The other day, in a thread replying to a Joe Remi tweet about the latest deadly lies about COVID on Tucker Carlson’s disinformation show, I found myself saying this:
Demagogic lies are stronger than nuanced facts. Simplistic fantasies are stronger than inconvenient, complex realities. In a wholly unfettered marketplace of ideas—without even informal guardrails—evil outcompetes good; lies trump the truth.
I was sort of shocked to read those words after I wrote them, and to realize: Yup. I said what I said. That’s what I think now.
This morning, the topic came up again, in reference to the ongoing controversy around Joe Rogan, Spotify, Neil Young, and now Joni Mitchell. In response to Bryan O’Nolan tweeting, “The antidote to misinformation is truth,” I repeated my “lies trump the truth” thesis, and elaborated:
I used to believe—at my very core—that “the antidote to misinformation is truth.” But I think it’s been catastrophically disproven. . . . I can’t overstate what a colossal shift this is for me. I hate it. HATE it. But the two Big Lies of 2020 & 21 — “COVID is an overblown hoax” and “the election was stolen” — have flourished no matter how loudly & irrefutably they’re disproven.
Because this is such a profound shift in my thinking — and a key part of where I’ve landed after my worldview was shattered* in 2016 and the years that followed — it seemed worthy of a blog post.
*See also here: “Anyway, if 2016 shattered my previous worldview (it did), I guess this is the extremely depressing new worldview that I think I’m settling into: for a huge variety of interconnected reasons, America’s national politics has stumbled into a perfect shitstorm, and the cavalry ain’t coming. The problems have become structural and fundamental, as well as cultural and moral, and at some level even spiritual, for lack of a better term. The cancer has metastasized into the very marrow of our civic life, and there is no cure.” (Cheery and uplifting, I know!)
Anyway, after the jump, I collect a whole bunch of Twitter threads that I’ve done on this topic (some of which I had forgotten, but unearthed thanks to Twitter Search) over the past ~1½ years, showing my evolving thought process on this issue.
(The blockquotes below are embedded tweets. Sometimes it takes several seconds for the Twitter script to load. This can mess up the spacing of things, so I recommend waiting until they load—in other words, wait until they look like tweets—before you start scrolling.)
First, this, from July 2020:
And again in August 2020:
October 2020:
A couple weeks later, in mid-October 2020, I said “lies beat truth” for the first time (I’d forgotten that), and really wrestled with this issue, in detail, for the first time:
In January 2021, there was the small matter of a deadly insurrection that broke America’s 231-year “peaceful transfer of power” winning streak. The attempted coup / putsch / autogolpe was directly caused by the Republicans’ Big Lie, as I wrote in my blog post on “incitement” (quoting my tweets from three days before January 6):
I’ve long felt that we’re too quick to blame politicians we dislike for the actions of violent crazies. Sarah Palin didn’t shoot Gabby Giffords; the #Resistance didn’t attack that GOP baseball game. But this is different. … If people believe your abject lie that a valid, untainted election result is a “steal” that must be “stopped,” violence at some point becomes a rational response from their perspective. …
Because fundamentally, when you lie to people in a democratic republic that their right to effect change by voting has been “stolen,” and no further nonviolent legal recourse exists, the logical conclusion of your lie, if believed, is violent revolution. You own that consequence. … That particular lie makes you culpable for the resulting violence. Because if people believe your lie that ballots are being flatly ignored, they will resort to bullets. They will do so not because they’re “crazy” but because the logic of your lie compels that conclusion. This is why such claims should never be made lightly, let alone falsely.
Naturally, this got me thinking about the free-speech issue again. First sarcastically (on January 8), then more thoughtfully (on January 9):
Here’s the January 9 thread:
Fast forward to March 2021:
In that thread, I started to connect the dots between reckless COVID lies and the Big Lie that triggered January 6:
Alas, the assholes didn’t stop. For example, in April:
In July 2021, tying together the disinformation problem with the broader doom-of-democracy problem, I wrote:
Later in July 2021, another thread:
After that, it looks like I gave the topic a rest for a while. But then came the thread earlier this week. Here it is, in full:
A few minutes later, I had to tweet a correction, noting I meant to say “We can’t have” all three things.
The sentence should have read: “We can’t have legally mandated free speech AND widespread mainstream abdication of all informal guardrails AND be a functional democracy.“
That led to my big sweeping conclusion about the relative strength of truth & lies, fact & fiction, good & evil in the marketplace of ideas:
A couple of days later, the Spotify/Joe Rogan controversy arose (or heated up and came to my attention, anyway), and I tied it in with my previous free-speech thoughts:
And finally, this morning’s thread: