The ‘disinformation’ warriors are all about suppressing any speech they dislike, even if it’s true

The “disinformation” warriors are out in full force to get the Supreme Court to reverse the landmark rulings that the Biden administration infringed on Americans’ constitutional rights by leaning on Big Tech to suppress content it disliked.

Mind you, while the “disinfo” zealots claim to fight falsehood, they mostly target speech they simply dislike, much of it perfectly true.

On Sunday, The New York Times jumped in, with a “news” article that fundamentally misled by painting concerns about this censorship as ginned up mainly by “Trump allies.”

Which is utterly nuts: The central journalistic work was done by lefties Matt Taibbi and Lee Fang and iconoclasts Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger; the Taibbi-Shellenberger testimony to Congress was based entirely on their investigations, not some Trumpie whispering in their ears.

Another confusion (one many justices seemed to share in Monday’s high-court oral argument) was a reckoning with just who the supposed “disinformation experts” are, and what their crusade is actually about.

In all but the tiniest sliver of cases, our would-be Ministers of Truth want to suppress not actual disinfo but opinions they don’t agree with and facts that are politically inconvenient for them.

On COVID, gender, Trump’s fake Russian collusion, and pretty much every other big news story of the past decade, the various nonprofits, executive-branch subagencies, and preening academics of our self-appointed “disinfo expert” class have been fighting against truth, not for it.

Take Nina Jankowicz, one of the key “experts” cited in the Times piece.

She’s a writer of Harry Potter fanfic songs whom the Biden White House picked to head up the “Disinformation Governance Board,” an Orwellian project within DHS scuttled thanks to public outrage once its mission — censorship, pure and simple — became known.

What qualifies her as an expert worthy of appointment as a powerful censor?

Hmmm, maybe it was her pushing of actual disinformation on Twitter, i.e. repeated suggestions that Hunter Biden’s 100% real laptop might somehow be a Russian intel campaign.

Or her saying — the horror! — that she shudders to think of “free speech absolutists” “taking over more platforms” (a nod to the Elon Musk/X acquisition)?

Jankowicz’s deranged views sum up the mindstate of disinfo warriors quite nicely: We get to decide what you see and hear, for your own good.

They were at work on this and abusing government power even in the Trump years before Biden took over.

This is not, as Chief Justice John Roberts seemed to think, about government giving feedback to social media companies.  

No: It’s about backdoor efforts to circumvent the First Amendment, using at least the threat of federal action to muscle these companies into suppressing the voices of ordinary citizens as well as academics like Jay Bhattacharya.

Whatever the Supreme Court decides, the fact remains that the crusade against “disinformation” is hyperpartisan politics at its ugliest, and utterly un-American.

https://nypost.com/2024/03/22/opinion/nyt-pushes-more-fake-news-on-disinformation-as-scotus-mulls/

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