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In recent days, some prominent Republicans have argued against impeachment on the ground that proceeding with it is likely to exacerbate national disunity and impede healing. For example, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has argued that impeachment is a bad idea because “it would divide our country more.” Senator Lindsey Graham has made similar statements. The Wall Street Journal editorial page also contends that impeachment should be avoided for this reason, even though they recognize that Trump committed impeachable offenses.

Republican leaders who worry that impeachment will exacerbate disunity have a simple way to address this problem: They can support impeachment themselves! For example, Kevin McCarthy could make a strong statement urging his House caucus to vote for impeachment. Graham, an influential GOP senator, could urge the same course of action on his Senate colleagues. And so on. If impeachment enjoys broad support from Republican leaders, the process could actually promote national unity rather than diminish it.

Such steps might not reconcile Donald Trump’s hardcore supporters. But a good many Republicans would likely follow the lead of party leaders, and impeachment could quickly come to enjoy broad (though not universal) bipartisan support. We could also thereby achieve a broad (though, again, not universal) consensus that Trump’s actions were indefensible, and deserved severe sanction, including barring him from holding federal office in the future.

Already, Trump’s approval rating has fallen significantly since the attack on the Capitol, and a  majority of Americans support removing him from office. GOP leaders could help broaden and deepen this agreement, and thereby help to achieve national unity and healing.

A number of prominent conservatives have already backed impeachment, including Peggy Noonan, Ed Whelan, and John Podhoretz, among others. Republican leaders concerned about unity and healing would do well to join them.

It is also worth noting that failure to impeach could itself contribute to disunity. If the GOP blocks impeachment, it would deepen justifiable suspicions that they don’t really think Trump did anything seriously wrong, and oppose holding him accountable for his grave abuses of power. Many Democrats and independents would even suspect that Republicans condone Trump’s actions, or at best only consider them to be minor wrongs. Sending a message like that is a poor way to promote unity.

None of this applies to people who oppose impeachment because they beleive it is unconstitutional, because they genuinely believe Trump committed no serious wrong, or some combination of both. Those types of arguments should be addressed on their own terms, and I have tried to so in other writings (e.g. here and here).

I also believe that some causes are worth the risk of exacerbating conflict and division. Imposing accountability for Trump’s grave abuses of power—and deterring similar misconduct by future presidents—are among them. Unity and healing are far from the only  civic values, and by no means the most important.

But political leaders who oppose impeachment because of fears of exacerbating disunity should take a long look in the mirror, and consider whether they themselves can do something to fix that issue. They might well find that the cause of the problem—and the potential solution—are staring them in the face.

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It’s been a wild week on social media. Twitter and Facebook permanently suspended President Trump following the Capitol riots; Twitter removed 70,000 accounts for allegedly promoting violent and conspiratorial content; Facebook mistakenly locked former congressman Ron Paul out of his account, an incident that demonstrates the perils of overly broad moderation; Apple and Amazon moved to eliminate Parler from the former’s app store and the latter’s servers, effectively destroying the alternative platform used by many Trump supporters.

The social media companies’ treatment of both Tump and Parler has prompted furious criticism from conservative pundits and politicians. “Big Tech wants to control what we see, how we behave, and what we say,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.) in a statement entirely characteristic of the right’s response.

These moderation decisions can be defended on their own: Trump has repeatedly violated Twitter’s terms of service, and spokespersons for the company have frequently suggested that he was receiving leniency only because of his status as president. The Capitol riots, in which Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric likely played some role, are a new low for his presidency, and the platforms are understandably worried that future calls to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election could inspire further violence. Moreover, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple are all private companies, and thus they have broad latitude to curtail speech, even in cases where doing so is not wise or well-founded.

It’s also fair to criticize the platforms for decisions that appeared hypocritical. While Parler has certainly played host to extremist speech, so have Twitter and Facebook—but Apple and Amazon didn’t punish either of them, which makes it seem like Big Tech is picking on a politically disfavored minor competitor. “It looks a lot like they’re making Parler a sacrificial lamb to political pressure to do something about people talking too uncontrollably online,” noted Reason Senior Editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown.

There’s another reason to be wary of far-reaching bans and takedowns that have the effect of purging extremists from mainstream social media sites: Many such social media users will migrate to corners of the internet where it’s harder to track their activities. Ironically, this could make it more difficult for law enforcement to foil violent plots, and more challenging to prosecute those who are responsible for violence.

Indeed, the swift justice currently being meted out to the rioters who stormed the Capitol last week is an illustration of this point. From the man who stole House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D–Calif.) lectern to the masked figure who brought zip ties (and his mom) inside the building, social media has been indispensable at helping to identify riot participants. The fact that so many of them tweeted about their plans—or even uploaded selfies while they were in the act of trespassing—means it will be trivially easy to arrest, try, and convict them.

There are similar lessons in counterterrorism. A recent study by the criminologist Joe Whittaker took a look at the Islamic State’s social media presence and found that the group was too online for its own good. Terrorists who discussed their plans on social media were twice as likely to be apprehended by law enforcement.

“It is vital to understand the unintended consequences,” wrote Whittaker. “This is particularly the case for content removal, which may inadvertently be aiding terrorists and hampering law enforcement investigations.”

It’s very clear that efforts to remove pro-ISIS content from Twitter and Facebook prompted the terrorist group to begrudgingly migrate to Telegram, an encrypted messaging service. Over time, ISIS became extremely reliant on the service, which made the group vulnerable; in November 2019, Telegram participated in a wildly successful police initiative to identify terrorists who were using the platform for recruitment. Even ISIS’s use of this somewhat more underground social media site ended up backfiring.

Many people who were kicked off Twitter or Parler—or are perhaps fearful they could be next—are currently flocking to Telegram and Signal, another encrypted messaging service. If these platforms become the default organizing centers for the kinds of right-wing political extremists currently threatening to unleash more violence on Trump’s behalf, they might be harder to foil in the future.

This doesn’t mean social media platforms should abandon efforts to moderate extremist content entirely, just that we should be wary of the tradeoffs involved in such moderation. I have to imagine the FBI would prefer for terrorists to livestream their seditious plots, complete with location tracking and time stamps, on an easily accessed social media site.

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President Donald Trump’s response to last week’s attack on the U.S. Capitol led Twitter to permanently ban him from its platform, and Facebook and YouTube closed his accounts on the grounds that he had used their platforms to incite violence.

Then Apple and Google banned Twitter competitor Parler from its app stores, on the grounds that the perpetrators of last week’s Capitol riot used it to coordinate the attack and because the service lacked adequate content moderation. Next, Amazon, which owns about a third of the global cloud storage market, evicted Parler from its cloud hosting service, causing the site to go down entirely.

These decisions drew a ferocious reaction, both for and against, from people of all political stripes.

“For better or worse,” as Edward Snowden said after Trump was kicked off Twitter, “this will be remembered as a turning point in the battle for control over digital speech.”

“It is stunning to watch now as every War on Terror rhetorical tactic to justify civil liberties erosions is now being invoked in the name of combatting Trumpism,” wrote journalist Glenn Greenwald.

So how should those who value a free and open society feel about the deplatforming of the commander in chief, the ongoing purge of many of his supporters, and repression of discussion of 2020 election voter fraud claims?

Twitter is a private company and CEO Jack Dorsey’s capacity to evict even the president of the United States is something to be grateful for. But what if the network power of a handful of Silicon Valley giants is so great that there’s nowhere for the evicted to turn? And are Facebook, Twitter, and Google acting independently, or are they bending to the will of Congress at a time when tech has become so deeply politicized?

The takeaway from the great deplatforming of 2021 is that we need an open digital commons more than ever, a place where individuals maintain ownership of their own identities and where speech is highly resistant to political pressure.

Decentralized networks are vital to protecting open discourse not only from Twitter, Facebook, and Google, but from Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas), Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), President-elect Joe Biden, and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, who have the real power to stomp on the free speech rights of American citizens.

It’s easy to forget that Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg embraced the concept of a neutral “public square” not long ago. Zuckerberg told Congress in July 2020, “We do not want to become the arbiters of truth.”

But the shift from digital commons to an actively curated news feed was underway long before the election. In October 2020, Facebook suppressed and Twitter blocked the sharing of a New York Post story claiming that Biden met with an executive at a Ukrainian gas company where his son held a board seat.

Twitter also blocked the New York Post from using its account for more than two weeks.

When New York Times contributing opinion writer Kara Swisher grilled Parler CEO, John Matze, about the platform’s role in inciting the Capitol breach, he defended Parler’s hands-off approach:

Swisher: …going into the Capitol building to do this, if it was organized on your site, what should happen on your site?

Matze: Look, if it was illegally organized and against the law and what they were doing, they would have gotten it taken down. But I don’t feel responsible for any of this and neither should the platform, considering we’re a neutral town square that just adheres to the law. 

The handful of companies that own the dominant share of social media and the underlying infrastructure of the internet disagree, and they’ve made it increasingly difficult for Parler to operate.

But the greatest threat isn’t coming from Silicon Valley.

To get what they want from tech CEOs, both Republicans and Democrats have regularly threatened to strip away the liability protections provided by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which is sometimes known as the internet’s “First Amendment.“

Democrats want to leverage Section 230 to force them to weed out misinformation, which they falsely imagine can be sorted out by panels of accredited experts or fine-tuned algorithms. Republicans have threatened to repeal Section 230 unless platforms commit to “viewpoint neutrality,” a standard that Daphne Keller of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center told Reason in June 2019, is impossible to uphold.

“I don’t even know what being neutral would mean,” said Keller. “Would it mean allowing every single thing to be uploaded and just showing it in chronological order? Can you be neutral if you have search features? Can you be neutral if you allow people to mute things? I think a truly neutral—meaning showing everything that is legal—social media platform would be full of content that most users don’t want to see.”

The incoming Biden administration and Congress have signaled their intention to introduce new national security and speech laws. Biden is making a public push for a new domestic terrorism law and red-flag laws, which would make it easier for federal agents to seize firearms based on users’ online posts.

“[P]erhaps [America’s] way of thinking about free speech is not the best way,” wrote Emily Bazelon in The New York Times Magazine in October 2020. “At the very least, we should understand that it isn’t the only way.”

She further argues that European speech regulations “have created better conditions for their citizenry to sort what’s true from what’s not and to make informed decisions about what they want their societies to be.”

But, in the European Union, these regulations have created the unintended consequence of flagging content that’s disturbing yet vital to the public interest, such as an archive of Syrian war crimes wrongly flagged as “terrorist content” under the E.U. guidelines. 

“Right now we don’t have any clear information telling us that taking down all of these videos really is making us safer,” says Keller of the E.U. regulations. “In fact, a lot of people who are expert researchers on security are concerned that this will effectively drive more people into darker corners of the internet, into echo chambers where they only ever hear from people who agree with a violent agenda.”

A study from psychologist Richard Rogers found that a robust network of deplatformed figures has already emerged over the past several years on encrypted apps like Telegram, which has become a refuge for extremist content but which is also a preferred platform of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong trying to avoid Chinese censorship and surveillance. 

A transition to a new, more decentralized and private web may be accelerating as privacy-centric DuckDuckGo has experienced significant growth in search as an alternative to Google, and the encrypted messaging app Signal saw a big bump after Elon Musk encouraged the masses to install it.

With a crackdown in progress and likely to intensify once the new administration settles in, we should focus instead on enhancing encrypted communication platforms that make online speech harder to control, and resisting law enforcement efforts to weaken vital tools like end-to-end encryption.

There’s a lot that still needs building to create an alternative digital commons, but it can be accomplished. Communicating freely might take more work in the future, and your favorite politician might get banned or your favorite app taken out of the store. But in this cat-and-mouse game, the mice far outnumber the cats.

That said, in the short term, the decision makers at Twitter and Facebook may want to consider that repression tends to have the unfortunate effect of pushing legitimate dissidents and dangerous, unsavory extremists into the same channels.

Sigmund Freud theorized that when thoughts or experiences are repressed, they inevitably resurface in more deranged and damaging forms. When our dominant communication platforms seek to repress widely held beliefs and opinions, those beliefs and opinions aren’t likely to simply disappear but rather reemerge elsewhere in less visible forums where they’ll face less scrutiny.

The next few years may be ugly, but silencing dissenters will ultimately fail. As Stewart Brand famously quipped, “Information wants to be free.”

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Graphics by Lex Villena. Riot footage by Ford Fischer.

Music credits: ANBR licensed through Artlist.

Photo credits: ID 174062831© Mirko Vitali Dreamstime.com, Gage Skidmore, Maurizio Pesce, Mark Warner, ID. 68071331© Joe Sohm Dreamstime.com, ID 66213669© Joe Sohm Dreamstime.com, Mandel Ngan Pool via CNP Newscom, POOL REUTERS Newscom, David Seelig Polaris Newscom

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President Barack Obama pledged at the Copenhagen climate conference back in 2009 to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by the year 2020. Guess what? We more than did it.

At that 2009 meeting, then-Secretary of State John Kerry assured the conference delegates that the U.S. would likely reduce its green house gas (GHG) emissions even more because in the coming years it would be so easy and cheap to cut them that “every country that has put a reductions target out there will exceed their targets.” (President-elect Joe Biden has selected Kerry to serve as a special envoy for climate, giving him a seat on the National Security Council.)

While it is true the cost of electricity from wind and solar power are falling, the bulk of U.S. emissions reductions between 2009 and 2019 stemmed from electric power generators switching from coal to natural gas. In a new report, the Rhodium Group consultancy estimates that as the result of the COVID-19 economic shock U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell this year by 10.3 percent. “This puts US GHG emissions below 1990 levels for the first time,” notes the report. “With emissions down 21% below 2005 levels, this means the US is expected to far exceed its 2020 Copenhagen Accord target of a 17% reduction below 2005 levels.”

“The enormous toll of economic damage and human suffering as a result of the pandemic is no cause for celebration,” observes the report. “The vast majority of 2020’s emission reductions were due to decreased economic activity and not from any structural changes that would deliver lasting reductions in the carbon intensity of our economy.”

President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement the day after the November 2020 presidential election. Under that agreement, the Obama administration had pledged to further cut U.S. GHG emissions by 26 to 28 percent below their 2005 levels by 2025. President-elect Biden has promised to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement on “day-one” of his administration and to set the U.S. on a path toward net-zero GHG emissions by 2050. Some recently calculated scenarios suggest that this goal is achievable, but the economic and political tradeoffs will be fierce.

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The article of impeachment against President Donald Trump that the House of Representatives is expected to approve tomorrow invokes Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, a little-discussed provision originally aimed at former Confederates. As relevant here, Section 3 says “no person” may “hold any office, civil or military, under the United States,” who, “having previously taken an oath as…an officer of the United States…to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

I understand why House Democrats might want to cite a specific legal provision as justification for Trump’s second impeachment after catching flak for not doing that the first time around. But I’m not sure this is a can of worms we want to open.

Under Section 3, the impeachment article charges, Trump disqualified himself from office by inciting his followers to violently obstruct the congressional affirmation of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory last Wednesday. The article also cites Trump’s “prior efforts to subvert and obstruct the certification of the results of the 2020 Presidential election,” specifically mentioning the January 2 telephone call in which he pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn that state’s election results.

Those actions, the article says, “threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of Government.” Trump “thereby betrayed his trust as President, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.”

Trump’s conduct last Wednesday, when he inflamed his followers with his oft-repeated fantasy of a stolen election and urged them to “fight like hell” against an “egregious assault on our democracy” that was about to destroy the country, was manifestly outrageous and irresponsible. At the same time, his speech, which on its face advocated nothing beyond peaceful protest, did not qualify as incitement to riot under federal law. Nor did it exceed the bounds of constitutionally protected speech as described in the 1969 Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio, which said even advocacy of illegal behavior is covered by the First Amendment unless it is not only “likely” to incite “imminent lawless action” but also “directed” at doing so.

Trump’s conversation with Raffensperger, during which he suggested that the secretary of state could face criminal prosecution if he failed to “find” the votes needed to change the outcome of Georgia’s election, was clearly an abuse of power. But it is doubtful whether it violated any criminal statutes, given Trump’s apparently sincere (though utterly groundless) belief that he was trying to correct election fraud rather than encourage it.

None of this means that Trump cannot be impeached for such conduct, since impeachment is not limited to statutory crimes (as even Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, has conceded). But is it accurate to say that Trump “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution when he persistently pressed his delusional claim that he actually won the election by a landslide, even after all the states had certified their results?

If so, wouldn’t the Republican members of Congress who supported his cause by objecting to electoral votes for Biden without a plausible argument that they had not been properly certified also be disqualified from office by Section 3? The Washington Post reports that some Democrats “want to use the 14th Amendment against members of Congress who supported the baseless allegations that the election was stolen from Trump and the demonstrations that led to the deadly attack on the Capitol.” Section 3 expressly applies to “senator[s] or representative[s].” Under a broad reading of “insurrection or rebellion,” legislators who use fiery rhetoric while violating their oath to “support and defend the Constitution” (pretty much all of them) would be ineligible to remain in Congress.

The history of Section 3 does not illuminate its reach very much. In a recent paper that he describes as “the first detailed account of Section Three,” Indiana University law professor Gerard Magliocca says the provision “disappear[ed] from constitutional law” after the postbellum controversy over how to treat former Confederate leaders, which began with tough enforcement, followed by congressional amnesties.

But Washington Post reporter Michael Rosenwald describes a subsequent episode that should give pause to those who favor a wide interpretation of Section 3. “In 1919,” Rosenwald notes, “Congress barred Victor L. Berger, a socialist from Wisconsin, from occupying a House seat following his opposition to the United States entering World War I.” The rationale for disqualifying Berger suggests how Section 3 could be abused to punish dissenters.

A special House committee concluded that Berger, “because of his disloyalty, is not entitled to the seat to which he was elected, but that in accordance with the unbroken precedents of the House, he should be excluded from membership; and further, that having previously taken an oath as a Member of Congress to support the Constitution of the United States, and having subsequently given aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States during the World War, he is absolutely ineligible to membership in the House of Representatives under section 3 of the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States.”

If speaking out against a senseless war counted as giving “aid and comfort” to America’s enemies (which tracks the Constitution’s definition of treason), what unanticipated results might flow from defining Trump’s two-month refusal to admit defeat as “insurrection or rebellion”? While alleging abuse of power or manifest unfitness for office unmoored to specific constitutional or statutory violations also creates a risk of unjustified, politically driven impeachments, the requirement of a Senate supermajority for removal is a pretty good safeguard against that danger. And the latter approach does not open the door to casting out senators or representatives based on differences of opinion.

South Texas College of Law professor Josh Blackman and Seth Barrett Tillman, a lecturer in the Department of Law at Maynooth University in Ireland, argue that Trump cannot be impeached based on his constitutionally protected speech. George Mason law professor Ilya Somin disagrees, because “high government officials don’t have a First Amendment right to be protected from firing based on their political views.” That principle, he says, “applies to presidents facing impeachment no less than other officials.”

Somin’s argument that presidents can be fired for speech that would not justify criminal prosecution comports with the more general understanding that impeachment is an appropriate remedy for serious presidential misconduct even when it does not technically violate the law. I think that is what we have in this case.

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