TPM THIS WEEK...

In the later half of Tuesday's VP debate, Tim Walz turned and asked J.D. Vance if Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance's non-answer, and Walz's assertion that the non-answer was "daming," was one of the defining moments of the debate for Democrats and much of the media. But it was the exchange that followed that captured the attention of many on the right, particularly those in the self-described heterodox (or free-thinking!) coalition.

In the exchange, Vance explains to the viewers at home that it's not the attempted subversion of elections that's a threat to democracy, but rather what he described as government and big tech censorship of social media:

VANCE: You yourself have said there's no First Amendment right to misinformation. Kamala Harris wants to use…

WALZ: Or threatening. Or hate speech.

VANCE: …the power of the government and Big Tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this political moment… Let's persuade one another. Let's argue about ideas and come together afterwards.

WALZ: You can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater. That's the test. That's the Supreme Court test!

If you're unfamiliar with what Vance was talking about — if you are not part of the "heterodox" community — it may not be clear why this was such a captivating moment for a certain cohort of online commentators. (Set aside, for now, that what Vance is describing did not happen — the Biden administration never forced social media companies to take down any content, it simply brought election and COVID misinformation to the companies' attention, a practice our right-wing Supreme Court upheld in June. The "heterodox" set are insistently unaware of those details.) For most voters, content moderation is not in the top handful of election issues, nor an imminent threat to democracy. 

But for much of the heterodoxy, it may well be issue numero uno. These are the writers, thinkers, and publications defined in many ways by their aversion to cancel culture. Think Bari Weiss and The Free Press, Matt Taibbi and Racket, Jonathan Turley, Glen Greenwald, etc., etc. This is a group for whom Elon Musk's pet project, the Twitter Files, might be considered a Magnum Opus. They generally view Democrats and those on the left who see Donald Trump as an existential threat to democracy as both hysterical and ludicrous. They are very influential, particularly among people who move in the same circles as JD Vance. They'd undoubtedly be even more influential if their ideas didn't keep getting censored. 

But what fired them up on Tuesday wasn't seeing their raison d'etre getting a shoutout on national TV (finally!), but that Walz had supposedly shown his anti-free speech calling card in responding with the verboten (among the heterodox) trope that you can't yell fire in a crowded theater. As nearly every heterodox luminary lined up to explain, the Supreme Court opinion Walz had paraphrased was nonbinding and later partially overturned. You can, sometimes, yell fire when there is no fire. This is America after all! In the heterodoxy's view, Walz had revealed the Biden and potential future Harris administrations' desire to crack down on free speech.

How do we have this insight into how heterodoxy thinks about content moderation? We read about it on the internet, of course. Which isn't entirely to dismiss the very real challenges of content moderation on tech platforms, but rather to call out Vance and free thinking heterodoxy for a self-serving disingenuousness around free speech. The social internet has fundamentally changed the way we communicate with each other and share information. It's understandable that there are growing pains and confusion. But speech being censored and speech having consequences are not that same thing. The First Amendment still stands. You're free to say you think Donald Trump won the election. You're free to say that you think the Democrats stole the election. However, when thousands of angry Americans show up in Washington, D.C. and storm the capital acting on the falsehoods you told them, don't act like they did it entirely unprompted. 

Covering the threats to democracy is core to our mission at TPM. In some ways, it is our raison d'etre. And we've been doing it for a long time. We take threats to free speech very seriously, as we do threats to reproductive health, and the right to vote, among others. We also try to do so in a way that is honest and non-hysterical. All Vance did on Tuesday was shout fire.

Concerning threats to democracy: yesterday a federal judge unsealed the most damning evidence special counsel Jack Smith has collected to demonstrate that Trump sought to block the peaceful transfer of power in the 2020 election. Styled as a legal brief, the motion addresses why Trump's actions are not immune from prosecution under the Supreme Court's July immunity decision. Much of the evidence had been covered at TPM before this point, in exclusives such as The Meadows Texts and The Chesebro Docs. But there was some new stuff. Highlights include Trump responding, "So what?" to news that Mike Pence has been taken to a "secure location" after narrowly dodging a group of rioters.

Also, Josh Kovensky outlines Trump and his allies' most audacious anti-immigrant promises as they anticipate a second term.

And on The Josh Marshall Podcast featuring Kate Riga, Kate and Josh discuss the VP debate, the last big scheduled event before the election, along with some 11th-hour Senate plays and Eric Adams' indictment.

By Hunter Walker

The most notable takeaway, perhaps, was the way in which Vance strenuously tried to distance himself from the persona he had only recently sought to craft: that of an incendiary, right-wing populist firebrand, an emissary from the fever swamps. Instead, the guy we saw tonight tried to reanimate the carcass of the man who wrote Hillbilly Elegy, a persona Vance had seemingly discarded sometime after January 6 as he sought to be Trump's running mate.

Smith describes the rioters as "bearing pro-Trump paraphernalia indicating their allegiance."

It's a striking way of phrasing this in part because it means that showing "allegiance" to the President in that moment also meant attacking Congress. This seems to go to Smith's broader aim here of arguing that all of this was private, and not official conduct.

As they anticipate a second term, Donald Trump and his allies' most audacious anti-immigrant promises include a lineup of new, different hits, albeit in the same key. They promise mass deportations, to strip citizenship from people who attended pro-Gaza rallies, and to remove the legal status that the Biden administration has offered to thousands of non-citizens.

Kate and Josh discuss the VP debate, the last big scheduled event before the election, along with some 11th-hour Senate plays and Eric Adams' indictment.

ONE MORE THING..

If you like TPM Weekly, we think you'll really like being a TPM member. Join now and get 40% off an annual membership.