Thread by @SethCotlar

I’ll see your aphorism that “the answer to speech you don’t like is more speech” and raise you “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it” by Jonathan Swift, 1710.

One of our two major parties has created an almost hermetically sealed media universe into which alternative perspectives and empirical reality have little chance of entering, and you think the solution is just to talk into that void more loudly?

I don’t know what the solution to our propaganda-warped political culture is, but I’m pretty sure publishing essays in magazines and tweeting more ain’t it.

Chris Rufo is an admitted propagandist who invented the anti-CRT panic that is currently driving much of our politics. He’s been exposed as a lying charlatan in dozens of publications. It’s had almost no impact. He’s the king of flying lies.

I will also gently remind folks just how powerfully sanitizing sunlight and counter-speech has turned out to be in regard to tfg’s barrage of lies about the 2020 election.

Remember when Kellyanne Conway said the phrase “alternative facts” in 2017 and all the wise heads laughed at her? I believe she’s the one laughing now.

Truth is social. No individual possesses it and can justly enforce it. The interests of the truth in modern societies is advanced by fallible human institutions--like peer review in academia and standards of journalistic ethics in the media.

This is why right wing propagandists attack both higher education & reality-based media outlets. They elevate cases in which those fallible institutions have failed in order to "prove" that they *never* work. They do this to advance their own, exclusive power to define truth.

Every speech act enters into a field that is already shot through with infinitely complex asymmetries of power. That's even more so the case in our current world of social media algorithms. Just obtusely pretending like those power asymmetries don't exist is hardly a solution.

This is why it's suboptimal for a society to have tens of millions of people getting their news from a credulous dope like Rogan who wouldn't know a fact check if it snuck up & gave him a pile driver. In his universe, a grifting quack gets the same treatment as an actual expert.

Credulous dopes have a right to their opinions. And I get why some people find his stoned dorm room banter to be entertaining. But he's not just sitting in a dorm room with his buddies...he's an influential public figure who can't disown that as a responsibility.

Anyway, what David said.

https://twitter.com/DavidAstinWalsh/status/1488184674358902795?s=20&t=FmnJsSjJhsWfKikPTVLaVw

We as a society have an investment in creating spaces in which people can just bat ideas around freely, even dumb ideas. But as this propaganda-assisted pandemic continues to roll on, it should be clear we also have an investment in having scientific truth defeat flying lies.

Same goes for climate change. Same goes for election results. Same goes for a host of other conversations where it's not just a question of which MMA fighter you prefer and why, but are instead matters of enormous consequence.