The Policing Crisis in New York City

By Kyle Smith

Monday, August 03, 2020

 

On Tuesday afternoon in Manhattan, cops carried out a routine arrest of an 18-year-old New York activist who is suspected of disabling police cameras by spraying paint on them. The person is suspected of this for very good reason: There are videos starring the perpetrator carrying out the act in question. (Allegedly.) The arresting officers were plainclothes members of the NYPD. The video of the arrest, in which plainclothes officers and uniformed police using bikes as barriers efficiently collar the subject, went “viral,” meaning it became attractive to stupid people who evidently have never seen Serpico or The Wire and insisted this was a “kidnapping” carried out by “stormtroopers,” presumably acting at the behest of Darth Trumper.

 

Plainclothes officers, in unmarked vehicles, are an essential crime-fighting tool and have been deployed for a very long time. Even a lintbrain such as Mayor Bill de Blasio, or Governor Andrew Cuomo, knows this. Yet what did they both do? Explain to the public how policing works? Of course not. They both denounced the police.

 

Cuomo was especially obtuse, calling the cops’ actions “outrageous,” because when you’re governor of New York, you’re at a remove from municipal police activity. But de Blasio should know better than to react as he did, which was to mewl support for the leftist street agitators of whom the arrestee was one. De Blasio has been badly burned before for issuing various no-confidence votes in the police force yet he called the arrest “insensitive,” adding that “we’re in a particular historical moment where there has to be sensitivity where folks are understandably worried about what they’re seeing coming out of Washington about the defense of democratic rights.”

 

Huh? This wasn’t a federal bust. “Washington” had nothing to do with it. De Blasio can’t pin this on Trump. It was his own police force. Moreover, what is a “sensitive” arrest supposed to look like? Cops descended stealthily because they thought the suspect would run away if marked police cars were deployed.

 

But if de Blasio had acknowledged that municipal police are allowed to make plainclothes arrests, he might have been led down the path of logic to recall that federal officers are allowed to do the same, which means the similar Portland arrests, by federal officials, were also a nothingburger, and Trump’s administration isn’t breaking any norms in this area. And being on the Trump administration’s side of anything, especially far-left activism and rioting, is anathema to de Blasio. “We’ve seen the chaos the secret police are creating in Portland,” de Blasio tweeted with his typical idiocy on July 20. “We won’t let it happen here.”

 

The tangible effects of de Blasio’s approach are everywhere. De Blasio has a vision for the city, and the cops are determined to let it be realized. At Broadway and 40th Street, junkies are shooting up in plain sight, in daytime. (Around the corner from where Rent used to dazzle Giuliani-era tourists by painting a picture of shambolic life in pre-Giuliani New York). The police shrug. In a protest at City Hall park, one activist smacked a New York Post reporter in the face with a two-by-four in view of police, and the police initially yawned, making an arrest only after the Post ran a story about the matter. Compared with last year, homicides are up 24 percent, burglary is up 46 percent, and shootings are up a breathtaking 69 percent. New Yorkers sense the city, already reeling from the virus and the economic effects of the lockdown, is sinking into lawlessness. De Blasio’s answer has been not to make amends with the police but to send crime counselors out into the street to advise people not to do bad things. Step forward, “violence interrupters.” I’m sure such “community groups” will talk the thugs out of shooting babies in their strollers.

 

With police already jumpy about getting engulfed by angry mobs, Molotov-cocktail attacks, and having their vehicles set on fire in even the toniest neighborhoods, they see de Blasio’s policy actions and public comments as gratuitous insults. Police unions have been buying full-page ads in the Post blasting de Blasio’s disastrous leadership, and one such union, the Sergeants Benevolent Association, has taken to ripping de Blasio in social media. Cops are lining up to hand in their retirement papers.

 

The city’s two big moves to placate protesters after the death of George Floyd have been to cut $1 billion from the NYPD budget and to ban “chokeholds,” which turned out to mean banning a variety of arrest techniques including placing a knee on a suspect’s back. Cop leaders have pointedly explained that in the process of arresting someone, no one can predict exactly how it’s going to unfold. What if officer and suspect go down to the ground in a heap? Can anyone guarantee no officer’s knee will ever touch a suspect’s back? And any arrest might well be photographed by onlookers. The new law is so nonsensical that the district attorneys of both the Bronx and Staten Island have pushed back against it, saying cops obviously should not be charged with a crime for accidentally kneeling on someone’s back during a lawful arrest. Assistant Police Chief Kathleen O’Reilly went so far as to say, “Chief, but we can’t put our people in harm’s way unnecessarily,” defending police reluctance to make difficult arrests given the new law. Her superior, Chief of Department Terence Monahan, essentially replied that police should continue as usual because he had secured promises from the five city DAs not to prosecute cops in such an incident.

 

How can police be sure of that, especially in such a politically charged environment? The law needs to be rewritten or repealed, if de Blasio wants to get a handle on crime in the city. It’s more likely that de Blasio will continue to antagonize the cops, and everyone who lives or works in the city will have to deal with the fallout. Police “are tired,” NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said on June 22. “They are stressed. And right now they feel unappreciated.” How could it be otherwise given the leadership of New York City?

What’s in a Nickname?

By David Harsanyi

Thursday, July 23, 2020

 

Oftentimes, walking my beloved wheaten terrier around my quiet suburban neighborhood, I’m confronted with the steely gaze of a silk-blue Volkswagen Beetle. I hadn’t put much thought into the car’s obnoxious past until I began trying to figure out ways to be offended by history.

 

It turns out I was in luck. In 1937, Adolf Hitler, an admirer of American mass-production methods, decided that German citizens needed access to affordable cars to make use of the nation’s new highway system. A state-owned company was formed, and by the next year, Hitler was visiting the Fallersleben Volkswagen factory, declaring the new car “a symbol of the National Socialist people’s community.”

 

It gets worse. When production of the people’s car was temporarily halted in 1939, Volkswagen diverted its manufacturing to the war effort and began using forced labor from concentration camps. Records show that during the war, around 300 Jewish metalworkers were transported from Auschwitz — where Hungarian Jews had been sent in 1944 — to toil in munitions plants. Hungary happens to be the country my grandparents were taken from during the war.

 

Having personally known some of the victims of Nazi oppression, I suppose I have a pretty solid historical grievance here. I should probably be gathering my fellow Jews and demanding the company change its name.

 

It’s not just the Volkswagen, mind you. A mere hundred years ago, Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, was spreading the vilest Jew-hatred imaginable. Yet here you are today, driving around in your Fiestas as if nothing had happened.

 

Though I am deeply serious about history, try as I may, I just can’t seem to generate any genuine indignation. I’m skeptical that you could, either.

 

Now, if you’re intent on removing a statue of Confederate major general Jefferson C. Butterworth III, that’s one thing. Most Confederate effigies were erected in the 20th century by fans of an ugly historical cause as a statement about an ugly contemporary political cause.

 

Today’s woke activists, the ones scouring Wikipedia to ferret out historical injustices no one really remembers, on the other hand, are sanctimonious, imperious, undereducated, censorious, and authoritarian. If they succeed, they won’t make life better for anyone, but they’ll end up stripping American culture of its wonderful peculiarity and historical flavor.

 

They’re winning, sadly. I knew they were winning after they finally browbeat the Washington Redskins — originally, the “Boston Redskins,” named after a head coach who claimed to be part Sioux — into dropping their name. As of this writing, the team hasn’t announced a new one, but I’m confident it will be completely benign and meaningless, something tantamount to the Footballers or Sportsguys.

 

A 2004 poll conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that nine in ten Native Americans weren’t offended by the name “Washington Redskins.” In 2016, a Washington Post poll found the exact same result. But if you keep telling people their self-worth is found in victimhood, and outrage is a moral imperative, they might start believing you.

 

The Cleveland Indians have already dispensed with Chief Wahoo. The Atlanta Braves have stopped promoting the tomahawk chop. The acknowledgment of Native American bravery and fearlessness, once embedded in our sporting ethos, celebrated from elementary school to professional leagues, will soon be gone. It’s a shame.

 

Demands that once seemed zealous and far-fetched are now gaining traction. Some argue that only the oppressed could possibly understand the pain of these names. Maybe so, but feigned outrage is infectious and irrational.

 

The greatest team mascot in history — both visually and symbolically — is the Fighting Irish’s bellicose leprechaun. Though the little bearded supernatural being — granted, probably intoxicated — might be spoiling for a fight, no rational person could possibly be offended by him. Yet killjoys up in South Bend are demanding the school drop the name because it is rooted in negative stereotypes of Catholics and immigrants. I don’t venture to speak for the Irish, but if my name were “McHarsanyi” I’d likely have a tattoo of that angry little guy. Because unlike the progeny of Catholic immigrants, who succeeded in creating an institution that requires a 4.06 GPA to attend, leprechauns aren’t real.

 

It is not in the impoverished Baltimore inner city but in the whitest of white Maryland suburbs that a bunch of historically illiterate students have gathered more than 1,000 signatures to rename Winston Churchill High School because of the man’s alleged “crimes against humanity.” The likelihood that any of them have read a biography of Churchill is zero. At some point, being slighted for others is self-perpetuating and meaningless.

 

It’s in the college town of Chapel Hill that activists rally for the University of North Carolina to rid its teams of the nickname “Tar Heels.” Apparently it conjures up thoughts of the antebellum South and so is associated with “white supremacy.” When I think of Tar Heels, I think of Michael Jordan and James Worthy. The term comes from the turpentine, tar, and pitch that were produced from local trees, and I assume they existed before and after slavery.

 

It is not the impoverished descendants of cotton-pickers who pressured high-end grocer Trader Joe’s to start changing the names of their ethnic foods — “Trader José’s” for Mexican, “Trader Ming’s” for Chinese. It takes a special kind of humorless scold to be offended by cartoonish appreciation of foreign cuisine, and yet here we are.

 

I’m relatively certain that neither Volkswagen executives nor my neighbor, despite the German company’s sketchy beginnings, is intentionally sending me Wagnerian taunts. I’m no more offended by the term “Volk” than you are by “Trader José’s” or fantastical fighting Irish eccentrics or the tomahawk chop. Not really.

It’s Time for Action on COVID Liability

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, August 02, 2020

 

Republicans have been hoping that Mitch McConnell can deliver a coronavirus liability fix in Washington. Question: Why haven’t Republicans already delivered coronavirus liability fixes in Tallahassee, Phoenix, and Boise?

 

Maybe they were too busy off attending lectures on federalism.

 

The coronavirus liability shield authored by Senators Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and John Cornyn (R., Texas) would redirect lawsuits accusing businesses of exposing employees or customers to the coronavirus, diverting them into the federal system. It would limit the cases to those in which the businesses could be demonstrated to have shown “gross negligence” and would exempt from liability those businesses that can prove they made “reasonable efforts” to comply with government guidelines.

 

Senator McConnell has held fast to the liability shield, and President Donald Trump did his standard thing of standing tall right up until the moment Nancy Pelosi bullies him into rolling over, which he did on Thursday, offering to support a deal without the liability provision that was, until five minutes ago, the top legislative priority. Instead of having to fight Pelosi, McConnell and Senate Republicans now have to in effect fight the speaker of the House and the president together. As usual, Mr. Art of the Deal cannot figure out how to make a deal with his own team.

 

Republicans have for years made a big noise about tort reform in the states, and they have made some progress on that front, most notably in Texas. (That policy victory for Texas Republicans made independents and Democrats out of a whole bunch of rich Republican lawyers in Dallas and Houston — politics is all about tradeoffs.) But these advances have been for the most part halting and partial. If, as seems likely, January brings with it some very good reasons and excellent opportunities for Republicans to turn their attention to the state capitals, tort reform should be near the top of the agenda.

 

It should be already. In the particular matter of the coronavirus epidemic, several states have passed very limited liability protections, mostly for health-care facilities. Republican-governed Iowa has passed a broader bill that would apply a good-faith exemption similar to the one in the federal shield to most businesses; Democrats bitterly opposed this, licking their chops at the potential gravy train of litigation against meat-packing facilities and retirement homes. A Utah bill offers blanket protection to businesses save those that have engaged in “willful misconduct, reckless infliction of harm, or intentional infliction of harm.” Democrats bitterly opposed it, licking their chops at the potential gravy train of litigation against restaurants and landlords. North Carolina has created broad protections for businesses that enacted coronavirus-mitigation plans and has enacted other measures that in some cases enjoyed bipartisan support and in other cases were — sing along, now — bitterly opposed by Democrats dreaming of a once-in-a-lifetime payday for the trial lawyers.

 

The coronavirus epidemic is an extraordinary event that requires an extraordinary legislative response. But the workaday problem of excessive and abusive litigation, especially against businesses, has been around since long before the coronavirus, and almost certainly will still be a problem when we have put this ghastly epidemic behind us. This is a fight worth having, and the reformers have not yet begun to fight — at least, they have not pressed the fight to anywhere near the point they must. There has been some encouraging action, notably in Louisiana. There is room for much more.

 

Tort reform presents a classic case of concentrated benefits vs. dispersed costs. The lawyers who get rich by suing businesses — in response to legitimate abuses or for purely mercenary harassment — have fought reform tooth and talon, and they can be counted on to continue doing so. Business leaders understand the issue from the other side, though it does not land on them with great weight until they find themselves in the crosshairs. Most of the real cost is borne by third parties, meaning consumers, meaning you and me. We pay more for food and medicine, for housing, for everything that moves in a truck, for everything that requires labor — for everything, effectively — in order to enable the nation’s trial lawyers to make the payments on their G550s.

 

I do not mean to suggest that the trial bar is purely parasitic. Individuals and institutions sometimes damage the well-being of others in a way that violates the law, and the trial bar, when it is functioning as it should, works as a kind of supplementary regulatory apparatus. There are even some kinds of lawsuits that we do not have enough of, notably libel and lawsuits against the likes of the Washington Post and Joy Reid. But the loosey-goosey norms of American tort action create powerful incentives for irresponsible and opportunistic litigation, which can impose very high costs, e.g. contributing to the high cost of doctors’ fees by making malpractice insurance radically more expensive than it needs to be. Texas has made some progress on that front, with the predictable result of the Texas Medical Board licensing a record number of new physicians in the years after the reforms were implemented. Fewer lawsuits means lower insurance costs means more doctors and more competition.

 

Texas imposed controversial caps on noneconomic damages in medical liability cases, and that is a tricky policy to get right. A more straightforward model for reform would be wider application of the so-called English Rule, the “loser pays” model. That would discourage the most parasitic kind of lawsuits, those in which the plaintiffs have no real case but the defendants (usually businesses) are financially better off settling the case than they are winning it, because winning it means being crushed by heavy legal fees.

 

The coronavirus epidemic has revived interest in tort reform, not just among big national lawsuit firms whose deep pockets are lawsuit bait but also among small and independent businesses whose owners have suddenly been made acutely aware of the depth and immediacy of certain liability risks. Republicans looking for something to offer other than tax cuts — or even dreaming of finding a way back into competitiveness in California or New York — have a rare opportunity here that combines good politics with good policy.

 

And they don’t have to wait on Mitch McConnell or Donald Trump to get to work.

The Chicago Gun Myth

By David Harsanyi

Monday, July 27, 2020

 

The tragically incompetent mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, appeared on CNN’s State of the Union this weekend to deflect attention from the horror show unfolding in her city by blaming interlopers for its spiking murder rate: “We are being inundated with guns from states that have virtually no gun control, no background checks, no ban on assault weapons — that is hurting cities like Chicago.”

 

Although these accusations have leveled by Chicago politicians for decades now, they are a myth.

 

For one thing, there is no state in the nation with “virtually no gun control” or “no background checks.” Every time anyone in the United States purchases a gun from a federal firearms licensee (FFL) — a gun store, a gun show, it doesn’t matter — the seller runs a background check on the buyer through the NICS (National Instant Criminal Background Check System) database. In some cases, the FFL checks to see if the buyer has passed a background check via a state-issued concealed-carry permit. In states that allow individual private sales, it is illegal to knowingly sell to anyone who you believe is obtaining a firearm for criminal purposes.

 

Those who cross state lines to buy guns undergo the same background check, and the sale is processed by an FFL in the buyer’s home state. The exact same laws apply to all online sales.

 

The vast majority of Americans obtain their guns in this manner, and they rarely commit crimes. Around 7 percent of criminals in prison bought weapons using their real names. Fewer than 1 percent obtained them at gun shows. As the Heritage Foundation’s Amy Swearer points out, there have been around 18 million concealed-carry permit holders over the past 15 years, and they have committed 801 firearm-related homicides over that span, or somewhere around 0.7 percent of all firearm-related murders. Concealed-carry holders not only are more law-abiding than the general population as a group; they are more law-abiding than law enforcement.

 

Studies of those imprisoned on firearms charges show that most often they obtain their weapons by stealing them or buying them in black markets. A smaller percentage get them from family members or friends.

 

On top of all this, federal law requires every FFL license holder to report the purchase of two or more handguns by the same person within a week to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. This is one of the reasons straw purchasers — people with a clean record who buy for criminals — spread their operations to other states. This is not unique to Illinois or Chicago. It has nothing to do with strict or lenient laws. It has mostly to do with cities and states failing to prosecute straw purchases.

 

Lightfoot claims that 60 percent of the guns used in Chicago murders are bought from out of state. I assume she is relying on 2017’s suspect “gun trace report,” which looked at guns confiscated in criminal acts from 2013 and 2016. Even if we trusted the city’s data, most guns used in Illinois crimes are bought in-state. If gun laws in Illinois — which earns a grade of “A-“ from the pro-gun-control Gifford Law Center, tied for second highest in the country after New Jersey — are more effective than gun laws in Missouri, Wisconsin, or Indiana, why is it that FFL dealers in suburban Cook County are the origin point for a third of the crime guns recovered in Chicago, and home to “seven of the top ten source dealers”? According to the trace study, 11.2 percent of all crime guns recovered in Chicago could be tracked to just two gun shops.

 

The only reason, it seems, criminals take the drive to Indiana is because local gun shops are tapped out. There is a tremendous demand for weapons in Chicago. That’s not Mississippi’s fault. And Lightfoot’s contention only proves that criminals in her city can get their hands on guns rather easily, while most law-abiding citizens have no way to defend themselves.

 

Lightfoot may also be surprised to learn that California borders on states with liberal gun laws, such as Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon. Yet no big city in California has quite the murder and criminality of Chicago. New York borders on states with liberal gun laws, such as Vermont, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire. Yet NYC’s murder rate is only fraction of Chicago’s. Texas gets an “F” from Gifford Law Center, yet Houston and Dallas have murder rates that are half of that in Chicago. The rates in Austin and El Paso are tiny when compared to Chicago.

 

Then, of course, the “assault-weapons bans” that Lightfoot brings up have absolutely no bearing on Chicago’s murder rate, even if such prohibitions actually worked. There were 864 murders in the state of Illinois in 2018 (the last year for which the FBI has full stats). Of homicides where the type of weapon is reported by law enforcement, 592 were perpetrated using handguns, 14 with rifles, and four with shotguns. Over 100 murders were committed using knives, other cutting instruments, hands, feet, and other types of weapons. And of the 14 “rifles” used, it’s almost surely the case that not all of them were “assault weapons.” Among the illegal guns recovered by Chicago law enforcement in 2018, 12,220 were handguns of some kind and 1,769 were rifles and shotguns.

 

In the states in Illinois’s neighborhood with no bans on “assault weapons,” the number of murders committed with a “rifle” is correspondingly small — ten in Indiana, eight in Tennessee, six in Kentucky, four in Wisconsin, and three in Mississippi.

 

It’s also worth pointing out that gun homicides dropped sharply in most cities after the national “assault weapons” expired in 2004, even though the AR-15 would correspondingly become one of the most popular weapons in the country. The AR-15 is an excellent home-defense weapon, but long guns aren’t conducive to criminality, despite what we see in movies. Tragically, AR-15s are often favored by psychotic mass shooters, but rarely by the murderers who plague Lightfoot’s city.

 

It keeps getting worse. Nearly 400 people have already been murdered in Chicago this year, around 100 more than in the entire year of 2019. On the night of May 29, 25 people were murdered and another 85 wounded by gunfire, more than any day in 60 years. And yet the mayor is appearing on TV to blame Mississippi and Texas. It is far more likely that black-market guns find their way to Chicago because the place has been a poorly run criminal mecca for decades.

Political Junkies Are Killing Our Democracy

By Claire Potter

Sunday, August 02, 2020

 

On the evening of January 20, 2019, as I scrolled aimlessly through Twitter, a short video shot that day in Washington, D.C. grabbed my attention. “This MAGA loser gleefully bothering a Native American protester at the Indigenous People’s March,” the caption read. A young, white man we now know as Covington Catholic high school student Nick Sandmann stood, smiling. Facing him was 64-year-old Nathan Phillips, an Omaha Nation elder and military veteran, beating a drum rhythmically, inches from Sandmann’s face.

 

Traveling through social media rapidly under the hashtag #CovingtonBoys, I could see this video going viral. In this first wave of coverage, some outlets, and my own progressive social media feeds, reported the confrontation as it was framed by the video’s producers: it was a typical instance of Trumpian racism performed by a teenager.

 

Many conservatives readers told a different story: They believed that the liberal media was accusing these boys of racism, when it was just as possible that the Native-American elder was really a political activist trying to provoke them.

 

The second wave of coverage framed the incident as a Rohrschach test. “Tell me how you voted and I’ll tell you what you think you saw,” wrote Jack Shafer in Politico, who warned of “our newly discovered infinite capacity for dispute.”

 

Worse, from the moment the video began to populate social media feeds, Sandmann and his family were showered with abuse and violent threats—even as new, unedited videos showed that he and the Covington students had done nothing wrong. The school closed temporarily because of bomb threats. Subsequently, the Sandmann family sued several mainstream outlets. Eighteen months and much unwanted notoriety later, they have won retractions, apologies, and two settlements.

 

The #CovingtonBoys video was, in a way, synecdoche for the fun-house world that the 2016 election created.

 

Because one of the under-appreciated aspects of Trumpism is that since the president has now made himself not just the head of government, but the center of American public life, we’re all political junkies now. Which means that we all want the political narratives that feel true to be true.

 

I became interested in the #CovingtonBoys story because I was working on a book about the rise of alternative media. As I worked on verifying the story, I realized that Nick Sandmann had been framed.

 

Progressive friends were angry and disappointed with me when I urged them to stop sharing the video because it felt true to them. Many went on at length about how Sandmann reminded them of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh, another Catholic school alumnus who had recently been confirmed amidst allegations of sexual assault.

 

As it turns out, I was right, and a good many people (or many good people, depending on how you want to think about it) were wrong about what happened in Washington that day, which is why this episode seems worth reflecting on as we come ever closer to another presidential election.

 

Why? Because today, digital media outlets are still shaping stories to create conflict, and mainstream media outlets still lean on social media feeds as tip lines.

 

These practices hurt all of us. And they will continue to hurt all of us until we grapple with what digital media has become, what role it plays in our political imagination, and why we are so unwilling to put our responsibility to be informed citizens ahead of the pleasure and excitement of being political junkies.

 

***

 

Political junkies used to be the most informed people. They were the ones who read two or three newspapers a day and subscribed to National Review or the New Republic (or both).

 

But the combination of extreme polarization and the rise of digital media has turned the political junkie into a person who reads more—much more—about political life. And actually knows less. Political junkies now persistently search for “scoops” that reaffirm their views—even if it means willfully misunderstanding reality.

 

The old media ecosystem produced and distributed the news, critical forms of truth-seeking—fact, expert opinion, and principled disagreement—which were necessary to maintaining democracy. But thanks to the economics of the digital world, that ecosystem is in the process of collapse.

 

In its place has grown an alternative digital media ecosystem, a forest of so-called “political news” sites and social media apps that bends reality to its will and serves as a perfect platform for political lies posing as news. In many cases, actual fake news doesn’t just reflect partisan divides, it creates them, bringing speculation, gossip, alternative realities, and conspiracy theories into the mainstream. By 2012, Donald Trump’s signature phrase—“a lot of people are saying”—was enough to launch crackpot theories from the alt-web into Twitter, and from there, to major newspapers and cable news programs.

 

***

 

As citizens, we should be outraged, not entertained, by fake news. We should be even more outraged when real news is said to be fake, as Donald Trump and his enablers do on a regular basis. And we don’t need to romanticize the public square, or the good old days of nightly news broadcasts on only three channels, to imagine that a country that could agree on basic facts would be on a path to a more democratic future.

 

It wasn’t always this way. From the political newsletters of the 1950s, to public television, to blogging, alternative media once promised Americans better reporting and deeper political knowledge. But when politics discovered the internet, a new and disturbing reality emerged: that alternative media channels could find a mass audience without having to clear any of the gatekeeping hurdles that professional journalists had built to keep themselves honest. And after them came the real fake news: The Facebook content mills run by Macedonian teenagers and husband and wife teams of grifters.

 

We cannot know how early alternative journalists with strong ideological perspectives, like I.F. Stone or William F. Buckley, would have responded to this torrent of sludge. But I think they would have been astonished by how freely we speak and write online, and, at the same time, how little of what we say contributes to the project of knowledge and human freedom.

 

Alternative new outlets like I.F. Stone’s Weekly and Buckley’s National Review helped readers think through the issues of the day because they took pains to tell the truth as they understood it. Each story was selected by a trusted friend, produced with care, packed with facts and well-considered opinions, and curated for an audience that valued information over sensation.

 

It was this same impulse to improve on the mainstream news that motivated the first generation of political bloggers—Mickey Kaus, Jonah Goldberg, Heather “Digby” Parton, and Andrew Sullivan. Whether on the left or the right, these political junkies believed in well-researched facts.

 

In addition, they trusted their readers to do their own research, to inspire conversation, and to lead the entire demos to consensus based on what was true and what was false. As economics blogger Tyler Cowan reflected in 2011, the best blogs were “self-critical and self-reflective”; a blogger needed to cultivate a sense of “your own weaknesses, where you were wrong last time, and where you can do better.”

 

But the blogosphere was killed by social media, aspirational corporate behemoths which ushered in a number of changes:

 

·         It reduced the barrier to entry for publishing to simple possession of an iPhone.

·         It made public comments so voluminous and ephemeral that crowd-sourced fact checking became much less frequent.

·         It helped magnify and accelerate the existing trends toward polarization by allowing everyone to create remarkably sturdy information bubbles.

 

The end result was that Americans fled to their ideological corners, consuming news that was curated for “them” but contributed little to the informed democracy that twentieth century alternative media pioneers had imagined.

 

How can democratic conversation function when it seems like all we do is reassure each other, within our partisan bubbles, that “we” are right and “they” are fatally wrong?

 

The answer is: It doesn’t.

 

***

 

The new digital alternative media has fueled a crisis of political civility and distrust, as well as contempt for traditional forms of cultural and social authority, while giving up its valuable historic role of holding mainstream media accountable.

 

It also forfeited the special role alternative media had played in telling truth to power. I.F. Stone revealed the truth about the Vietnam war, and Matt Drudge the truth about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. At the turn of the twentieth century, bloggers confronted mainstream media’s relationship to the political establishment and not only won, but made new grassroots political movements, and outsider candidacies, possible.

 

Alternative digital media can also play a particularly destructive role in choosing surrogates for political conflict. This is why the #CovingtonBoys video and its aftermath was always a bigger story than Donald Trump and his MAGA followers.

 

It was a story about us: About how badly we want access to truth,but how little we are willing to work to get it. About how eager we are to engage in politics, but how much more energized we are by conflict, rather than reasoned debate. And about how eagerly we accept any story that confirms our priors and reject any caution that challenges them.

 

But that isn’t how it has to be.

 

We don’t have to get up off the porch and chase every stick that Twitter throws. Yes, we now live in an illiberal political culture that snuck up on us while we were tweeting, Facebooking, watching YouTube videos, and scrolling through partisan sites whose main purpose is to capture and sell our data. We can’t change the past.

 

But the great thing about alternative media is how responsive it can be to failure, and how swiftly it can adapt to what its audience demands.

 

On the brink of a historic election, we might remember a moment, almost 250 years ago, when all American media that didn’t belong to the king of England was alternative media and, to paraphrase historian Bernard Bailyn, “the sheer explosiveness of the controversies” catapulted Americans’ minds “toward a mode of understanding altogether new, altogether modern.”

 

Those early Americans reflected before they reacted. They fought a war, but they also wrote pamphlets. They clamored in coffeehouses, and they dueled. They settled, often grudgingly, for compromises and imperfect solutions, acted on them, and then started writing, reading, and listening some more. And their descendants kept doing it, generation after generation, creating new, alternative media in which they upbraided each other, resolved their differences, and gathered like-minded folks together to imagine new futures.

 

So can we.