Americans old metaphors about free speech & debate don’t work with social media. But we still cling to them says Barb McQuade

I just read Barb McQuade’s new book. Attack from Within. How Disinformation is Sabotaging America. I had planned to go see her in person at the Commonwealth Club and ask her some questions, but it was sold out, plus I knew what would happen, the first person at the mic would say, “I don’t have a question so much as a 3 part comment ” and talk for 5 minutes.” (I’m guilty of that myself, I even used that phrasing as a joke line with my friend Cory Doctorow and Annalee Newitz at his book reading for Red Team Blues. )

My goal when asking book authors questions is to help them amplify the parts I see as important in a memorable way. Especially for an audience that needs to hear it, but will likely never read the book.

So when I heard Barb was going to be on the Nicole Sandler show I wrote Nicole and said, “I think the most important point Barb makes in the book is that with social media our old metaphors of speech & debate are out of date and they are being used against us. Please get Barb to repeat this, with examples! Go right to Chapter 5, Why America is Particularly Vulnerable to Disinformation”

Well, as it turned out there was a scheduling issue with Barb on Tuesday, so I called in and got to repeat some of her important insights and talk about what Barb identified as failures in law enforcement, legislation and business and her proposed solutions.

I’m a slow writer but fast talker, here’s a link to me calling into the show talking about all this, in my piece below I just cover a couple of key points.


This quote from Chapter 5 is the set up I still hear from people on the left. I call it the 1st Amendment, “Free Speech” platitude line.

First, our constitutional commitment to free speech is enshrined in the First Amendment and regarded by the left and the right with a near religious reverence. As a result, many of us embrace the view that we would defend the right of our neighbors to express even the most offensive ideas, because their right to express them is essential to democracy. And so with few exceptions people are free to say anything, even if their statements are factually incorrect or, worse, intentionally deceptive.

Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America, by Barb McQuade. Chapter 5

It’s the old, “I don’t like what they have to say, but I’ll fight to the death their right to say it!” line.
Very noble! But does that mean you’ll defend to the death the “right” of 5,000 bots out of Russia to amplify intentional lies about our election? What if your “neighbor” is in Lubbock Texas and calls for the killing of election officials AND THEIR KIDS, who live in Arizona? (True story. Texas man sentenced to 3½ years for threatening Arizona election workers, officials)


In the book Barb talks about how disinformation can lead to political violence. She also gets into WHY actions aren’t taken by law enforcement in the section, titled, “Our Reluctance To Investigate”
This was something that I knew about, from the great work by Reuters’ reporters Linda So and Jason Szep.
U.S. election workers get little help from law enforcement as terror threats mount

McQuade points out how the history of the FBI abuses, as revealed by the Church Committee, led to the Domestic Investigation Operations Guide (DIOG) and how that led to FBI’s failure to investigate Jan 6th insurrectionists, EVEN THOUGHT THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN monitoring them on social media.

“The FBI’s shameful history of infringing on civil liberties, with its counterintelligence operation of the 1960s and ’70s that targeted civil rights leaders in Vietnam War protesters, makes the agency reluctant to investigate crimes that touch on Free Speech or assembly. “

Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America, by Barb McQuade. Chapter 5

If I was interviewing her I’d ask her to explain why serious criminal threats to judges, prosecutors, witnesses and jurors, as well as public health and election officials, aren’t prosecuted. I’ve read the excuses used by state & local law enforcement, as well as prosecutors. I’ve been writing about this for a long time. I wouldn’t just accept the standard answer I hear from the FBI or former prosecutors.

In the book she gives the excuse used by the FBI to NOT identify the January 6th threat online, despite social media posts openly indicating it was coming. Then she quotes the head of the FBI INCORRECTLY saying to the January 6th Committee that the FBI was “not allowed… to just sit and monitor social media and look at one person’s posts to see if maybe something would happen just in case That we’re not allowed to do.”
Barb CORRECTLY says BUT THEY ARE! And she links to AG guidelines on assessments for protective purposes, for special events.

(BTW, the other group that failed here was the Secret Service. THEY were in charge of evaluating the groups at the January 6th event and they did NOT list The Proud Boys as a threat, despite a history of violence. )

As an activist and blogger I’ve learned over the years to follow up on the author’s suggested solutions, so I’d ask Barb:
1) Who is fighting against any positive change?
2) Who is spending big bucks and lobbying against change?
3) Do the people who WANT change have any political power? Leverage?
4) Who is fighting to BLOCK change from WITHIN?
5) What can the public do?

Barb’s book answered one of my questions: Who is fighting positive change from WITHIN? The FBI.
And she explains some reasons why.
1) They are clinging to their old metaphors of who are the domestic terrorists. They don’t want to investigate cases of threats from the right wing, so they lump them all into “1st Amendment issues” and “protected political speech.”

2) They are under RW political pressure. When school boards were getting death threats, and school boards asked the FBI to investigate, the right wing LIED and said “The FBI is going after us for a difference of opinion!” Jim Jordan spread that disinformation by holding a bogus government weaponization committee. He subpoenaed FBI Director Christopher Wray about the FBI’s “misuse of federal criminal and counterterrorism resources” to target parents at school board meetings.

3) They are overwhelmed by the scale and scope of the disinformation and threats. If it’s not a priority and they don’t have the budget, they ignore the cases.

I get tired of “documenting the atrocities” as Atrios likes to say, so if I was interviewing Barb I’d get her to give some examples of her proposed solutions working.

BTW, when I coach book authors to prepare them for the media, I have them tell a story that illustrates a problem and a solution. Since Barb wasn’t on my call with Nicole I gave an example I knew of her solutions working.

Since I’m an election worker, I looked into what was being done about threats to election workers. Did you know that in 2021 the Justice Department set up an Election Threats Task Force? They help local and state election officials investigate and prosecute people who made threats to election officials on social media. Here’s a list of successful prosecution from August 2023. Just this week the DOJ announced a Massachusetts man was sentenced to three years and six months in prison for sending a communication containing a bomb threat to an election official in the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office. 

The task force having the resources and the priority of prosecuting the case is great, and it helps with a change in attitude from law enforcement about what they CAN and SHOULD be doing. But of course the huge orange elephant in the room is the lack of action taken about the threats and harassments of elected officials made by Donald Trump.

I know that Barb has been asked many times, “Why can’t we do anything about the biggest spreader of disinformation and threats, Donald Trump?” It’s the same question I ask weekly to Glenn Kirschner. So instead I’d ask her about Chapter 9, how do we “Mitigate The Harms to Public Safety and National Security.”

She tells the story of the prosecution of the men who plotted to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. On the Sister’s In Law podcast she talked about working in national security at the US attorney’s office in Detroit. There she learned that the FBI refers to the time before an attack as, “left of boom.” The phrase connotes a visual image of a timeline, on which “boom” is the attack itself’ any point left of boom is a time before the attack.

What surprised me about that story was how there is no domestic terrorism statute that would allow “the FBI to act left of boom by using the same tactics they use in international terrorism cases.” This sounds like a good idea, help the FBI to investigate threats. But when I read that my mind jumped to “The FBI will use this power to go after LEFT wing groups! They will keep ignoring RIGHT wing groups!”

And this is where people on the left are blocking change, and the reasons are related to old metaphors and current history. Oregon passed a law that targeted the far right, but civil rights groups pointed out it is open to misuse against climate and racial justice activists. As, Natasha Lennard wrote in the Intercept.

THERE ARE ALREADY ample laws on the books and tools available to police should they wish to take on extremist violence overwhelmingly perpetrated by the far right. But it is not for lack of capacity or resources that police in the state have regularly ignored these groups; there is a well-established pattern of police support for, and indeed membership of, civilian far-right organizations, including the Oath Keepers militia.

Oregon Domestic Terrorism Law Targets the Far Right. Here’s How It’ll Backfire., Natasha Lennard. April 24, 2023 The Intercept

So it’s more than just having laws on the books, it’s about how we define terms, categorize people and groups and then who is actually prioritized for investigation and prosecution.

Think about how the right wing media and politicians are calling convicted insurrectionists hostages. The FBI has prosecuted people in right wing groups that clearly are domestic terrorists. There are hundreds of convicted insurrectionists with ties to known domestic terrorism groups. The FBI needs to keep an eye on these people with a history of threats and actual violence. It’s a threat to public safety if they don’t.

But if everyone is REPOSTING that phrase hostage, under the guise of reporting on Donald Trump, we are spreading that disinformation about who those people are and what those groups they belong to are doing.

So, since I always like to end on what we in the public do. I made a graphic to illustrate the point I learned from Marcy Wheeler about spreading disinformation, “Don’t be a Data Mule for Disinformation!





How do we stop the Supreme Court?

This court has proven with its actions—through one politically motivated decision after another—that it is unfit to wield the power that it does.”

The Supreme Court Must Be Stopped, Elie Mystal in the Nation. March 1, 2024

I agree with Elie. So what do we do? I’m an activist and I know that there are multiple steps to make something happen. Elie has thoughts about changing how we in the public perceive the court. Elie said, “The first step toward stopping the Supreme Court’s political actions is to treat the justices as political actors and subject them to all of the scrutiny, pressure, and protest normal political actors face every day. ” I like the way my friend Lisa Graves referred to them on the Nicole Sandler show “Politicians in robes.”

How we treat politicians in American is very different than how we treat Supreme Court Justices. We questions them, we have processes for getting rid of them when they do a bad job. Part of our perception comes from how the media treat them. That needs to change. When our perception of the court changes, so should our response to them. I LOVE the work that has . . . → Read More: How do we stop the Supreme Court?

How Much Does Trump Owe? When Does He Have To Pay Up?

How long Does Trump Have to Pay His Fraud Fines? From payuptrump.com

What will it take to stop the threats of violence?

Jamison Foser wrote an excellent piece about how the media disconnects the threat of violence from Trump and his supporters from the 14th Amendment court case. I read that and my first thought was, “Yes!” Then, “What can I do?” Followed by, “Do I have to write about it again? My brain gets tired just thinking about this! Where’s my Sodastream diet cola?” Some thoughts one liter later:1) The media doesn’t want to say it, but the threats from Donald Trump needed to be stopped years ago. Now to stop him it will involve putting him in pre-trial detention, with no direct access to social media, as the law provides.

2) Law enforcement doesn’t want to say it, but it takes too much time, money and human resources to find and arrest people making threats. So they just say, “It’s “protected” political speech and don’t charge anyone. 3) Legislators don’t want to pass laws that would appear to be targeting conservatives. Even suggesting it sends them into gaslighting hissy fits. “They want to send the FBI after me just because of a difference of opinion!” 4) Social Media companies don’t want to enforce their own Terms of Service . . . → Read More: What will it take to stop the threats of violence?

2 Ways To Stop White Nationalist Morons Like The Patriot Front

The White Nationalist group Patriot Front was confused by the turnstiles at NYC’s World Trade Center PATH station. It reminded me of this classic turnstile scene with Slim Pickens in Blazing Saddles.

But seriously folks, who is the Patriot Front and how can they be defeated once they figure out how to use turnstiles? In June I talked to Matt Binder on the Doomed podcast about Patriot Front, the Neo-Nazis group seen in this clip. They wear the same hats, khakis and gatherers on their faces when they go to Pride events, Juneteenth parades and other events.

The Patriot Front may appear dumb here, but they are very clever at avoiding being prosecuted for their use of threats online and in person. One organization that figured out how to fight them is the called Task Force Butler Institute. Their tag line: Veterans Fighting Fascism

From the Task Force Butler website under What We Do

Hold Extremists Accountable

For far too long neo-nazi, white supremacist, and fascist organizations have been able to terrorize vulnerable Americans and erode our democracy without paying a price.

We provide the resources and support necessary to ensure that those who want to destroy our . . . → Read More: 2 Ways To Stop White Nationalist Morons Like The Patriot Front

Stop Rudy Giuliani from weaseling out of paying the financial judgment against him!

The size of the financial judgement against Rudy Giuliani should come tomorrow. The first question people will have is. “Will he pay?” The rich have lots of tricks to avoid paying. Here’s a bit of good news from Barb Mcquade.

“Intentional torts, like defamation, are NOT dischargeable in bankruptcy.

And so it may be that Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss are able to chase Rudy Giuliani to his grave to catch every penny they can out of his pockets.”

barb Mcquade

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Elon’s dominance over global satellite communications is dangerous.

I just listened to Elon Musk on Spaces talk about the use of his Starlink satellites by Ukraine. He also talked about how they might be used by people in Gaza. When I listen to his answer I remember two things. 1) He is not ‘under oath” he can be lying and mischaracterizing what he did and what happened. There is no one on the call who will check him or ask for clarification. 2) His control over Starlink makes him a major player in global politics. Who has leverage over him? The US? He is located here and Starlink is a US corporation. He is a US citizen. BUT we have seen that the control the US government has over him is not total. Other people and countries have leverage over him. He listened to Putin and made a decision based on what Putin told him. Musk has dominance over satellite communications. When a company has harmful dominance over an industry they need to be disciplined. That can happen by competition, regulation or labor. Last week Cory Doctorow talked about why the US implemented antitrust laws. To stop harmful domination by a company.This should apply to person too. . . . → Read More: Elon’s dominance over global satellite communications is dangerous.

Real people are hurt by Trump’s words

I think it’s really important to focus on the people being hurt by Trump’s words. In this interview with Lisa Rubin she talks about the scope and the volume of the threats to Judge Engoron’s clerk. Chris Hayes FINALLY gets it and calls it “unacceptable.”

It’s time for the media to destroy Trump’s old excuse list instantly, then preempt new ones @spocko@mastodon.online

Today’s news on Trump’s national security crimes:

Trump Leaked Nuclear Sub Secrets To Australian Businessman Susie Madrak, Oct 6, 2023 Crooks and Liars

I dropped my Photoshopped illustration in the comments section of Suzie’s article at Crooks and Liars. I then popped over to Salon to read their article titled, “Tip of the iceberg”: Experts sound the alarm after Trump blabbed nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago by Igor Derysh where I read the various excuses given by Trump’s spokespeople:

A Trump spokesperson told ABC News that the report lacks “proper context and relevant information.”

“President Trump did nothing wrong, has always insisted on truth and transparency, and acted in a proper manner, according to the law,” the spokesperson said.

Igor Derysh, Salon, Oct 6, 2023

The story also included excuses from the Australian billionaire, Anthony Pratt, why it was okay that he got this information they included:1) It might not be accurate info, because he never saw any documents 2) We are allies and share this stuff anyway3) Even if the enemies did find out the details they already know them, so it’s no big deal.4) Bottom line. Trump helped secure a $40 billion dollar contract, so America got the . . . → Read More: It’s time for the media to destroy Trump’s old excuse list instantly, then preempt new ones @spocko@mastodon.online

Who will be the new Speaker?

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I get this.