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No, Biden Can't Save Us With a 'Reality Czar.'
Also, WTF?
It's peak season for terrible ideas from journalists, academics, and politicians about how to combat disinformation and extremism.
No, Biden Can’t Save Us With a ‘Reality Czar.’ Also, WTF? – Reason.comAlso, WTF?
It's peak season for terrible ideas from journalists, academics, and politicians about how to combat disinformation and extremism.
3 Feb 2021 ~~ By Matt Welch
Pessimistic technology reporter Kevin Roose has a piece in Tuesday's New York Times with the disconcerting yet accurately representative headline, "How the Biden Administration Can Help Solve Our Reality Crisis." Pegged to the twin anxieties over right-wing conspiracy theories and violence, Roose's article contains one of the most blink-inducing paragraphs I have ever encountered in a respected journal:
Several experts I spoke with recommended that the Biden administration put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a "reality czar."
Cue scores of snorting noises on Twitter about our new "Ministry of Truth.""It sounds a little dystopian, I'll grant," Roose concedes. "But let's hear them out."
OK, let's. Harvard's Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, joins the recent political-class chorus calling for a "truth commission," and pushes for the feds to have access to Facebook/Twitter/YouTube algorithms: "We must open the hood on social media so that civil rights lawyers and real watchdog organizations can investigate human rights abuses enabled or amplified by technology."
~Snip~
So merely as a matter of prevent defense, it's worth taking these ideas both seriously and literally. Starting with a point so obvious that only journalists and academics could miss it: Proposed changes to government policy should always be visualized with the opposing team in charge of implementation. Imagine as the annointer of a Reality Czar not Joe Biden, but President Ted Cruz, or President Tucker Carlson. You people do remember that the White House was the scene of insane meetings like this all of two weeks ago, right?
There are also several structural problems with tasking government to encourage and adjudicate society's net store of capital-T Truth. Politicians (such as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris) are incentivized to embellish their credentials, fictionalize their biographies, and misrepresent their records. Government agencies, given their druthers, would rather operate like the CIA—funding essentially guaranteed, details not available on request. As our resident Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filer C.J. Ciaramella frequently reminds us, it's the norm for bureaucrats to "flout the spirit and, quite often, the letter of federal record law." And the last time Joe Biden was in the White House, his boss left "a blueprint on how to suppress information and get away with it."
~Snip~
But what should said media do? Here is where my view diverges sharply. Journalists and media-theoreticians right now think the solution to Trumpy delusion is to deplatform even sitting U.S. senators, sic the feds on Fox News, break up Big Tech, reject "bothsidesism," use the most maximally negative adjectives to describe Republicans, and reposition journalism as a tool for producing better democratic outcomes through applied moral clarity.
My recommendation to journalists and their cousins in government and academia will be neither popular nor satisfying, but here it is: Do your own jobs better. That's it, that's the memo. If government was efficient and helpful, if journalism was compelling and truthful, if the academe was relevant and unpredictable, their lectures would have far more resonance, and audience.
Comment:
Who with an unbiased mind and clear thinking, did not see this coming?
Ministry of Truth, break their rules and get to be a part of the 99.9% who plead guilty to avoid being stripped of all worldly goods before prison.
Orwellian description of dystopian society has come into reality brought to you by Progressive Marxist/DSA Democrat Commies....
Actually at the beginning of his reign, Obama told us this was the beginning of the Fundamental Transformation of America....
Twelve years later we are seeing the results and China Joey Xi and Kamaltoe Harris in the illegitimacy is going to put it in place.
Conservatives will henceforth be known as domestic terrorists, jan 6th will according to the Commie Left will be know as the insurrection.
Wow!! I've been claiming that the Turner Diaries were prophetic....
Both Orwell and Pierce hit the nail squarely in their writings....
The question is, where do we go from here? Submit or RESIST?