There are some amongst us who worry about the blind acceptance of authoritative narratives, and then there are others who worry that such people exist. In fact, concerns regarding the existence of scepticism have risen to such levels recently that a crack team has been created to tackle the problem. Well, I say ‘crack team’ but the correct term, according to at least one particular member of this galaxy of talent, should be ‘all-star team’. This is evidenced by a recent tweet from the star concerned, Professor Sander van der Linden:
New paper in @Nature with all-star team! Ridiculous claims are made about how misinfo isn’t a problem, can’t be defined, & how fighting it = censorship. Nonsense. We know the playbook. Here’s why scientists need to stand up for truth & democracy!
So who is in this most recent assemblage of avengers, bravely helping the world to ‘stand up for truth and democracy’? Well, if I were to tell you that van der Linden has teamed up with Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook and Naomi Oreskes, you might just begin to understand the total absence of humility. You will probably also suspect that the article they have penned suffers from a total lack of self-awareness and logic, and of course you would be right.
The title of the article gives little hint as to the troubling logic it pursues: “Misinformation poses a bigger threat to democracy than you might think.” It is only when one takes on board the article’s basic premise for believing such a thing, and then sees the examples offered to illustrate the point, that one becomes aware that a circle is being squared. According to the self-proclaimed team of stars there are indeed irrefutable truths, and the threat to democracy does not lie in the fact that such claims are being made, but that there are people prepared to challenge them. The problem, as seen by the All-Stars, is easily stated. Apparently there are critics who have it all wrong:
Some critics, even in the scholarly community, have claimed that concerns related to the spread of misinformation reflect a type of ‘moral panic’. They think that the threat has been overblown; that classifying information as false is generally problematic because the truth is difficult to determine; and that countermeasures might violate democratic principles because people have a right to believe and express what they want.
What the authors thought needed to be done about such criticism was even easier to state:
This trend must be reversed.
To justify their position, the All-Stars were quick to provide examples that they believe demonstrate how the truth is actually quite often really easy to determine.
The Holocaust did happen. COVID-19 vaccines have saved millions of lives. There was no widespread fraud in the 2020 US presidential election. The evidence for each of these facts has been established beyond reasonable doubt, but false beliefs on each of these topics remain widespread.
Using the assumption that the above are all irrefutable truths, they proceed to say that the “acquiescence in the face of widespread misinformation and dismissal of the prospect that information can ever be confidently classified as true or false are morally troubling choices.” The reality, however, is that the morally troubling choice lies in the concept of the irrefutable truth, particularly when one chooses an eminently challengeable statement as one of your examples. No, I’m not talking about the Holocaust, nor do I wish to embroil myself in American politics. But I will say that claiming vaccine safety and efficacy in the absence of a universally accepted definition of what it even means to have been vaccinated cannot avoid being legitimately challenged. It is simply nonsensical not to do so. That an ‘all-star team’ can fail to consider basic issues such as definitional imprecision, then use claims for vaccine efficacy as a good example of a ‘fact’, just goes to show how much moral trouble one can get into when hubris and ignorance are teamed up. To be fair to them, they are only stating that vaccines saved millions of lives because that is what they’ve heard experts say, but that isn’t how facts are supposed to be established.
However, the situation gets even worse when our celestial panel of experts move on to explain the power of ‘pre-bunking’. Once again, their choice of example proves painfully self-destructive:
To illustrate the former, the US administration led by President Joe Biden pre-empted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justification for invading Ukraine in February 2022. In a public communication, citizens in several countries were forewarned. The administration explained how Putin would seek to make misleading claims about Ukrainian aggression in the Donbas region to rationalize his decision to invade, which might have served to limit the international community’s willingness to believe Putin’s claims when they were subsequently made.
That’s not pre-bunking; that’s called getting your own version of events sorted out in good time. Of course Biden knew what pretext Putin would use, because the West had made sure that he had that pretext. For heaven’s sake, US and NATO troops had been training Ukrainian troops and holding annual wargames, both on Ukrainian soil and in the Black Sea, ever since 1997 – exercises that went by the name Operation Sea Breeze. A variety of scenarios would be played out, including the recapture of territory in the Donbas. Even someone as senile as Biden would have known this — but not, it seems, the BBC or the All-Stars.
It is examples such as the above that bring home just how morally troublesome the concept of the irrefutable truth can be, especially when established through the application of supposed pre-bunking (or as the All-Stars like to put it, ‘logic-based inoculation’). But once more our defenders of truth and democracy go on the attack:
Although some critics think that such interventions aim to “limit public discourse … without consent” and do so “paternalistically” and “stealthily”, this is a misrepresentation of the interventions, which seek merely to educate and empower people to make informed judgements free from manipulation.
Ah yes, let’s talk about paternalism, stealth and manipulation.
You’ve got to admire the sheer chutzpah of a group mainly comprised of behavioural scientists, whose avowed purpose is to explore methods of manipulation, most of which only work when done stealthily, and who like to refer to their approach as libertarian paternalism, to then bristle with righteous indignation at the very suggestion that they are guilty of any of the above. Can there be anything more disingenuous than behavioural scientists who bleat that they ‘seek merely to educate and empower people to make judgements free from manipulation’? But, let’s face it, portraying themselves as a misunderstood force for good suits their purpose, because, after all:
Unfounded criticism that is directed at misinformation researchers provides intellectual cover for disinformers and makes this work even harder.
Actually, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to make a bunch of Pecksniffian, self-regarding, paranoid psychologists’ job even harder. Quite frankly, their work deserves to be hampered. Better still, it would suit me fine if it were to be rendered impossible. Perhaps then we would be saved from their lectures on the importance of evidence when so many of their own conclusions in the past have been arrived at with so little in support. Yes, I’m talking about the Debunking Handbook, in which four of the seven members of the All-Stars are credited as co-authors (if ‘credit’ is the right term). The first version of the handbook stated quite clearly, ‘Hence the backfire effect is real’, only for the next version to state:
Early evidence was supportive of this idea, but more recently, exhaustive experimental attempts to induce a backfire effect through familiarity alone have come up empty.
So it would appear that they had been able to confirm the reality of an effect even before attempts had been made to replicate the relevant experiments! How is that supposed to work? All I can say is that individuals who could commit such a gaffe certainly wouldn’t be my first choice to join an all-star team. Or, at the very least, you would think that individuals who had to learn the hard way how easily an irrefutable truth can turn to garbage would be more circumspect when it came to dismissing concerns about the dangers of certitude.
But please don’t go away thinking this is just a story of a group of overbearing and self-promoting psychologists who can be safely ignored. Theirs is a narrative that has gained huge traction and lies behind much of the institutionalised vitriol that climate science sceptics have had to deal with for many years now. Or, to put it in the terms preferred by our beleaguered team of heroes:
Therefore academics, intellectuals and editors need to promote evidence-based information and stand firm against false or fraudulent claims, unafraid to call them out as such. We are aware, from first-hand experience, that this can be a frustrating experience — as climate scientists who have been actively countering climate disinformation for decades can confirm.
Yes, you got that right. It is the climate sceptic that has been giving them grief, not the other way round. Besides which, you should understand that we sceptics are all bad actors who have ulterior motives for encouraging dispute:
These actors will welcome academic disputes about the existence of ground truths and the ethical justification of interventions, as they pursue ideologically motivated goals.
That’s just weird. It’s almost as if they think it were a bad thing. Because I would have thought any academic would welcome a healthy debate concerning ethics and epistemology. So who on Earth are these behavioural scientists to say what academic debates are, and are not, advisable? Oh but I forget, these are the views of an all-star team. We question them at our peril. Democracy and truth are at stake.
Climate Scepticism 
Excellent, John. Thank you. However, you missed one key paragraph from the paper, and it’s an area where I agree absolutely with them:
Democracy relies on authentic deliberation and open debate that transparently shape decision-making processes. Misinformation disturbs this fundamental mechanism of democracy. In general, it is unethical and antidemocratic for anyone — including scientists and those in power — to deceive and disinform the public on important matters that affect them, such as public-health issues or the risks from climate change.…
I wonder if they realised what they wrote there?
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Mark,
Yes, there’s probably quite lot more I could have highlighted from the paper. I suspect that your chosen quote was meant to refer to scientists who challenge the consensus. They are probably now wishing they had made themselves clearer. 🙂
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Nature is collapsing in real time. It used to be a journal grounded in reality, whose dedication was to finding out more about reality. I usually stay out of gender issues, but this article in Nature, a few days after Ecker et al, was sufficiently extraordinary to tell me that the Nature I knew and loved has gone. The new Nature gives us “Beyond the trans/cis binary: introducing new terms will enrich gender research.” Its opener tells us that
“…many individuals find themselves unmoored from binary terms such as male and female, or cis and trans…”
Towards the end we have
“Not everyone is male or female…”
But the authors do redeem themselves somewhat with
“The first step in science should never be to assume that something is correct.”
Something Ecker et al should take on board. [I urge Clisceppers to read this article, just to understand what Nature is now.] [Asterisk: this is not an attack on trans people, who deserve our respect. However, they should not define the objective reality that Nature sets out to discover.] Meanwhile, UK Springer Nature staff have gone on strike for better pay, not being able to afford to work.
Ecker was mentioned in this Cliscep article by Geoff, which includes this quote from Prof. Lewandowsky:
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Jit,
Thank you for the links, both of which were an interesting read. The link to the Nature paper was of particular interest, not only because it illustrates the point you make regarding its demise, but because it provides a classic example of what my own article is trying to say. As you have pointed out, towards the end, the authors write:
Truths? I would have thought that the existence of only two biological sexes, male and female, was about as close to an irrefutable scientific truth as you can get. And yet there are many who would go along with the authors and categorise the scientific position as misinformation (which, according to the All-Stars, attacks both truth and democracy). Then, having just spoken of making space for their truth, the same authors have the audacity to take a moral high ground on the scientific method:
What? Like you just did?
The second link was also interesting. After reading it, I think I should have named and shamed Ecker as well as the others. After all, he was one of the four All-Stars who co-authored the Debunking Handbook.
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As I suggested to Mark yesterday, there are actually quite a few good quotes from the article that ended up on my cutting room floor. For example, there is this gem:
Let me take a moment here. Seeking to influence people’s thinking is not telling people what to think? I’m going to have to go away and think about that one.
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Hayek argues in The Road to Serfdom ,Chapter 11, that collectivist propaganda leads to the destruction of all morals because it undermines one of morality’s foundations, ‘the sense of and respect for truth.’ (159.)
To make a collectivist system work everyone must pull together and aspire for the same ends. Everyone has to be persuaded to view officialdom’s ends as their own ends. Everyone must sing from the same hymn book. Hayek shows how this has taken place in historic practice…
‘The need for such official doctrines as an instrument of and rallying the efforts of the people has been clearly foreseen by the various theoreticians. Plato’s ‘noble’ lies, and Sorel’s myths serve the same process as the racial doctrine of the Nazis or the corporative state of Mussolini. They are all necessarily based on particular ‘facts’ which are then elaborated into scientific theories in order to justify a preconceived opinion.’ (P161.)No one may be permitted to think independently.
All criticism must be silenced. There can be no science for science’ sake, or art for art’s sake. The whole apparatus of spreading knowledge, schools, cinemas, the press must be seen to conform to official doctrine, The word ‘truth’ no longer has its old meaning. It no longer describes something to be found by way of evidence independently examined for validity but is transformed into something laid down by authority.
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“All criticism must be silenced. There can be no science for science’ sake, or art for art’s sake.”
The Sound of Science.
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Jaime, Beth,
I’m sure van der Linden and his colleagues would strongly dismiss the idea that they are defenders of socially engineered truths. Instead, they see themselves as warriors of the enlightenment. For them it is all about the educated and the rational standing firm against the ignorance of the brutish masses. As they put it:
I repeat, ‘academics, intellectuals and editors’.
But let us return to their favourite example regarding how the brutish masses fail to appreciate the truth regarding the Covid vaccines. A warrior of the enlightenment wouldn’t just be parroting the received wisdom they had read in the news. Instead, such a warrior would be doing his or her own thinking and asking questions such as, “I wonder if the reason why absolutely no one vaccinated died within 20 days of receiving a vaccination had nothing at all to do with a proven safety and everything to do with the fact that the authorities declared that no one should be considered to have been vaccinated until 20 days after the injection.”
It’s not rocket science, but it might as well be to an All-Star academic on a power trip.
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Misinformation has always been with us. I suspect Neanderthals misinformed each other. It will occur in the future and in all walks of life. As a species we deceive, and watching the machinations of my three dogs it is clearly attempted by other species upon us and on each other.
So we develop strategies to identify harmful misinformation. Most involve experience and a developing ability to spot untruths. But even at 81 I succumb. How any team, of whatever brilliance, can advise us all about being misinformed fills me with, at first, trepidation, but ultimately with disbelief and mirth.
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I am really sorry to read about the demise of Nature. It used to have such an elevated reputation and getting anything published within it gained you great kudos. I know this because as a post graduate, I and another did manage this trick, and it (falsely as it turned out) raised our status no end. (Falsely because, as it turned out, our explanations were 100% wrong).
I haven’t read Nature for almost two decades so I have only rumours to go on.
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Alan,
When you say “I and another did manage this trick”, would that be the Nature trick I’ve heard so much about?
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Jit:
I agree with that but I believe the category of trans deserves our contempt.
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Richard,
…the category of trans deserves our contempt.
Words are mercurial objects and what used to deserve our contempt will often turn into next year’s embodiment of God’s work on Earth. The word ‘gender’ has become a flagship for liberal acceptance and the right for self-identification but it didn’t use to be that way. Not so long ago it was just another word for ‘sex’ (at least that’s what my bookshelf dictionaries are telling me). But before then, even that usage was held in contempt. According to my Fowler’s Modern English Usage:
Oh how I miss the good old days!
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No John, the trick was getting published for the very first time in the highly prestigious Nature with a paper upon what turned out to be a totally incorrect reinterpretation of a calcite cement in ancient limestones. When we told colleagues we had submitted, we were informed we had no chance of being published there. Publication did initiate our reputations. My co-writer stayed in academia and became a geology professor at a prominent British university. And I did rather well.
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Contemplating and empathising with the delightful manifestation that illustrates the Scepticism Monster I identify most strongly with its pointy little finger. Others may claim more important bits
On second thoughts, rather too greenish for me, but a good likeness?
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The scepticism isn’t about the warming, it’s about the ‘official’ explanation for the warming. The climate authoritarians want to bury that distinction at every turn for obvious reasons.
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As is my wont, I’m going to hijack this thread, because of this
and, today, this.
By Sarah Knapton as the current lead story in the Telegraph (at least in my iPhone app).
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Richard,
A few off-the-cuff thoughts:
The fact that 14,000 of the 16,000 VDPS claims made since 1979 relate to the AstraZeneca jab seems to be saying something regarding the safety of that vaccine compared to others. I don’t really think a Proportional Reporting Ratio analysis will be necessary given such a huge discrepancy.
I’ve no doubt this is something to do with the fact that it was only ever approved for emergency use. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe all Covid-19 vaccines, to this day, remain approved on such a basis – even the recently introduced updates.
These data presumably lie behind the decision to quietly drop further use of AstraZenica.
Why did it take FOIA requests for this data to emerge, given that it is so obviously of public interest?
Presumably, in settling the claims, nobody has been quibbling over whether or not the claimants were, or were not, actually vaccinated at the time of injury. Or have they? Will a lot of these claims be dismissed because the injury preceded the arbitrarily decided 20 day kick-in?
These data, worrying though they are, cannot be used on their own to judge whether taking the AstraZenica jab, or taking no jab, was the safer option. For that, we need to compare against injury rates for the unvaccinated. But to make such a comparison we need to first address the problem raised by Professor Fenton regarding definitions.
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John,
I believe that the 14,000 claims made since 2021 are not just for AZ, but for Pfizer and Moderna too. The vast majority of the tiny proportion of successful claims are for AZ. The rate of serious adverse reactions varies considerably between the jabs, with AZ coming first, followed by Moderna and then Pfizer.
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I should just mention that the difference in the rate of serious adverse reactions to the different jabs is in itself a control which reveals that the jabs themselves are the most likely cause, absent even an unvaccinated control group. There are also plausible biological/physical explanations for the differences.
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Jaime,
It seems some of my thinking was too off-the-cuff. You’re quite right, AstraZenica represented 97% of the claims awarded, not the claims made. I should read more carefully.
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Yes, thanks Jaime for reading with care. But John:
Because people like Jessop and Fenton are waiting, ready to turn this malinformation into even more malinformation, that’s why. More when I’m back home.
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Another new story in the Telegraph that I see dovetailing with our vaccine concerns and a whole lot else
Of all the new Labour ministers Wes Streeting has, for me, been the most positive surprise. This review, plus further openness with data in the public interest, should hopefully purge out the ridiculous climate /energy directives that are so far from mission critical, as Mark has been showing. And will Labour really oversee some ‘repentance’ over the whole of Covid? It could be in their interests to do so.
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“There is an argument I have heard that clapping for the NHS during the pandemic was quite a dangerous thing to do … because no organisation can be a national religion, and no organisation should be beyond constructive criticism.”
What was it that Ronald Regan said?
Trust but…?
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I find this argument to be totally spurious if not fatuous. People clap individuals, individuals who were offering aid and succour during times of considerable stress, and not necessarily the organism they work for. I have seen similar reactions when lifeboatmen return having saved people in peril. The reaction is spontaneous and commonly well deserved. People that offer such services deserved to be clapped IMHO.
When you clap a batter for scoring a six for your cricket team, are you making that team a religion? What utter crap!
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evil spellchecker! Organisation not organism
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Alan,
I both agree and disagree.
Many NHS staff during the worst COVID days were brave, selfless, and deserving of spontaneous applause.
However, the public were more or less ordered by the government to stand on their doorsteps every evening and applaud for the prescribed time. There was something rather North Korean about it.
Yes, the applause was directed towards NHS staff (some of whom thoroughly deserved it, some of whom didn’t), but it was also directed at the organisation for whom the staff worked. “Thank you NHS”, the signs said. It has been turned into a national religion, and it shouldn’t be. Google “NHS scandal” along with a year, any year, and you will find one or more scandals.
At its best the NHS is truly wonderful. At its worst it’s absolutely dreadful. For much of the time, it’s barely adequate. Much like an awful lot of Britain today, but with one regrettable difference, namely some of the staff (sadly often doctors) seem to think they are special and should always be given special treatment. They’re wrong. They chose to do the job they do, and most doctors are very well rewarded for it, if not at first, then certainly before long.
The NHS should never be beyond criticism. While there is much to praise, regrettably there is much to criticise too.
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Alan: I spelled the name of this guy wrong in January 2000 but my applause was genuine.
It was Dr Ahmad Ahmad in fact. So good they named him twice 😉
The treatment of my left eye 2018-2020 was superb but, sadly, later in 2020, the same hospital badly dropped the ball when I had a quite different problem with my right eye. The ravages of Covid (and the political response thereto) had had their effect. Long story short, in June 2022 I met Dr Ahmad again, after what I felt had been some arse-covering half-truths from the BEH. He had gained a promotion to a position in an eye clinic in Clifton that was trying to sort things out. I didn’t know I was seeing him. “You probably won’t remember me …” “Of course I do – you were my doctor, originally from Egypt, at the BEH …” He didn’t seem to mind me remembering.
No problem for me clapping that beloved individual but the regular street-wide clapping of the NHS I never once took part in. I strongly agree with this from Rebecca Hilsenrath
That of course is much worse than anything I went through. And this empathetic line of thinking seems to be with the blessing of a Labour government. That I didn’t expect.
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Mark. My memory, which now is a very feeble thing with huge holes in it, has nothing in it relating to being asked to give applause to the NHS. Even if I had been urged to applaud the NHS I probably would have done so, but my intention would have been to thank those individuals in the NHS who aided my recoveries. Because I was one of the very earliest to catch Covid and spent a week in hospital, and later broke my hip (or rather my wicked Scottie did) and within 24 hours had an operation. And I am extremely grateful to all that have helped me. I am also grateful not to have encountered individuals that you believe give the organisation a bad name.
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Alan, both our memories are correct:
Clap for Our Carers, also known as Clap for Carers, Clap for the NHS, Clap for Key Workers or Clap for Heroes, was a social movement created as a gesture of appreciation for the workers of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) and other key workers during the global pandemic of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which spread to the United Kingdom in January 2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clap_for_Our_Carers
But note:
A Clap for the NHS was organised for the afternoon of 5 July 2020, the 72nd anniversary of its establishment.
Also:
“Thank You NHS” was a social phenomenon in the United Kingdom during 2020 and 2021, for part of the COVID-19 pandemic, whereby people and organisations posted messages of support for members of the National Health Service and other key workers, to acknowledge their heavy workload as well as their risk of infection.
Large numbers of private individuals placed home-made signs in their windows and outside their homes to thank the NHS workers. The handmade posters frequently featured drawings of rainbows.
The campaign was supported by the Conservative Party-controlled British government, which displayed children’s “Thank You NHS” signs in the windows of 10 Downing Street.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_You_NHS
My wife and I have encountered some wonderful people in the NHS, some truly dreadful ones, and a lot in the middle. NHS workers are people, like everyone else. Good, bad and indifferent, just like the rest of society. The NHS, as an institution, on the other hand, is bloated, flawed, wasteful and problematic. It requires reform. Like Richard, I have a degree of confidence in Wes Streeting to grasp the nettle.
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Here’s a review of a large NHS general practice in Bristol:
The young fella who was in a hurry because he wanted to go to an important environmental meeting was probably Dr Patrick Hart, a prolific climate protester who is a salaried GP at that practice; and it’s possible that the meeting was to plan the disruption of a rugby final. Hart and another JSO protester disrupted it on the day before that review was posted. (The timing means it’s unlikely to have been the final itself.)
A 2021 quote from Dr Hart: ‘I’m a doctor. I am terrified for my patients. The climate crisis is killing them.’
And here’s one explaining his disruption of the 2023 rugby final: ‘I am doing this because it’s my duty as a doctor. The climate crisis is the greatest health crisis humanity has ever faced. People are dying now and more will die every day unless we stop new oil, gas and coal. In the same way the tobacco companies lied to us that tobacco was safe, the scrum of fossil fuel companies and corrupt politicians have been lying to us. They are keeping us addicted to fossil fuels, even though they know it’s killing us. I am not prepared to let them get away with mass murder. We are ordinary people. We are the doctors and nurses who care for you when you are sick. I call on everyone to come and join us in the streets and be on the right side of history.’
He might not be a doctor for much longer. In February a GMC tribunal will consider whether he should be struck off – not for rushing appointments but because of his climate protests and convictions.
In other NHS and GMC news, a retired GP (also from Bristol) had her medical licence suspended on Friday because of her climate protests and convictions. At one of the protests Dr Diana Warner told a journalist that if we don’t tackle climate change within two or three years we might run out of oxygen. She uttered that unscientific twaddle nearly three years ago, so the licence suspension was long overdue, I reckon. (The mass suffocation? Don’t hold your breath.)
Here she is:
https://x.com/TalkTV/status/1448206392096067584
(She missed the first day of her trial for that protest because she was busy trying to stop a train that was delivering wood pellets to the Drax power station. Alas, she blocked the wrong train.)
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Vinny, probably I wouldn’t applaud some of your NHS representatives, but definitely I would mine. Our latest doctor carefully explained to me why he wasn’t recommending sending me to hospital for an X-ray after I had fallen and re injured my hip. He did a simple test, explaining that if I had reinjured my hip bone I would not be able to tolerate his test. He explained that if he authorised an X-ray it would take up to 3-4 weeks before it took place, by which time I should be improving. And this has occurred. So everything good that I expect in a GP, knowledgeable and able to judge my ability to understand his methodology and motives.
I’m sure the quality of the NHS varies markedly across the U.K., I’m extremely fortunate, from what you have written you are unfortunate.
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Mark:
Wes versus Ed perhaps?
Early days, obviously.
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Alan, I’m glad your hip is better. It sounds like you’ve got a good GP. I don’t know whether mine is. I’ve never met him/her. (Perhaps somewhat unwisely I haven’t seen a GP for nearly 30 years.) The ones I mentioned live about 100 miles away.
I had mixed feelings about people banging saucepans and cheering on Thursday nights to give thanks for the NHS. A lot of NHS workers deserved gratitude but it seemed a bit silly and self-regarding – more about tribalist woke self-congratulation than gratitude.
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John Kerry:
https://x.com/SwipeWright/status/1840231811554664541
He’s talking about consensus re. Net Zero and climate change. We are the ‘entities’ he wishes to ‘curb’ and ‘hammer out of existence’ by dismantling the First Amendment in the US. Biden/Harris are attempting to ‘win enough votes’ by importing illegal immigrants in their millions and placing them on the electoral register. Chilling.
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People who fret over the risk to democracy that supposed disinformation poses need to go back to school. The threat is far more fundamental than that:
Why Democracy Is Mathematically Impossible – YouTube
Getting rid of the right to free speech isn’t going to solve democracy’s inherent illogicality, but it will render the problem irrelevant.
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