We have been discussing the alarming shift in higher education in favor of censorship and speech regulations. These voices have been amplified on media platforms like MSNBC which has championed efforts to censor people and groups on social media and other forums. The most recent example is the interview of University of Michigan Law Professor and MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade by Rachel Maddow. In the interview, McQuade explains how the First Amendment is the “Achilles Heel” of the United States and why the public needs to embrace greater limitations on free speech.
Professor McQuade has published a book entitled Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America. Despite my strong disagreements with her views on free speech, I am sure that it will be an important contribution to this debate. My forthcoming book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in the Age of Rage, takes a diametrically opposed view on the meaning and history of free speech in America.
In the interview, McQuade recognizes the importance of free speech while emphasizing its dangers.
“Actually, Rachel, I think we’re more susceptible to it than other countries, and that’s because some of our greatest strengths can also be our Achilles Heel. So, for example, our deep commitment to free speech in our First Amendment. It is a cherished right. It’s an important right in democracy, and nobody wants to get rid of it, but it makes us vulnerable to claims [that] anything we want to do related to speech is censorship.”
Well, the question is what “we want to do related to speech.” If it involves blacklisting, throttling, deplatforming, and bans, it most certainly does raise questions of censorship. Free speech is now portrayed as an existential threat to the country as opposed to the very thing that defines us as a free people.
McQuade captures the theoretical divide over free speech, though she is clearly voicing a view that is increasingly popular among law professors. She advances views of free speech that I have discussed in prior academic writings and the new book as “functionalist.” These views allow for greater trade offs between free speech and overriding social or political priorities.
For some of us, free speech is a human right. In that sense, I am undeniably a free speech dinosaur who believes that the solution for bad speech is better speech. Rather than continue down the slippery slope of censorship under the guise of disinformation, we can allow citizens to reach their own conclusions in an open and robust debate.
The alternative is often to use transparently biased judgments over what is “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” (MDM). The government has used this rationale to coordinate censorship in what it has called the “MDM space.”
For example, within DHS, Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, extended her agency’s mandate over critical infrastructure to include “our cognitive infrastructure.” The resulting censorship efforts included combating “malinformation” – described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” I testified earlier on this effort.
McQuade’s book will certainly add to the scholarship in this area. However, her view is painfully familiar for many of us in academia.
Why is it that the desire to curtail free speech only and always comes from one political view? The left. If someone is against free speech you can be 100% sure they are liberal. When you exist on a house of cards built on lies, the truth is your greatest enemy. Irony that she choose Madow, one of our greatest vomiters of mal-information.
Rico,
Maddow is the leader of the leftists misinformation, disinformation and malformation.
Because the ideology of the left is inherently statist
Left wing nuts are near universally sheep looking for protection from the state.
Is there any means by which we could undo the decades of institutional indoctrination of so much of our youth and our broadcast TV addicts? How could we possibly be able to disabuse them of all the propaganda that has filled their noggins? I don’t think it can be done in less than non-traditional ways. We have seen than our media/education industry is polluted with prog/left marxists and even our churches and other cultural institutions have been infiltrated/infested with this ideology to the point where Christian and Reform Judaic assemblies are accepting gay marriages and such. I do not think we can debate our way out of this rocket sled ride we are on.
One solar flare will send everyone back to the 19th century. The ‘prepared’ need only defend their own stockpiles, livestock, and gold. Let watch and giggle while Leftist’s try to take ducklip-selfies with glassplate filmstock cameras.
I used to laugh off these clown. But they seem to be multiplying. Our educational system has turned into an indoctrination system. And our health system contributes to this metal decline. Read Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier. No bueno.
You are going to want to listen to this interview with Abigail Shrier on that subject,
Why the Kids Aren’t Alright
“American kids are the freest, most privileged kids in all of history. They are also the saddest, most anxious, depressed, and medicated generation on record. Nearly a third of teen girls say…”
https://www.thefp.com/p/why-the-kids-arent-alright-4cf
Hey, see that excerpt down below, that I posted! https://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/orwellg/whale2.htm
I find it truly hilarious that as the Left in America become more radical in their programs and views, the greater they take offense to the concept of free speech. I wonder if it is because the people are coming to realize how indefensible the Left’s approach to our lives is. If you are not winning the war of words , then eliminate the words. I think there was a wonderful novel about this whole issue and even a good film. The first was in 1956 and starred Edmund Obrien and Michael Redgrave, and a later version in 1984 with John Hurt and Richard Burton. I prefer the 1956 version. 1984 was seminal in its discussion of free speech and managing concepts in speech. Fahrenheit 451 was also excellent. Having read both books and seen the films.
Anthropology suggests that mankind’s brain accelerated it’s development and intelligence when speech came into being and concepts could be formed and then delivered to others of our own species and mankind was then able to leap forward into civilization and ultimately the modern world.
Anti free speech is anti-civilization, because it is anti thought. So much of what we have accomplished in our world was first conceived in a thought or observation of the natural world. Our thought is the key to leap beyond logic and creat a new logic or a thought that had not been seen before and then carried on to others and the world advances.
Free speech is the key. Without that we all just become drones and intelligence dies and then the species dies and we get replaced by something else. Probably this is a key component of why civilizations fall and are replaced by more robust civilizations.
One man can rule for a lifetime but a thought or concept of your civilization can rule or last for centuries or millennia.
What to do with rogue law professors who show the stupidity and lack of insight and total disregard for history every day. Present sight excepted.
Who was it that said “First let’s kill all the lawyers!”. Oh yes, Shakespeare in “Henry VI, Part 2”.
Strange how some basic thoughts persist through the centuries.
GEB,
Well said.
Free Speech is anti-intellectual.
The left believes they are intellectual but their words and actions prove otherwise.
Free Speech also shines the light on how their intellect, narrative, agenda all fail.
We need to get these leftists out of our education system, or develop a separate one.
I also think their system of thinking, Marxism, needs to be addressed in our schools, in context. Point out that not only has this leftist train of thought failed, but to the degree it failed. Point out the Soviet Union, Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Culture Revolution. The Third Reich. How they parallel with the current leftist narrative.
No need to ‘kill all the lawyers’, simply airdrop them, along with their brothers and sisters in government and media, a few thousand feet above the the country *they* claim are doing it right, with no phones, no lights, no motor cars; not a single luxury. They’ll be welcomed with open arms* by the locals, right? *arms can mean any of the commonly known meanings*
Free speech is wonderful if selective hearing is allowed. Professor McQuade and Rachel would likely be imprisoned or murdered in many Countries today because of their desire to express their opinions. Fortunately, in this Country, we can change the channel and not buy the book. Unfortunately, some may need to take her course.
I do not think Rachel Maddow is expressing HER opinions. Not unless she is a moron or imbecile, in the medical sense. I believe that Frau Rachel gets paid $24 million per year to express someone else’s opinion – the DNC, the Deep State, whatever you want to call them. She never for one minute believed the RussiaGate stuff.
Professor Turley, As one of the few,seemingly, unbiased legal commenters on the scene I’d love to have you do a deep dive on the validity of the various claims being amde re Trumps claims of immunity from prosecution both before and after leaving office for actions within the ambit of Presidential duties and perogative. I’ve read several conflicting opinions that seem to each have very different takes on not only what the founders intended but what the law actually says. It seems to me that the founders can’t have meant for a President to be hounded by lawfare as that would abrogate and constrain his sole executive authority but how far does this extend. Your wisdom and knowledge on this would be greatly appreciated.
It is amazing to me how far the whole censorship/misinformation argument has grown is such a relatively short period of time. Please count me in as one of your free speech dinosaurs Jonathan. Hopefully there are enough of us to carry the day and save this place.
When you don’t have any good ideas, and the beans have been spilled on your plan to coopt both parties, you have two options and censorship is the non-violent, first straw they will grasp.
It is very apparent with the explosion of censorship operations from the FBI, DOJ, DoD, NSA, CIA, DHS and NGO’s, that the fear isn’t the free flow of speech (or information), it is the fear that people will believe the speech (or information). Hence the labels “misinformation” and “disinformation”…….
Question: So what is the result if people “believe” something is mis- or disinformation? Thats the crucial question. Another 1/6? Next time relying o0n Amercna’s 2nd Amen,ment right or action to counter an imperious government?
You should proofread a little more ca4€funkly.
They know it works and people believe propaganda because they have support for their abject lies and BS
“Cognitive infrastructure” is just about the creepiest phrase I’ve ever heard. Downright demonic.
Yes, cognitive infrastructure is “the way people think” – now they are openly admitting that they want to control it.
It makes “disposition matrix” seem benign.
McQuade appears on one of the most notorious programs that has/does report misinformation to discuss the dangers of misinformation. She then falls to give specific examples like Russia Russia Russia, the Steele dossier, the laptop is Russian, and “the border is secure”. How about a gaslighting host who states if Trump is re-elected he will refuse to leave office. Of course we should digest and believe all the good Prof McQuade offers it’s gospel or is it an example of “misinformation”?
Not sure why the above post was came out an Anny post it’s me Margot?
Margot: you don’t watch MSNBC, so you really don’t know what sort of commentary Professor Barbara McQuade makes. Therefore, I know you are just repeating the swill you got from OAN, NewsMax, Breitbart or Fox. Professor McQuade is LEGAL expert and comments on legal cases, such as substantive law and procedure. She doesn’t discuss politics, like Russia Russia Russia, dthe Steele Dossier, the laptop or the border. If you actually watched MSNBC, you’d know that. And, anyway, Russia did help Trump in 2016–read the Republican Senate Intelligence Committe report if you don’t believe me. Oh, wait….I know…those Republicans on the Commitee are just RINOS.
One of the basic tenets of the totalitarian state.
Everything in the information space is about to change due to AI. As the recent Google AI faceplant showed, the information space will be so flooded with competing “truths” and “realities” that it will become increasingly difficult to discern what’s real.
I fear a fake AI generated October Surprise this fall that could fool a meaningful percentage of voters, for instance.
Or even worse.
Larry,
Well said and I agree.
It is sad when a large degree of people will believe the AI generated hoax and repeat it over and over again.
If it does happen in some way, shape or form, I fully expect to see it get repeated over and over again here on the good professor’s blog, just like the Russia hoax, the insurrection hoax, etc. we see everyday from our leftists dupes.
Also, all the more the reason to read from independent news outlets like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, The Free Press, Sharyl Attkisson, and others.
We saw how well “follow the science” BS narrative worked during COVID (which happened to be horribly mismanaged by the DoD and not the CDC). The damage that the so called authorities (despots) caused is incalculable, especially to children. They were hell bent to silence anyone who DARED question them, including the researchers and the real experts who understood the complexities.
The law professor, I suppose, would probably be the first in line for Kool-aid if she were living in Jonestown.
Regarding disinformation, propaganda and bovine excrement, it is imperative that the modern consumer of information be taught how to detect lies and deceit and how to piece together a semblance of truth. This is increasingly difficult. The once trusted news providers have gone to the wayside and don’t even pretend anymore. They are counting on people to be clueless and stupid.
Caveat Emptor!
We saw how well “follow the science” BS narrative worked during COVID
That would be the logical fallacy of ‘appeal to authority’
Here’s a list of some Logical Fallacies
ad hominem
Straw man
bandwagon
appeal to authority
false dilemma
Correlation/causation
anecdotal
Texas sharpshooter
middle ground
burden of proof
no true Scotsman
the fallacy, fallacy
The link provides a clean example of what a logical fallacy looks like
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/common-logical-fallacies
Excellent link!
Commentators over the years have noticed how important mere words, without underlying meaning, are in our country. (An example of such a commentator is Joseph Schumpeter.) If the words like censorship or dictatorship are used, everyone will say “bad”. If the words like misinformation or safety are used, people will let their freedoms be taken away. The underlying actions, e g. attempting to silence or jail a former President, may be the same, but our attitudes are determined by the rhetoric used.
The left wing of our political system argues against allowing speech that is misinformation or malinformation…as they tell us that crime is down
the border is secure
We need a ceasefire to stop an Israeli genocide
Joe Biden is not cognitively impaired
Joe Biden has not been involved with his son and has not made any money off of Hunter’s “businesses”
Illegals commit less crimes than citizens
The 2016 election was rigged and the 2020 election was not
White extremists are the greatest threat to our security
Mail in ballots are secure
China is a competitor and not an adversary
Iran should receive billions from us
The UN works for peace
The vaccine will prevent you from getting and/or spreading Covid
Inflation is down/the economy is strong
Climate change is real and now “it is our greatest threat”
Electric cars are key to saving the planet
We must stop our coal plants/China’s coal plants are fine
Germany ending nuclear power is good for…something
Yup, we better allow the folks spouting all of the above to decide what is allowable truth.
PS. Oh yeah, Covid was started by a bat.
Everything you said is TRUE. You disbelieve it because you watch pro-Trump news and like to believe lies. You are living proof of Professor McQuade’s comment that freedom to lie is our Achilles heel. That you believe none of these things are true is pathetic. I won’t bother to cite you facts–you are immune to facts.
Gigi, please explain why we should give Iran billions, why China’s coal plants are fine, how the UN brings peace, how the vax prevents covid, why Germany ridding themselves of nukes is good/ Also, do you really think that covid came from a bat? Do you think China isn’t an adversary? You think electric cars will save the planet? Ha!
Boy, you are more gone than I even thought.
𝐉𝐮𝐝𝐠𝐞 𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐝𝐬 𝐯𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐧 𝐣𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐂𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐝𝐠𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐜𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐥 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐫𝐞𝐟𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐮𝐥𝐠𝐞 𝐬𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge held veteran investigative reporter Catherine Herridge in civil contempt on Thursday for refusing to divulge her source for a series of Fox News stories about a Chinese American scientist who was investigated by the FBI but never charged.
By: Alanna Durkin Richer and Eric Tucker ~ February 29, 2024
https://apnews.com/article/catherine-herridge-journalist-contempt-fox-news-cbs-63f6b2cde67fceae192daebe5d11b1a1
“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.” ― George Orwell
I read your quote, and at first, I was unsure whether Orwell actually said that. There is so much misinformation on the internet. So, I looked it up, and here are some excerpts of the piece Orwell wrote, where it is contained. Thank you so much for putting that here! Anyway, this excerpt:
Unemployment is not merely a matter of not having a job. Most people can get a job of sorts, even at the worst of times. The trouble was that by about 1930 there was no activity, except perhaps scientific research, the arts, and left-wing politics, that a thinking person could believe in. The debunking of Western civilization had reached its Climax and ‘disillusionment’ was immensely widespread. Who now could take it for granted to go through life in the ordinary middle-class way, as a soldier, a clergyman, a stockbroker, an Indian Civil Servant, or what-not? And how many of the values by which our grandfathers lived could not be taken seriously? Patriotism, religion, the Empire, the family, the sanctity of marriage, the Old School Tie, birth, breeding, honour, discipline [Tradition]— anyone of ordinary education could turn the whole lot of them inside out in three minutes. But what do you achieve, after all, by getting rid of such primal things as patriotism and religion? You have not necessarily got rid of the need for something to believe in. There had been a sort of false dawn a few years earlier when numbers of young intellectuals, including several quite gifted writers (Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Hollis, and others), had fled into the Catholic Church. It is significant that these people went almost invariably to the Roman Church and not, for instance, to the C. of E., the Greek Church, or the Protestants sects. They went, that is, to the Church with a world-wide organization, the one with a rigid discipline, the one with power and prestige behind it. Perhaps it is even worth noticing that the only latter-day convert of really first-rate gifts, Eliot, has embraced not Romanism but Anglo-Catholicism, the ecclesiastical equivalent of Trotskyism. But I do not think one need look farther than this for the reason why the young writers of the thirties flocked into or towards the Communist Party. If was simply something to believe in. Here was a Church, an army, an orthodoxy, a discipline. Here was a Fatherland and — at any rate since 1935 or thereabouts — a Füehrer. All the loyalties and superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished could come rushing back under the thinnest of disguises. Patriotism, religion, empire, military glory — all in one word, Russia. Father, king, leader, hero, saviour — all in one word, Stalin. God — Stalin. The devil — Hitler. Heaven — Moscow. Hell — Berlin. All the gaps were filled up. So, after all, the ‘Communism’ of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.
But there is one other thing that undoubtedly contributed to the cult of Russia among the English intelligentsia during these years, and that is the softness and security of life in England itself. With all its injustices, England is still the land of habeas corpus, and the over-whelming majority of English people have no experience of violence or illegality. If you have grown up in that sort of atmosphere it is not at all easy to imagine what a despotic régime is like. Nearly all the dominant writers of the thirties belonged to the soft-boiled emancipated middle class and were too young to have effective memories of the Great War. To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism. Look, for instance, at this extract from Mr Auden’s poem ‘Spain’ (incidentally this poem is one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war):
To-morrow for the young, the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.
To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.
The second stanza is intended as a sort of thumb-nail sketch of a day in the life of a ‘good party man’. In the morning a couple of political murders, a ten-minutes’ interlude to stifle ‘bourgeois’ remorse, and then a hurried luncheon and a busy afternoon and evening chalking walls and distributing leaflets. All very edifying. But notice the phrase ‘necessary murder’. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens that I have seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men — I don’t mean killed in battle, I mean murdered. Therefore, I have some conception of what murder means — the terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells. To me, murder is something to be avoided. So it is to any ordinary person. The Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary, but they don’t advertise their callousness, and they don’t speak of it as murder; it is ‘liquidation’, ‘elimination’, or some other soothing phrase. Mr Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible, if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot. The warmongering to which the English intelligentsia gave themselves up in the period 1935-9 was largely based on a sense of personal immunity. The attitude was very different in France, where the military service is hard to dodge and even literary men know the weight of a pack.
Towards the end of Mr Cyril Connolly’s recent book, Enemies of Promise, there occurs an interesting and revealing passage. The first part of the book, is, more or less, an evaluation of present-day literature. Mr Connolly belongs exactly to the generation of the writers of ‘the movement’, and with not many reservations their values are his values. It is interesting to notice that among prose-writers he admires chiefly those specialising in violence — the would-be tough American school, Hemingway, etc. The latter part of the book, however, is autobiographical and consists of an account, fascinatingly accurate, of life at a preparatory school and Eton in the years 1910-20. Mr Connolly ends by remarking:
Were I to deduce anything from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development.
When you read the second sentence in this passage, your natural impulse is to look for the misprint. Presumably there is a ‘not’ left out, or something. But no, not a bit of it! He means it! And what is more, he is merely speaking the truth, in an inverted fashion. ‘Cultured’ middle-class life has reached a depth of softness at which a public-school education — five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery — can actually be looked back upon as an eventful period. To nearly all the writers who have counted during the thirties, what more has ever happened than Mr Connolly records in Enemies of Promise? It is the same pattern all the time; public school, university, a few trips abroad, then London. Hunger, hardship, solitude, exile, war, prison, persecution, manual labour — hardly even words. No wonder that the huge tribe known as ‘the right left people’ found it so easy to condone the purge-and-OGPU side of the Russian régime and the horrors of the first Five-Year Plan. They were so gloriously incapable of understanding what it all meant.
https://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/orwellg/whale2.htm
Another words, “do as you are told, when you are told”.
And, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Correct
Thank you for your dogged defense, Professor. In regard to DHS, I am reminded that the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) was just a small, insignificant bodyguard at the beginning.
Professor McQuade’s argument assumes she and her fellow travelers will always be in control of the narrative.
“The alternative is often to use transparently biased judgments over what is ‘misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation’ (MDM). The government has used this rationale to coordinate censorship in what is has called the ‘MDM space.’”
That is what the Left does not get. One day, censorship is going to have to work AGAINST them, not for them, because so any of their ideas are civilization-ending ideas. Our country will change course and survive, or we will be taken over by another country/people, and they will change course for us.
There will be little tolerance for silly, little non-binary people, stupid college graduates who can not think, people who do not perform useful functions, people who do not marry and make families, paper-pushers, people who have jobs but do not provide a real service or add real value such as DEI people, sissy boys who can not be a part of a military, criminals, etc.