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The Onion filed an amicus brief a few days ago in a case called Novak v. Parma. It's been making the rounds on social media lately because it's a legitimately funny and well-written document. It may well be among the best briefs I've read in my ten years as a litigator. Attorneys often seem to forget that job one of writing is to produce something readable. Nowhere is this more important than in amici, since judges are not required to read them in the first place.
What's the culture war angle here? Surprisingly (to me, at least), the brief is an unreserved and unapologetic defense of free speech by a respectable mainstream organization. This wouldn't have been so strange a few years ago, but it seems like the mainstream line on free speech has recently shifted from "free speech is important and must be defended" to "free speech is important and must be defended as long as it's not that kind of free speech." The ACLU has famously moved away from its robust defense of free speech, and nearly every publisher and platform has caveated any pro-free-speech views with disclaimers that carve out "bad" free speech like "disinformation" and "speech that causes harm."
But the brief doesn't even allude to caveats, and in some ways can be read to expressly repudiate them. One heading is titled "A Reasonable Reader Does Not Need A Disclaimer To Know That Parody Is Parody" and boldly proclaims "True; not all humor is equally transcendent. But the quality and taste of the parody is irrelevant." Nowhere do words like "harm" or "hate" or "disinformation" appear in the brief. Nowhere does the brief even allude to the popular idea that free speech can be used to "punch down" or "marginalize."
What makes this perhaps even more remarkable to me is the fact that Novak v. Parma isn't primarily about free speech, it's primarily about qualified immunity. It would have been extremely easy to dodge the free speech issue and emphasize a much woker angle, e.g., qualified immunity prevents people of color who have been harmed or killed by police from recovering damages to compensate them and therefore qualified immunity contributes to systemic racism, etc. I suppose this theme would have made for a dour and un-funny document, but given how woke schoolmarmery has tended to destroy humor over the past decade (see, e.g. The Daily Show), it's still a pleasant surprise to see they didn't go this route.
Maybe my optimism is unwarranted, but I'm marking this down as one small data point in favor of the theory that the woke tide is receding. I don't think it's going away completely, but I do think people are getting tired of it and I'm hopeful we'll start seeing a bit less of it in our daily lives.
Alternative take: the left really does defend free speech when government is the one being mean.
On the other hand, I remember the Obama-era IRS persecuting the Tea Party. Can't seem to remember anyone on the left complaining.
How so, exactly?
The Tea Party was a grassroots movement that coalesced mostly in response to the economic crisis in 2008 and the US gov't response of bailouts to various entities. It grew over the course of 2009 and 2010 on a general platform of no new taxes and debt/deficit/spending reduction (originally an American Revolution reference, TEA became "Taxed Enough Already"). Probably best known for its opposition to Obamacare, and a significant contributor to the Republican wave election of 2010. At the time, it was practically unique in being a right-aligned popular protest movement (and, famously, known for leaving its protest sites cleaner than when the protesters arrived). While members of the movement had individual political views that were broadly conservative-ish, the movement as a whole was strictly focused on taxation and fiscal responsibility issues--it did not have a social policy platform.
In any case, if you're going to go from public rallies in parks to any sort of real political impact, you need organization and fundraising with an eye to electing friendly candidates for office. That means setting up 501(c)(3)s and 501(c)(4)s with the IRS. With Lois Lerner on point, the IRS went to work trying to choke off the movement financially, by a combination of sitting on applications without movement for months at a time, making periodic records demands that escalated to ludicrous levels of invasiveness, leaking donor information to hostile third-parties, etc.
The Tea Party didn't last much longer, though a couple of the orgs created acquired grifters and continued on, zombie-fashion, for another year or two after 2010. A lot of the original support for Trump's candidacy in 2015-2016 came from veterans of the Tea Party who were less inclined to politeness the second time around.
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I'm not sure, I'd lean more towards your optimism being unwarranted. The Onion has fallen far and fast in terms of being an even-handed satire site. The Bablyon Bee and it's solid 6/10 performance should never have been allowed to enter the market at all, much less succeed as much as it has. The only reason it's done so is because the Onion has completely retreated from almost any critique of leftism.
Have you seen Babylon Bee's video satire "Californians move to Texas"? I had to pause the video at several points because I was laughing so hard. It's become a serial now. Here, enjoy it for yourself.
I actually do think the Bee is funnier than The Onion in average. There's a lot of good stuff there and they switch hit plenty, but I do miss bush-era Onion.
At this point, I think a lot of people miss Bush-era anything cultural. Or, at least, I do. (Consider the "Wake up, bro, it's 2006/7/8/9" meme.)
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This is what surprised me about the brief. If a "transgressive" comedian like Dave Chapelle or Matt Stone and Trey Parker had filed this amicus brief I wouldn't have batted an eye. But the Onion has obediently toed the party line for quite some time. And the party line has been hostile to full-throated defenses of free speech. The fact that a politically correct institution is defending free speech with no disclaimers is a positive sign.
I don't want to beat the horse too hard but.... I would stop very short of this being a full-throated defense of free speech. It's extremely close to what The Onion does in that this guy ran a parody account. And he's parodying a police department, an organization many writers at The Onion would doubtless have called to be defunded in 2020.
While Mr. Novak's page was overall pretty neutral, it still had a leftist tinge (though it's been hard to find great screengrabs etc.)
All I'm saying is that leftist institutions are very capable of crying "Free Speech" when it suits them, that's not a different behavior than anything we've seen the past 12 years.
I take your point, but can you think of any examples in the past couple of years of a politically correct organization putting out a statement defending free speech without some kind of caveat like "...but that doesn't mean freedom from consequences" or "...but we also acknowledge that free speech has been used to perpetuate systems of oppression." I can't think of any examples besides this one. I certainly can't think of any other examples that included a statement like "the quality and taste of the parody is irrelevant."
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I think it's an insight most common among comedians that stifling constraints on the breadth of speech hits comedy first and hardest--after all, everyone's most sensitive when it's their own ox being gored. Jerry Seinfeld has been commenting for a few years now that you can't do comedy on college campuses any more. It's good to see that The Onion is showing a higher allegiance to the craft of comedy than their internal political inclinations, at least in this instance.
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The onion has always seemed like the last gasp of 2000’s liberalism- generally progressive, but not to the point of speech controls or whatever. But ymmv.
In recent years being a "2000s liberal" who is "generally progressive, but not to the point of speech controls or whatever" has been increasingly labeled as right-wing or "right-adjacent" (e.g. Dave Chappelle). The fact that the Onion is able to occupy that space without getting tarred for it is a good sign, I think. Progressive friends of mine who have previously denounced people like Dave Chappelle and who opposed the Musk purchase of Twitter on the grounds that it would result in too much free speech are now sharing this Onion amicus with approval. I've seen literally no criticism of the brief from anyone. It feels like a subtle, yet tangible, vibe shift on free speech.
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