On Getting the Vaccine and Being White

I was given the Moderna vaccine at Las Clinicas del Norte in El Rito yesterday because I’m old, immune compromised, and white. I’m not casting aspersions on the El Rito Clinic, as it has probably inoculated more Hispano and Native American people than just about any provider in New Mexico. We’re blessed with a relatively good rural health care system in el norte that reaches into many areas that suffer other kinds of inaccessibility. It’s just that I found out the clinic was vaccinating from my network of white friends.

I’m talking about being white in the world. This discussion has been in the crossfire lately between the pro- and anti- cancel culture crowds over the legacy of white privilege and the absolutism of first amendment and civil liberties. On the one hand, there’s a movement to chastise, censor, and fire white people who do stuff that’s reactionary, bigoted, racist, misogynist, or any number of things that are deemed denigrating to the liberal code. On the other hand, there are those who see the actions that big tech companies have taken to kick these people off their platforms, or newspapers that have fired columnists or editors for these “indiscretions,” is an abrogation of their first amendment and civil rights.

This is all quite complicated and I’ve written before about it, in my #MeToo Part 2, December 14, 2017, of the difference between Roy Moore of Alabama, a pedophile who ran for the U.S. Senate, and Al Franken, a sitting senator who committed stupid “sexual misconduct.” Then there’s the incident where Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton wrote an editorial in the NYT saying President Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act to put down protests across the country after the murder of George Floyd, that resulted in the editorial page director being forced to resign (I just saw where he was rehired by The Economist).

When you make a distinction between depravity/immorality, and misconduct, then you need to also figure out where to draw the line between what constitutes free speech and what constitutes incitement. I doubt that Cotton’s editorial rises to the level of “incitement,” but what about the Proud Boys in Charlottesville who chanted, along with other neo-Nazis and anti-Semites “Seig heil,” “blood and soil,” and “You will not replace us.” That’s the first time I remember thinking, as a card carrying ACLU member, that maybe there were limits to free speech. Here’s what the First Amendment guarantees: “The First Amendment guarantees freedoms concerning religion, expression, assembly, and the right to petition. It forbids Congress from both promoting one religion over others and also restricting an individual’s religious practices. It guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely. It also guarantees the right of citizens to assemble peaceably and to petition their government.”

The Charlottesville protestors didn’t assemble peaceably. They beat up the counter demonstrators, they almost beat up Cornell West, and one of them killed a woman with a car. Was this protected free speech and if not, should the authorities have arrested all of them (the city tried to deny a march permit but they marched anyway)? Some ACLU folks raised this issue, but not Glenn Greenwald, former constitutional lawyer turned journalist. Writing in the Intercept, which he co-founded but has now left for Substack: “ . . . those who favor free speech suppression, or who oppose the ACLU’s universal defense of speech rights, will create results that are the exact opposite of those they claim to want. It’s an indescribably misguided strategy that will inevitably victimize themselves and their own views.” By exact opposites, he of course means the dangers of suppressing the free speech of the left.

Journalist Matt Taibbi is Greenwald’s partner in protest over the abrogation of free speech and the promotion of cancel culture. When YouTube announced in December of 2021 that it was removing any content that misleads people into thinking there was widespread fraud in the 2020 Presidential election, Taibbi claimed there wasn’t a “better way to further radicalize Trump voters.” Same argument for Twitter blocking Trump’s tweets. While they both acknowledge that Silicon Valley tech companies are monopolies that should have never accumulated the power they have to disseminate misinformation, it’s even more insidious if they are endowed with the power to suppress speech, no matter how misinformed or incendiary.

So where do you stand on this? Did kicking Trump off Twitter for insisting the election was a fraud help staunch the dissemination of propaganda? Was it too late? Should it have been done sooner? Did it recruit more crazies? We’ll have to leave it to the pundits to keep trying to find the answer.