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Wishing something that isn't s may be emotionally satisfying but it sets a dangerous precedence. There will come a time when Trump Haters will suffer because of what they have both perpetrated and condoned.
No, Trump Isn’t
Guilty of Incitement
Inflaming emotions isn’t a crime. The
president didn’t mention violence, much less provoke it.
By Jeffrey Scott
Shapiro
House Democrats have drafted an article of impeachment that accuses President Trump of “incitement to insurrection.” Acting U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin said Thursday that his office is “looking at all actors here and anyone that had a role” in the Capitol riot. Some reporters have construed that as including Mr. Trump.
The president didn’t commit incitement or any other crime. I
should know. As a Washington prosecutor I earned the nickname “protester
prosecutor” from the antiwar group CodePink. In one trial, I convicted 31
protesters who disrupted congressional traffic by obstructing the Capitol
Crypt. In another, I convicted a CodePink activist who smeared her hands with
fake blood, charged at then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a House
hearing room, and incited the audience to seize the secretary of state physically.
In other cases, I dropped charges when the facts fell short of the legal
standard for incitement. One such defendant was the antiwar activist Cindy
Sheehan.
Hostile journalists and lawmakers have suggested Mr. Trump
incited the riot when he told a rally that Republicans need to “fight much
harder.” Mr. Trump suggested the crowd walk to the Capitol: “We’re going to
cheer on brave senators and congressmen and -women, and we’re probably not
going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back
our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be
strong.”
In the District of Columbia, it’s a
crime to “intentionally or recklessly act in such a manner to cause another
person to be in reasonable fear” and to “incite or provoke violence where there
is a likelihood that such violence will ensue.” This language is based on Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), in which the Supreme Court
set the standard for speech that could be prosecuted without violating the
First Amendment. The justices held that a Ku Klux Klan leader’s calls for
violence against blacks and Jews were protected speech. The court found that
Clarence Brandenburg’s comments were “mere advocacy” of violence, not “directed
to inciting or producing imminent lawless action . . . likely to
incite or produce such action.”
The president didn’t mention violence on Wednesday, much less provoke or incite it. He said, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
District law defines a riot as “a public disturbance
. . . which by tumultuous and violent conduct or the threat thereof
creates grave danger of damage or injury to property or persons.” When Mr.
Trump spoke, there was no “public disturbance,” only a rally. The “disturbance”
came later at the Capitol by a small minority who entered the perimeter and
broke the law. They should be prosecuted.
The president’s critics want him charged for inflaming the
emotions of angry Americans. That alone does not satisfy the elements of any
criminal offense, and therefore his speech is protected by the Constitution
that members of Congress are sworn to support and defend.
Mr. Shapiro served as an assistant attorney general of the District of Columbia, 2007-09. He is a White House appointed official at the U.S. Agency for Global Media.Social Media company commentary:
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Why will the big tech
giants never censor foreign authoritarian regimes?
Because they have never been regulated, they
are not like other industries. There is no transparent explanation of why a
social media giant bans one account or another.
Ever since Twitter
suspended the account of US President Donald Trump, there have been many calls
for Big Tech social-media platforms to apply the same scrutiny to foreign
leaders, such as Iran’s
Ayatollah Khamenei. This talking point posits that while Trump and
others might reasonably be suspended by social-media giants, it appears
hypocritical that they don’t apply the same standards to others abroad. The
reasons for this are multilayered.
First of all, the social-media giants’ application of their own standards appears to be rapidly changing and arbitrary. The claim that various accounts violated their rules, such as inciting violence, spreading misleading information or hate speech, may be true, just as it may speak to how opaque these guidelines really are.
Because the social-media giants have never been regulated, they are not like other industries. There is no transparent explanation as to why they banned one account or another; they don’t have to provide that to regulators or to customers and users. They don’t have to back up the user information or provide regulators with an archive of their tweets or posts.
While they are private
companies, they are not like other industries, such as automobile
manufacturers, airlines or television stations, which might be regulated in
some way.
The arbitrary nature of social-media suspensions, bans and internal rules means that for all intents and purposes, companies can do what they want on a whim. Often, they do cave to social, political or economic pressure.
For instance,
social-media companies sought to close down accounts that support terrorism and
extremism after the rise of ISIS in 2014. By 2018, Twitter had removed more
than a million pro-terrorist accounts. Studies show that there had been more
than 17 million pro-ISIS tweets.
Social-media giants also suspended “millions” of bots in 2018. Last June, Twitter removed China- and Turkey-linked bot networks. In September, they went after more Russian bots. In Turkey’s case, a troll army linked to the ruling party had harassed dissidents and foreigners; some 30,000 accounts were closed.
TODAY THERE are two
lines of thinking about social-media giants closing down Trump’s accounts and
going after Parler and other platforms where pro-Trump commentators congregate.
Swept up in the “purge” of Trump content are also people like Rush Limbaugh and
former national security advisor Michael Flynn. The removal of far-right
accounts has happened before. Alex Jones and Laura Loomer were removed by
social-media giants in 2018.
This means the removal
of Trump is the culmination of an attempt to reduce far-right content. How
exactly such content is defined is unclear. Twitter has said it wants to be a
safe place for free expression and not have abusive behavior.
There are basically
two sets of guidelines underpinning these decisions, one from Facebook and the
other from Twitter. Together with Google, which owns YouTube, these platforms
are dominant and often appear to coordinate strategy, such as when they
censored access to a New York Post story on Hunter Biden.
In the past year,
Twitter has begun to label state-controlled media. But it also indicated it
would keep up the accounts of foreign leaders because they relate to the
“public interest.” However, information judged “misleading” – sometimes by
“fact-checkers” – has been flagged.
Critics note that all
of these complex decisions on who to ban and label don’t seem to apply to
foreign governments. Twitter did censor a tweet by Iran’s leader that spread
misinformation about COVID vaccines. At the end of November, it refused to
remove a tweet by a Chinese official that was misleading, despite Australia’s
complaints.
At the time, the
company said the tweet was marked “sensitive” but that foreign-policy
“sabre-rattling” is acceptable. The tweet in question was staged and showed a
fake image of an Australian soldier with a knife to a child’s neck. Misleading
comments about the US election were tagged as such, but not this image. Critics
wonder why.
The reason
social-media giants will not ban content by foreign totalitarian governments
that is misleading or incendiary is mostly because Western governments have not
put the kind of public pressure on them to do so. Internal domestic politics,
often written in English, are on the radar of social-media giants and are
hot-button issues. At the end of the day, these are corporations that grew out
of the US, so their knowledge of American politics is greater.
This is part of a
general Orientalist worldview that doesn’t see foreign countries or foreign
politics the same as internal Western democratic politics. This kind of
paternalism tends to treat hateful rhetoric by those like Iran’s supreme leader
as less “dangerous” than extremists inside the borders of the US. Foreign
extremists are seen as more comical, even if for their own citizens their words
are deadly serious.
Democracies have
become less robust at challenging foreign dictatorship media, which has often
enabled the well-endowed foreign media that are run by authoritarian regimes
such as Qatar, Russia, Turkey or other countries to operate freely in the West,
even as Western media and social media are sometimes restricted abroad.
THE LAST consideration
that appears to underpin the decision not to censor foreign authoritarian regimes
– even the ones that spread misinformation, undermine democracy and incite – is
that social-media giants also don’t want to be viewed as tools of Western
governments. If they cave to every demand from lawmakers in the US or Australia
to censor content from China, Iran, Russia or elsewhere, then they could run
the risk of being treated as hostile foreign entities abroad.
This would lead other
countries to create their own social-media platforms, as China already has,
potentially threatening the global hegemony of platforms such as Facebook and
Twitter.
In general,
social-media giants have appeared to cave more quickly to demands from
governments abroad, including religious extremists in Indonesia who got an
account on Instagram banned because it was devoted to gay rights. It is not
uncommon for Kurdish minority accounts to be banned on social media at the
behest of the authoritarian government in Ankara. These include accounts
devoted solely to language and culture.
In some cases, it
appears that social-media giants in the West have become tools of foreign
authoritarians to crack down on freedoms.
This creates an
extraordinary paradox. Companies founded in the West and that grew out of
freedoms accorded them – gathering users because people wanted an online
platform to express themselves – have now cut down on users in their countries
of origin, while appearing to accept the guidelines imposed by various foreign
regimes.
Iranian dissidents,
for instance, wonder why the regime in Iran gets to have unfettered access, but
they cannot. Russian dissidents wonder about the arbitrary censorship of some
Western activists, while noting that Moscow seems to exploit Western reluctance
to make sure dissidents in Russia have access to social media.
Alexey Navalny argues
that “this precedent will be exploited by the enemies of freedom of speech
around the world; in Russia as well. Every time when they need to silence
someone, they will say: ‘This is just common practice. Even Trump got blocked
on Twitter.’”
LASTLY, THAT social-media
giants don’t put a priority on policing the misleading comments of various
foreign regimes or subjecting them to fact-checking or bans for incitement, and
don’t help to amplify dissidents in those countries, boils down to caring less
about the rights or lives of people in Iran than in the West, particularly the
US.
That 1,500 Iranian
protesters could be killed by the Iranian regime, and its leaders still use
Western social media without restrictions, while the same giants are concerned
about democracy being undermined by riots in Washington and see that as
dangerous incitement, illustrates that the lives of Iranians matter less to
major Western corporations.
The story is the same
in Iraq: Dissidents are hunted down and killed, usually after incitement
against them online by accounts that are not banned. In Turkey, every thuggish
far-right media outlet, including those that post openly anti-semitic content,
is not suspended, but Kurdish women’s-rights activists who post about cuisine
or language are.
A combination of
economic decisions, public pressure and paternalism underpins why major Tech
Giants will not likely act against misleading incitement of authoritarian
regimes but will continue to police the speech and content of people in Western
democracies.
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Dov Fisher: Ain't over til it is over.
Why Trump Will Weather This Nonsense He’ll be back.
By Dov Fischer
We have been through this drill before — as with Charlottesville and as when President Trump held a press conference alongside Vladimir Putin overseas and stated that he believed Putin’s questionable asseveration that Russia had not messed with the 2016 American elections. Everyone is smart except Trump.
I view the video, and more than 95 percent of the people who made their ways inside clearly were just drifting and roaming around, walking mostly in single or double file, as in a tour of the Capitol.
In each case, the Mainstream Media whipped up a froth and frenzy. In all of human history, we essentially were told, there never had been such perfidy. We kept hearing, night after day after night after day, the carefully selected clip: “There were fine people on both sides.” So that meant, we were told, that President Trump, grandfather of Orthodox Jewish children, benefactor of Jared Kushner, doting father of Orthodox Jewish Ivanka, a man who commuted the unfair sentence of Shlomo Rubashkin, endorses Nazis. As recently as this very week, the Mainstream Media still are at it, still lying shamelessly that he endorsed Nazis at Charlottesville. While I was watching the nightly Hebrew news out of Israel on Israel’s equivalent of PBS, the Left-oriented public broadcasting station that the Government funds and that the taxpayers hate because all their Mainstream Media likewise are Left-oriented, their Thursday news report included that same precisely edited clip: “There were fine people on both sides.” Not a word about how the President in truth had condemned Nazism and White Nationalists two separate times in the same four-minute conference. That is why the general Israeli population hate their Mainstream Media and love Trump.
There was a similar froth and frenzy during and after that overseas press conference with Putin: James Clapper and John Brennan were all over CNN asserting that the President had perpetrated treason and such. It was worse than Benedict Arnold giving secrets to the British in the days when the Brits were our mortal enemies. (Interesting how time changes realities.) How could the President publicly say, alongside Putin, that he believes Vladimir Putin and not his own director of intelligence? Why didn’t Trump look Putin in the face, in front of world news media, and call him a liar and a crook and a tyrant — and then privately try to negotiate other issues that were on the table? As if any world leader ever would stare another in the face, in front of the world media, and would speak that way, that directly, rather than scold behind closed doors.
And now the current nonsense.
I have watched video of the Wednesday, January 6, incident over and over and over again. Insurrection? Coup? Yes, the Mainstream Media kept calling them “rioters.” But if you watch again carefully, muting the sound and believing only your own eyes, more than 95 percent of the people inside the Capitol just were milling around. It simply was not anything even remotely approaching what the frenzied Mainstream Media are trying to whip up. They make it sound like an insurrection, a coup. This was not the Bolshevik Revolution. Most trespassers inside had no intention of ending up there. They were rallying outside, and an incredibly deficient police and security detail found itself predictably unable to prevent a comparatively small number of people from knocking over pathetically inadequate barricades. The barricades then were down and the crowd just went forward. They were not armed for insurrection. They were not searching for blood. They were angry but — equally or more — just plain curious: “Let’s see where this goes.”
They meandered inside. I view the video, and more than 95 percent of the people who made their ways inside clearly were just drifting and roaming around, walking mostly in single or double file, as in a tour of the Capitol. The guy in Nancy Pelosi’s chair? OK, he should not have been there. It was not his office, not his chair. My mother taught me that: you don’t sit in someone else’s office chair without permission. But the guy obviously was just playing around, putting his legs on her desk, reading or taking an envelope from her desk. That was not an insurrection; it was a grown-up misbehaving — and, by the way, quite peacefully and jovially. It was not Black Lives Matter breaking a street of windows, ransacking stores, and burning down buildings. It was not Antifa shooting rockets into federal buildings including court houses. Rather, it was a bunch of people who played “Follow the Leader” and, out of curiosity as much as anything else, meandered into and out of the Capitol. It was January D.C. winter, and it was warmer inside.
For the Mainstream Media the incident offered a perfect bookend to their four years of dishonest coverage of a president they hated vitriolically from Day One and from before. They found a nut with a T-Shirt that said “Camp Auschwitz” and did their best to make him a symbol of the day. I am a Jew, an Orthodox rabbi, and I have devoted a good chunk of my life to the causes of American Jewry and Soviet Jewish freedom from Communist tyranny, and I have disseminated the words “Never Again” more than most. Yet I am sophisticated enough to discern that a jerk with a “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirt was but one of countless others having a field day in the Capitol. For comparison: a wonderful middle-aged married couple in Brooklyn, Orthodox Jews and former members of the shul where I am congregational rabbi — and still active financial supporters of my rabbinic work and secular writings from their new home in Flatbush — sent me a photo of the two of them, both very pro-Trump activists who campaigned for him across state lines in Philadelphia because New York electoral votes were not in play but Pennsylvania was an electoral battleground, just having fun and smiling outside the Capitol. Another very close friend, the son of an equally very close friend — both actively devoted for decades to the National Council of Young Israel, an organization of more than 130 Orthodox synagogues (including mine) across America and in Israel — was there. If one guy was wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” t-shirt, there were many times more Orthodox Jews than he, thrilled to be there — and so many scores more mainstream, easy-going, perfectly normal pro-Trump activists who just meandered into the Capitol because the House and Senate Sergeants-of-Arms and the Capitol Police defaulted and practically left the doors open. It was like Motel Six: just come on over, and we’ll leave the lights on for you.
This was no insurrection. It just wasn’t. Any objective look at the pictures sees that, yes, a few did break in, did shatter glass. That is inexcusable and must be prosecuted and punished. But, by and large, this simply was a weird day, when the Capitol found itself pathetically unguarded, and masses poured into the building because, well, hey, everyone else is doing it, so why not, and this is so cool, and can I take a selfie? What kind of insurrection and coup is dominated by people taking selfies and snapping photos on their smart phones? Really, c’mon.
OK, it makes total sense that many Congressional representatives and Senators were in a panic because they heard the worst, and you cannot take chances when something crazy like that happens. You have to be cautious, prudent, and secure when throngs throng into your place uninvited. Fair. And yet there is something rich in hearing all those Democrats who have been demanding “Defund the Police!” now screaming about how they have to fire the Sergeant-at-Arms, presumably the Lieutenant-at-Legs, the head of the Capitol Police, all while demanding angrily: Where were the police?
Uh, defunded?
Meanwhile, Trump made a speech. He urged people to march to the Capitol and peacefully protest. That is what he said: “peacefully.” He simply asked his followers to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. Since this is the Charlottesville Big Lie all over again, you have to listen for yourself to the actual speech. Where is the call for insurrection, for a coup? Where is the incitement? He simply called on them to act peacefully and to make their voices heard. When Obama and Holder and that crew did that, Ferguson burned, Baltimore burned. Obama fanned flames for eight years: If he had had a son, the boy would have looked like Trayvon Martin. Right.
The whole thing, the whole Media froth and frenzy, comprises a shameful denouement of its four-year effort to destroy President Trump. In its context, of course the likes of Elaine Chao and Betsy DeVos are jumping ship. It is January, the start of a new year. Their jobs expire in fewer than fourteen days. So they give two weeks’ notice. It gives them a résumé boost, conveying they “left the Trump Administration in protest.” In protest of what – that your job ends in ten days anyway? So they get to do a bit of virtue signaling, and OK. If that is what they feel they need to do to advance their careers, well — since when did Americans never hear of “taking care of Number One”? So be it. Mick Mulvaney leaving his post as a quasi-ambassador to Northern Ireland. Of course he is doing that. He previously served as the acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from November 2017 to December 2018. He also had served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from February 2017 until March 2020, then as acting White House Chief of Staff from January 2019 until March 2020. When the president made Mark Meadows the full-time Chief of Staff, sending Mulvaney for a tour of Northern Ireland and the Old Sod, it was a clear demotion. And Trump once embarrassed Mulvaney unfairly, ordering his Chief of Staff to leave the room while Trump was giving an interview, merely because Mulvaney had coughed. So this was payback time, and Mick got his chance to “Watch Out for Number One” by announcing, just two weeks before he is out of a job anyway, that he is coming back to America. Good for him. Welcome back. Set a spell.
As for impeaching Trump with ten days left to his first term in office, that also is rich. In a quirky way, imagine Mike Pence suited up as 46th President for, like, a day — and then watching Pence, as his one act in office, doing as Gerald Ford did and issuing a full anticipatory pardon to his predecessor. But that quirky moment will have to wait. The House would impeach Trump seven days a week if it could. And if the Senate went berserk, down to Joe Manchin, and voted for conviction — well, at least the Mormons of Utah would wake up to the shame they have brought on their state by replacing a statesman like Orrin Hatch with a sore loser like Mitt Romney who, like Hillary, never came to terms with how a sometime-bullvahn like Donald John Trump, often seeming to be a bull in search of a china shop, proved to be so much more popular than did either of those two.
In the 24-7 news cycle in which we live, politicians vie frantically for coverage by out-extreming each other, and media do the same. They exaggerate everything shamelessly. And then a few weeks pass, new “breaking news” captures center stage, and sensible people look back and recognize the hyperbole with accurate hindsight. Let the job seekers give their two-weeks’ notice. Play the full actual speech. Listen especially to the embedded link for one minute between 18:00 and 19:00 — and particularly to the words at 18:47-18:56. Read the transcript. And remember the more sensible, calm, and courageous who weathered the passing storm of Mainstream Media Big Lie Number Infinity with President Trump
And:
A lot of people who worked with Trump are deserting the ship. They feel he should have responded quicker, not pursued false hopes etc. I believe what has transpired will blow over, in time, but permanent damage has been done and like I said, historians now have an asterisk they did not have.
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An analysis I embrace:
| What Will The Democratic Takeover Do To The Economy | ||
| ||
| ||
| After four years of a Republican-dominated government sinking the U.S. financial situation further towards bankruptcy, it's now the Democrats' turn to step firmly on the spending and debt gas pedal. As the "stimulus," and "help" and "bailouts" continue to ratchet up, the standard of living for the American people will continue to ratchet down. | ||
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