Discourse, Interrupted

The Supreme Court, Twitter, and Monopolizing the Mind

Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court decided that affirmative action in college admissions was unconstitutional, student debt cancellation was unconstitutional, and business owners have a First Amendment right to discriminate against same-sex couples. Legal pundits and political commenters have argued that these decisions amount to a failure to recognize the persistent real-world consequences of marginalized identity, student debt, and discrimination more broadly. That they reveal what the conservative majority simply “can’t see.” That, by codifying blindness to differences in race, socioeconomic status, and sexuality, they, in turn, illuminate their own ideological blindness to the tangible impacts of those categories. It is Justice Jackson’s characterization of the Court’s disposition as “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” in the affirmative action cases that immediately made the rounds as one of the most-quoted lines in the Court’s opinions this term.

But the brazenness of the Court taking the ostensibly principled position that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it” on June 29th and then allowing businesses to discriminate against sexuality as an expression of their First Amendment right on June 30th doesn’t reveal a lack of recognition so much as a particular kind of cognition. Not only does antidiscrimination law no longer have to protect historically and presently oppressed people, but its successful protection of historically and presently oppressed people can be evidence of the oppression of historically and presently powerful people. While it’s true that this kind of reasoning is absurd, absurdity isn’t ignorance. What we are witnessing, instead, is the deliberate elimination of political subjects through the Supreme Court’s participation in the larger war on critical discourse. Particularly, by attempting to neutralize both alternative logics and ways of being in the world. It is this critical discourse, which reveals and challenges power relations, that has been fundamental to increasing public consciousness about the various forms of state-sanctioned violence that black, laboring, and queer bodies endure in civil and political society.

This right-wing monopolization of popular discussion was highlighted a few days later when Elon Musk announced that Twitter would begin to limit the number of tweets its users could view each day. This, along with the increase in hate speech and systemic prioritization of right-wing content following Musk’s takeover, resulted in users feverishly searching for new platforms on which to exchange ideas. Many landed on Spill, a black-owned social media app founded by former Twitter employees with an interest in becoming “the de facto platform to discover and discuss culture worldwide” and “creating safety for diverse communities.” Shortly thereafter, Meta/Instagram launched Threads, its very own Twitter-esque app. Predictably, while designed to capitalize on the exodus from Twitter, it remains agnostic to hate speech and misinformation. Threads is now the fastest growing app in history.

This is all to say that discursive violence - the legitimation of dehumanizing forms of reasoning and argument - has always been a coordinated effort between the rulers of the public and private spheres. The unspoken project of both the Supreme Court and social media companies is the assertion of dominance over human knowledge - what do people know? how do they know it? is it acceptable for them to know it? The fundamental objective of law isn’t the body, but the mind. The ability to decisively regulate thought. It not only demands compliance, but conversion. The function of punishment and vindication isn’t just behavior modification, it is the re-organization of belief.

So, it is, ultimately, unsurprising that a conservative court issued a series of rulings designed to destroy the decades of liberal legal principles undergirding existing antidiscrimination law. Principles that they, as a foundational matter, do not believe in. That was to be expected. But the discourse is now ripe for reinvigoration. Perhaps the liberalism that allowed selective inclusion to serve as a substitute for liberation was always vulnerable to this kind of embarrassing deconstruction. Perhaps the clock was always ticking. Perhaps it’s time to wrestle against those theories and approaches that naively seek to endlessly compromise and embrace those that might actually enable us to break free.