John Kerry: the elites and free speech
John Kerry’s not alone in putting down free speech, of course. He’s speaking for the elitist left the world over, who want to block free speech in the name of wanting to block “dangerous disinformation.”
The former Secretary of State took part in a World Economic Forum panel on Green Energy on Wednesday. Near the end of the panel, a member of the audience asked what can be done to push back against disinformation surrounding climate change online.
“You know there’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc. But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence,” Kerry said. …
He continued, “So what we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.” …
“The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing. It is part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. It’s really hard to govern today. The referees we used to have to determine what is a fact and what isn’t a fact have kind of been eviscerated, to a certain degree. And people go and self-select where they go for their news, for their information. And then you get into a vicious cycle,” Kerry said.
Note the way Kerry puts it – the referees “have kind of been eviscerated.” By whom, Kerry? By nefarious forces? Or by their own demonstrated unreliability and bias, again and again and again? How many predictions have the climate change people made that have turned out to be wrong? Why have they sounded the alarm about climate change but have generally rejected nuclear power? And on and on and on. If they have “been eviscerated,” it is through a form of unintentional hari kari.
Elites generally tend to distrust free speech, for very obvious reasons. They are (as Sowell labeled them) the anointed, and therefore they know best about everything. So the temptation is always there to clamp down on those who disagree.
And sometimes what the elites are clamping down on really is disinformation, and sometimes it really is dangerous. I’m aware that this is a real dilemma. For example, on this blog, if I didn’t block trolls they actually would take over the entire comments section and drown out all the other voices. But although I write in a public venue, I’m not the public square in the sense that the internet as a whole is, or even that venues such as Twitter and Facebook are. With the latter sites, it’s easy to justify blocking bots and spam, but more difficult to justify blocking actual people who are posting ideas that seem bad on the face of it. How far does one go in doing that? Who gets to decide?
As that great mind Humpty Dumpty said in a slightly different contest, the question is who is to be master. Because, as COVID has so clearly underlined, the elites are often wrong – which doesn’t mean that all the people challenging them are any better at the science of it all. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But the elites have squandered most of the trust people once had in them, and they are not good faith arbiters.
The argument for free speech has always been that in the free marketplace of ideas, the truth will prevail. Obviously, that’s more of a hope than a given. But so far it seems like the cure offered by Kerry is worse than the disease.
[NOTE: Glenn Reynolds writes on whether scientific fraud should be criminalized.]
Kerry is a congenital liar. And a braggadocio.
His 70 foot yacht cost him or his rich wife $7 mill. Crew and maintenance are annual unspecified sums. He does not have that kind of money unless he got it in divorcing his first two wealthy wives. He just has a nose for money, but he has no soul.
We’re seeing a lot of expertise being prostituted to propaganda. On the other hand, that the media and politicians have pet fake experts doesn’t mean that there aren’t real experts out there who sometimes should be listened to. It’s very easy to throw out the baby with the bathwater especially when you are not sure which is which.
What’s happened to online discourse is people look for clues about what side someone is on, and then make their decision whether or not to listen to that person based on those clues. This leads eventually to the filtering-out of those who tell you what you don’t want to hear, but I can’t think of a strategy to propose that I know is better. No one can get enough expertise in everything to know always when they should listen to which expert.
What will correct it all for us is some huge dose of reality that can’t be blocked from following us on Twitter. I don’t know what that world looks like, but I expect to find out sometime in the next 10-20 years, as will my young children.
john kerry who defamed his fellow sailor and airmen, not only in vietnam but 30 years later in iraq and afghanistan, who’s relations with Iranian spies could be considered treasonous, who grovels before Xi un prompted, well no good can come from this foolishness before the real life Bond Villain, Schwab’s forum,
the rhetorical capture is rather extraordinary, green energy, how is that different than with carbon, which is involved in every process, mineral, organic and inorganic, so windmills that are made from toxic chemicals that can’t be recycled that are sourced from China, well thats not what I would consider green,
“Zeus is not” was once just such disinformation, a dangerous teaching corrupting of the youth, be it said. Have a draught of hemlock as justice in return, and so be hammered out of existence.
How did that work out for them?
When I hear “fact check” or “disinformation” my default reaction is that the person crying “fact check” or “disinformation” is BS-ing.
I have a yellow-dog Democrat relative who loves to throw around “science” and “fact check” and “disinformation” in discussions on politics. In a discussion about electrical energy production in TX during the big freeze of 2021, I refuted a claim he made with a link to a federal government database on electrical energy production. He replied with the alleged Mark Twain saw about “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” I asked him to show I was wrong. He declined, although the government database had more than enough data for him to try to prove me wrong.(He is more competent than I in computer stuff, so he could have easily navigated the database.)
There are no working class censors.
now the methodology behind dezinforma is not the veracity of the statement but the source,
this is how JAMA and the Lancet, proferred ridiculous hypothesis, but because of their status, they were granted legitimacy, I’m referring to the most recent medical controversy,
Scientific dissent is more likely to be criminalized than scientific fraud.