You won’t be surprised to learn that I have some thoughts. Thoughts that I deliberated, challenged, challenged again, and then formed.
I want to start by sharing my thoughts on Assange as a person. To bottom line it: he’s not a good guy. He is a narcissist with some serious delusions of grandeur. Like James Comey and Michael Avenatti, he fancies himself the arbiter of all that is true and righteous. That always takes someone down a bad road, and they inevitably get themselves into trouble. But how I feel about him as a person is a separate issue from how I feel about his arrest.
On principal, I’m all for WikiLeaks and organizations like WikiLeaks. Exposing the dirty little secrets of governments around the world is, in the main, a good thing. If we had a WikiLeaks in the early 50s when the CIA was working with MI6 to install the Shah in Iran, the situation in the whole of the middle east would be very different (in a good way) right now.
As with all things, principal and practice seldom align. Assange went horribly, horribly wrong when he picked a team in our (or any) election and started using his platform to affect the outcome. Dumping 40,000 utterly worthless Clinton campaign emails on the day we learned of Trump’s pussy grabbing had no journalistic value whatsoever. There was literally no there there. I know, because I skimmed all of them. 50% – 70% of those emails were daily press clippings. Yawn. Then there was some shit talk about Bernie, and a risotto recipe. There was no news and very little “dirt”. The only purpose of that dump was to sponge up a week or a month’s worth of news cycles with distortions and flat out lies, and to deflect from Trump’s issues.
That was the day that Assange and WikiLeaks turned into yet another craven propaganda outlet. It’s basically Breitbart now.
But here’s the thing: in order to protect a free press, we need to accept the fact that with honest journalism comes a significant percentage of propaganda and lies. You really can’t have one without the other. Protecting the press means swallowing some bitter pills. I can’t think of anything more important to our democracy than protecting and advocating for a truly free press. The reality of the situation is that in doing so, we have to protect scumbags like Julian Assange. Let me be clear: I don’t think of Assange as a journalist. He practices precisely no journalistic standards and has no interest in providing context or verifying his sources. I think of him as journalist-adjacent. His proximity to journalism means that he must be protected in order to give journalists all the room they need in order to bring us the news.
The charges that have been brought against Assange are dangerous and I can’t bring myself to root for a conviction, no matter how despicable I think he is. This is about playing the long game, and the short term satisfaction isn’t worth the potential damage a conviction might do to the first amendment.
I will say this though: I took immense pleasure in seeing that Assange, who is a couple of years younger than me, looks at least twenty years older than I do. By the end of this whole thing, he’s going to look like The Doctor in the Doctor Who episode when The Master aged him like 8,000 years. That makes me happy, and it doesn’t hurt my long term self interest so YAY!
