What Happened Today: June 2, 2023
White House pressing China; Gadsby’s Brooklyn flop; AI off leash; Kheriaty on Censorship
The Big Story
The White House apparently wants the word out on CIA Director Bill Burns’ “secret” trip to China last month, as five unnamed sources are cited in a Financial Times article on Friday about the visit. Notably, Burns is the highest-ranking U.S. official to make the trip to Beijing during the Biden administration. The coverage would appear to be an integral part of the trip’s ostensible purpose to stabilize frayed relations between the two nations, with an anonymous source circulating the talking point to the Financial Times and several other outlets that “director Burns traveled to Beijing where he met with Chinese counterparts and emphasized the importance of maintaining open lines of communications in intelligence channels.”
Burns has become something of a go-to for President Biden to handle sensitive business. In 2021, before Russia invaded Ukraine, Burns was in Moscow warning Russian officials that the invasion was a fool’s errand. Similarly, Biden dispatched Burns to persuade Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the House, to call off her trip to Taiwan.
The current push to quell tensions with Beijing comes after several rocky months following the incident of a Chinese spy balloon floating over North America in February, when U.S. military shot down the aircraft and Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled his upcoming visit to China. Biden has been amplifying the pressure on Beijing to accept overtures to repair the row as of late, saying at a G7 summit in Japan in May, “I think you’re going to see that begin to thaw very shortly.” Corporate press outlets have so far embraced the role of helping the White House’s effort, but they’ve been less eager to cash in their White House access to reveal to the public how that effort fits into the administration’s larger ambitions.
Read More: https://www.reuters.com/world/cia-head-visited-china-may-met-counterparts-us-official-2023-06-02/
In The Back Pages: Slaying the Censorship Leviathan
The Rest
→ On Thursday, the Texas comptroller said that Attorney General Ken Paxton will no longer receive his $153,750 annual salary after the Texas House voted over the weekend to adopt 20 articles of impeachment alleging a gamut of illicit activity, including fraud, accepting bribes, and abuse of office. Recently elected to a third term, Paxton has been one of the highest-profile AG’s in the nation, a close ally to Donald Trump, and a frequent foe to Democrats, firing off lawsuits against both the Obama and Biden administrations. Now awaiting a trial in the Texas Senate that could forbid him from ever seeking office in Texas again, the episode reveals the deep divisions within the Texas Republican establishment. All together, 71% of his fellow Republican Party members in the House endorsed the impeachment orders created by a House investigative committee, suggesting a rising tide of party members with an appetite for a new GOP figurehead.
→ Quote of the Day:
That Picasso, probably the most written about painter in history, was both a great artist and a not-so-great guy is so far from being news as to qualify as climate. What matters is what you do with that friction, and “It’s Pablo-matic” does not do much.
That’s from NYT’s art critic Jason Farago in his body slam of a critique of a new Pablo Picasso exhibit seeking to unpack the “problems” with the painter at the Brooklyn museum. The exhibit was curated by comedian Hannah Gadsby, whose joke-free 2018 comedy special, Nanette, catapulted her to the front of a new guard of moralizing culture figures who championed, as Farago puts it about Gadsby, “a therapeutic purpose for culture, rejecting the ‘trauma’ of telling jokes in favor of the three-act resolution of ‘stories.’”
The Art News review of the show is worth a read, too: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/hannah-gadsby-its-pablo-matic-brooklyn-museum-review-1234670115/
→ Amazon could soon have a trove of new consumer data as it explores tacking on cell phone service to its $139 a year Prime membership plan. A whopping 167 million Americans were Prime members as of March this year, and a cheap or discounted 5G cell phone plan could become an attractive feature as Amazon tries to compete with Walmart+, the big-box retailer’s increasingly popular membership program. The move is still in its early days, reports Bloomberg, but it’s already unnerving the big national carriers. Amazon would likely roll out the same playbook it did with music and movies, absorbing billions of dollars in costs to barrel into a new line of business, but it wouldn’t build a new cellular network. Instead, it would resell service from one of the big carriers, offering discounts to sweeten the Prime pot. The carriers, in turn, wouldn’t make much from the deal but “aren’t really in a position to say no to Amazon” either, says Bloomberg, as they wouldn’t want to see customers switch to the Prime offering just as they all struggle to achieve returns on their costly investments into new and, as of yet, unprofitable 5G networks.
→ Number of the Day: 120%
That’s how many more Hebrew speakers there are now in the United States compared to 1980, pushing the previous tally of 100,000 up to 220,000, according to a new Pew study. Over that same time span, the number of Arabic speakers in the United States has grown dramatically—to 1.4 million in 2021 compared to the 1980 total of 215,000. At least on the Hebrew front, the growth in speakers in the United States “is largely a function of immigration, mainly from Israel,” according to Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at Pew. “Around half of Hebrew speakers in both years were foreign-born.”
Last month at a defense industry conference, Col. Tucker Hamilton, the chief of AI test and operations with the U.S. Air Force, described an AI simulation in which an AI drone tasked with taking out enemy defense systems turns on its human military operator before turning on the communications tower the person used to control the drone “because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective,” according to a defense blog recap of the talk. Since news of the AI drone simulation talk went up online, the U.S. Air Force has been quick to deny the test took place. “The Department of the Air Force has not conducted any such AI-drone simulations and remains committed to ethical and responsible use of AI technology,” a spokesperson told news outlet Insider. “It appears the colonel’s comments were taken out of context and were meant to be anecdotal.”
→ Trying to determine if heavy passengers or heavy luggage are adding too many pounds to their planes, Air New Zealand is rolling out a pilot program from its Auckland terminal asking passengers to be voluntarily weighed before getting on the plane. While the program ostensibly satisfies federal aviation requirements about tracking aircraft weight loads, the airline says it’s as much about that as it is giving pilots a better understanding of the weight and balance of the plane for takeoff and landing. Whatever the case, the airline tells passengers the weights remain anonymous, though airline analysts say passenger weight could soon become another fee tacked onto tickets for larger flyers, similar to existing requirements that they purchase an extra seat.
→ Much of Guam remains without power and access to clean water or the internet after the island, a U.S. territory, was hit last week by Typhoon Mawar. The tepid recovery effort has enraged many residents, who say officials are moving too slowly to restore basic functions. The internet outage has been particularly difficult as ATMs and banks remain largely closed, and shops that do have food, water, and other supplies cannot turn on credit card processing machines to accept payment. “The mix of issues has created the perfect storm of chaos,” Vice Speaker Tina Muna Barnes wrote in a recent letter seeking help from an association of banks on the island.
→ With two ongoing rescues on Mount Everest, one climber’s recent deadly fall down the 8,500-meter Tibetan side of the range, a deaf climber missing, and several emergency evacuations and attempted evacuations not being officially reported, something odd is going on on the highest peak in the world, says climbing outlet Explorers Web. Already, the season’s confirmed 12 fatalities puts it on track for one of the deadliest climbing seasons in recent memory, edging up to the 18 who were killed in an avalanche triggered by an earthquake in 2015. Part of the problem, Smithsonian Magazine reported recently, could just be too many climbers forking over the $11,000 or so for the permits issued by Nepal to begin their climb from the Everest base camp. The rise in affluent, novice climbers in particular is also leading to more waste product, as the inexperienced tourists create a market for “deluxe-type services like massage parlors or other entertainment services that need massive tents and other structures” on the mountain, Dambar Parajuli, president of the Expedition Operators’ Association Nepal, recently told the BBC. Mount Everest, he said, “is not where you indulge in luxury.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
The National Antisemitism Strategy Has No Clothes by Avi Weiss and Eitan Fischberger
Eradicating the world’s oldest hatred requires more than nice words and wishful thinking
The Dark Angel of Nonfiction by Susan Shapiro
After his retirement from Columbia, Phillip Lopate prepares for more books—and possibly more teaching
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Slaying the Censorship Leviathan
A court case exposes the government-led information war to censor what Americans think
One year ago, I joined the states of Missouri and Louisiana and several other co-plaintiffs to file a suit in federal court challenging what journalist Michael Shellenberger has called the Censorship-Industrial Complex. While much of the press cooperated with the state’s censorship efforts and has ignored our court battle, we expect that it will ultimately go to the Supreme Court, setting up Missouri v. Biden to be the most important free speech case of our generation—and arguably, of the past fifty years.
Prior government censorship cases typically involved a state actor unconstitutionally meddling with one publisher, one author, one or two books, a single article. But as we intend to prove in court, the federal government has censored hundreds of thousands of Americans, violating the law on tens of millions of occasions in the last several years. This unprecedented breach was made possible by the wholly novel reach and breadth of the new digital social media landscape.
My co-plaintiffs, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and I were censored for content related to covid and public health policy that the government disfavored. Documents we have reviewed on discovery demonstrate that government censorship was far more wide-ranging than previously known, from election integrity and the Hunter Biden laptop story to gender ideology, abortion, monetary policy, the U.S. banking system, the war in Ukraine, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and more. There is hardly a topic of recent public discussion and debate that the U.S. Government has not targeted for censorship.
Jacob Siegel, Matt Taibbi, and other investigative reporters have begun to document the anatomy of the censorship leviathan, a tightly interconnected network of federal agencies and private entities receiving public funding—where much of the censorship grunt work is outsourced. The “industrial” in Censorship-Industrial Complex should be understood literally: censorship is now a highly developed industry, complete with career training institutions in higher education (like Stanford’s Internet Observatory or the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public), full-time job opportunities in industry and government (from the Virality Project and the Election Integrity Partnership to any number of federal agencies engaged in censorship), and insider jargon and euphemisms (like disinformation, misinformation, and “malinformation” which must be debunked and “prebunked”) to render the distasteful work of censorship more palatable to industry insiders.
Our lawyers were in court last week arguing for a preliminary injunction to halt the activities of the censorship machine while our case is tried. I will spare you a full account of the government’s endless procedural wrangling, obfuscation, attempts to hide, delays, and diversionary tactics in this case—futile efforts to dodge even the most legally straightforward aspects of discovery, such as our request to depose former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki. So far, the government has been caught hiding discovery materials, which the judge chastised them about before ruling against their motion to dismiss, reminding the government that the limited discovery so far would widen once the case went to trial.
The government’s lawyers were not able to block the deposition of Anthony Fauci, however, who had to answer some pointed questions about his covid policies for the first time under the threat of the penalty of perjury. Dr. Fauci seemed to suffer from a strange syndrome of “sudden-onset amnesia” during his deposition, as I have described elsewhere.
But aside from these procedural scuffles, the more important aspects of this case are the government censorship activities we have already exposed. For example, our documents demonstrate how a relatively unknown agency within the Department of Homeland Security became the central clearinghouse of government-run information control—an Orwellian Ministry of Truth. My fellow citizens, meet the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency—better known as CISA—a government acronym with the same word in it twice in case you wondered about its mission. This agency was created in the waning days of the Obama administration, supposedly to protect our digital infrastructure against cyberattacks from computer viruses and nefarious foreign actors. But less than one year into their existence, CISA decided that their remit also should include protecting our “cognitive infrastructure” from various threats.
“Cognitive infrastructure” is the actual phrase used by current CISA head Jen Easterly, who formerly worked at Tailored Access Operations, a top secret cyber warfare unit at the National Security Agency. It refers to the thoughts inside your head, which is precisely what the government’s counter-disinformation apparatus, headed by people like Easterly, are attempting to control. Naturally, these thoughts need to be protected from bad ideas, such as any ideas that the people at CISA or their government partners do not like.
In early 2017, citing the threat from foreign disinformation, the Department of Homeland Security unilaterally declared federal control over the country’s election infrastructure, which had previously been administered at the local level. Not long after that, CISA, which is a sub-agency of the DHS, established its own authority over the cognitive infrastructure by becoming the central hub coordinating the government’s information control activities. This pattern was repeated in several other government agencies around the same time (there are currently a dozen federal agencies named among the defendants in our suit).
So, what exactly has the government been doing to protect our cognitive infrastructure? Perhaps the best way to wrap your head around the actual operations of the new American censorship leviathan is to consider the vivid analogy offered by our brilliant attorney, John Sauer, in the introduction of our brief for the injunction. This is worth quoting at length:
Suppose that the Trump White House, backed by Republicans controlling both Houses of Congress, publicly demanded that all libraries in the United States burn books criticizing the President, and the President made statements implying that the libraries would face ruinous legal consequences if they did not comply, while senior White House officials privately badgered the libraries for detailed lists and reports of such books that they had burned and the libraries, after months of such pressure, complied with those demands and burned the books.
Suppose that, after four years of pressure from senior congressional staffers in secret meetings threatening the libraries with adverse legislation if they did not cooperate, the FBI started sending all libraries in the United States detailed lists of the books the FBI wanted to burn, requesting that the libraries report back to the FBI by identifying the books that they burned, and the libraries complied by burning about half of those books.
Suppose that a federal national security agency teamed up with private research institutions, backed by enormous resources and federal funding, to establish a mass-surveillance and mass-censorship program that uses sophisticated techniques to review hundreds of millions of American citizens' electronic communications in real time, and works closely with tech platforms to covertly censor millions of them.
The first two hypotheticals are directly analogous to the facts of this case. The third, meanwhile, is not a hypothetical at all; it is a description of the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project.
The censorship activities of the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, which it terms “information warfare,” have turned the FBI, in the words of whistleblower Steve Friend, into an “intelligence agency with law enforcement powers.” But there is no “information warfare” exception to the Constitutional right of free speech. Which other federal agencies are involved in censorship? Besides the ones you might suspect—the DOJ, NIH, CDC, Surgeon General, and the State Department—our case has also uncovered censorship activities by the Department of the Treasury (don’t criticize the feds’ monetary policies), and yes, my friends, even the Census Bureau (don’t ask).
In prior precedent-setting cases on censorship, the Supreme Court clarified that the right of free speech guaranteed by the Constitution exists not just for the person speaking but for the listener as well: we all have the right to hear both sides of debated issues to make informed judgments. Thus all Americans have been harmed by the government’s censorship leviathan, not just those who happen to post opinions or share information on social media.
The judge presiding over the case, Terry Dougherty, asked on Friday in court if anyone had read George Orwell's 1984 and whether they remembered the Ministry of Truth. "It's relevant here," he added. It is indeed time to slay the government’s Ministry of Truth. I hope that our efforts in Missouri v. Biden prove to be a crucial first step in this project to restore our Constitutional rights.
Aaron Kheriaty, MD, is a Fellow and Director of the Bioethics and American Democracy Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute.
May the Grace of Almighty God be with you in this fight, Dr. Kheriaty, et al!!!!