Posted on January
31, 2023
Truth Vs. Power
Punishment for thoughtcrimes has begun
by
Daniel
Clark
Liberals like to congratulate themselves for imagined
acts of bravery by claiming that they "speak truth to power," but is it still
possible to do that, even if one were so inclined? Now that power has appointed itself the
arbiter of truth, anything you say that conflicts with an officially approved
narrative will be deemed untrue, regardless of its factual correctness. When the arbiters of truth tell you that
freedom is slavery, as in the novel 1984, you must not point out the
obvious fact that freedom and slavery are antonyms. If you do, you may find yourself banned from
social media, slandered in news publications, investigated by the Department of
Justice, and, of course, fired.
If
only we could return to those wistful times of yesteryear, when mere silence
was considered an acceptable response to such tyranny. Simply refraining from citing disapproved
facts is no longer enough. Now, you must
affirmatively state things that you know to be false, or face the consequences.
Suppose your co-worker Melvin comes in one day wearing
a wig and a dress, and your boss tells you that Melvin is now a woman, and that
Melvin's pronouns are she/her. Of course,
you know that Melvin is not a woman, that people do not have pronouns, and that
you would not have reason to speak of Melvin in the third person in his
presence anyway. Nevertheless, there
will be times when you need to refer to him when talking to somebody else.
In those cases, you could stay rooted in reality by
using masculine pronouns, and hope the other person doesn't inform on you. You could awkwardly substitute Melvin's
proper name in all cases, as in, "Is Melvin at Melvin's desk? I have to talk to Melvin about the revisions
Melvin needs to make to Melvin's report."
Or, you could simply go along with the absurdity. Pointing out the fact that Melvin is still a
man might not seem like a wise or responsible thing to do in this situation,
especially if you have a family to support.
Thus, millions of well-meaning people who are not themselves dishonest
have nevertheless become a critical component of an orchestrated campaign of
lies.
Though it may sound counterintuitive, this suppression
of objectivity has coincided with a campaign against "disinformation," which is
defined as any statement that challenges the chosen narrative of the arbiters
of truth. Last year, President Biden
attempted to establish a "Disinformation Governance Board" within the
Department of Homeland Security, whose purpose was made deliberately
opaque. In response to public outrage,
the creation of the board was suspended, until such time as the Democrats can
figure out how to successfully repackage it.
Thanks to Elon Musk's "Twitter files," we have learned
that the FBI played a role in burying the Hunter Biden laptop story, which
dozens of bureaucrats had falsely assured us was the product of "Russian
disinformation." They offered no
evidence to back up this claim, yet all information to the contrary was
prohibited from the public square until after the 2020 presidential election.
Twitter and other social media have censored spreaders
of "disinformation" about COVID, which would be disconcerting even if those
people's assertions had been uniformly false.
Mostly, the objects of this campaign were making completely defensible
arguments, such as that authoritarians were using the virus as a pretext for
revoking our freedoms, that the virus had come from a laboratory and not from
nature, that the experimental vaccines may have unforeseen effects, and that a
cloth mask is far too porous to impede the spread of the virus. The problem was never that these points of
view were invalid, but only that they were undesirable.
Last
June, retiring New York congresswoman Carolyn Maloney introduced a bill she
called the Stop Anti-Abortion Disinformation Act, with the intention of
shutting down pro-life crisis pregnancy centers. These facilities are genuine nonprofits that
not only provide free services, but also offer material assistance to the women
who seek them out. Nevertheless, the
aptly titled SAD Act would have empowered the Federal Trade Commission to
impose penalties of up to $100,000 on them, based on some bureaucrat's highly
fanciful definition of "deceptive or misleading statements."
As everyone who pays any attention to the issue is
aware, it is those on the pro-abortion side who specialize in duplicitous
language ("products of conception," "ending a pregnancy" and "bodily autonomy"
being but a few examples). So what is it
they would consider deceptive and misleading?
Telling a pregnant woman she's carrying a baby?
The Federal Trade Commission is an organ within the
Department of Commerce, which is headed by former Rhode Island Governor Gina
Raimondo. The day after the Supreme
Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Raimondo issued a press release condemning
the decision, which is a doggone peculiar thing for a commerce secretary to
do. Had SAD passed, this
obviously biased and unaccountable person would have been enlisted in the
disinformation police. If Maloney had
her way, it would be effectively illegal to counsel a pregnant woman without
explicitly advocating the very thing that the CPCs hope to prevent.
It is a common totalitarian tactic to look for ways in
which we are arguably all connected, in order to justify the oppression of the
individual in the name of the common good.
If we all belong to some nebulous entity called "the health care
system," that means your personal habits and decisions are everyone else's
concern. By that reasoning, President
Barack Obama openly declared it to be his responsibility to change our eating
habits and reduce sedentary behavior. If
mundane human activities connect us all by threatening environmental
destruction, then it is in other people's interests that bureaucratic wonks
regulate everything from our gas mileage to the capacity of our toilet
tanks. Now, it is being posited that our
words, through their ability to persuade, have a destructive potential that
requires them to be regulated as well.
So much for speaking truth to power. Not only must certain truths be silenced
today, but we must tell those in power the things they demand to hear, even
when we know those things to be untrue.
Hunter Biden's laptop is Russian propaganda. Hunter's father has no knowledge of his
business dealings. Wearing a mask is the
most effective means of combating the COVID virus. Carbon dioxide is destroying the earth. A baby in the womb is no different from an
inflamed appendix. Melvin is a
woman. Freedom is slavery.
The Shinbone: The Frontier of the Free Press