{"id":1423183,"date":"2022-04-07T08:30:35","date_gmt":"2022-04-07T12:30:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1423183"},"modified":"2022-04-07T08:30:53","modified_gmt":"2022-04-07T12:30:53","slug":"barack-obama-and-company-dishonestly-lecture-uchicago-students-on-disinformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/barack-obama-and-company-dishonestly-lecture-uchicago-students-on-disinformation\/","title":{"rendered":"Barack Obama And Company Dishonestly Lecture UChicago Students On \u2018Disinformation\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">20<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fbarack-obama-and-company-dishonestly-lecture-uchicago-students-on-disinformation%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1423183&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/q-d.png\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p>Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to attend a fire prevention speech delivered by an arsonist? Or perhaps a child safety seminar led by a pedophile? Well, that\u2019s exactly what it felt like Wednesday during the University of Chicago\u2019s \u201cConference on Disinformation and Erosion of Democracy,\u201d featuring some of the greatest promulgators of disinformation and illiberalism in American history.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Former President Barack Obama had the nerve to help open the event, although his administration famously spied on the Donald Trump campaign with a secret court warrant backed by the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded Christopher Steele dossier which, in an ironic twist, was the product of <em>Russian disinformation<\/em>. Democrats used this disinformation to repeatedly smear President Trump and undermine the integrity of the 2016 election.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Former chief advisor to the Obama administration David Axelrod moderated two of Wednesday\u2019s discussions. To this day, Axelrod still has the gall to repeat the debunked Russian collusion hoax. He even repeated it Wednesday.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>To make matters worse, The Atlantic\u2019s Anne Applebaum joined the stage to share her \u201cexpert knowledge\u201d on Russian disinformation. When asked pointedly by my Chicago Thinker colleague Daniel Schmidt about whether she thought the media acted inappropriately by dismissing the Hunter Biden story, Applebaum condescendingly responded that she didn\u2019t \u201cfind it to be interesting.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>What did she really mean? The Hunter Biden scandal (now even reluctantly <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2022\/03\/16\/us\/politics\/hunter-biden-tax-bill-investigation.html\">acknowledged<\/a> by the partisan New York Times) didn\u2019t fit Applebaum\u2019s narrative. So it was better left <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2021\/10\/14\/the-2020-election-wasnt-stolen-it-was-vandalized-by-democrats-big-tech-and-the-media\/\">censored<\/a> and unreported.\u00a0<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><\/figure>\n<p>And just in case UChicago\u2019s \u201cdisinformation\u201d conference couldn\u2019t get more laughably hypocritical, this Thursday and Friday will feature a swath of dishonest left-wing hacks like <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2021\/05\/14\/would-an-actual-potato-be-better-at-hosting-reliable-sources-than-brian-stelter\/\">Brian Stelter<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2020\/11\/19\/dhs-official-fired-cybersecurity-director-did-not-have-authority-to-speak-on-election-fraud\/\">Christopher Krebs<\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2019\/05\/17\/senator-amy-klobuchar-refuses-condemn-late-term-abortion-view\/\">Amy Klobuchar<\/a>. There will also be a few non-leftists deemed useful by leftists, like <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2020\/04\/14\/a-remedial-explanation-of-federalism-for-jonah-goldberg\/\">Jonah Goldberg<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2021\/05\/11\/adam-kinzinger-is-taking-pages-from-pelosis-playbook-to-attack-republicans\/\">Adam Kinzinger.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The speaker lineup makes things clear: the conference seeking to combat \u201cdisinformation\u201d does just the opposite. It celebrates some of America\u2019s biggest liars as they spread more lies.\u00a0<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Who Are the Arbiters of  Truth?<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>During his Wednesday address, Obama self-righteously claimed that \u201cYou have to fight to provide people [with] the information they need to be free and self-governing.\u201d The catch is, who gets to decide which information is good and which information is bad? Obama does. Or, at least, he thinks he and his partisan peers are the special \u201cchosen ones\u201d who <em>should<\/em> decide what is \u201cdisinformation.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s take a look at the specific \u201cdisinformation\u201d Obama is concerned about.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn our society, you have currently roughly 40 percent of the country that appears convinced that the current president was elected fraudulently and that the election was rigged,\u201d Obama told his audience, making no mention of the fact that larger percentages of Democrats believed the same thing after 2016.<\/p>\n<p>Americans are<a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/01\/06\/j6-hysteria-is-how-media-and-other-democrats-are-avoiding-accountability-for-their-rigging-of-the-2020-election\/\"> entirely justified<\/a> in questioning the results of the 2020 election. Tech oligarch Mark Zuckerberg spent $419 million to interfere in key states\u2019 election processes. At the same time, Big Tech consistently censored conservative thought leaders. The corporate media, Democrats, and Big Tech all conspired to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. And we now know that 16 percent of Biden voters say they would not have voted for Biden had they learned about Hunter\u2019s laptop before election day.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Obama proceeded to lament that \u201cYou have 30 percent to 40, 35 percent of the country that has chosen not to avail itself of a medical miracle. The development of a vaccine faster than anything we\u2019ve ever seen before, which by the way now has been clinically tested by about a billion people and yet, are still refusing to take it despite extraordinary risks to themselves and their families.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Once again, Obama used his powerful platform to mock Americans\u2019 genuine concerns. <a href=\"https:\/\/thechicagothinker.com\/editorial-uchicago-must-end-its-booster-mandate-we-are-not-lab-rats\/\">Americans<\/a>\u2018 legitimate reasons for questioning Covid injections include <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bmj.com\/content\/375\/bmj-2021-068665\">vaccine-induced heart issues<\/a>, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2021\/09\/17\/health\/fda-advisers-booster-five-things\/index.html\">questionable<\/a> federal approval of the Pfizer vaccine, and rapidly <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2021\/07\/23\/science\/covid-vaccine-israel-pfizer.html\">declining<\/a> vaccine efficacy.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The leftist disinformation police fail to address the concerns of those who distrust the results of the 2020 election and make the personal health decision to reject Covid vaccines. This \u201cdisinformation\u201d is simply information they don\u2019t like, so perhaps a better phrase for disinformation is simply <em>inconvenient<\/em> information. Leftist elites like Obama don\u2019t want to thoughtfully consider ideas they disagree with.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>An Elite Power Grab\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>If the \u201cDisinformation\u201d conference speakers aren\u2019t actually interested in combating disinformation, then you\u2019re probably wondering what their true aims are. Combating \u201cdisinformation\u201d is actually code for America\u2019s elite recapturing the gate-keeping powers it lost during the advent of social media.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Maria Ressa, a Filipino-American journalist and recent Nobel Prize recipient, told her Wednesday audience that a destructive change to the \u201cinformation ecosystem\u201d happened when information started being distributed via social media, resulting in \u201cjournalists los[ing] the gatekeeping powers.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In a similar vein, Applebaum contended that today\u2019s disinformation problem is rooted in Americans\u2019 diminished trust in elite institutions like academia, government, and journalism. According to Applebaum, something needs to be done about this. Namely, she wants average Americans to stop disputing elite narratives:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p><em>\u00a0There\u2019s a whole ecosystem, here at universities, you know, there\u2019s a scientific method. And there are peer-reviewed papers and there are arguments among colleagues. And there is a conversation that leads people to conclude that something is true and you arrive at it through a series of institutions. And that\u2019s true in journalism, it\u2019s true in academia, it\u2019s true in government\u2026 and you reach conclusions based on these networks. If you disrupt those networks and make people feel no sense of faith in those networks, they hate universities, they hate journalists, they hate the government, they hate bureaucrats, then you suddenly find that what is true and what is not true is disputed.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Applebaum goes on to claim that these elite institutions need to \u201crecreat[e] communities of trust.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Many of the regular, \u201cdistrustful\u201d Americans Applebaum is describing wouldn\u2019t dispute that they are skeptical of elite institutions. The problem is that Applebaum is not interested in genuinely considering Americans\u2019 reasons for that distrust. <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/01\/27\/crazed-left-wing-course-listings-at-the-university-of-chicago-signify-the-downfall-of-the-american-mind\/\">Academia<\/a> is overrun with woke crazies. <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2021\/11\/24\/your-default-assumption-should-be-that-everything-corporate-media-says-is-a-lie\/\">Journalists<\/a> repeatedly lie to the American people. And our <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2021\/07\/07\/tucker-bidens-nsa-illegally-leaked-my-emails-to-press-in-smear-attempt-after-illegal-spying\/\">government<\/a> agencies and bureaucrats have spied on and abused Americans.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Yet Applbaum somehow can\u2019t even imagine these are valid reasons Americans distrust our institutions. Instead, she wants the government to regulate the algorithms of social media platforms to diminish those inconvenient voices.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>One might ask: how is controlling the narrative, as suggested by Applebaum, <em>not<\/em> a suppression of free speech? Well that\u2019s exactly what it is, but Ressa wants you to believe otherwise.<\/p>\n<p>According to Ressa, \u201cThis is not a free speech issue. Don\u2019t believe the lie,\u201d she said (while lying). \u201cThis is actually [about] algorithm[s] and the data. This is tech and data. That\u2019s what we need to look at. Look, I can turn to my neighbor and tell a lie, right? You can tell your neighbor a lie, but it won\u2019t get amplified to 10 million people. Right? It\u2019s the distribution that\u2019s the problem\u2026 It\u2019s a freedom of reach issue, not a freedom of speech issue.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Silicon Valley leftists already wield a frightening amount of control, but Ressa doesn\u2019t think it\u2019s enough. Our elites already ban <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2021\/01\/28\/youtube-nuked-two-videos-of-a-senate-hearing-on-covid-19-treatments\/\">content<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2021\/06\/11\/youtube-bans-sen-ron-johnson-for-discussing-early-treatment-of-covid-19\/\">people<\/a>, and even entire <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2021\/03\/16\/apple-wields-big-tech-power-to-bar-parler-from-rejoining-the-app-store\/\">platforms<\/a>. Can you imagine how much the censorship will skyrocket if our government amplifies algorithmic control over our speech? This is <em>undeniably<\/em> a freedom of speech issue. <\/p>\n<p>Ultimately, Obama perfectly summarized the problem with this entire \u201cdisinformation\u201d conference. \u201cIt is difficult for me to see how we win the contest of ideas if, in fact, we are not able to agree on a baseline of facts that allow the marketplace of ideas to work,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Allowing one side to decide what is and isn\u2019t true will turn the digital world into a deceptive mouthpiece for today\u2019s leftist elites. But of course, Obama, Applebaum, Axelrod, and their colleagues aren\u2019t interested in creating a free public square of ideas. What they want, as Obama said, is to win.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><em>This story was originally published in the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/thechicagothinker.com\">Chicago Thinker.<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\" \/>\n<p>\n  Evita Duffy is a senior contributor to The Federalist, co-founder of the Chicago Thinker, and a senior at the University of Chicago, where she studies American History. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, &#038; her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evitapduffy@uchicago.edu<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to attend a fire prevention speech delivered by an arsonist? Or perhaps a child safety seminar led by a pedophile? Well,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":580,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1423183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1423183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/580"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1423183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1423183\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1423183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1423183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1423183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}