We expect Presidents to condemn hate speech, not contribute to it by inciting violent attacks.
Our political and legal institutions are lagging badly in dealing with twenty-first century communication forms that enable acts of violence against others. The sources of this rhetoric of hate may be politicians of various kinds, nativist groups that have formed online communities, or others using live forums. All are threats to the nation that we seem ill-prepared to handle. To add to the challenge, bloodshed motivated by hate has been made worse by a President whose billigerence has placed him in the chain of causes that have led to violence.
No one wants to give ground on protections for Americans to speak and publish at will. The First Amendment is our birthright. Dissent is often a necessary source of influence for needed reforms. The rights of advocates should always have a presumptive position in any discussion that would alter their protections. Even so, we are facing threats from especially from two quarters that should have the attention of law enforcement officials everywhere.
Incredibly, as we have noted, one source of the problem is the President himself. We are in a period dominated by unprecedented presidential bullying that a reasonable listener could understand as sanctioning attacks on members of the press and opponents. This week, when a person in a Trump rally suggested shooting border crossers, Trump simply smiled and laughed it off: further evidence of his stunning moral vacancy.
In 2018 Trump praised a member of the House of Representatives, Greg Gianforte, who assaulted a journalist and knocked him to the floor at his Bozeman Montana office. Trump applauded this aggression at another rally, noting “any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind of — he’s my guy.” It’s part of a larger pattern of sneers and taunts often directed at national journalists who are often separated from a jeering MAGA crowd only by a rope line. Some news organizations have had little choice but to hire protection for their correspondents from mobs fired up by the President. That’s how bad it’s become.
In yet another recent rally Trump talked about reproductive health clinics as if they were in the business of murdering babies. His specific choice of words included “executing babies,” followed by a chopping gesture that we might see in a butcher shop. This kind of talk was apparently enough to motivate at least one man, Matthew Haviland, to threaten kill “every Democrat” and other pro-choice demons he imagined, triggering a rare response from the F.B.I’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. We expect Presidents to condemn hate speech, not contribute to it by inciting attacks on other Americans.
The second source of this problem is even more ominous because it is also omnipresent. It is hate speech that is easily spread via extremist manifestos online. Most terrorism experts have given up on the old law enforcement bromide of the “lone wolf” shooter: a characterization that might have once been used to explain gun attacks similar to those on American synagogues in San Diego and Pittsburgh. Now, the more common analysis is that individuals are connected by racist or anti-immigrant websites that still get First Amendment protections. Apparently even haters have their chat groups. John Earnest, the attacker in San Diego, was reportedly motivated by online rhetoric from the recent New Zealand mass murderer, who was trying to exterminate Muslims.
Our hands-off approach is producing increasingly dire results.
Online manifestos functioning as calls to action against “alien” groups are all over the internet, sometimes taken down by individual platforms like Facebook, and sometimes allowed to stand. Groups may be motivated by anti-semitism, racism, hostility to immigrants and others. The problem is enormous because one platform that might reject content can be replaced by another. There is always an internet server somewhere inside or outside the United States that will host poisonous content.
To be sure, an internet that has turned into what the New York Times has called a “sea of hate” is beyond the easy control of any one nation. Like most digital media, content easily slips through political boundaries. Even so, we could be doing more to curb homegrown threats.
Should we Protect Hate Speech that Targets Others?
For the most part, hate speech in the United States is protected. A 1969 Supreme Court Case, Brandenburg v. Ohio, allows vitriol to exist unless it is likely to incite “imminent lawless action.” But few federal judges then or now want to prosecute speech on this premise. There is a long legal tradition to err in favor of the hothead expressing verbal hostility. But this hands-off approach is producing increasingly dire results. While most Americans would accept the rights of even a Nazi group to march or a group of white supremacists to gather, others might question why incitement is so narrowly defined. For example, English law allows charges to be brought against a person for “incitement to racial hatred.” Would our admirable record of tolerance of free speech be significantly harmed by a similar prohibition suggesting a violent response?
Smarter minds than mine need to begin to sort all of this out. But it appears that our laws and constitutional protections are far behind our technology and the coarsening of our rhetoric. We now have robust networks for the dissemination of hatred, even while basic norms of civility have withered.
No one thinks they are taking away a basketball or bicycle when they give an adolescent a phone. But there is an implicit swap at work.
The College of New Jersey’s Sarnoff Collection includes a 1948 RCA television, its small round screen surrounded by a hulking box of wood and clunky Bakelite knobs. The black and white television still works, these days using its limited lines of pixels to show You Bet Your Life to visitors who walk by.
It’s a stark reminder that it’s glow even then was showing us our future. Television was one of the the earliest forms of screen-based technology. It would soon alter the psychology and even physiology of most of us living in the Western World.
I’m speaking less of television itself, than its constituent elements that made it possible to deliver sound and pictures in a box. Now, of course, the technology has evolved and exists in many platforms: everything from phones to virtually every desktop. The ubiquitous presence of screens in our lives has come to dominate us in ways that ‘Bet Your Life’ host Groucho Marx could have never imagined.
What seems so noticeable is the screen’s effect to freeze children in place, a kind of physical demobilization from an earlier time when older children were the most ubiquitous travelers around our neighborhoods.
Most adults find reasons to sentimentalize their childhoods. It’s a generational perk. But even with those caveats, it remains true that the roaming habits of earlier generations provides a sharp point of contrast; in the twenty first century our stay-inside-kids venture less frequently beyond the front doors of their own homes.
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Growing up in Denver, I was one of those “free range kids” that boomers revere. My territory was a big part of the eastern section of the city on the wheels of a modest three-speed bike. There was an expectation that I would wander home when I was hungry. And I was careful to stay off the city’s busiest streets. But for an adolescent a bike was its own form of freedom machine .
Favorite east side haunts included City Park, the city Zoo (free), the fences along the city’s airport runways, the Fox Theater in Aurora, and a wonderful natural history museum (free). Situated in the middle of City Park, what is now the Denver Museum of Nature and Science has a towering glass foyer that still features a panoramic view of the city center.
Once a drunk near the museum tried to steal my bike. I said “no” and he left. It would have been a long walk home without it. Besides, stories of child abductions didn’t haunt the airwaves, leaving most parents comfortable with the basic decency of the city’s population.
A recent study in Seattle found that children between the ages of 10 to 16 now use only 12.6 minutes per day for vigorous outdoor activity, compared with over 10 waking hours of motionless staring at screens. That’s a staggering imbalance. Research from Britain’s National Trust suggests a similar result, with kids in the U.K. spending half the time of what their parents as children spent outdoors. As a result, these days teens tend to be a bit thicker and slower.
Of course many kids in tough neighborhoods are deprived of their birthright to explore their surroundings. Since nearly one in five of American children live below the poverty line, we are talking about a lot of children. It’s also true that prior generations of Americans weren’t necessarily spending unscheduled time in verdant city parks. As a child, my father in law was sent out on winter days to pick up coal along the railroad tracks. In northern Michigan this was in no sense “recreational;” the family was desperate for the fuel to stave off the cold.
Our lives have given way to mediated experience instead of richer forms of lived experience.
Even so, many families today have sufficient means to live in a cocoon of non-stop digital entertainment. Computers, phones and electronic games are on more than they are off. These platforms provide a kind of electronic wallpaper that can have the effect of putting kids under voluntarily house arrest: victims of a kind of what I call ‘screen thrall.’ One effect of their constant digital contact is to even make a tame backyard can look potentially threatening. Our lives have given way to mediated experience instead of richer forms of lived experience.
And so we are on the period of widely reported police interrogations of any parents who let their adolescent children walk to school unescorted. In my neighborhood on most mornings I see kids escorted to the street from their house in the family’s massive SUV. It ferries them from the front door to the street, where parent and charge sit and wait for the arrival of a bus.
If this sounds like we have made ourselves prisoners to our digital technologies, it’s more of plea for a sense of balance. A screen demands a sedentary viewer. No one thinks they are taking away a basketball, jump rope or bicycle when they give an adolescent a phone or tablet. But there is an implicit swap. We only need to look around at empty yards in most neighborhoods to know where the kids have gone.
No one thinks they are taking away a basketball or bicycle when they give an adolescent a phone. But there is an implicit swap at work.
It’s a stark reminder that it’s glow even then was showing us our future. Television was one of the the earliest forms of screen-based technology. It would soon alter the psychology and even physiology of most of us living in the Western World.