Each grade in elementary school has its bullies who threaten the peace-loving kids. And the most irritating of the bullies tend to be those who not only threaten, but also spout righteous and fabricated “rationales” for their assumed powerplays.
Sometimes those kids grow out of their bullying, lying ways. Other times, they become criminals, media celebs, collectivist philosophers, and megalomaniacal politicians who adopt the conceit that they can create Plato’s insane “Ideal City State” through even more force, and through, of course, their new “noble lies.”
It seems as if the people who populate the San Diego County Board of Supervisors are those kinds of bullies, because, they just passed a resolution declaring that what THEY call “medical misinformation” is a “public health crisis” and will be their tax-funded target.
Translation:
Free speech is a threat to our oft-unfounded, scientifically flimsy, anti-constitutional, and staunchly immoral “public health” edicts, and so we will take your cash to shout you down.
Sans any supportive evidence, the Board ambiguously claims that the proliferation of “health misinformation has created a culture of mistrust and has prolonged the COVID-19 pandemic.”
That’s right, politicians making a broad-brush claim about dangerous “health misinformation” provide no substantiating evidence to back up that claim.
The word “hypocrisy” come to mind.
But to point that out likely will see one accused of “medical misinformation” by those in power, so we’d better just stay mum.
As Deborah Sullivan Brennan reports for the San Diego Union-Tribune:
The board voted 3-2 after more than 250 people signed up and most spoke against the motion, saying it would lead to restrictions on free speech and other violations of personal freedoms.
Sensible people, there.
And she offers information on what the three Democrats in the Board’s majority want to do:
(T)he measure would create platforms for local medical authorities to counter the misinformation, and it would direct the county to follow the recommendations of U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy in his advisory ‘Confronting Health Misinformation.’ They include identifying and labeling health misinformation, examining gaps in health information, documenting sources and impact of misinformation, developing digital resources and training for health professionals, and working with the medical community to develop websites.
Can you say, “fascism”?
This sounds uncannily like the renewed “Portman-Murphy Countering Propaganda Act” that recently was passed in DC – a statute that allows the feds to shower nearly $200 million on regime-friendly “news sources” that tow the federal propaganda line. It makes taxpayers pay for the publication of ideas and claims that promote government narratives, not necessarily the truth.
THAT “government-favored-business” team-up originally came to life in December of 2016, thanks to the aforementioned Senators, their legislative pals, and Barack Obama, but in 2018, President Trump did not continue the propaganda program.
Now, it’s back, and the local dictators in San Diego want to mimic it to push their positions on COVID-19.
Even IF the government and its tax-funded “journalists” could be trusted to publish the truth – about COVID-19, about nutrition, or anything else -- there would be no moral justification to force people to pay for it.
The moral way to seek truth is through the market and free will.
It’s simple, and the bureaucrats in San Diego don’t seem to like how simple it is.
Related: UK Government Bans Phrase 'Fake News' in Public Documents - Seriously. | MRCTV