Get Trump: the Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process, and Our Constitutional Rule of Law by Alan Dershowitz

Author:Alan Dershowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510777828
Publisher: Hot Books
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The Complicity of Media and Academia

Our constitutional system of separation of powers and checks and balances includes only government institutions: the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. But non-governmental institutions—such as the media, academia, and religion—also play an important role in checking governmental abuses. The First Amendment—separating church from state, and precluding governmental control over the press—provides additional checks against tyranny. In this chapter, I focus on the failure of these extra governmental branches, which are protected by the First Amendment, to provide neutral checks. In other words, instead of being a part of the solution to partisan excesses, many of them have become part of the problem. They, too, are seeking to get Trump—to prevent him from regaining the presidency—by employing unprincipled and dangerous means.

Did Twitter Suppress Hunter Biden Laptop Story Ahead of the 2020 Presidential Election

The promised disclosure by Elon Musk of the real story behind Twitter’s refusal to tweet the New York Post reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop fell short of a “bombshell.” But it contained troubling information about the possible role of government actors in this pre-election decision.

The reporter to whom Musk provided his disclosure talked about the influence of “connected actors.” Neither the names nor statuses of these actors were provided—at least not yet. But the context suggests that the heavy thumb of government actors may have weighed—either directly or indirectly—on the censorial decisions of Twitter. The First Amendment does not prohibit Twitter, a private company, from censoring on partisan or any other grounds. It does prohibit the government from censoring, except in extraordinary circumstances not relevant to the Hunter Biden laptop.

So, the questions are: Did government actors play any role in Twitter’s decisions? If so, how much of a role? Was governmental pressure, direct or indirect, employed? If so, by whom? And how much? Are government actors continuing to influence decisions by other social media? Do government agents have compelling, nonpartisan, reasons for intruding? Or was the intrusion designed to help Democrats in the imminent election?

If Musk knows the answers to any or all of these important questions, I hope he provides them in subsequent disclosures because they are important. The public has the right to know what role government actors may have played in censoring information that may have influenced—rightly or wrongly—some voters.

Social media, especially Twitter, have the capacity to influence the outcome of elections. Donald Trump understood and made use of this relatively new tool during his campaigns and his presidency. There is a debate raging as to whether the government has any power under the First Amendment to regulate these powerful tools. There is no reasonable debate over whether government actors should have the power to manipulate these tools for partisan advantage. They should not, especially if they exercise that power surreptitiously and without transparency.

That is the real danger to democracy, the rule of law and the marketplace of ideas: government actors secretly manipulating private media to achieve partisan goals by censoring outside the protection of the First Amendment. If that

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.