Hypocritical leftists should stop carrying on about misinformation
One thing the left is particularly good at is euphemism. Stalin made his bones as a Bolshevik thug by robbing banks in order to fund the revolution; they called it expropriation. Now the obviously desperate Progressives are pounding the table, demanding that we masses be protected from the scourge of misinformation that's poisoning our minds. Only public statements that are approved for their content by progressive partisans should be allowed to have influence. Hmmm...sounds like censorship to me.
This romance with censorship is nothing new. Back in the 1970s, after an unusually contentious local election, then–San Francisco supervisor Dianne Feinstein proposed an ordinance that would make it a crime to include a false statement in a political speech. Although I was still a registered Democrat at that time, I couldn't help but wonder what kind of Star Chamber would have to be empaneled to rule on every single political utterance.
As this is being written, Elon Musk's total takeover of Twitter has just been made official. It's within the realm of possibility that he could take a page from George Orwell and rename it The Ministry of Truth. Just kidding.
An oblique form of censorship popular among leftists is to challenge the pedigree of an information source. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls American Thinker "a not so thoughtful far-right online publication." I received this statement in lieu of an actual response to specific "facts" and conclusions made in one of my blog posts. Why bother presenting a plausible contradiction when you can just impugn the source? Lazy minds, don't you know.
Lurking below all of this is leftists' palpable lack of desire to defend their opinions. As Ayn Rand's fictional John Galt stated in his laying out of Objectivism, mystical ideas are the enemy of civilization. Feelings are supposed to have more weight than logic. Take climate worship, for example. There are forces that we will never understand...that are conspiring to destroy our world...unless we destroy them first by strangling the economic basis for modern life.
Standing in the way of this impending disaster is that pesky thing called common sense. Humanity didn't make it this far by not being able to make good decisions. Adversity may not be pleasant, but it can be instructive. Add to this the modern facility for the transmission of information. It started with cheap paper and web printing, then radio, and then TV. Now there are the internet, cell phones, and satellite coverage. Bottom line: It's virtually impossible to monopolize information. Hence the panicked demand for what really amounts to censorship from those who've lost their monopoly.
Image via Public Domain Pictures.
Noted Russian hoaxer, Hillary Clinton, is suddenly worried about disinformation. The definition of disinformation is anything that does not conform to liberal ideology. In essence, it is an effort to increase the censorship against conservatives. Both, Hillary and Barack Obama are leading the drive for more censorship for conservatives.
Just a week before the 2016 election, Hillary posted:
“Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.” However, the Washington Times reported just under five years later, on Oct. 21, 2021, that “Special counsel John Durham has obtained the complete FBI investigative file on the bureau’s conclusion that there was no secret internet communication channel in 2016 between then-candidate Donald Trump and Alfa Bank, a large Russian lender controlled by Kremlin-tied billionaire oligarchs.”
Hillary’s lawyer, Michael Sussmann fed this to the CIA, who determined that it was not technologically plausible and that it was a made-up crime by the Hillary campaign. It has been thoroughly debunked a multitude of times. But that tweet is still up on Twitter. Is that not disinformation? Sussmann is standing trial for lying to the FBI about the origin of the information he handed over.
Hillary condemned free speech at the meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in 2011, Hillary said:
“In the United States, I will admit, there are people who still feel vulnerable or marginalized as a result of their religious beliefs. And we have seen how the incendiary actions of just a very few people, a handful in a country of nearly 300 million, can create wide ripples of intolerance. We also understand that, for 235 years, freedom of expression has been a universal right at the core of our democracy.” But she had a solution: “So we are focused on promoting interfaith education and collaboration, enforcing antidiscrimination laws, protecting the rights of all people to worship as they choose, and to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.”
But, while free speech still exists, let me just say this. Hillary lost the presidency twice when she was heavily favored to win. She then proved herself to be a pathetic loser. She blamed everyone, but herself, but let’s face it, she was one of the worst candidates of all time. Fortunately for her, Joe Biden has far surpassed her record.
