Editorial Roundup: Missouri

St. Louis Post-Dispatch. November 26, 2023.

Editorial: Bailey again shows he sees his job as culture warrior, not Missouri’s lawyer

Elon Musk is going off the rails again — nothing new there — but Missouri’s taxpayers might be interested to know their state’s top legal official is tumbling from the tracks right alongside him. Attorney General Andrew Bailey says his office is investigating a national media watchdog group that has infuriated Musk by exposing how antisemitic propaganda is sometimes displayed next to major advertisers on X (formerly Twitter), which Musk owns.

Before you ask: No, none of it has a single solitary thing to do with Missouri. But since when has that stopped Bailey from abusing his tax-funded authority by diving head-first into whatever fringy national mud fight is obsessing the extremists this week?

So we can now add an antisemitic billionaire to the list of masters Bailey serves, along with the illegal gaming industry, corporate polluters, the gun lobby and any cause that reinforces his extremist credentials. As usual, Missouri’s taxpayers are nowhere on the agenda.

Bailey, a Republican, was appointed to his current post in January to fill a vacancy and is seeking election to a full term next year. The latest controversy into which he has improperly inserted himself involves Musk’s bizarrely self-destructive descent into antisemitism on X, the social-media platform he owns.

Earlier this month, Musk tweeted his agreement with a post from an X user that accused Jewish people of promoting “hatred against whites” and supporting the immigration of “hordes of minorities.”

“You have said the actual truth,” replied the world’s wealthiest individual.

In the outcry that followed, numerous major advertisers like Apple and Disney announced they were pausing their advertising contracts with X. Those protests were driven in part by a related report from Media Matters, the left-leaning media watchdog nonprofit that showed that X’s algorithm sometimes places advertisements for major brands alongside antisemitic tweets.

Though no one has claimed the organization falsified its results, former presidential adviser Stephen Miller — chief architect of Donald Trump’s notorious family-separation border policy — alleged in a tweet last week that its methodology was misleading. “Fraud is both a civil and criminal violation,” Miller wrote, adding: “There are 2 dozen+ conservative state Attorneys General.”

“Interesting,” responded Musk, “Both civil and criminal …”

To which Bailey later tweeted: “My team is looking into this matter.”

“Great!” responded Musk.

Setting aside for the moment the specter of Missouri’s state lawyer taking his marching orders from two of the most deranged voices in America, what on Earth does Musk’s latest spat with his critics have to do with Bailey’s official state duties?

Bailey told the far-right cable channel Newsmax that his investigation is predicated on the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act, a consumer-protection law. As legal theories go, that’s gobbledegook; obviously, no Missouri consumer is harmed by a national media platform’s battle with a tech mogul.

But coming up with out-of-thin-air rationales for improper, politicized use of his authority is kind of a Bailey specialty.

That’s exactly what he did recently in stalling efforts to put abortion rights on the statewide ballot for next year. Bailey claimed, ludicrously, that returning legal abortion to Missouri would cost the state billions of dollars in lost future tax revenues. Not only was the claim made up out of whole cloth, but (as the courts ultimately found) Bailey had no legal authority to even weigh in on the question.

Bailey is similarly out of line in trying to derail a gun-safety referendum drive by claiming — again, based on nothing but his own political goals — that more restrictions on guns in Missouri will result in more crime and death.

Statistically, that’s the opposite of true, as evidenced by the fact that Missouri’s firearms mortality rate has risen to among the highest in the country in tandem with the state’s systematic removal of almost all gun restrictions in recent years. But as always with Bailey, facts aren’t the point, ideology is.

So, amid all this crass politicization of his duties, does Bailey at least perform the duties he’s supposed to be performing as attorney general?

• Attorneys general represent the state when felons appeal their convictions. So the Missouri legal world was stunned earlier this year when Bailey’s office filed a brief seeking to overturn the felony manslaughter conviction of a white Kansas City police officer in the shooting death of a Black suspect.

• Another duty of the attorney general’s office is to handle complaints of environmental violations. But that didn’t stop Bailey from filing a brief in support of a Missouri-based company being sued for alleged lead poisoning of children in Peru — a business whose parent company had donated $50,000 to a PAC that supports Bailey’s campaign.

• Thousands of unlicensed, illegal electronic gaming machines are operating in plain sight throughout Missouri, part of an industry so brazen that it sued the state to prevent enforcement of gaming laws. As attorney general, Bailey — who has accepted at least $25,000 in donations linked to the electronic gaming industry — is suppose to defend the state in litigation. But his office has recused itself and farmed out the case to private lawyers at the taxpayers’ expense.

Yet he leaps into action when Elon Musk tweets.

Musk has announced he’s suing Media Matters over its report, a case legal experts say is unwinnable. It also flies in the face of Musk’s own claims of being a “free-speech absolutist.”

That’s a position Bailey takes as well, to the point of suing the federal government over what he claims is its suppression of free speech online. Yet he’s willing to wield the power of the state to go after a media platform for its reporting.

Of course, with all of Bailey’s other offenses against responsible public service, why even talk about garden-variety hypocrisy?

We’ve said it before, but it can’t be said enough: Bailey represents the worst kind of politics out there today — a deeply cynical, deliberately divisive brand of it that vilifies large swaths of society and spurns sober public service in favor of culture-war gamesmanship. To reward this toxic strategy at the ballot box next year would greatly darken Missouri’s already-gloomy political landscape.

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