The Misinformation Racket

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, November 21, 2024

 

Do you remember when “money in politics” was the pressing issue of our time? For a while, one could hardly engage with the news without being bludgeoned over the head with slogans about the problem. Whatever the question, whatever the detail, the declarations were always the same. “We have to get money out of politics!” “We have to overturn Citizens United.” “We have to pass comprehensive campaign-finance reform.” “This country is for the people, not for the corporations and billionaires.”

 

Today, only Bernie Sanders still reliably beats this drum — and even he has had to amend his pitch to exclude “millionaires,” since, rather embarrassingly, he sold enough books to become one himself. Everywhere else, the matter has been dropped, abandoned, buried.

 

Why? The Democratic Party now habitually outraises and outspends the Republican Party, and the Democrats have finally noticed — that’s why. In the most recent election, Democrats across the nation spent around a billion dollars more on political advertising than Republicans did. In 2020, Donald Trump was not only outspent by Joe Biden to the tune of $225 million, but the Trump campaign was the first in history to raise nearly half of its entire haul from the small, $200-or-less donors whom the Democrats have historically lauded. In 2016, Hillary Clinton raised and spent twice what Trump did. It is possible that Bernie Sanders really does boast a nonpartisan ideological commitment to the changes he seeks. But, if so, he is alone. For a while, the issue of “money in politics” was useful to the Democrats as an explanation for why they lost elections. Now, it is not. The party’s jarring silence on the subject reflects that elementary fact.

 

Were this the end of the story, it would be a happy one. Unfortunately, though, things are about to get a whole lot worse, for, while the Democratic Party has jettisoned its obsession with money in politics, it has not discarded the underlying theory that led to that obsession — which, when shorn of its rhetorical obfuscation and its righteous indignation, is that the American public votes against Democratic candidates and positions only because it has been tricked into doing so by nefarious forces that ought to be brought under control.

 

Until now, this theory has been somewhat attenuated. The federal government needed to control the use of money, the Democratic Party has contended, because, if it didn’t, the “rich people” and “corporations” who had a lot of it would be able to control the flow of information in a manner that was not available to the average citizen. This view was wrongheaded and authoritarian — as the oral arguments in Citizens United neatly illustrated, it is practically impossible to prevent spending on politics without engaging in censorship — but at least it represented only an oblique attack on the First Amendment. The party’s new position, which is that the problem is the flow of information per se, dispenses with that ambiguity and, in so doing, makes claims that, however one twists or massages them, cannot be made compatible with the American system of government.

 

Democratic complaints about “misinformation” have been forthcoming since the election of 2016. But it took Trump’s second win for the idea to become the catch-all justification for the party’s inability to prevail at the ballot box. The hypocrisy of that claim is, of course, incredible, coming as it does from the chosen political vehicle of a movement that, in the last few years alone, has covered up the decline of an American president; has denied the existence of pervasive inflation; has made preposterous claims about the Covid-19 pandemic, about the number of minorities killed by police, and about the meaning of the U.S. Constitution; and has thoroughly convinced itself that there are no observable physical differences between men and women. Still, hypocrisy is not the greatest threat posed by this development. The greatest threat is to free speech itself — which, if it were to be redefined in the way that the cavilers desire, would be reimagined as a tool to be enjoyed solely by the ruling elite.

 

Only one day passed between Trump having been declared the president-elect and the ladies of The View insisting that “it would help if we could regulate social media.” Alas, this line was no outlier. Within a week, Biden’s former press secretary, Jen Psaki, told Katie Couric that “disinformation” had cost Kamala Harris the election and that, to address it, “laws have to change,” while Yale’s Timothy Snyder declared on X that the microtargeting advertisements that the Trump campaign ran in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina were the equivalent of Russian propaganda and “should be illegal.” In the immediate aftermath, the claim that “misinformation” had had a considerable effect on the outcome was near-universal on the center-left. At Politico, Representative Greg Casar, a Democrat from Texas, explained that his party stood for “civil rights and working people,” but that Hispanics had been prevented from properly understanding this by the “right-wing misinformation machine.” In his election postmortem, the Brookings Institution’s Darrell M. West submitted that, while inflation and border security were important, “we can’t ignore the ways in which disinformation shaped views about the candidates” and “affected how voters saw leader performance.” At Vox, meanwhile, Adam Clark Estes complained simply that “we’re all living inside Elon Musk’s misinformation machine now.”

 

It is, of course, true that people lie brazenly about politics. It is also true that those lies are often believed by their targets. But it is not true that this habit is the preserve of only one side, it is unlikely that it is as effective as its critics seem to believe (if it were, the media would decide every election for the Democrats, rather than merely help them at the margins), and, irrespective of its character or its effects, there exists no provision within our constitutional order to do anything concrete about it. Despite the ongoing attempts to convince the public otherwise, there is, in fact, no legal category of speech called “misinformation.” Like “hate speech,” “misinformation” is a subset of protected political speech that, while undesirable, is not eligible for superintendence by Congress, the president, or the courts. Certainly, elected officials may use their own speech to rebut claims or arguments that they disdain. But they are no more permitted to intervene to regulate these than they are allowed to silence the Klan. The fundamental conceit that undergirds the First Amendment is that, unless speech is inextricably connected to illegal action, its contents remain no business of the government — not because that government is obliged to regard all speech as being equally useful or sincere, but because deciding what’s what is the preserve of the citizenry.

 

Those who defend this system are often accused of being ideological — or even naïve. But, ultimately, this arrangement is a concession to political practicality as much as to intellectual abstraction. If the public were to empower the government to micromanage “misinformation,” the public would first have to empower the government to decide what is true and what is false, and thus to pronounce on a host of the contested issues that create the need for our political system in the first place. Worse yet, under such an arrangement there would be no mechanism by which to stop the incumbent government from making decisions that benefited it and its agenda. A federal government that followed Jen Psaki’s advice and changed the laws that govern social media would be a federal government that was able to silence information that it considered damaging while giving its allies a free pass. When one stops to think about it for more than a half second, it is a matter of considerable irony that the people who have responded to the election of Donald Trump by calling for the federal supervision of our national debate are, in effect, demanding that our national debate be supervised by . . . Donald Trump.

 

Thanks to the scale of the Republican victory and the resolve of the U.S. Supreme Court, the chance that Congress will pass a federal “misinformation” law in the near future is slim. Nevertheless, changes in our culture often predate changes in our politics, and the arrival of a Democratic Party that believes earnestly in the evil power of “misinformation” ought not to be sniffed at or ignored. For years, conservatives warned that the lunacy that was spreading on college campuses would not be forever contained therein. They were correct, as the mainstreaming of once-fringe ideas such as critical race theory, gender fluidity, and living constitutionalism clearly shows. Unable to get its way in Washington, D.C., the progressive movement will soon attempt to crack down on “misinformation” in every other institution over which it holds even the slightest sway. This, in turn, will create a new class of would-be arbiters of truth, some of whom will eventually win political power. Americans who comprehend the threat that their ideas pose to the integrity of our democratic republic ought not to mock them or revel in their current impotence, but to meet their propositions with force, lest, having been allowed to march unmolested through our apparatus, they lay a solid foundation for shutting the rest of us up.