Incoherent speech
The Left's competing visions of free speech cannot be squared
If the American people concluded in last fall’s election that the political and cultural left, as represented by the Democratic Party, has descended into utter incoherence, it might be because voters were simply paying attention.
Because here are the Left’s two major talking points on the issue of free speech:
Free speech is so sacred that the government must bend over backward to accommodate even the most obnoxious speech, and should err on the side of protecting speech even when it veers into threats and/or physical violence
Free speech is a tool of the far right to spread misinformation, and the government is well within its legal authority to regulate misinformation in order to protect democracy
We see the first argument offered up in regard to ongoing legal and legislative efforts to force universities to put an end to anti-Semitic attacks on their campuses - efforts the Left condemn as representing an unconstitutional attack on free speech.
The second argument is the one offered in defense of the previous presidential administration’s successful efforts to get certain viewpoints censored on social media during the COVID pandemic (as well as on issues surrounding climatology).
In fact, prominent Democrats and left-of-center legal experts argue that there was no free speech issue whatsoever when the Biden White House flagged individual posts and accounts on Facebook and Twitter, and demanded that those private companies remove or hide said posts and/or accounts — because they only flagged “disinformation.”
And so in trying to weave these two arguments into some kind of single view on free speech, we’re apparently expected to believe that supposedly “pro-Palestinian” protestors are well within their rights to verbally harass Jewish students — or students they merely suspect of being Jewish — and maybe even bash a few Jew heads in the process, but that eminently qualified scientists should not be allowed to weigh in on issues arising in their areas of expertise if the government determines that their views are somehow outside some consensus or other.
By this argument, low-level interns at the White house possessed the scientific knowledge and legal authority to brand the opinions of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — who has earned not only an M.D., but a doctorate in economics from Stanford — as “misinformation,” and demand that Twitter and Facebook censor his posts.
Which they did.
Pre-COVID, Bhattacharya was one of the leading statistical epidemiologists in the world. He was our nation’s resident expert on how quickly different infectious diseases spread through various populations.
And then COVID-19 hit, and the media began covering it much as the media covers climate change: As a cataclysmic emergency in which action is needed, not debate. And so outlier opinions (at least as judged by members of the media) are not only ignored or discarded, but those holding them become public enemies who must be destroyed.
When some researchers at the Imperial College in London published a paper early in the COVID pandemic predicting 2.2 million deaths in the United States and more than 500,000 in Great Britain, political leaders here and in Europe used that model as justification to impose sweeping economic and social lockdowns — confining entire nations to their homes except for “essential services” such as gasoline, groceries, and, at least in California, pot shops and liquor stores.
Bhattacharya’s own models were far less dire than that of the Imperial College, and he reached out to see if they would share their computer modeling code so he could compare these very disparate results. He was quickly rebuffed — it turns out with good reason: The Imperial College “model” for COVID was based on untested, 13-year-old computer code that had been intended for flu modeling, not coronaviruses. It was so old, nobody — not even the authors of the study — could vouch for it.
In other words, the authors of the Imperial College study had found an old computer program whose code they did not understand, plugged in some early variables on COVID-19 mortality rates and rate of transmission, and then published the results — without even knowing if the computer algorithms were what they intended!
While Bhattacharya’s early models ended up slightly below the actual COVID fatalities, his assertion that lockdowns would have virtually no effect on the spread of the virus turned out to be accurate — as we saw when it was all over and there was no statistically relevant difference between jurisdictions with strict lockdowns (Norway, Denmark) and those with basically none (Sweden).
And his numbers were far closer to the end result than those of the Imperial College model that the media touted all along not as a worst-case scenario, but as the most likely scenario.
But beyond all that was the fact that you had a respected researcher in Bhattacharya weighing in on an issue that was smack dab in the middle of his area of expertise. (The author of the Imperial College model, Neil Ferguson, on the other hand, had a track record of grotesquely exaggerated models: 150,000 people would die from foot and mouth disease in 2001, and in 2005 that 150 million people would die worldwide from bird flu. The actual number of fatalities? 177 from foot and mouth disease, and 282 from bird flu.
And yet, the national media — CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, Washington Post, New York Times, Associated Press, etc. — took Ferguson’s study as gospel, while subjecting Bhattacharya to withering questioning of his model, conclusions and even qualifications, while also exposing his family to threats.
Bhattacharya specifically questioned whether these lockdowns were being weighed against real-world economic and sociological costs — which he predicted (and the evidence after has borne out) would be particularly damaging to the educational development of Hispanic and African American children. As he pointed out, black and Latino parents are statistically less likely to have the resources to organize the unofficial online “study pods” that immediately popped up in affluent and even middle-class school districts to pick up the slack of lost learning during the lockdowns and online-only coursework that followed.
After Bhattacharya led the drafting and publishing of the Great Barrington Declaration, in which hundreds and then thousands of top scientists and researchers argued against mass lockdowns and instead for a focused protection of the most at-risk populations — primarily the very old, the very young, and those with compromised immune systems — the White House made its move to have him removed from the most popular social media sites, or at least have his posts “shadow-banned.”
The government justified its moves against critics of the lockdowns by claiming it only went after falsehoods — “misinformation” or “disinformation” — and that untruths are not covered by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. (Which is itself, ironically, “misinformation” in that the courts have repeatedly held that the government can simply not be trusted nor is it generally competent to decide what is and is not “true” or even factual.)
“Shadow-banning” is particularly insidious because it’s never announced. Twitter and Facebook simply adjusted their settings so that users so targeted could still post whatever they liked, but those posts would not show up in the feeds of their followers and subscribers.
The fact that the Supreme Court eventually agreed with the government that this did not constitute a violation of the First Amendment only proves that the Court is as fallible as any other human enterprise.
And, again, the Democratic Party and most of the national media approved of this White House action to mute Bhattacharya and others who questioned the scientific basis for the lockdowns. We even had reporters for NBC News and the Washington Post personally flagging accounts and asking Twitter and Facebook why they were still up.
Now let’s compare this attitude — that the government should have wide latitude to decide which scientists and researchers should be allowed to participate in public debates on scientific issues — with the Left’s views on countering anti-Semitism on university campuses.
First off, much of the Left simply denies that it is possible for anti-Semitism to even exist on the Left. It is, we are assured, the sole manifestation of “white supremacists” on the right side of the political spectrum.
But now that Israel — the world’s only Jewish nation — is responding to the unprovoked terror attack of October 2023, the Left argues that a vigorous protest of Israel is so urgent that even if some protestors do end up accidentally beating Jewish students, well, it’s all in good cause.
And so we had Jewish students at UCLA turned away from campus by supposedly “pro-Palestinian” protestors who appointed themselves campus gatekeepers. We’ve had Jewish professors at Columbia University and other schools have their classes interrupted by protestors demanding that the Jewish professors denounce Israel.
Whether Leftists really believe their fellow travelers are capable of anti-Semitism or not, these attacks bear all the hallmarks of traditional anti-Semitism: By demanding Jews denounce Israel, they implicitly accuse Jews of not being loyal Americans.
We’ve seen how that plays out elsewhere.
Setting aside for a moment the utter intellectual nonsense that passes for “Palestinian” support (nearly all of it nothing more than pan-Arab nationalism and mythology), we’re told that the government must — MUST — err on the side of protecting the free speech rights of the anti-Israel agitators.
Yet we’re also supposed to believe that the government’s main obligation is to err on the side of keeping the public square free of “misinformation.”
Well, if the term “misinformation” means anything, it ought to apply to the gibberish that passes for argument on the part of Israel haters. Promoting the idea that Jews are “colonialists” in a land they’ve lived in for at least 4,000 years ought be grounds alone for expelling students from supposedly elite universities simply for being intellectually unqualified to have been admitted in the first place. And castigating Zionism as a “racist” ideology while defending the Arab “right of return” is simply choosing between nationalist myths, and favoring the group that arrived last.
Still, no matter how badly formed (and informed) the ideas of Israel’s critics are, they should be allowed to voice them.
At the same time, it shouldn’t even need to be stated that these ideas have to be voiced without resorting to personal attacks on Jewish students and professors.
And never mind the violence.
The best response to bad speech is always better speech.
That so many on the Left now believe that only they should be allowed any speech may be why they are currently in political exile in this country.
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