‘If I Had a Hammer’: Giving Government a Mallet With Which To Police ‘Misinformation’ Is a Blueprint for Corruption

Demands for the federal government to police “misinformation” are gaining steam in Washington. The argument is that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to falsehoods, but supporters are failing to consider the dangers of such a scheme — and how often the powerful seek to conceal embarrassing truths by branding them false.“You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater,” Governor Walz said in the vice-presidential debate. “That’s the Supreme Court test.” However, Mr. Walz — who said he often misstates facts because he’s a “knucklehead” — was wrong about the context of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s words in Schenck v. United States.Senator Vance later noted in a rally that the quote is from a “disgraced” opinion “used to justify censorship.” In that 1919 case, the Nine upheld the conviction of Charles Schenck, a socialist. Schenck ran afoul of President Wilson during World War I by distributing a pamphlet opposing the draft. “Long live the Constitution of the United States,” it read. “Your liberties are in danger.”President Biden and Vice President Harris have criticized President Trump for “misinformation” about hurricane relief efforts. Yet campaigns often trumpet dubious claims and, in a storm’s chaos, the picture is often unclear. Many attacks that Democrats made against President George W. Bush over Hurricane Katrina have since been exposed, by Popular Science and others, as myths.Sunday on CNN, Secretary Clinton took aim at social media for spreading untruths. “If they don’t moderate and monitor the content,” she said, “we lose total control.” She called for repealing Section 230, which gives websites immunity from prosecution for content posted by users.The result would be less speech as citizens hesitate to share news, memes, or comments. Why risk punishment when it’s impossible to know if what you say will be disproven — if a joke, hyperbole, or exaggeration for effect will be taken as a sinister attempt to spread falsehoods? After all, even trusted news sources are known to retract or correct stories.Two weeks ago, at the World Economic Forum, Secretary Kerry, an envoy for the Biden-Harris Administration, lurched into the fray. “If people only go to one source,” he said, with “an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.”The First Amendment was written with the exact purpose of blocking the government from striking down those advancing a political agenda. Citizens may be duped by a charlatan or have their convictions challenged by unpopular ideas that are morally right. This is, as they say, “what democracy looks like.” It doesn’t look like the government setting itself up as the arbiter of truth.Especially when its track record for accuracy is flawed. Throughout our history, fearless individuals and dogged journalists have used the First Amendment’s protections to expose corruption that leaders would have rather kept hidden. President Garfield had Crédit-Mobilier. President Harding Teapot Dome. President Nixon Watergate. President Clinton Monica Lewinsky.Hand a president a hammer to smash speech they find a threat to their position, and he’ll be tempted to swing it. The First Amendment was forged as a shield against that impulse; the founders knew that the “natural course of events,” as President Jefferson wrote, is “that liberty recedes and government grows.”Would bureaucrats at an Orwellian Ministry of Truth be of such flawless character that they lack bias and never make errors? Consider an infamous recent example: The laptop of Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter. Now accepted as genuine, at the time 51 former intelligence officials declared it disinformation, leading to mentions of it being censored across social media.“Believe nothing you hear,” Edgar Alan Poe wrote, “and only one half that you see.” It’s up to individuals in a free society to determine truth, weighing information and using it to persuade each other by making better arguments. The government is the wrong tool for that job — a hammer would come to see a growing number of citizens as nails.

‘If I Had a Hammer’: Giving Government a Mallet With Which To Police ‘Misinformation’ Is a Blueprint for Corruption

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