Not Without Incident: Questioning Big Brother's Platitudes

History repeats itself, and whether Musk’s Twitter implodes or not, the real conflict, the Western illiberal liberal classes fighting to retain control of information from us unwashed plebs will continue. Still, too many are distracted by other superficial fights, and in the words of Granger, “It can’t last”.

“So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause . . .”[i]– Padme

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”[ii]– Aldous Huxley

“The rhythm is the rebel
Here’s a funky rhyme that they’re tappin’ on
Just thinkin’ I’m breakin’ the beats I’m rappin’ on
CIA FBI
All they tell us is lies
And when I say it they get alarmed
‘Cause I’m louder than a bomb”[iii]– Public Enemy

When Allen Ginsberg published his famous poem, “Howl” in the collection “Howl and Other Poems”, it was met with controversy and copies were seized from a bookstore by authorities, who claimed it was ‘obscene’.[iv] Obscenity laws were designed to police morality in literature and artwork, and have thankfully been scrapped, though many on the Christian right seek to reimpose them. In the case of Ginsberg and his poem Howl, he, and his publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Press, who was arrested for publishing the poem, stood in a trial that was a landmark case for literary expression.[v] Ginsberg was a major figure in the beat generation, alongside writers like Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, and the obscenity trial and its conclusion made Ginsberg and Howl extremely consequential for the ability for other writers in the beat generation, as well as writers in the generations that followed. Although this was not a trial that tackled the first amendment, it is significant for its fight against censorship, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).[vi]

It’s easy to smirk at the absurdity of obscenity laws, but the woke corporatist puritans in our present day impose their own versions of such laws and political correctness. The case of Howl is informative for far woke puritans. ‘Liberals’ have deviated from anything that represents a liberal ideology. In Howl, Ginsberg delves into themes around homosexuality, consumerism, and drug addiction, and therefore it was censored and deemed obscene, it critiqued an increasingly vapid consumer culture. Ferlinghetti expressed this when he wrote in an essay reflecting on the Howl case that “The “Howl” that was heard around the world wasn’t seized in San Francisco in 1956 just because it was judged obscene by cops, but because it attacked the bare roots of our dominant culture, the very Moloch heart of our consumer society.”[vii] Moloch refers to a demonic figure in the film Metropolis by Fritz Lang, which is critique of industrialism.[viii] In Lang’s film, workers are sacrificed and fed to Moloch.[ix] This imagery is not real, it is the product of a hallucination of Freder, son of the city’s master, who sees stretchers of dead workers as what he imagined as sacrifices to Moloch.

The Moloch of our present day is the woke corporate establishment, choking freedom of expression and hollowing out the state to fund endless wars. Literary culture is becoming more puritanical, favoring diversity of superficial characteristics over diversity of ideas and stories. Ferlinghetti’s conclusion to his reflective essay is ominous, as he writes, “Fifty years later, Ginsberg’s indictment still rings in our ears, and his insurgent voice is needed more than ever, in this time of rampant nationalism and omnivorous corporate monoculture deadening the soul of the world.”[x] Therefore I refer to the case of Ginsberg’s Howl as instructive in our current age of censorship and woke puritanism, as his insurgent voices such as his are targeted by the puritans, the illiberal liberal class, for cancellation and censorship.

Ginsberg was part of a literary movement that fought for the expression of themes in the interests of the traditional left and those who resisted the stigmatization of homosexuality and addiction. Those who seek to ban literature written by political figures they don’t like, ideas they label ‘conspiracy theories’, and Elon Musk’s Twitter are no different than those who sought to ban Howl from bookstores. It is the corporate monoculture that Ferlinghetti refers to in his essay that is killing our ability to express ourselves artistically. We will soon all be like Winston in George Orwell’s 1984 as he sits in front of his diary, unable to articulate thoughts and express himself in the written word, not because we are simply tired or sick, but because the fear of committing an offense or ‘thought crime’ has totally suppressed our creativity and imagination.[xi] The beat writers are some of the most important and consequential writers of all time. The victory for Ginsberg in the obscenity trial over Howl was a victory not just for him and his work, but for other writers and us. It shows us the power of free expression and the beauty that it can create. In response to such creation, some call it offensive or obscene, and seek to censor and banish it. If the current regime of censorship and thought policing continues, we will enter a destructive frenzy of banishment akin to the burnings in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, where ‘firemen’ scorch all literature.[xii] The only difference between Bradbury’s dystopia and ours will be that in Bradbury’s, a group of exiles commit heaps of books to memory, acting as human libraries, and in our dystopia, we are unlikely to be blessed with such intellectuals.

As the illiberal liberal class cries for the censorship or even the outright obliteration of Musk’s Twitter, they also decry the suppression of press and internet freedoms in states like Russia, Iran, and China. Not only is there a push to silence the unwashed, the plebs, the deplorables, from questioning narratives around issues like the 2020 election, Covid-19 vaccines, and policies, hate speech, and white supremacy. Only the enlightened can have a say, and criticism of other surveillance states like China are mere projection from the most pervasive surveillance state of them all, the US and its Western counterparts like Canada and the United Kingdom.

The gall of people like Suzanne Nossel of the PEN America foundation to critique other countries for cracking down on press freedoms while the US government is continuing to pursue its ridiculous and draconian case against Julian Assange, who is responsible for the most revealing and significant journalism of our generation, is grotesque.[xiii] As Trump’s return to Twitter is lambasted by civil rights groups as harmful to human rights, the petty tyrants in the illiberal liberal class are desperate to usurp control of information flows from Musk so they can impose a censorship regime that works in their favor, not so they can create a free and open internet.[xiv] That was the original goal of and argument for the internet, and a free and open internet, commonly referred to as net neutrality, was supposedly a major milestone for Barrack Obama’s administration, who campaigned on net neutrality and touted victories upholding the FCC’s net neutrality rules.[xv] However, under Obama the Espionage Act was invoked multiple times, press freedoms were strangled, Wikileaks was targeted for financial devastation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) under the Attorney General Eric Holder, and Chelsea Manning, who provided the documents on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars published by Wikileaks in 2010, was arrested and tortured to get to Assange.[xvi] A truly free and open internet seems like a utopian ideal, as the US government is even looking to take control of and crack down on digital currency.

Just as Ginsberg’s Howl was put on trial for obscenity, the speech of distasteful and discursive figures like Trump and Project Veritas, and the ability of the deplorables, of, as Chris Hedges argues, we are all a member, to speak up is on trial.[xvii] If we are to win, we must come together and fight for a free and open internet and a shared right to freedom of expression.

Silencing the Unwashed

“Very reassuring. So whereas a Christian approach is usually summarised as ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin’, here the guiding principle seems to be ‘Love the sin, crucify the sinner’.”[xviii]– Timothy Garton Ash

The outrage over Trump being reinstated on Twitter is revealing, as Trump said in a Republican convention that he would not be returning to Twitter and this shows that his mere presence, the potential for him to speak, is a threat and alarms the blue check brigade.[xix] Others have also been reinstated, like Jordan Peterson and The Babylon Bee, however, one person not allowed back on Twitter is Alex Jones, who should be reinstated, as the arguments for not reinstating him are truer of many people and organizations who are on Twitter, like the CIA and US officials like Michael Hayden. Twitter under Musk simply violates the doctrine of the new woke puritans.

These clownish puritans show their ridiculousness in the infighting and speech policing on Mastodon, a Twitter alternative for outraged blue checkmarks.[xx] Jelani Cobb of the New Yorker is an example of self-proclaimed journalists leaving Twitter, as the unwashed being able to speak is an offensive notion to his ilk.[xxi] The illiberal liberal class is not upset that Musk is a billionaire controlling a social media platform on principle, they are upset that they are not the ones in control. Their arguments reek of hypocrisy, and seals clap away and repeat the mantras plastered all over headlines in these outlets. The harm principle as conceived by John Stuart Mill has been distorted by the woke puritans. People must now be protected from offense, not instilled with the value of open and rigorous debate. Recent works on free speech are interesting but disturbing, just as works pondering whether democracy is the optimal form of government after all, as Trump and Brexit were results of democratic elections.

Timothy Garton Ash wrote a book arguing for ten principles of speech in a rapidly changing and digitizing landscape.[xxii] Ash argues that to judge whether speech merits harsh punishment or is to be deemed harmful or offensive, he presents a ‘personal judgement grid’ “three axes marked Context (of the speech act), Justification (of the constraint) and Justified Constraint. We place each case within the three-dimensional grid to determine the most appropriate constraint.”[xxiii] As examples he uses two extremes, one that is clearly harmful, as we know the ultimate outcome, and one that is clearly harmless and although distasteful, ultimately innocuous.[xxiv] He posits that in the case of “those who advocated exterminating Tutsis ‘like cockroaches’ on Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines in Rwanda”, they should have been punished harshly and imprisoned, and he then uses an example of someone telling a racist joke at a private lunch.[xxv] This is absurd, as we only know the harm caused by the speech advocating for the genocide of Tutsis because we know the horrors of the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. Some guy at a private lunch in the company of a handful of work colleagues, even if he is a senior employee, has nowhere near the influence that people on Rwandan media had. This may be Ash’s point, but this notion of context and how it matters can be used for sinister ends, as one could point to, as in buffoonish media organizations like Media Matters, that a host like Tucker Carlson, the most watched show in cable news, has massive influence and in the perceptions of many in the illiberal liberal class, he spreads white supremacist views.

For justified constraint, Ash argues that the constraint needs to be justified by the harm caused by the speech act, and again, this can be sinister, as what is harm?[xxvi] To many, Trump’s speech on January 6^th, 2021, was incitement, however, in the speech he told his supporters to “march peacefully and patriotically”, and in his final tweets before his permanent suspension after he left office, he called for his supporters to remain peaceful.[xxvii] Was the harm done in the Capitol building that day a direct impact of Trump’s speech? In an age where words are violence and acts of misgendering someone are apparently akin a punch in the face, this judgement matrix put forth by Ash is ripe for misuse. An example of abusing the harm principle is the notion that different identity groups feel offense and trauma differently. Thus, where the first amendment guarantees freedom of speech for all equally, some argue that is impossible, for example Nossel argues in her book on free speech that “The effective defense of free speech must acknowledge the harms speech can cause and recognize that such harms can vary. Those who ridicule members of minority groups, women, undocumented immigrants, and others targeted by nasty speech as weak or cossetted risk furthering the unhelpful view that “free speech” as a concept denies these particularized experiences.”[xxviii] Malcom X is turning in his grave, and on meeting the brutal racism of the Klan, Malcom X proclaimed that if the government did not stop them, he and his fellow Americans would, and he said, “You can’t ever reach a man if you don’t speak his language.”[xxix] If we self-censor and censor speech deemed harmful, we are ill equipped to handle vile and grotesque speech acts.

Minority groups do not need us to coddle them and to soften our language for them, and by speaking his language, meaning the virulent bigots in the Klan, Malcom X does not mean be racist back, he means match the force and brutality of the rhetoric. When language is softened, this becomes impossible, especially when the justification for softening language is the distinct risk that minority groups face in ‘free speech hellscapes’. As George Carlin said, political correctness is soft language that “takes the life out of life”, and Nossel’s idea that harms of speech vary is the foundation of intersectional identity victimhood and only does a disservice to the groups she claims require special protection, just the notion that certain people need special protection on the internet from mean words and deranged trolls is paternalistic, overbearing, demeaning rhetoric.[xxx] If there are harms of speech, they do not vary, or they should not. For example, if someone tells a mom joke to someone whose mother passed away in a Call of Duty lobby, but this person tells mom jokes to everyone he meets in lobbies, is he engaging in harmful speech because one of the random people he will probably never meet in person lost his mother? Importantly, is he engaging in a criminal act? Can speech be a crime? Nossel’s argument is the basis for criminalizing speech that is singled out for targeting minority groups, or “protected groups”. As Carlin put it, you should make fun of any group who takes themselves too seriously.[xxxi]

Poking fun is not the same as having malicious intent. People tend to conflate the two when banning comedy, they deem offensive, and increasingly cordial and civil arguments are conflated with being offensive and harmful, if the argument being made is any of the several phobias, from transphobia to Islamophobia. As Mick Hume writes, “What passes for debate today often looks more like an arms race to see who can appear most offended. Identity politics is the sphere of competitive victimhood. Identity groups draw their moral authority from claims for redress for grievances and offences against them, past and present.”[xxxii] Aside from this being an indulgence of a late capitalist society, the arms race for claiming the most harm caused by speech is pathetic and results in the imposition of a form of Newspeak, with new words being added daily based on offense found. We are not far off a gameshow called So You Think You’re Offended? where contestants compete for finding certain phrases and words offensive more than the others. Don’t blame me if this show becomes a reality.

Conclusion

‘Nothing. I thought I had part of the Book of Ecclesiastes and maybe a little of Revelation, but I haven’t even that now.’[xxxiii]– Ray Bradbury

Watching people argue with Musk and those who laud his loosening of speech regulations is tragically comic. The tragedy is that the people attacking Musk are not upset at his control over the speech platform, they are upset that they are not at the helm. Perhaps these people should stop and reflect on the problem we face, that information is under the thumb of a handful of oligarchs, and faceless, nameless people play with algorithms and decide who gets to speak in public. The staff of companies like Facebook and Google are filled with former CIA agents and intelligence advisers, and these propaganda experts inevitably favor the line of the Washington establishment. Those who suddenly realize the issue of oligarchic control of information is almost refreshing, as noted, it is artificial, as there is nowhere near the same ire for Bezos’ ownership of the Washington Post. The only media mogul more hated is the villain in all liberal discourse, Rupert Murdoch, whose very own FOX News hosts Tucker Carlson, the only corporate journalist who advocates for the freedom of Assange and who questions Washington’s war machine. Bezos is a good billionaire, he is our billionaire, he has the correct ideology, as do George Soros and Bill Gates. It is a massive tragedy that Musk’s takeover of Twitter has not sparked the debate we should be having, that our freedom of expression relies on the whims of a rich person. In the mind of Twitter’s previous owners, Trump, Jordan Peterson, and other right-wing figures were dangerous and hurtful, and now, Musk reversed their bans and according to his feelings. However, Musk is evidently not the free speech absolutist he claimed to be as he was buying Twitter. Alex Jones can never be brought back into the public square, but organizations of death like the CIA and the Taliban can tweet freely. As Noam Chomsky pointed out decades ago, if you support free speech, you support it for views you despise and find abhorrent, otherwise, you support censorship.[xxxiv]

Hate speech, an abstraction that polices language and thought is not only defined by the UN but is touted as the inevitable result of people like Musk owning social media platforms.[xxxv] Frederike Kaltheuner, the director of the tech and human rights division for HRW, said in an interview as Musk was set to buy Twitter that “An absolutist view on freedom of expression doesn’t wrestle with these complex challenges – to the detriment of those on the receiving end of harmful speech.”[xxxvi] Those seeing mean words directed at them on the internet are apparently being ‘harmed’ by ‘harmful speech’. The term ‘harmful speech’ is an Orwellian phrase. This take on speech, that it can be hateful, violent, trauma inducing, is only taken seriously by those who seek to censor ideologies they disagreed with. It is a digital form of Herbert Marcuse’s theory of repressive tolerance.

The first amendment and free speech are distorted to favor establishment and puritanical narratives. Stanley Fish opens his book on free speech by writing “The one thing speech isn’t is free. There are costs to those who produce it and costs to those who are subjected to it.”[xxxvii] What are these costs Fish refers to? Are people ‘subjected to speech’? What does that even mean? Like many arguments calling for stricter regulation and opposition to ‘free speech absolutism’, Fish is vague and deals only in legal abstractions. While the concept of free speech is itself an abstraction, it is about more than just the act of speech in conversation, it is a principle and is about the freedom of artistic expression and the freedom to exist in the marketplace of ideas. This is worth fighting for, and Musk may not be the perfect representative, he should reinstate Jones and Steve Bannon for example, but he is a much better representative than his predecessors, so far.

When we lose our freedom of expression, we lose our ability to make meaning of the world around us, and the works of writers like Ginsberg will be lost to us, even if they are not burnt like in Fahrenheit 451. Contrary to the proclamation of deconstructionist Roland Barthes that the author is dead and that we readers are all authors of all works in our own minds, crafting and resonating with a work in different ways, writers are necessary for humanity to make meaning of the complexity of ourselves. Readers who are capable of critical thought are necessary to interpret texts that grapple with the complexity of the human struggle. As Bradbury writes in his introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451, he does not prescribe meaning onto his work, as “I’ve always written at the top of my lungs and from some secret motives within. I have followed the advice of my good friend Federico Fellini who, when asked about his work, said, ‘Don’t tell me what I’m doing, I don’t want to know.’”[xxxviii] Freedom of expression is not to be forced, it is a natural force, and we must resist those who seek to suppress it if it does not deliver dominant narratives. We must be like Ginsberg and his contemporaries- insurgent voices. We must also allow people to realize on their own the importance of freedom of expression and of principles like the first amendment. This is frustrating as people, especially in tribes, are stubborn. Thus, we often realize consequential truths when it’s too late. As Granger says to Montag in Fahrenheit 451, after introducing him to all the human libraries waiting on the end of the war on literature, “you can’t make people listen. They must come round in their time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them. It can’t last.”[xxxix] History repeats itself, and whether Musk’s Twitter implodes or not, the real conflict, the Western illiberal liberal classes fighting to retain control of information from us unwashed plebs will continue. Still, too many are distracted by other superficial fights, and in the words of Granger, “It can’t last”.

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[i] Star Wars: Episode III- Revenge of the Sith. DVD. USA: 20th Century Fox, 2005.

[ii] Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper & Row, 1932.

[iii] Public Enemy. Louder than a Bomb. CD. USA: Def Jam, 1988.

[iv] Morgan, Bill, and Nancy J Peters. Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2006.

[v] Morgan and Peters. Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression

[vi] Morgan and Peters. Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression

[vii] Morgan and Peters. Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression

[viii] Metropolis. DVD. Germany: Parufamet, 1927.

[ix] Metropolis. DVD. Germany: Parufamet, 1927.

[x] Morgan and Peters. Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression

[xi] Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

[xii] Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451: Fahrenheit 451–the Temperature at Which Book Paper Catches Fire and Burns.

[xiii] Lindsay, James, and Suzanne Nossel. “Threats to Free Expression, with Suzanne Nossel.” Council on Foreign Relations, September 27, 2022. https://www.cfr.org/podcasts/threats-free-expression-suzanne-nossel.

[xiv] Feiner, Lauren. “Civil Rights Leaders Condemn Musk Decision to Lift Trump Twitter Ban.” CNBC, November 21, 2022. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/21/civil-rights-leaders-condemn-musk-decision-to-lift-trump-twitter-ban.html.

[xv] Obama, Barack. “Net Neutrality: A Free and Open Internet.” The White House, 2016. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/net-neutrality.

[xvi] Assange, Julian, Jacob Appelbaum, Müller-MaguhnAndy, and Jérémie Zimmermann. Cyberpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. 2022. Reprint, OR Books, 2012.

[xvii] Hedges, Chris. “We Are All Deplorables.” Truthdig, November 21, 2016. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/we-are-all-deplorables/.

[xviii] Garton Ash, Timothy. Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. Yale University Press, 2017.

[xix] Feiner. “Civil Rights Leaders Condemn Musk Decision to Lift Trump Twitter Ban.”

[xx] Knight, Will. “The Man behind Mastodon Built It for This Moment.” Wired, November 14, 2022. https://www.wired.com/story/the-man-behind-mastodon-eugen-rochko-built-it-for-this-moment/.

[xxi] Cobb, Jelani. “Why I Quit Elon Musk’s Twitter.” The New Yorker, November 27, 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-i-quit-elon-musks-twitter.

[xxii] Garton Ash. Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World.

[xxiii] Garton Ash. Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World.

[xxiv] Garton Ash. Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World.

[xxv] Garton Ash. Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World.

[xxvi] Garton Ash. Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World.

[xxvii] AP NEWS. “Transcript of Trump’s Speech at Rally before US Capitol Riot,” January 14, 2021. https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-trump-capitol-siege-media-e79eb5164613d6718e9f4502eb471f27, and Trump, Donald. “Https://Twitter.com/Realdonaldtrump/Status/1346912780700577792?Lang=En.” Twitter, January 6, 2021. https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1346912780700577792?lang=en.

[xxviii] Nossel, Suzanne. Dare to Speak. HarperCollins, 2020.

[xxix] Malcom X. “Malcolm X.” Figures of Speech, February 14, 1965. https://www.speech.almeida.co.uk/malcolm-x.

[xxx] Carlin, George, ed. George Carlin: Doin’ It Again. Streaming. USA: HBO, 1990.

[xxxi] Carlin, ed. George Carlin: Doin’ It Again.

[xxxii] Hume, Mick. Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? 2022. Reprint, London: William Collins, 2016.

[xxxiii] Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451: Fahrenheit 451–the Temperature at Which Book Paper Catches Fire and Burns.

[xxxiv] Chomsky, Noam. “His Right to Say It.” chomsky.info, February 28, 1981. https://chomsky.info/19810228/.

[xxxv] Feiner. “Civil Rights Leaders Condemn Musk Decision to Lift Trump Twitter Ban.”

[xxxvi] Kaltheuner, Frederike, and Amy Braunschweiger. “Interview: Elon Musk, Twitter, and Human Rights.” Human Rights Watch, May 10, 2022. https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/05/10/interview-elon-musk-twitter-and-human-rights.

[xxxvii] Eugene Fish, Stanley. The First: How to Think about Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump. New York: One Signal Publishers/Atria, 2019.

[xxxviii] Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451: Fahrenheit 451–the Temperature at Which Book Paper Catches Fire and Burns.

[xxxix] Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451: Fahrenheit 451–the Temperature at Which Book Paper Catches Fire and Burns.

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