Trending toward Idiocracy

In an interview/podcast with Ben Weingarten in the Federalist, Glenn Reynolds explains some of the points he made in his new book, Social Media Upheaval.

Big tech is evil.

...People always ask me that. “Do you miss Twitter?” “No!” And people are sometimes trying to pressure me to go back to Twitter, and I can happily tell them, “My account’s cancelled. All my followers are gone. You wouldn’t even know if I did tweet.” I’m calmer. I’m happier. My life is better in every way. And I thought that I would miss out on a lot of breaking news and stuff, but it turns out not really very much. In fact, what you really see on Twitter is just the same old crap being beaten to death day after day.

...As Jaron Lanier points out in his book on social media, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, the easiest emotions for the algorithms to amplify are the negative emotions – so, fear, anger, and sadness. Weirdly, research shows that a lot of people on social media tend to be more scared, angrier, and sadder. Go figure.

In the book, I come out primarily for the enforcement of antitrust laws, and one of the things antitrust laws forbid, besides just monopoly, is collusion. And what we’ve seen pretty clearly is collusion on the part of the Big Tech companies to keep out competitors.

...The second thing is bigness. These companies are effectively monopolies.

...But companies like Google and Facebook, etc., actually basically have their feet on the neck of the political communications in the country, and they can take a story and make it go away, or they can advance it. And again, we had another case recently where they admit that Google is fiddling with their searches of Trump to make him look bad, just because they can. So that is a kind of political power that is something previous eras of monopolists didn’t have, and I think that it’s entirely consistent with libertarian principles to break up that kind of source of unaccountable power.

...The bad news for the tech companies is that — I guess with the social acumen you would expect from a bunch of geeks — they have managed to make everybody hate them. They’re hated on the left. They’re hated on the right. It’s really actually astounding because their personnel lean very far left, so you would think they would naturally cultivate allies on the left to protect them from attacks on [the right]. No. They’ve blown it completely. The left hates them too. And there’s just a huge amount of common ground. So I think that they’re going to have to spend a lot of money on lawyers and lobbyists in D.C., and that may not be enough.

...But I think they definitely have decided to put a thumb on the scale this time. They did a little bit in a few cases in 2016, but they’re just all in for 2020. And I think that’s super risky for them for two reasons: One is, they might fail. And in fact, I think they’re likely to fail because while they have power, they have less power than they think they do. Like Robby Mook, they think their data analytics tells them more than it really does. You think the trust-busting is bad, but if they lose to Trump after trying to kill him – you know the old saying, “If you strike the king you must kill him” — Trump remembers, and he’s not gonna let bygones be bygones.

But the second thing is, if they succeed, they become like the Praetorian guard of American politics. Now whoever wins has got to control them. And I promise you that if any Democrat, really, wins, they are going to make sure those companies are thoroughly under their control and under their thumbs in ways that the companies will probably turn out not to like very much.

...There was a wonderful woman who’s a neuroscientist who decided to test herself by reading some of the long books by Thomas Mann and people like that whom she had liked, and she said she can’t do it. Her attention span is too short. You start reaching for your phone, or whatever.

Read more here.

If we value democracy, can we permit our intelligence agencies to exist in their current form?

I missed this post by Glenn Reynolds at USA Today on May 30.

In 1972, some employees of President Nixon’s re-election committee were caught when they broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters to plant a bug. This led to Nixon’s resignation and probably would have led to his felony prosecution had he not been pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.

But if a single bugging of the political opposition is enough to bring down a presidency — and maybe lead to an unprecedented criminal prosecution of a former president — then what are we to make of the recently unveiled Obama administration program of massively spying on political opponents in violation of clearly established law?

Because that’s what was unveiled last week.

When the FBI wants to wiretap a domestic suspect, it goes to court for a warrant. But when listening in on foreigners, the National Security Agency hoovers up a vast amount of stuff in bulk: Conversations between foreigners, conversations between Americans and foreigners, conversations between Americans who mention foreigners, and sometimes just plain old conversations between Americans.

There are supposed to be strict safeguards on who can access the information, on how it can be used and on protecting American citizens’ privacy — because the NSA is forbidden by law from engaging in domestic spying. These safeguards were ignored wholesale under the Obama administration, and to many Republicans, it is no coincidence that intelligence leaks damaged Democrats' political opponents in the 2016 election.

A report from journalists John Solomon and Sara Carter last week, based on recently declassified documents, exposed what went on. As Solomon and Carter write:

More than 5%, or one out of every 20, searches seeking upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA’s so-called Section 702 database violated the safeguards President Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011, according to one classified internal report reviewed by Circa. ...

The normally supportive court censured administration officials, saying that the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier amounted to an “institutional lack of candor,” and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a recently unsealed court document dated April 26.

The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans. ... The American Civil Liberties Union said the newly disclosed violations are some of the most serious to ever be documented and strongly call into question the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to police itself and safeguard Americans' privacy as guaranteed by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure.

As former anti-terrorism prosecutor and national security expert Andrew McCarthy writes in National Review, this is a very serious abuse. And potentially a crime. If such material were leaked to the press for political advantage, that's another crime.

McCarthy observes: “Enabling of domestic spying, contemptuous disregard of court-ordered minimization procedures (procedures the Obama administration itself proposed, then violated), and unlawful disclosure of classified intelligence to feed a media campaign against political adversaries. Quite the Obama legacy.”

Will the Justice Department investigate and prosecute former Obama officials? It seems hard to imagine. But then, so did Nixon’s resignation, when the Watergate burglary was first discovered.

This debacle also raises serious questions about the viability of our existing “intelligence community.” In the post-World War II era, we gave massive power to the national security apparatus. In part, that power was granted in the belief that professionalism and patriotism would lead people in those agencies to refuse to let their work be used for partisan political purposes.

It now seems apparent that we overestimated the patriotism and professionalism of the people in these agencies, who allowed them to be politically weaponized by the Obama administration. That being true, if we value democracy, can we permit them to exist in their current form?

That’s a decision that President Trump and Congress will have to face. Ironically, they may be afraid to — for fear that intelligence agencies will engage in further targeted political leaks.

Finding the good in tough times

In his USA Today column Glenn Reynolds finds some good in his father's last days.

No disciplinary action against Glenn Reynolds

No mention of what I imagine were hundreds of letters of support for Glenn.

Statement from Dean Melanie Wilson about Professor’s Tweet
POSTED SEPTEMBER 27, 2016
Following Professor Glenn Reynolds’s tweet and my public response last week, I began an investigation that included an examination of the facts, policies in the university’s Faculty Handbook, and the law. I discussed the situation with Professor Reynolds, university leadership, and General Counsel. I also sought feedback from College of Law students, staff, faculty, the Alumni Council and Dean’s Circle, and other UT Law alumni. As a lawyer and a law school dean, I know that gathering information and upholding the principles of due process are absolutely necessary in a situation like this.

In short, no disciplinary action will be taken against Professor Reynolds. The tweet was an exercise of his First Amendment rights. Nevertheless, the tweet offended many members of our community and beyond, and I understand the hurt and frustration they feel.

Today, Professor Reynolds issued an apology to the law school community via email.

I appreciate Professor Reynolds’s statement. We will now move forward to rebuild our law school community and refocus on our primary purpose: educating future lawyers and leaders. Our students and their education should always be our primary concerns at the college. Only by coming together as a community in thoughtful and constructive dialogue can we ensure that UT Law—and the university overall—is a supportive, collegial community of scholars and lifelong learners.

Extremely unlikely confluence of events

Robert Shibley of the Foundation for Indivual Rights in Education (FIRE) weighs in on the "investigation of Glenn Reynolds' tweet.To find Glenn's speech unprotected,

one must also believe:

that drivers on the affected area of I-277 in Charlotte were reading Twitter while driving;
that they were followers of the @Instapundit account;
that they saw the tweet itself; and
that Reynolds had a substantial enough level of control or influence over those drivers that they would be likely to immediately follow his advocacy.
This confluence of events seems—to put it mildly—extremely unlikely.

Read more here.

Army of Davids, front and center!

Here is the email and phone number of the Chancellor of the University of Tennessee. Let him know there is an Army of Davids out there who support Glenn Reynolds.

Support Glenn Reynolds!

Sure enough, Glenn Reynolds is being "investigated" by the University of Tennessee. I liked this commenter's suggestion,

Here's a thought: Put the Dean and those "concerned" in a university minivan and send them to investigate by driving around the more riotous parts of Charlotte. I'll be interested in what they have to say when they get back. Assuming they survive, of course.

Another commenter:

If the university is truly against violence and comments that might lead to violence, I expect they will be condemning the "protesters" any moment now, right? I mean, a crowd of angry people chanting "no justice, no peace" seems a bit more likely to lead to violence than a tweet, wouldn't you think?

Support Glenn Reynolds now!

Our blogfather may be in trouble. Glenn Reynolds got temporarily suspended from Twitter, when, in response to the rioters in North Carolina blocking the interstate and surrounding motorists, Glenn wrote "Run them down." The left is leaping, and Glenn's law professor job at Tennessee may be in jeopardy. What can we do to show support for Glenn?

Lessons

Glenn Reynolds writes in USA Today,

So the post-Brexit number-crunching is over and it turns out that the decisive support for Britain’s leaving the EU came not from right-wing nationalists but from working-class Labour voters. This offers some lessons for British and European politicians — and for us in America, too.

Read the whole thing here.

The elite's failure to understand

At Instapundit Glenn Reynolds responds to David Brooks of the New York Times,

The Tea Party movement — which you also failed to understand, and thus mostly despised — was a bourgeois, well-mannered effort (remember how Tea Party protests left the Mall cleaner than before they arrived?) to fix America. It was treated with contempt, smeared as racist, and blocked by a bipartisan coalition of business-as-usual elites. So now you have Trump, who’s not so well-mannered, and his followers, who are not so well-mannered, and you don’t like it.

Accomplishments and practical skills are more important than credentials

Glenn Reynolds has a column in USA Today about the fact that the GOP may nominate someone who did not finish college (Scott Walker) as their candidate for president next year.

A lot of people don't know much about him yet, and he may not even be running, but if Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is elected president in 2016, he'll immediately accomplish something that no other candidate being talked about can: He'll lay to rest the absurd belief that you're a nobody if you don't have a college degree. And he might even cut into the surprisingly recent takeover of our institutions by an educated mandarin class, something that just might save the country.

...But the college degree — especially a degree from an elite school — has become an entry-level ticket into the educated mandarinate. In his important book, The New Class Conflict, Joel Kotkin calls it the "clerisy" — that now dominates government, journalism and academia. And as a result, an America that once prided itself on real-world achievement and practical good sense now runs largely on credentials.

...Already people can point to tech pioneers like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as evidence that a college degree isn't essential to getting ahead. But just as electing America's first black president had a resonance that no other achievement did, so, perhaps, electing America's first non-college-grad president in many decades will serve to remind people that a college degree isn't the be-all and end-all, and that accomplishments and practical skills are, in the end, more important than credentials. It would be educational.

Read more here.

Three areas where we can combat poverty

Glenn Reynolds has three ideas for combating poverty. They involve fixing problems in education, immigration, and job licensing. Read his USA Today column here.

Is it parental malpractice to send your children to public schools?

Glenn Reynolds wonders if it is becoming parental malpractice for parents to send their children to public schools. He is referring to this story in which a girl was not allowed by school officials in San Antonio to bring sunscreen on a school field trip, because sunscreen is "toxic."

A Congressional candidate who reads Bastiat

Mia Love won the GOP primary in Utah this week for Congress from the suburbs of Salt Lake City. Glenn Reynolds did this interview with her in 2012.

Getting your news from party organs

Bryan Preston describes the media as "Democrat operatives with by-lines." Heexcerpts heavily from a column by Glenn Reynoldsabout California State Senator Leland Lee:

California State senator (and, until last week, candidate for secretary of state) Leland Yee was well-known as an anti-gun activist. Then, last week, he was indicted for, yes, conspiring to smuggle guns and rocket launchers between mobsters and terrorists in exchange for massive bribes.

This all sounds like news. You've got charges of huge bribes, rampant hypocrisy, illegal weapons and even a connection with foreign terrorists — and from a leading politician in an important state.

But — and here's the part Hollywood would miss — outside of local media like San Francisco magazine, the coverage was surprisingly muted.The New York Times buried the story as a one-paragraph Associated Press report on page A21, with the bland dog-bites-man headline, "California: State Senator Accused of Corruption." This even though Yee was suspended, along with two others, from the California state senate in light of the indictment.

When Republicans do things that embarrass their party, the national media are happy to take note, even if they're mere state senators. But when Democrats like Yee get busted for actual felonies, and pretty dramatic ones at that, the press suddenly isn't interested.

We've seen this before, of course: Washington Post reporter Sarah Kliff dismissed the horrific Kermit Gosnell trial as a "local crime story", even as the press was going crazy covering another equally local crime story, the George Zimmerman trial. Likewise, another state senator, Texas' Wendy Davis, got national attention when she filibustered an abortion bill, a story that fit conveniently with the "war on women" theme used by Democrats.

It's almost as if "what's news" is just a synonym for "what advances the narrative chosen by the Democratic Party." The question that "news" operations like CNN may want to ask is, how many people are really interested in getting their news from party organs.