Today, a free speech event in Texas was attacked by two gunmen, who were shot and killed by police when the attackers opened fire and injured security guard Bruce Joiner (read the event and assault details here). Because the event, featuring a speech by a member of Dutch parliament, involves a cartoon award bestowed for the best drawing of the Islamic prophet Mohammed, the assault must be presumed to be another Islamic terrorist attack.
Despite—or due to?—the nature of the event, there is no mention of Islam or Moslem terrorism by the statement issued by the conservative, Republican governor of Texas, which mimics every Obama administration knee-jerk response to an act of potential Islamic terrorist violence and merely refers to a “senseless act”.
In fact, before the event, which is sponsored by an activist against Islam who says she sought to exercise free speech on principle, the Texas town’s residents denounced the event on principle, comparing its intent and purpose to shouting ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater and denying even the fact that it is an exercise of free speech. One resident spoke out against the anti-Islamic event, which is currently protected by the First Amendment, as a threat to “public safety”. Of course, the oft-cited fire in a theater claim is also a distortion of the freedom of speech; it is totally justifiable to speak up in case of one’s belief that there is an impending emergency, such as a fire, even if one turns out to be wrong.
There is more to learn about today’s attack, such as who sponsored it, the motive of the attackers, and why the government failed again—as in Boston, Benghazi and on September 11, 2001—to stop an act of war by Moslem radicals in spite of mass, unchecked surveillance of the entire U.S. population and government control of travel.
Whatever the specific facts about today’s act of war against America and the individual liberty America once stood—and, still, mostly stands for—May 3, 2015 marks a major turn for the worst for liberty in the United States. Americans should already know that we are at war with state sponsors of Islamic terrorism. Americans should already know that we are in conflict with our own American government, which sanctions, appeases and actively supports state sponsors of Islamic terrorism and seeks to control the everyday lives of Americans.
With this news of an assault on a cartoon event in America’s Lone Star state, especially after the Paris attack on Charlie Hebdo, a mass murder of artists for cartoon depictions of Mohammed, Americans can no longer deny, ignore or evade that more Americans—the most religious, Christian, conservative Texans—oppose the freedom of speech. After today, in my estimation, more bad Americans will follow and rise to oppose the freedom of speech in the name of “public safety” and the fire-in-a-theater nonsense.
Today’s attack should motivate defenders of liberty. However, as seen by the town’s opposition to this event, it is likely to motivate the advocates for censorship.
This should make the good Americans and those who support the absolute freedom of speech, such as PEN American Center, CNN‘s Christiane Amanpour, Salman Rushdie—who this week came out in support of PEN’s courage award for Charlie Hebdo—focus and fight more strongly and with more passion and reason while speaking out more often than ever. As Pamela Geller, the organizer of the anti-Islamic event, said and asked: ‘This is a war. This is war on free speech. What are we going to do? Are we going to surrender to these monsters?”
The few and best Americans must rise to defend today’s artists and thinkers and oppose the voices for tyranny—on the right, on the left and especially those waffling in the middle of the road—with a united and uncompromising stand for reason, egoism and individual rights. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, the rational American must never surrender—and never submit to silence, censorship or the sickeningly insidious attack on free speech. This is the real fight of the century. Liberty must be avenged.
As usual, both leftists and conservatives proved their bankruptcy, this time in attacking Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s encouraging new campaign.
On the left, the reaction was predictable. Leftists say they want a conversation about race. But they don’t—not really. What they want are more controls, dictates and unearned guilt trips against capitalism, business and the individual based on race. The hatred heaped by the left upon this particular business, one of the most successful examples of capitalism in history, was an anti-capitalist diatribe against Starbucks, unleashed on social media and, of course, personally attacking private executives. The leftists’ objections to Starbucks’ partnership with a newspaper to foster discussion of thoughts about race, “Race Together” (#RaceTogether on Twitter) ranged from an assault on Starbucks for employing too many white people, itself an example of racism, to a generally dismissive approach to taking ideas seriously if the idea originates with a big business.
Today’s conservatives agree with leftists, as they so often, without realizing it, do, because they share the New Left’s hatred of taking ideas seriously and they share the New Left’s approach to acquiring knowledge: faith over reason. Conservatives, as I observed in this post years ago when I wrote about the pro-capitalist origins of the individualistic Tea Party movement when it was being hijacked, do not seek real, radical change from welfare state cronyism to capitalism and individual rights. Conservatives are not, as Ayn Rand spent most of her career pointing out, radicals for capitalism; they seek to conserve the status quo based on altruism and collectivism—the roots of racism, as Rand argued—and some modified form of government control. To the extent conservatives support capitalism, as some still claim to do with varying degrees of credibility, they are mixed because they also seek to dictate or control free speech, sex, trade, abortion and drugs. Conservatives, like leftists, oppose egoism, pure capitalism and individual rights.
Like today’s college-bred New Left descendants, today’s church-bred New Right descendants embrace today’s bankrupt, cynical culture with enthusiasm. Don’t take my word for it. Read their posts, forwarded e-mails and Tweets, joking about racial comments, insults and attacking an American company for trying to profit from fostering an exchange of ideas for the sake, in the words of Starbucks’ CEO, of a better company and country. Conservatives, and their Christian libertarian brethren, demonstrate the same disdain for capitalism in practice that leftists do, only conservatives pretend that they actively support the company’s right to choose its practices.
But they do not—not really. In practice, they defend any religious CEO, quarterback, cable TV celebrity or chicken food chain for making controversial actions or comments, and sometimes they have a point. But when a lone businessman seeks to start a voluntary discussion about a controversial topic, those who cry that they never get a fair hearing on controversial topics attack the forum and they do so with the same derision as the left. It’s a point radio host Rush Limbaugh has often made; conservatives try so hard to live through others, i.e., leftists, that they act like them. They don’t know how to take yes for an answer. It’s as though they haven’t got the strength of their convictions and they’d rather argue than use reason and persuade. Just because Mr. Schultz, who is clearly biased to the left, didn’t frame the issue exactly right—his comments are loaded with self-hating prejudice against whites—conservatives rant, crack racial jokes and ridicule and reject voluntarily talking politics in a cafe predicated on profit by social gathering.
This is the pioneering, entrepreneurial spirit of the Starbucks effort. Social, even intellectual, discourse in gatherings is central to the Starbucks business proposition. Not only does Starbucks stand to lose and go out of business if Americans remain divided, Starbucks stands to gain and prosper if Americans become united. Howard Schultz, as two business writers know and recently observed (see reference links), knows that voluntarily talking politics in a cafe predicated on profit by social gathering is precisely what America needs.
Starbucks, with 4,700 U.S. stores, published a full page ad in Sunday’s New York Times asking: “Shall We Overcome?” with the words “RaceTogether” and the company’s mermaid logo. The question is intended to stimulate conversation and debate about issues of race in America by encouraging employees to talk with customers after writing, and only of their own volition, the words “Race Together” on a coffee cup. Today’s edition of the company’s partner in the campaign, USA Today, will have the first of a series of inserts with a variety of perspectives on race relations. Starbucks says its baristas are under no obligation to generate debate—in my experience this week, no one did—and, according to Starbucks, the goal is simply to activate an exchange of ideas.
This might not be desirable, in demand or in a company’s interest in a purely laissez-faire capitalist economy, yet in today’s divisive, government-controlled society, made worse by a divisive president and me-too political parties, isn’t one more likely to find an honest exchange among traders in a coffee shop than on a college campus (remember when Brandeis disinvited an infidel?) or a political arena?
Is it possible that Starbucks is the perfect place to start?
Imagine people talking, listening and learning, becoming informed, and making better cases and arguments. The founders did this in pubs when they sought to create America, which ended up being debated and founded in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall.
Debates about ideas are good for a business built on gathering—especially in an environment in which speech is stifled by political correctness, speech codes, disunity, mass government surveillance of private lives and censorship. Conservatives often complain about not having a forum in which to make their points and they incessantly gripe about mainstream media. Leftists often complain about the need to enfranchise and converse and they incessantly gripe about businesses for the smallest grievances. Both should find the good in Starbucks’ campaign and unite in support of Starbucks’ call for voluntary discussion of a controversial topic free from government coercion. Another more toxic type, the nihilist, festers in this blank, death-based culture. See the links for an example.
If Americans are not fully free to have rational arguments in halls of government, academia and the media, and apparently and increasingly Americans are suppressed and restricted, let Americans chat over coffee—and at least leave Starbucks alone to sponsor, prosper and profit from it. I think the initiative has the potential to advance a radical American future free from those who want to control people’s lives for God and tradition and from those who want to control people’s lives for the race, tribe or collective. Conservatives and leftists have been propping up the same false dichotomies and continuous loop of Clintons, Bushes and asinine wars, policies and schemes for decades. America needs better ideas and new forums for free expression. Let us embrace this new effort by Starbucks—or any other American business that dares to speak up when Americans desperately ought to speak up—and let’s get to the business of saving America by encouraging Americans to speak up in pursuit of reason.
Sony Pictures Entertainment’s decision to withdraw its movie, The Interview, from its scheduled release next week, is not an example of compromise, cowardice or caving in. The company, which is being sued by its own employees in a class-action lawsuit and attacked by hackers sponsored by Communist North Korea, according to the U.S. government, is the victim of an attack and it has its reasons. Sony is a for-profit enterprise and this is a business decision. No one but Sony’s executives knows what its principals know and there may be good or bad reasons for its choice to pull the movie from distribution but that choice is Sony’s to make. This unprecedented derailment of a major product launch under threat of attack is caused by those who initiated the technological attack and subsequent threat of physical violence.
The responsibility for defending against such an attack and threat lies primarily with the United States government. As Objectivist scholar Onkar Ghate wrote in 2006 about an Islamic terrorist attack over cartoons, the American government should protect individual rights, including the exercise of freedom of speech, “no matter who screams offense”. Beginning in earnest with the first President Bush, who refused to defend Americans and U.S. bookstores against Islamic Iran’s threat to murder writer Salman Rushdie over a book he authored, and continuing through the dreadful Obama presidency, which tried to censor CNN, the United States blames, opposes and suppresses free speech. An administration that deliberately, wrongly and systematically blames a motion picture for a terrorist attack, as Obama’s team did over the September 11 attack at Benghazi, can and should be expected to be hostile to a movie that mocks a foreign leader. Sony is not the police and should not be blamed for pulling the movie; making movies and money without the presumption of police protection and military defense is tantamount to self-destruction. Sony had no reason to believe the U.S. would defend itself and American movies, theaters and lives (the administration said and did practically nothing to defend Sony against this attack). Sony has every reason to conclude that the opposite is true.
The content of the movie, as with a book or any other expression of the freedom of speech under assault, is not the issue, though certain lowlifes in the press, such as Variety, the Los Angeles Times and Fox News, sanctioned the attack with their sensationalistic and despicable reports disclosing the stolen property. When an attack occurs, all discussion of content must end and freedom-loving people should rally around the right of the speaker to speak. Charlie Chaplin made – and his United Artists distributed – The Great Dictator decades ago, mocking a fascist dictator in plain sight and with much notice. But that was when Americans at least superficially supported the First Amendment and recoiled from being ordered to submit to force and tyranny. Instead, today, many Americans mock the First Amendment. They recoil from the making of the movie or shrug in compliant acceptance of the status quo and lockdown as the ‘new normal’. They submit to the TSA. They are willing to go along with constant, unchecked surveillance by the NSA. Under such conditions, what happened to The Interview will almost certainly happen again. Like Humphrey Bogart’s character Rick in another movie that might never have been made, Casablanca, Americans face an imminent moral choice to sanction the self-destruction or speak up and demand that their government protect and defend individual rights.
Today’s Supreme Court ruling against ObamaCare underscores the reality that the U.S. is ruled by laws, not men.
Here’s why: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – which is more like a dictate, since its legislative passage was of dubious legal status and it’s been changed at the president’s arbitrary discretion ever since – puts the entire health care industry under government control. As I’ve written about ObamaCare, arguing that it’s totally immoral, America’s medical profession is being terminated in unprecedented waves, sweeps and steps. Today’s ruling, the Hobby Lobby case asserting a for-profit company’s right to reject a government dictate on religious grounds, raises new questions and further complicates the law, the industry and everyone’s lives. But ObamaCare is, as I wrote years ago in the Washington Times, a national deathtrap. It must be destroyed.
The prospect of a judicial ruling advancing the nation toward theocracy bred by America’s mixed economy welfare state is a legitimate concern. Whatever is wrong with this 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court, which sentenced the nation to hell two years ago in its previous ruling, it is the fault of the judicial branch, which refuses to strike down what is clearly unconstitutional (read my inteview with Professor Randy Barnett as to why here), the legislative branch, which refuses to repeal this monstrosity, and the executive branch, which imposed this evil act against America. ObamaCare is ultimately caused by the American people who accept, sanction and support the fallacy that health care is a right. Correcting errors with partial fixes that buy time but do not fundamentally eradicate the basic flaw – the entire law ObamaCare – compounds the error and threatens to create new, worse government control of the individual’s life.
America has never had a totally government-dictated health care system, so the health care system is subject to new and unpredictable events. Accordingly, today’s ruling against the dictate does not “chip away” and is not cause for celebration, no more than is sparing a person at a witch trial because she is not a witch. There is no such thing as a witch as there is no such thing as a right to health care. So to exonerate someone for not being a witch is to implicitly accept the premise that a witch is possible. Today’s decision that a company can reject a dictate within a dictate similarly accepts the premise that health care can be dictated by the state. Thus, the persecution of the individual’s life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness in the name of faking reality continues and marches on.
Government control of health care is a death march. Any action to delay it is better than a forward march. Today’s decision is not a rejection of the ObamaCare dictate and, as the saying goes, that which does not kill it makes it stronger. As always, ObamaCare must be repealed.
When American whistleblower Edward Snowden decided to disclose classified documents detailing indiscriminate mass government surveillance of the American people, he turned to journalist Glenn Greenwald to provide the narrative and tell his story. After following meticulous, cryptic instructions and cooperating with another Snowden-designated intellectual, filmmaker Laura Poitras, and his newspaper The Guardian, Greenwald traveled to Hong Kong last May to meet the anonymous source who claimed to have evidence of the National Security Agency’s widespread, systematic spying on Americans (and global leaders). Greenwald’s No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State is his tale of those days in Hong Kong when he met with the hero who would be accused of being a traitor to what is best described as the U.S. surveillance state and the weeks that followed.
Greenwald is a leftist who has no problem using terms such as jingoistic, which set off alarm bells for the rest of us. He is pugnacious and, at times, sanctimonious. He oversimplifies issues and makes assertions that would have more credibility had he provided notes and an index [6/5/2014 update: he has since added an index to the iBooks version]. He doesn’t address legitimate concerns about U.S. national security with enough seriousness given the context of the worst act of war in U.S. history by Islamic terrorists operating through state sponsors, such as Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, which are cowardly and do not admit sponsorship as explicitly as they endorse and advance Islamic fundamentalism. Greenwald shows an inability to contrast his position with others, which results in a dry retelling of facts that undercuts a compelling narrative. No Place to Hide is uneven in this sense and would be more interesting if it contrasted various perspectives and addressed opposite viewpoints more thoroughly. There are too many infographics and screenshots of Snowden-leaked documents. For what amounts to a historic act of heroism against the rise of a U.S. dictatorship, the book lacks a proper exposition. Reading about metadata dumps is more urgent – and the issue is urgent – when the author examines and explains what the disclosures mean to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Despite its shortcomings, Glenn Greenwald has written an important book about today’s emergent totalitarianism in America.
Beginning with a strong, involving narrative about coming to Hong Kong to stake his claim on earning the 29-year-old national security clearance-approved Snowden’s trust, Greenwald discloses his own background, perspective and position which illuminates why he was chosen by the young libertarian government worker who began to distrust the government. Greenwald is a fine writer and reporter in general, demonstrating both his knowledge of facts, history and relevant counterpoints and his ability to integrate what he knows with what matters. As he asks early in the 700-plus page book: “Will the digital age usher in the individual liberation and political freedoms that the Internet is uniquely capable of unleashing? Or will it bring about a system of omnipresent monitoring and control, beyond the dreams of even the greatest tyrants of the past? Right now, either path is possible. Our actions will determine where we end up.”
In this essential statement of the basic choice Americans face, Greenwald is 100 percent correct. Whatever one thinks of Snowden’s actions – traitorous, heroic or a mixture of the two – treating technology as a religion, as too many do, is a grave error and the world’s only nation based on individual rights, a status that no one can deny, is in danger of a total betrayal of its founding principles. To read and think about the author’s assertions and account of Edward Snowden, a high school dropout who has gained support from credible intellectuals such as Objectivist thinker Leonard Peikoff and columnist George Will, is to take facts and values – as well as one’s future – seriously.
Greenwald, who is also a lawyer, writes that, having unknowingly been the recipient of an anonymous e-mail from Snowden as “Cincinnatus” in Greenwald’s overwhelmed inbox, he eventually and favorably responded to the whistleblower’s propositions. He met with filmmaker Poitras, who confided at a Marriott hotel in Yonkers that she, too, had received anonymous e-mails from this unusual person. Greenwald says that he felt kinship with the source because he soon realized, after extensive back and forth exchange, that his new, prospective source “had been driven by the same conviction, writing almost on a daily basis about the dangerous trends in US state secrecy, radical executive power theories, detention and surveillance abuses, militarism, and the assault on civil liberties.”
Nevertheless, Greenwald admits that he wondered about the anonymous source’s motives. Greenwald writes that Snowden, not yet known to Greenwald as Snowden, responded via encrypted e-mail that “I want to spark a worldwide debate about privacy, Internet freedom, and the dangers of state surveillance.” Snowden added: “I’m not afraid of what will happen to me. I’ve accepted that my life will likely be over from my doing this. I’m at peace with that. I know it’s the right thing to do.” Greenwald reports that while he was inclined to take Snowden at his word, he reserved judgment until they met.
When they finally did, amid gripping, page-turning secrecy recounted in No Place to Hide, Greenwald was impressed. Meeting Snowden with Poitras in Hong Kong, accompanied by a reporter for the Guardian, getting two hours of sleep per night, was stimulating and nerve-wracking. Greenwald would learn between 2013 and the present that the North Carolina native was influenced by Greek mythology, Latin, the ideas of Thomas Jefferson – and playing games (“… Snowden had learned from immersion in video games … that just one person, even the most powerless, can confront great injustice.”)
All of this was in service of government document disclosures that Greenwald maintains he knew had the capacity to change the course of history.
“[T]he NSA was secretly and indiscriminately collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans, at least. Virtually nobody had any idea that the Obama administration was doing any such thing. Now, with this ruling, I not only knew about it but had the secret court order as proof…Even more significant, the files—along with the Verizon document—proved that the Obama administration’s senior national security official, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, lied to Congress when, on March 12, 2013, he was asked by Senator Ron Wyden: ‘Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?’ Clapper’s reply was as succinct as it was dishonest: ‘No, sir.’
As Greenwald writes:
The president, who had campaigned on a vow to have the ‘most transparent administration in history,’ specifically pledging to protect whistleblowers, whom he hailed as ‘noble’ and ‘courageous,’ had done exactly the opposite…Obama’s administration has prosecuted more government leakers under the Espionage Act of 1917—a total of seven—than all previous administrations in US history combined: in fact, more than double that total. The Espionage Act was adopted during World War I to enable Woodrow Wilson to criminalize dissent against the war, and its sanctions are severe: they include life in prison and even the death penalty.”
Tracing media coverage since the first disclosures were reported in his Guardian articles and others in the Washington Post, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage, Greenwald chronicles the past 12 months, from early support for Snowden to the current mixtures of support and opposition amid nonstop smears and calls for arrest and trial from the government, the quasi-state-controlled media and academics. “Now, a giddy gallows humor crept into our dealings,” Greenwald writes. “I call the bottom bunk at Gitmo,” Snowden joked as he contemplated our prospects. As we talked about future articles, he would say things like, “That’s going into the indictment. The only question is whether it’s going into yours or mine.” Mostly he remained inconceivably calm.”
Though he asks the reader to take too much on faith, undermining his arguments, Greenwald makes a strong case for the truth of Snowden’s disclosures as proof that the United States is becoming an illegal, immoral police state. “The US government had worked very hard over the past decade to demonstrate unlimited power,” he rightly observes. “Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: the US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide. Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe. The agency is devoted to one overarching mission: to prevent the slightest piece of electronic communication from evading its systemic grasp.”
Laying out the document points, graphs and highlights in page after page, No Place to Hide demonstrates that the secret FISA courts designed to protect national security rarely reject NSA applications to target Americans with surveillance. From its inception, he argues, FISA has been a rubber stamp; in its first 24 years, FISA rejected a total of zero government applications while approving more than twenty thousand requests. Greenwald notes that Senator Dianne Feinstein and Congressman Mike Rogers amount to NSA lapdogs. The amount of data being collected and stored, according to Greenwald, is astonishing: “Once Internet-based communications were added to the mix, the total number of communication events stored was close to 1 trillion …”
With a huge, government center being constructed in Bluffdale, Utah, he cites a report that the state will add four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage and more than 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration for collecting and examining actual content of emails, Web browsing, search histories, and chats. In fact, Greenwald writes, thanks to Edward Snowden, Americans know that the government is building a massive secret surveillance system backed by an agency that seeks global surveillance domination. He asks: what does limitless surveillance mean for us as individuals, in our own lives?
And he answers in shocking details that do not begin to examine what total government-monitored society means, advocating the apparently now-radical idea that “the desire for privacy is shared by us all as an essential, not ancillary, part of what it means to be human.”
He procceds: “We all instinctively understand that the private realm is where we can act, think, speak, write, experiment, and choose how to be, away from the judgmental eyes of others. Privacy is a core condition of being a free person.” Citing Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in the 1928 case Olmstead v. U.S., Greenwald frames man’s rights as the essence of laissez-faire: “The right to be left alone [is] the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by a free people.”
Greenwald goes further than a peek at what Snowden’s leaks mean for America’s future, extending the surveillance state – predominantly the NSA, to say nothing of the TSA, the IRS, the VA and other alphabet government bureaucracies including of course the new monster ObamaCare – to daily life in a psychological reduction evoking George Orwell’s 1984 and other horrifying visions of dystopian future.
“What makes a surveillance system effective in controlling human behavior is the knowledge that one’s words and actions are susceptible to monitoring,” Greenwald writes. “This principle was at the heart of British philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century conception of the Panopticon, a building design he believed would allow institutions to effectively control human behavior. The building’s structure was to be used, in his words, for “any sort of establishment, in which persons of any description are to be kept under inspection.”
The philosopher’s Panopticon solution, he says, is to create an apparent omnipresence of the inspector in the minds of the building’s inhabitants: “The persons to be inspected should always feel themselves as if under inspection, at least as standing a great chance of being so.” They would thus act as if they were always being watched, even if they weren’t being watched, Greenwald writes. The result is total compliance, obedience and conformity.
Greenwald argues that the surveillance state forces the entire population to silently submit to total government control.
As he notes, one U.S. senator told CBS’ Early Show in 2006: “I don’t have to listen to your phone calls to know what you’re doing. If I know every single phone call that you made, I am able to determine every single person you talked to. I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive.… And the real question here is: What do they do with this information that they collect that does not have anything to do with Al Qaeda?… And we’re going to trust the president and the vice president of the United States that they’re doing the right thing? Don’t count me in on that.”
The senator opposing metadata collection was Joe Biden, currently vice president in the most anti-American administration in history.
But conservatives should note that it was a left-wing Democrat, Idaho Sen. Frank Church in 1975, who warned against the dangers of mass surveillance, which was first imposed on the U.S. population in earnest by President George W. Bush after 9/11. Addressing the prospect of mass domestic spying in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Sen. Church predicted: “That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyrant … the technological “capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance … is within the reach of the government to know.”
Speaking of the Islamic terrorist 9/11 attack, Greenwald dispels the notion that mass government spying works to stop acts of war, noting that, before September 11, the NSA already “had a warrant to establish surveillance of everyone connected to Al Qaeda in America. It could follow them, tap their phones, clone their computers, read their e-mails, and subpoena their medical, bank, and credit-card records. It had the right to demand records from telephone companies of any calls they had made. There was no need for a metadata-collection program. What was needed was cooperation with other federal agencies, but for reasons both petty and obscure those agencies chose to hide vital clues from the investigators most likely to avert the attacks.
The government was in possession of the necessary intelligence but had failed to understand or act on it.”
As I have previously observed, post-9/11 acts of war, whether mass murders at Fort Hood, Boston or Benghazi – Greenwald cites other attacks by Moslems – continue unabated in spite of mass data sweeps, including siege-specific warnings of plots against America.
The media, Greenwald writes, hastens the rise of fascism. And he cites an interesting exchange with his friend Andrew Sullivan who wrote privately to Greenwald that Sullivan’s interview with the New York Times (about Greenwald’s reporting on Snowden’s disclosures) was slanted by the Times with smear questions. Whether Greenwald is, in fact, a journalist, blogger or activist, a distinction with clear legal implications for Greenwald, is also addressed and explored. As a writer, journalist and activist – and, from H.L. Mencken to Glenn Greenwald, what chronicler of injustice is not at once all of those? – I found the section on the press fascinating and chilling.
Greenwald argues that the media, especially Obama administration propagandists such as NBC’s David Gregory and Chuck Todd, provide in toadying shows such as Meet the Press “a place where political power goes to be amplified and flattered, where only the most staid conventional wisdom is heard, where only the narrowest range of views is permitted.” In a particularly repulsive quotation, he unmasks New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks for mocking Edward Snowden because Snowden is symbolic of “the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good.”
Again, Greenwald goes deeper than merely compiling damaging evidence of weak opposition. Once he’s past the substance of Snowden’s disclosures, and with relative ease and powerful persuasion, he explains why the free press, i.e., freedom of speech, is crucial to daily life and he offers a thin, silver lining when he notes that, thanks to Snowden, the Committee to Protect Journalists, described as an international organization that monitors attacks on press freedoms by the state, issued its first-ever report denouncing the United States. The October 2013 report, written by Leonard Downie Jr., a past executive editor of the Washington Post, concluded that the Obama administration’s efforts to control information are “the most aggressive … since the Nixon administration.… The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations … interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent.”
By examining divergent media coverage of his highly controversial source, smeared as a high school dropout, community college student and narcissist, Greenwald points out that Snowden is, to most intellectuals, part of a false dichotomy: obedience to the establishment or radical dissent from it. By this account, he argues, duty to the state is the only sane and valid choice and being a radical is crazy and illegitimate. Defenders of the status quo, such as David Brooks, Jeffrey Toobin and most of NBC News, reduce one’s radical opposition to the prevalent orthodoxy to mental deficiency. To the obedient, radical dissent is evidence, even proof, of deficiency.
“With that false premise in place,” Greenwald writes in his most astute argument, “society pays great attention to the motives of dissenters, but none to those who submit to our institutions…Obedience to authority is implicitly deemed the natural state. In fact, both observing and breaking the rules involve moral choices, and both courses of action reveal something important about the individual involved. Contrary to the accepted premise—that radical dissent demonstrates a personality disorder—the opposite could be true: in the face of severe injustice, a refusal to dissent is the sign of a character flaw or moral failure.”
Of course, this viewpoint applies to the smears against Greenwald, too, and he has suffered greatly – such as when his partner, David Miranda, was detained without cause by the British state – for refusing to obey the surveillance state. Every person who seeks to speak out against what he sees as tyranny – a blogger, podcaster, or citizen at a public hearing – should read and think about Edward Snowden and No Place to Hide. That Greenwald touches on, though he does not quite understand, the principle of objective journalism, is critical for anyone seeking to be his or her own advocate against government-controlled food, beverages, roads, schools, health care, cars, drugs, banks, industry and life. Maligned for coming at Snowden and his surveillance disclosures with certain principles, he argues, rightly, that “[t]he relevant distinction is not between journalists who have opinions and those who have none, a category that does not exist. It is between journalists who candidly reveal their opinions and those who conceal them, pretending they have none. The very idea that reporters should be free of opinions is far from some time-honored requirement of the profession; in fact, it is a relatively new concoction that has the effect, if not the intent, to neuter journalism.”
In today’s distorted Orwellian culture – which is sure to engulf everyone that speaks out against the Department of Water and Power or the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Department of Whatever the Government Dictates Tomorrow – objective “means nothing more than reflecting the biases and serving the interests of Washington orthodoxy.”
Tellingly, lest readers conclude that grievances against the NSA are Tea Party, black helicopter conspiracy nonsense, as defenders of the status quo and fascist enablers (usually one and the same) insinuate, Greenwald, who has since introducing Snowden bravely started his own journalistic enterprise, gives the reader a backgrounder on the New York Times‘ new executive editor, Dean Baquet, the one who pushed out Jill Abramson (and, according to Greenwald, she was only slightly better than the Times‘ new pro-statist czar):
Dean Baquet killed a story in 2006 by his reporters about a secret collaboration between AT&T and the NSA, based on information given by whistle-blower Mark Klein. He had come forward with reams of documents to reveal AT&T’s construction of a secret room in its San Francisco office, where the NSA was able to install splitters to divert telephone and Internet traffic from the telecom’s customers into agency repositories. As Klein put it, the documents showed that the NSA was ‘trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans.’ But Baquet blocked publication of the story, Klein recounted to ABC News in 2007, ‘at the request of then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and then-director of the NSA Gen. Michael Hayden.’ Shortly thereafter, Baquet became Washington chief for the New York Times and was then promoted to the position of that paper’s managing editor. That the Times would advance so willing a servant of government interests should come as no surprise.”
So this is the new order of post-9/11 media: submission of the press to the state. It is, Greenwald writes, the opposite of what so-called liberals or progressives once claimed to have held as the goal of their highest ideals. As the author observes, shortly before he died in 2005, Vietnam War correspondent David Halberstam gave a speech to students at Columbia Journalism School. “The proudest moment of his career, he told them, was when U.S. generals in Vietnam threatened to demand that his editors at the New York Times remove him from covering the war. He had, Halberstam said, “enraged Washington and Saigon by filing pessimistic dispatches on the war.” The generals considered him “the enemy” since he had also interrupted their press conferences to accuse them of lying. For Halberstam, infuriating the government was a source of pride, the true purpose and calling of journalism.”
This shrinkage is what the New York Times, journalism, the press and the public has come – and been reduced – to: sycophants for fascism and all in a mere 40 years.
This is precisely what makes Edward Snowden a hero. As Greenwald, himself a hero in some sense despite his negatives, writes of the young American in his aptly titled No Place to Hide: “An ordinary person in all outward respects—raised by parents without particular wealth or power, lacking even a high school diploma, working as an obscure employee of a giant corporation—he has, through a single act of conscience, literally altered the course of history. Even the most committed activists are often tempted to succumb to defeatism. The prevailing institutions seem too powerful to challenge; orthodoxies feel too entrenched to uproot; there are always many parties with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. But it is human beings collectively, not a small number of elites working in secret, who can decide what kind of world we want to live in. Promoting the human capacity to reason and make decisions: that is the purpose of whistle-blowing, of activism, of political journalism. And that’s what is happening now, thanks to the revelations brought about by Edward Snowden.”
And thanks to the writer – and journalist and activist – who reported those disclosures.
After being abused by Moslems in Somalia, Ayaan Hirsi Ali moved to the Netherlands. She became an outspoken critic of Islam and wrote a screenplay for Submission, a 2004 movie that specifically critiques Moslem treatment of women. The picture’s director, Theo van Gogh, was murdered by an Islamic fundamentalist. A note found on his corpse threatened to assassinate Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who’d become a member of Dutch Parliament.
Ali, who denounced Islam following the 9/11 attack on the United States, wrote about her internal struggle with her Islamic faith in Infidel, a 2007 New York Times bestseller reprinted with a foreword by the late Christopher Hitchens, which, according to a Publishers Weekly review, “delivers a powerful feminist critique of Islam informed by a genuine understanding of the religion.”
Ali was recently named as recipient of an honorary degree by Brandeis University, which invited her to speak to students during commencement—and promptly withdrew the honor and invitation after a fundamentalist Islamic group raised objections and coordinated a campaign against the infidel, a term which is Latin for without faith.
Upon the controversial Brandeis decision, few spoke up in defense of Ayaan Hirsi Ali—and, I noticed, almost no one from Brandeis University came to the infidel’s defense.
As a longtime intellectual who never attended college, I have nevertheless become aware that college professors do not typically speak out against colleges that placate political correctness or submit to smear campaigns, let alone speak up against a college for whom they are employed.
But I recently discovered—and talked with—one who did.
His name is Thomas Doherty, a film scholar at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Doherty, cultural historian with special interest in Hollywood cinema, is chair of the American Studies program at Brandeis, an associate editor for the film magazine Cineaste and film review editor for the Journal of American History. His books include Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (Columbia University Press, 2007) and Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press, 2013).
Following the Brandeis-Ali affair, Doherty gave a short interview to the press in which he said he refused to sign the letter and added that he thinks Ali is a “courageous freedom fighter”. We spoke briefly before the interview, confirmed the interview in e-mail correspondence and talked at length about the author Ali, the university and the risk of speaking out for reason. This is an edited transcript.
Scott Holleran: Why have you chosen to defy the university by speaking out for a known infidel—an atheist against Islamic fundamentalism—who has been targeted by terrorists, singled out by your employer for denunciation and cast out?
Thomas Doherty: This wasn’t a difficult call. 86 faculty members of about 350 faculty members at Brandeis signed the letter [denouncing Ali and demanding her removal from the list of honored recipients]. I got a call from Associated Press and they asked what I thought. I said that she’s a courageous feminist who is putting her life at risk to defend women’s rights. I didn’t know her work well. I knew her mostly from her film Submission. I thought she was a great choice for receiving an honorary degree from Brandeis, which typically names white males. When I first heard about the letter, I thought it was bizarre that there was controversy. When I read the letter, I was shocked. It’s pretty depressing.
Scott Holleran: What is the most common response if any to your comments supporting Ayaan Hirsi Ali from the Brandeis administration?
Thomas Doherty: I’ve heard nothing from the administration. When you’re tenured, it doesn’t matter. What can they do—give me a smaller raise?
Scott Holleran: What is the most common response if any from fellow faculty members?
Thomas Doherty: I got a very gracious letter from Bernadette Brooten who wrote the [denunciation] letter. I’ve received support and agreement from a couple of my colleagues but that’s here in the American Studies department—so we study America and we might be considered an outlier.
Scott Holleran: What is the most common response if any from students?
Thomas Doherty: I haven’t talked to students yet. I must have gotten 40 or 50 letters in support saying ‘what happened to the university I graduated from?’ Those are mostly from lawyers and professors, alumnus of Brandeis. Frankly, I’d never raise something like this in class.
Scott Holleran: When you first became aware of the campaign against Ali, did you think the campaign would fail or succeed?
Thomas Doherty: First, I was stunned. They announced the honorary degree and then my wife told me Megyn Kelly was talking about the university’s decision on Fox News. I had heard that the women’s studies professors were upset with choice of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. That didn’t sound right to me. Then, I read the letter. I didn’t think their campaign would succeed—I thought it would fail. I was surprised how quickly Brandeis University collapsed.
Scott Holleran: Have you seen Submission?
Thomas Doherty: Yes. I just checked out her new film Honor Diaries. It’s sort of an arty protest against Islam. It has pictures of women in a chador with projections of the Koran over it. It’s your basic art protest against an ideology which happens all the time in film. There are protests against patriarchy, Mormonism, Catholicism. I didn’t think of her [2004] film Submission as especially formidable or controversial. It really came to my knowledge when the movie’s director, Theo van Gogh, was assassinated [by an Islamic fundamentalist]. I thought at the time that people in the arts should have been more aware of that. So I was surprised that the Oscars in 2005 did not honor [Van Gogh]. The guy was literally killed for making a film. I got in touch with a friend at the [trade publication] Hollywood Reporter who confirmed that Van Gogh was not mentioned during the [Academy Awards] ceremony. There wasn’t any kind of homage. I thought then that if there had been a gay filmmaker who made a film against Christianity and had been assassinated by a Christian fundamentalist, there would have been an homage.
Scott Holleran: Have you read Infidel?
Thomas Doherty: No. I have read sections of it. I’m not an expert on this woman. I’ve never met her. I’ve had no contact with her. I’m mostly a film guy, so she came to my consciousness through film. What I know about her is that she was mutilated under [Islamic] law and severely abused and when she told her story in film, someone murdered the director and put a death sentence on her. When someone’s been trying to kill you for 10 years and you speak out against them, it’s not insane.
Scott Holleran: Is it possible that the university became aware of the campaign against Ayaan Hirsi Ali and decided that it was unable to protect and defend the students and faculty against the threat of initiation of force by Islamic jihadists?
Thomas Doherty: I have no idea how the decision was made.
Scott Holleran: Do you agree with Brandeis alum Jeffrey Herf, author of Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale University Press, 2009) and The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard University Press, 2006), who wrote to Brandeis President Fred Lawrence that the university’s decision is “an act of cowardice and appeasement”?
Thomas Doherty: Yes.
Scott Holleran: Do you agree with Mr. Herf that “… the Nazi interpretation of Christianity as well as the core texts of the Christian tradition itself, were used by the Nazis to justify their mass murders”?
Thomas Doherty: The Nazis would use anything to justify their mass murders. If you look at the Nazi propaganda, they were propagandizing against the pope too. Look at the cartoons—they did it because Hitler wanted no gods before him, so there’s a lot of anti-Catholicism.
Scott Holleran: Your work centrally addresses the conflict between the individual and the state in your books Hollywood and Hitler and Hollywood’s Censor. Do you see your opposition to the university’s withdrawal of the honorary degree as part of a career theme exploring submission to slavery?
Thomas Doherty: No. This is an easy call. If you believe in freedom of expression then you support people who believe that as well. I oppose the totalitarian mindset. She’s put her life on the line since 2004—we are talking about someone who has literally put her life on the line. The notion that 13 members of the faculty in women’s studies would oppose this woman is mind-boggling. I have no idea why.
Scott Holleran: Both feminists and multiculturalists claim that all people and cultures are equal in every sense, so they accept the egalitarian ideal that all cultures and religions, for example, are equal in every way—if religion means female genital mutilation, so be it—and one must never judge—
Thomas Doherty: —That’s what they put forward but there’s obviously a judgment here in the end against Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I believe in feminism but you have a Third World Somali woman so how much more multicultural can you get? This woman’s being shut down. If someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali isn’t under the umbrella of feminism, who is?
Scott Holleran: What is your estimate of her new movie, Honor Diaries?
Thomas Doherty: I like it. She’s interviewed in it and she executive produced the film. It’s about nine Moslem women fighting to improve conditions in predominantly Moslem countries ruled by Sharia law, with female genital mutilation, and other than Ayaan Hirsi Ali, most of the women self-identify as Moslem so the theological criticism is from within the orb of Islam. [Islamic advocacy group Council for American-Islamic Relations, which drove the campaign to pressure Brandeis University to withdraw Ali’s honorary degree] wants to shut the film down, too.
Scott Holleran: The Brandeis statement said that “[t]he selection of Ms. Hirsi Ali further suggests to the public that violence toward girls and women is particular to Islam or the Two-Thirds World, thereby obscuring such violence in our midst among non-Muslims, including on our own campus. We cannot accept Ms. Hirsi Ali’s triumphalist narrative of western civilization, rooted in a core belief of the cultural backwardness of non-western peoples.” But the Brandeis University motto is: “Truth, even unto its innermost parts.” Is the Brandeis motto a fraud?
Thomas Doherty: In this case it certainly is. If you look back to the 1950s, Brandeis was founded not just as a celebration of the Jewish experience but also from the very beginning we welcomed the liberal leftist college professors—we got Herbert Marcuse—so to see this particular arc come around is particularly distressing given the Brandeis tradition.
Scott Holleran: Do you think your own life may be at risk for speaking out for the infidel?
Thomas Doherty: I hope not. [Pauses] No, I don’t think so. I’ve received no death threats. Brandeis is a great place. [Pauses] There’s an expression in Yiddish shanda which means you’ve disgraced us and reflected poorly on Jews—shanda. This is a big shanda.
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As usual, both leftists and conservatives proved their bankruptcy, this time in attacking Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s encouraging new campaign.
Scott Holleran: Have you read Infidel?