When Speech is Illegal

 

Screenshot via South China Morning Post, October 2013,

The last time I had occasion to devote real time to thinking about the late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel was almost 12 years ago,  when he was in trouble not for something he said on his show, but for his failure to respond to something a small child said, in a segment aired during the government shutdown of October 2013, which he called Kid's Table:

The offending remark came while Kimmel was talking to a group of children, ages 5 and 6, about the United States government’s debt, much of which is held by China.

“America owes China a lot of money, $1.3 trillion,” Kimmel told the children. “How should we pay them back?”

“Shoot cannons all the way over and kill everyone in China,” one boy said.

Or in this case, as he said afterwards, "Kid's Table, the Lord of the Flies edition". It was widely felt, in the Asian American community anyway, that he should at the very least have distanced himself from this bloodthirsty proposal in the followup, which was not quite what he did:

“Kill everyone in China? OK, that’s an interesting idea,” Kimmel said.

He then posed the question: “Should we allow the Chinese to live?”

While one boy said, “No,” most of the children said, “Yes.”

“If we don’t allow them to live, then they’ll try to kill us,” a girl said.

Normalizing the concept of permanent ineradicable hostility between the races. I don't know anything about the races of the kindergartners on the show, but I hope none of them were East Asian in origin—you can imagine how it would have gone if one of them was, how that child would have felt about the discussion, and then you can go on to understand that there were certainly people of East Asian origin watching the show at home.

Protests in Chinatown, protests in my own half-Chinese family, protests from the Chinese embassy, protests from my H-1B Chinese work colleague with the PhD from Urbana-Champaign, not normally in unison with the CPC, who got me to sign a petition, and ABC's swift damage control and Kimmel's apology, which was not too gracious ("I thought it was obvious that I didn't agree with that statement"), though I can see his point. A reviewer for KTAR radio in Phoenix said it was "poignant and hilarious" (just bumped into that one). Anyway that was the end to the controversy as far as I knew. Now I seem to be the only one who remembers it, though I did have to google to remember what it was about, and I may never have known that, because I find I'm seriously shocked by it now. Or could I really have thought it was OK back then? Could I have been resensitized by the explosion of anti-Chinese racism that came with the pandemic so that I now experience it in a different way? No reported pressure of any kind from the federal government, though, ABC seems to have been able to deal with it on a purely business basis.

I thought it would be helpful to have an example of a situation that Kimmel definitely handled badly before we go on to the case on which there is some disagreement.

His response to the September 10 killing of Kirk, in any case, wasn't at all "denigrating the memory of Charlie Kirk", as Stephen Bannon put it; he denounced the murder, as everyone should, and refrained from speaking ill of the victim. What aroused the criticism was what he said about Republican politicians, not involved in the murder one way or the other, but rushing to exploit the murder, starting with Donald Trump, who released a video on the night of September 10, before a suspect had even been identified, blaming it on the "radical left" and unnamed "organizations" that supposedly fund it;

His Wonders to Perform

Photo via petguide.com.

 

I don't have a Hardcore email account like Edroso's, but I do get some crazy off Twitter, from nuts there who have followed me at one time or another (I always follow back), for reasons I can't generally reconstruct. One of whom goes by "Question Ray Epps". It's also come to me that outside the depths of the Slough of Paranoia most people don't have a very clear idea of why Ray Epps is a thing, whereas, because of my Twitter connection, I've spent some time trying to figure it out, so I probably have a slightly clearer concept than most of you of who Ray Epps is, and the enjoyable Ray Epps news that has surfaced this week, and I thought I should share that.

Epps was an ex-Marine, the owner with his wife of a wedding-venue business in Arizona, and a pretty high-ranking  Oath Keeper, president of the Arizona chapter, who didn't get charged in the January 6 investigations, although he was captured on video during the rally the night before, telling an interviewer and later a crowd that "We've got to go into the Capitol! That's where our problems are!"—"Peacefully! Peacefully!" he added the second time,  leading the crowd to begin chanting, "Fed! Fed! Fed!" And the next afternoon just at the moment of the breach on the Capitol itself, where he's briefly seen whispering to an unidentified person outside the barriers, who then joins the others knocking the barriers down and punching the cops on the other side, while Epps disappears. There's a pretty good mashup of these glimpses in this story at The Independent.

Then, as Ted Cruz was telling the FBI's representative in a Senate hearing on January 11 2022, a mysterious development:

Cruz then noted that Epps initially appeared on a poster issued by the FBI seeking information about people connected to criminal activity on Jan. 6, but was absent from another FBI “seeking information” poster distributed July 1.

“Magically, Mr. Epps disappeared from the public posting,” he said. “According to public records, Mr. Epps has not been charged with anything. No one’s explained why a person videoed​ urging people to go to the Capito​l​,​ a person whose conduct was so suspect the crowd believed he was a ​fed​,​ would magically disappear from the list of people the FBI was looking at.”

I can tell you something about that one: the FBI wasn't looking for him any more, because when the first poster went up and Epps realized they were looking for him, he immediately called them and gave them whatever evidence he had to give (The New York Times checked his phone records and found he'd spoken to them for an hour), so it's really not all that magical.

For the Record: Lab Leak

Philippine pangolin pup curled up with its mom, via Wikipedia. 

Matt Taibbi, pushing a report by his "Twitter Files" coconspirator Michael Shellenberger (best known for his work in the crusade on behalf of the despised plastic straw in his 2020 book Apocalypse Never)

Michael Shellenberger’s Public today released a blockbuster story, “First Person Sickened By COVID-19 Was Chinese Scientist Who Oversaw “Gain Of Function” Research That Created Virus,” which generously credits Racket. The story cites three government officials in naming scientist Ben Hu, who was in charge of “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the “patient zero” of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is a major story, contradicting early official explanations pointing to zoonotic cross-species “spillover” at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, colloquially known as the Wuhan wet market. The mystery bat or pangolin suspected of transmitting the disease to humans at that market was never found. The Public story for the first time asserts the source of contamination: a Wuhan Institute scientist fell ill after exposure to a virus engineered at his place of work.

Well, engineered or not engineered, according to the same story, since it also suggests (with pix!) Hu didn't use enough protective gear when he was working with naturally occurring bat and pangolin viruses, so he could just as easily have gotten sick, if he did, from a virus his colleagues brought to the lab from the wild.

For the Record: Del Rio Truthers

 

Bringing takeout from Ciudad Acuña to the family in Del Rio. Photo by Jordan Vonderhaar/Getty Images via The Guardian.

Has anyone actually looked into this? https://t.co/JqYTGaTcn0

— Don Winslow (@donwinslow) September 24, 2021

From article: "And so this is a community that, you know, operates through word of mouth. So people started saying, hey, Ciudad Acuña is open. This port is open."

— 1984_brien (@1984_brien) September 24, 2021

That's according to Politifact. This is an international matter and as such would seem that much of the US IC can analyze what went on here and in other situations where refuge movements are encouraged.

— 1984_brien (@1984_brien) September 24, 2021

It wasn't exactly sudden. They were on the way, mostly concentrated in Panama, in July 2020. Something like what would have been called a "caravan" six or seven years ago https://t.co/CizuiHXIue

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 25, 2021

Obviously the fact that Trump was being replaced by a less racist and anti-immigrant president encouraged more people to join in from January 2021 onward, but the movement was already happening.

Douthat: Q Is Right!

Ding dong, the Bilderberg is dead!

And here's Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, at his weirdest, with an agenda I want to try unpacking ("The End of the New World Order"): it starts off with a mysterious warning that some rightwing conspiracy theories, while false, may be sort of true in a way that overrides their particular falsehood:

This is as true in the Trump era as in any other. Extraterrestrials are probably not among us, but we keep being handed new evidence that the U.F.O. phenomenon is real. QAnon is a landscape of fantasy, but the fact that powerful sexual predators have ties to presidents, popes and princes is a hard post-Jeffrey Epstein truth....

The phrase “New World Order” was lifted by the conspiracy-minded from the optimistic rhetoric of George H.W. Bush, and since then the paranoia and the facts have always existed symbiotically. The fantasy is looming totalitarian control, black helicopters descending, secret Bilderberg plots. But it’s been encouraged by various undeniable realities — the growth of transnational institutions, the manifest power of a global overclass, the often undemocratic expansion of the European Union and the rise of digital surveillance and the ties binding China and the U.S. into “Chimerica.”

I'm not so sure about this whole perspective. It's like if you read about the myths of Zeus or Thor and came away with the idea you'd found proof that thunder goes back at least 3000 years. That's not the point! We have independent reasons for believing that thunder is millions of years older than that because that's how Earth weather works! They made up stories about it 3000 years ago because they didn't know that, but we do; the myths tell us more about the people than about the natural phenomenon.

And the (journalistic) grift goes on

Startled by a headline in The Hill

AG Barr just signaled that things are about to get ugly for the Russia collusion team

into thinking what? there's a chance that Junior and Jared, Flynn and Prince, Stone and Parscale, and some of those other malefactors could be in trouble?

Sadly, no, and of course that's not what Barr is talking about. The headline writers didn't realize that the expression "Russia collusion team" has an obvious meaning. What the author of the article, one Kevin R. Brock, is offering, is an interpretation of what Barr meant on his visit the other day to Laura Ingraham's Foxhole:

"I think the president has every right to be frustrated, because I think what happened to him was one of the greatest travesties in American history," Barr said. "Without any basis they started this investigation of his campaign, and even more concerning, actually is what happened after the campaign, a whole pattern of events while he was president. So I -- to sabotage the presidency, and I think that – or at least have the effect of sabotaging the presidency." 

That is, Brock is hoping Barr's announcing an effort to get the real villains, McCabe and Strzok, Simpson and Ohr, and Robert Mueller and presumably James Comey and Barack Obama and maybe FBI inspector general Michael Horowitz, who had the nerve to say that the investigation of the Trump campaign was not baseless, or a travesty, or sabotage, at all.

Unleashed Kraken

Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in George Cukor's Gaslight, 1944, via Vox.

If you were startled to hear Big Donald tossing out dark hints of an unusually vast international conspiracy against him—

“So what I’ve done is I’ve declassified everything,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday before leaving on a trip to Japan.

“[Attorney General Barr] can look and I hope he looks at the UK and I hope he looks at Australia and I hope he looks at Ukraine.

“I hope he looks at everything, because there was a hoax that was perpetrated on our country.”

—I may be able to help. We're actually contemplating two different and equally idiotic conspiracy theories, one for UK and Australia and one for Ukraine.

The latter is Rudolph Giuliani's developing hypothesis that Ukrainian authorities after the Euromaidan revolution didn't have any reason to investigate how Paul Manafort got himself a $66-million cut of the pillaging of Ukraine by the pro-Russia Yanukovych regime—why on earth would they want to know anything about that?—but only did it because the sneaky Democratic National Committee tricked them into it, to harm the Trump campaign (as we briefly noted a couple of weeks ago).

For the Record: Anonymous Sources

Some imbecile was proving to me that Bob Woodward's use of anonymous sources was connected to the fact, not previously known to me, that the "MSM" and Hillary Clinton were in conspiratorial cahoots in the 2016 campaign:

An anonymous source confirms that his other anonymous sources are telling the truth https://t.co/w0s3ezyEOF

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) September 12, 2018

Then again you've never found out how historians work either, though you actually pretend to do it yourself.

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) September 12, 2018

You don't know how journalists work either. You're quoting from the rule book (which is very good), not from the technique book. "Sparingly" means "only if it's necessary to get the story", which in practice can be a lot, as when the sources' jobs or lives are on the line.

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) September 12, 2018

The unconscious of a conservative

The 1967 Poor People's Campaign, from Ecumenical Women at the United Nations

I've already amused myself more than could be considered strictly necessary, or even entirely sane, with Arizona's attorney general, Tom Horne, who believes that the Tucson high schools' Mexican-American Studies Program was teaching students that they were "oppressed by white people" and therefore "just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it." But I'm not really over it. Anyway, it's Dr. King's birthday...

So what I want to know is: What exactly is it about rightishness [jump]

Tikkun for a ride

Can't seem to get away from this speech of Romney's, where he is castigating Obama for his grandiose promises:

“I’ve been watching some clips of President Obama, then candidate Obama, when he was going across Iowa four years ago,” Romney said. “And the promises were just non-stop of all the great thing [sic*] he was going to do: heal the nation, bring us together, repair the nation and repair the world.”

Which is of course not an accurate report of promises that the president made, but you knew that already. What's important about what Romney says--unless he really does have some fascinating brain ailment, which I don't really believe--is what he is trying to do with language, the effect he is trying to make, and here it's that phrase "repair the world".

If I understand it correctly, what Romney is up to now is pretty bizarre, and probably a good deal more evil than we have imagined, as detailed below the fold...

*This is particularly weird in its own right--as far as Dr. Google and I can figure, every single source in the whole world that quotes this has the same error except for one rush transcript from CNN--and not one either says anything snarky (like about how hypnotized our royal-court stenographers are) or silently corrects it. Does it mean something?

I'm sure that lots of people besides me, like the Kossack commenters to the source linked above, or the great Steve Benen, have recalled that "repairing the world" has a particular meaning and resonance; that it is the normal translation for Hebrew tikkun olam, the obligation of every Jew to make a positive response to what you might call the Melville problem:

Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending. 

It's not anything like the first time Obama has been associated with Jewishness; indeed, only a couple of days before the Romney speech, on New Year's Eve, Rabbi Steven Bob published an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post calling him the "tikkun olam president"--

It’s refreshing how genuinely and naturally our president relates to the Jewish community. He mentions by name responsibilities like tikkun olam, the Jewish tradition of working to repair the world, and then talks from the heart about his belief in the same. He discusses the concept of “hineini” – “Here I am” – not only because he thinks giving an unexpected d’var Torah makes for a good speech, but because he subscribes to the values those prophetic words represent.

And last September, John Heilemann in New York Magazine famously suggested that Obama is actually our "first Jewish president". Heilemann, of course, is mainly trying to clarify to the world that Obama is a fervent supporter of Israel and that Binyamin Netanyahu is a schmuck. But the idea of Obama as Jewish president goes back much further than that: to Abner Mikva and the 2008 campaign.

I agree that there is something Jewish about Obama in the way there was something African-American about Bill Clinton (Toni Morrison, 1998). With Clinton it was that smooth, charmed way of letting you know that he knew when there was jive in the air, coming out of someone else's lips or his own, and then the extraordinary way he was mistreated--boy'd and uppity'd, regarded as a rapacious rapist and a hamburger glutton, and, as David Broder remarked to Sally Quinn, no doubt over cocktails in Georgetown or NW, "He came in here and he trashed the place and it's not his place..." Clarence Thomas may have thought he was the victim of a high-tech lynching but Bill Clinton was subjected to an oh-so-civilized one of pursed lips and sidelong glances, and of course nobody really got hurt (except for all the victims of poverty and injustice and no health insurance that suffered when his programs crashed on the rock of the White Southern Republican party under the so-called leadership of... that putz is back running for something???--I can't help it, I'm still really angry about this!).**

With Obama, it's the irony--whether he's in a tux delivering a comedy routine (for which he may have written a couple of his own jokes!) or wearing a baseball cap on the golf course looking around him in bemusement, and the self-questioning--he thinks he's the only one smart enough to do it, of course. And it is also the mode in which he is discriminated against: not, like Clinton, as nothing more than a big id, but rather as some kind of terrifying superego, the chief Illuminatus of who knows what kind of conspiracy of everybody from bankers to Communists, or going back to Romney, at another rally yesterday,

"I think president Obama wants to make us a European style welfare state, where instead of being a merit society we're an entitlement society, where government's role is to take from some and give to others," Romney told the crowd.

"What I know is if they do that, they'll substitute envy for ambition, and they'll poison the very spirit of America and keep us from being one nation under God," Romney said, leveling rhetoric at the president that he had not used before.

 Obama the hater of America, Obama the secret socialist, Obama the Rootless Cosmopolitan! When Romney hints at a Jewish Obama, you see, a would-be repairer of the world, he's not talking to you and me, but to those who are prepared to believe in this ugly old story... I'm halfway serious here, you know...

**And yes, I know that Clinton did some very bad things, of which the least forgivable to my mind is maybe the smallest, the despicable execution of Ricky Ray Rector, remembered for being such an innocent in the broad sense that he saved the dessert from his last meal "for later". I have mentioned this problem--the intrinsic wickedness of all politicians, even the ones we love--before, and I hope to begin working through it in another post.