One Year Anniversary Edition

"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."

First Amendment to the United States’ Constitution

On May 18th, the Biden administration announced that they were pausing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s newfound Disinformation Governance Board due to the backlash it received from the public. Prominent among the criticisms were the airing of free speech concerns that the government was improperly influencing the national discourse in what is supposed to be a democratic self-governing society by distinguishing between what is true and what is disinformation in the name of public safety. The director of the board, Nina Jankowicz who is a “disinformation expert” according to CNN, has also resigned. Jankowicz and other Biden officials have defended the board’s role as important for national security in tackling foreign sponsored disinformation and disinformation revolving around the illegal migration crisis that the US faces. After resigning, Jankowicz defended the board by saying, “We need to have a grownup conversation about how to deal with threats to our national security and that’s not what happened here.” That Nina Jankowicz has decided that it is the government's place to combat disinformation is surprising given that back in 2020 she was a skeptic of governmental involvement in fighting disinformation.

In the name of having that adult conversation, this article will seek to demonstrate why a government body policing speech is unwise in the first place and how the American government has increasingly infiltrated the private sector by demanding stricter controls on free expression. To be clear here, not all speech is lawfully permitted even in democracies. For instance, incendiary speeches that contain incitement for unlawful action like rioting are not treated as free expression. The Founding Fathers of the United States intended the country to be an exemplar of ordered liberty and not chaotic unruly anarchy. As such, it is my contention that fighting against lies, libels, and calls for violence is praiseworthy but that the government's track record of policing, monitoring, or “advising” what is correct speech is neither praiseworthy nor desirable in a free society.

For one thing, the government should not be seen as a proverbial guardian class of benevolent truth tellers. Such a government body, like that of the Disinformation Governance Board, that is devoted to the curation of information on the basis of what is (alleged to be) true harkens back to Woodrow Wilson’s infamous Committee on Public Information, which operated from 1917 to 1919. This committee was tasked with stirring up pro-war sentiments in the United States and was involved in the creation of a propaganda machine that manipulated and censored news coverage in the country. The Committee was so effective in stirring up passions that it led to self-appointed patriots violently harassing pacifists, the politically undesirable, and ethnic groups like German immigrants. Such acts of press curation by a government are not unique to the United States alone in leading toward the suppression of truthful information and demonization of those deemed the enemy.

It is not just that governments have a history of suppressing truthful information but that governments also have a way of lying or at least spreading disinformation of their own to drag a country into war or stir up war fever. As Otto von Bismarck put it, “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.” To add to Bismarck’s witticism here, it is not just during a war that people lie but that people may lie to get the country into war. American history is replete with such occasions of the government not giving out good information in order to go to war. The rush to blame Spanish perfidy for the sinking of the battleship Maine in 1898 in Havana harbor to justify an American war with Spain when there was no hard evidence that they sunk the ship is one such example. One of the buildups to America’s entry to World War One in 1917 was the sinking of the Lusitania, a passenger ship, represents another such example. What was not advertised was that, in addition to its American passengers, the ship was carrying arms to Great Britain. There are even questions over whether the British put the ship in harm’s way. The 1964 infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was used as an excuse to secure a Congressional resolution permitting a direct American intervention into Vietnam, was based on a lie that the North Vietnamese had launched a second attack on an American warship. The 1990 babies in incubators story, that Iraqi soldiers killed Kuwaiti babies by pulling them from incubators, was used to sell the idea of intervening in Iraq turned out to be false. The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction narrative that was started in 2002 by George W. Bush was used to justify another American intervention against Iraq. This too was based on faulty information. Whether these wars, as a whole or individually, were inevitable or whether they wisely advanced American interests is beside the point here. The point is governments, whether intentionally or otherwise, have given faulty and even entirely incorrect information to their own public in order to justify certain acts like war.

A history of disinformation also seems present in the Disinformation Governance Board itself. Nina Jankowicz, the former head of the Disinformation Governance Board, herself has an eyebrow raising history of purveying partisan narratives that turn out to be false. Her various statements (and propagation of statements by others) that denigrated the Hunter Biden laptop corruption exposé as being “a Trump campaign product” and her demanding that voters deserved the true context behind the discovery of the laptop and not a fairy tale being one such example. Nevertheless, the laptop was not Russian disinformation. The laptop and the various emails from the laptop were verified (and the context given behind its discovery remains intact) as a genuine source of various misdeeds by the Biden family by the corporate press. The same press had derided or ignored the scandalous emails from the laptop for nearly 2 years after the initial stories from the laptop broke. Indeed, much of the basic information that the corporate press broke since then using the emails from the laptop were recirculated from older reporting from non-corporate sources.

Jankowicz also dismissed the story that Covid came from a Chinese lab-leak and she accused opponents of Critical Race Theory as being “disinformers”. While there has certainly been misinformation in the context of Covid, the lab leak theory is now being seriously considered while her attack on opponents of Critical Race Theory is just partisan politics. Such vulnerabilities and one-way partisanship demonstrated by Jankowicz were not missed by those like Senator Josh Hawley who adroitly used this as a line of attack on the board and its director.

Jankowicz was not the only government official to be grilled in this manner. Senator Rand Paul also attacked Alejandro Mayorkas, the head of the DHS, on similar lines that he and Mayorkas could not agree on what qualifies as disinformation and questioned the capability of the government to deal with the problem effectively. In terms of the performance of Biden’s DHS in the functions it is already tasked with, there is much to be desired. While the Trump administration recorded low rates of illegal immigration, the Biden administration has recorded historically very high rates of illegal immigration into the United States. Indeed, the very practices of the Biden administration have been criticized for being unserious or for even encouraging this boom in illegal immigration. Biden’s DHS nevertheless seems more interested in what to call illegal migrants (the new term is undocumented non-citizens or just migrants) rather than seriously tackle this problem. There are some grounds for cynicism that this Disinformation Governance Board would have been used to cover for or would have diverted attention from these mounting problems. Such cynicism has gained greater currency as recent whistleblower documents confirmed that the board’s scope was not just restricted to issues of foreign or immigration related disinformation but other more domestic issues like certain stances on election security or on Covid. These documents also show that there was coordination between the board and Twitter, a private social media company, on setting up a system to censor viewpoints that the board deemed misinformation. In effect, the board’s purpose was well beyond what was advertised in Congress as and it was engaged in a closed door censorship campaign against certain views.

Even before the formation of the Disinformation Governance Board, however, there was mounting evidence that the American government was using its influence to encourage a greater censorship regime by private social media companies. Until recently it seemed that both sides of the political aisle in the United States were at least rhetorically largely against a government sponsored censorship regime on the internet and denounced other governments for imposing such regimes on their citizenry. For instance, Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, proclaimed in 2011 that “For the U.S. the choice is clear— we place ourselves on the side of openness. Internet freedom raises tensions like all freedoms do but the benefits outweigh the costs.” Many social media outlets like Twitter were founded on the ethos of being “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” At least in the West were such lofty promises of free speech and free platforms so seemingly tenable.

Yet, since Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2015 and won the 2016 election, such promises in the West of an open platform have increasingly been under heavy assault by even the American press itself. This tirade against an open internet has even reached hysterical declarations that the internet, which until a few years ago was largely touted as a democratizing force, was damaging to democracy. Such calls for greater control of social media content were echoed not just in the press but by politicians in Congress who threatened to legislate if social media did not toe the line. Representative Jan Schakowsky for instance has jumped on the board of censoring content citing ads in the 2020 election that compared Joe Biden to a Latin American socialist dictator. Others demanded content moderation against Covid-19 vaccine skeptics or else these sites would face Congress compelling them to do so by law. The Biden White House has also admitted that they flag (and encourage others to flag) what they see as disinformation for censorship by these private outlets. In other words, pet political projects are thrust into what social media should promote and protect. Some of these calls have come even after revelations that these media sites were already censoring stories that were damaging to Democrats in the 2020 election.

When Elon Musk announced that he was going to purchase Twitter and try to return it to its free speech roots, there was an outcry. Max Boot, an American political commentator, bemoaned this potential acquisition by a free speech advocate by shrilly proclaiming that “For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation not less.” Evidentially, according to the school of Max Boot, the power of democracy rests on the need for content moderation [i.e. censorship]. Max Boot in this awkward declaration is effectively arguing that the public is too stupid to discern what is truthful information by themselves so they must be cajoled by a superior class of moderators, who naturally have no bias or personal interests of their own, into enlightening the vulgar unwashed masses on what good information is and what is bad information. Lest one think this opinion is confined to one paranoid commentator alone, other outlets like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Vice have run articles to this effect. Other outlets like Esquire took a more intelligent approach and made arguments that an eccentric billionaire owning a major hub of information may not be in the best interests of a truly free society.

Given that wealthy people already own various hubs of information prior to Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter, however, this is mostly a moot point. Personally, what matters to me is the values that the owner of the site or paper has. If they are for free speech, then buying that news or social media site is not much of a concern to me. Elon Musk for instance seems to be a free speech advocate as he has clarified that what he means by making Twitter a free speech zone again when he tweeted the following:

"I simply mean that [speech] which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask government [sic] to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people."

As of now, I am not aware of a real alternative to the privatized system we have that has a better track record concerning free speech.

After Musk’s offer to buy Twitter was made public, the White House expressed its concerns over the potential of a less curated platform. Jen Psaki, then White House spokesperson, said the following:

“The president has long talked about his concerns about the power of social media platforms, including Twitter and others, to spread misinformation…We engage regularly with all social media platforms about steps that can be taken. That has continued, and I'm sure will continue, but there are also reforms that we think Congress could take."

Several revelations have come out after Musk’s bid for Twitter. After Twitter assured Musk that no more than 5 percent of their users were bots (automated accounts designed to mimic a human user), an audit found that nearly 1 out of 4 followers of Musk on Twitter could be bots or spam accounts raising concerns that the proportion of bots on Twitter are much higher than disclosed. A similar audit found that nearly half of Joe Biden’s twitter followers were fake as well.

This is not the first bit of controversial discovery over how the Biden administration handles their social media accounts. Criticism has been previously voiced over the Biden administration’s own official YouTube channel barring anyone from leaving a comment and how YouTube enacted a general policy after the Biden administration came into power that when applied to government social media accounts hides how many downvotes these public channels received. Given the collaboration between big tech and the Biden White House such an artificial following of the current president may not be coincidental. If it is revealed that the White House’s information curation campaign also included artificially hiking up the president’s social media account with fake followers, this would be another example of why such agendas are bad. If you manufacture fake followers to create the impression of popularity or a phony consensus, then this is also damaging to genuine debate.

Given all this, it is difficult to say why the government should be regarded as the supreme arbitrator of truth. The record is clear that governments, the United States included, have embarked on disinformation campaigns and that they have hidden truthful information before in order to achieve their own institutional goals. People at the top have partisan agendas, biases, and interests and for them to be granted the role of censor/content moderator of (mis/dis/false) information should be worrying. People have died from the wars and the internal strife that these campaigns of government “content moderation” brought into being before. Free societies are supposed to be beacons of debate and have avenues for lawful dissent. The growing nature of the collaboration between the government and big tech should be a cause of uneasiness for any civil libertarian. To “save our democracy” as many of our paranoid pundits like to phrase it, we cannot take away basic liberties as this would be a betrayal of our democracy. It seems to me at least that much of this zeal for censorship is a cry for authoritarianism of a sort where people are only exposed to one pre-approved narrative and are not allowed to effectively question it. This is not healthy nor is it remotely democratic.

Let us be blunt, because there is not much time to lose before midterm elections; Biden, now a year and a half into his term, has abysmal ratings. A Reuters/ Ipsos poll put Biden’s approval rating at 36% in June, just days before SCOTUS vacated Roe v Wade reverting abortion legalization to the states and before the most significant gun control act in 30 years passed in Congress. Seemingly detached from whatever happens in greater Washington D.C., Biden’s ratings just sink lower and lower. The core issue that potential US voters are actually worried about is the economy. A staggering 80% of people polled by the Wall Street Journal said the economy is “poor or not so good”. Whether that is truly Biden’s fault, whoever is sitting in the White House at a given time gets the blame or the glory. In answer to that same poll, respondents said they are not satisfied at all with their financial situation (33%), they have no chance to improve their standard of living this year (46%) and a strong 38% said their financial situation is worse now than in the past few years. Much of the media coverage of the 2022 mid-terms has centered around whether former President Donald Trump is still a kingmaker within the GOP. But, at least as important, and likely more so, is the frank conversation about who will run for the Democrats in 2024 and who has any chance of winning?

Historically, the incumbent is expected to run and hopefully win. If not, the second in command, which in this case would be Vice President Kamala Harris, is the likely next choice. For real and honest reasons neither of these two people have a reasonable chance of making it over the finish line in 2024.

When Biden and Kamala Harris were running in the 2020 election cycle an idea was widely floated that she could step into place as a candidate if Biden proved too old or somehow incapable of running for a second term. Only half a year into their term (June of 2021) Harris made a disastrous visit to the border in her new role as Vice President, having been given the charge of ameliorating the immigration crisis at the border between the United States and Mexico. Almost no one gave Harris high marks for how she handled her June, 2021 visit to El Paso. Her polling popularity continued to drop until a year later she had a 41% favorable to 52% unfavorable rating. While Pence polled in the statistically same vicinity numerically at the same point in his term no one seriously thought that Trump would move out of the way for a Pence candidacy in 2024. Vice Presidents have moved from that office to the Presidency. Eight have become President when the then-President died in office and 4 were later elected. But, in this case, a Democratic choice to champion Harris would only lead to a resounding defeat.

Harris is very, very unpopular with males (60% are unfavorable), Independent voters (60% are unfavorable), white voters (60% are unfavorable). Those are just not winning numbers in a day and age when every vote counts and might be challenged. So - with neither Biden or Harris a rational choice - who else in the Democratic Party could mount a strong and possibly successful campaign for US President in 2024?

Ballotpedia offers a list of Democratic politicians (May, 2022) who have had media coverage suggesting they might be viable candidates. Perry Bacon Jr. of The Washington Post lays out the issues of a second Biden run in an opinion article on June 23, 2024. There he explains how his candidates of choice for 2024 would be the “leading Democrats and liberals.” I respectfully disagree that those are the people who might win a 2024 contest against Trump or his likely surrogate, DeSantis. The key to the next election are the large number of Independents, up to 40% of the entire electorate. Most Independent voters will admit to “leaning” towards Democrat or Republican but a full 10% of Independents are genuinely not interested in affiliating with either major party. These voters are also the most likely to just “sit out” a given election since they don’t have a candidate that resonates with them.

Ipsos conducted or will conduct, seven separate polls asking a randomized selection of adult Americans which issues are most important to them. FiveThirtyEight, a company which uses data and polling to determine trends, analyzed 2,000 recent responses to what their biggest concern is. The answer they got was inflation. Looking at the candidates from the point of view of what the voting population wants it would seem that the most likely successful Democrat would be a moderate with a very strong track record of fiscal responsibility. Overwhelmingly, Americans of most income brackets are reeling under record inflation as the world economy attempts to claw its way back from the long COVID pandemic. Inflation hit 8.6% in May, 2022, a 41 year record.

If the Democrats want to win in 2024 the messaging and the messenger have to be clearly capable of moving the United States out of a recession, away from a depression and onto a more equitable, sustainable economic footing globally, supply chain issues and pandemic issues be darned. Here are three Democratic politicians who have delivered on economic issues in their own states or are currently doing it in. All of them should be regarded as contenders for the Democratic nomination. None has significant name recognition outside their local regions. When is the time for them to start serious campaigning? Now.

JB Pritzker, current Governor of Illinois, is an heir to the Hyatt Hotel chain and has a personal fortune of about $3.5 billion. He spent most of his adult life in business and ran the private equity firm, Pritzker Group until 2017. He is also the founder of 1871, a non-profit business incubator in Chicago. Since his inauguration in Illinois in 2019, Pritzker has literally turned around years of fiscal mismanagement and passed a balanced budget every year, including the achievement of six credit upgrades from rating agencies, which allows the state to borrow money on preferred terms. In addition, he is largely responsible for such a large growth in business startups in Illinois (up nearly 70%) that Illinois has beaten California, New York, Texas, and Florida in the growth of small businesses. His landslide win in 2018 for the gubernatorial seat in Illinois against a Republican incumbent by 54.5 percent of the general vote displays his record of popular acclaim. In 2021, he steered an enormous clean energy and jobs bill through the Illinois legislature. BOMA Chicago (Building Owners and Managers Association), while acknowledging they did not have enough input into this legislation, supports it as “the most sweeping legislation to be passed in a decade”.

Pritzer is tactically involved in multiple midterm election bids, both within Illinois and on the national level. He’s donating large sums of his own money to lesser-known local candidates and stumped in New Hampshire and Maine. Meanwhile, he is working overtime to ensure that his constituents get and retain jobs, including signing a law raising the minimum wage in Illinois to $15 an hour by 2025. He has long been a supporter of abortion choice so his reaction to the toppling of Roe v. Wade was completely in character. He has come out early and strongly in stating that women in Illinois will have a “safe haven” there regarding abortion rights. Although abortion rights are low on the electorate's priorities, it is absolutely mandatory that any Democratic candidate will support those rights and Pritzker has checked off that box.

Mitch Landrieu (pronounced “Lan-drew”) was Mayor of New Orleans from 2010 - 2018. On his second electoral bid he won with over 63% of the vote. He is currently serving in Washington D.C. as the White House Senior Advisor for Infrastructure. There are 4,000 projects underway that have been funded by $110 Billion over the past six months. These projects are designed by the bipartisan infrastructure bill to rebuild roads, bridges, replace lead pipes, extend high-speed internet, upgrade ports and airports and more. The money from the fund flows from the Federal government to state and local jurisdictions and part of the decision-making, over how the money is spent, happens locally.

Landrieu first came to national attention in 2017 when he finally carried out the decision to implement the removal of four Confederate statues in New Orleans. This decision was originally decided upon by the City Council in 2015. His clear, unequivocal speech in 2017 after the last of these four statues were taken down was full of quotable moments, leading with this, "There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it." The speech in its entirety, had the hallmark of a historical speech. After his stint as New Orleans mayor he founded E Pluribus Unum, which is a non-profit organization dedicated to confronting the issue of race in America head on. This organization, which is concentrated in the South, does surveys on race relations, racial attitudes, and experiences. They then use the data to explore what issues can create more positive outcomes, mainly in the areas of economics and health. While the topic of race does not figure high on the list of issues of great concern to the general electorate it is a very key concern to Democrats. Landrieu’s consistent treatment of the subject of racism: with respect, without name-calling, and with the simple insistence that it is not too late to right historical wrongs echoes against the strident hate speech and lack of civil discourse that many Americans are fed up with. Again from the speech explaining why New Orleans chose to remove the Confederate statues:

“That is why today we reclaim these spaces for the United States of America. Because we are one nation, not two; indivisible with liberty and justice for all… not some. We all are part of one nation, all pledging allegiance to one flag, the flag of the United States of America.”

Given his passion for healing our historical racial divide and his current position in the bipartisan attempt to heal our aging infrastructure Landrieu has, as a moderate Democrat, a solid basis for becoming more well known nationally, which can add to his stature as a viable, middle of the road candidate for 2024.

Rounding out this trio of possible Democratic Presidential options is Michael Bennet, currently serving as US Senator for Colorado. He was originally appointed by Governor Bill Ritter in 2009, but then proceeded to win re-election twice and is running for a third term in the midterm elections this year. Bennet is widely popular in Colorado and sits on several Committees in Congress. He is Chair of the Finance Subcommittee on Energy, Natural Resources, and Infrastructure. Energy and Conservation are big issues in Colorado and Bennet is known for his solid advocacy in those areas. Colorado is ranked by US News as the number two state in the union for its robust economy.

The Democrats don’t have to run any of these three candidates to win, but they will surely lose if they run either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris again in 2024. Any serious Democratic candidate has to follow the lead of people on the Republican side, like Ron DeSantis, who is not “officially” running, but who is getting his name out there constantly and building a base. Only time will tell if he can overcome Trump with the Republican party leadership. But, if he does, he will be well-positioned to make a run for the Presidency in 2024. Who will be the Republican candidate's true Democratic opposition if that happens?

“The underlying theory on which Casey rested — that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause provides substantive, as well as procedural, protection for “liberty” — has long been controversial.”

“Roe conflated the right to shield information from disclosure and the right to make and implement important personal decisions without governmental interference.”

“Attempts to justify abortion through appeals to a broader right to autonomy and to define one’s “concept of existence” prove too much. Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could license fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like.”

Justice Alito in his majority opinion

On June 24th the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court invalidated nearly 50 years of its own precedent, and stripped millions of women of their right to control their reproductive autonomy - a right that has been held for multiple generations. I don't expect to change anyone’s stance on abortion, nor will I try to, but I will profess my deep misgivings about how the majority came to their ruling, and concerns I have for other important precedent recently considered inscrutable. As shown above, the majority opinion in parts reads as much like an editorial as this Op-ed, yet it affects the course of our nation’s legal future. As former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said: “the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.” I might not be able to fight Alito's legalese, but I can certainly find fault in the historical experience on which his analysis relies and the consequences for the outcome of his analysis.

In his opinion, Alito makes impassioned philosophical queries about the variation in the age of fetal viability, asking “on what ground could the constitutional status of a fetus depend on the pregnant woman’s location [and available medical care]?”. To which I have a simple answer: it doesn't, or at least shouldn't. If adequate maternal health facilities like planned parenthood etc. are properly funded and distributed these disparities would not be so glaring between localities. Moreover, it would only be logical to apply the earliest point of viability as the lowest common denominator - thus mollifying Alito’s entire 2 page diatribe on the ethical quandaries of a woman’s location.

In a stroke of legal tunnel vision, Alito further explains that “Roe conflated the right to shield information from disclosure and the right to make and implement important personal decisions without governmental interference.” Considering the right to privacy firmly applies to the former, god forbid anyone make the mistake of thinking that they can implement their important personal decisions without government interference. What an unconstitutional thing that would be… Better yet, the court seems to think these decisions belong to the legislature and the body politic at large. “Casey necessarily declared a winning side. Those on the losing side — those who sought to advance the State’s interest in fetal life — could no longer seek to persuade their elected representatives to adopt policies consistent with their views.” Bear with me here, because this is a radical concept: but its almost as if those who disagree with abortion dont need to have one. Crazy right?

As for the “state’s interest in fetal life”, I would like to know where the state's concerns for not yet extant life are rooted. Are they an unborn citizen of the state, thus protected by the state's laws? If so, do they automatically become a citizen of whatever state the pregnant mother happens to be in at any given moment? Would a divorced father have visiting rights to his pregnant ex-wife’s womb? Would a mother without a seat belt be culpable of child endangerment? Could anorexic mothers who suffer a still birth or miscarriage be charged with capital murder like parents who starved their child? Do any of these questions sound reasonable? If an unborn child is considered a citizen then these would all seem to be answered in the affirmative, along with a Pandora's box of other strange legal questions that would need to be explored.

However, if the “state’s interest in fetal life” (which is left legally vague) is based in the religious mores of its citizens, then it should not be permissible under the separation of church and state implicit to the Establishment Clause. This appeared to be the case when Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed the country’s most stringent new abortion law, saying it was a “powerful testament” to the belief that “every life is a sacred gift from God.” Unfortunately, these same justices have been eroding the barriers to state endorsement of religion as well, which the recent ruling in favor of a public high school coach leading his team in post-game Christian prayers at the midfield after he refused to find an accommodation with the school board does. The irony is that some of these supposed “Originalist'' justices are some of the most willing to ignore the principles laid out in the Constitution when it suits their rulings. Albeit, no one should be surprised given that some equivocated their way onto the bench regarding their belief in Roe as “settled precedent”.

In the search for reasons to repeal Roe, an entire section of the opinion is dedicated to the notion that “Roe and Casey have led to the distortion of many important but unrelated legal doctrines”. However, the only citations provided are to minority opinions from cases that attempted to challenge the “undue burden” principle established by Casey through convoluted and tangential restrictions on abortion access (as well as a citation to Kavanaugh's personal gripes about the right to due process). The Dobbs opinion further states that “continued adherence to Casey’s unworkable “undue burden” test would undermine, not advance, the ‘evenhanded, predictable, and consistent development of legal principles.’” Yet the exact same could be said for the repeal of Roe. How can the abrupt nullification of 50 years of legal precedent and forthcoming surge of contradictory state legislation on abortion possibly advance the “evenhanded, predictable, and consistent development of legal principles”? Regardless of how the current bench answers that question, it is predictable that more precedent will be ‘evenhandedly’ repealed consistent with their revisionist tendencies - likely using similar lines of reasoning as follows:

“Thus, historical inquiries are essential whenever the Court is asked to recognize a new component of the “liberty” interest protected by the Due Process Clause. In interpreting what is meant by ‘liberty’… [we must] examine whether the right at issue in this case is rooted in our Nation’s history and tradition”… “Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. No state constitutional provision had recognized such a right… By the time the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy.”

The central pillar of Alito's argument against stare decisis (i.e. the supremacy of precedent) is rooted in a fallacious analysis. By pointing to the past illegality of abortion while simultaneously ignoring the past illegality of many other things we now consider to be implicit rights for women, Alito uses an historical straw man as the justification for the rest of the ruling. That is unless he truly considers a “history and tradition” of oppression to be legal grounds for reimposition of those repressive codes. Until the 1970's all states provided exemptions for marital rape, but we arent going to try and use “historical inquiries” to revive these depraved laws are we?

This reflection on any historical right to abortion fails to look in the mirror and contextualize the subservient position of women held in society. Prior to 1848, a married woman couldn’t form contracts, control her own income, transfer or sell property or instigate a lawsuit. As the De Facto property of her husband, how could a woman ever have had those rights? In this byzantine approach, the majority opinion uses a straw man fallacy as a pretense to launch their attack on the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment, thereby laying the faulty foundation of their reactionary ruling. By using a fallacy (even if not a legal fallacy) to justify the initial historical analysis from which their ruling emerged, the majority undermined the validity of their decision.

Although certain pro-birth groups would like to attribute the low rate at which single mother’s choose adoption (1.7%) on access to abortion by comparing modern numbers to pre-1973 levels (19.3%), they ignore this aforementioned historical context just like Justice Alito - which I believe is fundamental to any conclusions one can draw about the “history and tradition” of our laws. Until the 1974 Fair Credit Act women were frequently barred from even obtaining credit cards, and the social stigma of having children out of wedlock was far more severe, i.e. being a single mother was almost impossible. Even today it is incredibly difficult - women denied a wanted abortion who have to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term have four times greater odds of living below the Federal Poverty Level, and are significantly more likely to stay in a relationship with abusive partners.

Retroactively applying historical standards to a previously marginalized segment of society (as Alito’s foundational argument against stare decisis does) is almost as logical as if the Supreme Court overturned Brown vs. Board of Education by citing a widespread tradition of segregation in the U.S., pointing to Jim Crow laws, and claiming that “the authority to regulate [segregation] is returned to the people”. Although Alito wrote “abortion” in his opinion, that sounds equally absurd.

After reading the majority opinion, one begins to wonder: does this lay the groundwork for ex-post-facto repeal of any newfound freedoms from the last century? It certainly seems to belie a set of reactionary views among the Justices that inherently threaten the fabric of our modern society. In attempts to assuage these concerns, Alito claims “the Court emphasizes that this decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Yet, Clarence Thomas throws that straight out the window in his concurring opinion. Thomas takes aim at the rights to contraception, same sex mariage and concensual relations. Claiming that “because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’ we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents”.

Lawrence O. Gostin, a Georgetown Law professor who specializes in public health, said it would be “easy to dismiss Thomas as a lone wolf” and to do so would be a dangerous mistake. Now that the majority on the court has destroyed the foundation on which Roe was built, Gostin warns, “the other rights may well come crumbling after.” Fundamentally, the Dobbs Decision is the first sundering crack in a reactionary assault on the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment, and puts numerous other rights in line for the legal gallows. It is becoming more evident that the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court views “precedent” as a four letter word.

With the majority having invoked the “original constitutional proposition that courts do not substitute their social and economic beliefs for the judgment of legislative bodies”, it is time to take national legislative action to secure the right to abortion that a majority of our modern society has deemed fundamental. I don't wish to count weeks or propose the specifics of such federal legislation, but women deserve control of their reproductive autonomy. Period. And as the dissent best articulated: “If the majority is serious about its historical approach, then Griswold and its progeny are in the line of fire too.” Our Miranda Rights have already been curtailed in the intervening weeks, and other cases of significance to our elections have also been added to the docket. If there is a democratic mandate post-midterms (i.e. a liberal majority in Congress after the elections despite the significant political headwinds) then it is imperative that legislation be passed to protect these rights. Likewise, anyone who values their liberties should vote like their rights depend on it - because they do.

At the start of June, the public and dramatic defamation trial of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard came to a close, with Depp being awarded 13 million in damages from his ex-wife. The court case was initiated through a defamation lawsuit filed by Depp, over an article written by Amber Heard that was published in the Washington Post. Although Heard never mentioned her ex-husband explicitly in the article, the defamation complaint filed by his legal team argued that “Although she never identified him by name, the op-ed plainly was about Ms. Heard’s purported victimization after she publicly accused her husband, Johnny Depp (“Mr. Depp”) in 2016”. Heard characterized herself in her Washington Post article as a “public figure representing domestic abuse” and by the end of the trial, that was true in a way. She had become a symbol for abuse, but not as the victim.

There were a number of recordings used for evidence that indicated Heard was abusive to Depp. One recording featured Heard responding to Depp’s threat to report Heard (for striking him) by saying, "tell the world that, I, Johnny Depp, a man, was a victim of domestic abuse…and see how many people believe or side with you"". Another clip came out where Heard responded to Depp complaining about her punching him, by saying “I was hitting you, I was not punching you”. When Depp continued to complain, Heard was heard telling him to “stop being a baby”. As the trial progressed, the evidence that Heard had abused her ex-husband continued to pile up. Starling Jenkins III, who was working for the couple as a bodyguard, testified that Heard had confessed to him that she left her own fecal matter on his bed. An excerpt from a private love letter that Heard wrote to Depp was read in court, where Heard apologized for severing part of Depp’s finger by saying “I’m sorry I hurt you, I can get wicked when I’m hurt”.

While the evidence of Heard's abusive behavior towards Depp continued to pile up, Heard's accusations of Depp's abuse towards her were steadily losing credibility. Bryan Neumeister, a digital forensics expert, determined that the photos Heard used in a post accusing Depp of assault, “were modified”, explaining that “forensically, the fingerprints of the photos don’t match”.

Witnesses also testified to the court that Heard had called in the media to question her about her bruises, when she filed for a restraining order against Depp. Kate Moss, Depp's ex-girlfriend, testified that Johnny had never “pushed me, kicked me or threw me down any stairs” during their relationship", shutting down rumors spread by Heard that he had pushed Moss down the stairs. The trial concluded on June 1st, with the jury finding in favor of Depp’s side, awarding Depp over 10 million dollars in damages.

The trial drew enormous interest online, with over 18 billion total views for videos that used the hashtag #justiceforjohnnydepp. After the conclusion of the trial, Heard gave an interview to NBC and addressed all the criticism she had received on social media. She claimed that she didn't “take it [all the social media criticism directed towards her] personally” and argued that "even if you think that I’m lying, you still couldn’t look me in the eye and tell me that you think on social media there’s been a fair representation”.

The right to due process and a fair trial are important and correct judicial values to try and uphold. Although I disagree with Heard that she wasn't fairly represented on social media, I do think there's a case to be made that social media can put pressure on the jury and influence the jury decision. When social media takes a strong stance on an ongoing trial, it has a strong potential to cause the jurors to be biased in favor of the winner preferred by social media.

Although the trial showed the potential for social media to create unfair bias in a jury and erode, it also helped strengthen due process as well. Some progressives have advocated that "all women [who make a claim] should be believed" and the defamation trial highlighted the fallacy behind that idea. Claims of sexual assault and abuse must be taken seriously and are too often brushed aside, but investgating claims of assault doesn't necessarily mean believing them simply because the accuser is a woman. Johnny Depp’s defamation lawsuit was yet another example (a very public one) why society needs to protect due process and reserve judgment, regardless if domestic abuse has a male or female abuser or victim.

After following the trial closely, it is clear to me that Heard engaged in violent and abusive actions towards Depp and the jury's ruling was fair and proportionate. An unfair/made up accusation of assault can destroy someone's life and career. Disney cut ties with Depp over the controversy and Depp is one of the biggest movie stars in the world. It isn't unreasonable to believe that Depp has likely lost millions of dollars in potential work, because of Heard's accusation. Despite my belief that the jury's ruling was correct, the potential influence of social media to influence the judiciary is a worrying dynamic that isn't going away any time soon.