Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
Earlier this month in San Francisco, two friends and I wanted to imbibe strong rum drinks at the bar Smuggler’s Cove, so we used a phone app to summon a car. It arrived without a driver, we climbed into the back seat, and a trivia app entertained us on the way to our destination while distracting us, at least a little bit, from the fact that no one was in the driver’s seat.
The driving was safe and efficient. But at the end of the ride, the car stopped in the middle lane of a three-lane street, forcing us to cross a lane of traffic to reach safety on the sidewalk.
So … not yet ready for prime time, but pretty close.
Are driverless cars the future? Should cities allow them to be tested on the street now? Even in your neighborhood? What about the multiton driverless trucks that the Teamsters want to ban? (I am pro-innovation, but when sober, I also like driving. I hope I’m never forced to give it up.)
Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.
Conversations of NoteLaughs, Lies, and Fabulist Hate
Last week, Clare Malone published an article in The New Yorker revealing that the comedian Hasan Minhaj, who came of age as a practicing Muslim in post-9/11 America, made up various stories he has told about bigots engaging in prejudicial or abusive behavior toward him.
For example, in a 2022 Netflix special, he speaks about the reaction to his talk show, Patriot Act. Malone describes the scene from the special:
The big screen displays threatening tweets that were sent to Minhaj. Most disturbing, he tells the story of a letter sent to his home which was filled with white powder. The contents accidentally spilled onto his young daughter. The child was rushed to the hospital. It turned out not to be anthrax, but it’s a sobering reminder that Minhaj’s comedic actions have real-world consequences. Later that night, his wife, in a fury, told him that she was pregnant with their second child. “ ‘You get to say whatever you want onstage, and we have to live with the consequences,’ ” Minhaj recalls her saying. “ ‘I don’t give a shit that Time magazine thinks you’re an “influencer.” If you ever put my kids in danger again, I will leave you in a second.’ ”
Powerful stuff. But it didn’t happen, Malone reports:
The New York Police Department, which investigates incidents of possible Bacillus anthracis, has no record of an incident like the one Minhaj describes, nor do area hospitals. Front-desk and mailroom employees at Minhaj’s former residence don’t remember such an incident, nor do “Patriot Act” employees involved with the show’s security or Minhaj’s security guard from the time.
During our conversation, Minhaj admitted that his daughter had never been exposed to a white powder, and that she hadn’t been hospitalized. He had opened up a letter delivered to his apartment, he said, and it had contained some sort of powder. Minhaj said that he had made a joke to his wife, saying, “Holy shit. What if this was anthrax?” He said that he’d never told anyone on the show about this letter, despite the fact that there were concerns for his security at the time and that Netflix had hired protection for Minhaj.
The article describes other similar instances of fabulism, and Minhaj’s explanation for them: The stories are based on “emotional truths” and “the punch line is worth the fictionalized premise.”
The revelations have prompted a lot of journalistic reactions. Few have defended the falsehoods. Yet as Kat Rosenfield put it at UnHerd, “It is understood that for comedians, the question of truth, as in authenticity, is something separate from what is true, as in accurate. Comedians will do anything for a laugh, lying included, and everybody knows this—even if the precise ethical boundaries of untruth are sometimes the subject of debate, including by comedians themselves.” So many observers have had a hard time describing why Minhaj crossed the line, even though most of them are committed to the proposition that something is amiss.
In fact, I’ve yet to see anyone pinpoint what I see as the strongest case against Minhaj’s style. But before I tip my hand, here’s a quick rundown of some alternative indictments. In The New York Times, Jason Zinoman argues, “When stories told about racism, religious profiling or transgender identity are exposed as inventions, that can lead to doubt about the experiences of real people.”
For Nitish Pahwa at Slate, the problem was something to akin to stolen valor:
There are more than enough brown people across the country who’ve actually had their loved ones and livelihoods attacked in those very ways. If those same Americans were fans of Minhaj, it was because he effected a nationwide breakthrough of the truth that many of us have, in fact, been abused in our personal and professional lives thanks to our skin color or faith … The people he claimed to be speaking for were led to believe he really did get it on a visceral, fundamental level. This was a rare public figure who could be a high-profile voice for our fears, who could get people in the highest levels of society to hear and pass on his onstage and offstage anecdotes … Minhaj never even hinted that he was doing a character, or giving voice to stories he’d heard from others, or gesturing toward the broader landscape of Muslim Americans. Minhaj took what real, everyday brown folks were going through and led those people to believe that he’d also been there—earning his fame and plaudits from that very trust, as well as the trust that engendered among those who wished to understand brown Americans.
My own take?
Hate crimes carry an additional legal penalty. And there’s a strong argument in favor of hate-crime enhancements: Robbing or assaulting or murdering someone because they are Muslim or Black or gay sows fear in whole communities, harming many beyond the primary victim. When a person fabricates a hate crime or adjacent acts of bigotry, they do similar second-order harm. The gang-rape hoax that Rolling Stone published in 2014 scared many women on college campuses. Chicagoans who believed Jussie Smollett were frightened at the prospect of MAGA zealots beating Black pedestrians. Obviously, gang rapes and street assaults do happen; nevertheless, fabulist accounts of such incidents cause many to erroneously believe they are a bigger threat, or a different one, than they had previously judged.
Imagine the ripples of fear an Islamophobic bigot would cause––to Muslim Americans, and to Muslim public figures and their families especially––by mailing mysterious white powder to the house of a prominent Muslim comic. Imagine how such an act might chill the speech of some Muslims. The ripples of fear such a bigot would cause are the same ripples that Minhaj himself caused! And that, in my estimation, is the strongest case against Minhaj’s “emotional truths.”
A Debt Unpaid
In The Atlantic, Adam Harris flags an attempt to quantify a particular kind of racial discrimination:
On Monday, the Biden administration sent letters with a clear message to 16 governors: Over the past 30 years, their states have underfunded their historically Black land-grant colleges by hundreds of millions—or, in some cases, billions—of dollars … the first time the federal government has attempted to put a comprehensive number on the financial discrimination against these institutions.
He goes on to note “the exact amounts each land-grant Black college would have received from 1987 to 2020 if the institutions had been funded at the same level per student as the 1862 land grant stipulated.”
For example:
If Alabama A&M University had received its fair share in comparison to Auburn University, which has been dogged for decades by low enrollment figures for Black students, it would have had an additional $527 million over the period; meanwhile, Tennessee State University may have had an additional $2.1 billion if it had received an equitable share of the pie.
“There is now a number attached to the legacy of discrimination at historically Black colleges, at least for the most recent decades,” he concludes. “The lingering question is whether states will actually atone for it.”
Wonder Wall
At Wisdom of Crowds, Damir Marusic makes a claim about an aspect of aging:
I found myself outside of a bar with a friend. As we stood outside on the sidewalk, we remarked how funny it is to see all the people out, walking around, going to one place after another, clearly anticipating a great night ahead. “I remember what that used to be like—that excitement,” I said. “Sure, it was just a bar or a club we were heading to, but it represented a kind of energy.” I personally never went out to bars to meet new people, just to meet up with my people. So that feeling wasn’t so much a sense of possibility at serendipitous encounters with strangers as it was being surrounded by an electric charge. Drinking in loud crowded places amplifies the inherent buzz of alcohol. And for whatever reason, the novelty of that amplified buzz felt like it would never wear off.
But wear off it did. I don’t drink much these days, as it makes me slow the next day. And as I grow older, I don’t want to squander days on useless things like recovery. Beyond being more gun-shy, however, is a more banal truth: it got repetitive. All senses, if overstimulated, dull out. Looking at all the happy buzzing people out on 14th street that night, it struck me that what separated me from them is a sense of wonder. When you’re younger, you have more capacity for it. You don’t recognize patterns quite so well, so you believe that things are more mutable than they are. As you discover the world, it seems limitless, and limitlessly astonishing.
But as you experience more and more of it, you start to figure out how things work. Not in the sense of gaining ultimate and total knowledge—that’s hubris. Hard-won wisdom is the opposite: figuring out what is unknowable, and appreciating how chance works. Still, as the patterns become a little more recognizable, the world becomes a little less enchanted.
How the First Amendment Works
In Politico, Adam Cancryn reports, “Biden officials have felt handcuffed for the past two years by a Republican lawsuit over the administration’s initial attempt to clamp down on anti-vaxxers, who alleged the White House violated the First Amendment in encouraging social media companies to crack down on anti-vaccine posts. That suit, they believe, has limited their ability to police disinformation online.” To which National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke responds, the suit has limited the Biden administration’s speech-policing “as opposed to what?”
He writes:
The First Amendment’s protection of the progenitors of “misinformation” is not an esoteric loophole or a marginal technicality or the remnant of a bygone era. It is not vestigial, or contingent, or the product of a quirky mistranslation. It is one of the foundations of our society. In the United States, it is the authorities, not the citizens, who are cabined by the law. The Constitution grants no enumerated power to the federal government with which it might legitimately police lies, and, as if to make the matter as clear as possible, the Bill of Rights explicitly prohibits such policing. In totalitarian nations, the state is permitted to determine what it considers to be authoritatively true, to disseminate its resolutions across the country, and to punish anyone who dissents. Here, the state must allow individuals to speak irrespective of the contempt in which it holds their opinions. Remarkably, this applies even when the president is a Democrat and the topic is vaccines.
The frame that both the Biden administration and Politico have adopted is thus defective. The White House has not “felt handcuffed”; it is handcuffed. The limits on its power are not the consequence of “a Republican lawsuit”; the Republican lawsuit is meant to uphold the constitutional limits on its power. Biden’s compliance with the ruling has not given those whom he disdains “more space to promote their views”; that space existed beforehand and was being temporarily invaded by the executive branch. Throughout, Politico implies that those who have benefited from the verdict are not really exercising their rights: The lack of force, the outlet sneers, has allowed them to “tout themselves as free speech warriors.” But there’s no “tout themselves” about it. They are free-speech warriors. They’re engaged in “free speech,” which, in America, includes misinformation, and they’re “warriors” because the government is trying to shut them up. That the content of their speech is often preposterous is no more important to the case than it would be if it were “hateful.” There are no classes of expression in the First Amendment.
Provocation of the WeekIn The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey writes:
Being vegan means forgoing many of life’s pleasures—cheeseburgers, peppermint ice cream, warm sourdough with cold butter. It means absenting yourself from your own culture—not taking the piece of birthday cake, not going to the amazing new restaurant. It means constantly feeling like you are failing, given the difficulty of avoiding animal products in a world where animals are a commodity. It means living in a way that makes other people feel judged and uncomfortable. It is exhausting, abstemious, weird. One paper found that omnivores view vegans more negatively than any other stigmatized group except for drug addicts.
It is not surprising that the share of people forgoing animal products has barely changed since at least the late 1990s. Just 5 percent of Americans say they are vegetarian, and only a sliver of the population, perhaps 1 percent, truly never eats meat. Globally, the number of animals consumed per capita has nearly doubled in the past five decades, as has the share of animals raised in confined, industrial environments.
DxE believes it can change that, not by turning omnivores into vegans but by turning vegans into vegan activists. It has attracted thousands of donors and participants, mostly Millennials and Gen Zers, over its 10 years of existence. (There’s no formal membership count, as there’s no formal membership process.) But it has also amassed plenty of detractors, who see the group as cultish and its activities as pointless and obnoxious. Social change is hard enough for movements that don’t ask people to give up anything, let alone their grandmother’s brisket …
Focusing on radicalizing vegans rather than converting meat-eaters allowed DxE to embrace a revolutionary message: “Animal liberation in one generation!” rather than “Try out meatless Monday!” But the activists adopted some tactics that were unpopular even with vegans. In addition to targeting big grocery chains, DxE went after small businesses devoted to slow food and humane meat, including Chez Panisse, the beloved originator of California cuisine. The group stopped weekly protests outside a revered Berkeley butcher shop only when the owners agreed to put up a sign reading “Animals’ lives are their right. Killing them is violent and unjust.” (The owners described this as “extortion.”)
Read the rest for some harrowing scenes of animal abuse by factory farms and an interesting exploration of what drives radical activism even when, as here, it may be ineffective or even counterproductive.
Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.