By Mark C. Ross
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.
An oblique form of censorship popular among leftists is to challenge the pedigreeof an information source. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls American Thinker “a not so thoughtful far-right online publication.” I received this statement in lieu of an actual response to specific “facts” and conclusions made in one of my blog posts. Why bother presenting a plausible contradiction when you can just impugn the source? Lazy minds, don’t you know.
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.