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Embrace Partisanship, Encourage Censorship

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Ted Rall

            We already know partisanship can be toxic. It also has some overlooked side effects. Team politics — the type of partisanship in which adherents of a party excuse every act of hypocrisy and wrongdoing by their own side while exaggerating and lying about the purported evils of the other — fuels censorship.

            Consider climate change, by some measures the issue about which Democrats and Republicans most disagree. During its four years in power the Trump Administration deleted more than 1,400 references to global warming from U.S. government agency and department websites. Climate scientists reacted by censoring themselves, using terms like “global change,” “environmental change,” and “extreme weather” instead.

After Biden took over, it was Democrats’ turn to suppress dissent. The new president’s top climate-change advisor pushed Silicon Valley to crack down on climate-change skeptics. Facebook, which like most social media companies is aligned with Democratic politics, now classifies posts that deviate from majority scientific opinion as “misinformation” and deletes them. In response to the change in political winds, some scientists have reversed their public stances in order to reduce their risk of losing funding.

Whatever you think about climate change or other issues, reasonable people ought to be able to agree about how to disagree: let everyone speak. Open and vigorous discussion and debate is the most effective way to arrive at societal consensus based on solid information. There’s a catch: you have to be willing to hear and listen to opinions with which you disagree expressed by people you may dislike.

We are moving away from that ideal. According to polls, we are becoming less tolerant of opposing views. 55% of Americans tell Pew Research that the federal government should restrict false information even if their censorship restricts freedom of information, up from 39% in 2018. (70% of Democrats share this view as opposed to 39% of Republicans.) 65% are OK with tech companies censoring speech, up from 56% in 2018.

Americans support free expression of views with which they agree. The other side, they think, should be neither seen nor heard. 36% think banning hate speech is more important than free speech and 35% don’t think the First Amendment should protect comedians and satirists, according to a 2021 Freedom Forum survey. Only 63% would vote for the First Amendment if it were on the ballot.

So Southern conservatives ban LGBTQ+ books while liberals turn a blind eye to Twitter shutting down accounts belonging to Donald Trump and the right-wing New York Post, the latter over the Hunter Biden laptop story—which turned out to be true. Democrats lose sometimes, Republicans lose other times, and the censors win all the time.

As a left-leaning cartoonist and writer, I have often found myself under political fire amid calls to silence me by terminating my employment or not permitting my work to be distributed. A former candidate for president even suggested that I ought to be executed. Even though I have spoken out publicly against liberal censorship campaigns directed at right-wingers like Dr. Laura Schlessinger and Rush Limbaugh, no conservative has come to my defense.

Now the cancel-culture brigade has moved from right to left and the censors are targeting conservatives. The satirical news site Babylon Bee, the social media platform Rumble and other figures on the Right have filed a court challenge to a new New York State law that prohibits social-media posts a court determines to “vilify, humiliate, or incite violence against a group” over “race, color, religion, ethnicity, national origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.” The law, backed by heavy fines and probably unconstitutional because “hate speech” is protected under the First Amendment, also requires aggressive comment moderation and mandates that angry readers be provided with a venue to report offenders.

My first reaction is to be appalled by Attorney General Letitia James’ heavy-handed attempt to curb freedom of expression. My second is to note the right-leaning politics of the plaintiffs. Conservatives are silent when their allies and fellow travelers go after people like me. Why should we speak up on their behalf? Why not zap up some popcorn, pour a glass of Chardonnay and bask in the schadenfreude?

            The answer, of course, is that the enemy of my enemy isn’t always my friend. As committed as I am to my Marxist-Leninist point of view, rhetorical class war must take a back seat to the fight against censorship even when the censors identify with the left and their victims belong to the right. A society in which censorship becomes normalized is doomed to authoritarianism and dictatorship without any political debate whatsoever; odds are slim indeed that what remains will be an ideological orientation that you will personally find agreeable. Team politics divides victims of censorship and benefits the forces of repression.

            Whether they know it or not, the editors of the Babylon Bee and their allies are defending people like me. I hope that conservatives will draw the same conclusion and start to form alliances of convenience with the left when we struggle for the right to be heard. As for me, I support anyone who takes on censors, liberals and conservatives alike.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

The Right To Be Wrong

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Ted Rall

Many medical experts and journalists believe that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is wrong about vaccines. They say that Kennedy, a candidate for the 2024 Democratic nomination for president, wrongly says that COVID-19 vaccines are ineffective and incorrectly validates assertions that childhood vaccinations can cause autism.

Many people, all of whom are pro-Biden Democrats, say that RFK Jr.’s opinions are so dangerous as to automatically preempt anything else he has to say about any other issue. They say that society would benefit if he were to shut up. They say that he should not be given a public platform, that he should be silenced, that we should not hear him because we might believe him and that could cause terrible harm.

Even his family is telling him to STFU.

As a long-time non-epidemiologist with no medical education, I don’t know who is right. However, I do know this: anyone who thinks they have the right to decide what information I get to hear or who I get to hear it from can go to hell.

Let us stipulate, for the sake of argument, that these journalists and doctors, none of whom I have met or know anything about, have no bias and no axe to grind, that they care about the well-being of all humans, especially me. Let us further stipulate that they are 100% right and that RFK Jr. is 100% wrong. Let’s even pretend that these folks have never “debunked” “conspiracies” that turned out to be true or promoted conspiracies as though they weren’t lies.

Even so: I demand the right to hear from him if I so choose. RFK Jr. has the right to be terribly, dangerously wrong, l have the right to listen to his stupid incorrect rants in which he gets absolutely nothing right, and I have the right to be deceived into believing things that are stupid, false and even dangerous if I so choose.

My brain, my choice.

Not according to the elites, however. They think they’re smarter than you and me. That we should listen to them. That those who disagree with them should be shut down.

The Biden Administration came under fire in 2022 when its Department of Homeland Security, a government entity with a fascist name, rolled out its Orwellian Disinformation Governance Board whose stated goal was to “coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security.”

The DGB was killed, but censorship efforts with a Father Knows Best spin have proliferated in recent years, mostly from Democratic-leaning institutions. Newspapers and other media outlets rolled out fact-checking websites and chronicled lists of the president’s purported lies, the latter beginning and ending when the president was named Trump. The FBI and other three-letter agencies told social media companies which posts to throttle or kill and handed them lists of accounts that should be shut down. At least one company, with deep ties to covert intelligence agencies, purports to tell you which news outlets you can trust. The war between Russia and Ukraine prompted the Apple and Google app stores to deplatform Russian state media outlets.

The push to characterize news and opinions that deviate from a “mainstream,” i.e. corporatist, narrative hit full steam during the pandemic. Government and media partnered against what they called misinformation and disinformation (others’, never their own). Their obsessive efforts to marginalize and hobble RFK Jr.’s candidacy and access to the information space is a continuation of the COVID information war.

Mis- and disinformation are real and they have real-world impacts that ought not to be minimized. The bizarre QAnon conspiracy game/cult has contributed to or caused, among other events, the hammer attack against Paul Pelosi, a coup attempt against the German government, death threats and mass shootings, not to mention January 6th. Lies can be dangerous, whether they originate from the podium at the United Nations or an wacky underground cell.
            Censorship is an understandable impulse. As a cure, however, it’s worse than the disease. Citizens forced to navigate a world where they know that many things are not as they seem on their face learn to hone the critical thinking skills that tell them not to click on the link in a phishing email and to question whether an especially ridiculous political attack may be a deep fake. No matter how benevolent and adept a government can be—and ours is neither—the collective BS detector of 330 million Americans is likelier to identify and debunk the cleverest act of disinformation than an agency of bureaucrats. If the government and its media allies get their way, we’ll trust them to suss out what’s true and what’s false and, of course, set the stage for them abusing our gullibility. And they’ll do it on a far grander scale than QAnon.

Besides, taboo and forbidden material is inherently more attractive than stuff that’s freely available. From pornography to Cuban cigars to the dark web, nothing is more enticing than something that’s hard to access. If the powers that be don’t want us to hear from RFK Jr., many voters are thinking, then I really want to find out what he’s about. The DNC and the New York Times have no business telling me I’m too dumb to assess his statements about COVID, Israel or anything else.

My brain, right or wrong!

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

Big Tech Is Killing People

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Ted Rall

The Wall Street Journal has published “the Facebook papers,” which revealed that Facebook and other big technology companies have been more than willing to monetize disinformation and misinformation, even when it needs to people’s deaths. Legacy media is laughing, but they should look at themselves too.

Killing People Is Only Wrong When Social Media Does It

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Ted Rall

In a remark that he later walked back, President Joe Biden complained that social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook are killing people by allowing misinformation on their platforms. He would know something about killing people…

From the Same People Who Brought You WMDs

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Ted Rall

The White House has been pressuring Fox News in public and through back channel communications to stop spreading misinformation about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines. This sounds innocuous but there are frightening implications, not least the question of whether anyone can believe something simply because the government says that it is true. Then there is the question of whether there should ever be this sort of collaboration between government and the media that is supposed to be its watchdog.

(Mass Murderer and) Pervert

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Ted Rall

Osama bin Laden was accused of murdering thousands of Americans, yet US forces who killed him found it necessary to smear him with revelations that he had a stash of pornography in his home.

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