On May 29, I appeared at the WBUR Festival at Boston University, a school that sprawls along the Fenway-Kenmore and Allston neighborhoods against the southern shore of the Charles River in Boston, Mass. A nearby meteor explosion and gale warnings that chased off the planned street vendors did little to dissuade attendees from showing up for the (indoor) speaking events, including mine on “Judges, Law and the New Era of Immigration Enforcement”. I came away relatively unscathed, wondering whether the “X (formerly Twitter) World” of bunkered acrimony really exists.
Setting the Scene
To put the event into context, WBUR is a local NPR affiliate, and if you went to “the Hub”, the center for the weekend’s activities, you could purchase t-shirts that reflected disdain for (bordering on struggle against) the federal government’s decision to defund (objectively left-leaning) national public radio.
The city itself is almost reflexively, cruise-control liberal: The last Republican mayor (Malcolm E. Nichols), left office 96 years ago, and his latest successor (Michelle Wu, a Democrat) seemingly employs a team of staffers and a nuclear-grade thesaurus to express and publicize her hatred for immigration enforcement.
In the 2024 presidential election, the Democrat candidate, Kamala Harris, won 61.3 percent of the votes cast in the Commonwealth, and 77 percent of the ones dropped into ballot boxes in Boston proper.
Then, there’s Boston University itself. College-ranking website Niche asked students there about their political leanings, and 7 percent stated they were either “very conservative” (1 percent, who likely looked over both shoulders while responding) or just plain “conservative” (6 percent), while 64 percent claimed to be “liberal” (36 percent) or “very liberal” (28 percent).
To the students’ credit, they aren’t delusional: 72 percent of those polled by Niche described the “political beliefs of the campus as a whole” as either “liberal” (52 percent) or “very liberal” (20 percent).
Distill all this down to the very select group of locals who pay good money to sit indoors on a weekend and listen to political debates on the hottest of hot button issues, and I viewed my invitation to appear at the festival with the same trepidation I would have if invited to Bardstown, Ky., (the “bourbon capital of the world”) to extol the glories of temperance, or to my local Waffle House at 2 AM on a Saturday morning to lead a yoga class and hand out Ozempic pamphlets.
The Response
Let’s just say that I was pleasantly surprised by both the reception I received and the audience’s response.
The coordinators ran the program with military precision: each session lasted exactly 45 minutes, and the theater was cleared after each for a 15-minute intermission. Magnetometers were in place in parts of the venue to ensure we didn’t need to employ the “active shooter” protocol I had received in advance.
The moderator, Simón Rios — “an award-winning reporter, covering immigration, politics and local enterprise stories for WBUR”— ran a preparatory Zoom session three days in advance with me and my fellow panelist (a former immigration judge and attorney specializing in immigration law with, interestingly, a separate passion for “Native American law, history and culture”), and deftly directed the discussion itself.
The only way I can describe the whole event (and I stuck around for the rest of the festival with my special “all access” pass) is “civil”: refreshingly, exhilaratingly, and soul-cleansingly civil.
While I may not have changed many attendees’ minds, I did at least prompt them to ask me even more questions, to probe and understand my answers. Let me explain.
There was a free lunch for those who shelled out hundreds of dollars for “VIP” tickets and for speakers, and as I have retained the passion for gratis meals I honed over my eight years as a congressional staffer, I went (it was “Raising Cane’s” chicken and artisanal water and coffee, in case you are curious), and there was buttonholed by a group of folks who wanted to know more.
Then, as I was being ushered out of the 4:00 musical performance by the “Wolves of Glendale” (who took phrases solicited live online and turned them into a tune with lyrics my editor wouldn’t allow me to repeat), two women who left my panel early stopped me to hear my response to the final question (which had to do with whether Trump’s immigration policies were driven by “white supremacy”).
It was like they had been reading an Agatha Christie novel and found the last three pages ripped out or had been in a movie theater where the projector glitched going into the third act of The Sixth Sense.
Finally, as I was sitting on an outdoor bench after the last panel of the day (“On the Front Lines: Covering Mass Deportations”, featuring reporters from the New York Times, Boston Herald, and Migrant Insider, again moderated by Rios), I overheard two local doyennes discussing their “favorite” panels of the day.
As the second said, “the one where the two older gentlemen [ouch] were so civil in discussing immigration”, the first saw me and said, “You were on that panel, weren’t you? You two were so kind to one another!”
The Unreality of Twitter World
Like many, I have an X (formerly Twitter) feed, and follow it regularly, primarily for news updates and to find fresh material.
No offense to Elon Musk or anyone else involved in the endeavor (X is simply a platform for discourse, it doesn’t create content), “Twitter World” is as divorced from the one I experienced on the banks of the Charles as Oz is from Kansas.
The latter (Twitter World, not Oz) is an online cage match where self-styled, self-proclaimed, and self-baptized “experts” drop zingers and “own” others of the same ilk on the other end of the political spectrum — safe from any physical harm thanks to the electronic anonymity of the virtual space it inhabits.
Not to say that there aren’t real experts there, particularly in the field of immigration, but thanks to the algorithms and the user’s ability to curate what one is exposed to and isn’t, if you aren’t already attuned to their Weltanschauung, you likely won’t hear much from them.
In a darkened concert hall on a blustery day under the bright lights, pundits (on both sides) don’t get to block those with whom they don’t agree. You either concede uncomfortable truths or come up with counterpoints, quickly and in an entertaining way, unless the moderator lets you off the hook and moves on (Rios kept both of us honest, to his credit).
Not that X doesn’t have real value and hasn’t proven its worth since Musk took the helm.
H.L. Mencken defined “puritanism” as “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”, and for an extended period a similar “haunting fear” has been implicitly expressed by those who control our culture that there are sects of Americans who are happy with the Republic despite its flaws.
Musk began reversing that trend by giving both voice and platform to cultural and political dissenters, and if he sometimes uses a heavy hand or holds outré positions, remember our nation was inspired by any number of tax cheats, smugglers, and weirdos (and drunkards — lots and lots of drunkards) whose ideas would have gotten them gibbeted if the authorities could have gotten their hands on them.
Back to Civility
Respectfully, many who propose imposing external rules of civility on online platforms like X either risk imposing a certain political spin on public discourse or deliberately intend to.
No one forces you to tweet, but then no one forced the founders to preach in taverns and coffee houses, either, and if you stand in the public square (real or virtual) you may assume many of the reputational dangers they did (the physical ones are a different matter).
Examined through the Twitter lens, Boston may seem a place of dull liberal conformity. Mark Krikorian, my boss, didn’t force me to go there, but he encourages staff to reach out to everybody. I’m glad he does, because on a rainy Beantown afternoon, I found many who may still disagree with what I say but appreciate the “civility” with how I said it in the real world.