Author: hamilton1788

J: Why are you looking so down, Alex?

H: It’s that idiot Trump and his war on free speech. What he really wants is to limit free speech to morons who worship him.

J: But you supported the Sedition Act! Why are you so upset about Trump?

H: I wasn’t responsible for the Sedition Act–that was my party, not me. I was a progressive for my day on free speech. I was the lawyer on an important free speech case before free speech was a thing.

J: That’s not what I heard. Some historians say you were a big supporter of the Act.

H: I’ll let the historians work that one out. Anyway, your hands aren’t exactly clean, either.

J: What do you mean?

H: First of all, you used public funds to set up an opposition newspaper when you were in the cabinet.

J: Guilty as charged, but at least I was on the side of free speech, even if you didn’t like it.

H: And of course, your slaveholder buddies, and their Jim Crow descendants, did everything they could to prevent any public discussion of the rights of racial minorities in the South. First it was just in the South, and then they made it a national cause.

J: That was my friends, not me.

H: The New York Times v. Sullivan case only came about because your white racist populist friends wanted to muzzle any discussion of the Civil Rights Movement. It is proof of the proper limits on democracy.

J: My racist friends are a bit of an embarrassment to me. But that’s not me.

H: And Trump is presiding over their revival.

J: Which we both deplore.

H: Trump wants to govern the republic of ignorance. He thinks some fool with no credentials on the internet has more expertise than a real expert. Guess how that will turn out?

J: I never dreamed that populism would come to that.

H: Can we at least agree that Trump needs to go?

J: I’m on board with that.

Donald Trump read the room at the UN yesterday and decided the best way to promote American interests was to insult virtually everyone there. He might as well have been at one of his more deranged campaign rallies.

The undiplomatic offensive rolls on! Even Kaiser Wilhelm II would have resisted that temptation.

It used to be that the Democrats would keep the government running through the use of “clean” continuing resolutions, while the GOP would demand policy concessions in exchange for their support. Today, the shoe is on the other foot. It is the Democrats who are demanding concessions in the face of GOP calls for a clean CR. Is this pure hypocrisy, or is something else going on?

Two things have changed the dynamic between the two parties. First, the Republicans, previously the supporters of limited government, no longer want to shut it down because Trump sees it as an indispensable tool to crush his opponents. Second, Trump only views appropriations as suggestions from Congress; he will spend the money given to him any way he pleases. In that sense, there is no longer any such thing as a “clean” CR.

Finally, there is the promised abuse of the administrative system to investigate and punish enemies of the right. I would say this is the most dangerous of the methods that will be used to stifle free speech.

The administrative abuse tactic goes back to Richard Nixon and his enemies list. There are two big differences between Trump and Nixon, however. First, Nixon did his dirty work in private; Trump announces it in public to intimidate his opponents. Second, Trump, thanks to technological progress, has access to far more data than Nixon did. That means he doesn’t have to focus on a handful of enemies in the media; he can use his power to make life miserable for millions of Americans he doesn’t even know. And he probably will.

Some elements of the left have exploited the internet to impose their views on various cultural issues over the past decade. After screaming about this tactic for years, the right has openly embraced it. People are being fired all over America for saying unflattering things about Charlie Kirk. Right-wing cancel culture, now branded as “consequences culture,” is all the rage.

The woke left has nothing to complain about, but liberals, who by definition want to keep the free speech window as wide and nonpartisan as possible, do. The difference between right-wing and left-wing cancel culture is that the latter evolved without government involvement, while the former is being driven by Trump and his minions. That makes it much more dangerous to free speech than a PC internet mob.

I was born in a town in the northern part of England in Victorian times. My father was a prominent Methodist minister. I had brothers and sisters and dogs. We lived a middle-class life in a gray stone house with a few servants. We were a close and happy family.

One day when I was about eight years old, I got too close to the fire in the fireplace. My clothes caught on fire, and I died as a result. When I was reunited with my family on the other side, we decided that I needed to return to this world to find and finish my mission. Either my mother or one of my sisters agreed to return with me to be my mother to keep me from being alone. It was also determined that we would be Americans this time, as most of our neighbors had emigrated. I was ultimately reborn in a mining and industrial town in Pennsylvania, and the rest is history.

This was revealed to me in a series of intense and lucid dreams over several years. I believe in the vision because it is the only plausible explanation for my personal eccentricities; no known experience in this life can account for them. I am terrified of fire to the point that I cannot light matches to this day. I am a passionate Anglophile frequently more comfortable in the UK than in my own country. I wear plain clothes and eat completely plain food. I follow rules, but only on my own terms; in other words, I obey authority while remaining skeptical of it. My mother looked nothing like her parents or any of her ancestors. And so on.

This is my experience, not yours. It’s OK for you to doubt it. Just don’t expect me to deny it, because I can’t. Its significance for my views on metaphysics will be discussed in future posts.

Trump is now firing veteran prosecutors who are telling him that there is no legal case against his political enemies. The message here is clear–there is no place in the DOJ for ethical attorneys.

Even right-wing judges–Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett, to name two–have to be appalled by this development. But will they do anything about it? Not a chance! They will continue to pretend that it is business as usual, that Trump is the same as any other president, and that the DOJ is still entitled to presumptions of regularity and fair play. Why? Because they can’t handle the truth.

While the Chinese have yet to confirm this, it appears that Trump has made a deal on the future of Tik Tok that is favorable to his side. The real question now is what Xi managed to extract from him in return. Since Trump has very strong views on trade issues, the most likely concession would be geopolitical, and would probably involve Taiwan. In other words, it is possible that he has traded an island of extreme economic, political, and military importance for an app that features short videos. We will see.

ABC capitulated to Trump because its case wasn’t ironclad and it feared setting a bad precedent. CBS, with a stronger case, made a deal to avoid nasty regulatory consequences. The WSJ and the NYT have shown no interest in settling defamation cases in which the requested relief was in the billions of dollars. The NYT case, which was just filed a few days ago, has already been dismissed on the basis that Trump’s bombastic pleading style violated the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

Defamation cases are obviously part of Trump’s tool kit when it comes to crushing dissent. Based on the current case law, they have little chance of success. What is he thinking? Three things: first, the mere size of the demanded relief may be enough to intimidate the MSM; second, that he might get lucky and draw a Trump judge (that didn’t happen in the NYT case); and third, that the Supreme Court could decide to overrule New York Times v. Sullivan. Justice Thomas has shown a strong inclination to do just that, although it is unlikely he can get a majority for that position.

Larry Ellison is a tech titan and a Trump-aligned Republican. He and his son (apparently a Biden donor) are attempting to buy Warner Brothers, which controls, among other things, CNN. They already succeeded in purchasing CBS and are making it a more Trump-friendly network. They may also be in line to own some or all of Tik Tok once the details of Trump’s deal with the Chinese are known.

If you can’t beat them, buy them; that’s a page out of the Viktor Orban playbook. With Musk already controlling Sewer and Disney and the WaPo apparently neutered, the only major media that haven’t capitulated to Trump are the NYT and NBC, the former of which has been sued for $15 billion. More on that tomorrow.

I’ve been saying it for years. I think left-wing mobs policing politically incorrect speech on the internet are deplorable, but reactionaries will use the far greater powers of government to move the window of acceptable speech well to the right. That’s much more dangerous.

That day is here. The sliver of good news is that, barring a lurch towards unvarnished authoritarianism–which is by no means off the table–the likelihood of successful criminal prosecutions for “hate speech” is very low. There is no federal statute defining and prohibiting “hate speech,” and there is no prospect of one being enacted in the near future. The First Amendment, Pam Bondi’s comments notwithstanding, does not contain an exception for “hate speech.” Even Trump judges would show some respect for the First Amendment, and some right-wing commentators are uneasy about limiting “hate speech.” After all, they know those arguments could be used against them if the shoe is on the other foot.

Trump and his authoritarian friends have plenty of other weapons to quash dissent, however. I will be analyzing each of them in posts throughout the week.

As we have seen over the last few years, both the left and the right have crackpots who believe in the utility of violence. It doesn’t help that they have virtually unlimited access to guns. But only one side has militias. There are no left-leaning versions of the Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, and Proud Boys. For now, at least.

This is a fundamental difference between the left and right that doesn’t get enough attention.

The Democrats are depressed. Ross Douthat thinks they can get over it by going to church. Ezra Klein thinks they should focus more on finding ways to build stuff. Is either of them right?

The truth is, the Democrats are depressed for two reasons. First, the combination of the McConnell Project and the markets have made it impossible for them to accomplish very much in Washington. The federal system and gerrymandering make it difficult for them to win majorities in both houses; the filibuster makes it almost impossible to move legislation through the Senate; and the judicial system strikes down most of what they do actually accomplish. If you don’t believe me, just ask Joe Biden, whose ambitious plans to uproot the dollar store economy ultimately failed for these reasons. The second reason is that the system is letting Trump do virtually everything he wants. How can the left stop him without overthrowing what is left of the Constitution?

The bottom line here is that the Democrats will unite around opposition to Trump in 2026, but they will have to choose among three options for a better future in 2028. They can: limit themselves to a promise to roll back Trumpism; take advantage of the new Trump version of the Constitution by ignoring legal constraints to promote growth and equality; or restore and respect the McConnell system, but work within it to make government more effective. That’s Klein’s agenda, and it has a lot going for it.

As I noted in a previous post, Ben Shapiro thinks Barack Obama was an extremely divisive president, in spite of his rhetoric about healing and unity. Why? Because the election of Obama in 2008 proved that America had overcome whatever racism it had in its past. He should have just shut up about the issue. He didn’t; white America reacted angrily to the suggestion that systemic racism was still a thing and that some of them were bigots; Trump was elected in 2016; and the rest is history. Is Shapiro right?

He’s living in fantasyland. The vehemence of the support for Sarah Palin in 2008 and the birther controversy are powerful evidence that racism was firmly embedded in the reactionary right long before Obama said anything about white cops and vigilantes shooting black people. Trump’s use of the military in blue cities, undertaken in the face of urban crime rates that have fallen dramatically, is evidence that it still exists; it is an article of faith among reactionaries that we need to keep an occupying force in our cities to keep black violence from spilling out into real (i.e., white) America.

While the 1970s weren’t a great time for America in general, the movies were outstanding. To this day, two of my favorites are “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “The Sting.” Redford will always have a place in my heart just for them.