Broken axles and unvarnished truth

I was almost killed a few weeks ago. Had I been, this column would have been ghost-written. 

Not even a pothole could break my spirit, but it did my car axle. Hardly a departure from the norm in our town. My in-laws drove from South Africa to Zambia years ago and they compared those roads favorably with the handiwork of our Department of Transportation.

It happened suddenly with no warning — a loud noise, followed by instant total immobility. Luckily, I was coasting to a red light beneath the overpass of a highway on which I had been speeding two minutes earlier with motorists at my tail as though they were in hot pursuit of a Big Mac.

A stranger called the cops. Two rookies responded within a few minutes and pushed my car a whole block out of harm's way. I neither revere nor revile cops, but these cops were too good to be true. If the scene were re-enacted for use as a public service announcement, it would have idealized them, which would have left most City Council members cold.

They'd twist it into an argument for doubling down on the sageness of revoking “qualified immunity” for police. If anyone should lose qualified immunity, it's judges and district attorneys. Technically, they don't have it, because the statutes call it something different, but they are invincibly shielded in any case.

The perpetual light cast on cops' sporadic abuse of authority should be expanded to illuminate the heinous and cynical decisions that are increasingly rendered on the basis of activist demagoguery rather than enlightened principles of law.

Morbid leniency is a form of judicial abuse. It is wrongdoing no less than are the suitably punishable excesses of police officers.

When empathy-proof judges and DAs use their discretionary powers to advance their own biases, untouched by the havoc wrought on victims and their survivors whose lives will be irreversibly haunted by avoidable tragedies, they should be made to pay. The price should include forfeiture of career, assets and freedom.

Police morale is depressed for many reasons, many related to the NYPD being a political football. With the recent appointment of former Sanitation Chief Jessica Tisch as commissioner, it may have been stroked a bit. Probably taking liberties with the confessions of her heart, she said that being the commissioner of sanitation had been her “dream job.”

Her appointment has been hailed by unions and mocked by critics, such as WABC radio host and Guardian Angels leader Curtis Sliwa. He isn't impressed by Tisch's numerous critical contributions to the NYPD, though she was never a law enforcement officer. The fact that her multibillionaire family is the 43rd richest in the United States, according to Forbes, should neither speak in her favor nor be held against her, though it fuels unquenchable skepticism.

Tisch's ascendency to a position of supreme authority over officers whose expertise and credentials she lacks reflects the enduring philosophy of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose belief that all managers are the same led him to fill school principalships with entry-level educators, as long as they had at least managed a motel with ceiling mirrors and hourly room rentals.

There's much work for Tisch to do, including fixing the plight of the many sergeants who are paid less than their subordinates. And she has the character to not hide her Star of David pendant, even on college campuses.

Confronting and repelling the direct and oblique forces of intimidation from government, social media, communication empires and big tech is our “solemn duty” (a phrase generally applied as a misnomer). Typically, people don't object to censorship, as long as it targets views that oppose their own. And they regard as traitors to common cause any mavericks who give credit to their adversaries for even a single, isolated matter of principle. 

Progressives are tainted and exiled by other progressives for the most picayune departures from their neo-traditional orthodoxy.

Brendan Carr, president-elect Donald Trump's nomination as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, is determined “to dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.” Now there's a can of worms that must be opened with the greatest of care.

There's no agreement on what, in practice, constitutes either censorship or a cartel. It depends on self-interest and “whose ox is being gored.” Opponents of regulations will reverse themselves if they are in a position to institute regulations that favor their own ideological investments. 

Carr contributed to “Project 2025,” a document from which Trump has simultaneously distanced himself and embraced.

There's ample evidence that Carr will bestow windfalls on Elon Musk, in part because of his agenda — ensuring compliance, while inhibiting the intractably liberal Corporation of Public Broadcasting. He may continue the experiment of weaponizing the IRS and agencies nominally charged with protecting the free speech of individuals and hydra-headed companies like Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet and Apple. 

He has repeatedly called for banning TikTok, regarding it as the Chinese Communist Party's tool to corrupt American minds.

He may also be poised for retribution against “fake news” television and radio stations whose licenses fall within the FCC's jurisdiction. And most vociferously, he wants to scrap Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which states “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

In other words, Carr wants to make internet companies accountable for user-generated content on their moderated platforms. He has said that Congress should ensure that “internet companies no longer have carte blanche to censor protected speech while maintaining Section 230 protections,” which have been dubbed a “Good Samaritan” bulwark against civil liability for third-party content, even when it is constitutionally protected.

At the center of the dispute is whether these platforms are publishers or distributors. In the balance hangs the answer to questions that parties jockeying for power may find convenient and prefer to leave unresolved.

Section 230 already has restrictions in place against sex trafficking, for instance. But far more controversial are, for example, issues pertaining to the definition and perception of hate speech.

Can an educated population be trusted, or should their liberties be protected by stifling their freedom to exercise it? Given the current proliferation of denialism about science and history, it's clear, particularly in academia, that even affirmable knowledge is less likely to be set in stone than to be marinated in venom.

Legacy truth is a rusty vehicle with a broken axle.