Win for the First Amendment? Not So Fast

As usual, the 'victory' for the First Amendment wasn't restorative. Instead, it was predictive. And limited.

Jimmy Kimmel came back onto his after-hours show last night, filled with some remorse, some emotion, and a great deal of posturing about free speech. All of which was fine, and somewhat restorative.

Aha, but not so fast. Two things have stood out in the detritus afterwards:

• Not all affiliates are showing Kimmel anymore. To be noted is the Washington, DC area, where the Sinclair network is making sure 47 doesn't see it; and
• A new, especially notorious, prevention of free speech, potentially far more contentious and far more devastating, is presently taking place within the Pentagon.

To the first: A reminder that, to paraphrase A. J. Liebling, that the only way to guarantee a free press is to buy one. Kimmel is back on about 80% of the stations he once was, but as he himself pointed out, in significantly large population areas such as Portland, OR; St. Louis; and Louisville, he continues to be blacked out. Which means that free speech continues to have a price, whatever that price continues to be. Yes, of course I'm glad he's back, and bemoan the temporary banishment of him from the airways because, as he so aptly put it, "The president can't take a joke." 

What he should have added was, on him. I sincerely hope that Kimmel will get right back on his sarcastic horse, because 47 just made a horrible, incredibly embarrassing (if you're paying any attention and are mindful of his ego problem), speech to the United Nations that will go deep into the annals of complete nonsense. 

And--I might add--his talk at a dinner given him by King Charles of England, in which he looked like a 3rd grader trying to read for the second or third time, is another poorly reported (I found it on You Tube) moment that should make everyone pause about just what we've done to ourselves. The richness of those pathetic performances should give Kimmel and Stephen Colbert plenty of fodder to load their cannons.

To the second: This is The Pentagon Papers writ large. The Pentagon is now demanding that, to report any information inside it, reporters must run it past them first. This is a repeat of what happened more than 50 years ago, when the New York Times and Washington Post discovered, and at first ran, what became known as the Pentagon Papers--a secret, running account of the decisions and strategy encircling our participation in the Vietnam War. They revealed that the government had, in effect, conspired on an ongoing lie as to how it looked upon the fighting that ensued. Predictably, the Nixon administration sued to have these and other papers (including the Milwaukee Journal), in effect, muzzle themselves for reasons of National Security, but the Supreme Court ruled otherwise.

Looks like this situation will have to go to court as well; some media moguls will have to go after it. This is "prior restraint," as it's called: The effort to keep information from the public by creating a self-sustaining barrier. It's exactly what The Pentagon Papers case sought to bar, and--at least back then--exactly what the newspapers sought to overcome. 

But if the president thinks he's king and isn't to be challenged, this is what you get: a firewall that, in case we should be preparing for war--note that 47 wants the Department of Defense's name switched to the Department of War--we would never know until it was imminent.

That doesn't prevent what happened to Jimmy Kimmel from amounting to a big deal: It sure was. But the  Pentagon deal is far, far more important to sustaining the kind of conversation that should happen in a democracy: whether or not to put our young people's lives at risk, or whether to expand the use of the military to take over cities. I wonder whether that has, or will, become common anti-press policy in the other Cabinet departments--State and Treasury Departments come to mind--and if it will soon become accepted practice.

47 and minions are always 'trying stuff' to see if they can get away with it. Jimmy Kimmel's firing and resulting hubbub were perfectly timed to distract us from what might have been surreptitiously planned for weeks, perhaps months. Remember--Project 2025 was in the works, enough to entertain plausible deniability, for quite some time before the last election. All the administration may be doing is continuing to follow the pre-planned script. 

Also note this: along with the reporters' ban comes the story that generals and admirals are being called to the Pentagon for some kind of meeting with Secretary (I hate to capitalize that) Hegseth. Nobody knows why. Could we be going to war without anybody knowing, including Congress? Inquiring minds need to know.

Democracy remains at risk, now more than ever.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

You Can Feel Both Ways About Charlie Kirk

One of the most ironic things about extremists is their absolute anathema of feeling ambivalent about anything. To them, all the answers are simple. You just have to sit down and figure it out.

It was so with Charlie Kirk, too. He thought--and this has been re-published several times now--that the unwanted deaths of some Americans was worth the maintenance of what he believed to be viable and deserved gun rights, that that was the price that needed to be paid for his concept of 'freedom.'

Thus are the machinations of those who believe that they, too, will live forever, and that nobody would dare mess with their lives and their very existence. He, instead, became a sought target, and a recipient of the very philosophy that he espoused.

Will I miss Charlie Kirk? No, but I'm sad for his family. His ideas, though, are still out of the mainstream of American thought, though follow-up articles will suggest otherwise. I'm sure he became quite rich because of the intensity of his presentations of them. With that comes some semblance of deservedness and lack of perspective as to what exactly his worth really is in the bigger picture of things. His potential to do far more harm to our public discourse, largely because of the lack of effective resistance to his absolutist notions, stood to propel him to what some may have called future greatness.

Is he a tribute to our First Amendment freedom of expression? Only if you accept it as a gateway to his insistence that his way is the only right way. Did he want to take people on? Yes, we know he did. But only in surging to prove his point, not to accept anyone else's. He didn't flourish in the exchange of ideas. He wanted to bury and destroy others' adequacy. That didn't feed his intellect. It fed his ego.

But did he deserve to be attacked and killed? No. See? I can feel both ways about him. That he became a recipient of his own twisted values shouldn't be surprising, though, the way that political violence has never drifted far from our consciousness--and that goes back quite some way, at least to Lincoln's assassination if not farther. Our very nation, in fact, was borne out of the inability to compromise and willingness to shoot it out with the British rather than sit around and wait for them to recognize Americans as equals.

Few people alive remember the shooting of Huey Long, he also of a certain form of craziness and deception disguised as sincerity, and also known for his sweat-drenched, hyper-emotional populism. In 1935, at the height of the attention being paid to him, someone planted a bullet in him and he died from its complications. Being a U.S. Senator and what appeared to be an intraparty presidential candidate who was about to challenge FDR for nomination to a second term, he was a far greater threat to democracy than Kirk, though we will never know what kind of threat Kirk would have been now.

But he understood it. Kirk understood what kind of influence he could be. Because he did what everybody agrees one has the right to do, but few actually do it: He contrived a style of thinking and never relented about informing others of it. We all say we have that right, but only those of us most daring ever afford ourselves of it.

Why? Because few of us are ever as hard-baked as we need to make ourselves to absorb the impact of it and the feedback that will inevitably ensue. But Charlie Kirk likely figured out that, if he hung in there, he would gain a following that would make the naysayers irrelevant. It would take work, and it did. It would take time, and it did, though far less than most people thought. 

He must have also seen, and in a sense copied, the effects of someone else who had made the decision to go national with his irrationalisms and--surprise!--he found that people were hungering for it, hungering for the simple, force-filled, pseudo-religious, absolutist ideas. Suddenly, he found that his demagoguery took hold, and we have had to endure ten years of it--and running, finding its way to the White House and its dangerous power.

That's what happens when someone decides to utilize the freedom they have and twist it out of recognition. That is what happens when nobody takes it upon themselves and calls out the nonsense of it, or at least doesn't do it enough. That is what happens when the fierce undertones of the lies and innuendoes aren't responded to with facts laden with equivalent, fierce undertones: Nonsense becomes truth, and truth disappears.

Someone stopped Charlie Kirk from rising to the top of the culture with his piles and piles of illogical conclusions. But there will be another like him, soon enough. Kirk may be made into a martyr of nonsense: someone who, in death, may become larger than the life he was leading. His legacy will be reflective of our inertia and neglect, which also continue.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark