an advocate of J Street–style liberal Zionism. That is a viable niche in the Jewish community. But running against AIPAC and J Street is a formula for giving up on the Jewish vote.
One rough comparison would be how Black voters approach affirmative action. The community’s opinion is more splintered than one might think based on the position of advocacy organizations — slightly more than half of Black Americans approved of the Supreme Court ruling striking down racial preferences in admissions. A Democrat who opposed racial preferences could probably compete for Black votes if they had other ties to the community to fall back on. A candidate who was obsessed with the evils of affirmative action, and tried to turn the race into a referendum on quotas, probably couldn’t. Liberal Jews who disagree with AIPAC are going to suspect that somebody who treats AIPAC as the greatest force for evil in the world is harboring deeper levels of hostility toward their community.
Bowman is a flawed candidate who’s made a series of weird statements and infamously pulled a fire alarm in Congress for reasons he’s struggled to explain but that appeared to be a ham-handed attempt to delay a vote. But Latimer, for all his polish, has hardly run a perfect race. His awkward characterizations of Bowman’s identity politics (“Does he have an obvious ethnic benefit? Yes.”) sound dated.
Latimer also committed what would in ordinary circumstances be a deadly gaffe when he came out against any tax increase on the rich. Here Latimer adopted a stance that is unpopular not just with Democratic-primary voters but the entire electorate. But despite making some efforts to exploit this wedge in their debate, Bowman has chosen instead to focus on AIPAC.
Bowman seems almost to crave political martyrdom. But if he does lose, it would be more accurate to attribute his demise to political suicide.
How Jamaal Bowman Blew Up His Own Coalition
good...
Supreme Court allows White House to press social media companies to remove disinformation
(cnn)
I agree with Lash on this one.
When you give this power to government....who are more and more increasingly secretive (ie. are hiding the truth more an more)...you give such people further power to silence the truth by labelling it as lies.
Yes, there is more and more disinformation going on out there.
But the answer isn't to allow centralised organisations with a penchant for hiding the truth...
...the power to decide what is 'truth' coupled with the power to silence anything they decide is not 'truth'...
Supreme Court Rules That US Government Can Continue Talking to Social Media Companies
The SCOTUS ruling overturns an earlier injunction that prevented platforms from communicating with the government for more than a year.
Today, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that the plaintiffs who'd sued the US government for allegedly violating the First Amendment—by communicating with social media companies about misleading and harmful content on their platforms—did not present enough evidence to prove that they had standing to sue.
The case was brought by the attorneys general from Louisiana and Missouri, who alleged that government agencies have had undue influence on the content moderation practices of platforms and coerced the platforms into taking down conservative-leaning content, infringing on the First Amendment rights of their citizens. Specifically, the case alleged that government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) coerced social media companies into removing content, including posts that questioned the use of masks in preventing Covid-19 and the validity of the 2020 election.
In a May 2022 statement, Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt alleged that members of the Biden administration “colluded with social media companies like Meta, Twitter, and YouTube to remove truthful information related to the lab-leak theory, the efficacy of masks, election integrity, and more.” Last year, a federal judge issued an injunction that barred the government from communicating with social media platforms.
Today, the court said that the plaintiffs could not prove that communications between the Biden administration and social media companies resulted in “direct censorship injuries.” In the majority opinion for Murthy v. Missouri, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that “the evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment.”
While it is the government’s responsibility to make sure it refrains from jawboning—the practice in which governments and leaders appeal to the public in an effort to influence the behavior of private companies, and in ways that potentially violate free speech—Kate Ruane, director of the free expression project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, says that there are very valid reasons why government agencies might need to communicate with platforms.
“Communication between the government, social media platforms, and government entities is critical in providing information that social media companies can use to ensure social media users have authoritative information about where you're supposed to go to vote, or what to do in an emergency, or all of those things,” she says. “It is very useful for the government to have partnerships with social media to get that accurate information out there.”[emphasis mine]
Google and Meta declined to comment on the case.
David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that the court’s decision earlier this cycle on a case called National Rifle Association v. Vullo was likely an indicator for how it would approach the Murthy decision. In the Vullo case, the NRA alleged that New York Department of Financial Services superintendent Maria Vullo pressured banks and insurance companies not to do business with the NRA by threatening “enforcement actions," and suppressed the organization’s advocacy. In a 9–0 decision, the court ruled that the NRA had presented enough evidence that a case against Vullo could move forward. In the opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the NRA’s complaint “plausibly alleges that Vullo threatened to wield her power against those refusing to aid her campaign to punish the NRA’s gun-promotion advocacy.”
In Murthy, however, the justices found that the plaintiffs had not presented enough evidence to show that the government had used similar tactics to pressure platforms into making content moderation decisions.
“Other than that the facts involved are sort of politically motivated, the legal issue itself is not something that I think traditionally breaks down along partisan lines,” says Greene.
But Greene says that without clear guidelines, state, local, and federal government bodies—of all political leanings—could feel freer to contact platforms now. “We will see a lot more of that type of government involvement in these processes,” he says.
