Left-Wing Disinformation v Right-Wing Misinformation
Left-Wing Disinformation v Right-Wing Misinformation
One activist’s truth is another one’s poison
Ever since the death of George Floyd, being a white, middle-aged male involved in public debates has been a delicate affair. Unless I bow to a left-wing agenda, play the pronoun game and obsessively concentrate my time on social justice issues, I would be cancelled out, my ideas denigrated as white privilege and my person classified as institutionally racist, colonialist and representative of a corrupt, dying capitalist system. There is no possibility of being heard on complicated subjects without first genuflecting to their simple solutions (be it on climate change, financing of social goods or benefits or actions on global political crises).
Since that time, left-wing activists, the self-proclaimed standard-bearers of “the truth”, have squeezed their little box of enemies into tighter and tighter confines, labeling those like me as part of a right-wing misinformation machine that denies COVID, climate change, election results and the Holocaust. You are either with us or you are some nutjob far-right conspiracy theorist. A recent article published in Nature entitled “Misinformation poses a bigger threat to democracy than you might think” makes such claims.
The article makes it clear: misinformation is a serious problem for democratic institutions. But by misinformation, they mean anything industry or conservative political leaders say. Perhaps they were motivated to rush this tirade through out of horror at the rise in popularity of conservative political parties and the increasing normalization of the extreme right following certain European elections.
The seven authors of this article were left-wing academics, including the poster-child for post-capitalist, anti-industry hate campaigns: Naomi Oreskes. In a previous Firebreak article, Oreskes was found to be attacking researchers funded by industry while she was secretly being paid off by a tort law firm funded by foundations she was working with to sue oil companies out of existence. In this article, Naomi remains consistent with her indefatigable hypocrisy.
The article itself is very sloppy and poorly researched with no clear structure, unfinished citations and embarrassing knowledge gaps. For example, the seven authors somehow failed to differentiate disinformation (the active attempt to mislead someone) from misinformation (the failure to acquire accurate information). They chose to refer to misinformation when, in most cases, they were showing cases of disinformation.
With all of the PhDs working on this paper, you would imagine someone would want to argue how social media algorithms are dividing political communities (tribes or echo-chambers) so that misinformation is easily validated within the silos. … Not a word. Perhaps this is because three of the seven authors claimed consulting work for Google and Meta in the competing interests section (the two firms, by the way, are held in a positive light throughout the article).
It is a further sad indictment of the journal Nature to have published a piece whose only merit is that it aligned with their political ideology on trending topics.
Re-educating the Public
Rather than examine how people can be misinformed today, the authors try to portray the world into a clear case of good v evil, where the evil side (those they politically disagree with) are maliciously abusing innocent people who will believe anything they are told. So their answer is simple: the public (never actually defined) must be protected from these right-wing manipulators and properly “educated”.
There are consequences when we allow insulated left-wing academics to leave their ivory towers and try to influence political discourse. They start using words like “protect the public” from challenging ideas, to “educational interventions” via “evidence-based campaigns”. Yes, Naomi, we are all so unfortunately stupid and are waiting for you and your ilk to set us right.
Ask anyone older than 50 from Eastern Europe what it felt like to be protected from information and thoroughly re-educated.
The solution that information must be controlled and “classified” as false or misleading implies a simplistic approach to discourse. If a group of politically active academics declare that they represent the consensus on an issue (say that we must immediately transition from fossil-fuel based energy and transportation due to the threats of climate change), then anyone who disagrees with the self-proclaimed consensus are to be classified as a threat or a liar and excluded from the debate, ie, cancelled. As activists will argue that industry actors are going to mislead for profit, they are excluded from the discourse from the get-go.
How does this left-wing solution not encourage misinformation? It supports protecting the public from challenging information, re-educating them and excluding anyone who does not follow their declared consensus (for protective measures). Just sit back and let the experts we agree with feed you your information (and for good measure, let’s call it the “truth”).
As someone who has been frequently cancelled by activists on the left for challenging their dogma or exposing their interests, I recognize these tactics. They believe there are facts and truths (their facts and their truths) that must be protected from analysis or discussion. But these facts will only be strengthened if they can resist falsification, if they are challenged and shown to be evident. If you censor anyone who challenges your position, you are not only admitting that your argument may not be solid enough, but that you have other, non-evidence-based objectives in defending your information. In other words, your objectives are political and not scientific.
Psychological Inoculation
Another solution to right-wing misinformation proposed by the authors of this recent Nature article is chillingly referred to as “psychological inoculation” (also known as “pre-emptive correction” or “prebunking”).
Before any “untruths” are spread, authorities can speak out and discredit the source or put forward the politically-cleansed position. In the old days we used to call psychological inoculation: “propaganda”, but I suppose the authors of this article find this tool far too efficient to get tangled up in semantics. A good example used in the past by some of the authors of this paper is to prebunk a person’s evidence by claiming that it is industry-based. The psychological inoculation here is that after decades of denigrating and tobacconizing all industry groups, no one would possibly believe any information with industry ties or funding. This is exactly the Oreskes strategy outlined in her La Jolla Playbook.
Sorry, but no matter how cleverly dressed up in academic hyperbole and claims of moral and intellectual superiority, this psychological inoculation recommendation is simply a call for more socialist propaganda. I marvel at the hypocrisy here. Naomi Oreskes’ book, Merchants of Doubt, criticized industry propaganda and the attempt to control what people thought.
A New Moral Majority
In the late 70s and 80s a group of righteous religious actors entered the US political arena claiming to represent the moral majority. Their conservative ideology was restrictive, intolerant and manipulated by the right-wing political actors of the day. Convinced they held the truth, they suppressed any opposition. Today this new class of American socialists, in their cult campaigns against capitalism, corporations and industry, are playing the same game declaring a moral majority in the fight against disinformers.
The Oreskes group exhibits an intellectual superiority – we know better than you so we are just going to silence you, re-educate you and protect you from challenging ideas. This is coupled with a new moral righteousness expounding the social justice virtues of sustainability, diversity, tolerance and equality. We are protecting you from certain views not only to save democracy, but because it is morally just.
This article portrays the opponents of left-wing activists as lying, polluting, conspiracy theorists that threaten an innocent public into believing their misinformation. The public (too innocent and docile) can only be cured by a program of re-education, censorship and psychological inoculation. They claim to be doing this for the good of humanity, democracy and, well, to safeguard basic truths. These zealots are acting on a sense of intellectual and moral superiority and are, quite frankly, dangerous. National Socialists and Communists once tried to re-engineer public beliefs to fit some morally and politically advanced cult ideology and things did not go so well.
Left-wing academics cannot see their own disinformation campaigns. So while they are trying to box all conservative or industry positions as extremist conspiracy theories, what about left-wing “misinformation” campaigns.
Beware of the Left-Wing Conspiracy Theorists
There have been some interesting campaigns on the left, manipulating certain actors, twisting evidence and using events to try to get the public to believe their political theories (that counts as disinformation, a much more egregious activity than simply being misinformed). They are trying to paint industry, technologies and conservative economic theories as conspiring against humanity and the planet (which can only be saved by transitions away from the capitalist model). Some examples:
Every forest fire, flood or heatwave; every case of airplane turbulence, crop failure or pandemic; every industrial or economic development… is linked to the existence of climate change and becomes the platform for furthering activist degrowth, deindustrialization campaigns. We’ll only be able to live safely, they argue, when capitalism is dead.
Campaigns against agricultural technologies leave the public afraid of extremely unlikely health risks in the food chain. Left-wing activists fund studies to link pesticides to a multitude of diseases while advancing their agroecological alternative of local, peasant-driven organic agriculture. The activists then link “industrial agriculture” not only to health risks and soil degradation, but that great public fear: climate change.
Biodiversity loss and the Sixth Mass Extinction (which we are told we are already suffering) is due to industrial expansion and must be corrected with an urgent series of transitions (in agriculture, energy production, transportation…). These transitions are non-negotiable, despite the fact that their extinction claims (like the loss of all honeybees) has been overblown and overplayed.
Humans, wildlife and the environment are being destroyed by plastic pollution. They have declared the Great Pacific Garbage Patch swallowing up an ocean, an explosion of microplastics and nano plastics surging through our bodies and an abandonment of nature by a callous, polluting industry. Most of the actual pollution claims come from unmentioned sources (like fishing nets and car tire dust) and the health claims are based on correlation and speculation, but that does not stop the fearmongers from continuing their relentless campaigns regardless how unsustainable the alternatives to plastics are.
None of these fear campaigns are as serious as the activists portend. In most cases, the arguments rely on studies done by ideologically-cleansed academics funded by left-wing foundations and other interest groups to deliver results to feed into their political campaigns. This is known as activist science. Data is cherrypicked, conclusions drawn by flimsy correlations and media campaigns built around the studies (often before they are published in pay-to-play journals). The left’s objective is to disinform the public, raise unnecessary fears and paint the status quo as diabolical to further their political agenda: to deindustrialize, interrupt capitalism and invoke systemic change.
And for good measure, they refer to their cherry-picking, overblown fearmongering and unjustifiable correlations as the “truth”. How could the editors at Nature ever explain why they published this horrible article?
Torturing the Truth
Left-wing political activists are also engaging in the services of US tort law firms to strengthen their claims and “educate” the public about the dangers of certain industrial products. Some activist scientists, paid by tort law firms and working with NGOs and interest groups, got a small WHO agency, IARC, to declare glyphosate as probably carcinogenic. No other government agency supports this claim but that did not stop tort law firms from extorting billions in a settlement with glyphosate producer, Bayer (and sharing this wealth with the other anti-industry interest groups).
Naomi Oreskes engineered this legislation by litigation tactic fourteen years ago to try to destroy targeted industries by suing them out of existence. She herself has personally profited from consulting fees from a tort law firm, Sher Edling, which only exists to sue fossil fuel companies for the consequences of climate change. Facts in a courtroom take on emotional baggage and can easily be manipulated by opportunistic lawyers. Disinformation motivated by greed and courtroom showmanship.
The authors of this paper, regrettably published in Nature at the beginning of the month, focused only on extreme cases of right-wing misinformation to argue such conspiracy theorists were a threat against democracy. They should have looked at the threats from their own disinformation campaigns. But I suppose that would interfere with their political ambition to re-educate and psychologically inoculate the public and censor dissent.