Firehose #85: Make Art (and Moyni-memes), Not Censorship

Also: Can we somehow make this about Shohei Ohtani’s gambling problems?

Well sure, that’s a meme-able image, why pretend it’s not? One of the magical byproducts of creating a new and least somewhat funnish thing fortunate enough to find an audience, is that the resulting community of heretofore strangers will generate their own separate-if-related art, hijinx, and inscrutable rituals. The world before The Fifth Column did not know it needed Moynihan Reaction Face (MRF); the world now stands corrected.

* The aforementioned MRF derived from a Moynihan-moderated Free Press debate this week between Walter Kirn and Geoffrey Cain about banning TikTok, a subject we discussed (not to universal listener acclaim!) in Episode #446.

* Speaking of ban-hammers, our friendly FIRE-man Greg Lukianoff (#216, Members Only #183, #427), along with co-author Sean Stevens, has come out with Part 2 of their “The Skeptics Were Wrong” series, looking back at nothing-to-see-here declarations about campus speech illiberalism from six years ago, and measuring them concretely against what has transpired since. From Part 1:

Jeffery Sachs declared, “There is no campus free speech crisis, the kids are alright, those that say otherwise have lost all perspective, and the real crisis may be elsewhere, ” and, “The ‘campus free speech crisis’ is a myth and here are the facts.” Rich Smith let everyone know, “There’s No Free Speech Crisis on Campus, So Please Shut Up About It.” And Matt Yglesias claimed in Vox, “​​Everything we think about the political correctness debate is wrong.” 

And from Part 2:

Of the 668 deplatforming attempts involving students [as compiled by FIRE since 1998], 527 of them have come from the left (79%). One-hundred-and-twenty-two of these (23%) occurred from 1998-2013 — an average of about nine per year. The other 405 (77%) have occurred since 2014 — an average of roughly 40-and-a-half per year. To be clear, this is more than quadruple the average of nine per year from 1998 through 2013.

In contrast, only 110 of the 668 deplatforming attempts involving students have come from the right (16%). Forty of these (36%) occurred from 1998-2013 — an average of two-and-a-half per year. This is less than a third of the average attempts from the left during the same time period. Since 2014, 70 deplatforming attempts (64%) have come from the right — an average of roughly seven per year. That’s about one-quarter of the attempts involving students from the left. […]

In other words, deplatforming attempts have been increasing, and have increasingly come from the left. Unfortunately, the same can also be said for disruptions that occurred once campus events began.

* Lukianoff’s co-author of the 2018 bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt, has a hot new forthcoming book out titled The Anxious Generation, a sample of which you can taste at The Atlantic: “End the Phone-Based Childhood Now.” Haidt will be interviewed for a Reason Speakeasy April 15 in NYC by Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72 & #379), an event at which I hope/presume we’ll see beloved Fifdom artiste Dave Cicerilli. Why single out young Dave? Because he is creating some singular art in conjunction with Jon’s book. Check it on out:  

More from Cicerilli Industries:  

[W]e will blanket the centers of media, government, and tech in provocative images and installations that remove the filters from the phone-based coming of age.  

This guerilla art takeover is anchored by a ten-foot-tall “Missing Childhood” milk cartons in prominent public spaces. These cartons will not just tell the tragic story of youth’s mental health decline but also be a forum for passerbyers to share their personal experiences with this dramatic shift in childhood. (quick video recap here)

Starting this week, our street team and film crew will be traveling with the Anxious Generation Art Takeover to the following cities: 

·        Washington, DC —  National Mall (3/22)

·        New York City  — Union Square  (3/25-3/26)

·        San Francisco — Pier 15 (3/27-2/28)

·        Los Angeles — TBD (4/2-4/3)

* More cool art begetting more cool art:

My old collaborator Ken Layne (referenced heavily on M.O. #179), having already podcast-memorialized his ex-bandmate Mojo Nixon on The Desert Oracle, is organizing an awesome-sounding San Diego send-off for the Right Reverend on April 20. (Tickets going fast.) Deets:

Be there at 2 p.m. Saturday 4/20/2024 for a big-screen showing of the award-winning documentary THE MOJO MANIFESTO followed by tall tales from Mojo World with a Q&A featuring director Matt Eskey & the Beat Farmers, all followed by a memorial gathering at Hooleys Public House next door. And THEN the Farmers are playing El Cajon's Downtown Cafe (6-9:30 PM), to keep the night rolling on.

We've got a Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/MojoSanDiego if you'd like to follow the event, leave a comment, or yap at your hosts, Sam Chammas & Ken Layne.

Judging by the recent Mojo tribute in Austin, this will be a memorable event.

* More free-speechy contentions: We mentioned in passing on #447 this week’s big Supreme Court case Murthy v. Missouri, concerning the Biden administration’s pressure on social media companies to suppress the allegedly misinformational speech of their users. As the great First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh noted after oral arguments, “In recent decades, the Court has been extremely skeptical when the government, acting as sovereign (as opposed to employer, subsidizer, educator, etc.) tries to suppress speech based on its content…. But several of Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson's questions raised the possibility that the government may indeed be allowed even to coerce platforms into restricting speech—including speech that doesn't fall within the familiar First Amendment exceptions (such as for true threats or solicitation of crime).”

It's a potentially big freakin’ deal, in other words. (I associate my position on the case with that of my Reason colleague Jacob Sullum.) At any rate, one subplot of this case involves former guest Matt Taibbi (#226, #348). On March 17, the newspaper formerly known as The Paper of Record published a pre-write so loaded that Sullum’s reaction piece was headlined, “The New York Times Again Worries That Free Speech Endangers Democracy.” In it, the NYT mostly focuses on the role of former Trump administration official Mike Benz in popularizing what the paper stated was an exaggerated and often inaccurate notion (in part via cooperation with Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger in their Twitter Files reporting) that the Biden White House was directly pressuring social media companies to censor. It’s a pretty dense thicket, but here’s part of Taibbi’s pushback, headlined “On Today’s Absurd New York Times Hit Piece”:

[Jim] Rutenberg and Lee Myers imply Benz influenced a change in my personal reporting, since I didn’t discover “evidence of direct government involvement” in the first installment of the Twitter Files about the Hunter Biden laptop story:

The author of that dispatch, Mr. Taibbi, concluded that Twitter had limited the coverage amid general warnings from the F.B.I. that Russia could leak hacked materials to try to influence the 2020 election. Though he was critical of previous leadership at Twitter, he reported that he saw no evidence of direct government involvement.

In March 2023, Mr. Benz joined the fray. Both Mr. Taibbi and Mr. Benz participated in a live discussion on Twitter, which was co-hosted by Jennifer Lynn Lawrence, an organizer of the Trump rally that preceded the riot on Jan. 6… As Mr. Taibbi described his work, Mr. Benz jumped in: “I believe I have all of the missing pieces of the puzzle.” There was a far broader “scale of censorship the world has never experienced before,” he told Mr. Taibbi, who made plans to follow up.

Nice try. Though I didn’t find “direct evidence” of government involvement in censorship programs in the first Twitter Files piece, we did discover it, on a grand scale, almost immediately after. Subsequent Twitter Files reports reflected this, including “Twitter, the FBI Subsidiary” from December 16th, 2022, and the “Twitter and Other Government Agencies” story published on Christmas Eve of 2022, the day the IRS opened a case on me.

Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and other Twitter Files reporters discovered the key elements of the Twitter Files reports, from the “industry calls” held between the FBI and Internet platforms like Twitter, to the role of Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, to the role of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center in sponsoring “anti-disinformation” work, in the first two weeks of research. Our central thesis about state-sponsored censorship was online months before we met Benz. By mid-December 2022, I knew we were looking at a sweeping federal content-control program, and repeated the idea many times.

* More consequential journalistic work from Fif’ friends: Lookee who was smack dab in the middle of this week’s bombshell Shohei Ohtani gambling story! Why, none other than Gustavo Arellano (#306, #377), as part of a big L.A. Times team competing with ESPN for lead dog on the evolving and deeply confusing scandal. A thousand related links on Gustavo’s must-read email newsletter. Unsurprisingly, Ethan Strauss (#185, #333, #383, M.O. #151, #408) has jumped into the analytic fray. I’ll cheat and jump to the conclusion:

There used to be a separation between the leagues and the underworld. You used to have to visit a book or a bookie to make a bet, versus do it on your phone. Now that everything is combined as one, how can we expect athletes and fans to compartmentalize? I don’t know if this is the beginning of a bigger Ohtani scandal; I just know it’s the beginning of more scandals like Ohtani’s.

* Den mother Nancy Rommelmann (#79, S.D. #27, S.D. #30, #198, #203, S.D. #34, S.D. #50, S.D. #64, S.D. #111) went on Noam Dworman’s Live From the Table podcast to talk about Israel, #MeToo, and the social-media sexual assault trial of Yascha Mounk (#124, #195), which was a major second-half discussion on #442:

* Unpopulist Publisher Shikha Dalmia reacted to our mischaracterization-pushback (in Firehose #84 and M.O. #204) by writing nearly 4,000 more words dissecting our 37-minute, mid-December discussion about The Fall of Minneapolis. It is about as intellectually rigorous as you’d expect.

Walkoff music is a good old cover of a good old song. Honey I’m laughing all the time: