Apparently unhappy with their tenuous grasp of the American public’s attention and trust when it comes to who to believe when it comes to the news, the New York Times is calling for President Joe Biden to take drastic measures against free speech in the United States. Technology columnist Kevin Roose amplified calls by left-wing ideologues for the president to address what he called the “hoaxes, lies and collective delusions” of some Americans by creating a “truth commission” and appointing a “reality czar” to his administration.
It’s all in the name of “national unity,” according to Roose: “How do you unite a country in which millions of people have chosen to create their own version of reality?” Roose lamented.
“I’ve spent the last several years reporting on our national reality crisis,” Roose wrote. “I worry that unless the Biden administration treats conspiracy theories and disinformation as the urgent threats they are, our parallel universes will only drift further apart, and the potential for violent unrest and civic dysfunction will only grow.”
In search of an answer, Roose consulted his own handpicked “experts” to explore a solution to this dire situation in which people have their own opinions. It’s a cliche to say that the solutions Roose’s experts came up with are Orwellian — cliché, but also quite true.
Joan Donovan of Harvard called for the president to create a “truth commission,” similar to the 9/11 Commission, whose job would be to do an in-depth search of the causes, planning, and excecution of the so-called siege that took place at the Capitol on January 6.
“There must be accountability for these actions,” Donovan said. “My fear is that we will get distracted as a society and focus too much on giving voice to the fringe groups that came out in droves for Trump.”
Nothing Orwellian about that at all.
This “truth commission,” Roose noted, should also meet regularly with Big Tech platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter to assist those entities with policing of their platforms. Roose also suggests that such platforms receive “safe harbor exemptions” from the federal government, which would allow the tech sector to share data with the government without breaking any privacy laws.
Sure, because Big Tech in America is not protected enough under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Roose and his experts also suggested that the algorithms of Big Tech platforms be audited regularly to find out how and where conspiracy-minded people find each other. This will give the folks at the Southern Poverty Law Center and other such groups the tools they need to expose right-wing movements before it’s too late.
“We must open the hood on social media so that civil rights lawyers and real watchdog organizations can investigate human rights abuses enabled or amplified by technology,” Donovan said.
Such a “truth commission” would need to be careful about who they labeled domestic terrorists and who are just cranks that bear watching, according to Roose.
“A paranoid retiree who spends all day reading Qanon forums isn’t the same as an armed militia leader, and we should delineate one from the other,” Roose pointed out. Both are problems, of course, but the armed militia leader is a more immediate problem.
Roose failed to mention either Antifa or Black Lives Matter, two groups that contributed greatly to the violent riots that occurred throughout 2020.
Also needed, according to Roose, would be a Cabinet-level position, which he refers to as a “reality czar.” The reality czar would be responsible for centralizing the federal government’s response to “disinformation and domestic extremism,” which Roose termed “haphazard and spread across several agencies.”
So, the “reality czar” would presumably hold wide discretion across federal agencies to determine what is reality and what is conspiracy. It sounds like a big job for one person — determining the entire nation’s reality.
Free speech and political discourse no longer matter to the Left in America. Such things only cause trouble, and authoritarian governments don’t like trouble — they smash it. The real fear is that the executive order-crazy Biden administration — whoever is in charge of it — might actually consider ideas such as these. They can’t have people thinking freely, after all.
