Like an illustration in a galactic Just So Story, the Elephant's Trunk Nebula winds through the emission nebula and young star cluster complex IC 1396, in the high and far off constellation of Cepheus. Also known as vdB 142, the cosmic elephant's trunk is over 20 light-years long. This detailed close-up view was recorded through narrow band filters that transmit the light from ionized hydrogen and oxygen atoms in the region. The resulting composite highlights the bright swept-back ridges that outline pockets of cool interstellar dust and gas. Such embedded, dark, tendril-shaped clouds contain the raw material for star formation and hide protostars within. Nearly 3,000 light-years distant, the relatively faint IC 1396 complex covers a large region on the sky, spanning over 5 degrees. This dramatic scene spans a 1 degree wide field of view though, about the size of 2 Full Moons. via NASA https://ift.tt/2PaHaGq
This car wouldn’t have to make this plea if we had automatic stabilizers.Joe Raedle/Getty Images
A little over a year ago, a group of progressive policy experts published a book of essays titled Recession Ready, which offered a simple, compelling, and modern theory about how to deal with economic catastrophe. “Recessions are both common and devastating,” it warned. Instead of trying to fight downturns on a case-by-case basis, waiting until disaster strikes to write a bespoke stimulus bill, the authors argued that Congress should plan ahead by putting in place more “automatic stabilizers”—policies that are preprogrammed to kick into gear and support the economy when it slumps.
The United States has a number of automatic stabilizers in action already, though we don’t always think of them as such. Safety-net programs like food stamps and unemployment insurance, for instance, fit the bill. They are designed primarily to help Americans in times of need, but as a result they also add ballast to the wider economy at moments of crisis by boosting household spending power and aggregate demand.
But Recession Ready’s contributors wanted to take the concept much further. The government could redesign unemployment benefits and food stamps to increase in value when unemployment spikes. Washington could send households cash, deliver more aid to states, and increase infrastructure spending during periods of weakness—all automatically. In many ways, the book reflected the lessons and scars of the Obama era, when the White House spent years battling recalcitrant Republicans on Capitol Hill for more fiscal stimulus while the economy languished. And rather than praying for responsible leaders in Congress to save the day through white-knuckle, down-to-the-wire negotiations, it argued, you could set up the better part of a recession-fighting machine ahead of time, allowing it to run on autopilot whenever the need arose.
Now that we’re muddling our way through the coronavirus crisis, the book’s case seems more urgent than ever. At the moment, about 30 million Americans are set to lose crucial unemployment benefits that have been sustaining them through the pandemic—for the simple, mind-numbing reason that Congress couldn’t hit an arbitrary deadline. Lawmakers have known for months that the extra $600-a-week payments Americans are depending on were set to officially expire on Friday. And yet Republicans waited until the last minute to introduce a badly insufficient, and arguably dangerous, bill to deal with the next phase of pandemic relief, which Democrats rejected.1 As a result, Congress skipped out on town without a deal, and out-of-work Americans will now see their incomes slashed in the midst of our worst economic collapse on record. Anyone with a working neuron should see this as lunacy.
We could have avoided this nationwide facepalm if unemployment benefits were designed to rise and fall with the health of the economy, in the first place. “Automatic stabilizers prevent you from cutting off things too soon,” George Washington University professor Jay Shambaugh, who co-edited Recession Ready, and served on Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, told me. “The idea that the unemployment rate is higher than at any point in the Great Recession and we’re about to pull support from the economy—that’s just ridiculous.”
Using automatic stabilizers to recession-proof the economy would have other advantages, too. Take speed, for starters. Lawmakers moved quickly to pass the CARES Act this March, but that wasn’t necessarily typical. After Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, the country had to wait five months into the Great Recession for Obama to be sworn in and then sign his stimulus package. A well-designed stabilizer could get money out the door much faster, perhaps as soon as the unemployment rate or jobless claims significantly ticked up.
Another plus: With automatic stabilizers in place, we wouldn’t have to worry about Congress failing to cover all of its bases. So far, Democrats haven’t been able to get anywhere near enough aid to states into the coronavirus relief bills, and as a result, many are facing looming budget crises. It’d be better if that aid was simply loaded and ready to go.
Programs also tend to work better if they are in advance and tested, instead of thrown together on the fly while the world is burning. Had Congress decided ahead of time that it wanted to let freelancers get unemployment benefits, or try to pay people their full wages after losing a job, or send out checks to nearly every American at a moment’s notice the next time the economy crumbled, we might have had good systems in place to do them. Instead, we’ve run into all manner of administrative and logistical headaches, from laid off workers waiting months for their benefits to the Treasury sending out prepaid debit cards that people threw away because they looked like junk mail. (The entire structure of the flat, $600 unemployment bonus that’s so controversial was essentially a workaround to deal with the limits of antiquated state computer systems.) It’s good that Congress can improvise when called up. But it would be nice if our parachute actually deployed properly the next time the economy was in freefall.
There are clear political upsides as well, at least for Democrats. With stabilizers in place, a potential president like Joe Biden wouldn’t have to worry about as much about a Republican Congress attempting to undercut his administration by refusing to pass stimulus measures during a recession. That could also yield economic benefits: Businesses might be less likely to lay off workers at the start of a downturn, and families might not cut back spending as much, if they know Washington will support the economy whether or not there’s gridlock on Capitol Hill.
Automatic stabilizers won’t entirely eliminate the need for Congress to act when the economy tanks, since each recession has its own unique root causes that usually need to be addressed. In 2008, there was a housing crash and financial crisis; today, there’s a pandemic that’s shut down normal life. Lawmakers will still have to come up with solutions to tomorrow’s calamities as they arise.
What stablizers would do is spare our elected officials the need to reinvent the wheel every time a crisis comes up, by making the basic, well-established steps for fighting a recession an automatic routine that doesn’t require a massive partisan fight to enact. “When we went around talking to people on the Hill about this book, we kept trying to say to them, ‘This isn’t everything you would do in any situation.’ What we picked as topics are the things we always do,” Shambaugh told me. Having a recession-fighting regime in place would also free up politicians’ attention to focus on the really unique, complicated problems they need to address. “Last time it would have left more space to think about housing. This time it would have left more space to think about test-and-trace, about the proper way to deal with the health care system around this. And what do we do about businesses that we are telling to shut down, because that’s just different.”
Recession Ready left a deep impression among some Democrats in Washington, and in many ways, it helped shape the party’s response to the coronavirus crisis. Two of its contributors, Washington Center for Equitable Growth economist Claudia Sahm and former Obama chief economist Jason Furman, were among the most vocal proponents of mailing checks to families (or, more often, wiring direct deposits). One crucial reason Democrats pushed for enhanced unemployment benefits so aggressively in March is that, prior to the crisis, two senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Michael Bennet of Colorado, were working on bills to bulk up UI benefits and make them a better stabilizer. More recently, Wyden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced a bill that would have extended the $600-a-week payments, and only decreased them incrementally as the unemployment rate fell. The unity task force between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders’ campaign also included a revamp of unemployment insurance in their recommendations.
But if Democrats take control of Washington after November, they should be willing to go further by setting up recession-fighting weapons like cash payments and infrastructure spending to fire off automatically when necessary, too. They also can’t let the idea get eclipsed by other, shinier priorities. There’s nothing particularly sexy about stabilizers. (Even the word suggests the exact opposite of excitement.) It’s probably not going to get a large part of the base revved up, or even make an immediate difference in people’s lives, any more so than a temporary stimulus package. But after two economic cataclysms where Congress has failed to what was needed, in part because of Republican obstruction or incompetence, Democrats owe it to the country to make sure that we aren’t in the same position a decade from now. We know the essential steps to fight a recession. We should be able to set them and forget them.
1The GOP tried to make up for its delay by proposing a temporary extension of jobless aid. But by the time they got around to it, the offer was essentially pointless, because states had already switched off the extra bonus payments and would have had to potentially spend weeks restarting them.
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Episode Notes
On the Gist, NBA jerseys.
In the interview, filmmaker Mark Duplass is here to talk about his anthology series Room 104 currently airing on HBO. He and Mike discuss the use of rules in the creative process, why the series seems to defy genre, and the experience of growing up with your brother as your artistic partner. Room 104 airs on Friday nights on HBO.
CDC Director Robert Redfield during a hearing on Friday in Washington.Erin Scott/Pool via Getty Images
After months of belittling or opposing the use of masks against the novel coronavirus, Republican politicians are coming around. Even President Donald Trump, who hasscornedmasks, now promotesthem in scriptedbriefings. Instead, Trump and his proteges have drawn a new line: They’re against requiring people to wear face coverings. “I want people to have a certain freedom,” Trump argued in a Fox News interview on July 19. But one important constituency disagrees with Trump’s position: Republican voters.
Public opinion within the GOP has shifted in favor of masks. In a Navigator survey taken in late May, Republican voters said they were “pro-mask,” not “anti-mask,” by a margin of 24 percentage points. By July, that margin had grown to 38 points. In the May survey, 24 percent of Republicans said they generally didn’t wear masks; by July, that number was down to 13 percent. The July Navigator survey also asked voters to choose between two statements: that “there is too much shaming of people for not wearing masks” or that “people who don’t wear masks in public places are putting others at risk and deserve to be called out.” Most Republicans chose the latter statement.
Republicans don’t just support masks. They support mask mandates. Two weeks ago, in an AP/NORC poll, a two-to-one Republican majority (58 percent to 27 percent) endorsed “requiring Americans to wear face masks when they’re around other people outside their homes.” Seventy percent of Republicans said that as schools reopened, “requiring all students and staff [to] wear face masks” was essential or important. In a Yahoo News poll released on Friday, 57 percent of Republicans said it should be “mandatory to wear a mask in public,” and 65 percent said it should be mandatory to do so in “states with large numbers of new COVID-19 cases.”
If you’re a member of Congress, you might assume that opposing a federal mandate, as opposed to state or local mandates, is the safe position in the GOP. But you’d be mistaken. In a mid-July Fox News poll, 55 percent of Republican voters said “the federal government” should announce “a national mask-wearing order for indoor spaces.” Last week, in a Harvard CAPS/Harris survey, two-thirds of Republican voters endorsed “a national mandate making it mandatory to wear masks in public to fight the coronavirus pandemic.”
You might assume that opposing a federal mandate, as opposed to state or local mandates, is the safe position within the GOP. But you’d bemistaken.
This support for mandates is more than symbolic. Republicans say they’re willing to enforce such orders with fines or incarceration. In a Politico/Morning Consult poll taken two weeks ago, 58 percent of Republican voters said their own states should impose a “mask mandate in public spaces, where not wearing a mask could be punishable by fine or jail time.” In the Harvard/Harris survey, 57 percent of Republicans endorsed “local governments imposing fees for anyone who does not wear masks in public spaces.”
Even Trump fans—who are generally more hostile to masks than Republicans as a whole are—tend to favor mask mandates. In the Fox News poll, most voters who approved of Trump’s job performance backed a national order requiring masks indoors. In the Morning Consult poll, most Trump approvers endorsed a mask mandate punishable by fines or jail. In the Harvard/Harris poll, most voters who said they had cast ballots for Trump in 2016 supported “local governments imposing fees for anyone who does not wear masks in public spaces.” In the Yahoo News poll, 59 percent of people who said they would vote for Trump in 2020 agreed that “states with large numbers of new COVID-19 cases” should “require masks to be worn in public places.”
Republican acceptance of mask orders isn’t unlimited. The Georgia poll, taken by Monmouth University, asked a separate question about an outdoor ban “requiring people to wear face masks when they come within six feet of others in public places outdoors.” Republicans opposed that idea, 52 percent to 40 percent. But whites narrowly supported it, as did voters in Trump counties, and Georgia voters as a whole backed it by 30 percentage points. Likewise, in the earliest July poll on mask mandates, 56 percent of Republicans rejected the proposition that “everyone should be required to wear face masks in public.” But by every other measure, the voters on whom Republican politicians rely—whites, white men, white non-college voters, and rural voters—endorsed that proposition.
Masks are good. They significantly reduce transmission of the virus. And because they prevent the wearer from infecting others—as opposed to protecting the wearer from an infection he or she might otherwise choose to risk—they should be required. But if that argument doesn’t persuade your governor, your senators, or your state representatives to support a mandate, show them the polls. If they aren’t moved to protect others, maybe they’ll do it to protect themselves.
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Are you there, William Bowery?Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Paul Kane/Getty Images, Kevin Winter/Getty Images for CBS Radio, Paul C. Babin/Wikipedia, Manny Carabel/Getty Images, Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images, Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images, and Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images.
For Taylor Swift, an album release marks the culmination of months, if not years, of labor. But her finish line is only the starting point for fans: New Taylor music is a signal to put on their detective hats and get to scouring every lyric for clues and references Swift has embedded throughout the songs. Folklore’s release last week was no different from any of Swift’s previous outings in this respect, as online platforms quickly exploded with fan speculation about what it all means. Many of these discussions focus on the text of the music itself—the Betty, James, and Inez of it all—but the most intriguing conversation this time around has to do with authorship rather than lyrics: Who is William Bowery?
Someone named William Bowery is credited with co-writing two songs on Folklore, “Betty” and “Exile.” But no one has ever heard of Bowery, and no one with that name has any previous songwriting credits to speak of, according to fans who have combed through all readily available reference material. Assuming he exists at all, we only know a few things about this Bowery for sure. One of them is that Swift admires his musical abilities quite a bit: When she announced the album on social media, she wrote that it gave her the chance to collaborate with “some musical heroes of mine,” before naming the National’s Aaron Dessner, Bon Iver, Jack Antonoff, and—sticking out among such distinguished company—Bowery.
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Also lending credence to the idea that Bowery is a nom de plume is Swift’s dalliance with pseudonyms in the past. In 2016, she revealed that, while she was dating deejay Calvin Harris, she secretly co-wrote one of his biggest hits under the name Nils Sjöberg. All signs point to William Bowery being another classic Swiftian mystery. The theories about his identity are numerous, so let’s go through them one at a time, from least to most believable.
10. An Actual Guy Named William Bowery
If there were a William Bowery gifted enough to be one of Swift’s musical heroes, wouldn’t he be, if not world-famous, at least someone whose existence could at least be corroborated by even one other person? The complete lack of an internet trail is suspicious. Plus, the name itself smacks of fiction. “Bowery” is not a particularly common surname, but it is the name of a street in downtown New York City—a place where Taylor Swift used to live and has sung about before. All of this adds up to the obvious: There simply is no William Bowery. I’m reasonably sure that if a songwriter with that name really existed, he would be tied to a chair being interrogated by a gang of militant Swifties right now.
Odds: 1,000,000:1
9. One or More Members of BTS
Refinery29 listed RM, a member of the South Korean boy band BTS, as a possible Bowery, and a few Twitter users have espoused this view as well. Meanwhile, some other Twitter users have posited that Bowery is a different BTS member, Suga. I think at least some of these fans are making a meta-joke about the complete lack of evidence all the other theories about Bowery’s identity are relying on. But some of them are probably just stans who want to believe.
Odds: 1,000,000:1
8. Lana Del Rey
Because why not! Even the people suggesting this one admit it’s in “total crackpot” territory.
Odds: 1,000:1
7. Joni Mitchell
Mitchell is definitely a musical hero to Swift, who has frequentlycited the grande dame of folk music as one of her favorite artists. A song off Swift’s previous album, “The Lucky One,” was even said to be about her. The less convincing pillars of this theory are that Mitchell, also a painter, has a painting called Bowery Bum and that her father went by the name Bill, a nickname for William. Then there’s the question of passing a woman off as a man, which would seem to go against Swift’s belief in feminism. (Then again, when Swift herself used a pen name, she chose a man’s name.) But the biggest strike against this theory might be that if Swift wrote a song with Mitchell, she’d probably want to shout it from the rooftops rather than hide it.
Odds: 1,000:1
6. Lorde
This one is about as thin as the BTS and LDR theories: Fans have guessed that William Bowery could be a pseudonym for Lorde because Lorde and Swift are friends and that would be cool. To be fair, there is documented evidence that the two are actual friends, which is more than can be said for Nos. 7–9 on this list.
Odds: 500:1
5. Ed Sheeran
The Sheeran truthers, like many of the factions here, don’t have much to go on. They point out that Sheeran and Swift are friends, and that he is also a musician, one with roots in folk. It’s true that the two have collaborated before. It’s also true that Sheeran has performed at Bowery Ballroom, and his shows sometimes incorporate harmonica, an instrument that can be heard on “Betty.” The guitar in that song also gives it a Sheeranish sound, some have posited. Lastly, Sheeran has a grandfather named William, one who’s appeared in his own lyrics. Needless to say, all of this seems highly circumstantial. Don’t a lot of people have grandfathers named William? Why would Swift and Sheeran have to hide their collaboration when it’s common knowledge that they’re pals who’ve recorded songs together before? Sheeran as Bowery is really only plausible if you also buy into the conspiracy theory that he and Swift have dated in the past or are dating now and need to cover it up.
Odds: 500:1
4. Austin Swift
Swift’s brother, Austin, who is also a musician, played a key role in another mystery connected to his sister earlier this year. In May, a cover of Swift’s song “Look What You Made Me Do” appeared in the TV show Killing Eve. The cover was credited to Jack Leopards & the Dolphin Club, a group that, just like William Bowery, has no presence online and no one had ever heard of. Nils Sjöberg, a previous Swift alias, was listed as a producer on the song. As for Austin’s involvement, Swift had reportedly previously asked Killing Eve creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge about featuring her brother’s music. Separately, fans noticed that the art that went along with the song resembled a childhood photo of Austin, who had also referenced “the Dolphin Club” in his display name on Twitter at some point. This whole scheme may have been a way to stick it to Scooter Braun, with whom Swift is engaged in a very public feud with over ownership of her back catalog. Apparently, a TV show using a cover of one of her songs rather than the original would deprive Braun of royalties. But the Braun–Swift feud only concerns her earlier albums; she owns the masters on Lover and Folklore. Where Swift had a reason for obscuring her brother’s alleged involvement a few months ago, none of this points to why she would give her brother a pseudonym this time. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible that Austin could be Bowery, just that he’s no more likely to be Bowery than anyone else in Swift’s inner circle.
Odds: 500:1
3. Taylor Herself
Some fans noted that Swift’s last confirmed use of a pen name was during the Nils Sjöberg affair, and the person’s identity she was covering up then was her own. Assuming a man’s name in a male-dominated field like the music industry was both a way to feel less conspicuous and a bit of insurance against those who would underestimate her. I wouldn’t put it past her to do it again. Boys have come and gone over the years, but Swift’s commitment to upholding her reputation has been a constant. Now, why she would need to use a pseudonym to take credit for a song that she was already credited with writing is a different question.
Odds: 25:1
2. Harry Styles
Refinery 29 has pointed out that Dessner—who claims not to know Bowery’s true identity despite also collaborating on Folklore—thinks the real Bowery is an experienced songwriter. Swift’s ex Styles has moonlighted with songwriting under a pseudonym before, and when he did, some thought the resulting songs were about Swift. How does this connect to “Bowery”? Apparently in 2012 when Styles and Swift were a couple, they stayed at the Bowery Hotel. The Bowery Ballroom is also one of the last places Styles performed before the coronavirus lockdown began. Looking to the lyrics themselves, there’s a line in “Exile”—“We always walked a very thin line”—that fans have said evokes Fine Lines, the name of Styles’ most recent album. (This theory doesn’t seem to account for “William” at all.) The strongest evidence for the Styles-as-Bowery case might be that it would indeed cause a frenzy if the media found out that Styles and Swift collaborated, which seems like a plausible motivation for pseudonym-ing up.
Odds: 10:1
1. Joe Alwyn
Dessner said Alwyn’s not Bowery. But Dessner has also said he doesn’t know who Bowery is. And sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one. Alwyn is the guy Swift is dating right now, so if there are secret shoutouts on her album, shouldn’t they be to him? In fact, if Alwyn isn’t Bowery, he should be having an awkward conversation with Swift right about now. A pen name would also fit with the narrative of Alwyn wanting to keep their relationship very private. All that said, some of the “evidence” for Alwyn as Bowery is pretty weak-sauce: Alwyn’s great-grandfather was a composer and was named William. (Once again: Many people have or had old relatives named William!) Slightly more convincing is that Swift and Alwyn were spotted at the Bowery Hotel in New York early on in their relationship, after they’d attended a private Kings of Leon concert—it’s not a huge leap to guess that this date might have a special significance to them. (Possibly also notable detail: Lorde was there too.)
As for whether Alwyn has enough musical talent to co-write a song with one of the music industry’s top artists, I was intrigued by one Reddit fan’s point that at least once before, in the song “Ronan,” Swift gave a songwriting credit to someone who didn’t directly contribute to writing that song but whose words she quoted on it. Perhaps Alwyn didn’t exactly help write “Exile” or “Betty,” but Swift quoted his notes or texts to her in it. Of course, the same could just as easily be true of someone else. And it still leaves us with no explanation for the “musical hero” aspect of the puzzle. Whatever the case, the identity of a writer named William has not been this hotly contested since the Bard.
Odds: 3:1
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A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover onboard launches from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Thursday, July 30, 2020. via NASA https://ift.tt/2XecjNN
As parents plot increasingly byzantine care arrangements for children whose schools and day cares decide to stay closed this fall—pod? Home school? Part school, part pod? Leverage a neighborhood teenager?—their stress mounts over the prospect of having to mix work, child care, and education. A lot of their problems would be solved if the government would financially enable more parents to be their kids’ caregivers and teachers, just for the duration. Imagine: a dedicated educator for every kid—if not someone who’s professionally trained, at least someone who’s not extremely stressed by trying to work and teach simultaneously. Plus, effective suppression of coronavirus transmission, without all that podding and traveling.
There are problems—in-person education would be much better for kids, academically and socially; so far in this pandemic, it’s tended to be mothers who step back from the workforce, harming their future prospects. Still, this seems like at least as much of a win as you can find in August 2020, and it’s the kind of choice that many more privileged parents are making already. But those who can afford it aren’t the only ones leaning this way: Over the summer, a series of polls have found that nonwhite and low-income parents are more likely than white and higher-income counterparts to be considering keeping kids home from school and to already be scaling back their work hours to take care of those kids. As things stand, lower-income households will pay quite a price for that safety-minded choice.
Is there a way for the government to underwrite more parents’ choices to concentrate on caregiving this fall? Advocates for children and families see a few ways to do it.
The nature of the crisis—rolling, uncertain—means that more than one provision may benecessary.
The paid leave portions of the Family First Coronavirus Response Act, passed in March, were meant to provide time for people who have COVID-19 to quarantine as well as 10 paid weeks (and an additional two unpaid weeks) to take care of a child whose school or day care is closed. This was a dramatic expansion of existing paid leave provisions, but it was still full of holes. According to calculations from the Center for American Progress’ Sarah Jane Glynn, if every business eligible for exemption from the law were to take it, only 17 percent of private sector workers would get the kind of coverage it offers. One huge loophole was the exclusion of companies with more than 500 workers from the rule. (Immediately, workers at places like McDonald’s, Kroger, and Amazon were no longer eligible.) There’s also a stipulation that companies with under 50 employees could be exempt from providing leave for parents with kids out of school if they thought that their businesses would be harmed. Poor and low-income workers are more likely to be employed by the kinds of small businesses covered under that exemption.
But even if you were covered by the FFCRA, its benefits end on Dec. 31 of this year, are limited to 12 weeks, and are paid at two-thirds of the regular rate of pay, making the option less than ideal. “In March, we didn’t know very much,” Vicki Shabo, an expert on paid leave policy at New America’s Better Life Lab, said. “We didn’t know how long this pandemic was going to last. We didn’t know what the effects of the disease itself were going to be, that there would be long-haul cases or ongoing health effects. Congress didn’t think a lot about a family maybe having sequential cases of COVID—one person gets sick, then another one,” so somebody needs to take off time for sickness, and then more for caregiving. And, of course, in March, we didn’t know that many school districts would be making the decisions they’re having to make now. The HEROES Act, passed by House Democrats in May and stymied by the Senate, included $32 billion to extend and expand the paid leave credit for businesses, to fix some of these loopholes; by contrast, the HEALS Act, put forth by Senate Republicans last week, contains nothing for paid leave.
But paid leave is only one possible provision that could help parents face an autumn (or a year? Don’t say it!) without child care or school. According to Michelle Dallafior, of the advocacy group First Focus on Children, the nature of the crisis—rolling, uncertain—means that more than one provision may be necessary. “Families are finding themselves in different situations at different times in this crisis,” she said. “And it looks like it’s going to continue for a long time.” Even some people who were able to take paid leave under FFCRA, she pointed out, may already have used up their 12 weeks, since schools have been closed since March and many summer care arrangements were canceled.
An additional measure, Dallafior added, should be for the government to provide cash assistance for families where parents don’t have jobs to take leave from. Enhanced unemployment insurance payments, of course, have been part of that picture; as of Friday, negotiations between congressional Democrats and the White House on extending those benefits stand, once again, at an impasse. Dallafior and her organization think that another way to get more money into the hands of people who have kids at home, and to take the pressure off this fall, would be to expand coverage of the child tax credit so that it covers the many low-income families who currently don’t qualify due to lack of earnings, and then to convert that credit into a monthly allowance for families with kids. This wouldn’t be a giant amount of money, but Dallafior emphasized that the regularity of those payments “would give some sense of security for families to make decisions”—to spend the monthly money on child care, or rent, or whatever else would keep their household on an even keel. That measure to expand the tax credit is in the HEROES Act but not in the HEALS Act. And the proposed Pandemic TANF Assistance Act, which would help needy families get emergency money for housing and food, wasn’t included in the HEALS Act either.
Of course, as my colleague Jordan Weissmann recently wrote, everything in the HEALS Act is calculated to push people out into the public sphere. This is grotesque, in the middle of a pandemic, but it’s only logical, given our recent political history around the idea of welfare. In a recent Twitter thread, Jen Roesch, an activist, writer, teacher in training, and parent of a child in middle school in New York City, argued that part of the reason why paying parents to help them stay home with kids has been absent from the discussion over school closures is “the ideological legacy of the war on welfare.” “I’m not saying that we should have to stay home with kids,” Roesch said in an interview, “but we should also recognize that there are a lot of women, especially women of color, who might want to be able to take care of their own children right now, and all of our policies are being engineered to send them out to take care of ‘essential labor,’ at the expense of their own families.”
The idea that even poor parents might be paid something to full-time parent, if they want to do it, is painfully far from present in our politics. When this preexisting paradigm meets the conditions of COVID, the results are more stress, sickness, and pain. “This [situation] is being placed on top of the American context, and the assumption that poor people cannot be trusted to make decisions that are right for their families and, frankly, good for society,” Myra Jones-Taylor, of the early-childhood advocacy organization Zero to Three, said in an interview, “so government has to step in and compel them to do the right thing.” From the perspective of the Republicans in control, “the right thing,” at least for people who can’t afford to assign one parent to take charge of schooling and supervision, involves work for parents and school or day care for kids. COVID makes doing that supposed “right thing,” and still staying safe, impossible.
Is there any hope that negotiations in Congress in coming weeks might result in movement on paid leave or other help for parents? Vicki Shabo pointed out that support for paid sick and family leave has long been robust in the United States and that polls around questions of paid leave to help people to get through the pandemic reflect similar levels of support. She pointed me to June polling that showed that most respondents favored the idea of expanding the coverage available through the FFCRA to cover the classes of employees left out by the original act as well as to cover people who need to take caregiving leave when an adult family member or loved one needs it. Another poll taken in June showed that 80 percent of American respondents supported the idea of expanding leave to workers for businesses with more than 500 employees. If legislators are responsive to public opinion, we may see a shift before the relief package is finalized. But that’s a big if.
For her part, Jones-Taylor found some hope in the increasing universality of parents’ current predicament, pointing out that now, the “pathologizing” of poverty was coming to apply to more and more people—“more people are in need of SNAP, in need of WIC.” “I think,” she said, “there is going to be a reckoning—a recognition that these narratives have been wrong forever, and are tired, and need to be upended.”
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Colin Jost at the 26th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards in Los Angeles on Jan. 19.Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images
About halfway through Colin Jost’s new memoir, A Very Punchable Face, he tells a story about the time he passed out drunk in a Helsinki cemetery. “I’m the kind of person who, once he gets sleepy,” he writes, “cannot stop himself from falling asleep on whatever surface or food is next to me.*” The asterisk leads you to a footnote—the book is riddled with them—where he recounts once falling asleep with his “face on a hamburger” at 7 a.m. on a Sunday, after the Saturday Night Liveafter-after-party. This, he explains, earned him the nickname “Burger Jost.”
Reading this, I was forced to confront something I’d long been aware of, but had spent years suppressing. I interviewed Jost on the phone about seven years ago, for a short, frivolous item in a special issue of the New York Times Magazine, and he had related the same anecdote. In fact, he was slightly more forthcoming in the interview than in his own memoir; according to my notes, still sitting in Google Drive where I left them, it was Jason Sudeikis who coined “Burger Jost.” The memory I’d suppressed was that Jost was an unusually generous and friendly interview subject, especially considering how asinine my questions were. This was back when he was just a head writer at Saturday Night Live: before I’d ever seen his blandly handsome face on my TV screen, before he became engaged to Scarlett Johansson, before I’d watched him deliver the joke news on Weekend Update—before I developed an unhealthy fixation on him, before I tweeted about him scores of times (in the pursuit of an ongoing bit where I pretended to see him as a righteous truth-teller), before I caught what I’ve come to think of as “SNL Disorder.”
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I know for a fact I’m not the only one who has suffered from SNL Disorder. I’ve heard other people (friends, colleagues, podcasters) describe it in similar terms: a compulsion to watch the show, week in, week out, despite taking little pleasure in it. If pressed, sufferers tend to rationalize and say that they like to know what the average American finds funny. They might say they want to catch a glimpse of our waning monoculture before it slips behind the horizon—perhaps to finally figure out who Billie Eilish is. Maybe also they’re a little hungover sometimes on Sundays, indulging in some palliative Hulu. Like so many other institutions in American life, SNL chugs along almost regardless of its capacity to execute on its core functions. And, as with so much else, no one can seem to agree on what, exactly, has gone wrong—or, indeed, if anything has gone wrong at all.
There is indeed something about him, something in the face area, that lends the impression he simply drifted to the top of the foodchain.
For one reason or another, I was mesmerized by Colin Jost the very instant I saw his face on Weekend Update. He was just … this guy. The edgiest thing about him was his jawline. And his almost elementally anodyne bearing only heightened the Jost Mystery: It was never quite clear what he was there to do, why he, of all people, was installed at Weekend Update for what has proved to be a longer tenure than Norm Macdonald’s, Kevin Nealon’s, Amy Poehler’s, Colin Quinn’s, or even Jimmy Fallon’s. The Weekend Update chair is usually the launching pad for post-SNL fame or infamy, but Jost seems to have gotten comfortable there.
And who could blame him? In recent months, the anchor’s chair has transformed into a plush seat in his Montauk, New York, home, which he shares with Johansson. Though I overcame my chronic case of SNL Disorder earlier this year, I still see his likeness everywhere in my feeds: screenshots of him Zooming from home with a conspicuous guitar in the background, suspiciously well-timed paparazzi shots of him shredding two-footers in the Hamptons, Times portraits of him strolling pensively in the dunes. Considering all of these from the vantage of my sweltering Brooklyn apartment, I had to agree that there is indeed something about him, something in the face area, that lends the impression he simply drifted to the top of the food chain—from Harvard, to SNL, to head writer, to Weekend Update, to dating Scarlett Johansson, to hosting the Emmys, to getting engaged to Scarlett Johansson, to buying that home in Montauk—borne aloft on zephyrs of privilege and charm.
Of course, this is the precise reason Jost wrote the book. “Listen,” he writes in the introduction, “I know why people want to punch me.” He goes on: “I look like a guy who’s always on the verge of asking, Do you know who my father is? Even though my father was a public school teacher on Staten Island.” These two lines are the book in miniature: He knows he made a bad impression over these last six years, and he wants to patch things over by showing you the real Colin Jost. What’s surprising is the extent to which he succeeds. At least for me.
From his childhood in Staten Island all the way up through hosting the Emmys, the protagonist of Punchable portrays himself as a klutz and a grind, a try-hard who also frequently shits his pants (on the golf course, at a movie theater, at an office party), a straight-A student whose body is covered in stitches acquired from dumb accidents (a sledding incident, a surfboard to the face on the Jersey Shore, a VR-related mishap). But above all, Jost portrays himself as a millennial of the meritocracy, ascending its grueling peaks, accruing credentials and promotions, but never without a measure of impostor syndrome.
Jost earns a scholarship to attend Regis High School on the Upper East Side, which liberates him from the confines of his somewhat knuckleheaded Staten Island upbringing, exposing him to the city’s moneyed elite. There, Jost competes on the speech and debate team, in a discipline called “original oratory.” This, we learn, is where he got his first taste of proto-stand-up, delivering “as many jokes as possible” hoping to get a judge who “wanted to laugh and not contemplate” the self-serious diatribes of his opponents.
Being funny in comparison to one’s stolid surroundings is the fuel for Rodney Dangerfield comedies, Da Ali G Show, and even Weekend Update; it is also the foundational idea behind the Harvard Lampoon, the student publication—and feeder program for comedy writers—that Jost eventually comes to run as an undergraduate. Again, he is eager to assure us that this didn’t come easily. “Unlike most clubs at Harvard, it’s entirely merit-based,” he writes. “It doesn’t matter if you grew up rich or your mom was on the Lampoon or your dad was Saddam Hussein.” It takes him three semesters and 80 rejected pieces to get one accepted by the magazine. He describes this day as the happiest of his life.
At Harvard, Jost studies Russian literature, an interest that leads him to travel to St. Petersburg to translate a short story by one of his favorite authors. The trip turns out to be a disaster: He’s lonely, his host family neglects him, he’s too depressed to get any work done, he whiffs really hard with some Spanish girls, culminating in an incident where he vomits a plume of absinthe. He returns home early, noting ruefully that the story remains untranslated. It was here, 90 pages in, that I had to admit to myself I was starting to like the guy.
On-camera Jost is an impenetrable wall of centrist politics and apparent self-satisfaction. That persona is a foundational part of the current Update dynamic: earnest, cautious, privilege-oozing Jost vs. laid-back and eye-rolling—but prickly—Michael Che. Book Jost is different. For one, he possesses interiority, quite a bit of it in fact, and this quality can frustrate even the most committed hater. He takes pains to convince the reader that his path wasn’t as preordained as it seems, but was actually psychologically and emotionally trying. And, as the Russian sojourn suggests, he presents as someone with a measure of artistic integrity, however deeply buried it may be under his thick lacquer of jockish contentment. In fact, he even blames his arrogant on-camera demeanor on his raging insecurities, which prevented him from feeling present in his early Weekend Update days: “I would get nervous and my reaction was to smile or laugh on camera,” he writes, “which was unnatural and probably came across as smug.” Though the pro-Jost politics of Punchable are obvious, this doesn’t render his pleading any less earnest. A true snake would never turn belly-up like this.
Or would he? This canny self-presentation leaves Jost’s own ambition a bit of a lacuna. His agents pop up on occasion to nudge him this way and that, but he’s not always terribly forthcoming about what it is that Colin Jost wants. And though he’s happy to share with you the intimate details of every humiliating injury he’s suffered, whenever Jost takes you inside the walls of 30 Rock, the juicy details dry up. What was in his packet that got him accepted to SNL? We don’t know; what we do know is that Lorne Michaels left Jost waiting for six hours, then said something cryptic at the end of his interview, which confused the rest of the staff, leaving Jost to wait for another 30 minutes in an office while the situation was sorted out. Does he have any issues with cast members or writers? Not that you’ll find out about; many of the passages about his colleagues read like acknowledgments. The only host to come in for any abuse is, not surprisingly, Donald Trump, who, upon meeting Jost, allegedly said: “I like you. You got that good face.” Jost pretends to hate the generally beloved Aidy Bryant in an unfunny ongoing bit that calls to mind Chuck Norris jokes and Dos Equis ads. (“Aidy is not my enemy, because the word ‘enemy’ implies a level of respect she has not earned. Aidy, this is a serious message: The monster store called and they want your personality back.”)
At one point, Jost suffers what sounds like a panic attack outside Lorne’s office as he waits to receive the boss man’s notes after a table read, and as his heart races, he considers his own death, and how he might be memorialized on the upcoming broadcast.SNL seems like a challenging workplace for a whole bunch of reasons, and yet Jost often hides its most interesting machinations behind what I came to think of as an Epic Jack Handey voice, deployed for the purposes of professional obfuscation. For example, instead of explaining how or why Lorne promoted him to the head writer position, Jost inserts a rather unfunny scene of hard-boiled detective patter between himself and Seth Meyers that completely elides the matter. He barely mentions Weekend Update until, all of a sudden, you’re with him 15 minutes before he goes live for the first time. When he finally offers to describe what Lorne is “really like” to the reader, he deflects yet again: “Solid build. 6’2”. Jet-black hair. Has an accent you can never quite place. Hands that have clearly seen the handle of an axe.” It goes on like that for about a page and a half.
Jost seems to think his Catholic guilt is the driving theme of the book; he points it out multiple times, once in all caps (“HAVE I MENTIONED I WAS RAISED CATHOLIC?”). But what he really reveals about himself is that he’s a consummate organization man—both beneficiary and victim of the Peter principle. He goes from Regis to Harvard (where he rowed crew) to the Lampoon to SNL, carrying with him an eagerness to please his betters, even if those betters don’t always sound particularly deserving. In a chapter on his and Michael Che’s disastrous Emmys hosting gig, he admits that he erred on the side of caution, abandoning promising bits—“Steve Harvey Weinstein”(!!)—in the name of making things run smoothly. “We wound up with a show that ended right on time,” he writes, “at the expense of having almost zero comedy.”
An unusual number of contemporary SNL sketches work like this: Two normal people find themselves stuck with someone who is odd, and the audience-surrogate “normal” characters comment on how outré the other person is, repeatedly. The comedy comes less from the reversals of expectation that defined some old-school SNL sketches (“the caveman is actually so competent at practicing law he uses his apparent defect in lawyerly fashion”), or irony (“motivational speaker is actually a total loser”), or even the identification of a certain type (“overweight, enthusiastic sports fan from Chicago”), than from zany performances, buttressed by repeated reminders that something is a little off here. “David S. Pumpkins” is perhaps the most successful example of this tendency, though it rests atop a mountain of lesser efforts.
The show’s other mainstay is the ripped-from-the-headlines cold open, which, under the Trump administration, has become ever more closely ripped from the headlines. I understand the incredible time constraints the writers are under (even more so after reading Punchable), but SNL frequently errs on the side of caution, larding these sketches with recognizable sound bites, desperately mashing together real-world references, often at the expense of sustaining a recognizable comic premise. It’s a little like having the news read to you in “dumb guy voice.” Impressions of Republicans have become so spiteful they’re more ritualistic than funny, impressions of Democrats so saccharine they leave you feeling ill. You could watch this drift happen in real time: Kate McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton began as a power-mad lunatic and ended with the infamously wistful “Hallelujah” performance.
If he once struck me as the center point of SNL’s ills, he now strikes me as a sideeffect.
There’s a way of seeing the show’s aesthetic travails as completely beyond its control. Born in the ’70s, it found its groove satirizing a stale, TV-made monoculture—inane shows, corny commercials, straight-laced newsmen—and since then it has witnessed the complete dissolution of that arrangement. As media has splintered and hybridized in unimaginable ways, SNL has been spread so thin it’s become practically translucent, a skein of satirical latex stretched over the culture. In recent years, funny sendups of omnipresent-but-niche artifacts (the podcast Serial, Lil Pump’s “Gucci Gang”) have seemed to fall flat with a studio audience that simply might not have known the underlying reference material.
The other thing these SNL tendencies have in common is that both are present to varying degrees in A Very Punchable Face—no surprise there. Jost is the head writer after all. But if he once struck me as the center point of the show’s ills, he now strikes me as a side effect or epiphenomenon. He also seems like a solid dude: funny, self-effacing, a good storyteller. (Apparently Zadie Smith agrees.) The resolution to the Jost Mystery offered by the book is hardly triumphant, but I found it humanizing: He’s a charismatic, hardworking guy cursed by his ability to ascend the ranks slightly beyond the limits of his talents. He writes repeatedly about his Weekend Update critics, people like me, and how much pain we caused him. “I took all the criticism to heart and I was really, really sad for about two full years of my life,” he writes. “I thought, Shit, I’m trying my best and people really don’t like me. Maybe I should just quit so everybody on Earth can celebrate.” He says he used this anger to focus, to make himself improve. This hurt to read, until I realized I may have assisted in his betterment.
Absolution secured, I was ready to abandon my disordered grievances. That is, until I came to the end of the book, to the prestige Jost had been saving all along, an epilogue that begins with a quote credited to his agents: “Sooo … when are you leaving SNL?” Jost, who once worked as a Staten Island Advance reporter, buried the lede under 302 other pages. “In terms of ‘family friendly jobs,’ SNL ranks somewhere between long-haul truck driver and Somali pirate,” he writes. It’s “an amazing and fulfilling life—to a point. And I think that after fifteen years, I’ve finally reached that point.” Soon he’ll be off to parts unknown (Hollywood), free at last of the confinement—and support—of his institutional walls. The book was phase one in the creation of Free Agent Jost, and he needed to do the one thing all those years on camera could not: make people like him. Well, it worked. I felt a little like Agent Kujan in The Usual Suspects, only realizing I’d been had once Colin’s already down the block, stepping into a Town Car with ScarJo behind the wheel.
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Demonstrators participate in the “March for Change” protest led by Clemson University football players, June 13, 2020, in Clemson, South Carolina.Maddie Meyer/Getty Images
As part of the ongoing Free Speech Project, Future Tense editorial director Andrés Martinez invited Robby Soave, associate editor at Reason; Pardis Mahdavi, dean of social sciences at Arizona State University; and Sabine Galvis, a 2020 graduate of ASU who served as the executive editor of the student newspaper the State Press, to talk on Slack about rising concerns (and rising pushback to those concerns) about eroding tolerance for free speech on college campuses across America, and throughout society.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Andrés: Pardis, shortly after President Trump’s bizarre Fourth of July rant at Mount Rushmore against a “new far-left fascism,” you told me this was the latest sign of a “moral panic” around the question of a supposed erosion of free speech in this country. Soon after, a letter published in Harpers, authored by an eclectic, mostly liberal, mix of public intellectuals (including Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick), also expressed concern over what they considered a “restriction of debate” on the left (while making it clear that Donald Trump is a bigger threat). How do you see things in this fraught year of 2020? Is this the golden age of free speech in the U.S., or do you worry about where we’re headed?
Pardis: I vacillate between worry and hope.
Across the country, debates about the campus culture wars have been mired in anxieties about free speech, academic freedom, and the perceived lack of resiliency of millennials characterized as the proliferation of “snowflake culture.” Indeed, institutions of higher education have been seen as the battleground for a determination of American values and American-ness. Students, like those President Trump addressed at the Dream City Church in Phoenix recently, are seen as the foot soldiers.
These discursive trends reveal a modern-day moral panic about youth gone astray and are contributing to an identity crisis in higher education, rather than helping to alleviate it. Like other moral panics, the narrative around higher education in 2020 is based largely on assumptions. This is not unlike other moral panics that have preceded this one—reefer madness in the 1930s, moral panics about sexuality during the sexual revolution. But rather than seeing protesting and engaged students on campuses today as morally astray, it is more useful to understand their actions in the context of a desire to reform higher education, address the identity crisis, and bring more dialogue about values into the classroom and higher ed writ large.
Andrés: I know you have studied in great depth questions of inclusion and academic freedom on campuses across the country, but before we get into that, do you think there is a distinction between how free speech debates play out on campus versus the rest of society?
Pardis: I think that the debates are playing out on campus, but they mirror what is happening in society today
I do think that we need to be worried about free speech, but we need to be clearer about what our worries are. Students want more freedom to speak and to experiment. Simply put, they want the freedom to be wrong sometimes, too. But they want more speech, rather than less. And the moral panic seems to be casting students as snowflakes who want to be free from speech
Andrés: I do wonder if there isn’t a generational shift, though, in how we think of disagreeable speech that makes us uncomfortable. In one of my journalism classes a couple of years back, most of my students said it would be reasonable to ban what they considered controversial speakers (such as Trump administration officials) from campus. The one student in class who felt strongly that any invited speaker should be heard was a Russian journalist here on a State Department exchange. It was pretty funny, as he was like, “But this is America.” So I wonder what you mean when you say students want the freedom to be wrong sometimes, too—because that seems to be what the folks in the moral panic school are saying, too.
Pardis: So, I think that students want the space (which some derisively chide as “safe spaces”) to wrestle with these difficult issues. They want to be able to try out new words, frameworks, phrasing. But they want to feel safe to do that. They don’t want to be called out for saying the wrong thing. So our job in higher ed is to create networks of belonging where students can feel like they belong and are being heard, but where they can dig into the challenging issues
Andrés: Robby, for much of our history, it was the left that worried about the right restricting debate and speech, and now there is this concern about political correctness on the left leading to an erosion of speech. Sitting at the libertarian citadel of Reason, do you feel there has been a shift in terms of where the threat lies, or do the threats to speech continue to come from all sides? What worries you most these days?
Robby: I think one of the difficulties in discussing these issues is scale. Certainly, there has been plenty of catastrophizing coming from people on the political right. We are told that the campus free speech problem is a crisis, political correctness is the worst it’s ever been, young people hate free speech, that sort of thing. There are enough examples—many of them quite egregious!—that if you’re looking to demonstrate that this is the case, there are things you can point to. Some promote this narrative while ignoring the very real threats to free speech posed by the government and specifically the Trump administration.
All that said, it does appear to me to be the case that culturally speaking, a climate of self-censorship has taken shape in many elite progressive social circles, college campuses being the first and most obvious.
It is not universal, there is still plenty of interesting dialogue happening. But some students, and indeed some professors—many who are themselves on the political left—do seem to run into trouble when they discuss certain topics, often relating to race or sex. And that trouble is usually caused by a small number of ideologically motivated students whose view of free speech is that they essentially have a right not to be offended.
Pardis: I don’t disagree that people are self-censoring—but I think that folks on the right and left are frustrated with self-censorship.
Robby: That I would heartily agree with. I hear all the time from professors who represent the “old” left, ACLU types, and are increasingly frustrated by their students—not all of them, but the small number of unreasonable ones who demand a lot of attention and appeasement.
Andrés: Sabine, you just graduated from ASU, where you were the executive editor of the State Press newspaper. Congrats (and how you managed all that in a time of pandemic, is a separate question for another day). What’s your take on us older folks speculating on your generation’s views on free speech and your “slowflakeiness”?
Sabine: If anything, I think political correctness is generally asking for more thoughtful speech. While there are some egregious examples, as Robby said, of people who may take it to an extreme, I think that does not represent youth and students at large.
But what is being called snowflakeiness is really a push for public figures to be accountable for speech that members of the public (largely, but not exclusively, made up of Gen Z and millennials) see as being bigoted, harmful, or simply incorrect. There is a demand for accountability that can gain traction very quickly and organically.
In general, I think this kind of criticism can be seen as adding to the discourse, as a counterpoint to whatever offensive statements are made, which really affirms free speech. After all, free speech never called for freedom from criticism and consequences.
Pardis: I would agree with that, Sabine. I think that the phrase “political correctness,” though, has also been taken out of context and triggers moral panic.
Sabine: It’s a catchphrase, like the term “snowflake,” that’s made it easier at times to malign the intentions of youth and students.
Andrés: Were there speakers who came to campus in your years at ASU that you felt shouldn’t have had the right/opportunity to speak?
Sabine: I think the most controversial speaker I can remember is Carl Goldberg, who was brought to campus by College Republicans United, a far-right political club at ASU. A number of groups, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, have criticized Goldberg for misrepresenting Islam and being Islamophobic, while the Southern Poverty Law Center described him as an “anti-Islam lecturer.” CRU set up the event as a discussion between Goldberg and the Muslim Students Association, who invited a local imam to provide a counter perspective. I don’t think there’s any need to give space to bigoted speech on campus, and the event created a false equivalency between the two speakers, given that Goldberg is heavily prejudiced against Islam and promotes Islamophobia. The interesting thing is that CRU said in an email at the time that “Press is NOT welcome to attend the event,” which is a hypocritical stance from a group that claims to love freedom.
Robby: I mean, it’s very difficult coming up with a precise term to describe the range of examples we’re usually talking about—from, say, Ben Shapiro getting shouted down at a college campus to data guy David Shor being fired from his job. “Cancel culture” seems to be the term that is currently winning.
Andrés: Robby, you’ve done some great reporting on some of the more disconcerting episodes on campus, but as you also say, there is a question of scale and how prevalent these episodes really are. Columbia President and First Amendment scholar Lee Bollinger had a powerful essay in the Atlantic last year saying this is far less of an epidemic than is sometimes suggested.
To shift gears a bit: You are working on a book about content moderation on social media. Do you feel that what we see online is analogous to the campus debates, and whether you are worried about a decline of free speech online? (Seems like many people fret about the opposite.)
Robby: I think that social media has greatly expanded our capacity to engage in speech. It would be hard to argue otherwise. I mean, right now, we are using an online platform to hold a debate! Remarkable. We forget how much harder this would have been just 15 years ago. But more speech isn’t always pleasant, and in fact, social media has permitted a lot of irritating people to make themselves known, and to identify each other and group together. On the far right, this manifests itself in the form of some really awful racist and sexist people—the alt-right, for instance—engaged in campaigns of harassment that make the internet a much more miserable place. But you also have this problem where now everything people say is public record forever, and it’s trivially easy to go digging, find an unwise remark or joke from perhaps years ago, and get someone fired or dragged through the mud. And this happens to people on the right and the left.
Pardis: Totally agree.
Robby: Social media spaces act as public spaces, but they are privately owned and administered, so the rules here can be more flexible than what the First Amendment requires of, say, a public university. So there are a lot of interesting debates to be had about how much moderation there should be, and if it can be done in a nonbiased way.
Like, in a truly public space, I mean, the Westboro Baptist Church can shriek obscenities at people’s funerals. That’s literally what the Supreme Court has ruled! On Twitter and Facebook, they don’t have to permit that. But they could.
But what results is people being “censored” on social media, and then they complain about it. And sometimes if you look, it does seem like the call was wrong, or unfair, or here’s 80 examples where someone said the same thing and didn’t get in trouble.
Andrés: I don’t envy Mark Zuckerberg. The right accuses him of too much content moderation, the left of not doing enough. And yes, these are not First Amendment questions. He can set whatever rules he wants on his platform.
Robby: The platforms do get attacked either way, yes. Too much moderation, and Sen. Josh Hawley comes for you. Not enough, and it’s Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Andrés: How do each of you feel about political ads on Twitter and Facebook? The former said it wouldn’t accept them anymore, FB still does. How do you all feel about tolerating a certain amount of what Colbert used to call “truthiness” from candidates on these platforms?
Pardis: I guess I think we need to be wary of censorship of any kind. Our job as educators is to help teach readers how to sift through information. Teaching critical thinking skills and looking for Truth (capital T intentional) is a key component of higher ed. So that is the role we play.
Robby: I prefer Facebook’s approach. I think expecting Mark Zuckerberg to be the arbiter of what’s true online would be foolish, and Zuckerberg was correct to realize this. I’m intrigued by Facebook’s new council that will adjudicate difficult speech questions; this could be a model for other platforms.
Andrés: It’s also true that we can no longer pretend to be in some sealed-off Fortress America. As you noted in a recent article, Robby, two-thirds of Facebook’s new Oversight Board are foreign experts, as befits a global platform. Increasingly, too, institutions like the NBA and even Hollywood studios have to be mindful of Chinese censors when exercising their own speech. Should we worry that our speech freedoms might be devalued by globalization (paradoxically?) regardless of our internal spats on the issue?
Pardis: The global angle is really important, and I’m glad you brought that up. For me, being censored, arrested, and kicked out of Iran for my writings really informs my views on the topic. And it makes me appreciate the importance of academic freedom and free speech here in the U.S.
Andrés: I wondered about that, Pardis. You courageously gave a speech at the University of Tehran in 2007 on sexual politics,
and within 14 minutes of getting started, you were hauled off stage by four soldiers who’d barged in to put a stop to your talk. Subsequently you were detained and expelled from the country. How does that inform your views on speech?
Pardis: I think it makes me really attuned to the importance of freedom to speak.
It makes it so that I don’t take for granted the fact that I can write a book that may be critical of the government and then not be arrested
But it also makes me committed even more to higher education, specifically that which a liberal arts education offers. Teaching students to question, to think, and to uphold the freedom to hold that space
Andrés: Does your experience in Tehran make you empathize with controversial far-right speakers who get disinvited or shouted down on campuses?
Pardis: That’s an interesting question. Because I do want to go back to Sabine’s point about the call for thoughtful speech. My experiences in Tehran were so haunting because I was trying to be very thoughtful about how I presented my work, and it was data driven—the result of a decade of research.
Andres: But who’s to decide what’s thoughtful?
Pardis: I wasn’t speaking up to offend people, I was speaking up because people’s rights were being violated.
Sabine: It’s also important to remember that censorship abroad centers around criticism of government and powerful officials. Here in the United States, I see people like those who signed the Harper’s letter, claim that they’re being censored because there is public outcry against their speech and actions.
And so in assessing these cases, I think it’s important to take into consideration the power differential.
Andrés: The power differential between?
Pardis: Between who is regulating and who is being regulated. A lot of this is also getting mixed up with the social pandemic of racism that rages in our country.
BIPOC individuals have been silenced for a long time. And they want to feel safe to speak up and speak back.
A big problem as I see it is that free speech is posited as the counter weight to efforts around diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And the two are not diametrically opposed forces. Not at all. But that is how it’s being framed.
Sabine: Public figures have larger platforms than the average individual who may criticize them online. I think criticism from youth, students and BIPOC when they “punch up” can be considered as adding to freedom of speech, rather than censorship. Certainly, social media can amplify their power in a way that is unprecedented.
Robby: My issue with the “power differential” argument is that it often seems to assume that there are two groups, the marginalized and the powerful. But people can be marginalized in some situations and powerful in others. Obviously, if you belong to certain historically oppressed groups, that has an impact on you in many ways. At the same time, it’s been fairly easy for the supposedly powerless to drum up social media canceling campaigns (for lack of better terminology) against the supposedly powerful.
Andrés: I always think of poor Trotsky when I hear about cancel campaigns. He was canceled in so many ways!
Robby: I think the next phase of this conversation will move to the workplace. I recently wrote about a San Francisco museum curator who was forced to resign because he said, after noting the museum’s diversity efforts, that well, of course, there would still be paintings from white artists, too. Was it clumsy phrasing? Sure. But it created a petition that branded him a white supremacist and demanded his immediate ouster. This is the kind of thing that worries me, and probably worries a lot of other people. Was it properly a free speech issue? I guess not. Still seems bad and wrong.
Pardis: But this is why we need freedom to be wrong, and freedom to be clumsy, and freedom to talk about things, about pain points, about racism in safe ways.
Andrés: Slate alum Michelle Goldberg wrote in her New York Times column that she does worry about the left having a speech problem in a climate of “punitive heretic-hunting” (speaking of Trotsky), and she alluded to NYU professor Jonathan Haidt’s criticism of “safetyism“ in these debates, when disagreements are quick to lead to calls for HR to get involved. She wrote that “even sympathetic people will come to resent a left that refuses to make a distinction between deliberate slurs, awkward mistakes and legitimate disagreements.”
Pardis: That’s why it keeps coming back to campuses. We need to be having the conversations that get us to better frameworks and phrasing, so that those who want to push political correctness don’t veer into extreme waters of moral panic, either.
Andrés: Robby, I wonder what advice you’d give to universities after all you’ve reported on … to not curb freedom of inquiry that we seek to preserve?
Robby: Fire a bunch of administrators!
Andrés: Whoa, careful! I think I technically may be one.
Robby: University administrations do too much policing of speech, often in the form of investigations. Lots and lots of investigations. I don’t think professors should have to fear that a classroom discussion occasionally veering off topic is going to trigger a Title IX trial. We need to restore a presumption of good faith.
Andrés: Sabine, you get the last word. How do you think you will look back at this time, when you were in college during the Trump administration? Will you look back at this time of incivility and polarization as a precursor of better days, or are you wary that this will be the environment you will be working in for coming years?
Sabine: I hope that future generations feel empowered to help shape the society that they want to see. I do see these turbulent times as a path toward “better days,” but I don’t think incivility is as much of a problem as it is being made out to be. Civility is a comfort for those whose identities are not at stake in the discourse. It shouldn’t be prioritized over standing up for marginalized peoples, and sometimes it’s necessary to shake the table in order to make way for change. Saying something bigoted in a polite tone isn’t respectful, it’s only a false veneer that protects those espousing harm. Tolerance doesn’t need to extend to proponents of bigotry, because bigotry is inherently violent, and I don’t think civility is always required in turn. More than anything, I think the current environment pushes us all to be better. Rather than looking at “cancel culture” as something to fear, I think we can look to it as a moment for growth and learning, which makes me optimistic.
Local residents show support for a Confederate soldier statue on the grounds of the City of Virginia Beach Municipal Center in Virginia during a rally calling for the statue’s removal on Aug. 24, 2017.Alex Wong/Getty Images
Earlier this month, a meme was shared in the Facebook group Save Southern Heritage that featured the portraits of two men: the Prophet Mohammed on the left and Robert E. Lee on the right, their chins tilting toward each other. “[Mohammed] owned many slaves. Robert E. Lee was against slavery,” the caption reads. “So why are we tearing down statues instead of mosques?” That post, which received 248 likes, is still up, despite the suggestion of real-world violence (and its use of Mohammed’s image). But a comment, rambling about Arabs and Jews “running this mess” as a “little joke,” was removed within hours. Whether it was Facebook’s algorithms, or content moderators, or one of the group’s eight admins, a decision was made that one had to go while the other could stay. One slipped through the porous “free speech” filter; the other did not.
In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, demands for Facebook to address hate speech have escalated, coinciding with a nationwide movement to remove Confederate statues and flags from cities, states, and institutions long imbued with Confederate symbolism. More than 1,100 companies and organizations have pulled ads from Facebook for at least the month of July as part of the #StopHateforProfit advertiser boycott. At the same time, Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia has ordered the removal of the statue of Lee that famously towers over Monument Avenue in Richmond, Mississippi decided to drop the cross of the Confederate battle flag from its state flag, and NASCAR banned the flag from its races.
These movements, intertwined and mutually reinforcing, pose a particular threat to those who consider themselves present-day Confederates. From their perspective, Facebook has become more essential than ever to amplifying their message at a critical moment in history—just as Facebook has shown a new willingness to police their speech.
Facebook has recently deplatformed hundreds of groups that express overtly violent, white supremacist beliefs, such as those associated with the Boogaloo movement. But the platform has yet to settle on a consistent approach to a more difficult—and more common—question: how far to go in policing groups that the platform doesn’t consider “hate groups,” but that nonetheless often attract hateful content. This gray area contains hundreds, perhaps thousands, of neo-Confederate groups that are thriving on the platform. Individual posts containing hate speech are sometimes flagged and removed, but as a whole, these groups have so far remained relatively unscathed amid Facebook’s heightened moderation, continuing to churn out thousands of posts a day in support of the Lost Cause. By insisting they promote “heritage not hate,” they’re able to skirt the boundaries of content moderation, even as their ideology rests on a reverence for the Confederacy and the antebellum South. Their complicated position on Facebook gets to the heart of the problems inherent to content moderation itself. It is a slow, often arbitrary process, driven not by clear understandings of what “hate speech” and “hate groups” are, but by haphazard flagging, a reliance on self-policing, and confusion over the kind of space Facebook or its critics want to create.
Since Facebook users exist in echo chambers, it’s easy to miss how widespread Confederate heritage communities are if your Facebook friends aren’t sympathetic to their cause. Many such groups, both public and private, have existed since the mid-2010s, but a spate of new groups appeared this summer. Some local varieties have just hundreds of members, while other national groups, such as Confederate Citizens, have nearly 100,000 members. Not only are these groups extensive, but they also serve as content factories. Groups such as In Defense of the Confederacy, Dixie Cotton Confederates, and Save Southern Heritage see hundreds of posts each day, which circulate rapidly around other groups, pages, and news feeds. At heart, these groups share some common features: the casting of Lee as a benevolent, misunderstood figure despite his documented defense of slavery in the U.S.; the efforts to preserve and build Confederate iconography; the indignation at the toppling of statues; and the—rhetorical?—call to arms.
Many of these groups spend a lot of time thinking about hateful speech. Just take a look at their self-policing and content policies: It’s not uncommon for a group to explicitly forbid hate speech, racist content, and bullying. Nor is it rare for moderators to post and repost these rules in a group’s main discussion. Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University known for her work on extremist communities on Facebook, told me that this dynamic is particular to Confederate groups. A public-facing Facebook presence is important to the Confederate agenda of, for instance, getting the Lost Cause narrative in children’s textbooks. “At the same time, they also attract this sort of hateful element, and so they know they need to clamp down on that or it will look bad,” Squire said. “I guess my question is always: If people didn’t talk like that on your page, you probably wouldn’t have to write that rule, right?”
Moderators and group members are vigilant in part because they’re aware some of the content they attract (and many would like to espouse) won’t fall within Facebook’s policies. “I fully respect the First Amendment. But the Wizard of Facebook doesn’t. I don’t want to get kicked off Facebook or have my growing page taken down because of racist words,” posted a moderator of Confederate Defenders, a public group, a few years ago. That same moderator wrote earlier this month, with greater urgency, “With all the censorship going around, I don’t want to lose my page. PLEASE BE CAREFUL WITH YOUR LANGUAGE.”
For many Confederates, that censorship is a worthwhile trade-off. “If I’m willing to self-censor myself and my organization, I can reach a reasonable number of people with my message and I can do it every day,” Kirk Lyons, an admin of Save Southern Heritage, told me. He also runs the Facebook page for the Southern Legal Resource Center, an organization he co-founded that has been called the “legal arm of the neo-Confederate movement.” Lyons identifies as an unreconstructed Southerner, but the Southern Poverty Law Center considers him a white supremacist lawyer. (Lyons denies this and maintains that the SPLC’s article on him contains many inaccuracies.) Lyons sees Facebook as a sort of necessary evil to getting his message out. “It’s worth putting up with all of Mark [Zuckerberg]’s nonsense … because it’s so much easier than it was in the email age or the letter and postage stamp age,” he said. If he’s careful, he explained, his individual posts can reach hundreds of thousands of people, such as a recent image of a Confederate flag—his Confederate flag—flown over NASCAR’s race at Talladega.
How sincere the language opposing hate speech comes across varies from group to group, user to user, which is fitting for a movement known for its broad ideological spectrum. Some say that their beliefs are compatible with an outright rejection of racism or even disrespectful content; they may believe they can revere Dixie on their own terms, irrespective of the racial violence it’s rooted in. Along these lines, the least incendiary—and the most moderated—groups tend to focus on Confederate soldiers and their descendants, as well as historical documents.
On the more extreme end of the spectrum, groups affiliated with the League of the South are known for openly discussing white supremacist beliefs. (For this reason, Facebook actually deplatforms them: A few weeks ago, for instance, Facebook took down one such group based in North Carolina, though a new group replaced it within a day.) Group discussions often bear out the disparities among Confederates’ approach to hate speech. In screenshots Squire sent me from a private Confederate “monument protection” group in her county, a number of members expressed anger at seeing a fellow Confederate hold up a sign at a rally on July 11 that read, “NO FREE COLORED TVS TODAY”—presumably a racist dog whistle. “I don’t care how you look at this, but to me this is racist period,” said one user. “People state over and over we are for history and heritage yet make signs like this.” Some reiterated this isn’t what they stand for, some didn’t understand what the big fuss was about, and others were more focused on the sign’s potential to give fuel to detractors and the “liberal media.”
But that sort of pushback is dwarfed at times by the amount of hateful speech that persists. Group members often post about landing themselves in “Facebook jail” for a reason. Even in the public groups, it’s not unusual to see racial slurs, some of which aren’t later removed. Last month, for example, a member of Save Southern Heritage used the N-word to refer to people “destroying and looting.” “I’m impressed you weren’t banned for that word on FB,” another member replied. “I agree with every word though.” More common than racial slurs, however, are calls to violence—sometimes specific, sometimes more vague. In a group called “Save the Confederacy and restore our Confederate heritage flags up,” a post on a Black Lives Matter demonstration prompted a few users to say that drivers should run protesters over and “take out as many as possible.” In Dale’s Confederate Group, which is now private, a user commented this month that the best thing to do with Democratic cities is to bomb them.
All the examples mentioned here, aside from Squire’s, come from public groups. Private groups are strict about admittance: Virtually all require you to answer questions about your commitment to the Confederacy, your opinion on the real cause of the Civil War, and what the Confederate flag means to you upon your request to join. Given the content that’s visible in public groups, it’s safe to assume that more borderline-to-outright-hateful speech thrives in these self-contained spaces. “One of the eternal problems with Facebook is that if this stuff goes on in a private group, the only way to report the content is to join the group, find the content, and report it. Each report takes 10 clicks. It’s putting a lot of work on a user,” said Squire. And in private Confederacy groups, those users may not be inclined to do any of that work.
A recent civil rights audit of Facebook, carried out by independent civil rights experts and lawyers over the course of two years, criticized the platform for prioritizing free speech over nondiscrimination. The auditors concluded, among other things, that Facebook needs to be more proactive about identifying and removing extremist and white nationalist content. “I don’t know if Mark appreciates that hateful speech has harmful results, and that Facebook groups have real-world consequences,” Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, told the New York Times after the civil rights report was released.
Those real-world consequences are worth considering. Before Facebook restricted public access to its application programming interface, or API, in 2018, Squire used Facebook’s data to systematically study about 700,000 users across 2,000 hate groups and 10 different ideologies. Of these groups, the Confederates were the least likely to cross over with other ideologies: About 85 percent of them belonged only to Confederate groups. There are two stories here. The first is that Confederate groups are relatively contained and self-sustaining, and that their members don’t dabble much in other, more violent ideologies. From that perspective, their threat consists mostly of the speech within their groups. The second story is about the other 15 percent of Confederates who cross over into militia, white nationalist, alt-right, and anti-immigrant groups. The prime example of the dangers of that crossover is the Unite the Right rally in 2017. Although the rally was ostensibly held to protect the Lee monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, it became a gathering for hate groups across the far-right, including neo-Nazis and Klansmen, that left at least 33 injured and one counterprotester dead.
It’s not controversial to say that neo-Nazi or Boogaloo groups should go, but it’s less clear what a mainstream platform should do with “heritage not hate” groups—groups that, as the SPLC puts it, “in their effort to gloss over the legacy of slavery in the South … strengthen the appeal of Lost Cause mythology, opening the door for violent incidents.” Even the SPLC, which refers to neo-Confederacy as a whole as a revisionist branch of American white nationalism, doesn’t consider a number of Confederate heritage groups, such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans, to be hate groups.
When I asked Squire—someone who’s outspoken about her activism and who provides data on far-right extremists to the SPLC and antifa activists—whether she believes Facebook should allow these groups to operate on its platform, she pointed to the fact that their speech isn’t illegal. And more than that, she said, their beliefs are “not fringe down here” in the South. She mentioned that state representatives in her state of North Carolina haveties to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill gave $2.5 million last year to that organization after protesters toppled a statue of a Confederate soldier on campus in 2018. “We’re fighting it, obviously, but it’s a very long and uphill battle,” Squire continued. “And I think Facebook has to bridge both of those realities.”
As people continue to call for more robust definitions of hate speech online, it may be helpful to remember that sometimes what we want from Facebook is misaligned with how the platform operates. Facebook can be dangerous not just for its content, but for its lack of public data; for how its (private) algorithms work; for the ways it amplifies certain voices and can lead to deeper polarization and, in some cases, radicalization. There’s a reason researchers are alwaysgoingonabout the dire need for transparency. Outside of calling for Facebook to police its most extreme content, it’s worth asking what we can reasonably expect from a private company that operates in its own interest.
Sometimes what we want from Facebook is misaligned with how the platformoperates.
After Facebook released the findings of the civil rights audit, the Verge’s Casey Newton succinctly summed up the problem in his newsletter: “The company could implement all of the auditors’ suggestions and nearly every dilemma would still come down to the decision of one person overseeing the communications of 1.73 billion people each day.” The same could be said of the majority of #StopHateforProfit’s 10 recommendations for Facebook, which demand changes such as further audits, a C-suite civil rights executive, and heightened content and group moderation. “This campaign is not calling for Facebook to adopt a new business model, spin off its acquisitions, or end all algorithmic promotion of groups,” wrote Newton. Nor is it calling for an overhaul of Facebook’s approach to transparency. Yet these sorts of changes may in fact be necessary to addressing the root of Facebook’s speech and radicalization problems.
The complexities of Confederate discourse on the platform ultimately show that singling out hate speech as the primary target of public outrage at Facebook is, in part, a distraction—a Sisyphean endeavor that has a tendency to obscure more serious issues. Such a focus leaves us with the classic censorship vs. free speech dichotomy, which inevitably leads to some people demanding a return to the First Amendment, and others retorting that the Constitution doesn’t pertain to private sites, ad infinitum. What borderline speech can force us to do is to move beyond the terms of that debate, to update the conversation (and call to action) to reflect the platform as it operates today.
But what a better conversation—let alone moderation framework—would actually look like is unclear. Newton writes that the best hope for addressing Facebook’s role in accelerating and promoting hate speech, misinformation, and extremist views comes not from the campaign or the audit, but from Congress, which has the potential to question the company’s “underlying dynamics” and “staggering size.” And that’s certainly one avenue for change, especially with Zuckerberg testifying before the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee on Wednesday. But informed government regulation often relies on citizen engagement, and in the case of Facebook’s speech problems, users must grapple not only with the flashiest and most extreme bits of Facebook’s content, but also with the shades of speech that exist just below that, and the mechanisms that allow that speech to flourish.
