Conspiracy Nuts Are Poisoning America
Free Speech Means Sociopaths Have The Right To Upend Society With Lies
There’s an old saying:
"The Constitution Is Not A Suicide Pact”
It is often claimed that President Abraham Lincoln uttered the phrase during the Civil War when he took dramatic steps to suspend habeas corpus and other Constitutional rights to prevent dissent on the Union side. The more likely truth is that the phrase is a bastardization of a line in a dissenting opinion by former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson.
In 1949, the Supreme Court ruled in Terminiello v. City of Chicago that the city’s “breach of peace” ordinance criminalizing speech that "stirs the public to anger, invites dispute, brings about a condition of unrest, or creates a disturbance" was unconstitutional. The decision was a close 5-4, with Jackson as one of the dissenting justices. In his dissent, he wrote:
The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.
The Supreme Court had ruled that if you say something that leads others to violent acts, it’s perfectly legal, as it is considered “free speech.” Jackson disagreed, suggesting such a theory would lead to violence and chaos that would jeopardize both order and liberty.
Jackson’s argument has hampered our nation’s interpretation of the First Amendment since the Constitution was first drafted: How far can we allow free speech to go before it puts the safety and security of the American people at risk? What happens if the speech that triggers the violence is a lie and the speaker knows it is a lie?
That question has become a political hot potato since the COVID-19 Pandemic and the rise of misinformation online. Since then, misinformation has poisoned the discourse over vaccines, the 2020 Election, anti-racism programs, care for transgender people, especially minors, and now, the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
Helene struck the Southeast late last month as a Category 4 hurricane, tearing into Florida’s Big Bend region. However, the storm did most damage inland, dumping heavy rain and causing severe flooding in Georgia, South Carolina, and most notably in the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee. The devastation was so intense that much of the region was cut off from society, especially in Western North Carolina.
Republicans, sensing a political opportunity, attempted to latch on to any bad news from the disaster zone to try to spin the federal response to the storm as incompetent, hoping to use it against Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign just weeks before the presidential election. The strategy is meant to prevent another “Sandy” situation, where Republicans thought Obama’s perceived competent response to Hurricane Sandy, which struck the New York City area a week before the 2012 election, helped him win.
Last week, the New York Post ran a story about a private helicopter pilot who was threatened with arrest after he flew into the disaster zone without approval. The Post spun the story to make it seem like the federal government, possibly under the order of President Joe Biden or Harris, is ordering those trying to rescue hurricane victims or render aid to them to stand down so people in the heavily Republican rural Appalachian counties could die. The true story is that the pilot, a retired cop, flew into the disaster zone without alerting the FAA, causing several other rescue helicopters and aircraft delivering relief aid to be grounded and delaying help. The arrest threat came not from the federal government but from a local official in a Republican county.
The queen of crazy, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), suggested Democrats manufactured Hurricane Helene as a means to kill Republican voters. Elon Musk, whose brain has been fried since his transgender child disowned him and his ex-partner Grimes left him, agreed and used his massive social media network Twitter1 to spread the theory.
Several other conspiracies festered online: That FEMA didn’t have money to give people because Biden was using it to fund “illegal immigrants.” It was Trump who did that. Another is that victims only get $750 in total, which is a lie. They were given $750 immediately, with more aid in the coming weeks and months. A fake AI-generated photo of a sobbing little girl in a life vest clutching a puppy in a rescue raft was shared by Republican officials to suggest the Biden Administration had left her to die. Several accounts on Twitter tied to Russian disinformation campaigns shared the image with a caption suggesting Biden had left the child to die in order to send money to Ukraine, who is currently at war with Russia.
The conspiracies became so widely spread that officials, both Republican and Democratic, from the disaster zone pleaded with people to stop sharing and promoting them. The pleas haven’t worked.
I covered Hurricane Sandy as a reporter, and within days of the storm, FEMA, the Small Business Administration, state and local officials, and insurance companies were all on the ground in hard-hit areas like Howard Beach, Queens. Utility companies from as far away as California and Louisiana worked to restore power. Local officials gathered them all together for a town hall in Howard Beach a few weeks after the storm, and the meeting descended into chaos, with people shouting at each other and shouting at officials, spreading conspiracy theories and threatening officials. Disasters bring out the best in people, but they also bring out the worst. Right now, we live in a society where very powerful, wealthy people - like the manchild who bought Twitter to spite his daughter and felon trying to regain the presidency to save himself from prison - are exploiting the worst. They are creating chaos for their own enjoyment and their own personal interests.
And we’re letting them. Why?
Well, the apparent reason is Republicans want to win, and facts don’t often work in their favor. Republicans believe offered to Obama by then-Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was a significant factor in Obama’s election victory a week after Sandy. They know the best chance they have at stopping Harris’ and her party’s momentum is to try to turn this into the Biden Administration’s Katrina.
I think there are other sinister reasons, too. The lies surrounding the federal response to Helene are a permission structure for right wingers when they’re in power to ignore Democratic-voting areas when they get hit by natural disasters. The goal of misinformation is to present liberals and Democrats as the evil they accuse conservatives of being, in the hope there won’t be a backlash to conservative plans to oppress liberal-leaning groups when they are in power.
I also think that some people like to watch the world burn. These are sociopaths who get pleasure out of watching people fight each other and enjoy the power they get in causing these problems. They are like the Joker in The Dark Knight or Regina George in that scene from Mean Girls when she stands in the hallway smirking as the chaos she triggered ensues around her. Imagine you are a lonely person, maybe a divorced man with few friends, a crap job, and no prospects looking for a way to feel like you have power. What better way to scratch that itch than to start a rumor that gains so much influence that world leaders have to respond to it? It must be exhilarating. It must make you finally feel like you matter.
Disasters bring out the best in people, but they also bring out the worst. Right now, we live in a society where very powerful, wealthy people - like the manchild who bought Twitter to spite his daughter and felon trying to regain the presidency to save himself from prison - are exploiting the worst.
I don’t know how to solve this. If the First Amendment gives people the right to blatantly lie, even at the cost of lives, then laws can’t solve the issue. The Supreme Court has ruled that they do in the past, notably in Terminiello. There is little chance that the current court will jeopardize the ruling.
The only way to solve the misinformation problem is to put the fear of God in the people lying for sport. There have to be societal consequences if there can’t be legal ones.
Still, we won't do that because many reasonable people defend misinformation or downplay it. I believe we, at some point, collectively decided we wanted to retain the right to be the Joker one day and cause unnecessary chaos for our personal enjoyment. We will defend the right to lie and sow chaos, even at the cost of lives, to preserve the right for ourselves to do so one day.
No I will not call it X
I’d agree that legal consequences aren’t enough. I’m partial to SCOTUS’ Brandenburg v Ohio test that concerns “imminent lawless action” and to restoring the Fairness Doctrine, but (as instances in ‘90s Rwanda and Israel today have shown) the question of restoring truth valence and rooting out hate speech in media is a broader problem. I have faith in public editors who openly and responsibly critique and explain major journalistic decisions and processes to their bosses and readers, and I think concentration of media ownership needs to be attacked more by better antitrust enforcement, by local nonprofit news agencies, and perhaps by a publicly-owned social network, as Ethan Zuckerman suggested in 2019 and Joshua Citarella did last year.
“ We will defend the right to lie and sow chaos, even at the cost of lives, to preserve the right for ourselves to do so one day.”
I don’t think it’s exactly that. I think it’s that we will defend people’s rights to say what they want in case we might one day hold an unpopular opinion that an in-group will declare a lie. You know, one person’s fact checking can be another’s propaganda.