Mike Gravel was to Bob Barr’s left in more ways than one at the Libertarian National Convention in 2008. Photo released by Bob Barr under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
The passing of former United States Senator Mike Gravel (D-AK) on June 26 was largely overshadowed by that of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld three days later. The same need not be true of their political legacies.
Fifty years to the month before, while Rumsfeld was Counselor to President Richard Nixon, Gravel “didn’t really know what the legal consequences would be” of “resting on the speech and debate clause of the Constitution” to make public the top secret Pentagon Papers that turned popular opinion against the Vietnam War.
In 2008, Gravel was one of the few presidential candidates offering a break from Rumsfeld’s renewed militarism in the Middle East, as term limits prevented George W. Bush’s re-election but not the continuation of his wars. Those wars remained ongoing as Gravel ran again in 2020, by which time he would have entered the Oval Office as a nonagenarian.
Mike’s antiwar “Gravelanche” paralleled the scene in Jim Henson’s fantasy film Labyrinth where a motley group of underdogs use an ability to “call the rocks” to summon enough boulders to drive back an army. If Gravel’s message had far less impact on the engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq than in Vietnam, it may not be simply because Americans have, like Dana Carvey’s Saturday Night Live impersonation of George Bush (senior), failed to generalize the example of Vietnam beyond Vietnam.
To some degree, Gravel was simply less heeded in the twenty-first century. At the height of his influence, he admitted to The New York Times that he could only “chip away, bit by bit, for what I want” if he built enough grassroots support that “they will have to listen to me in the Senate.” Even so, it’s hard to tell how many assumed that the battle against war was too far uphill for them to have an effect. A renewed peace movement might find itself garnering wins as seemingly unattainable as what Howard Zinn called “the impossible victory” of ending the war in Vietnam.
Gravel’s 2008 announcement that “I’m joining the Libertarian Party because it is a party that combines a commitment to freedom and peace” pointed to an alliance which never quite materialized. Yet successful efforts to expose government malfeasance and decriminalize personal choice pioneered by marginalized mavericks like Mike Gravel and Jesse Ventura could be expanded to more areas, and perhaps even all, of social life.
New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.
Facebook-approved US extremist group. Public domain.
Facebook, USA Today reports, “is asking some U.S. users whether they may have been exposed to extremist content, or if they are worried that someone they know might be becoming an extremist.”
The pop-ups are part of something called The Redirect Initiative, which attempts to “combat violent extremism and dangerous organizations by redirecting hate and violence-related search terms towards resources, education, and outreach groups that can help.”
The Redirect Initiative sounds like something that could be a valuable public service if Facebook was serious about fighting extremism. But that’s obviously not the case.
Only the least popular and least powerful extremists need worry that they’ll be targeted by Facebook. The company actively coddles and cuddles up to the most powerful, violent, and deadly extremist groups on the planet: Governments.
Facebook’s Community Standards on “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” divides extremist groups into three tiers. The top tier includes “entities that engage in serious offline harms — including organizing or advocating for violence against civilians, repeatedly dehumanizing or advocating for harm against people based on protected characteristics, or engaging in systematic criminal operations.”
And yet the US Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — two groups explicitly organized for violence against civilians — maintain active Facebook pages on which they publicly advocate for, and openly celebrate, their depredations with nary an objection from the company.
The US Internal Revenue Service — a protection racket no different in principle from any other “nice income you got there, be a shame if anything happened to it” criminal scheme — also uses Facebook without negative consequence.
Oh, Facebook will come down hard on a government or government-affiliated actor now and then, but only if that government or individual has managed to get on the wrong side of the political establishments Facebook itself supports and caters to.
Domestically, Donald Trump is the obvious example, and not a terribly sympathetic one.
Abroad, regimes and state actors who find themselves at odds with the regimes controlling Facebook’s most profitable markets may face bans or “Facebook jail” for activities the company considers “legitimate” when the US or EU (for example) engages in them.
Facebook’s claimed opposition to extremism isn’t a principled stand against violence, hate, or criminal activity. It’s performance art, virtue signaling, and propaganda in service to the extremist groups Facebook endorses and willingly works with — with opposition to those extremist groups itself often falsely labeled “extremism,” or at least “misinformation.”
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
New York City Hall. Photo by Aude. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.
Confusion reigns. More than a week after Democratic voters from New York City’s five boroughs cast their primary ballots, we still don’t know who those voters chose as their party’s nominee for mayor. Seven days after the polls closed, the city’s Board of Elections issued preliminary results, then quickly withdrew them, citing a discrepancy in which test ballots were counted along with real votes.
Opponents of Ranked Choice Voting are having a public field day, declaring that the results — or, rather, lack of results — prove the method is defective. It’s just too complicated, they claim, for the average voter to figure out.
They’re wrong. The New York City Board of Elections’s apparent inability to quickly, competently, and accurately count votes isn’t an indictment of Ranked Choice Voting. It’s an indictment of the New York City Board of Elections.
What’s going on here? What’s the problem?
One possible explanation is incompetence. Mike Ryan, the board’s director, went on extended medical leave after his relationship with a voting machine vendor led to calls for a conflict of interest investigation. His absence left the board’s operations in the hands of deputy executive director Dawn Sandow, who may be a token Republican appointee rather than a skilled administrator. An anonymous fellow GOP official tells the New York Post that Sandow “isn’t very qualified to run a large agency.”
Another possibility is that this Ranked Choice Voting exercise isn’t going very well because the powers that be in New York City politics don’t WANT it to go very well. In a system where two parties continually dominate, and in a city where one of those parties enjoys a pretty firm stranglehold on power, RCV threatens to upset the (big) apple cart. It produces winners based on the broadest level of popular support rather than leaving voters with a binary choice between lesser evils. Party bosses hate that idea. It’s possible that New York City’s version of RCV was built to fail
A non-possibility is that Ranked Choice Voting itself is to blame for the fiasco. There’s simply nothing complex or confusing about it.
The voter simply ranks the available candidates from first place to last, something he or she probably already did when considering which candidate to vote for in “vote for one” elections.
At the election administration level, RCV MORE work, but it’s not COMPLICATED work. If no candidate receives a majority of “first place” votes, the candidate with the fewest such votes is eliminated. His or her votes are transferred to those voters’ second choices. This process repeats until one candidate holds a majority. Even in hand-counted elections it would be a simple and tedious chore, not rocket science. In the computer age, it’s a simple coding problem.
Among the explanations for the New York City debacle, I lean toward administrative incompetence rather than political conspiracy. But either way, New Yorkers shouldn’t let the opponents of Ranked Choice Voting defeat its future use. Where democratic processes are important, RCV is a needed improvement.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
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