Skynet and The Misinformation "Police"
They Will Not Stop Until Free Speech is Dead
The truly wise know that to presume a monopoly on truth is the fastest way to find out how wrong you are about a great many things. So, what purpose does it serve for any entity (organization, individual, group, or government) to crown itself not just the king or queen of what is true or right but also as judge, jury, and executioner of speech they declare unfit to stand in the arena of public opinion?
Controlling what people are allowed to see is easier than trying to maneuver around dissent, especially if you have or intend to abuse your authority.
I can think of many a way to analyze the effort or the relationships (there are several hundred at this link if you’ve got that kind of time), but for today, how about two?
They think you are too stupid to know what is true (doubly damning if they also insisted on a monopoly on education).
Despite their best effort, not enough people are falling for their lies when other voices are not silenced.
Call it arrogance, hubris, or just imperiousness, but it takes a certain special someone to think they not only know what’s good for you but that allowing the mere presence of thought contrary to theirs threatens your health or safety.
Free Speech
When I broke ground on Substack a few weeks ago, one of my earliest contributions was a simple premise I’d not yet made (to my recollection): that the government should not have a monopoly on the right to be wrong.
Everyone gets things wrong. Why should the government own the patent on it? Let the wrongness swirl around the marketplace of ideas with yours, and we’ll debate the points until we reach some agreeable truth, which - even then - should remain open to debate.
We should not all have to agree, but that’s not the America in which we currently live. Like most governments, the US government is good at being wrong, so much so that it keeps trying to institutionalize its monopoly by using intelligence assets and police powers to control public perception.
Free speech is almost always at odds with the government's aims, which is why our founders wanted to ensure we had it. However, the digital era opened the door to a whole new level of abuse.
COVID will continue to be THE best example of this in recent memory. The trailing shadow of the response is littered with the proclamations of petty despots, systemic tyranny, and a wreckage of businesses, careers, bodies, lives, and lies. Almost everything they tried to tell us was the truth was a lie, and someone knew that when they were saying it. Repeating it. Suppressing doubters.
The government’s institutional response to being publicly exposed as a serial fibber was to do a better job of policing speech and debate. Something they’ve been perfecting (digitally at least) for more than a decade.
The Obama administration deployed a handful of efforts in its eight years in office to get your neighbors to spy on you. The Obama campaign was running disinformation schemes before the man ever took office.
Democrats created Truth Squads at the local and national levels to feed the attendant media with the proper narratives—their truth before yours.
Remember Attack Watch?
The Obama administration later got busted for weaponizing the intelligence community into the modern-day surveillance state. They spied on private citizens, allies, members of Congress, and even the media. It then spied on a presidential campaign and lied to FISA courts to get secret (illegal!) warrants in an effort to undermine an election and then a duly elected president.
You don’t have to like him to grasp the threat to your own rights.
We then got a pandemic of lies that are still being exposed, along with the experts in government who peddled them while concealing the truth as the FBI (and likely the CIA, NSA, and others) coerced private companies to suppress speech online—concealing and silencing the truth to protect their lies.
And it’s worse than that. It is working to shift the culture to a place where all speech is political, and it is acceptable for the government to police “misinformation.”
An increasing number of Americans agree that someone should address too much speech (perhaps without realizing this includes their own), but the misinformation infrastructure is not waiting for them to realize the truth. Piles of government grant money are being funneled into research to develop AI assets that will speed up how well governments illegally surveil citizens, stockpiling digital dossiers to use as leverage should anyone dare to challenge them on anything.
Examples must always be made, but examples of what?
Ask the J6 Prisoners held indefinitely without trial or bail because someone in power is using them as media fodder to invalidate the candidacy of the guy they illegally spied on back in 2016. How about a citizen arrested for a meme or a group of them for being successful with digital currency?
Again, you don’t have to like any of them to see the threat to yourself and your children.
Without regard to who we elect, this system continues to metastasize in power and reach. It is not Skynet from the Terminator films, but it works in a similar manner. It has decided that human beings’ ideas and words are a threat to its power, and it will not stop until free speech is dead.
The threat is already real in a handful of Western democracies.
Are you so sure you are on the right side and will always share their side that you would give the government the power to silence opposing opinions, which we’ll never get back once they have it?
If you disagree with anything the government has ever done, the answer is no, and you will disagree again, but if it's too late, you’ll be on the wrong side of history that only they are allowed to write.