The Right to be Wrong

For John, BLUF:  We are facing a crackdown on dissident views the Victorians or the Puritans would be proud of.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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YouTube pulls Spectator editor interview with Trump lawyer John Eastman

Here is the sub-headline:

Big Tech threatens to ban nonprofit for discussing alleged election fraud

From The Spectator US, by "Cockburn", 5 April 2021, 9:54 am.

Here is the lede plus one:

Over three-quarters of Republicans believe that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election and about a third of all Americans believe that President Biden’s win was illegitimate.  When tens of millions of Americans lose faith in the system, that spells serious trouble for democracy.  A normal and healthy country would allow a fair and open debate about whether or not fraud occurred, and, if so, how much fraud and what evidence exists to back up these claims.  Instead, Big Tech platforms have repeatedly censored any mention of voter fraud at all.

Such was the case late last week when YouTube and Vimeo pulled a video interview with Trump lawyer John Eastman.  Cockburn’s colleague and The Spectator‘s Washington editor, Amber Athey, is a fellow at the Steamboat Institute and was invited to conduct the interview with Eastman at an event in Colorado.  The event was called, ‘What Really Happened?  An Insider’s Perspective on Representing the President and Claims of Election Fraud.’

Information does want to be free, but Big Tech is going to try to stifle it.  Thus the old fashioned sin of gossip will still flourish in the age of electronics.  Unless we go to a totalitarian regime, where all fear being reported to "the authorities" by friends and relatives, people will exchange information on the side.  It is slower that the Main Stream Media, but works as well.  It is what fueled the exchange of ideas in pre-Revolutionary War America.  Even in the Soviet Union there was the Samizdat Press.

However, today we do face the practice of Social Credit, as practiced in China.  To quote Wikipedia,

The social credit initiative calls for the establishments of unified record system for individuals, businesses and the government to be tracked and evaluated for trustworthiness.  Initial reports suggested that the system utilized numerical score as the reward and punishment mechanism; recent reports suggest there are in fact multiple, different forms of the social credit system being experimented with.  Numerical system has been implemented only in several regional pilot programs, while the nationwide regulatory method has been based primarily on blacklisting and whitelisting.  The credit system is closely related to China's mass surveillance systems such as Skynet, which incorporates facial recognition system, big data analysis technology, AI and Project Maven.

But, back in the United States, we are doing a cancel culture thing, where one is considered PNG (persona non grata) for holding the wrong views.  Thus Big Tech censoring certain produced materials.  Until we rebuild a concensus that information needs to be free, so that approaches to problems can be democratically determined, we will have censorship,  Until we learn to tolerate the views of others we will not be a Democracy in the best sense of the world.  We need to learn that people have the right to be wrong.  They don't have the right to impose their wrong thinking on others, but they have the right to hold wrong views.

Hat tip to my Wife.

Regards  —  Cliff