Charges filed
The workers retort.
U.A.W. Files Labor Charges Against Trump and Musk Over Interview
It won’t succeed, but it’s a good poke in the eye.
The United Automobile Workers union filed charges with federal labor regulators on Tuesday accusing former President Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk of threatening workers during a livestreamed conversation a day earlier.
The union, which has backed Vice President Kamala Harris, accused Mr. Trump of violating the law by voicing support for the practice of firing workers when they go on strike, an approach the former president suggested Mr. Musk had embraced.
In the glitch-delayed conversation on X, Mr. Trump described Mr. Musk as the “greatest cutter” of workers. He claimed Mr. Musk has responded to striking workers by saying, “That’s OK — you’re all gone.” Mr. Musk, the billionaire leader of Tesla and SpaceX, laughed in response, but did not directly address Mr. Trump’s remark before the former president changed the topic.
They mean, before the former president lurched into a totally different subject because he has the attention span of roadkill.
A spokesman for the Trump campaign, Brian Hughes, called the complaint against Mr. Trump a “shameless political stunt intended to erode” the former president’s support from American workers.
It’s fascinating that he doesn’t call Trump’s “Hahaha you’ll just fire them all hahaha” a shameless political remark but does call a reaction to it a shameless political stunt. Which of the two is the more shameless? For real?
Of course it won’t succeed, and, if the quoted characterisation of the lawsuit is correct, we should all be grateful that it will not. Specifically,
In United Statesian jurisprudence it is not generally held to be a crime to voice an opinion contrary to the law. In fact it is a cornerstone of American legal and political philosophy that, outside of very limited circumstances more-or-less explicitly enumerated, it is impossible for a law to actually prohibit an act of speech, making it consequently impossible to “violate the law” by “voicing support” for behaviour which violates said law.
Which, in world-historical terms, is a rare and precious thing for a society to have agreed upon. Among other things, it allows the people here to argue against abortion bans and trans nonsense and other miscarriages of justice and boneheaded government policies without worrying that a uniformed officer of the law will come ’round and arrest you for committing thought crimes.
Notwithstanding the enormous own-goal such a lawsuit would be for the union (because suing and losing is unlikely to redound positively to any actual pro-union laws or policy and is very likely to bring them detriment), it is a negative development for American legal culture and broader civil society to sue people more and more often for what they say. It’s a phenomenon that Ken White has been sounding the alarm over for a number of years, now; his specialty is in defamation, which it appears this particular suit isn’t, but it seems driven by the same instinct — a bad man said something we didn’t like so we’re going to sue him for, essentially, hurting our feelings. In America this tendency is still more-or-less a nuisance for rich people and entertainment for the masses, but in other Western countries it has begun to challenge longstanding assumptions that we live in more or less free societies.
In my adoptive country, for example, we have laws against “insulting” people. Since the pandemic, and more specifically since the government had to deal with widespread criticism and protest of the countermeasures it employed (which have, with the benefit of hindsight, proven of extremely questionable efficacy in having done much of anything at all), these doctrines and laws against “insult” have been rolled into the crime of “delegitimising the state” — so that, for example, if you put up a sign asking if the Minister of the Economy can count to three, the police will raid your home and office and arrest you for having insulted him. (In this case the court has evidently ruled that said sign was not an insult, seeing as “satire is covered under freedom of opinion”, which is guaranteed in the German constitution…but that is little consolation to the middle-aged man who had to affirmatively prove this in court against the government.) Or where the Interior Minister can, without consulting any court or proving you’ve violated the already-stringent speech laws here, declare your publication to be a “right-wing extremist organisation” and disband it, on the more-or-less explicit basis of it supporting a right-wing political party whom the government wishes to hinder in advance of state elections where said party appears poised to do very well, and again have police raid your home and offices in full tactical gear and shut you down. (Again, it appears the courts are partially walking this back after the fact, though according to the linked article they have confirmed the government’s power in principle to take such action while saying they haven’t yet done enough to show that in this case the ban was justified.)
Or in the UK, where people regularly have the police show up to their homes to arrest them for things they’ve posted on Facebook, or retweeted, or even liked. The latest round of this of course has to do with the riots, where the Director of Public Prosecutions warns that “…even seemingly harmless actions, such as retweeting videos or sharing images of unrest, could be subject to criminal prosecution if such content is deemed likely to incite further unrest or violate the law.” Alistair Campbell, one of Tony Blair’s underlings who gleefully helped drag the United Kingdom into the Iraq War, has recently called for Douglas Murray to be “investigated” because he had the temerity several years ago now to publish a book discussion mass migration into Europe in less than glowing terms, which Campbell seems to think makes him partially answerable for the current unrest.
Free speech is a precious thing. The ability to write books, or even blog posts and tweets, that government bureaucrats or union bosses don’t like but cannot punish you for having written is a precious thing. I would advise against trading these things away for the emotional satisfaction of giving people you don’t like a good “poke in the eye”, especially when said poke is unlikely even to bring a tear to said eye and is very likely to sprain your finger, and just might contribute to your hand eventually breaking off at the wrist.
Point taken.