Censorship. Misinformation. Disinformation. Malinformation.
Yes, today's world has grown a bit more complicated with respect to various governments, political parties, search engines, left-wing news outlets, and social media sites suppressing information that they don't want you to see — particularly information that runs contrary to their multitude of narratives and bald-faced lies.
While the former Soviet Union and Communist China, along with North Korea and a few other despotic dictatorships, relied on — and continue to do so — blatant censorship, we now have several other often sneakier versions of suppression with which to contend. Let's briefly run through the definitions of each before we continue to the issue at hand.
According to Merriam-Webster:
Censor: "to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable."
Misinformation: "incorrect or misleading information."
Disinformation: "false information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth."
Malinformation: "a controversial term for information which is based on fact, but removed from its original context in order to mislead, harm, or manipulate."
Clear as mud, right? Call it whatever you want, but three of the above are among the left's favorite descriptors of information, facts, data, and opinions that they don't like or by which they feel threatened.
Speaking of the left and censorship, let's take a look at related activities of the Biden administration over the last nearly four years. If I told you that the administration spent 44 times as much on combatting information it doesn't like than spent by the first Trump administration, would you be surprised? Of course you wouldn't.
Check it out:
The Biden administration has spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to study and police “misinformation,” according to a report released Friday.
OpenTheBooks, a spending watchdog, said the federal government has spent $267 million since 2021 on contracts and research grants that include the term “misinformation” in the proposals. During the Trump administration, $7 million was spent on grants involving misinformation.
I know; try to control your shock and amazement.
According to OpenTheBooks, much of the spending under Biden went toward studying information about the coronavirus and Americans’ response to the pandemic. Programs also included broader attempts to combat what the government deems misinformation. One U.S. university walked away with nearly $250,000 to construct misinformation “escape rooms” at libraries.
Misinformation "escape rooms." How awesome. I wonder if they had therapists on hand in the rooms to calm down leftist loons who got frantic over reading "misinformation." Ridiculous.
The group suggested in its report that the Biden administration's efforts, in this case, constituted a fool's errand — and harmful to the public (emphasis, mine).
Learning to think critically and discern truth from lies is an important life skill, but the federal government has proven it is not capable of addressing that need responsibly. It’s the worst possible arbiter of truth, as it were, because it makes the state a gatekeeper of speech.
Spoiler: The federal government under Joe Biden — and likely worse under Kamala Harris if she had won — is the opposite of the above. The last thing today's Democrat Party and the radical left want is for the American public to think critically and discern the truth from the lies.
Even More 'Fun'
Misinformation spending soared in 2021.
Misinformation spending soared in 2021, when Mr. Biden took office, with $126 million spent — chiefly on pandemic-related projects. It has steadily dropped but totaled $18 million in the just-ended fiscal 2024.
Most of the COVID-19 spending went to Health and Human Services Department projects to boost vaccine use and other government-urged measures for racial and ethnic minorities. That includes “evidence-based interventions to address vaccine misinformation.”
HHS also authorized grants that paid for outfits to monitor social media for vaccine and other medical information contradicting the department’s preferred narratives.
The National Science Foundation sent $200,000 to researchers to study how political polarization made people more susceptible to disinformation. According to OpenTheBooks, the result was a paper “slandering President-elect Trump.”
The authors concluded that governments should “allow the experts to have the main say” in responding to health crises. They urged governments to use that same expert-based approach in policing information about climate change.
One — an honest, objective one, that is — can only imagine what censorship under Biden-Harris would have looked like if the administration and the Deep State had been given free rein to censor the daylights out of anything and everything at their own discretion — the First Amendment be damned.
MORE TROUBLESOME NONSENSE:
REPORT: Google Continues to Push Progressive Agenda With Biased Search Results
OpenTheBooks said it "smelled hypocrisy in many of the efforts after initial claims about social distancing and the risks of the virus to younger people proved imprecise." Just imprecise? Please.
The report also came down hard on "heavy-handed policing of social media conversations, which spurred even more resistance to what agencies were urging."
Finally, OpenTheBooks concluded what the rest of us — conservatives, that is — already know.
Americans simply cannot trust that continued grant and contract spending and various bureaucratic programmatic activities involved in ‘misinformation’ will not be ideologically motivated to silence critics.
Amen.
'Nuff said — until next time.
