Won’t someone save democracy from the people?
Free speech on the internet endangers democracy, Hussein Obama told Stanford University.
The widely hailed speech at Big Tech’s favorite university claimed that autocrats are “subverting democracy” and that democracies have “grown dangerously complacent.” In the slow parade of teleprompter cliches he even warned that “too often we’ve taken freedom for granted.”
To Obama, the threat to democracy doesn’t come from government power, but the lack of it.
“You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe. Once they lose trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions, in each other, in the possibility of truth, the game’s won,” he summed up.
Like every Obama speech, “Challenges to Democracy in the Digital Information Realm” didn’t offer anything new, just a distillation of familiar talking points and misplaced assumptions.
The assumption at the heart of Obama’s speech and that of the range of arguments depicting free speech as a cultural and national threat is that the purpose of discourse is state power.
Obama, like many post-liberal lefty critics of free speech, reduces speech to its social impact and its social impact to its political impact. This holistic integration is so fundamental to Marxists and many lefties that they don’t even think twice about the idea that everything we do is reducible to a move on the great abacus of social justice. The food you eat, the car you buy, and the words you say have the potential to either save or damn the planet and humanity. Continue reading Obamunism: Only Internet Fascism Can Save Democracy
