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Obama’s embrace of censorship speaks to the desperation of a party that can’t survive without uniform control of the information space
The modern Democrat Party is many things. But an ardent defender of Americans’ First Amendment right to free speech is not one of them.
This theme was front and center during a sit-down interview former President Barack Obama participated in at The Connecticut Forum earlier this week. At one point in his conversation with historian and author Heather Cox Richardson, America’s 44th commander-in-chief broached the subject of “propaganda” and how “[t]hose in power, those with money, exploit [the information] space in which nobody knows what’s true.”
“Vladimir Putin and the KGB had a saying that was then adopted proudly by Steve Bannon, which was if you want propaganda to be effective, you don’t have to convince people that what you are saying is true,” Obama said. “You just have to flood the zone with so much poop. They use a different word. But you have to flood the zone with so much untruth, constantly, that at some point people don’t believe anything.”
The former president went on to take an indirect shot at President Donald Trump’s contesting of the 2020 election results, saying, “it doesn’t matter if a candidate running for office just is constantly, just hypothetically, saying untrue things, or if an elected president claims that he won when he lost and that the system was rigged, but then when he wins, then it isn’t rigged, because he won.” Tying it back to his remarks about “propaganda,” he noted, “It just matters if everybody starts kind of throwing up their hands and saying, well, I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“And that’s what’s happened. That’s what’s happened in one of our major political parties. You have a whole bunch of people who know that’s not true, but we will pretend like it is. And that is dangerous,” Obama said.
The most sinister part of Obama’s commentary, however, came during his subsequent discussion about the role of government and Big Tech in the information sphere.
While claiming to support “diversity of opinion,” the former president argued that “we’re going to have to … start experimenting with new forms of journalism and how … we use social media in ways that reaffirm facts, separate facts from opinion.” To help accomplish this, he advocated for the government to step in and enact “regulatory constraints” around such a venture.
“We don’t want diversity of facts. And how do we train and teach our kids to distinguish between those things? That, I think, is one of the big tasks of social media,” Obama said. “By the way, it will require … some government regulatory constraints around some of these business models in a way that’s consistent with the First Amendment, but that also says, look, there is a difference between these platforms letting all voices be heard versus a business model that elevates the most hateful voices or the most polarizing voices or the most dangerous, in the sense of inciting violence, voices.”
Try as he may, Obama’s “consistent with the First Amendment” qualifier isn’t fooling anyone. What the former president is not-so-subtly pushing for is exactly what his buddy Joe Biden undertook during his presidency: government policing of speech. --->READ MORE HERE
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