The Harvard commencement ceremony this week received some press attention after Harvard’s Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi confronted Maria A. Ressa, a journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, on stage over her prior allegedly antisemitic comments. However, her commencement remarks were equally chilling in another respect; a full-throated condemnation of free speech principles and a call for a crackdown on disinformation. As is often the case with anti-free speech tirades, the speech included disinformation while seeking to silence others to combat disinformation.
The speech was alarming for many of us who respect Ressa’s courage in opposing the regime of then Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, including her struggle to support the free press and free speech that won her a Nobel Prize with Dmitry Muratov.
Nevertheless, a speech calling for censorship and speech regulation is not viewed as problematic while civil libertarian Michael Smerconish is blocked from giving a commencement address and denied his honorary degree.
The commencement speech lashed out at her critics, including those who call her an anti-Semite. She described the critics who call her views antisemitic as examples of “power and money because they want power and money.”
In her full remarks, Ressa (a supporter of Hillary Clinton) suggests that the 2016 election was substantially influenced by Russian disinformation efforts:
“If the tactic worked on us, then it was deployed for you. That’s what happened in 2016, when 126 million Americans were targeted by Russian disinformation, and on January 6, in the violence on Capitol Hill when Silicon Valley’s sins came home to roost.”
As I have previously written, Clinton and Trump were the least popular candidates ever to run for the presidency, according to multiple polls. They hardly needed the help of a dozen or so Russians in St. Petersburg to materially add to those divisions. Indeed, the sheer premise of the operation was moronic. It was like trying to speed the descent of a falling locomotive by jumping up and down on it. We were already a nation plunging into political chaos with the selection of these two candidates and long simmering political divisions stretching back to the Bill Clinton administration.
There are hundreds of “legitimate” Democratic and Republican trolling sites (some supported by campaign activities) that did little but generate gossip, conspiracies and false stories. From the descriptions in the indictment, these Russians look like the tee-ball league in comparison to these major league players of political slime.
“I said this in the Nobel lecture: an atom bomb exploded in our information ecosystem because social media turned our world upside down, spreading lies, faster than facts, while amplifying fear and anger, fueling hatred. By design. For profit…
And here’s three sentences I’ve said over and over. Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without these three, we have no shared reality, no rule of law, no democracy. We can’t begin to solve existential problems like climate change.
…Too many powerful people are getting away with impunity – from countries to companies, and it is dividing us in ways that are literally destroying us, destroying democracy, destroying trust.
In Cambridge Commons just on the other side of that gate, there’s a marker to American patriot William Dawes, who, like his more famous friend Paul Revere, rode through here sounding the alarm: ‘The British are coming.’
…I will say it now: ‘The fascists are coming.'”
“Now, Big Tech is now choking traffic to news sites, which means you will get less news in your feeds. How do you know what’s real, how do you know what’s fact when your emotions are what’s manipulated, when our biology is hacked? Instead of facts, And instead, the “enshittification” of the internet is in full bloom: more trash, more propaganda, more information operations that push our emotional buttons. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo deleted X last year, calling it a human sewer.
We will have to struggle harder for agency, for independent thought.
And it’s not just the tech companies that abdicated responsibility for protecting us, it’s also democratic governments like the United States. Tech is the least regulated industry around the world.
That’s why the US needs to reform or revoke section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. We need to stop the impunity.”
So to sum up, you will get “less news” unless you eliminate opposing viewpoints on the Internet and “stop the impunity” in the use of free speech. You can only achieve “independent thought” by relying on the government and corporations to limit what you see on the Internet. For some of us, free speech requires a sense of impunity to exercise a human right for self-expression.
Ressa concludes by calling on the graduates to “make it a world that is safe from fascists and tyrants” by limiting free speech and supporting government and corporate regulations to promote whatever she deems to be the truth on subjects like climate change or election integrity. That does not make her or their allies “tyrants,” of course. They are simply right.
In many countries, e.g., the Philippines, tyrants use “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (MDM) laws” (aka “fake news” laws) to censor political opposition.
Now Ressa, a victim of those “laws,” wants to use those “laws” to censor political ideas she doesn’t like (e.g., about elections and “climate change”).
Censorship for thee but not for me is getting a bit old.
Be patient! The pressure for a return to cogent normality is building quickly. It will manifest in one of two ways. It may come as did the American Revolution, with noble ideals and a flourishing society founded on Liberty and Justice. Or, it might come like the French Revolution, with terror and the guillotine. Either way, it’s coming. The Left is the catalyst. How it manifests is up to We The People.
Censorship of ‘politically incorrect’ speech is a typical move of the Philosopher Kings of the NeoMarxist left, as espoused by Herbert Marcuse in his 1965 essay on ‘Repressive Tolerance’.
As Professor Michael Sugrue said, there’s nothing so provincial as German mandarins legislating for the world. They are really getting very tiresome with their self-important nostrums, and really should do the world a favor and go back
to reading books in dusty libraries while picking their spotted behinds.
Who is this Maria Ressa? She is owner of a news group called Rappler. It’s a really muddled group financially. She or he ( they, them) was charged with tax evasion. There are things called DR or depository receipts that are purchased for the purpose of foreign investments within another nation. Rapper is invested or owned by Dolphin Fire Group as far as I can see an India owned investor among others. There’s layer’s and layers of ownership in these things. Rapper had 5 charges 4 have been dropped. Someone knowing finances could have field day with this thing.
Clearly she’s after that money and power thing. It’s a mess. Of course the US is fortunate in its continued acceptance of these nutjobs no doubt. Yes, they them Ressa, you and Akheish Jah know what’s best. 🤦♀️
Maybe she owns Raptor news.
When, exactly, was that august American institution, Harvard University, “fundamentally transformed” into a third-world banana republic cesspool of Marxist mendacity and incoherence?
America requires no pontification from its denizens skewed with delusions of ideological ascendancy.
A president of the United States of America could never be a theoretical physicist.
And a theoretical physicist could never be president of the United States of America.
The American Founders did not provide dominion to extraordinary or eccentric intelligence.
The American Founders provided dominion to freedom and self-reliance.
The American Founders established a nation through the adoption of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Naturalization Act of 1790—the borders, the law, and the population.
I am reminded of George Bernard Shaw, who said, “I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite —-but NEVER the Fiend in Human Form who came up with the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Why arw my comments being censored?
I love the line,
“We can’t begin to solve existential problems like climate change.”
Medals and awards mean nothing, especially when they come from the dynamite empire
As the person picked by serial plagiarist Claudine Gay, she didn’t disappoint.
OT. I said a day or so ago that the floating pier in Gaza is yet another Biden administration failure.
Now Red State says this:
“The US floating pier allegedly used to provide relief supplies to Gaza civilians has partially washed away, and two boats used to service it have been washed ashore. According to reports, the Army was temporarily relocating the floating pier to the Israeli port of Ashdod because of heavy wave action. During the move, a segment of the pier came free, and the boats sent to retrieve it went aground”
I wonder if demented Biden really is running things with cockups like this? This seems beyond the powers of failure for even the usual twenty-something social justice morons in the administration. It requires a special Depends level of incompetence.
Is there really any doubt that the Ivy upon the walls of higher learning are suffocating ? And, yet, so many are still willing to take out huge loans to obtain a piece of paper for social status that was.
It starts with arrogance (deplorables, low info rubes, clowns) and ends in autocracy. Such is the new radicalized left / Dem party. Wear the ribbon, or The Machine will crush you. See EG the sham Bragg partisan lawfare extravaganza vs Trump.
Is it an honor or an accusation to be called a Nobel Peace Prize laureate?
The list includes Yassar Arafat, Mandela, Gore, Obama, Rigoberta Menchu Tum, UN, Kofi Anan, the EU, Carter, etc …seems more like a rogue’s gallery.
One could reasonably argue the world would be better or saner if they had never done anything.
I think the reasons behind this anti-Free Speech movement on the left is because they all realize that they now control the mass media to a large degree. It moves in lock-step with the Democratic party’s new radical center repeating every day’s party talking points ad nauseam. As Free Speech constantly blunts its impact, the party radicals turn to censorship couched in Orwellian logic as the means to their totalitarian ends. These people are abhorrent threats to our democracy and freedoms and should be publicly condemned at every opportunity.
Something definitely happens to people (*cough*indoctrination*cough*) when they’ve been exposed to the modern left for too long. What a tool, and I stopped thinking the Nobel was anything but a participation trophy for elites years ago.
Repealing Section 230 does open up tech platform censors to scrutiny. For instance, it will allow citizens to sue for defamation, where the platform’s algorithm or staff are contributing to the spread of malicious defamation. That’s not govt. censorship, it’s people power regulating elites’ ability to push out content meant to dupe the public.
They know what’s best for us….
Well, here in what must be the lowest biosphere the media is focused on snot, poop and pee in TV and radio media. TV is one string of of murder and killing and horror shows or inane comedies from old past years altered in pc ways. There is no doubt Harvard has become one large twah lette flush.
A humble opinion… AND thank you, they them Ressa for the hand signals. 🤦♀️
I hadn’t had my coffee …
For a Nobel Laureate journalist, she could use a little help on her grammar.