Former president Barack Obama Thursday called for regulation of free speech because Americans have lost their “capacity to distinguish between fact, opinion, and wholesale fiction.” Prefacing his remarks as “pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist,” Obama said “people are dying because of misinformation.” Obama’s point is that there is so much misinformation and disinformation circulating through social media that nobody knows the truth, and his big idea on fixing the problem is for the government to regulate free speech in conjunction with a committee of people from various aspects of American life—the technology industry, political advocacy groups, and government bureaucrats.
Trouble is, what Obama wants to regulate is dissent to his politics. There were two examples that he repeated throughout his speech: Election fraud and vaccination information. He said, “A lot of times this makes it impossible to tell the difference between, say, a peer-reviewed article by Dr. Anthony Fauci and a miracle cure being pitched by a huckster… The fact that scientists developed safe, effective vaccines in record time is an unbelievable achievement. And yet despite the fact that we’ve now, essentially clinically tested the vaccine on billions of people worldwide, around 1 in 5 Americans is still willing to put themselves at risk and put their families at risk rather than get vaccinated. People are dying because of misinformation.” There is so much wrong with this statement, starting with admitting that people worldwide were used for experimentation.
He also used the election as an example: “President Trump’s own attorney general has said that the Justice Department uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud. A review of the ballots in Arizona’s largest county, the results of which were endorsed by some pretty courageous local Republicans, because many of them were harassed and received death threats, actually more votes for President Biden and fewer votes for President Trump. And yet today, as we speak, a majority of Republicans still insist that President Biden’s victory was not legitimate. That’s a lot of people.” But Obama’s misinformation is ignoring the massive voter integrity issues uncovered in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin. People are going to jail for voter fraud. But Obama failed to mention that. It’s his version of free speech. Only.
The dissent over the COVID vaccine and treatment has many peer-reviewed studies and more facts are coming in every day that the experimental vaccine was not as advertised, and that people did die—not from misinformation, but from government-mandated treatments. Treatments that may have prevented those deaths were censored and denied as misinformation. But Obama doesn’t acknowledge these truths. He wants to regulate free speech to only speech that supports his political agenda. He is not promoting democracy, but tyranny. A government bureaucracy regulating free speech would be worse than one that regulates healthcare. And we have seen first-hand those results. He also wants to educate children on how to recognize disinformation. Obama said that this new truth would strengthen democracy.
He said, “It is a chance for all of us to fight for truth, not absolute truth, not a fixed truth, but to fight for what, deep down, we know is more true, is right. It’s a chance for us to do that not just because we’re afraid of what will happen if we don’t, but because we’re hopeful about what can happen if we do.” So to Obama there is no absolute truth, only what we know is “more true.” Folks, it is far better to allow free speech than to regulate it. And yes, there is a lot of bad information coming from the left and the right, even among Christians who should know better. But I submit that Christ himself is the answer, “If you continue in my word, then you are my disciples indeed; And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free (John 8:31-32).” Christ sent us the Spirit of Truth to guide us in all truth—something Obama and his political ilk would not understand.
