Political Cynic takes @FT pulse!

US Supreme Court rules that Donald Trump can remain on Colorado ballot

Decision is victory for former president and removes one obstacle in his run for White House US Supreme Court rules that Donald Trump can remain on Colorado ballot

https://www.ft.com/content/c90cfe99-a1bc-4dbc-9350-53aab0b66387

The Reader might start her inquiry of this Financial Times ‘report’ by this essay about Schenck v. United States: which is relevant to the Trump decision, no matter the resistance of the Oxbridger cadre of the Financial Times!

DEEP DIVE

Rereading Schenck v. United States

Please don’t falsely yell fire in a crowded theater.

BY EVELYN DOUEK & GENEVIEVE LAKIER

JULY 7, 2022

…

Analogies get misused all the time. Take, for example, the other famous metaphor Holmes introduced into American free speech law: namely, the metaphor of the “free trade,” or marketplace of ideas. This metaphor is frequently invoked on the other side of free speech debates, to suggest that speech regulation is somehow illegitimate because it interferes with the operation of an ideal speech market. Like the analogy to false cries of fire in a theater, the evocative power of this metaphor makes it a powerful weapon in free speech debates, and one that gets used to justify a deregulatory conception of free speech that ignores plenty of evidence of market failures in many arenas.

That analogies can be misused does not mean, however, that we should—or could—embrace an analogy-free legal debate. Analogies are also useful because they translate difficult conceptual ideas into more accessible language. They concretize complicated concepts and therefore broaden the base of people who can engage in the relevant debates. They can even, as is the case with the fire meme, be enlightening by highlighting the false factual premises that the analogizer is relying on.

This is why, even though we had some hesitation about adding fuel to the (ahem) fire of the debate about Holmes’ analogy, we thought it worthwhile to explore what not-so-flickering light the fire meme sheds on First Amendment law. To dismiss the invocation of the meme as a sign of ignorance or stupidity is to try to transform an important legal, public, and cultural debate about the proper regulation of speech in modern society into a technocratic debate about “holdings” and “dicta” (which, to reiterate, is a poor description of the meme’s doctrinal status today!) and to distract from the substantive issue.

The focus should remain on what is really troubling about most uses of the meme: not the invocation of a hypothetical that states a valid principle of First Amendment law, but the mistaken supposition about how people are affected by information they consume that motivates many of those who invoke the analogy in contemporary debates. False and inflammatory speech online is equated with speech acts that have coercive force. Participants in public discourse are too often characterized as mere automatons who can be made to join a stampede (or storming of the Capitol) at any moment. It is better to confront this incorrect view head-on even if that is harder to do than attempting to extinguish cries of false cries of fire in theaters.

In this case ‘no matter how odious’ Trump may be to the bourgeoise politics of the Financial Times. Reader recall :

Eugene Debs: When a prisoner ran for president

By Thomas Doherty April 21, 2023

Thomas Doherty is a professor of American Studies at Brandeis. This article originally appeared on The Conversation.

…

On April 4, 2023, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced the indictment of former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump on 34 felony charges related to alleged crimes involving bookkeeping on a 7-year-old hush money payment to an adult film actress.

Trump is unlikely to wind up in an orange jumpsuit, at least not on this indictment, and probably not before November 2024, in any case. Yet if he does, he would not be the first candidate to run for the White House from the Big House.

In the election of 1920, Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party presidential candidate, polled nearly a million votes without ever hitting the campaign trail.

Debs was behind bars in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, serving a 10-year sentence for sedition. It was a not a bum rap. Debs had defiantly disobeyed a law he deemed unjust, the Sedition Act of 1918.

The act was an anti-free speech measure passed at the behest of President Woodrow Wilson. The law made it illegal for a U.S. citizen to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United States government” or to discourage compliance with the draft or voluntary enlistment into the military.

By the time he was imprisoned for sedition, Eugene Victor Debs had enjoyed a lifetime of running afoul of government authority. Born in 1855 into bourgeois comfort in Terre Haute, Indiana, he worked as a clerk and a grocer before joining the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen in 1875 and finding his vocation as an advocate for labor.

Representing American socialism

For the next 30 years, Debs was the face of socialism in America. He ran for president four times, in 1900, 1904, 1908 and 1912, garnering around a million votes in the last cycle.

“The Republican, Democratic, and Progressive Parties are but branches of the same capitalistic tree,” he told a cheering mass of people in Madison Square Garden during the 1912 campaign. “They all stand for wage slavery.”

In 1916, he opted to seek a seat in Congress and deferred to socialist journalist Allan L. Benson to head the party’s ticket. Both lost.

In April 1917, when America joined World War I’s bloodbath in Europe, Debs became a fierce opponent of American involvement in what he saw as a death cult orchestrated by rapacious munitions manufacturers. On May 21, 1918, wary of a small but energized and eloquent anti-war movement, Wilson signed the Sedition Act into law.

Debs would not be muzzled. One June 18, 1918, in an address in Canton, Ohio, he declared that American boys were “fit for something better than for cannon fodder.”

In short order, he was arrested and convicted of violating the Sedition Act. At his sentencing, he told the judge he would not retract a word of his speech even if it meant he would spend the rest of his life behind bars. “I ask for no mercy, plead for no immunity,” he declared. After a brief stint in the West Virginia Federal Penitentiary, he was sent to serve out his sentence at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.

Imprisonment only enhanced Debs’ status with his followers. On May 13, 1920, at its national convention in New York, the Socialist Party unanimously nominated “Convict 2253” as its standard bearer for the presidency. Debs was later given new digits, so the campaign buttons read “For President, Convict No. 9653.”

As Debs’ name was entered into nomination, a wave of emotion swept over the delegates, who cheered for 30 minutes before bursting into a rousing chorus of the “Internationale,” the communist anthem.

A ‘front cell’ campaign

Debs’ opponents both were better funded and enjoyed freedom of movement: They were Warren G. Harding, the GOP junior senator from Ohio, and James M. Cox, governor of Ohio, for the Democrats.

Yet Debs did not let incarceration keep his message from the voters. In a wry response to Harding’s “front porch” campaign style, in which the Republican candidate received visits from the front porch of his home in Marion, Ohio, the Socialist Party announced that its candidate would conduct a “front cell” campaign from Atlanta.

In 1920, broadcast radio was not a factor in electioneering, but another electronic medium was just beginning to be exploited for political messaging. On May 29, 1920, in a carefully choreographed event, newsreel cameras filmed a delegation from the Socialist Party arriving at the Atlanta penitentiary to inform Debs officially of his nomination. The intertitles of the silent screen described “the most unusual scene in the political history of America – Debs, serving a ten-year term for ‘seditious activities,’ accepts Socialist nomination for Presidency.”

After accepting “a floral tribute from Socialist women voters,” the “Moving Picture Weekly” reported, the denim-clad Debs was shown giving “a final affectionate farewell” before heading “back to the prison cell for nine years longer.”

At motion picture theaters across the nation, audiences watched the staged ritual and, depending on their party registration, reacted with cheers or hisses.

The New York Times was aghast that a felon might canvass for votes from the motion picture screen.

“Under the influence of this unreasoning mob psychology, the acknowledged criminal is nightly applauded as loudly as many of the candidates for the Presidency who have won their honorable eminence by great and unflagging service to the American people,” read an editorial from June 12, 1920.

Public opinion turns

On Nov. 2, 1920, when the election results came in, Harding had trounced his Democratic opponent by a record electoral majority, 404 electoral votes to Cox’s 127, with 60.4% of the popular vote to Cox’s 34.1%. Debs was a distant third, but he had won 3.4% of the electorate – 913,693 votes. Debs’ personal best showing was in the presidential election of 1912, with 6% of the vote. To be fair, that was when he was more mobile.

Even with the Great War over and the Sedition Act repealed by a repentant U.S. Congress on Dec. 13, 1920, President Wilson, during his final months in office, steadfastly refused to grant Debs a pardon. But public opinion had turned emphatically in favor of the convict-candidate. President Harding, who took office in March 1921, finally commuted his sentence, effective on Christmas Day, 1921, along with that of 23 other Great War prisoners of conscience convicted under the Sedition Act.

As Debs exited the prison gates, his fellow inmates cheered. He raised his hat in one hand, his cane in the other, and waved back at them. Outside, the newsreel cameras were waiting to greet him.

As senile Old Joe tries to appear, as something other than a Zionists lap-dog, by his Air-Drop of food to the Palestinians: that reeked havoc and death on a desperate population: an enforced famine continues! Trump is a political inevitability. The New-Democrats, The Republicans, The Neo-Cons birthed Trump and recoil at the Monster they made. Not to speak of the fact that this Political Triad offers nothing!

Political Cynic