Barry Obama is concerned about America’s divided conversation. “I’m much older than you… when I was coming up, you had three TV stations, and people were getting a similar sense of what is true and what isn’t, what was real and what was not.” Translation: We had message control, and now we don’t.
“Today, what I’m most concerned about is because of the splintering of the media, we almost occupy different realities,” Obama said, adding “If something happens, in the past, everybody could say, all right, we may disagree on how to solve it, but at least we all agree that, yeah, that’s an issue.”
“Now people will say, well, that didn’t happen, or I don’t believe that,” he complained, asserting that “one of, I think, the goals of the Obama Foundation, and one of the goals of my post-presidency, is how do we return to that common conversation? How can we have a common set of facts?”
So, to clarify, if things were Obama’s way, Hillary never had an illegal email server, Benghazi was caused by a YouTube video, and the Steele Dossier was not a pack of lies spun up to smear and impeach a duly elected president. Hunter’s Laptop would be Russian Disinformation, SARS C0V2 came from some Chinese wet market and not a Lab in Wuhan, and the climate cult didn’t get every single prediction wrong.
I’ve kept the list deliberately short. We could go deep on Biden (for example), but I try to stick to my own word limit for articles on GranteGrok, and such an expedition would most certainly exceed it before I got to the point. Obama is trying to go yard for the ongoing disinformation narrative the Dems have been spinning as a way to innoculate Americans into accepting limitations on speech, and we can see why? They spend so much time lying and deceiving people that without such protections, the truth emerges, and the despotism for which they pine cannot brook speech on these terms.
It’s a problem, and they are hoping to convince America we need to let them solve it in their favor. Misinformation is protected speech. Even the Congressional Research Service has to admit as much.
The Supreme Court has said the Free Speech Clause protects false speech when viewed as a broad category, but the government may restrict limited subcategories of false speech without violating the First Amendment. For example, defamation, fraud, political advertisements, and broadcast speech are subject to special considerations.
But that’s about it. And even those often fall under the strictest of scrutiny because the exercise of free speech and a truly free press – as opposed to Barry’s contrived muppet media – is essential to liberty.
The Supreme Court has recognized that false statements may not add much value to the marketplace of ideas. Even so, there is a concern that by prohibiting false speech, the government would also “chill” more valuable speech, meaning it would cause people to self-censor out of fear of violating the law. Consequently, the First Amendment creates “breathing space” protecting the false statements and hyperbole that are “inevitable in free debate.”
You would think these nuances would please the Left, given its penchant for deceit, but it is not enough. They seek to control the message because, as noted above, their preferred form of government is impossible. Obama implies we are better off if we are all on the same page. It is simpler, easier, and I guess the government would be doing us a favor and making our lives easier.
But,
The only model that asks nothing of its citizens in terms of learning, autonomy and decision-making is the authoritarian one. By arguing that freedom from speech is often more important than freedom of speech, advocates unwittingly embrace the nineteenth-century (anti-)speech justification for czarist power: the idea that the Russian peasant has the best kind of freedom, the freedom from the burden of freedom itself (because it surely is a burden).