By Kyle Smith
Tuesday, November 17, 2020
Fun game: Imagine President Obama’s litany of bitter
grievances expressed not in the imitation deepthink of middlebrow magazines and
their compassion for good government, but in the somewhat earthier demotic of
his successor. Take this example, from Obama’s recent BBC comments to promote
his third book on his favorite subject:
There are millions of people who
subscribed to the notion that Joe Biden is a socialist, who subscribed to the
notion that Hillary Clinton was part of an evil cabal that was involved in
pedophile rings. I think at some point it’s going to require a combination of
regulation and standards within industries to get us back to the point where we
at least recognize a common set of facts before we start arguing about what we
should do about those facts.
Obama, apparently referring to Facebook posts and other
non-mainstream sources of information, is saying the United States should have
a regulatory body empowered to stop anyone from publicly stating opinions with
which he disagrees (“Biden is a socialist”) or assertions for which there is no
evidence (Hillary Clinton was involved in a pedophile ring). Let’s be honest
here: What Obama is saying is crazy. It’s a triple-layer cake of crazy
with whipped craziness on top. He might as well tweet out: “We would win every
election if it weren’t for the FAKE NEWS who will be DEALT WITH!!! My new
DEPARTMENT OF FAKE NEWS BLASTERS will shut them up FOREVER!!!”
It’s crazy that Obama thinks the existence of a free
press is, on balance, worse for his party than for Republicans; it’s crazy that
Obama, a former constitutional-law lecturer, thinks there is some previously
unnoticed truth clause in the First Amendment; it’s crazy that he thinks his
idea would pass muster with a judiciary that is at the moment more supportive of
the free exchange of ideas than in any previous period in American history,
especially given the current makeup of the Supreme Court; it’s crazy that Obama
thinks that Clinton narrowly lost her bid for the presidency, and Biden
narrowly won his, because swing voters decided either that Biden is a socialist
or that she is in league with pedophiles. It’s also crazy that Obama hasn’t
noticed there are already “standards within industries” to limit the spread of
information uncongenial to Obama’s party, revealed in Twitter and Facebook’s
publicly admitted
efforts to stop the New York Post’s reports about the contents of Hunter
Biden’s laptop from spreading, a determined
effort by mainstream-media outlets to ignore or downplay the story, and the
startling admission
by the editor of the New York Times that he removed accurate information
from an already-published story centering on a sexual-assault allegation
against Joe Biden because Biden’s campaign complained.
Moreover, the examples Obama cites hardly make his point
for him. There is as much evidence that Hillary Clinton was involved in a
pedophile ring as there is that Donald Trump has been a Russian asset since
1987, but one of these fanciful theories languishes in the fever swamps of the
information ecosystem while the other landed
the cover of New York Magazine and was asserted by a conspiracy
theorist, Jonathan Chait, whom Obama had previously legitimized by inviting
him to the White House for an off-the-record chat.
As for “Joe Biden is a socialist,” is he? True, Biden has
never said, “I am a socialist,” but neither has Trump ever said, “I am a
fascist.” The former idea enjoys little airing anywhere in the mainstream
media; the latter has been asserted regularly in virtually every mainstream
media outlet (and by
Obama himself) for five years. The heart of Biden’s economic agenda is a
version of the Green New Deal, which his platform labeled
“a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face.” That proposal
was in turn dubbed not a “climate thing” but “a
how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing” by one of its lead engineers,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti. The
Democratic Socialists of America enthusiastically
back the Green New Deal. If you propose ideas socialists find to be
socialist, are you a socialist? Is the matter at least debatable?
Obama’s proposal to have the federal government decree
how “we at least recognize a common set of facts” is a childish notion, typical
of Obama in that it begs the question of what the truth is in the first place.
The whole point of a free press is that a diverse range of voices gets to hash
out the question of what is and isn’t true. May the most convincing argument
win. Donald Trump is currently the chief executive. Should he be able to
appoint the head of a federal agency charged with identifying and punishing
those who promulgate speech he deems untrue? Does Obama think any future
Republican president should be entrusted with this power? Remembering that
Democrats are not always in charge of the federal government should inspire
Obama to notice that deciding what the populace may and may not hear is not
friendly paternalism but undisguised authoritarianism. It’s a deeply unserious
plea, the sort of desperate brain-blurt made by those who fear that the only
way they can win an argument is by gagging the other side. For Barack Obama,
who in his many platitudinous speeches never managed to convince the American
people of any idea other than that they should vote for him, the self-serving
nature of his latest outlandish proposal is pitifully clear.
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