Disinformation and Persuasion
Will "climate change" help stop the stampede toward authoritarian-imposed silence?
Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties; and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.
They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones. Believing in the power of reason as applied through public discussion, they eschewed silence coerced by law — the argument of force in its worst form. Recognizing the occasional tyrannies of governing majorities, they amended the Constitution so that free speech and assembly should be guaranteed.— Justice Louis Brandeis, Whitney v. California (1927) (concurring opinion, joined by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes)
So I just wrote about potential quislings such as Tucker Carlson and the “New Right” led by The Former Guy, who side against their homeland, the United States of America, in a traitorous fashion. But the risk of writing such a column is that someone will cite it as part of an effort to suppress speech: “silence coerced by law”, as Justice Brandeis characterizes such effort in the excerpt above.
Today’s article is inspired by my friend Peter Venetoklis, who writes an excellent daily Substack column entitled “The Roots of Liberty”, and his column on Columbus Day (“Indigenous People’s Day”, to the lost and woke among us) entitled “Free Speech Shell Games”. In it, he highlights a recent speech by New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, arguing in favor of imposing government censorship on speech and positions that the government believes to be harmful. As the description of her speech on the libertarian website Reason notes, in her September speech to the U.N.:
Ardern briefly acknowledged free-speech concerns, before waving them away as less important than the dangers of unregulated speech. By her words, this category encompasses promotion of terrorism, undefined extremism, disinformation, and also ideas the powers-that-be find threatening.
"How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists?" Ardern demanded of her audience. "How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology?"
To combat these perils, she demands "international rules, norms, and expectations" comparable to those applied in weapons control.
One of the (apparently unintentional) interesting points here is that Ardern seems to believe that there is no responsibility on government proponents of a position to persuade others of the correctness of that position. I admit that I’m fascinated by the imperial arrogance that Ardern projects, as if the pronouncements that she believes on the issues she sees as important are protected by the doctrine of papal infallibility. And yet . . . you don’t have to be a cynic to realize that you are surrounded by fallibility, and so government needs to rely on persuasion more than coercion.
The Maestro of Misinformation
Now, we’ve all seen the “stable genius” Donald Trump rattling off insane nonsense like this attempt to defend his failure to turn over all of his presidential documents, as required by law:
“George H.W. Bush took millions of documents to a former bowling alley and a former Chinese restaurant; where they combined them. So they’re in a bowling alley slash Chinese restaurant. A Chinese restaurant and a bowling alley. With no security and a broken front door.”
This is, of course, a total lie built around a kernel of truth, as is typical of Trump:
(1) George H.W. Bush didn’t take any documents anywhere. He turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration (the legal owner of such documents under the Presidential Records Act) as required by law.
(2) The National Archives took the unsorted boxes of documents to College Station, Texas, the impending home of the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum.
(2) To sort out the documents for the Bush Library (located on the campus of Texas A&M University), the National Archives rented a former bowling alley in College Station and ended up having to rent the building next-door as well, a former Chinese restaurant.
(3) According to news reports at the time, the rented space was heavily secured during this process.
(4) After sorting and organizing, the 44 million pages of documents were moved into permanent storage in the National Archives space at the Bush Library.
(5) There are no Bush documents currently in a former Chinese restaurant or a former bowling alley, let alone one with no security and a broken front door.
I can understand the concern that people might believe Donald Trump’s BS. But Trump is the maestro of disinformation, and yet his efforts such as this one generally wind up in widespread mockery. At this time, the only people who are likely to believe Donald Trump’s claims might be charitably characterized as “morons”. Now, there may be more morons in the U.S. (and in the world) than many of us are comfortable with, but it’s a scientific fact that half the people in the world are below median intelligence (even in Lake Wobegon, despite Garrison Keillor’s claim that, in that town, “all the children are above average”).
Of course, as a New York Times article over the weekend points out, Joe Biden also lies constantly, although (unlike with Trump) the NYT uses euphemisms for most of his lying (“spinning yarns that unravel”, “spinning embellished narratives”, “details that are exaggerated or wrong”, “serial exaggerator”), which we could consider professional courtesy among partisan Democratic operatives such as Biden and the NYT. One of the best narratives NOT in the story is this one from Biden, which took place on the campaign trail in 2019, as reported by the Washington Post. Biden told a story about a four-star general who asked Biden, when he was vice-president, to take a dangerous trip to Kunar province in Afghanistan so he could put the Silver Star on the chest of a Navy captain. Biden claimed to have said: “We can lose a vice president. We can’t lose many more of these kids. Not a joke.” And the story from there, in the words of the Post:
The Navy captain, Biden recalled Friday night, had rappelled down a 60-foot ravine under fire and retrieved the body of an American comrade, carrying him on his back. Now the general wanted Biden to pin a Silver Star on the American hero who, despite his bravery, felt like a failure.
“He said, ‘Sir, I don’t want the damn thing!’ ” Biden said, his jaw clenched and his voice rising to a shout. “ ‘Do not pin it on me, Sir! Please, Sir. Do not do that! He died. He died!’"
The room was silent.
“This is the God’s truth,” Biden had said as he told the story. “My word as a Biden.”
Well, as the Post disclosed, his “word as a Biden” wasn’t worth much:
In the space of three minutes, Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.
According to the Post, here’s what really happened:
Biden visited Kunar province in 2008 as a U.S. senator, not as vice president. The service member who performed the celebrated rescue that Biden described was a 20-year-old Army specialist, not a much older Navy captain. And that soldier, Kyle J. White, never had a Silver Star, or any other medal, pinned on him by Biden. At a White House ceremony six years after Biden’s visit, White stood at attention as President Barack Obama placed a Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor, around his neck.
So, a lie, right? Not according to left-wing “fact checker” Scopes, which gives the story a “mixed” rating. How does it get there?
What's True
In recounting a story about a grief-stricken soldier who tried to refuse a medal pinned on him by Biden, Biden got key details wrong.
What's False
Biden's story is not "false," as was widely reported, because his underlying recollection of pinning a medal on a grieving soldier who did not want the medal is based on a real occurrence.
Well, if having the story contain a kernel of truth is the standard, then Donald Trump’s story about George H.W. Bush’s records above should also have a “mixed” rating, because the Bush administration documents really were combined in a former bowling alley and a former Chinese restaurant, right? But both Trump’s story and Biden’s story are flat-out lies, regardless of the opinions of some self-appointed “fact checkers”.
However, slinging B.S. is a longtime right in the United States, dating back to peddlers of folk remedies (including the infamous “snake oil salesmen”). No draconian restrictions on speech can — or should — change that fact.
The Maestro Has Lots of Company
Anyway, Trump and Biden aren’t the only ones slinging B.S. As I noted in the quisling article, the narrative that “Trump is a Russian asset” was accompanied by many, many proclamations from reporters, citing generally anonymous federal sources, that the clinching evidence had just been discovered. In 2018, the “Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting” went to the staffs of the New York Times and Washington Post for, in the award’s words,
“deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”
And yet despite the supposed deep sources and the unquestioned relentless reporting, not a shred of evidence of “Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign” beyond the usual Russian sh*t-stirring ever turned up. And, even though Russia may have wanted some connections inside or collusion with the Trump campaign, and Trump might have been receptive as well, no evidence of that ever showed up either, except for one Trump Tower meeting between Trump aides (including his son and son-in-law) and a person who was apparently at least a supposed Russian asset.
That’s not to say that the Trump/Russia narrative has been disproven, either,. But the undeniable fact that Trump is a self-promoting megalomaniac, and all of his 2016 actions can be explained by that fact, means that the reporters and unidentified federal sources making these claims would need to have some actual evidence to support them, which they did not have and have never had.
To top it off, in October 2020 the New York Post reported on a laptop that it claimed had been left for repair and then forfeited by Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son. The laptop contained evidence of both debauchery and corruption, including an e-mail chain regarding a contract between Hunter Biden’s company and a Chinese government-connected energy company that contained a ten percent set-aside for “the big guy”, identified by one of Hunter’s associates as former vice-president and then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Both the U.S. mainstream media, the large U.S. social media companies, and the FBI said that the laptop was probably a Russian disinformation campaign and suppressed or banned any reporting about it. But the only disinformation was coming from the U.S. media and the FBI, because, as we now know, the laptop really had been Hunter Biden’s, and the story was authentic. No one will ever know whether the partisan Democrat bias reflected in those disinformation activities from media and the FBI influenced the 2020 election, but the doubts will linger forever.
So much for the credibility of the press — or of the government insiders touted by Ardern. Truthfully, the illogic of her paradigm has been conclusively proven by all of the recent examples above, but there is no better example than one of the issues she actually cites: climate change.
The Climate Change Conundrum
To the best of our knowledge, climate change has been a constant since the earth came into existence (however that happened). Geologists believe that the earth has had five separate ice ages, including the current period. Antarctica supposedly froze over only about 14 million years ago. Since the 1980s, scientists have believed that climate change, caused by the impact of an asteroid with the earth in the Gulf of Mexico area, wiped out the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago, which we believe to be illustrated by geologic evidence at the K/T boundary. Other climate fluctuations have taken place as well.
However, the current theory of climate change is not centered around natural fluctuations but rather centered around anthropogenic climate change: changes to the climate caused by human activity. The claims of anthropogenic climate change in that theory begin with the time that humans began to clear land to grow grains in Europe and the Middle East around 8,000 B.C. and began to create wetlands to grow rice in Asia around 5,000 B.C. (when the world only had about 5 million people instead of today’ 7+ billion); however, the growth of the internal combustion engine is cited as the factor that has turned this into an existential crisis. But is it really?
There can be no doubt that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased over the last 100 years, and the mere existence of more humans than at any prior time in history is undoubtedly part of that, as well as the presence of petrocarbon emissions (including automobile exhaust fumes) from the past 150 years. There can also be no question that a world with a reduced buildup or even a reduction in carbon dioxide would be preferable, and costless or low-cost measures to achieve such a reduction should undoubtedly be pursued. [But photosynthesis does require carbon dioxide for the production of free oxygen: 6 CO2 (carbon dioxide) + 6 H2O (water), chlorophyll, and sunlight yields C6H12O6 (“hexose” sugar, which may take many forms, including dextrose and glucose) + 6O2 (oxygen).]
But is this really an existential crisis requiring the elimination of internal combustion engines and other high-cost measures, as many on the left claim? Or, since their luxury private jet flights send a different message than their words do, is this simply an example of “do as I say, not as I do”?
Persuasion Has Become a Thing of the Past
The question of trade-offs and their costs has to be an essential part of this public discussion. The “peasants” are not going to accept high-cost climate restraints and a reduction in their standard of living simply because some woke jet-setter like Ardern thinks they should. [In fact, Ardern’s top-down COVID-motivated restrictions on travel to and from New Zealand are generally seen as the reason that she is unlikely to be re-elected and so has embarked on her current crusade.]
Although public debates about “global warming” largely began during the 1980s, much of the public posturing on climate change was a result of the winter of 1992-93. In the winter of 1966-67, the Alpine classic ski races first became an integral part of the brand-new ski racing series called the FIFA Alpine Skiing World Cup. Now, those races sometimes had had to be cancelled due to lack of snow — for example, the Hahnenkamm Races in Kitzbühel, Austria began in the winter of 1931 but had to be cancelled in both 1938 and 1939 due to lack of snow. However, Austria and the world were facing much bigger issues in those years. They were also cancelled in 1964, but that was before the World Cup.
The first time the Hahnenkamm Races had to be cancelled for lack of snow after the introduction of the World Cup was in winter 1988 — when there was such a lack of snow in the Alps that the Lauberhorn ski races in Wengen, Switzerland also had to be cancelled. But one fluke season wasn’t seen as a big deal — in part because the Winter Olympics that year were held as scheduled in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where snow was not an issue.
But a second snowless season was. The exact same thing occurred in winter 1993, again cancelling both the Hahnenkamm and the Lauberhorn races, and climate panic set in throughout Europe. Since the late 1970s, when environmentalist predictions of a coming ice age had been discredited, the U.S. and Europe had climate evangelists preaching the global warming gospel with revivalist fervor (the same fervor they had brought to the ice age cause), but the 1993 experiences convinced them not only that they were correct about global warming, but that the world would soon be so warm that snowfalls would become a thing of the past.
And the gains in the environmental movement from the snowless winter played a major role in Germany’s politics. In the 1990 federal elections, the first after German reunification, the Greens (Alliance 90) won 8 seats in the Bundestag, all from the former East Germany; they lost every seat they had held in West Germany. In the very next German federal elections, Alliance 90/the Greens won 49 seats and suddenly became the third-largest party in the German Bundestag, and they remained the third-largest party in 1998 and 2002, when they became the coalition partners of the Social Democratic Party in the national government (and embarked Germany on a policy that would make the country entirely dependent of Russian natural gas, instead of German coal or nuclear power, for their energy needs).
Yet the panic fueled by those two winters has receded into the past, as snowless winters have not recurred in the “ski belt” in the Alps since then. Instead, the worldwide green movement has turned to modeling their pitches to the public on religion, and listening to an environmentalist speaker on climate change is never satisfactory unless you get to say “Amen!” a few times during the speech. Persuasion, not snowfall, has become a thing of the past.
Gimme That Old-Time Religion
The current climate change revival meetings often focus on a well-to-do young woman on the autism spectrum (accompanied by her parents, who are professional performers) doing her best impression of Aimee Semple McPherson for an audience of true believers and potential converts.
Consistent with that approach, the environmentalists want “climate deniers”, which are people who do not accept the entire religion of climate change, to be treated as apostates and expelled from civilized discussions. Not for the climate change evangelists the work of actually needing to persuade and convince others of the merit of their cause, oh no. Instead, it’s sermons all the way down.
The problem with this approach is that a real strategy never gets developed. Instead, things only change when the environmentalists gain enough power that they can make a top-down decision with the authority to enforce it, such as the German decisions in support of Nord Stream 1 & 2 and simultaneous closure of German nuclear power plants — which failed to take into account the risk of being solely dependent on an international outlaw like Vladimir Putin for their nation’s energy supply. Had an actual debate been conducted and a decision been made, any politician who left his or her country so vulnerable to blackmail by an international villain would “have some ‘splainin’ to do”.
But that’s the whole point of stifling debate and both setting and enforcing policy from the top down: no accountability. Even those of us who are not on the autism spectrum and were very active in environmentalist causes in our youths (like the author of this column) are embarrassed to see a policy based on preaching and demands from on high replace the broad-based policy approaches that were so successful in cleaning up America’s air and water resources in the 1970s-90s.
There is no reason that the same policy prescriptions that were being pitched by environmentalists to deal with global cooling in the 1970s should be adopted en masse to deal with global warming in the 2020s, yet the lack of substantive debate makes that outcome (preferred by the environmentalists) more likely. Is it really just as simple as this: the environmentalists prefer those policies in general and are willing to represent them as universal panaceas, similar to snake oil? Certainly the environmentalist idea that the U.S. and Europe should adopt restrictions and become poorer so that China and India don’t have to and can continue to prosper will never achieve popular support in the West, despite the religious fervor accompanied by the pronouncements from the elite, so this is no time to shut down debate about alternatives.
Peter Venetoklis’s Substack column (linked above, and worth subscribing to) focuses more on Joe Biden doing the same thing as Ardern. But the sense of entitlement that Ardern’s comments betray was better described in a follow-up comment from Peter (which perhaps should have been appended to his column, so I’m including it here):
Many moons ago, I went to a birthday party for someone my wife knew. Her partner was a UN bureaucrat, and there was a passel of such there. They all had an air of . . . if not arrogance, then certitude that they were important people doing important work, and that they were a level above most others in society. That the U.N. is a joke was completely lost on them.
This is the plague of the “Best-and-Brightest” that I so often mock. Their self-importance not only drives them to meddle in others’ lives and take unto themselves the task of running the world, it blinds them to the reality that their way of thinking doesn't magically osmose into everyone else.
And that’s the problem when you fail to persuade others on a policy. It can become a trap, where one faction thinks it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread and deserves 100% implementation, if not 110%. But the other faction believes that it needs to be sabotaged completely and receive 0% implementation, if not -10%. On an issue like climate change, where the truth lies somewhere in between and most likely could best be analyzed through cost-benefit analysis, neither faction wants a non-zero-sum option, no matter how valuable it might be in the long run.
Gaslighting about the Gas Lines
And so we get more gaslighting, as a self-important and self-righteous international leader (Ardern) tries to ramrod a policy popular among her crew of “important international leaders” that defies one of the most important principles that the United States has tried to spread to the rest of the world (and that Justices Brandeis and Holmes defended in the quote that starts this article). The silly and incoherent policy that is likely to be adopted after such discussion-free top-down malarkey is always going to be suboptimal. Will we be able to avoid the return of 1970s-style “gas lines”?
Peter notes the current situation, in which the United States is trying to block oil production and shipment in the U.S . . . while removing sanctions on the Marxist regime in Venezuela so that it can produce more oil. There actually is a reason for this approach — because the Venezuelan “heavy oil” matches the type refined in the American refineries with capacity available, which are mostly located along the Gulf of Mexico — but the Biden Administration doesn’t want to discuss that reason, because the Canadian tar sands “heavy oil” that also matches the available Gulf Coast refinery capacity was condemned to oblivion by Joe Biden’s short-sighted, high-handed — and debate-free, at least among Democrats — Keystone XL pipeline cancellation back in January 2021.
You’d have to be a politician to adopt such a stupid, self-contradictory policy. Unfortunately, only politicians become President of the United States.
Maybe U.S. president #47 will do a better job. He or she certainly would be hard-pressed to do a worse job than presidents #44 (Obama), #45 (Trump), and #46 (Biden). But would anyone be willing to bet on that?
Next time, I think, will be an entire discussion of the Minneapolis-St. Paul musical group The Jayhawks — one of the best bands in America for decades but still virtually unknown. They formed in 1984, and released six studio albums on major American labels in 1992, 1995, 1997, 2000, 2003, and 2018 (plus a greatest hits in 2009), and five studio albums on minor American labels in 1986, 1989, 2011, 2016, and 2020, as well as serving as Kinks leader Ray Davies’ backing band for two major label albums in 2017 and 2018. But they have exactly one U.S. top twenty single (“Waiting for the Sun” from 1992, which barely made it) and are still largely anonymous outside of a devoted cult. Those of you who are only interested in my political and legal thoughts may want to pass on it.
But if you haven’t heard of The Jayhawks, you might want to discover them yourself.
Be seeing you.
I hadn't realized that NYT won a Pulitzer for its Trump-Russia tub-thumping. It's just another example of how such prizes have become part of policy rather than marks of actual excellence (see: Obama+Nobel), and that they're devolving into the same log-rolling (or circle-***k if you prefer) as the Oscars and Emmys.
A certain crowd has become too enamored of credentialism, substituting a piece of sheepskin or a trophy for demonstration of actual intellect, insight, or understanding. But, to paraphrase Hayek - those who come to understand socialism stop being socialists.