When it comes to Barack
Obama, however, you’d think wrong. Obama spoke Wednesday at an event sponsored by The Atlantic and
the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, “Disinformation and
the Erosion of Democracy.” In the course of a long and rambling
discussion with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama called
for government control over the Internet in order to stem the “demand
for crazy” that was spreading what he called “disinformation.” As
Leftists always do, Obama claimed that this “disinformation” was
threatening “our democracy,” that is, the Left’s political and cultural
hegemony.
Obama first insisted, with his characteristic near-incoherence: “I am
close to a First Amendment absolutist. I believe in the idea of not
just free speech, but also that you deal with bad speech with good
speech, that you engage, um, that, that, that, that the exceptions to
that are very narrow, um, and, and, and, y’know, particularly, uh, among
this cohort of folks in college, and I’ve talked to my daughters about
this, um, y’know, I don’t want us to be such a society of manners that,
like, we can’t, we feel like our feelings are hurt and we can’t hear
something that, uh, somebody says, and, and, and we wilt. Uh, I think,
uh, I want us all as citizens to be in the habit of being able to hear
stuff that we disagree with and be able to answer with our words.” His
First Amendment absolutism, however, only went so far.
After a good bit more rambling, Obama got around to asserting that in
order to limit the spread of what he called “toxic information,” it
would be “reasonable for us as a society to have a debate, and then to
put in place a combination of regulatory measures and, uh, industry
norms, uh, that leave intact the opportunity for these platforms to make
money, but say to them that, there, there, there’s certain practices
that we are not, that we don’t think are good for our society and we’re
gonna discourage.” There goes the First Amendment.
This is because, he explained,
“I do think that there is a demand for crazy on the internet that we
have to grapple with,” and that this involves “a systematic effort to
either promote false information, to suppress true information, for the
purpose of political gain, financial gain, enhancing power, suppressing
others, targeting those you don’t like.” Among these, “Roughly 40
percent of the country appears convinced that the current president was
elected fraudulently and that the election was rigged,” and 30-35%
reject the “medical miracle” of vaccines. It was important, Obama said,
to reassert “the value of, y’know, expertise and, uh, science.” There is more.
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