Is GOP domestically produced disinformation preferable to the imported Russian brand? I have a feeling they’re both the same product packaged differently.
— Jay Nonymous (@sglockenspeil) August 26, 2022
“A lie by any other name would smell as rancid.” - Shakespeare’s campaign manager.
There's a lot of leftists who don't understand...okay, I understand this sentence can end in a trillion different ways.
There's a lot of leftists who don't understand...how borders and citizenship works. Jay (that's Jay Nonymous, not Jay Gallé whom he's responding to) is one of them. His question is whether or not there should be a distinction between how United States government agencies treat people who say untrue things (such as, say, #NiggerLivesMoreImportantThanSocietyMotherFucker riots were "mostly peaceful" except for all those secret Trump supporters) different based on where they are produced from. There are four possible answers to this question (in descending order of sanity):
- No, both domestic and foreign misinformation should be treated the same: utterly ignored
- Yes, domestic misinformation should be treated less severely than foreign misinformation
- No, both domestic and foreign information should be treated the same: vigorous state control
- Yes, foreign misinformation should be treated less severely than domestic misinformation
Option (4) is clearly not anything anybody is particular interested in. Therefore Jay basically picked the worst answer to his own question (in other words he shouldn't have asked it). There are arguments to be made in favour of restricting the political speech of foreign entities: particularly entities owned or operated by a foreign government. As a semi random example, President Monkey broke American law by deliberately allowing foreign citizens to contribute to his election campaigns. The understanding is that American citizens choose American legislators, and with an influx of money from people whose interests may be served in American policy favouring non-Americans it becomes far more likely that such policies be implemented. While it's certainly possible for a government to naturally enact policies which explicitly harm its citizenry without discernible benefit, it's generally understood in a democratic system that this isn't the norm.
So if keeping "foreign money" out of elections (because it can be used to buy campaign ads, for example) is deemed a valid action, then it's likely that foreign political commentary can be tagged along for the ride. (If this carryover makes you feel a little squishy, remember that Citizens United was successful because it performed the line integral in the other direction). In the same way that I wasn't allowed to buy an authentic "Make America Great Again" hat, I similarly am not allowed to move south and immediately start making just any political expression I feel like.
However, those arguments utterly and completely end when we switch from foreign to domestic. There should be as little (ideally zero) restrictions as possible on citizens of a nation to communicate politically. They can promise a chicken in every pot even if they know that's impossible. They can scream up and down that God-Emperor Donald Trump is a Russian spy even though that's a complete and made up lie. They are even allowed to foster rebellion against the democratic system by supporting explicitly fascist or communist (but I repeat myself!) political parties. This is not, one might note, an exclusively American phenomenon: Britain routinely bans the import of speakers (even from Commonwealth countries!) who are planning to say things that remain legal to say in Britain by British citizens. The European Union banned Russian TV station Russia Today (RT) from broadcasting within its borders despite the right to free political expression being enshrined in law: it's still legal however for a Greek or Belgian to stand on a street corner and read a transcript of last night's broadcast. Indeed it was perfectly legal for U.S. citizens to start/join political movements inspired by information directly or indirectly provided to them by Russian media/agents/citizens.
So it's generally understood, whether morally justifiable or not, that foreign speech can be treated differently than domestic speech. Part of this is the same reason people get so (justifiably) upset when an immigrant (particularly an illegal one) commits a heinous crime, and often argued that he should be removed immediately and ideally changed so people like him don't come in. Which is where we swing back to Jay's angry charge of "misinformation".
If Jay is correct and the GOP was guilty of "misinformation", then that's tough titty toenails. As we've already covered, lying U.S. citizens such as Jay are allowed to spread all the false information they like. Americans might wish people like him weren't in the country, but there's no way around that: as a (presumed) citizen you can't keep him out or send him anywhere. AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Richard Glossip and Bill Cosby were all born in America: like it or not, you're stuck with them. Piers Morgan and Javier Bardem and Jean Macean and Gerson Fuentes are not: they don't have to be allowed in which makes any actions they take kind of your fault.
Hilariously enough, of course, Jay is lying about "GOP misinformation". The Hunter Biden laptop story was real. It was suppressed by social media who claimed it was a Russian fake. While no smoking gun has yet emerged indicating that Facebook (or other sites) did so implicitly or explicitly on the direction of state actors, such a thing does constitute a serious breech of the First Amendment specifically.
So while Jay claims to fear the false bogeyman of GOP misinformation (and, meanwhile, exaggerates the almost-entirely-false bogeyman of Russian misinformation), he really should be devoting his time to learn more about the border.
He's already admitted that he doesn't want to give the right of unfettered political speech to foreigners: now time to understand that has left him only morally justified to hold Option (2).
