The Desire to Control Information
Lee Smith
https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-desire...on_4429460.html
April 27, 2022 Updated: April 27, 2022


Commentary

In two speeches this month, former U.S. President Barack Obama claimed leadership of an all-hands-on-deck effort to fight “disinformation.” Or in layman’s terms, to censor political speech damaging to America’s ruling class.

Why are Obama and his retinue of political, corporate, and media elites so keen to shut down free speech? With President Joe Biden’s poll numbers cratering and midterm elections on the horizon, Democrats have no good news to tell voters, so they have to bury as much bad news as they can or else face a total rout come November.

And then there’s the long-term threat to the establishment’s control of the information ecosystem: One of their own jumped sides. With Elon Musk buying Twitter, the opposition is celebrating the arrival of a white-hat media oligarch who they hope will set them free by practicing what he preaches—free speech is essential to the health of a democracy.

Obama sees it differently. As he told audiences at the University of Chicago and Stanford, “disinformation” threatens democracy. Of course, the framers of the Constitution made no provision for any form of censorship, never mind a federally supported campaign joining big tech to U.S. intelligence services in order to strip Americans of their first amendment rights.

Several of Obama’s former spy chiefs, such as ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and one-time CIA chief Leon Panetta, authored a letter last week on behalf of the U.S. spy community. It urged congress not to regulate big tech flagships like Google and Apple, lest it harm the ability of U.S. intelligence bureaucrats to weed out “disinformation” seeded by foreign adversaries, such as Russia.

It wasn’t lost on conservatives that Clapper and Panetta were also among the 50 former intelligence officials who published the letter claiming that the emails found on Hunter Biden’s laptop showing evidence of financial ties between the Biden family, including the current president, and foreign officials was “Russian disinformation.” Except, as the New York Times and Washington Post acknowledged, those emails are authentic.

And thus, perhaps inadvertently, Obama and the spy chiefs provided a working definition of “disinformation”—facts liable to hurt the Democratic Party as well as the national security apparatus that the 44th president manages from his Washington, D.C. mansion.

At Stanford, Obama compared former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon to Vladimir Putin. Sure, it’s repugnant that a former commander-in-chief compared a domestic political opponent to a foreign adversary, but this kind of rhetorical flourish has been a feature of Obama’s political style since his first presidential term. Of any policy or project or idea at odds with his promise to transform America, Obama was fond of saying, “That’s not who we are as Americans.” The effect was to divide the country between those who were loyal to Obama and those whose Americanness was in question.

By comparing a Trump aide to the Russian despot, Obama also echoed the collusion narrative claiming that Trump had been compromised by Putin. -- excerpt, rest at link above --