In two speeches this month, former U.S. President Barack Obama claimed leadership of an all-hands-on-deck effort to fight “disinformation.” Or in layman’s terms, to censor political speech damaging to America’s ruling class.
Why are Obama and his retinue of political, corporate, and media elites so keen to shut down free speech? With President Joe Biden’s poll numbers cratering and midterm elections on the horizon, Democrats have no good news to tell voters, so they have to bury as much bad news as they can or else face a total rout come November.
And then there’s the long-term threat to the establishment’s control of the information ecosystem: One of their own jumped sides. With Elon Musk buying Twitter, the opposition is celebrating the arrival of a white-hat media oligarch who they hope will set them free by practicing what he preaches—free speech is essential to the health of a democracy.
Obama sees it differently. As he told audiences at the University of Chicago and Stanford, “disinformation” threatens democracy. Of course, the framers of the Constitution made no provision for any form of censorship, never mind a federally supported campaign joining Big Tech to U.S. intelligence services in order to strip Americans of their First Amendment rights.
It wasn’t lost on conservatives that Clapper and Panetta were also among the 50 former intelligence officials who published the letter claiming that the emails found on Hunter Biden’s laptop showing evidence of financial ties between the Biden family, including the current president, and foreign officials was “Russian disinformation.” Except, as The New York Times and Washington Post acknowledged, those emails are authentic.
And thus, perhaps inadvertently, Obama and the spy chiefs provided a working definition of “disinformation”—facts liable to hurt the Democratic Party as well as the national security apparatus that the 44th president manages from his Washington mansion.
At Stanford, Obama compared former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon to Vladimir Putin. Sure, it’s repugnant that a former commander-in-chief compared a domestic political opponent to a foreign adversary, but this kind of rhetorical flourish has been a feature of Obama’s political style since his first presidential term. Of any policy or project or idea at odds with his promise to transform America, Obama was fond of saying, “That’s not who we are as Americans.” The effect was to divide the country between those who were loyal to Obama and those whose Americanness was in question.
By comparing a Trump aide to the Russian despot, Obama also echoed the collusion narrative claiming that Trump had been compromised by Putin. Russiagate started with the Hillary Clinton campaign in the summer of 2016, but after Trump won the White House, Obama picked it up and ran with it.
Weeks before leaving office, Obama tasked his spy chiefs, Clapper and ex-director of the CIA John Brennan, to produce an official document assessing, with no credible evidence, that Putin had sought to help Trump win the election. That was a fiction—or “disinformation” if you prefer—that destabilized the U.S. government under the president the American people had chosen to succeed Obama.
And this puts reports of fraud in the 2020 election in a clearer context. Obama saddled the Trump administration with a fraudulent account of reality for four years while the media and intelligence officers shoved a conspiracy theory down the throats of U.S. voters. The Obama-led confederation comprising the prestige press, social media, spies, and Democratic Party operatives misled—indeed defrauded—the electorate.
Elon Musk is right: Democracy doesn’t work unless different perspectives and accounts are available to inform the people’s decisions about the fate and future of their families, communities, and nation. And because he’s believed to be likely to act on his conviction, the world’s richest man now has a big target on his back. Unless Musk uses Twitter like its previous executives to block information and deplatform personalities harmful to the ruling class, the Biden administration and its allies in the House and Senate will regulate his new purchase out of existence while subjecting him to congressional hearings and other legally plausible measures to hurt even him, the white-hat oligarch.
The desire to control information and punish those who contest the regime’s account is a tell-tale sign that a political establishment has begun to acquire a taste for totalitarianism. Already we’ve seen clear signs of it, with Jan. 6, 2021, protesters unconstitutionally detained and released only after they succumbed to pressure to denounce Trump and confess to Biden’s legitimacy. These are the ethics and methods of a third-world dungeon.
With Obama promoting censorship to protect the ruling faction he leads, he has shown he’s not simply a divisive figure but also a destructive one, too. For it turns out his transformative vision for the democracy that elected him president twice is to make it into a one-party tyranny.
