I originally posted this in March of 2018 after reading a piece by one of the survivors of the Parkland school shooting. The piece is a manifesto to "fix" the gun laws of the United States, and by "fix" we all know what anti-gun activists mean. And to be sure, the assault hasn't abated, even if you haven't heard of it. The only good thing is that there are counties across the United States that are fighting back by becoming sanctuary zones, but I wonder if that alone will be enough.
To be sure, just saying "we won't enforce federal gun laws" won't be enough, and that's not what I'm necessarily talking about. What I'm referring to is this. I know it's not related to the 2nd amendment per se, but what Psaki is saying here is a direct assault on the 1st, which in time WILL effect the ability of pro-2A people to reach audiences with their content. The reason this is so pernicious is illustrated best when we look back at that "manifesto" and think about what it means when coupled with this idea of "promoting trusted content" while policing "misinformation."
Who the hell decides? According to the Guardian US the kids from Parker are the trusted content- they got page space and guest editorship of the paper in 2018. Did Colion Noir get such treatment? Would any other pro-2A person get such treatment? I can make an assumption that they'd likely not. But the anti-2A people do, and we see this come up a lot on the news. Like this. Or this. Or this. There's no shortage of anti-2A stuff out there. Even NPR has been on the bandwagon (lest you think they don't have a dog in the fight). Few in media are on the side of those who wish to retain the 2nd amendment.
But make no mistake, many of these same people are also championing the censorship of their adversaries in the public spaces like Facebook, Twitter, and the like. They've even gone so far as to claim that reporters (what we currently refer to as "The Press") have the ability to see/read things we normies cannot, though the video I have seen for this seems to have been scrubbed- which is kinda the point. Censorship, at any level, doesn't promote the expression of ideas- whether good or bad- it quashes them. And if you want to try and argue that stopping the spread of misinformation is a good thing, I have to ask you again- who the hell decides?
I'm not going to say that there isn't rampant misinformation about a whole host of issues. See the flat earth and young earth debates to get an idea of the level of misinfo that is out there. What I am saying is that you don't combat "misinformation" by scrubbing it from the internet. You have to show how that information is wrong. Slapping a "fact check" on something isn't going to help as most of those "fact checking sites" are biased as all hell (watch the JP Spears episode linked to the end to see why that is). Unfortunately, lots of us are lazy or busy and don't have the desire or the time to search for the "Facts" ourselves. So we simply listen to others who we assume have done their research and trust them- until they talk about something we understand- but then we go back to trusting them again when we don't know what they're talking about.
The simple fact that the current administration is having dialogs with Facebook (and likely the rest of the social media heavy hitters) to "curb misinformation" should concern you- at least a little. What reason would the government have to censor- I mean, advocate for social media to clean up- "misinformation," and how can we trust that those entities (government and social media) aren't just pushing they're preferred narrative to accomplish certain goals? I mean, it's not like governments or media have ever published anything to disparage an entire group of people before... Or advocate for the removal of rights... Or cover up something they did that was bad...
Again- who decides what is worthy of scrutiny and what isn't? That is the Pandora's box that we're watching get opened before our very eyes, and we should be very concerned with it. Once Government has de-facto control over the spread of information, we have a serious problem on our hands for not only the 2nd Amendment, but all the rest as well.