Gastonia, NC
Even-handed is the only rule that is not a jersey, and I will defend that all day. What I am not going to defend is the empirical claim underneath the second half of this question, because it does not survive five minutes with the record.
The claim is that assassination imagery aimed at Trump went unpoliced for years and the institutions discovered urgency only after the thirteenth.
Kathy Griffin held up a bloody severed head in a photograph in May of 2017. The Secret Service opened an investigation. CNN fired her. She lost her tour dates, spent time on a watch list, and told an interviewer years later that her career had not recovered. Johnny Depp made an assassination joke at a festival and apologised within a day after the Service took an interest. Madonna talked about blowing up the White House and was investigated. A Shakespeare production with a Trump-shaped Caesar lost two corporate sponsors inside a week.
Those are consequences. Serious ones, in some cases career-ending ones, applied contemporaneously.
I read copy for a living and I check a claim before I print it. Anybody arguing this week that the culture treated killing-talk about Trump as a genre with no cost is going to be handed the Griffin file by the first person who bothers, and the whole argument goes with it.
So let me keep what actually holds.
The principle is correct and I would write it in stone. One standard, both directions, no poll. Assassination aesthetics aimed at anybody holding or seeking the office get the same treatment regardless of the target’s party, and the treatment does not change with the news cycle.
What the week after Butler revealed is not that a dormant rule woke up. It is that enforcement in this area has always been episodic, reactive, and driven by embarrassment rather than by policy — in both directions, against both targets, for at least a decade. The Griffin response was also a panic. It just happened to be a panic in the direction our side liked.
Episodic enforcement is the problem. It has never been a rule, for anybody, and pretending it was a rule that was selectively suspended makes our case weaker rather than stronger.
Owatonna, MN
Minnesota is going to correct its own side on this one, because the version being argued this week will not survive contact with anybody who was paying attention in 2017.
The premise is that killing-talk about Trump was tolerated as entertainment for years. Here is what actually happened to the most prominent examples.
Kathy Griffin, May 2017: Secret Service investigation, fired by CNN, tour cancelled, on a watch list for a period, and by her own account years of professional damage. Johnny Depp, June 2017: a joke at Glastonbury about actors assassinating presidents, an apology within twenty-four hours, and a Service inquiry. Madonna, January 2017: investigated over the White House remark. The Public Theater’s Julius Caesar that same summer: Delta and Bank of America withdrew their sponsorship.
That is not a tolerated genre. That is a genre that produced real, immediate, and in one case lasting professional consequences, applied by the same institutions our side is accusing of indifference.
I would rather establish that in July than have it produced against me in October.
Now, what survives, and I think it is more useful than what I have discarded.
The pattern in both directions is episodic. Something ugly happens, there is a scramble, a few careers are damaged, and no standard is left behind. Nobody wrote a rule after Griffin. Nobody is writing one now. Each incident is handled as an emergency and then the file closes, which means the next incident is handled from scratch by whoever is on duty and however the wind is blowing.
That is the failure, and it is bipartisan, and it is a failure of institutions rather than of coalitions.
An even-handed policy would be a written one: no depictions or advocacy of violence against anyone holding or seeking federal office, enforced identically, published in advance, with examples drawn from both piles. Both piles exist and both piles are ugly.
What we have instead is a system where enforcement tracks whichever body is currently bleeding. That will produce vigilance this month, indifference by November, and a scramble the next time somebody is hurt.
Write the rule. Nobody will, because a written rule binds you when your own people are the ones being ugly, and that is the whole reason none exists.
Prescott Valley, AZ
There is a distinction here that the argument keeps collapsing, and collapsing it is why our side gets dismissed on this subject.
There are two different things being called assassination rhetoric.
The first is depiction and advocacy: a severed head in a photograph, a joke about shooting somebody, a post celebrating a shooter. That category is narrow, identifiable, and already prohibited nearly everywhere. Enforcement has been episodic but it exists — Kathy Griffin’s career took years to recover from a photograph.
The second is existential framing: he is a threat to democracy, this is the last election, the republic will not survive him. That is enormously heated, it has been used by both parties about each other, and it is ordinary political speech. It is not a call for violence and no honest reading makes it one.
I taught for a long time and the reason to keep those separate is not delicacy. It is that a claim which merges them cannot be enforced. Any rule broad enough to reach “threat to democracy” is a rule that would have banned most American political argument since 1798, and no institution will write it or should.
So a class working through this would end up where I do. The first category should have a written standard applied identically to both parties. The second category cannot have a standard and the remedy for it is people choosing to speak differently, which is not a policy and cannot be one.
Now the honest part, which is that the second category does bear on the first even though it cannot be regulated.
Somebody who has been told for years that a man is about to end the republic is being handed a premise. Most people do nothing with a premise. A very small number act on premises, and the people supplying them are not responsible for the acts and are responsible for the supply.
That is a moral claim rather than an enforceable one, and it applies to whoever is talking that way at the time, which over the last decade has been everybody.
The rule I would want written covers the first category, two ways, in advance. The second category is a matter for the people who hold microphones, and the only sanction available is that other people remember what they said.
Dayton, OH
Our side has been reaching for the wrong exhibit all week. There is a much better one and it is five days old at the time of the shooting.
On the eighth of July, on a call with donors, the President of the United States said it was time to put Trump in a bullseye.
That is not a comedian’s photograph or a late-night monologue. It is the sitting president, speaking about his opponent, using the word bullseye, five days before that opponent was shot at from a rooftop.
He acknowledged it himself. In an interview a couple of days after the shooting he said the word was a mistake and that he should not have used it. That is the right thing to have said and it does not unsay the original.
In process terms this is what an engineer would call the strongest available data point and our side has been ignoring it in favour of ten-year-old celebrity clips that all produced consequences at the time. Kathy Griffin lost her network job over a photograph. Depp apologised inside a day. Those examples cut against us and we keep citing them.
Cite the bullseye. It is recent, it is from the highest office in the country, it is documented, and it was conceded by the man who said it.
What follows from it is a specification argument rather than a partisan one.
There is no standard governing this. None. There is no rule that says a candidate or officeholder may not use targeting language about an opponent, no enforcement mechanism, no publication requirement, nothing. The only sanction is embarrassment, and embarrassment operates after the fact and only when something has already happened.
That is a control system with no upstream limit, and control systems with no upstream limit fail exactly the way this one did — everybody runs closer and closer to the edge because there is no line, and then something happens and everyone spends four days discovering that a line would have been useful.
Even-handed enforcement is the right answer. It requires a written standard covering people who hold office and people seeking it, applied identically. Nobody will write it, for the obvious reason that whoever writes it binds their own side first.
Wheeling, WV
I want to give the other side its due on this one, because our version of the week after Butler is not accurate and I would rather say so myself.
Enforcement after the thirteenth was not one-directional. People lost jobs for celebrating the shooting — a Home Depot employee, a couple of academics, a few others whose posts got screenshotted within hours. Platforms took down content that regretted the shooter had missed. That happened fast and it happened to people on the left, which is not the picture our side has been painting.
And going back, the picture is worse for us. Kathy Griffin held up that photograph in 2017 and the Secret Service investigated her, CNN fired her, her dates cancelled, and she spent years digging out. Depp apologised inside a day. Madonna was investigated. The Shakespeare production lost its sponsors.
So the idea that there was a free pass on killing-talk about him for a decade does not hold, and thirty years of grievance work taught me that a claim which does not hold is worse than no claim at all, because it hands the other side the whole file.
Here is what I still say, and it is narrower.
Enforcement in this country is not a rule. It is a reflex. Something ugly happens, the phones light up, somebody gets fired, and no standard gets written down. That is true whichever way the ugliness runs. Nobody wrote a policy after Griffin. Nobody is writing one now. The next incident will be handled by whoever is on duty, from scratch, according to how loud the reaction is.
Reflex enforcement always looks partisan to the party it lands on, because the reflex fires when the coalition that owns the platforms is embarrassed, and the coalitions take turns being embarrassed.
What I want is boring. A written rule, published in advance, covering depiction or advocacy of violence against anybody holding or seeking federal office, enforced the same regardless of who is being depicted. That is one paragraph and it would settle most of this.
It will not be written, because whoever writes it goes first against their own people, and nobody in either party has that appetite. So we will keep having reflexes, and each side will keep experiencing the other side’s reflex as persecution.
Tyler, TX
East Texas would price this the way it prices any coverage dispute, which is by asking what the policy says before the loss and not after.
There is no policy. That is the finding and everything else is argument about vibes.
There is no published federal standard governing targeting language by candidates and officeholders about each other. There is no platform rule written specifically for it. There is a general prohibition on threats, which is a criminal standard and correctly a high one, and below that there is nothing but discretion exercised after the fact by whoever is embarrassed.
In my business that is an unwritten coverage grant, and unwritten coverage grants get interpreted in whichever direction the adjuster is leaning at the moment of the claim. It is not that anybody is dishonest. It is that with no policy language, the interpretation is the policy, and the interpretation moves.
So the even-handedness the question asks about was never available. You cannot apply a standard evenly when there is no standard to apply. What we got in the week after Butler was a reflex, and reflexes are not even-handed by construction, because they fire in proportion to how badly the people with the enforcement authority feel about the thing that just happened.
Now, I want to be honest about what our side has been claiming, because I would not accept it from a claimant.
The claim is that there was a tolerated genre of killing-talk about Trump. The record does not support that. Kathy Griffin lost a network job and years of work over a photograph. Depp apologised in a day. Those are consequences, applied at the time, by the same institutions we are accusing of indifference. Using them as evidence of a free pass is going to get the whole file thrown out.
The good exhibit is the bullseye remark from the eighth of July, five days before the shooting, from the President himself, which he then conceded was a mistake. That is recent, documented, and admitted. Lead with it.
What I would underwrite going forward is a written two-way rule and nothing else. Everybody’s ugly examples on the table, one standard, published, applied without regard to the target. Anything less is discretion, and discretion always looks like a jersey to the man it lands on.
Long Island, NY
I draft speech policies for institutions, so let me describe what a defensible one looks like and then explain why nobody will adopt it.
A workable standard has four features. A defined prohibition — depiction, advocacy, celebration, or facilitation of violence against a person holding or seeking public office. A stated scope covering all such persons regardless of party. Published examples drawn from both directions, so the boundary is visible before anyone crosses it. And a fixed enforcement consequence that does not scale with the volume of public reaction.
That fourth feature is the important one and it is the one that is always missing. Enforcement that scales with reaction is not enforcement. It is crowd response with a policy document attached.
Now apply that to the record rather than to the week.
The claim that assassination imagery aimed at Trump went unaddressed does not hold. Griffin’s photograph produced a Secret Service investigation and the termination of her network relationship. Depp’s remark produced an apology and an inquiry. The Julius Caesar production lost its corporate sponsors. Those are enforcement events, and anybody arguing otherwise has an evidentiary problem.
What is true is that none of those events produced a written standard. They produced outcomes. Outcomes without a rule are precedent to nobody, which is why the same argument recurs every few years with the targets reversed and neither side can point to a document.
So the accurate finding is not one-way urgency. It is the absence of any standard at all, which produces enforcement driven by the identity of whoever is currently sympathetic — and the sympathetic party changes, which is why each coalition can produce a genuine list of grievances and neither can produce a rule.
The strongest item available to this Forum, and one nobody has used, is the sitting President’s remark on the eighth of July about putting his opponent in a bullseye, which he subsequently conceded was a mistake. That is not a comedian and it is not a decade old. It is the person with the largest platform in the country, five days before, and it demonstrates precisely the absence I have described: there was no rule he violated, which is why there was no consequence beyond his own acknowledgment.
Write the rule. It will bind whoever writes it first and hardest, which is exactly why the drafting has never been attempted by anybody with the standing to do it.
Cheyenne, WY
I keep books, so let me post both columns before deciding whether this was one-way.
Column one, things done to people who talked about killing Trump. Kathy Griffin: Secret Service investigation, fired by her network, tour cancelled, years of professional damage. Johnny Depp: inquiry, apology within a day. Madonna: investigated. A theatre production: two corporate sponsors withdrawn.
Column two, things done after the thirteenth to people who celebrated the shooting. Several firings within forty-eight hours. Platform takedowns of content regretting the miss. Real, fast, and applied to people on the other side.
Both columns have entries. Neither column has a rule.
That is the finding and it is not the one our side has been posting. There was no free pass. There was also no policy. Every entry in both columns was a reflex, applied after the fact, in proportion to how loud the reaction was.
Reflexes feel one-way to whoever is standing where the reflex lands, and over ten years the reflex has landed on both sides. Ours remembers 2017 as a free pass because the consequences fell on people we do not follow. Theirs will remember this month the same way.
One entry does belong in our column and nobody has posted it. On the eighth of July the President told donors it was time to put Trump in a bullseye. Five days later a man shot at him from a roof. The President said afterward the word was a mistake, which was the right thing to say and does not erase the entry.
That is a real item, it is recent, and it is admitted. It is worth more than every celebrity clip from 2017 put together, and our side has been arguing the clips.
So: even-handed is the right rule and it has never existed in either direction. Write it down, both ways, before somebody else gets shot at, and stop describing an absence of policy as a conspiracy against one party. An absence of policy is worse than a conspiracy. A conspiracy at least implies somebody is in charge.
Sydney, Australia
The American discussion of this proceeds as though there were two options: platform discretion or nothing. Every comparable democracy has a third, and it is worth describing because it does not solve the problem either.
Australia has a statutory regulator. The eSafety Commissioner, under the Online Safety Act, can issue removal notices to platforms for defined categories of material. That is not a moderation policy written by a company in California. It is an officer of the Commonwealth with published criteria, an appeal path, and enforcement power.
Britain has more. Thousands of prosecutions each year under the communications offences for grossly offensive messages, plus a new Online Safety Act regime overseen by the broadcasting regulator. Americans find those numbers astonishing and they should — the volume of speech prosecuted annually in the United Kingdom would be constitutionally impossible in the United States.
I should be clear about why the United States cannot simply adopt any of this. Our constitutional arrangement is different in kind, not degree. Australia has no bill of rights; what our High Court found in the nineties was an implied freedom of political communication, which limits what Parliament may legislate rather than granting anyone a personal right. Britain has no written constitution at all. The First Amendment is a genuine constraint and the American inability to build a regulator here is a legal fact, not a failure of nerve.
Now the part that ought to interest this Forum, because it is the part everyone assumes away.
The regulator does not solve the even-handedness problem. It relocates it.
In April our Commissioner ordered a platform to remove footage of a stabbing at a church in western Sydney. The platform refused, the matter went to the Federal Court, and by June the Commissioner had discontinued. The proceeding was accompanied by weeks of accusation that a government officer was making politically motivated content decisions — precisely the accusation the Americans level at private platforms.
So the comparative finding is not that other democracies have solved this. It is that they have moved the same argument from a company to a bureaucrat and acquired one useful thing in exchange: an appeal, a written standard, and a decision that has to be justified in a court.
That is not nothing. It is a great deal less than the Americans imagine when they wish for a rule.
The honest answer to the question, then, is that even-handedness requires a written standard applied by somebody with no stake, and no democracy I know of has produced one. What they have produced is regulators who are accused of bias instead of platforms who are accused of bias. The difference is that a regulator can be taken to court, and in April ours was, and lost the appetite for it inside two months.
Sheffield, Jamaica
The Americans are arguing about whether the enforcement of speech rules was even-handed in the week after a man was shot at. I want to describe what my country did after eight hundred people were killed in a single election year, because the answer to this question exists and it is not a content-moderation policy.
In 1980 Jamaica held a general election. The campaign killed somewhere in the region of eight hundred people in a country of two million. Gunmen aligned to both parties, garrison communities, weapons flowing in from outside. Four years earlier, in 1976, the government had declared a state of emergency during the campaign. This was not rhetoric producing an atmosphere. It was organised political killing at scale, and both parties were implicated.
What came out of it, eventually, is the thing this Forum keeps saying it wants and cannot imagine.
Jamaica has an agreed Code of Political Conduct, signed by both major parties, governing campaign behaviour — including inflammatory language, the conduct of supporters, and the responsibilities of leaders when their own people cross a line. It is monitored by a Political Ombudsman with statutory standing to investigate breaches and to report publicly on them. The parties agreed to be bound by a document neither of them controls, and they submit to public findings against themselves by an officer they jointly accept.
That is a two-way spec. It exists. It has existed for years. And it was produced by mass death, because nothing less would have produced it.
I want to be careful about the comparison, because the scales are not alike and pretending otherwise would be unserious. One attempt on one man is not eight hundred funerals. The American problem is at the very early end of a spectrum my region has travelled to the other end of.
But the mechanism question is identical and the region’s answer is consistent. Colombia lost three presidential candidates to assassination in nine months between 1989 and 1990, and had a political party whose membership was killed in the thousands over a decade. Mexico has just concluded the most violent election in its modern history, with dozens of candidates murdered during the cycle that ended in June.
In none of those cases did the remedy turn out to be platform enforcement or federal messaging. In every case where anything worked at all, it worked because the parties themselves signed something and accepted an outside monitor.
So my counsel to this Forum is to stop arguing about whether a platform was even-handed in the third week of July. That argument cannot be won and it does not matter. The available remedy is a code agreed between the two American parties, covering conduct and language toward opponents, monitored by somebody both sides accept, with public findings.
The Americans will not sign one. Each party is certain it is the injured side and certain a code would bind it more tightly than its opponent. That is exactly what the two parties in Kingston believed in 1978.
It took 1980 to change their minds, and I would not wish the arithmetic of that on anybody.
