“The greater likelihood is that extremes of free speech will continue to be tolerated, creating a pathway for more Donald Trumps.”
—Washington, D.C.-based journalist Lawrence Martin, a Canadian journalist, bemoaning how the “elites” no longer control the limits of free speech because of the internet, and the results are disastrous in a column titled, “Excessive free speech is a breeding ground for more Trumps.”
Even though this guy could be classified as a Canadian journalist, make no mistake: he is stating out loud how a large component, even a majority perhaps, feels about freedom of speech when it doesn’t stop with letting journalists and their favorite politicians and glitterati say, state and opine about what ever they want in the public square. This is exactly what “saying the quiet part out loud” means.
For that, I suppose we should be thankful to Martin. I would say we should also be thankful that he almost exclusively writes for Canadian publications—you know, the ones that cover the Great Stupid infected country to the north that is seriously considering a law, Bill C-63, that would establish life sentences for “speech crimes.” Oh, don’t worry: Martin feels that the bill goes “too far.” That’s nice. Based on his screed, I’m sure he favors lesser sentences.
These people, and by that I mean the self-appointed elites who really and truly think they are the smart ones who deserve special privileges like saying what they think, believe the garbage Martin spews in this column, which, ironically, proves that he isn’t smart at all, doesn’t understand democracy, and absolutely doesn’t understand why Donald Trump seems more necessary than repulsive to so many voters here. Read the article, but be warned, here are the typical sentiments you’ll encounter, so hold on to your skull…
-
“When other communications revolutions like the printing press, radio, and television came along, they were still largely controlled by the elites. But when the internet came along, regulatory bodies like Canada’s CRTC backed off. It was open season for anything that anyone wanted to put out. No license needed. No identity verification.What a far cry from the days when the masses had no outlets save things like “man-on-the-street” interviews or letters to the editor or protest placards. We moved from one extreme to the other. The masses were finally weaponized – not with arms, but with a communications instrument that empowered them against establishment forces like they had never been empowered before. The change represented one of history’s significant power shifts.With the multitudes given megaphones, what a wonderful democratic advance it was. But it came with a rather massive irony. Free speech became as much a slayer of democracy as an enabler.”
- “The way to reverse the trend is with rigid regulation, but the free speech lobby in the United States is as fierce as the gun lobby. The historic triumph the internet gave free speech is all but forgotten. The amnesiacs scream censorship. Joe Biden is out ‘to crush free speech in America,’ Mr. Trump ludicrously charged recently.”
“Ludicrously.” Lawrence Martin has revealed how “the elites”—like him, of course—define democracy. It isn’t the internet or social media that caused the rise of Donald Trump. It was the sufficient numbers of the American public finally realizing exactly what the “elites” were and why they needed to be slapped down, restrained, and exposed.
Ethics Alarms 
I think the reason so many support Trump is not who and what he is, but what and who he isn’t.
I think there’s a LOT of truth to that.
Two quick thoughts.
Donald Trump strikes me as a “safe” martyr figure. He’s capable enough to endure the slings and arrows flung at him and still be effective, and he has goaded the Left into raving-mad revelation of who they really are, and so he might have the capacity to rescue us from the descent we’re in. But he’s also detestable enough that, while we’re outraged in principle at his mistreatment, we’re not unduly overwrought at the pains he suffers.
Second, the explosion of voices on the internet is a very real concern. Any fringe thought, any radical notion, any outrageous idea can now find a platform, find like-minded people, and present themselves as reasonable voices for the masses to listen to. The proliferation of false and misleading data has magnified a thousand-fold, and all this is a concern. However, the problem is not that there are so many voices, but that the strongest voices who should have been able to easily rebut these fringe elements have been revealed as arrogant, untrustworthy purveyors of false and misleading information themselves. If people don’t know who to trust, and will be goaded into believing anything, it is because those who should have been trustworthy took advantage of that trust and squandered it.
If you don’t want more Trumps, be better men than Trump.
l want to respectfully push back on “the explosion of voices on the internet is a very real concern”. It sounds to me like you’re making a milder, but similar, case to Martin – the unwashed masses need the elites to tell them what is acceptable to see and/or believe. And concern about false or misleading information doesn’t define “false” or “misleading” leaving it wide open for abuse. In 2020, calling masks useless was “false” and “misleading.” Now, any attempt to define “woman” is called “false” and “misleading.” We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
It is a concern, and I think we’d be lying to say that it isn’t. We have in the course of just a few decades gone from a society where very few people could make their voices heard, and information took days or longer to reach people, to a society where everyone can, to some audience, make his voice heard, and where information can travel across the globe at the speed of light. The question is, in my mind, not whether this is a concern, but what we should do about it.
I think it is correct to be concerned about people spreading falsehoods online, especially in social media platforms where it can be picked up and repeated at blinding speed. Lies have never had such a greater advantage. (And remember Wizard’s First Rule*: people are stupid, and they will believe a lie either because they want it to be true, or they fear it is true.) Where we have disagreement is how to handle this. I, and most free speech advocates, believe the way to counter lies is by diligence, making the effort to debunk lies as they appear, to offer sound arguments to rebut invalid claims, and to have the humility not to oversell a position. There is a glaring problem with this method, which is it takes so much more effort to rebut a claim than make a claim. It is, admittedly, overwhelming dealing with all the false claims out there.
On the other side, the thought of how to counter misinformation is to shut it down, to deny it any platform, to censor it into silence. There are two main problems with this method, though. First is that it appeals to our lazy side. We’d rather just dismiss claims than argue against them. We’d rather make dismissive rhetorical statements like, “We don’t waste time arguing the earth is round anymore,” than address issues head-on. And this leads to the second problem, which is knowing what is outright wrong versus what is partially wrong, especially since we tend to be very convinced that items of the latter are actually the former, often based on our own likes and dislikes. And the third problem is who will be the gatekeeper of what can be said and what can’t be said. Really, if ever someone could be appointed gatekeeper to prevent the promulgation of misinformation, that person would have to be omniscient, and that person would have to be perfectly benevolent, for otherwise, we could not trust that he would censor the right information, nor do it for the right reasons. As we have seen.
We actually do need elites, at least in a certain sense. None of us are an expert at everything, and so it would be preferable to rely on experts in fields where we don’t have expertise. Thus if someone did propose some crackpot idea or some novel philosophy or some worldwide calamity that can only be addressed by bankrupting the world and killing off 90% of the population, we could defer to the analysis of the experts and trust that it was correct. But again, our experts have failed us and fallen into a trap of hubris.
I hope that clarifies my position. Misinformation is a problem, but the solution is not censorship but the free exchange of ideas.
Precisely. ”Sunlight is the best disinfectant” goes the saying, but when those controlling or ignoring much of the sunlight are themselves promoting their own distorted agendas, where does the disinfecting come into play? Without honest debate, nothing will ever get solved, but squawkers on both sides of the political divide have forgotten the art of HONEST debate. The biggest threat to our country is lazy journalism – making the story about the outrageous soundbite rather than the substance of an issue, and applying the outrage clamor unevenly across the spectrum. i.e. If the entire Hunter Biden story – documentation, videos, testimony, etc. – was exactly the same, but about DJT Jr and his family, how would the so-called journalists on either side change their tune?
The biggest problem with this is people like Martin believe they hold the power. I wonder if it occurs to them that Trump could just as easy say, yeah, that seems great, lets do that and take it all from them. The only people I think that don’t consider the future more than politicians are journalist.
They also think they are smart, wise and right. Most of them just aren’t. If the elites really were elite in ability and perspective, their arrogance and delusion of superiority would at least have some basis. But they just aren’t.
After years of reading Ethics Alarms and not commenting except occasionally on matters of grammar, I find myself making an exception to my habit of lurking. The reticence is principally because, as a Canadian, I have always questioned the ethics of commenting on issues largely centred on the United States. But Lawrence Martin? Oh my, I need stay silent no longer.
Since the 1970s, Martin has been a fixture in the Globe and Mail, (a prominent Toronto newspaper). I first really noticed him in the 1980s when he was the paper’s Moscow Bureau Chief. He was bizarrely in love with the Russians. While the rest of the world was sickly fascinated, unable to look away from the slow-motion train wreck that was the Soviet Union, Lawrence was besotted with them. He regularly contrasted them with what he saw as an evil actor in the White House who was pretending (successfully as it turned out) to be a great President.
In the years since, he has written on many other subjects most of which I have read with my eyes-rolling.
Now a large part of that writing style is just his basic self-congratulatory Canadianness. We Canadians have the appalling tendency to continually spout off about motes in America’s eye while being utterly oblivious to the beams in our own.
But Mr. Martin is a special case. In many ways he reminds me of Bob Gates’s assessment of Joe Biden: “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,”
And so it is with Lawrence Martin. Despite an elite career and an education which includes a graduate degree from Harvard, he just isn’t very bright. I remember that when I was in graduate school – mercifully, not Harvard – I used to say of my classmates that they were “often wrong, but seldom in doubt”.
That little aphorism is at the heart of understanding Lawrence Martin. He has a small set of approved beliefs, from which he never strays, perfectly crafted for his principal audience – the self-satisfied members of the Laurentian Elite. Think New York Times and Washington Post-subscribing U.S. elites, but further north.
His essential message – that free speech is bad because because it permits “wrong” thoughts which might spread is not uniquely Canadian. Don Lemon – another wannabe intellectual poseur – from the ranks of journalists said as much to Elon Musk the other day. More frighteningly, Justice Jackson said something similar during oral arguments at SCOTUS last week. But at least Americans, backed up by the strong clear language of the first amendment, have been far more likely to protest efforts to curtail speech, whereas Canadians are far more inclined to say “oh well, if it prevents the emergence of some conservative Antichrist, it’s probably a good idea.”
I mean, what could go wrong?