"Misinformation" and Censorship on the Ballot

This week, there's a valuable lesson on the importance of free speech from a controversial historian, Darryl Cooper, and others. Is there such as thing as misinformation and does it matter?

I’d never heard of Darryl Cooper. Then, he was interviewed (or, more accurately, given a platform) by a surprisingly non-inquisitive Tucker Carlson this week. “Darryl Cooper may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” Tucker gushed on his website. “His latest project is the most forbidden of all: trying to understand World War Two.” Carlson called Cooper “the most important historian in the United States.”

In case you’ve not kept up with the talented, successful, provocative, and unapologetic Tucker Carlson, he was a legend and Fox News’ rating star for seven years until he was unceremoniously dumped in 2023, the whole story we’ve never read or heard. He’s segued to a new platform on Elon Musk’s X (formerly known as Twitter), focusing on long-form interviews (most are over an hour), also shared on other platforms such as Rumble, the alternative to the notoriously censorious Google-owned YouTube. The preppie bow-tie days on CNN are long gone.

Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper

Carlson’s evolving and often controversial views and video antics have earned him praise and scorn, most recently for giving Cooper a platform.

As for Cooper, I’d never heard of him, despite prolific posts on X and his Substack site. He has a lot of subscribers and over 267,000 followers on X. He is also under attack for, as military historian Dr. Victor Davis Hanson said, “casually present(ing) a surprising number of flawed theories about World War II. He focused his misstatements on the respective roles of Winston Churchill’s Britain and Adolf Hitler’s Germany—especially in matters of the treatment and fate of Russian prisoners, the Holocaust, the systematic slaughtering of Jews, strategic bombing, and the nature of Winston Churchill.” That’s a lot of disagreement.

In fairness, Cooper discussed much more than WWII on the Carlson broadcast. A post in support of Cooper’s interview with Carlson summed it up this way on X: “The hysterical reaction to the episode exactly demonstrates what Cooper set out to describe: history as essential myth-making to support the regime's present-day objectives. if you deviate from the established view even a little, you get all manner of academics, historians, and toadies out for blood. so as a kind of performance art, Cooper accomplished more than he could have imagined.”

To Cooper’s detractors, he’s a revisionist historian. To his fans, he’s challenging the “regime.” That’s not an uncommon dividing line in a lot of social sciences these days.

Fellow Substacker, author, and former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson describes Cooper as “a historian who is a Nazi apologist and - at best - walks to the edge of Holocaust denial.” Hanson’s colleague at Stanford University’s Hoover center, Niall Ferguson, the author of 16 books, said “I had never heard of Cooper until this week and was none the wiser when I went to look for his books. There are none.” 

I’m not here to pick fights or get in the middle of Carlson and Cooper versus others or engage in a point-counter-point analysis of Cooper’s rendition of history, whether he’s Nazi apologist or an anti-Semite or not. I’m a huge fan of Hanson and Ferguson, both brilliant writers and historians, so any biases I have lean their way. But the entire exchange, plus the contributions of others, reminds me of a larger point: The value of freedom of speech, and why it is on the ballot this fall.

The answer to “bad” speech, or speech you disagree with, is best dealt with by more speech, not censorship. That’s not original thinking of my part, of course. That line of thought emerged from John Stuart Mill in his famous “On Liberty” treatise in 1859, and has been repeated often ever since.

“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race,” Mill wrote. “If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. If wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

We have been feted not just with Cooper’s alternative views of history, such as they are, but a wealth of analysis and valuable information and insights from other historians that might never been published were it not for the Carlson interview. I learn from such exchanges, especially where experts and others disagree, and trust my ability to discern truth from error. There are others I can consult when in doubt. I’m not afraid to change my mind, and have, frequently.

I don’t have a problem with Carlson or any venue lending their platforms in this way. Cooper already has a huge following. Some think that constantly engaging with people who think “wrongly” will erode truth. Poppycock, Mills might say. “Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.” In other words, people we may disagree with make us think.

Ultimately, most arguments are neither true or false. They’re a mixture of both. “As iron sharpens iron,” Proverbs 27:17 says, “so one person sharpens another.”

Which leads us to Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for President. She’s for silencing you if your disagreement crosses a line. I agree with US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) when he calls her the largest threat to free speech since our nation’s second president more than 200 years ago. Via Cruz’s popular “The Verdict” podcast:

Kamala Harris displays more antipathy to free speech in the First Amendment than any presidential candidate in two hundred and twenty four years. The last time we had a presidential with this antipathy was John Adams, our second president, who had enforced the Alien and Sedition Acts and used them to persecute his political opponents. It's been two centuries since that has happened since then, and Kamala Harris displays an unprecedented willingness to use government power to silence you.

The origins of Cruz’s concern - shared by editors at the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere - is a post-Democratic presidential primary debate in 2019 when Harris, then a US Senator and candidate for president, debated with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) over whether to ban Donald Trump from Twitter (he was eventually banned and only recently reinstated by new owner Elon Musk):

He has lost his privileges and it should be taken down. And the bottom line is that you can’t say that you have one rule for Facebook and you have a different rule for Twitter. The same rule has to apply, which is that there has to be a responsibility that is placed on these social media sites to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop.

CNN’s Jake Tapper and then-presidential candidate, US Sen. Kamala Harris, in 2019. Source: Mediate.

“Government must regulate speech across all media platforms and dictate one set of rules for what people are permitted to say?” asked the Wall Street Journal. “This is a proposal for a frontal assault on the First Amendment, and a great reason for voters not to grant Ms. Harris the promotion she now seeks.” Amen.

It got worse for Harris Americans when she added this: “Twitter has terms of use policy, and there are terms of use dictate who receives the privilege of speaking on that platform and who does not. . . . I'm asking that Twitter does what it has done in previous occasions, which is to revoke someone's privilege because they've not lived up to the advantages of the privilege.”

Get that? Freedom of speech is a privilege. She has a point if you believe our rights come from government, as they do in Canada with their “Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” Except that which government grants and can take away isn’t a “right.” It’s a privilege. Just ask Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and a constitutional expert on the First Amendment.

Harris often speaks of free speech as if it is a privilege bestowed by the government like a license and that you can be taken off the road if you are viewed as a reckless driver.

It doesn’t get better with her prevaricating running mate, the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz. “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate especially, especially on our democracy.” That’s a Kamala-worthy word salad that is also demonstrably false. No one this ignorant of the First Amendment has any business serving in any elected capacity in this country. He certainly has no problem with the First Amendment when lying about his military service record.

When Democrats say they want to regulate or censure “misinformation” or “disinformation” that varies from the their official government narrative, you can count on one thing: ultimately, there is no such thing as misinformation, just differences of opinions or judgment. Just look at who the federal government tried to censor over Covid, and why. Pay attention to Berenson’s suit against President Biden. He has standing. Substack is also under attack for not doing a better job of “moderating” (read: censoring) its contributors.

Turley:

For free speech advocates, the 2024 election is looking strikingly similar to the election of 1800. One of the greatest villains in our history discussed in my book was President John Adams, who used the Alien and Sedition Acts to arrest his political opponents – including journalists, members of Congress and others. Many of those prosecuted by the Adams administration were Jeffersonians. In the election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson ran on the issue and defeated Adams.

It was the only presidential election in our history where free speech was a central issue for voters. It should be again. While democracy is really not on the ballot this election, free speech is.

I disagree with Turley on one point. Democracy - rule of the people through free and fair elections, is on the ballot, and hand-to-hand combat is underway both in Congress through the SAVE Act and state and local rules and procedures to make sure votes are accurately cast by individual citizens and counted transparently. Ask yourself why Democratic Members of Congress are fighting so hard against legislation that would simply make it law to prove your citizenship before voting. There’s only one reason, and it’s not because it’s “already illegal.” There’s evidence that non citizens are being registered and voting. Just ask the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF).

There’s a reason that a growing number of Americans are losing trust and confidence in our elections. That’s a big problem.

“This we can say for certain,” says PILF: “Foreigners are on the voter rolls across the United States.” Ask yourself as well why so many states are refusing to update their voter rolls when others, such as Virginia and Texas, are removing thousands of deceased, relocated, and other unqualified voters. Why are Pennsylvania and other states with notoriously inaccurate voter rolls and fighting hard to keep them that way?

But the larger point on the freedom of speech is one I suspect both Darryl Cooper and Victor Davis Hanson would agree. So should you.