Won’t someone save democracy from the people?
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Free speech on the internet endangers democracy, Barack Obama told Stanford University.
The widely hailed speech at Big Tech’s favorite university claimed that autocrats are “subverting democracy” and that democracies have “grown dangerously complacent.” In the slow parade of teleprompter cliches he even warned that “too often we’ve taken freedom for granted.”
To Obama, the threat to democracy doesn’t come from government power, but the lack of it.
“You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe. Once they lose trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions, in each other, in the possibility of truth, the game’s won,” he summed up.
Like every Obama speech, “Challenges to Democracy in the Digital Information Realm” didn’t offer anything new, just a distillation of familiar talking points and misplaced assumptions.
The assumption at the heart of Obama’s speech and that of the range of arguments depicting free speech as a cultural and national threat is that the purpose of discourse is state power.
Obama, like many post-liberal lefty critics of free speech, reduces speech to its social impact and its social impact to its political impact. This holistic integration is so fundamental to Marxists and many lefties that they don’t even think twice about the idea that everything we do is reducible to a move on the great abacus of social justice. The food you eat, the car you buy, and the words you say have the potential to either save or damn the planet and humanity.
This quasi-religious conception of mass social mobilization pervades American society. It’s the precondition for wokeness because the only possible moral justification for terrorizing random people on social media is the conviction that governance isn’t political, it’s social, and that the only way to avert climate change and social inequality is by controlling what everyone believes.
Wokeness collapses the distinction between the private and public spheres, and between government and individuals. In a national social crisis, the only conceptual framework through which the Left ever really governs, there’s no time for such liberal niceties as private spheres.
Obama’s speech neatly illustrates the fascism at the heart of this panopticon political project.
Introduce disagreement and you “raise enough questions” that people “no longer know what to believe” and then “lose trust in their leaders”, “mainstream media” and even “truth”. Stripped of all the Brookings Institute globalist prose, what Obama is really saying is that individual disagreement undermines the state. And that truth is dependent on public faith in the state.
This is a value system utterly at odds with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, one which envisions an intimate link between individual speech and state authority that would have horrified King George III, but absolutely delighted Hitler or Stalin.
It assumes that there can be no other legitimate points of view other than the official one and that there should be no leaders except those who share them. Limiting the range of opinions is necessary to protect state power because there is no distinction between them and the state.
Or as a certain Austrian artist once put it, “One people, One state, One leader”.
When he was promoting his last book two years ago, Obama made the same arguments. “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work.”
The assumption that the democratic process leads to truth rather than choice, absolute rightness rather than people power, is an undemocratic paradigm. Its inevitable conclusion becomes that of Obama, that democracy must be protected by controlling the people.
Not only elections, but ideas, are too important to be left to the public.
Obama doesn’t want a marketplace of ideas because people might get the wrong idea and vote him and his political allies out of office. The explicit goal of internet censorship is to control election outcomes by filtering what information the public is able to access.
Like the provenance of a certain Delaware artist’s laptop.
Narrowing the range of acceptable information in order to narrow the range of acceptable opinions, candidates and political systems is the first fundamental trick of tyrannies. It takes a certain chutzpah and a stock of Orwellian buzzwords to redefine that as protecting democracy.
Obama complains, “China’s built a great firewall around the Internet, turning it into a vehicle for domestic indoctrination” and proposes a democratic firewall around the internet under a “regulatory structure” to be designed with “communities of color” to slow “the spread of harmful content.” The democratic people of color firewall will be so much better than China’s firewall.
Pro-censorship elites have the same assumptions as China about the interaction between speech, society, and the state which is why they, like Obama, arrive at the same conclusions. They can dress up those conclusions in buzzwords about “democracy” and “people of color”, but those are differences of style, not substance. The trains all end up at the same station.
Obama speaks about “bugs” in the Constitution. While he is always happy to critique America, the particular totalitarian bug here is deeply embedded into the leftist worldview which denies that people have individual agency, insists that everyone is a prisoner of their social context, and contends that the purpose of the society and the state is an enlightened intertwining. The bug, which is really more of a feature, directly leads to the same outcome as in China or Stanford.
A free society requires healthy breathing spaces between politics and life.The difference between a politicized society and a tyranny is only time. The question at the heart of this debate is “What is discourse for” which is really the question of, “What are people here for?” To believe, as the Left does, that people primarily exist as vehicles for political change is to enslave them.
That’s why every leftist revolution invariably slides toward tyranny along the same worn tracks.
The Founding Fathers believed that people would self-define their purposes. That was why America’s revolution uniquely led to freedom and why leftist revolutions lead to tyranny.
America defined freedom as individual power while lefties define it by the power of the state.
Obama is simply replaying what happens when liberation is treated as a collective enterprise, a journey toward rather than from, that can only be achieved collectively, through the exercise of state power rather than individually through personal choices. The internet, once individualistic, has become collective, and social media, the ultimate embodiment of that collectivism, has become the battleground between individualist expressers and collectivist censors.
somehistory says
“bo”…the mozlum community organizer….has done more than his share of flooding the “public square” with filth. and he just keeps on “giving of himself” to keep the square dirty.
CogitoErgoSum says
I’m thinking if the government will just decide which platforms on the internet should be classified as a publisher and which should be classified as a utility this problem will no longer be a problem – or at least less of a problem. If you like censorship you could visit only those platforms that are registered as publishers where a publisher can be sued for libel or slander. If you want free speech you can visit the platforms that are registered as utilities where an individual user can say what he wants but leave himself open to being sued for libel or slander. It would be up to the individual which platform to use and it would be up to the individual to decide what is the prudent thing to say. The free market will be able to decide whether or not any specific platform, either publisher or utility, will survive.
gravenimage says
Good points CogitoErgoSum.
wpm says
If you view a” right wing platform” too much or give to a “right wing cause” ,maybe post something supporting “right wing” maybe in the future in America your bank accounts can be frozen like they did in Canada? See how the truckers convoy and their supporters were treated in Canada this year.
CogitoErgoSum says
Some banks and credit card companies have already done this sort of thing. GoFundMe even shut down contributions to the Canadian truckers and was going to redirect the money already contributed to a charity GoFundMe thought was more deserving. All the threats to democracy that Obama is talking about are things that the Leftists have already done are still doing. The man is nothing more than a con artist. He’s good at it but he’s still a con artist.
Walter Sieruk says
The message is so very important that it’s well worth recapitulate it .The message is that the is much to be concerned about because that woman ,Nina Jankowicz, who is the head of the Biden regime’s new created “Disinformation Governance Board” which in reality is more the Orwellian totalitarian state’s “Ministry of truth” in the George Orwell classic novel “1984.”
The point being the sinister impostor “president” , Biden , with one of his top politically correct propagandist ,Jankowicz , ready and willing to disseminate lies under the disingenuous pretense of “truth speaking” . Even to the point of ,by gradualism, use governmental power to silence those who actually speak and publish genuine truth is unconstitutional tyrannical , despicable and outright wrong.
This is leading to a freedom catastrophe and the American people should not let that affront to liberty occur.
As George Washington has ,very wisely, declared “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led like sheep to the slaughter.”
Tom says
“Not only elections, but ideas, are too important to be left to the public” Obama.
Another one of his ilk said it too “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We don’t allow our enemies to have guns, why would we let them have ideas.” Joseph Stalin.
somehistory says
they were cast from the same mold. “bo” would gladly slaughter those who disagree…imo, from hearing him, and knowing that he is all in favor of murdering newborns who survive the murder the doctors, nurses and pregnant people try to inflict.
gravenimage says
Tom, I think the things Obama has *actually* said are damning enough. You don’t have to make anything up.
Tom says
Gravenimage it is not made up. Try searching it on the net and you will see.
Tom says
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/joseph_stalin_136260
gravenimage says
Tom, I am familiar with that quote from Stalin. I was referring to the quote attributed to Obama. The only references I can find online are to this exact article. Do you have links to this from Obama?
Tom says
You are correct I was quoting the article and mistakenly though it was a direct quote from Obama.
On re reading the article I see that it was the authors interpretation of Obama’s stance.
gravenimage says
Thank you, Tom. Obama has indeed done a great deal to erode freedom of speech:
“Obama’s legacy: The trashing of free speech”
https://thehill.com/news/287426-obamas-legacy-the-trashing-of-free-speech/
Wellington says
Here is the difference between Obama and Biden, to wit, the former puts forward terrible ideas in a smooth and often convincing manner and the latter puts forward terrible ideas in a tedious and non-convincing manner.
gravenimage says
Yep. Obama is a just a lot slicker. Other than that, not a lot of difference…
James Lincoln says
Wellington,
100% spot-on.
Obama may be a lot of things, but he’s not stupid.
Lee Poteet says
Actuallu, he is precisely that. He may be clever, facile and evil, his ideas are just plain stipid.
James Lincoln says
Lee,
What I was trying to convey is that Obama is not “stupid” in the sense that he is intelligent, has a decent IQ, and speaks coherently – in contrast to Biden.
That being said, absolutely agree 100% that his *ideas* are stupid.
gravenimage says
Only Internet Fascism Can Save Democracy
Won’t someone save democracy from the people?
……………
This *is* basically what he is saying. Just appalling.
somehistory says
Remember when it was said to be a government “of the people, by the people and for the people”?
“bo” wants it to be one for him to do as he pleases, spending the money he never earned and living in homes ‘he never built,’ etc.
gravenimage says
Yep.
mortimer says
I post the following comment for Barack Obama who is speaking as a neo-fascist.
-“The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish.” – Justice Robert H. Jackson, chief prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials
Obama echoes Hitler who suppressed the voice of Germany’s FREE SPEECH OPPOSITION … namely, the MUNICH POST newspaper.
Hitler had all the staff arrested and ‘disappeared’ and had the printing presses smashed and thrown into the street below.
gravenimage says
All grimly true.
mortimer says
Obama accused others of doing what they Dems and their media-minions CNN and others have been doing for the last 10 years in particular:
“You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe. ” (Obama)
Apparently, Obama thinks it isn’t ‘dirt’, ‘sewage’ or ‘conspiracy theory’ when DEMS DO IT!
Patriotliz says
Why are Democrats naturally bossy? Why so arrogant and such “know-it-alls?” In school you would naturally shun such individuals as bullies. Then they grow up to be tyrants such as the present day FascsistCommie Democrats who learn to develop their talents of bullying and propaganda to con others out of their wealth to redistribute ostensibly for the good of others which includes themselves. Free Speech is a big No-No since it exposes the con.
So-Sad says
The “Manchurian Candidate” speaks ………. why does anyone listen?
Obama should have been hanged for the USURPATION of the Office of President.
Never have the democrats shown by what definition the Usurper Obama occupied that Office.
It matters not “where” he was born, nor does it matter “who” his “father” was (Frank Marshal Davis?).
He was adopted by Lolo Soetoro which made him an “Indonesian citizen and muslim, BY BIRTH”.
It seems that there are many who do not understand the purpose and meaning (legally) of adoption.
gravenimage says
I am no fan of Obama, but being later adopted by someone doesn’t change where a child was born. It is also not clear that he was ever adopted by his stepfather.
Lee Poteet says
Actuallu, he is precisely that. He may be clever, facile and evil, his ideas are just plain stipid.