I hope that our readers have read the response of NewsGuard’s Gordon Crovitz to my recent criticism of the company’s rating system for news sites. He makes important points, including the fact that the company has given high ratings to conservative sites and low ratings to some liberal sites. I have mutual friends of both Gordon and his co-founder Steve Brill, who have always sworn by their integrity and motivations. I do not question Gordon’s account of past ratings for sites.
However, I also welcome the opportunity to further this discussion over media rating systems and to explain why I remain unconvinced by his defense. It is a long overdue debate on the use and potential misuse of such systems.
As a threshold matter, I want to note that I am aware of conservative sites reviewed by NewsGuard that have been given favorable ratings. That is a valid distinction from past rating sites like the Global Disinformation Index (GDI).
Moreover, while I noted that NewsGuard has been accused of bias by conservatives and is being investigated in Congress, my primary objections are to rating systems as a concept for media sites. Before addressing that opposition, I should note that I still have concerns over bias from the email that was sent me, particularly just after a column criticizing the company.
Now to the main concern.
A Shield or a Sword?
In his response to me, Gordon argues that “I would have thought, including based on your recent book, that you’d especially welcome an accountable market alternative to censorship.”
I disagree with Gordon’s suggested dichotomy. As I argue in the column, rating systems are arguably the most effective means to silence opposing voices or sites. These systems are used to target revenue sources and have been weaponized by the current anti-free speech movement. They are used more as a sword than a shield by those who want to marginalize or demonetize a site.
We have seen such campaigns targeting various sites and individuals, led by political groups opposed to their viewpoints, including figures such as Joe Rogan. This includes Elon Musk and X after the reduction of censorship systems and the release of the “Twitter Files.” After being targeted by these campaigns for years, rating systems have been denounced by Musk as part of an “online censorship racket.”
Moreover, the use of private entities like NewsGuard is precisely what makes the current movement so insidious and dangerous. Whether by design or by default, rating systems are effective components of what I have described as a system of “censorship by surrogate.”
What NewsGuard is attempting is potentially far more impactful for the funding and viability of websites. Rather than an alternative, it can be an avenue for censorship.
I have also written about my concerns with the Global Alliance for Responsible Media and its use of rating systems to deter advertisers for targeted sites. The group states that it “unites marketers, media agencies, media platforms, industry associations, and advertising technology solutions providers to safeguard the potential of digital media by reducing the availability and monetization of harmful content online.”
As the column discusses, NewsGuard seeks to position itself as a type of Standard & Poor’s rating system for media. The role would give the company unprecedented influence over the journalistic and political speech in America. The rating can be used to discourage advertisers and revenue sources for targeted sites. Just as S&P scores can kill a business, a media rating could kill a blog or website.
That is an enormous amount of power to be wielded by any organization, let alone a for-profit enterprise started by two self-appointed monitors of media. That is not meant to disparage Gordon and Steve, but to acknowledge that this is not just a hugely profitable but a hugely powerful enterprise.
It is also not a criticism of the founding principles. We have seen many organizations that began as faithful to principles of neutrality only to see those principles corrupted with time. Indeed, as we have previously discussed, the very principles of objectivity and neutrality are now rejected in many journalism schools.
The Criteria
While NewsGuard insists that its criteria is completely objective and neutral, that does not appear to be the case. The site’s standards include key determinations on whether some sites run statements that NewsGuard considers “clearly and significantly false or egregiously misleading.” (That appears part of the most heavily weighted criteria for credibility at 22 points).
The staff will determine if it believes that a site shows a tendency to “egregiously distort or misrepresent information.”
The staff decides if information is false and, if it is considered false by NewsGuard, whether the site “identifies errors and publishes clarifications and corrections, transparently acknowledges errors, and does not regularly leave significant false content uncorrected.” Thus, if you disagree with the claims of falsity or view the statement as opinion, the failure to correct the statement will result in additional penalties.
The site will also determine if it finds the sources used by a site to be “credible” and whether “they … egregiously distort or misrepresent information to make an argument or report on a subject.”
If the site decides that there are errors, it will lower ratings if the site does not “transparently acknowledges errors, and does not regularly leave significant false content uncorrected.”
The company pledges to combat “misinformation” and “false narratives.”
We have seen mainstream media use these very terms to engage in highly biased coverages, including labeling true stories or viewpoints “disinformation.”
Given these terms and the history of their use in the media, NewsGuards assurances boil down to “trust us we’re NewsGuard.” GDI made the same assurances.
This is not to say that some of these criteria cannot be helpful for sites. However, the overall rating of media sites is different from Standard & Poor’s. Financial ratings are based on hard figures of assets, earnings, and liabilities. “Liquidity” is far more concrete and objective than “credibility.” What NewsGuard does is fraught with subjectivity regardless of the motivations or intentions of individual raters.
The Res Ipsa Review
The inquiry sent to this blog reflects those concerns. The timing of the inquiry was itself chilling. I had just criticized NewsGuard roughly a week earlier. It is not known if this played any role in the sudden notice of a review of Res Ipsa.
One inquiry particularly stood out for me. The reviewer informed me:
“I cannot find any information on the site that would signal to readers that the site’s content reflects a conservative or libertarian perspective, as is evident in your articles. Why is this perspective not disclosed to give readers a sense of the site’s point of view?”
The effort of NewsGuard to label sites can have an impact on its ratings on credibility and transparency. Yet, sites may disagree with the conclusions of NewsGuard on their view of the content. What may seem conservative to a NewsGuard reviewer may be less clearly ideological to the host or blog.
Moreover, despite noting that it asked MSNBC to state its liberal bias, it is not clear if the company has suggested such a notice from many other sites from NPR to the New Republic. For example, is Above the Law supposed to warn readers that it takes a liberal perspective and regularly attacks conservatives? What about other academic blogs like Balkinization?
The point is not to say that they should be required to label their own views (though some sites choose to do so) but to ask whether all sites are asked to do so. If not, when is this demand made for sites? For some reviewers, a liberal perspective may simply seem like stating the obvious or unassailable truth.
Labeling
In fairness to NewsGuard, we all often engage in labeling as part of our discussions — both labeling ourselves and others. For example, I often acknowledge that I hold many libertarian views. However, I continue to write columns that run across the ideological spectrum and I continue to be attacked from both the right and the left for those columns.
Identifying yourself as a libertarian does not convey much information for readers. Many readers have erroneous views of libertarians as a monolithic group. (The public high school teacher of one of my kids told the class that libertarians were just conservatives who did not want to call themselves Republicans). In actuality, it is a group that runs from liberal to conservative figures who maximize individual rights. Labeling your site as libertarian is about as helpful as saying that it is utilitarian.
The suggestion in the email is that readers should be informed that anything they read is coming from a libertarian or conservative on the site. Yet, most law professor blogs are very liberal, but do not make the same type of warning.
We often discuss these labels in judging the diversity of faculties. Yet, that is based largely on surveys of professors self-identifying or the political registration of academics. It is admittedly a blunt tool, but there is little debate that faculties around the country are overwhelmingly liberal. Indeed, even sites like Above the Law have strived to defend “predominantly liberal faculties” as just reflecting the fact that most conservatives are simply wrong on the law.
There is always an overgeneralization in the use of such labels, but we try to take that into consideration in discussing the overall lack of diversity of viewpoints on campuses today.
Conclusion
Rating media sites is vastly different. You are often relying on the views of the reviewers that may be challenged by the site. Postings that challenge popular narratives are often denounced as false or disinformation by critics.
I am particularly concerned over the reported government contracts given to NewsGuard by the Biden Administration as well as agreements with teacher unions to help filter or rate sites. The Twitter Files have shown an extensive system of funding and coordination between agencies and these companies. The funding of such private rating or targeting operations is precisely what I have warned about in congressional testimony as a type of “censorship by surrogate.” The government has been attempting to achieve forms of censorship indirectly that it is barred from achieving directly under the First Amendment.
Consider those bloggers and scientists who were censored and denounced for voicing support for the lab theory on Covid 19 and other subjects from the efficacy of masks to the need to shutdown schools. They spent years having mainstream media figures denouncing them for refusing to admit that they were spreading disinformation or conforming to general views on these issues.
The Washington Post declared this a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.” The New York Times’ Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli was calling any mention of the lab theory “racist.”
Political and legal commentary are rife with contested opinion over the facts and their implications. Having a company sit in judgment on what is fact and what is opinion is a troubling role, particularly when the rating is used to influence advertisers and financial supporters.
Once again, there are many people on the other side of this debate who have good-faith reasons for wanting a standardized set of criteria for news sources and commentary sites. I simply believe that this is a degree of influence that is dangerously concentrated in a small number of groups like NewsGuard.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster).
N.B.: After this response ran, NewsGuard wrote me that Above The Law actually was marked down for failing to clearly delineate between news and opinion. It further said that the New Republic acknowledges its liberal take, so there is no issue on labeling. What is not clear is whether every site, including academic blogs, are asked to label themselves and who makes that decision on what label should apply.
No site should have to label itself. The spirit of the 5th amendment abjurers that. To make that request is unAmerican.
If some commercial site wants to label an internet site then fine. We can argue about both the commercial site and its subject about each of their sites’ bias. Every site speaks in its own voice about the topics and subjects that are relevant to it, and any request to force it to speak about a subject, topic, or preference that it does not choose to speak about should be ridiculed.
Why not label NewsGuard and GARM, and expose their siphoning taxpayer money for speech control..
Rate the news raters and expose their anti-human rights misdeeds.
There is a SIMPLE way to determine the bias of any outlet. Simply do a scorecard of how many false stories they reported as being true, and vice-versa. And how neatly do their falsehoods fit into the talking points of a particular political party. Examples: the “Steele dossier” hoax, Trump called neo-nazis “very fine people”, Covington Catholic, Hunter’s laptop is “Russian disinformation”, hands up don’t shoot”, Officer Sicknick was “murdered by a Trump mob”, “multiple officers died on January 6th”, Lauren Boebert vaping at a theater is “Bombshell News!!” but BLM & Rashida Tlaib cheering on Hamass’ orgy of murdering and kidnapping is “not newsworthy”, a violent leftist mob storming the Wisconsin state capitol to stop a vote (including Democrats tweeting out where the mob could hunt down Republicans escaping the building through tunnels) & months of BLM/Antifa burning & assaulting is “democracy in action” but a few hours on Jan 6 with far less violence is “a violent insurrection”, the “DeSantis Publix scandal”, buried Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber bragging that the signature policy victory of the entire Obama presidency was based on endless lies that Democrats only pulled off due to “the stupidity of the American people”, Trump called for “a bloodbath if he loses”, if conservatives like Judge Kavanaugh are accused of crimes (with zero evidence) it’s immediately #BelieveWomen but if it’s Democrats (with actual evidence) the “media” feverishly digs up dirt on the accuser. There are literally endless examples. The day after Biden’s recent debacle in his debate with Trump, I held my nose and flipped between CNN and MSNBC to see what Democrat Party talking points they were delivering. I wasn’t surprised. The banner at the bottom of one of them (who cares which, they’re both the same) nearly the entire time I watched read, “Biden stumbles while Trump lies during debate”. Yup! Only Trump lied apparently. Biden spoke some bizarre whoppers too. Like that he “inherited 9% inflation from Trump” and even tried resuscitating the “media’s” thoroughly debunked “very fine people” lie. But our “media” was only concerned with Trump. Our “media” in a nutshell.
It sounds good, but the problem is that the damage is done in real time. The mea culpa maybe 5-10 years later when the “truth” finally comes out. There should be no rating system other than the one of the reader decided what to read. Disinformation is as old as language.
My own mind always has been and always will be my “newsgaurd”.
Thank you for maintaining this website
All media domestic and global must be censored for white supremacy and Christianity and any source of white privilege destroyed or altered including all artwork and music such is our hate.
Yes, MT, blood curdling.
In the previous column (Crovitz original response), he makes this remark:
“There are right-wing sites like OAN that get low ratings such as for its Dominion Voting Systems claims”
I have read and evaluated whatever investigative reporting has been done on the Dominion Systems voting machines, including the reports issued by the official investigations. As a 40+ year computer professional, I saw nothing in those reports that would disprove the notion that cheating by those machines was not only possible but would be relatively easy to do.
The claim that DVS systems are secure based on them having won lawsuits is not persuasive, because at least to my knowledge, they have not released their source code for independent expert review, nor have they allowed exhaustive review of any machine used in a contested election.
In fact, after the ’20 election, it was determined that DVS did indeed have security issues which they repaired. the bland assertion by CISA that none of the flaws would have impacted the ’20 election is more “we checked ourselves and we’re cool” nonsense that we’ve seen so much of from the government lately. https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/ics-advisories/icsa-22-154-01
Regardless of the ultimate resolution of OAN’s claims regarding DVS, Crovitz et al should not be using their belief that DVS is in the clear to rate any media outlet. It sometimes takes months, years and longer to resolve these sorts of questions, and some may never belfully resolved, e.g. the JFK assassination. Allowing anyone to implicitly censor our news media (such as much of the applicable media can be called “The Press” in the First Amendment sense) based on data available today, allows those parties to shape the current narrative using presently unfalsifiable unknowns.
For the people that don’t know, Gordon Crovitz is a member of the COUNCIL of FOREIGN RELATIONS, a globalist internationalist organization committed to “a one-world government” based on a centralized global financing system. This man and his masters want to destroy the First Amendment and free speech as we know it.
Well, the solution is quite simple. Just create rating sites which rate rating sites. And then create rating sites which rate…well, you get the idea.
Yes. Who cares, really? Nobody pays any mind in the wake of media matters, politifact, and the like. Even formerly prestigious gatekeepers such as Poynter and Columbia are open cesspool jokes nowadays.
Maybe Olbermann likes them?
I have one more thing to say about this demand for you to “label yourself” by this “Newsguard” scam. And it is a scam, imagine, setting yourself up as the purveyor of all “truth” so you can earn a living deciding for everyone else what truth is. The hubris of it is monumental. But that’s not what I have to say, that’s a sideline.
The fact is these “labels” have become a way for the news media, govt and other organizations to categorize any dissent to any idea, … as being biased therefore unreliable.
Think about it.
During the Olympics apparently some sick, twisted sickos with their sick twisted lifestyles decided that the Olympic games would be a good place to push their sick, twisted lifestyle choices on the entire world. Where children cheering on their athletic heroes could see a bunch of sick, twisted transvestites and pervs exposing themselves on global television because its their way of validating their illness to themselves.
This was sick. I don’t care who you are the idea of mocking the Last Supper which this clearly was, they claim it was supposed to be a “pagan ritual” but it purposely set itself up to mirror Davinci’s famous painting of the Last Supper.
Forgetting that this insulted and debased the sacred beliefs of hundreds of millions of people we’re still left with the question, in what world would this sort of sick, twisted pornography be part of the Olympics? What does it have to do with athletes and their accomplishments?
Nothing.
But that didn’t stop the mainstream press, as well as the olympic committee from identifying anyone unhappy with this sick spectacle they pushed on us as “conservative”.
They fill up the news cycles with “conservatives are outraged”, which dishonestly tries to paint any detractors from this perversion as merely “conservatives being outraged” rather than “people are sickened by this”, which is the correct way to state it.
People are sickened by this. But they dismiss that by labeling any detractors “conservative” , thus it’s not a sick perverted display, …which it was, ,….but now its just “something that outrages conservatives”.
See how they do that? Suddenly its not a bad thing, its just a thing that conservatives find offensive and no one else….right?
Of course that’s all carefully crafted words to gild it thus, but the fact is anyone with any decency would find that display of sexual perversion being served up to families everywhere who tune in to see the worlds greatest athletes compete, disgusting.
Conservatives do the same thing with liberals. Climate change for example is real, and there is ample evidence that man’s burning of fossil fuels is making it worse. NASA proved that in the 60s with the “blanket effect” experiments (we did them in grade school in 68) and we knew that fossil fuel build up over cities and towns heated up the surface temps.
But conservatives label it liberal paranoia, …as the waters rise and coastlines disappear, the northern glaciers melt into the oceans and we see annual heat waves like never seen in my 6 and a half decades on the planet, …as if its all just liberal paranoia, because that’s what they’re told. And they do as they’re told. Just like the liberals.
Meanwhile the liberals blow it out of proportion, try to make it sound like its “all” our fault, and all the result of fossil fuels or that by immediately changing to electric we can somehow magically turn it around. We can’t. Its something that’s happening on a planetary scale that we can only have an impact on. We cannot control it.
And yes we can and should move towards cleaner and more sustainable energy sources, but it has to be done logically, and naturally. The govt can’t force it and the market won’t take it until it works. Right now they burn more fossil fuels to make a single battery for a single electric vehicle than they would if they just put in a diesel and ran it like that for a few years, …until they get the batteries right.
No one is going to buy electric vehicles until they get it right, and they haven’t done that yet. The cars idiots are driving now that are electric are all experimental models, nothing more. Beta test vehicles that people are dumb enough to buy.
When they get it right, then the market will drive people to them and the govt, media and the liberals won’t need to.
Folks will buy them when they work right. And when they don’t cause more harm to the environment than the gasoline and diesel engines we run now.
But none of that’s the point. They don’t care. The goal of the govt is to copulate with big business, in the feminine side of course, while business drives it home.
That’s what they do, and right now big business, i.e. big energy doesn’t want you us off diesel, and they don’t want us off gasoline. So how do they keep us fighting technological change instead of embracing it? Simple.
Make it a “left\right issue”.
They get the right wing to hate it, the left wing to love it then get all the idiots in both camps, none of whom are qualified to expound a single paragraph on the scientific aspects of the phenomenon, to fight over it and then no one actually looks at the facts because the liberals just accept any of it coming from the MSM and govts because they “believe in it” and the conservatives just reject it all as an evil liberal plot.
And the real science starves in the process and nothing ever really gets done about it because the left pushes unrealistic measures, deadlines and goals they erroneously believe will “solve it” and conservatives reject it all as liberal quackery.
And nothing ever gets done, and the big oil companies are happy to let the two parties bicker over it while they continue with the status quo.
In either camp, all you’re ever going to hear is an echo chamber.
You won’t hear real opinions, nuanced facts or actual questions.
All you’ll hear are the echo’s, parroting what “their side” is saying.
These labels are a way of dismissing any real discussion, any real science, any real challenge to that science and any chance of workable compromise in a technologically advanced society where without compromise nothing ever gets done.
Its like labeling someone a “witch” in New England in the 1600s. Once that was done, anything they say moving forward, true or not is taken as the lies of a witch.
Labels are a way of killing knowledge, and strangling wisdom.
“The hubris of it is monumental.”
EXACTLY!
I agree with most of your response. The difference is climate change. Perhaps it is changing (as it has since the beginning of time), but it is less than clear that the burning of fossil fuels is the reason. Correlation does not prove causation. IF you ever walk on pavement exposed to the sun barefoot and then step on the grass to cool your heals, you know why cities are heating up.
“This includes Elon Musk and X after the reduction of censorship systems and the release of the ‘Twitter Files.’ After being targeted by these campaigns for years, rating systems have been denounced by Musk as part of an ‘online censorship racket’.”
Just to be clear; Musk is a total fraud, and he engages in as much or more censorship as his predecessors at Twitter. It amazes me how he manages to keep it quiet. But it doesn’t amaze me that Turley is CLUELESS about it, since he was also clueless about Obama, Hillary, AND Fake President Joetard, having voted for ALL of them and thus contributed to bringing us to the moment the Professor now complains about.
You’d NEVER know it from reading Turley’s blog or tweets, but nonetheless information about what Musktard is doing IS available, same as information about Obama, Hillary, and Joetard was available — same as information was available about subsequently-convicted multiple felon Michael Avenatti back when Turley teamed up with Avenatti and his porn client to bash Trump — thereby greatly contributing to Joetard’s election and the moment we now find ourselves in.
But even though information is available, it’s only useful if one chooses to pay attention to what’s going on:
“STUDY: X Is Giving Congressional Dems a BOOST Before the 2024 Election”
https://mrcfreespeechamerica.org/blogs/free-speech/christian-baldwin-joseph-vazquez/2024/07/15/study-x-giving-congressional-dems
“Elon Musk has made strides to turn X (formerly Twitter) into a free speech platform but there are still remnants of the Old Twitter censorship regime and they are interfering in the 2024 election. It now appears that X is actively boosting content posted by Democrat congressional members’ accounts, while simultaneously de-amplifying their GOP counterparts in the middle of an election year.”
3RD PARAGRAPH IN YOUR LINK
“With the 2024 election just months away, MRC’s evidence suggests that a radical remnant is still working against Musk in secret by tilting the scales in favor of the left. ”
Well, you didn’t read or absorb big points in your own article. You just lied and denounced Elon Musk.
You’re such an idiot it is incredible you open your piehole so wide.
Your “Shield or Sword” response is outstanding! Thank you, Jonathan Turley, for being a shield!
It used to be that racial classifications determined your destiny in study, marriage, workplace and every other aspect of life. See, e.g., Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 and its “one drop rule,” which required residents to list their ancestry back several generations. Quadroons or octoroons had hard barriers to overcome.
That is so yesterday. Now it is ideological classifications that determine your destiny. The mission of Newsguard and other opinion overseers is to determine a site’s ideological, not its racial “purity.” Most sites’ income stream from advertisers and hence survivability will soon be directly correlated to how much red hue taints its “ideological purity.” We’re not quite at the “one drop rule” for conservative bias yet, but give it a few more years and we’ll be there at the present growth rate for surrogate censorship by the ruling left-wing elite.
I am just waiting on marketers who are interested in reaching that half of the populatiion buying advertising at a discount.
“. . . the reported government contracts given to NewsGuard by the Biden Administration . . .”
No need for the qualifier “reported.” It is a fact.
NewsGuard received money from Biden’s State Department to combat “Covid misinformation.”
And received some $750k from Biden’s DoD to combat “disinformation.”
That is called fascism — a private company doing government’s censorship bidding.
The greatest deception in the news business is in what IS NOT mentioned. How do you rate that?
The only way to be truly informed is to read things that you are drawn to by your opinions, then find opposing views, and be big enough to alter your opinion when your intellect or conscience tells you to do so. The pool of information makes this difficult because of the dog whistle of headlines and first paragraphs. Any rating system can turn into the Southern Poverty Law Center over time. Even Drudge is over half way there.
Jonathan (to imitate my dear friend Dennis McIntyre, who should be showing up for work soon): I notice this at the beginning of your column I have mutual friends of both Gordon and his co-founder Steve Brill, who have always sworn by their integrity and motivations
I would like to remind you that for a long time your writings reflected that you would have sworn by the integrity and motivations of Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland. No matter whatever malfeasance Garland did in the open or did under the table and was exposed, you always justified Garland as a good man of integrity… but sometimes he simply just made a mistake.
You should know Merrick Garland by now after his history over the last three and a half years. Steve Brill also has a history from his actions and what he has said for many more years than you’ve been watching Garland. It isn’t a record that shows any kind of integrity – but it certainly does put his motivations on display.
Garland came for Trump. Then he came for those in the Trump administration. Then he came for the right to life crowd. Then he came for parents objecting at school board meetings. Then he came for traditional Catholics. But Garland always had integrity and good motivations and never came for you, so you thought he was just making mistakes.
Steve Brill came for Trump and others opposed to the Soviet Democrat agenda. And now Steve Brill and NewsGuard are coming for you, Jonathan – but you’ve been assured of their integrity and motivations.
Welcome to your Martin Niemöller “and now they’ve come for me” moment, Jonathan.
I’m from NewsGuard and I’m here to hate you.
Outsourcing your opinions is such a weird concept. Who does that? “So, do I like chocolate ice cream this week?”
Worse than Crovitz’s position and the anti-intellectual urge to “label”, he and NewsGuard are guilty of congenital H U B R I S. How soon can they hire Nina Jankowitz to hum them a catchy little melody?
I have to agree Professor Turley and I think this is a very important article.
Requiring someone to “identify themselves as libertarian” is a chilling marker of a class society that is emerging from all this political infighting our “leaders” have drug us through the past several years.
In fact the very request makes my blood run cold. I hate labels like liberal, conservative or libertarian which idiots who sit in here and elsewhere arguing all day demand you affix to yourself so they can then “define” that label for you and tell you what they “know” you think.
Well I am neither liberal, conservative or libertarian. Like you Professor I hold many libertarian leaning views, but to pigeonhole my entire moral, intellectual and ideological thinking into one stupid petty little label so some moron can then proceed to “bash” anything I say by framing it into their own infantile understanding of those labels, is a fools errand.
I hate labels. They don’t work and they lie. Labels lie. And so do most people who insist on using them.
Chris Weber,
Well said.
It seems academia likes assigning labels or putting people in boxes.
As to requiring someone to not only identify themselves is very Orwellian, but fact is, most people are actually cannot really be identified as any one label. Most people support a variety of issues that can be on anywhere on the political spectrum.
The Cancel Culture Gestapo’s outreach to guarantee the use of “New Speak’ and defend democracy. This is why they don’t want you reading Orwell and Huxley.