The hypocrisy of ‘those braying the loudest about misinformation’

[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire.]

By Carl M. Cannon
Real Clear Wire

We live in a time when U.S. politics is not only hyper-partisan, but toxic. Party activists on both sides of the divide assign a higher value to slurring those on the other side – and covering up for those on their side – than to telling the unvarnished truth.

In this hothouse environment, some well-meaning people assert that misinformation and “disinformation” threaten the very pillars of self-government.

The most obvious and immediate problem with this approach is hypocrisy: Many of those braying the loudest about misinformation have made wildly untrue assertions and statements themselves. The long-term problem is that freedom is and always will be utterly incompatible with a society in which the government or private media monopolies control the right of people to speak or write or broadcast without being censored.

In the waning days of December 1793, Thomas Paine was arrested in Paris. This was the height of the “Reign of Terror,” and the result of being detained on political charges, as Paine was, usually meant the guillotine. Paine certainly thought that was to be his fate.

Born in 1737 in England, Tom Paine was introduced to Ben Franklin in London in 1774. It was a fortuitous meeting. Franklin helped Paine emigrate to Philadelphia where he became a journalist. Just 13 months later, Paine became famous on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean by publishing “Common Sense,” a blistering attack on the idea that Americans should be ruled by a faraway king – or any monarch at all.

This call to revolution, which pre-dated the Declaration of Independence by six months, galvanized the colonies. In a letter to his wife Abigail, John Adams described Paine’s 47-page pamphlet as “a ray of revelation” that has arrived “seasonably to clear our doubts, and to fix our choice.”

Paine was embraced by George Washington, who allowed him to embed with the Continental Army. Restless soul that he was, Paine did not settle down after independence was won, however. He gravitated toward the more radical French Revolution, visiting Paris in 1789 and returning to England to write a rebuttal to Edmund Burke’s critique of France’s excesses.

Paine’s two-part book, “Rights of Man,” prompted a reaction the British weren’t in a position to effect in 1776 when he lived in America. Paine was arrested and charged with “seditious libel” by William Pitt’s government, which was in the process of trying to suppress speeches and writing it feared would bring the fires raging across the English Channel to their own shores.

The trial, which began on Dec. 18, 1792, resulted in a mixed verdict: Although the jury found Paine guilty, outside the courtroom he was hailed as a hero by a supportive mob. For his part, William Pitt was emboldened by the case and began arresting, prosecuting, and jailing printers who published “Rights of Man.”

So Paine himself made way to Paris where he was initially embraced by French radicals. But his opposition to capital punishment didn’t square with the Jacobins’ grisly methods of operation, and Paine was soon detained in a castle-turned-prison. Although he felt abandoned by his old ally George Washington, incoming envoy James Monroe frantically pulled strings to get Paine released. Whether it was American intervention – or the fact that Robespierre himself went to the guillotine, Paine’s life was spared.

Afterward, he returned to the United States, but the new nation wasn’t yet ready for “The Age of Reason,” the book he had been writing in France. Tom Paine, a hero of free thought, died poor and unlamented in 1809.

But the lessons of Thomas Paine’s life’s work must be learned – and re-learned – with each generation. Disingenuous FBI bureaucrats and easily spooked members of Congress may think they are protecting unwitting Americans from “disinformation” by stifling the expression of ideas they dislike on Twitter and elsewhere. But to me, they are simply updated versions of William Pitts. Likewise, “woke” social justice warriors and their allies in Big Tech and the media claim to be championing progressive policies by censoring ideas they find false or distasteful. Instead, they are modern-day Jacobins, who have found authoritarianism and absolutism to be heady drugs.

The battle lines form again and again all over the globe. Today, France is a beacon of free expression, and has been for two generations. When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's “literary investigation” into the vast network of prisons for political dissidents – a system at the core of the Soviet Union's existence – was released on Dec. 28, 1973, it was published in Paris.

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Any Russian publisher who dared print “The Gulag Archipelago” would have been committing suicide. Suicide was, by the way, the Kremlin's official explanation of what happened to Elizaveta Denisovna Voronyanskaya, a typist and Solzhenitsyn collaborator who was arrested in 1973 and interrogated for five days by the KGB. After her release, she was found hanged in a grim stairwell of her Leningrad apartment building. Solzhenitsyn suspected she was murdered, as do I.

Famed American diplomat George Kennan pronounced the book she worked on “the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times.” TASS, the Soviet news agency, termed it a work of “unfounded slander.” It was the opposite of unfounded: Solzhenitsyn had been a political prisoner himself and had worked on the manuscript for decades. And Soviet leaders unwittingly underscored the veracity of the author’s work by deporting him from the country of his birth and forbidding the Russian people from reading “The Gulag Archipelago” for themselves.

The great writer subsequently won the Nobel Prize for literature, lived safely in the United States, and later returned to Russia to live out his final days after the demise of the system he did so much to expose. But the fight is never done. Today, Russia is ruled by a former KGB functionary who has brought back a feature of Soviet-style despotism practiced by Stalin: sending assassins abroad to murder political rivals.

Meanwhile, an odious feature of Chinese-style communism revealed itself three Decembers ago when the government in China handed out a four-year prison term to 37-year-old lawyer and citizen journalist Zhang Zhan for reporting on her government's handling of COVID-19.

Zhang had traveled from her home in Shanghai to Wuhan to document what was really happening with the virus. Her videotaped interviews revealed that the government was lying about the perils of the lethal virus making its way around the world. Pointing out official mendacity is a crime in China. The actual charge is “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” which is a pretty good working definition of what self-respecting reporters should be doing – “without fear or favor, regardless of any party, sect, or interest involved.”

Vive la liberté!

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