The MAGA Doctrine Page 14
Trump criticizes the media—though he would have to tweet very rapidly indeed to criticize them as often as they criticize him. He has half-jokingly wondered aloud whether some TV news networks deserve to have their broadcast licenses revoked for lying, but that’s not even his call. It’s the FCC’s, and even the FCC doesn’t have the power to censor views or close down a whole network. At most, they could yank the broadcast licenses of individual, local stations. The Internet would remain almost unassailable even then.
But this is all hypothetical—and a little ridiculous. Trump is not going to shut down the media. What he is going to do is something that bothers journalists far more than government action. (They seem to like government action most of the time, in fact.) He’s going to keep criticizing them. That isn’t a threat to the First Amendment. It’s part of the endless debate the First Amendment makes possible.
Trump has a good record as a defender of the whole Bill of Rights (to take just the most well-known part of our Constitution, its first ten Amendments). Consider:
The First Amendment
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Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
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In addition to leaving the press unmolested, Trump took an important symbolic action against one stealthy, growing threat to free speech. If the government subsidizes universities, and those universities increasingly restrict what students can say (at an important, politically formative time in their lives and on campuses that are incubators for later political organizing in the adult world), the government is in effect outsourcing censorship to academia.
Officially, Congress’s hand stays clean, but indirectly government thereby strikes a terrible blow to our culture, undermining the willingness of young people to engage in open-ended, free-spirited political discussion, especially if they want to speak up in favor of rights like the ones enshrined in the Constitution, as opposed to ones conjured by “social justice” advocates.
President Trump invited members of my group, Turning Point USA, to be present at the White House on March 21, 2019, when he signed an executive order warning colleges that receive federal funding that they have a duty to respect their students’ First Amendment rights. The president also mentioned our organization on multiple occasions during the event, complimenting the work we are doing on campuses across the country.
As the president put it, “We reject oppressive speech codes, censorship, political correctness, and every other attempt by the hard left to stop people from challenging ridiculous and dangerous ideas. These ideas are dangerous. Instead, we believe in free speech, including online and including on campus.”
With both his criticism—not censorship—of the press and reminder to publicly funded colleges of their stated missions, Trump is not seizing control of elements of the culture beyond his purview. He is barely altering policy. He is, however, sending a powerful cultural signal to two of the most important bastions of left-wing power that the rest of us are onto them.
For decades now, the institutionalized left has relied on the “tenured radicals” of academia not only to encourage campus activists—sometimes giving them time off or even class credit for left-wing activist activities but rarely for, say, Turning Point USA rallies—but also to train the nation’s journalists. You don’t have to go to journalism school to pick up on the left’s philosophy, either. It’s in English classes. It’s in history classes. Almost any college student in America in the twenty-first century knows what it’s like to be told, in ways subtle and unsubtle, that there’s a rough narrative that all good people agree upon about what America is and what one should expect each new story from the wider world to affirm.
You’re free to say what you like, thank goodness, but unless you’re naturally combative, you’ll probably have been trained to be skeptical of tradition, religion, capitalism, individualism, the right to armed self-defense, conventional gender roles, or the classics of Western literature. In the place of all of those things—which not so long ago one might have summed up with the label “civilization”—there is the gospel of social justice, substituting, respectively, for each of those components of civilization: subversion, mysticism, socialism, collectivism, gun control, sixty-three genders, and postmodernism.
Who needs censorship, the cynical leftist might chuckle, when everyone in academia and media is on the same page anyway? To step out of line takes courage when it invites disapproval that can affect, in rough chronological order, your prospects for college admission, good grades, philosophical credibility, employment, and affirmation by the media establishment. Everyone from your teachers to social media executives is determined to behave as if the left-establishment’s worldview is as unquestionable as mathematics or basic physics, and it’s an effective strategy. People are prone to think as their peers do. If no one appears to be questioning a worldview, it remains dominant . . . at least for a while.
In pointing a finger at two of the pillars of the liberal establishment’s dominance—academia and media—Trump is not threatening the First Amendment. He’s showing us where the threats to those freedoms are likeliest to come from. Sooner or later, an establishment that hates to be questioned may like to make it official by writing it into law.
I don’t expect the left to pass a law anytime soon saying that conservative books are banned—but keep in mind their ever-expanding definition of “hate” and their willingness to contemplate legal remedies to that state of mind.
While Trump gets lambasted unfairly as a threat to press freedom, the Federal Election Commission keeps openly contemplating the idea of cracking down on “misinformation”—as decided by them—that might affect the outcome of elections. I won’t deny there’s plenty of nonsense online, some of it from dubious sources, but if policing information for its political appropriateness isn’t a formula for First Amendment violations, I don’t know what is. We will regret going down that road if we insist on doing so.
I think if the debate were about censoring books or traditional print newspapers that contain political “misinformation,” it would be more obvious, even to the left, how insane this line of thinking is. When it’s slightly newer technology, the idea somehow seems more palatable, like a modernized regulation instead of a direct assault on a document ratified in 1787 and meant to endure for the ages.
Even now, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is publicly discussing its plans to develop software to combat misleading memes. That means a think tank affiliated with the Defense Department, using taxpayers’ dollars, will wage cyber war against what the government deems bad ideas, using algorithms to hide the fact that certain values are overriding certain other values, as if it were all just a matter of spotting certain letter combinations and numbers.
Meanwhile, TV journalist Chris Cuomo effectively threatens CNN viewers and his Twitter followers, telling them CNN has the right to view documents (such as those leaked to WikiLeaks) that the public does not and that “hate speech” is not protected by the First Amendment, which would be a big surprise to some sharp-tongued Founding Fathers and their political opponents.
And while the press itself—not Trump—erodes the idea of free speech, back on campus, activists partner with boring college administrators on hundreds of US college campuses to encourage the idea of anonymously reporting any remotely culturally biased statement to “bias response teams,” which can lead to mandatory sensitivity training.
Ironically, over two centuries after fighting the British for the right to create our Constitution, it sounds like we’re moving in the direction of creating speech cops who listen in on your conversation for insensitive or forbidden ideas, as police in England increasingly do. All for your protection, of course.
The Second Amendment
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A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
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A couple of generations ago, it was liberals and leftists who often claimed to be the guardians of the Constitution, especially of First Amendment speech protections, but they’re rapidly losing interest in that amendment. The Second Amendment, by contrast, they never much liked to begin with.
Only recently have they become so bold as to suggest legislators should repeal the Second Amendment outright, something that is not very likely to happen in a nation with about one hundred million enthusiastic gun owners. But they are always chipping away at it, seizing every opportunity to press for new regulations, more restrictive background-check recommendations, more exaggerated mass-shooting stats, louder overreactions to gun-related tragedies, more sinister characterizations of average gun owners, more implausible post hoc rationalizations about which criminals would have been caught by which hypothetical screening methods, and endless “commonsense” proposals for seemingly minor regulations that in practice would make gun purchases nearly impossible and impose strange use, storage, and equipment standards for little or no safety reason.
It is striking how different the view of guns in rural America (where a disproportionate number of the conservatives are) is from the view of guns in urban centers (where a disproportionate number of the leftists are). Rural America knows most gun owners are harmless defenders of property, range shooters, or hunters, while urban America, still getting over its nightmares from the sky-high rates of gang violence thirty years ago, thinks guns spontaneously spark violent chaos if left unregulated for more than a few seconds. Urban dwellers have a very hard time imagining a gun in the hand of anyone other than a cop or a criminal—which means they feel very comfortable imagining the rest of us disarmed.
Given that President Trump is a New Yorker, then, we should consider ourselves very lucky he didn’t pick up the urban anti-gun impulse. He respects Americans’ right to self-defense, and he respects the responsible nature of most legal gun owners over the federal government. He strays in tiny ways from the pure NRA stance of resistance to every new gun regulation proposal—but then, so does the NRA itself. Luckily, Trump’s conservative supporters haven’t been shy about holding his feet to the fire on the rare occasions when he sounds sympathetic to bump stock bans or social credit-checking for gun purchasers.
He has certainly signaled his sympathy for the nation’s hunters and gun owners, in any case, and I had the honor of seeing that another member of the Trump family enjoys putting his gun rights into action: I’ve been alligator hunting with Donald Trump Jr. in the swamps of Louisiana, with that state’s attorney general, Jeff Landry, plus Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Sergio Gor from Senator Rand Paul’s office. I first met the Trumps back in Chicago in person at one of Trump Sr.’s big rallies, little imagining I’d one day be with a member of the First Family in a setting so intimate and yet so far removed from their New York or D.C. homes, or other urban media and political environs. Neither Donald Jr. nor I were born woodsmen, needless to say, but he has become quite the avid hunter—probably a good influence on his father’s thinking about guns.
I am learning. Paradoxical as it may sound to the non-hunter, you learn a greater respect for both the gun and the gator while you’re out in the swamp. The protest banners we dimly recalled from back in the big cities and the piles of political literature wouldn’t amount to much in this primal confrontation of lead and teeth. Even alligator hunting is a story of the little guy against the government. The alligator was put on the endangered species list in the 1970s and taken off in the 1980s. However, there were three-quarter of a million alligators when the government added it to the list. It was never genuinely endangered. The reason their population has grown to five million since is instead due to the careful work of local hunters, landowners, and farmers whose livelihoods depend on the successful protection of alligators.
You’re happy to have a gun when you see a twelve-foot gator headed your way.
I used it, too. Don Jr. got an eleven-footer. Sergio got a ten, which he had mounted. And Kimberly made a pair of high heels out of the nine-footer she bagged.
Let no one tell you the only purpose for a gun is a government-run militia, police force, or military. Sometimes, whether against gator or human predator, you’re on your own, as the frontier-expanding Founders well knew.
The Third Amendment
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No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
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Historian Gordon S. Wood has called the Third Amendment the least-litigated of all the amendments, and the Supreme Court has not based decisions on it. Not since at least the days of the Civil War has there been much call for soldiers to be quartered in Americans’ homes, thank goodness. Compared to many war-torn regions in the world, the United States has been an oasis of peace most of the time for over a century.
But the Third is one more reminder that Trump’s aversion to unnecessary military conflicts has implications for the home front, not just for distant lands about which Americans may know little. In a sufficiently large-scale war, including one that began in a Latin American trouble spot such as Venezuela and spread across our porous southern border, there might well be sudden pressure to use Americans’ homes as makeshift military installations.
None of us have seen the United States tempted to resort to such measures in our lifetimes, and I hope we never will, not even if it is done in an orderly fashion. This is not meant as any slight toward the military but as respect for the integrity of home and hearth.
The Fourth Amendment
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The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
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The status of the Fourth Amendment is precarious in an era of increasing technological surveillance capacity by the government. In the early 1990s, the Supreme Court grappled for the first time with the question of whether watching a suspect’s home with infrared FLIR goggles constitutes a search, for instance. If the only thing that counts as a search is the very old-fashioned method of stomping into a home and turning over tables, the government’s perceived authority will be dangerously broad indeed.
And with each passing day, as whistle-blower Edward Snowden reminded the world in 2013, government’s tools for watching and tracking us—not just as suspects but as innocent citizens going about our everyday business—grow ever more subtle and sophisticated.
As well-intentioned as the USA PATRIOT Act may have been in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, its capacity to create a roving, ill-defined power of federal government surveillance over Americans has been recognized by critics on both the left and right. The USA Freedom Act of 2015 sought to narrow some of the powers granted to government in the PATRIOT Act in part by limiting the National Security Agency’s power to collect bulk “metadata” on whole populations of non-suspects, the reasoning at the time of PATRIOT’s passage having been that metadata is not in itself communications or user-generated messages.
But by now, most people have some idea just how much can be deduced about any of us, whether by government or industry, from the patterns of our communications alone—who we’re connected to when, by what means, and for how long—even without the specific content of our messages being examined. The thought that the government might think it can continually collect such information from nearly everyone, instead of just precisely named specific criminal suspects for whom surveillance warrants have been written, is unsettling.
At the same time, the Freedom Act acknowledged the relatively reasonable case for continuing to allow roving wiretaps, in the sense that a known suspect might well pick up and discard numerous devices in the twenty-first century as a means of leaving a complex trail for law enforcement to follow.
So it is encouraging, though the issue has by no means been resolved, that as I write these words in the summer of 2019, Trump’s outgoing director of national security, Dan Coats, acknowledged in a letter to Congress the suspension of the NSA’s collection of call detail records but carefully specified the case for renewing the roving wire tape authority (as guided by FISA courts) and for treating “lone wolf” terrorist suspects as fitting targets for tracking even if they are guided by a foreign terror ideology without officially being members of a foreign terrorist organization.
We don’t want the government to do whatever it likes in the name of national security, but we don’t want to be killed by terrorists over a technicality either. Trump’s basic sensibilities incline him to recognize this tension. He is skeptical of both government and red tape, not such contradictory impulses. He has also done admirably little grandstanding on these easily demagogued issues.
The Fifth Amendment
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No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.