Victory in the Second Circuit on Trump Twitter lawsuit

Clown imitates icon.

“The First Amendment does not permit a public official who utilizes a social media account for all manner of official purposes to exclude persons from an otherwise-open online dialogue because they expressed views with which the official disagrees. … Once the President has chosen a platform and opened up its interactive space to millions of users and participants, he may not selectively exclude those whose views he disagrees with.”

— Barrington D. Parker, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit

Yesterday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided in our favor in Knight Institute v. Trump, upholding the decision of from the U.S. District Court that President Trump violating the First Amendment by blocking me and six other plaintiffs on Twitter. The decision was unanimous among the three judges (two appointed by Republicans, one Democrat), who heard oral arguments in March (available in video here).

In ruling that Trump can't block people on Twitter, the 2nd Circuit said the First Amendment stands for the concept that "the best response to disfavored speech on matters of public concern is more speech, not less." We agree!

— EFF (@EFF) July 9, 2019

Here is some of the coverage.

• New York Times: “Trump Can’t Block Critics From His Twitter Account, Appeals Court Rules“
• Politico: “Judges: Trump violates First Amendment when he blocks Twitter critics“
• Washington Post: “President Trump cannot block his critics on Twitter, federal appeals court rules“
• Haaretz (Reuters): “Trump’s Blocking of Twitter Foes Is Unconstitutional, U.S. Appeals Court Rules“
• El País: “Trump ya no puede bloquear a sus críticos en Twitter“

More to come.

I was interviewed for a (paywalled) Times Higher Education article, “US university professor helps beat Trump on Twitter blocking,” saying:

“I often don’t read his tweets before replying. The point is not to have a dialogue with him, but to engage with the millions of people who read his tweets. … When I have a popular reply it can be viewed by 100,000 people or more, which, while small in the grand scheme, is very satisfying as an individual act of resistance.”

The article concludes:

But the professor acknowledged that some of his friends regard his approach as a waste of time, “playing into Trump’s hands, sinking to his level, fueling the outrage industry without advancing the cause of improving democracy through civil discourse. And honestly, they may be right,” he said. “We each have to respond in our own way to what, for many, is a deeply distressing turn of events.”

Much more important than my tweets is the effect of the case on the legal protections for democracy. I share the optimistic take by Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight Institute and the lawyer who delivered the oral argument in the Second Circuit:

“Public officials’ social media accounts are now among the most significant forums for discussion of government policy. This decision will ensure that people aren’t excluded from these forums simply because of their viewpoints, and that public officials aren’t insulated from their constituents’ criticism. The decision will help ensure the integrity and vitality of digital spaces that are increasingly important to our democracy.”

(The whole team at the Knight Institute has been amazing and I’m deeply grateful.)

I also gave this interview to ABC News streaming show Briefing Room, and offered this summary off the cuff:

This is exactly what we were hoping for. Trump and the Department of Justice that’s representing him had argued that when Trump tweets, they acknowledge, that’s official business, but when he blocked people they said that was his personal preference and his personal behavior. And it’s really new territory because increasingly government official are communicating with the public on these private platforms, and we have to do some work to bring the First Amendment to bear in these environments. The principle here is that if the government, or a government official, establishes what’s called a public forum, then they can’t exclude people from that forum on the basis of their views. So Trump can have a private party, he can have a campaign rally, he doesn’t have to let every person in the world walk into the White House – but if he puts up a sign that says, “Public Debate Happening Here,” then he can’t say, “Oh, by the way, only Republicans can come.” And that’s what the court found he’s doing essentially with his Twitter feed when he blocks people, and creates this false impression that, you know, he has the biggest crowds and everybody loves him.

Here’s the clip:

The next step is to see whether Trump appeals, in which case he can either ask for a review by the full panel of the Second Circuit, or go up to the Supreme Court. We’re supposed to hear within 90 days.

The news office at Columbia, host of the Knight First Amendment Institute, which represents us, produced this short video on the decision:

Tone policing: Am I allowed to put Regnerus, Wilcox, and Hitler in the same headline?

Sir, are you aware you were using a caustic tone back there? (photo: Thomas Hawk)

Nicholas Wolfinger reviewed my book Enduring Bonds for Social Forces (paywalled [why paywall book reviews?]; bootlegged). It would be unseemly of me to argue with a two-page book review instead of letting my life’s work stand on its own, so here goes — but just on one point: tone policing.

This is the opening of the review:

Philip Cohen has a lot of beefs. Hanna Rosen is an ”antifeminist” (p. 134) prone to “errors and distortions” (p. 146), and a “record of misstating facts in the service of inaccurate conclusions” (p. 185); W. Bradford Wilcox offers an “interpretation not just wrong but the opposite of right” (p. 76) and elsewhere gives a “racist” interview (p. 175); Ron Haskins, a “curmudgeon” (p. 175), presents a meme that’s “stupid and evil” (p. 47); David Blankenhorn is the author of a “deeply ridiculous” article (p. 80); Christina Hoff Sommers speaks in “[a] voice [that] drips with contempt” (p. 200) and is deemed to be an “antifeminist” (p. 155), even though she’s later identified as a
feminist (p. 197).*

He adds:

Also making the list: Paula England, for her “disappointingly mild” review of Cohen’s Public Enemy Number One, the “obtuse, semi-coherent” (p. 106) and “simply unethical” (p. 91) Mark Regnerus. Indeed, 29 of the 209 pages of Cohen’s book are spent excoriating Regnerus for two different studies.

This makes up his argument that, “Cohen writes so tendentiously that the useful bits get carried away in a torrent of ad hominem asperity,” and his conclusion, “you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

Over my many years as a caustic person, I have heard this a lot, mostly from academics, bless their hearts. Which is cool, that’s my career choice and it would be unseemly to complain about it now, so here goes.

Listing the bad words I used doesn’t mean anything. And telling me I spent 29 pages on Regnerus (Wolfinger doesn’t mention that his frequent co-author, Brad Wilcox, is featured heavily in those 29 pages, or even that Wilcox is his frequent co-author), is not a meaningful critique unless you explain why these people don’t deserve it. I’ve heard, for example, that people have written very good whole books about specific individuals and the bad things they’ve done — including, off the top of my head, Hitler. The meaningful question is, am I wrong in those assessments, and if I am, why? In other words, you catch more flies by telling the reader why it would not be unacceptably harsg to write a whole book about Hitler but the same cannot be said about 29 pages on Regnerus and Wilcox. Or why it’s wrong to criticize Rosin, Haskins, Blankenhorn, Sommers and (lol) England in harsh terms.

If you want to enjoy a world where entire reviews are written about the use of harsh words, reviews that don’t even give a hint — not even a mention — as to the content of the issues and disputes that prompted those harsh words, then I can only suggest a career in academia.

Ironic aside

I tweeted a link to Wolfinger’s review, even though it is completely negative, because I’m scrupulous and fair-minded.

This led him to go on a multitweet journey, complaining that “he took words like ‘formidable’ out of context to suggest a much more positive review,” and exploring my motivations — responding to someone who said, “That was clearly a joke” with, “You see a joke, I see mendacity,” and concluding, “‘‘Just a joke’ is a weak, all-purpose way to cover up a fuck up like getting caught twisting the evidence.”

I hate to bring up Hitler again (not really), but the last time someone spent so much time pretending to not understand I was joking it was actual nazis, quoting a tweet where I joked that Jews were devoted to “eradicating whiteness and undermining its civilizations” (not linking, but you can google it). This led to a lot of online grief and some death threats, including posting my address on Reddit. So it irritated me.

The online nazi mob technique is to pretend things Jews say aren’t jokes, then pretend they themselves are joking when they talk about genocide. I’m sure many Jewish readers will recognize that failure to understand sarcastic humor is actually a common trait among rank-and-file anti-Semites — the people who have a hard time differentiating “New York” from “Jewish” — something that leading anti-Semites are very adept at manipulating. So that resonated with me.

(The above is labeled “aside” to make it boringly over-clear that I’m not saying Wolfinger is anti-Semitic.)

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* Correction: Sommers is not “identified as a feminist” on p. 197, I just reported the name of her video series which is, absurdly, the The Factual Feminist.

 

Wilcox plagiarism denial and ethics review

Recently I made the serious accusation that Brad Wilcox and his colleagues plagiarized me in a New York Times op-ed. After the blog post, I sent a letter to the Times and got no response. And until now Wilcox had not responded. But now thanks to an errant group email I had the chance to poke him, and he responded, in relevant part:

You missed the point of the NYT op-ed, which was to stress the intriguing J-Curve in women’s marital happiness when you look at religion and gender ideology. We also thought it interesting to note there is a rather similar J-Curve in women’s marital happiness in the GSS when it comes to political ideology, although the political ideology story was somewhat closer to a U-Curve in the GSS. Our NYT argument was not inspired by you, and our extension of the argument to a widely used dataset is not plagiarism.

Most of that comment is irrelevant to the question of whether the figure they published was ripped off from my blog; the only argument he makes is to underline the word not. To help readers judge for themselves, here is the sequence again, maybe presented more clearly than I did it last time.

Wilcox and Nicholas Wolfinger published this, claiming Republicans have happier marriages:

I responded by showing that that when you break out the categories more you get a U-shape instead:

Subsequently, I repeated the analysis, with newer data, using political views instead of party identification (the U-shape on the right):

This is the scheme, and almost exactly the results, that Wilcox and colleagues then published in the NYT, now including one more year of data:

The data used, the control variables, and the results, are almost identical to analysis I did in response to their work. His response is, “Our NYT argument was not inspired by you.” So that’s that.

Ethics aside

Of course, only he knows what’s in his heart. But the premise of his plagiarism denial is an appeal to trust. So, do you trust him?

Lies

There is a long history here, and it’s hard to know where to start if you’re just joining. Wilcox has been a liberal villain since he took over the National Marriage Project and then organized what became (unfortunately) known as the Regnerus study (see below), and a conservative darling since the top administration at the University of Virginia overturned the recommendation of his department and dean to grant him tenure.

So here are some highlights, setting aside questions of research quality and sticking to ethical issues.

Wilcox led the coalition that raised $785,000, from several foundations, used to generate the paper published under Mark Regnerus’s name, intended to sway the courts against marriage equality. He helped design the study, and led the development of the media plan, and arranged for the paper to be submitted to Social Science Research, and then arranged for himself to be one of the anonymous peer reviewers. To do this, he lied to the editor, by omission, about his contribution the study — saying only that he “served on the advisory board.”

And then when the scandal blew up he lied about his role at the Witherspoon Institute, which provided most of the funding, saying he “never served as an officer or a staffer at the Witherspoon Institute, and I never had the authority to make funding or programmatic decisions at the Institute,” and that he was “not acting in an official Witherspoon capacity.” He was in fact the director of the institute’s Program on Family, Marriage, and Democracy, which funded the study, and the email record showed him approving budget requests and plans. To protect his reputation and cover up the lie, that position (which he described as “honorific”) has been scrubbed from his CV and the Witherspoon website. (In the emails uncovered later, the president of Witherspoon, Luis Tellez wrote, “we will include some money for you [Regnerus] and Brad on account of the time and effort you will be devoting to this,” but the amount he may have received has not been revealed — the grants aren’t on his CV.)

This is covered under the Regnerus and Wilcox tags on the blog, and told in gripping fashion in a chapter of my book, Enduring Bonds.

You might hold it against him that he organized a conspiracy to fight marriage equality, but even if you think that’s just partisan nitpickery, the fact that the research was the result of a “coalition” (their word) that included a network of right-wing activists, and that their roles were not disclosed in the publication, is facially an ethical violation. And the fact that it involved a series of public and private lies, which he has never acknowledged, goes to the issue of trust in every subsequent case.

Money

Here I can’t say what ethical rule Wilcox may have broken. Academia is a game that runs on trust, and in his financial dealings Wilcox has not been forthcoming. There is money flowing through his work, but the source and purpose that money is not disclosed when the work is published. For example, in the NYT piece Wilcox is identified only as a professor at the University of Virginia, even though the research reported there was published by the Institute for Family Studies. His faculty position, and tenure, are signals of his trustworthiness, which he uses to bolster the reputation of his partisan efforts.

The Institute for Family Studies is a non-profit organization that Wilcox created in 2009, originally called the Ridge Foundation. For the first four years the tax filings list him as the president, then director. Since 2013, when it changed its name to IFS, he has been listed as a senior fellow. Through 2017, the organization paid him more than $330,000, and he was the highest paid person. The funders are right-wing foundations.

Most academics want people to know about their grants and the support for their research. On his CV at the University of Virginia, however, Wilcox does not list the Institute for Family Studies in the “Employment” section, or include it among the grants he has received. Even though it is an organization he created and built up, so far grossing almost $3 million in total revenue. It is only mentioned in a section titled “Education Honors and Awards,” where he lists himself as a “Senior Fellow, Institute for Family Studies.” An education honor and award he gave himself, apparently.

He also doesn’t list his position on the Marco Rubio campaign’s Marriage & Family Advisory Board, where he was among those who “understand” that “Windsor and Obergefell are only the most recent example of our failure as a society to understand what marriage is and why it matters”

Wilcox uses his academic position to support and legitimize his partisan efforts, and his partisan work to produce work under his academic title (of course IFS says it’s nonpartisan but that’s meaningless). If he kept them really separate that would be one thing — we don’t need to know what church academics belong to or what campaigns they support, except as required by law — but if he’s going to blend them together I think he incurs an ethical disclosure obligation.

Wilcox isn’t the only person to scrub Withserspoon from his academic record — which is funny because the Witherspoon Institute is housed at Princeton University (where Wilcox got his PhD). And the fact of removing Witherspoon from a CV was used to discredit a different anti-marriage-equality academic expert, Joseph Price at Brigham Young, in the Michigan trial that led to the Obergefell decision, because it made it seem he was trying to hide his political motivations in testifying against marriage equality. Here is the exchange:

Court proceedings are useful for bringing out certain principles. In this case I think they help illustrate my point: If Brad Wilcox wants people to trust his motivations, he should disclose the sources of support for his work.

Naomi Wolf and sharing our lanes

Bruce Stokes / https://flic.kr/p/dMG983

The other day, in response to the Naomi Wolf situation, I tweeted in response to Heather Souvaine Horn, an editor at the New Republic:

The tendency of some literature people to make unsupported statements about history was a big reason I left culture studies for sociology https://t.co/a7AlSAkHOH

— Philip N Cohen (@familyunequal) May 25, 2019

After which she invited my to submit an essay to the site. It’s now been published as: Learn the Right Lessons from Naomi Wolf’s Book Blunder: Expertise matters. But lane-policing is counterproductive.

Wilcox and colleagues plagiarized my work in the New York Times

In the New York Times yesterday, W. Bradford Wilcox, Jason S. Carroll and Laurie DeRose published an Op-Ed with the ridiculous title, “Religious Men Can Be Devoted Dads, Too.” In it they included this figure:

In 2015 I wrote a post titled, “That thing about Republican marriages being happier (isn’t true),” which included this figure:

There are trivial differences between these figures. Theirs is from the General Social Survey for 2010-2018, mine was for 2010-2014. Theirs used political views while mine used party identification. Theirs is just women, and controls for age, education, and race; mine included men and women while controlling for gender, and I also controlled for income and religious attendance. (And they used gray for the middle bar, instead of purple.) However, in a subsequent post, from 2017, I redid the analysis for the years 2012-2016, using political views instead of party identification, in a post titled, “Who’s happy in marriage? (Not just rich, White, religious men, but kind of).” The results are almost identical to theirs in the Times (on the right, here):

Did they know about my pieces? I am certain they did, though I can’t prove it. It’s relevant that my first post, “That thing about Republican marriages…” was a critique of a post by Wilcox and Nick Wolfinger, which had only reported that Republicans were slightly happier in marriage than Democrats, which they called “The Republican Advantage in Marital Satisfaction.” My post was a correction, showing the U-shape the emerged when you broke out the categories — the change Wilcox and colleagues have now adopted. My follow-up post was reported by Bloomberg (and carried in the Chicago Tribune), and the Daily Mail. Both of my posts were tweeted by popular journalists who work in this area. I expect that would claim they never noticed my little blog posts.

You also could split hairs on the definition of plagiarism to try to defend this unethical behavior. The relevant passages of the American Sociological Association Code of Ethics:

(b) In their publications, presentations, teaching, practice, and service, sociologists provide acknowledgment of and reference to the use of their own and others’ work, even if the work is paraphrased and not quoted verbatim.
(c) While sociologists utilize and build on the concepts, theories, and paradigms of others, they may not claim credit for creating such ideas and must cite the creator of such ideas where appropriate.

But no one can seriously argue they shouldn’t have referenced my work.

Wilcox has done much worse, of course, most importantly leading a conspiracy to gin up research to turn the Supreme Court against same-sex marriage and then lying about his role in that conspiracy (the subject of a chapter in my book Enduring Bonds). And this is not a very important idea (their explanation is very flimsy, and I have no real explanation or theory to explain the pattern.) But this one goes on the list somewhere.

Why?

Why do I care? Is this just petty partisanship and even jealousy because Wilcox paid himself $80,000 of right-wing foundation money in 2016, and continues to publish low-quality research in important outlets like the New York Times? Draw your own conclusions. Of course his views are noxious to me. But more than that, in the game of trust that is the research ecosystem, reputations matter a lot. Once someone is tenured, and funded by unaccountable political actors, our options for defending the system are limited. The norms of publishing, especially outside academia, don’t require research transparency (like their current report, made to order for conservative funders, not the research community or peer review). If someone says, “This is my finding,” publishers (like the Times) usually vet the researcher instead of the research. 

I don’t believe in lifetime bans, and I don’t care about atonement for research ethics. My question is, “Can we trust this person’s research?” Before we can answer that affirmatively, we need to have an accounting of past malfeasance that makes clear future work will be clean. Until then, I don’t mind spending a few minutes now and then reminding people that Wilcox (like Mark Regnerus) is not trustworthy.

The changing household age range, U.S. 1900-2017

One way to understand daily interaction, and intergenerational resource exchange, is just to look at the structure of households. This doesn’t tell you everything that goes on in households, but it gives some strong clues. And we can measure it going back more than a century, thanks to IPUMS.org’s collection of Census microdata.

In 1900, the most common situation for an American was to live in a household where the age difference between the oldest and youngest person was about 38 years. Now the most common situation is an age range of 0 — either living alone, or with someone of the exact same age. And there are a lot more people living in households with only similar-aged adults, with age ranges of less than 10.

In between 1900 and 2017, life expectancy increased, the age at first birth increased, and the tendency to live in multigenerational households fell and then rose again. So the household structure story is complicated, and this is just one perspective.

But it’s one indicator of how life has changed. Line up your household from youngest to oldest, look to your left and look to your right — how far can you see?

 

Data and Stata code (for all decades 1900-2000, then individual years to 2017) are available on the Open Science Framework, here.

White children are 2.7-times more likely than Black children to live with a parent who has a PhD

For a reflection Amy Harmon was working on, a followup to her article on the experience of Black mathematicians in American academia, I took a shot at the question: How many children have parents with PhDs?

The result was the highlighted passage (17 words and a link!) in her piece:

[all the racial biases that contribute to Black underrepresentation include] the well-documented racial disparities in public-school resources, the selection of students for gifted programs — and the fact that having a parent with a Ph.D. is helpful to getting one in math, while black children are less than half as likely as white children to live with such a parent.

To get there: I used data from the U.S. Census Bureau via IPUMS.org: The 1990 5% Public Use Microdata Sample (decennial census); and the 2000, 2010, and 2017 American Community Surveys.

I coded race/ethnicity into four mutually-exclusive categories: Single-race White, Black, and Asian/Pacific Islander (API); and Hispanic (including those of any race). I dropped from the analysis non-Hispanic children with multiple races reported, and American Indian / Alaska Natives (for whom about 0.5 percent lived with a PhD parent in 2017).

IPUMS made a tool that attaches values of parents’ variables to children with whom they share a household. I used that to calculate the highest level of education of each child’s coresident parents. In the Census data, children may have up to two parents present (which may be of the same sex in 2010 and 2017). Children living with no parent in the household were not included.

This let me calculate the percentage of children living (at the moment of the survey) with one or more parents who had a PhD. For each of the four groups the percentage of children living with a parent who has a PhD roughly doubled between 1990 and 2017. API children had the highest chance of living with a PhD parent, reaching 6.8 percent in 2017. The percentages for the other groups were: Whites, 2.7 percent; Blacks, 1.0 percent; and Hispanics, 0.7 percent:

The 2.7% for White children, versus, 1.0% for Black children, is the basis for her statement above.

Details (including the whole parents’ education distribution), data, codebook, and code, are available on the Open Science Framework at: https://osf.io/ry3zt/ under CC-BY 4.0 license.

Math bias

Both of Amy’s pieces are important reading for academics in many disciplines, including sociology, to reflect on the experience of Black colleagues in the environments we inherit and reproduce.

With regard to math, Amy points out that Black exclusion is not just about denying economic opportunity, it’s also about denying the public the benefits of all the lost Black math talents — and about denying Black potential mathematicians the joy and satisfaction of a passion for math realized.

As Daniel Zaharopol, the director of a program for mathematically talented low-income middle-school students, put it when I interviewed him for a 2017 article: “Math is beautiful, and being a part of that should not be limited to just some people.”

And Amy makes a good case that math bias and its outcomes contribute directly to racism much more broadly:

Some misguided people claim that there are not many black research mathematicians because African-Americans are not as intelligent as other races. These people, whom I have reported on for other stories in recent months, almost invariably use mathematical accomplishment as their yardstick for intelligence. They note that no individuals of African descent have won the Fields Medal, math’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. They lack any genetic evidence to explain the gap in average I.Q. scores between white and black Americans that they cite as the basis of their belief, or reason to think that a genetic trait would be impervious to social or educational intervention, or that high I.Q. is key to math ability, which Timothy Gowers, a 1998 Fields medalist, has attributed largely to “the capacity to become obsessed with a math problem.”

But I have been reporting on these topics for several years, and I am acutely aware that math prowess factors heavily into the popular conception of intelligence. There’s a vicious cycle at work: The lack of African-American representation in math can end up feeding pernicious biases, which in turn add to the many obstacles mathematically talented minorities face. Which was one more reason it seemed especially important to hold up to the light all the racial biases that contribute to that underrepresentation.