Friday, April 29, 2022

The real misinformation lies within the Left's hypocrisy (UPDATE)

Apologies. I inadvertently took April off for Easter, but that's kinda important in an eternal way, so a much needed refresh. But we can't allow April to fly by without talking about Elon and The Deal.

Seems to be all the buzz for the better part of the month, particularly the latter half as the deal approached evermore certainty. From the comedy of Sears and Dice (and you better believe theBabylonBee) to the analysis of Brand and Rogan with their patented sarcasm, everybody's gotten in on this goldmine. And BOY, have the crazies gone from freakout to meltdown to pretty much revealing their hand in say, something like the last election...
Remember the rule: they'll always accuse us of doing what they've already done. 

All of this not over free speech, but the adherence to its censorship and control of any/all narratives, mind you. Peculiar how progressive Twitter accounts lost followers, while conservatives gained within days of Elon's purchase, isn't it Ari? It's like the dials were suddenly turned back. James thought so too...
There's a bigger picture here, though, that cuts to the heart of this 'misinformation' hypocrisy...
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.
Uhh, hold on. No sooner than those words were written did the Biden Admin prove they weren't kidding about a Ministry of Truth! Newspeak, anyone? How hellishly Orwellian of 'em...
A federal speech czar? Just as the Founders imagined it, no doubt.

Earlier this week, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Congress that his agency is creating a "Disinformation Governance Board" to combat "misinformation" coming from Russia as we near this year's midterm elections. The Biden administration's new Committee on Public Information will be led by Nina Jankowicz, "a disinformation fellow" who, perfectly enough, comes to the administration from a think tank named after Woodrow Wilson. Like Wilson, Mayorkas, himself a font of untruths, does not explain under what constitutional power he proposes to oversee speech.

It gets tedious to point this out, but you can vividly imagine the thermonuclear meltdown the country would be (rightly) subjected to if a Republican president assembled a government panel tasked with weeding out "disinformation." To our technocrats' dismay, this isn't Europe, where the state can dictate allowable speech and sometimes arrests those who don't abide. Here, citizens are the ones who call out the state for peddling misinformation, not the other way around.

The pro-censorship Left, which is to say the vast majority of contemporary Democrats, now have Barack Obama on board as well. The one-time neoliberal champion of free speech -- a freedom he employed aggressively to mislead the American people when it served his partisan interests -- alleged during a recent Stanford University speech that "people are dying" from misinformation. And, you know, if censorship can save one life ...
In case you didn't catch that, here's the ridiculous ninny the government is trying to put in charge of regulating OUR speech:
God help us as these people brazenly push us towards dystopian nightmares...
...which is as good a segue as any to wrap up the discussion concerning the Left's hypocrisy on this...
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.
I mentioned earlier about controlling the narrative... keep in mind, half of these guys that I'm referencing throughout this are not conservatives. They are however believers in open, honest, free debate and opinion. When not even a liberal is safe, this is how far the radical left have lurched in their concerted effort towards total control. It's why you've got a guy like Elon Musk who's made to feel like this:
But, hey, if they wanna keep pushing people, WELCOME brethren, to the battle in this brave new world!

Related links: Biden’s Ministry of Truth: Taking a page from Mussolini and Orwell
Fox New Host Zeroes in on Why Biden Wants a 'Ministry of Truth'
Biden blasted for policing free speech with ‘dystopian’ disinformation bureau
Critics slam timing of Biden's 'ministry of truth' to police internet for 'disinformation'
The Book Club: 1984 by George Orwell with Dave Rubin
The Book Club: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand with Eric Daniels
The Book Club: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley with Sen. Ted Cruz

More: Can One Vote Make a Difference?
The Ministry of Truth is a Bucket of Lies

UPDATE: I'm guessing they smelled the midterms coming...


Still gonna take more than that to hold back the deluge, but don't think the Left won't pull out all the stops. Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.
Posted by an ebb and flow at 5:00 PM