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Aug. 10, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:21
PARTY OF CENSORSHIP Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep640
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Coming up, I'll showcase the legal filing by Democratic officials confirming that Democrats are now officially the party of censorship.
I'll expose how the January 6th committee destroyed documents to conceal inconvenient truths.
I'll reflect on how fact-checkers lie, and specifically how the Washington Post routinely updates its stories to cover up its falsehoods.
And I'll complete my discussion of Hayek's essay on tyranny and powerlessness.
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The Democrats are now the party of censorship.
The left is the party of censorship.
If you look at attempts to shut down the other side, conservatives, Republicans, the right, we're not trying to shut down the other side.
We're happy to have them have their say.
Very often we invite them to engage with us, debate us.
They won't do it. They don't want to do it.
They want to shut us up and they want to shut us down.
Now there's proof of this coming from many different quarters and I want to focus just on one.
I'm reading, I just read this morning, An amicus brief that is filed in the very important free speech case, the free speech case, which I've talked about on the podcast more than once.
It's Missouri versus Biden.
And we're talking about now an injunction issued by a judge that is under appeal, an injunction that tells the Biden administration, you cannot collaborate with social media platforms to censor people, deplatform them, restrict them, ban them.
Shadow ban them, and so on.
And interestingly, this amicus brief, which is signed by a whole bunch of attorneys general, really all Democrats, attorneys general for New York and Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, notice that we're talking about Blue State upon BlueState.com.
Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin, and D.C. So all these liberal states, all these blue states have come together and filed a brief with the court, and they're defending censorship.
They're defending the collaboration of the Biden regime, of the federal government, with these digital platforms.
So it's really intriguing to think about What is their argument?
Why do they think censorship is a good idea?
Why do they think that the First Amendment doesn't require the government not to tell social media platforms, here's a list of people you need to ban.
Here's a list of people who are violating the guidelines.
Here's a list of people that you can kick off.
Why do they think the government can do this?
Well, as it turns out, the brief is duplicitous from start to finish.
Just read the first line.
Since the advent of social media, government and private companies have often shared information.
Now, you'll notice the presence of multiple euphemisms.
Shared information and engaged in dialogue about the dangers that the spread of harmful content on social media platforms may pose to public health and safety.
So first of all, they act like this is all about public health and safety, even though lots of banning has nothing to do with that.
Lots of banning has to do with abortion or has to do with the trans issue.
Where's the public health and safety concerns?
Election fraud. Where's public health and safety involved in that?
So you have to interpret safety and it's broad.
Well, people need to be safe from election fraud.
Well, people need to be safe to be able to have an abortion.
So this is Orwellian speak creeping into the sort of back doors of this amicus brief.
By and large, the brief goes on to argue that the government's involvement with these social media platforms is purely recommendatory and non-coercive.
So now they're acting like, well, the government's not really pressuring these social media platforms to do it.
They're just recommending. The government's just saying, you might want to take a look at this.
But it's non-coercive.
It's ultimately the social media platform's decision.
Now, this would have a little more credibility if the social media platforms weren't dependent on the government.
If leading figures in government hadn't threatened to take away Section 230, impose more regulations on social media platforms, restrict them in all kinds of ways, in some cases fine them.
So, none of this is even mentioned in the brief.
And then the brief goes on to say, the federal government, like the states, has an essential role to play in contributing to the marketplace of ideas.
Think of how deceitful that is.
Of course, the federal government can say whatever it wants.
We're not talking about contributing to the marketplace of ideas.
We're talking about actively working with the platforms to shut other people from participating in the same marketplace of ideas.
So yeah, the federal government can put out all the leaflets and all the brochures, and it does.
Hundreds of millions of pages of garbage.
They can keep doing it. The point is they can't shut other people from stating their opinion, and this is actually what they want to do.
And then in the amicus brief, it gives a couple of examples, and the examples are thoroughly misleading.
One has to do with violent images from the Buffalo mass shooting.
The other has to do with protecting children and the mental health of children from bullying.
Again, think about it.
What does this have to do with the vast majority of censorship that's going on?
Is it really about publishing highly violent content that shows all this imagery that could be disturbing or even in some ways advocate violence?
We're not talking about that.
We're talking about people who are trying to discuss the Dobbs decision.
We're talking about people who are skeptical about climate change.
We're talking about people who want to get to the bottom of the origins of COVID. We're talking about people who think that biological men are males and biological women are females.
And there's no way to alter that.
You can create a pretense of it.
So, these are discussions happening all over our society, and the government wants to shut one side down.
It wants to shut its political opponents down.
It wants to shut down dissenting points of view.
So, the Democrats here are full of lies.
We already know that.
But the point is they're exposing themselves as the organized party of censorship, the organized party of shutting down rival points of view, the party that really opposes, in its heart, the First Amendment.
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Something quite interesting and incriminating has just come to light.
It appears that the January 6th committee has been deleting or destroying It's own documents and records.
We suspected, I did, I think you did also, that this January 6th committee was a sham.
It was a propaganda operation led by, well, Nancy Pelosi was its guiding spirit, but Benny Thompson, Liz Cheney, they were putting out a one-sided view of what happened with selected images.
Carefully crafted interviews, suppressing information that was inconvenient to their side.
And all of this is now coming to light.
Representative Barry Loudermilk of Georgia wrote to the January 6th committee and he said, send us the documents that you have so we can review them as part of our routine congressional oversight.
And it turns out the January 6th committee is not supplying all these documents.
When Representative Loudermilk pressed Benny Thompson, he says, in effect, I'm not obliged to give them all to you.
I don't have to give you all the documents.
We've given you a bunch of stuff, and that's kind of all we're going to give you.
Even though the law requires, A, the January 6th Committee to preserve the documents, and B, to turn them over when they are requested or demanded by a legitimate investigation.
Now, Congressman Loudermilk goes on to say, we looked at the documents that they gave us, and none of it really was even organized.
Quote, nothing was indexed.
There was no table of contents.
Usually when you conduct a level of investigation, you use a database system.
Everything is digitized, indexed.
We've got nothing like that. We just got raw data.
And I realized, quote, we don't have anything...
Much at all from the blue team.
Now, what's the blue team? The blue team was a special team convened by the January 6th committee to look at security failures that might have contributed to what happened on January 6th.
Think about it. There was a lot of intelligence that federal agencies had that lots of people are coming to town.
There have been some threats.
There are people threatening to go into the Capitol.
So, hey, we need to protect against that.
But those measures were not taken.
In fact, the Capitol Police weren't even properly notified about what these threats were.
At least that according to Mr. Sund, the head of the Capitol Police in a recent book.
So the blue team was going to look at all this.
And yet...
The records of the Blue Team appear to have been erased because, according to Loudermilk, the January 6th committee didn't want to hear from the Blue Team.
They shut up the Blue Team.
At one point, I think Liz Cheney was the one who had been accused of Of saying, we want to make this all about Trump.
We don't want to make this about security failures.
We don't need to get into all of that.
So this is the way in which a propaganda operation suppresses truth by saying, let's only look over here because if we look over here, it'll bring out facts inconvenient to the narrative that we're trying to put out over here.
And then says Representative Loudermilk, we're not seeing anything from the Blue Team as far as reports on the investigation.
What we also realized was videos of all the depositions.
So the Blue Team took a bunch of depositions from security officials, and those depositions have not been turned over to the House GOP. And so...
So, what is now becoming really clear is that the J-6 Committee was working closely with the Biden administration to craft a narrative.
At one point, the House GOP found a letter that was sent by Benny Thompson to To a guy named Richard Sauber.
Richard Sauber is the attorney for Joe Biden.
He's the attorney also for DHS. And the letter referred to, quote, an agreement, some sort of an agreement that was made between the January 6th committee and the Biden administration.
So think about it. January 6th committee, supposed to be this independent congressional committee, supposed to be bipartisan, looking at what really happened.
They're making backdoor agreements with the Biden regime about, listen, we're going to send you some information for you to review.
You're going to tell us...
So they're collaborating on the public narrative that the January 6th Committee is putting out.
Again, this is all exposing this as a highly ideological, partisan, and propagandistic operation.
And once again, these documents, the communications between Benny Thompson, between the January 6th Committee, between Liz Cheney and her gang, and the people in the Biden administration, where are those communications?
Representative Loudermilk is like, we don't have them.
So this is nothing more than, you talk about obstruction of an investigation, refusing to turn over documents.
Now, all of this is facilitated by the media, because you're hearing it from me.
Have you seen a bunch of articles about this?
Have you heard it being talked about, even on Fox News?
Have you heard it being talked about anywhere?
Is there an outrage about it?
Are the networks covering it on the daily news?
Not at all. So what the media does here, A very important part of our media is to suppress things, not just to expose things.
They like to expose certain things, but just as important as what they cover and the biased way in which they cover things is the very careful way in which things are screened out.
So I guess what I'm saying is that the very erasure of facts by the January 6th committee is mirrored by an equivalent erasure by the mainstream media.
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I want to talk about fact-checkers and fact-checking.
And I'll begin to do that by focusing on the Washington Post and its fact-checking.
The fact-checker I have in mind is Glenn Kessler, who is the chief fact-checker for The Washington Post.
In fact, he's the guy who doles out the so-called Pinocchios.
You can get one Pinocchio.
I think it goes up to four Pinocchios.
And one Pinocchio is like, well, this is your shading the truth.
Two Pinocchios, this isn't really accurate.
And four Pinocchios, this is a flat-out whopper.
It's an outright lie.
And this kind of tagging of articles and claims has been a very effective way for the Washington Post, not only to discredit information that it wants to go after, but also to provide a basis for censorship.
Because after all, if something goes, for Pinocchio, it's obviously misinformation.
And then digital platforms go, well, our job is to ban misinformation.
And so you have YouTube, you have Google, you have Facebook, you have Meta, then banning information based upon these so-called fact checks.
But how reliable are these fact-checkers and how honest are they?
How upfront are they? No one says, just as when you report an article, you can make a mistake, but you should be upfront.
Hey, I made a mistake. Hey, I'm going to delete this post.
Hey, I'm going to acknowledge that I made a mistake.
It's been pointed out to me.
I was wrong about that.
So newspapers traditionally run corrections or they repudiate an article and then publish a completely new version of the article.
What I'm about to tell you and show you is that the Washington Post doesn't do this.
In order to hide their own lies and the fact that their fact checkers are telling you lies, they go back and stealth update these fact checks.
So they say something or someone says something, the Washington Post goes, that's completely false.
And then they realize, oops, it's actually true.
So then they go back and update the old fact check and rewrite it as if they never put out false information in the first place.
They don't publish a correction.
They don't say we were wrong.
They don't engage in any head-scratching about how we got it wrong.
Were we biased? Did we only look at one side of the matter?
None of that. So this is a form, almost Orwellian, of party erasure, of inconvenient facts that in retrospect are no longer defensible.
And I want to talk specifically about the Washington Post's very notorious October 2020 article, a fact check.
It was about whether Hunter Biden met with a senior official of Burisma, A guy named Vadim, V-A-D-Y-M, with a long last name, Pozarski.
This is the guy, by the way, who's part of the operation bribing the Biden.
So the point was that the New York Post had reported that from the Hunter Biden laptop, it's very clear that there was a dinner event.
At Cafe Milano in Washington, D.C., Hunter Biden was there.
Joe Biden was there.
Vadim Porlovsky from Burisma was there.
And the Washington Post said, this is false.
This is not true. And the reason they wanted to say it's not true is because, of course, Burisma was at the time paying Hunter Biden and also Hunter Biden's business partner $83,000 a month.
So, the Washington Post quotes a whole bunch of Biden officials saying, oh no, A, the dinner didn't happen.
B, even if it happened, Joe Biden wasn't there.
C, the information on the Hunter Biden laptop is unreliable and it could be a Russian plant.
And so, even Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post fact checker says, this was the most kind of famous, most read articles in the 13-year history of having fact checks in the Washington Post.
And then along comes Devin Archer very recently, and he says, A, there was such a dinner.
B, it was at Cafe Milano.
C, Hunter Biden was there.
Vadim Porofsky was there.
Joe Biden was there. Now, before Devin Archer's bombshell testimony.
Let's remember, Devin Archer is himself partners with Hunter Biden.
He was at the dinner, so he knows exactly who was there.
But even before this, the Washington Post began to realize that its reporting was problematic.
First of all, the Hunter Biden laptop was validated.
The FBI decided, yes, this is valid.
Hunter Biden ultimately, in his own backwards way, admitted it was his laptop.
The other, there was all kinds of corroborating information about the laptop.
So, the Washington Post went back and did a stealth edit and, quote, update on its fact check.
And what did they say now? They said that, yeah, the Hunter Biden laptop is, in fact, accurate.
And it was, Joe Biden did, in fact, come to the dinner.
But the idea was that the dinner wasn't really on his schedule, and he didn't really stay.
He just kind of popped in, hello, hello, and then he took off.
The, quote, there was less to the story than one might imagine.
And now, after the Devin Archer disclosure, the Washington Post has gone back and done another update because Devin Archer said, no, Joe Biden didn't say hello and leave.
He sat down and took part in the whole dinner.
He was there the whole time.
And so the Washington Post now has gone and, in a sense, updated its own reporting and, um, All told, the post has now run six corrections of the original post.
So think about it. This is supposedly a fact check.
But the fact check, it turns out, was a lie.
It was based on bad reporting.
And the point I want to make is that while the post has secretly, quote, corrected this...
They've never admitted error.
They should be giving themselves four Pinocchios.
But of course, they'll never do that.
Because if they do that, the fact-checking process itself gets called into question.
And that's what I want to talk about in my next segment.
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I spoke in the last segment about the duplicity of Glenn Kessler, the duplicity of the Washington Post, the bogus fact-checking of the dinner at Cafe Milano involving the Bidens, Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and a senior official at Burisma.
I want to broaden the discussion by looking at an article I just read from Phoebe Smith and Michael Schellenberger.
It's called Narcissism of the Fact-Checkers.
I want to go through a couple of key findings from this article because it shows you the wider scope of this fact-checking problem.
It begins with a comment that there is a fact-check on riots in France.
And apparently there was a post...
From a Twitter account, from an X account.
And BBC Verify jumped on it.
BBC Verify is a fact-checking site.
And it says, the video accompanying this quote is from the set of the film, the action film Fast and Furious 8.
It's actually not from the French riots at all.
So this was like the fact-checkers busting a Twitter post and exposing it as false.
But then Phoebe...
P.B. Smith and Michael Schellenberger point out, first of all, the fact check is itself a little problematic because it's coming from a parody account, and the account is clearly designated as parody.
So, parody accounts juxtapose things and post stuff that is parody.
Parody, by definition, is something that is either exaggerated or false, that the humor comes out of that.
And presenting it as if it was a real post.
So the fact check is actually lying to you as if there's an account that's posting misinformation and not noting or not noticing that it is a parody account.
And not only that, but the authors of this article, Community Notes at Twitter or X, had pointed out right there on the article that the video doesn't come from the French riots but comes from the movie, from the film Fast and Furious 8.
Now, one of the justifications put out by the fact-checking community for censorship is that fake news or falsehoods travel, quote, six times faster than real news.
So in other words, misinformation travels faster on social media than real information.
So Phoebe Smith and Michael Schellenberger go, well, where's the evidence of that?
Let's look at the proof.
Where's the proof?
Turns out that the proof is from an MIT study that didn't look at any articles at all, but looked only at tweets.
And it looked at a very small number of tweets.
It looked at 126,000 tweets that occurred over 21 seconds.
21 seconds.
Now, let's think about it. In the sort of Twitter sphere, there are millions and millions of tweets.
And so when you look at 121,000 tweets, and who knows if this was even a random sample of tweets, you're looking at a tiny fraction of the universe of tweets.
And so yet the MIT study takes these tweets, looks at their traction, if you will, and then generalizes to the entire internet.
And again, they haven't proven that news articles that are false travel faster than articles that are true.
All they are talking about is their guys on Twitter who are putting out tweets that carry false information.
Then the article goes on to say that fact-checkers frequently spread disinformation, and they demand censorship based on that disinformation.
And we get several examples.
Facebook censored stories claiming COVID-19 might have come from a lab.
Anthony Fauci commissions a study from authors who have expressed doubt about whether the virus was created in a lab, and he sort of arm twists them to put out a study.
He gives them grants and gratitude for the study, saying it had a natural origin.
So you've got a kind of almost wicked collaboration between the scientific community, at least represented by Fauci, and these digital platforms.
Politifact has been forced to make an embarrassing series of retractions.
They had attacked a doctor who said COVID-19 was a man-made virus created in a lab.
They had supposedly debunked him.
Then they had to take the debunking back.
Was evaluating a claim by the British politician Nigel Farage who said he had been debanked.
He had been kicked out of his banking system by NatWest Bank because of his political views.
The BBC says, oh no, we're fact-checking it.
That's completely false. Then it turns out it's completely true and the BBC fact-check had to be pulled back.
There was a report from fact-checkers saying that the people in France who said that French President Emmanuel Macron had threatened to, quote, shut down the internet.
And the fact-checkers were like, no, he didn't do that, Snopes.
And other fact-checkers said he never did that.
But now it's come out.
In a report from The Guardian that Macron made the following statement, when things get out of hand, we may have to regulate them, he's talking about social networks, or cut them off.
Wow. So, again, a statement that the fact-checkers deemed to be false...
It turns out to be true.
And this has happened now so many times.
I could give you at least three examples from my own experience on Facebook, on YouTube, and on Twitter.
And so the fact-checkers, as it turns out, are not genuine fact-checkers.
They are chronic liars.
They are narrative shapers.
They are propagandists who are functioning at the behest of a regime.
And they are not to be trusted.
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Many January 6th defendants, in fact hundreds of them, are facing a charge that is called obstruction of an official proceeding.
What's the official proceeding?
The convening of the Congress to essentially ratify the votes to Take the votes of the electors from the different states and declare the duly elected president of the United States.
And these January 6th defendants are charged with and often convicted of trying to stop that proceeding or interfere with it.
Now, I'm looking at the statute itself.
And the statute itself is...
Title 18, U.S. Code, Section 1512.
And I'm going to read the relevant part.
Whoever corruptly alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so with the intent to impair the object's integrity or availability...
for use in an official proceeding.
Now, I think it's safe to say that no January 6th defendant did this.
There's not a scintilla of evidence that any of the documents or records that Congress was using in order to make its determinations were assaulted, grabbed, seized, destroyed, or any of that.
But there is a second part of this obstruction provision which is more vague.
Otherwise obstructs Now, this second part...
Which is more broad and more vague, has been used by the Biden DOJ to go after the January 6th defendants.
Because it doesn't talk specifically about altering a document.
It just says, it seems to say, if you obstruct a proceeding.
But the question is, did they obstruct the proceeding?
Many of them had nothing to do with the proceeding.
The proceeding was delayed because of their presence in the building.
But nevertheless, was this in fact obstruction?
Or... Is it the case that the Biden DOJ, which otherwise would have minor misdemeanor charges to make, this is a guy who should not have been on the Capitol grounds, this is a guy who should not have been inside the Capitol, these would be misdemeanors, and if it's a first-time offense, would carry light penalties.
Are they using this to try to put people away?
Not to try, but to put people away, often for long periods.
Of prison time, felony prison time, because of this clause.
Now, this clause was clearly not put here with this particular episode in mind.
And a January 6th defendant, a guy named Jake Lang, Edward Jake Lang, has asked his attorneys to file a brief With the Supreme Court to file a petition to the Supreme Court to intervene and throw out not only his obstruction charge, but the obstruction charges of all the other January 6th defendants.
So this is potentially a claim with huge implications.
It may seem like, wow, Dinesh, you know, does this guy even have a prayer that this is going to work?
Well, it worked at the district court level.
The district judge decided that Jake Lang had a point and threw out his obstruction charge, but it was reversed by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
So now, Jake Lang is going one step higher and appealing to the Supreme Court.
Basically, Jake Lang's point is this.
This is a statute that was put there to prevent tampering with evidence.
It was not put there to block protests, demonstrations, people speaking up their own mind, people trying to petition for redress to Congress.
That was not the intention of the law.
That was not the point of the law.
The law is being misused or abused in order to go after people who are doing nothing more, at least in many cases, than exercising their finances.
First Amendment rights.
And so the petition says that they have run, quote, really far afield from what Congress intended.
Now, Debbie was asking me, where is this really going to go?
Is the Supreme Court going to take the case?
The simple fact is the Supreme Court takes only a tiny percentage, a small portion of the cases that are petitioned before it.
So out of 100 cases, they may take two or they may take three.
I think that Jake Lang has a better chance with this one.
Why? Because of the wider implications.
It's not just about Jake Lang.
The Supreme Court may go, well, you know, there are hundreds and hundreds of these defendants.
They're all facing this charge.
Let's take a look at what the statute actually means.
What were the intentions of the framers of this statute?
And is it applicable in this case?
Or is it being misused in the way that Jake Lang alleges?
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I want to continue and complete my discussion of Hayek's famous essay on power and powerlessness.
It's called The Power of the Powerless.
And Hayek, if you remember, raises the question of why would a green grocer in a socialist society put up a sign in his window, Workers of the World Unite.
Now here's Hayek commenting on this.
He says, after all, the people who walk past the window will certainly not stop to read it.
The fact of the matter is they don't even really read the slogan or even see it.
He says if you ask some woman who stopped by the store window, hey, what was in the window?
She'd say, well, you know, I saw they had tomatoes today or they didn't have potatoes or the price had gone up.
But it wouldn't be likely that she even noticed this slogan.
So then Hayek says, once again, coming back to the question, what is the point of the slogan?
And he comments as follows.
The green grocer had to put the slogan in his window, not in the hope that someone might read it or be persuaded by it, but to contribute along with thousands of other slogans to a panorama that everyone is aware of.
Now, what is this so-called panorama?
Here is Hayek.
The panorama has a subliminal meaning.
It reminds people where they are living and what is expected of them.
It tells them what everyone else is doing and indicates to them what they must do as well.
If they don't want to be excluded, fall into isolation, alienate themselves from society, break the rules of the game, risk the loss of peace and tranquility and security.
And then, says Hayek, the woman who ignored the greengrocer's slogan is quite likely to have a slogan like that herself in the corridors of the office where she works.
Again, why did she put it up?
She did it pretty much without thinking also.
And she did it for the same reason.
And this leads Hayek to, I think, a very important idea.
The greengrocer and the office worker have adapted to the conditions in which they live, But in doing so, they help to create those conditions.
What is Hayek getting at here?
Well, what he's getting at is that as tyranny begins to establish itself in a society, and by the way, part of the purpose of me expounding this essay is to see parallels to our own society, we are tempted to adapt to the tyranny, to be like, well, yeah, but they did take away our free speech, but of course this was their stated reason.
Or yes, there's a certain kind of political correctness that's become consolidated in our institutions and we go along with it because, you know, that's our job and we don't want to cause trouble.
And Hayek says, it is your unwillingness to cause trouble.
It is your tendency to want to get along, to postpone a discussion or a conflict or a moment of tension that is helping to prop up and reinforce the system.
They conform to a particular requirement, and in doing so, they perpetuate that requirement.
And then says Hayek that we are, in any kind of a tyrannical society, the objects of the system's control.
It wants to control us.
But we are also subjects that help to enable that control.
In other words, our degree of freedom of action is not zero.
We could say no. We could say, I'm not putting up the slogan.
I'm not going along with the lie.
But the fact that we do creates our collaboration with the system and in some ways puts some responsibility for the system on us.
We become guilty of helping to hold the system up.
And Hayek says that these systems, in the end, are kind of impersonal.
He says, In other words, think about...
You know, we're doing it for democracy.
We're part of a larger society.
Don't you care about the common good?
So the idea here is you're not an individual.
Your life is not your own.
You must willingly subordinate your interest to some larger interest.
And so what's happening here is the system creates, through the participation and involvement of citizens, a general norm which then brings pressure to bear on other fellow citizens.
So you're part of creating, if you will, this sort of public opinion.
It's not real public opinion.
You haven't consulted the true opinions of the public.
It is public conformity that sends signals to people.
Don't do this. Don't do that.
Walk over here. Don't walk over there.
Think this. Don't think that.
Everyone is involved and everyone is enslaved.
But everyone is not enslaved in the same way.
And then says Hayek, and this is a little bit of a depressing thought, but I think accurate, there is obviously something in human beings which responds to this system, something they reflect and accommodate, something within them which paralyzes every effort of their better selves to revolt.
Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact Of living this way.
He says, in a sense, we become degenerate images of ourselves.
So what is Hayek getting at?
He says, really, inside of human nature, there is a kind of a good side and a bad side.
And the bad side isn't just evil, it's also cowardly, it's conformist, and so it succumbs to the system.
It becomes part of the lie.
And I think Hayek's warning here, and his warning to citizens, don't be part of the lie.
We now get to the real punchline or climax of Hayek's essay, The Power and the Powerless.
And Hayek sets it up beautifully.
He says, let us now imagine one day that something in our green grocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself.
He stops voting in elections that he knows are a farce.
Hayek here is talking about communist elections where there's not a real election.
All the candidates are put up by the Communist Party.
He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings.
And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support.
So in other words, he backs the good guys who are under scrutiny or under threat or even under imprisonment from the regime.
In this revolt, says Hayek, the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie.
He rejects the ritual.
He breaks the rules of the game.
And Hayek says there are huge dividends, huge benefits that come from this.
He discovers once more his suppressed identity.
Your identity, which had been constricted, controlled.
You had become a sort of artificial person, used to mouthing meaningless slogans.
Now you stop doing that.
He gets his dignity back.
He gives his freedom a concrete significance.
His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.
Now, says Hayek, get ready.
The bill will not be long in coming.
He will be relieved of his post as manager of the shop.
His pay will be reduced.
His hopes for a holiday in Bulgaria, think about it, in communist societies like the old Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria was like the place to go, will evaporate.
His children's access to higher education will be threatened or denied.
His superiors will harass him.
His fellow workers will wonder about him.
What happened to that guy? Most of those who apply the sanctions, however, will not do so from any inner conviction, but simply under pressure from conditions.
Think about FBI agents who raid a house.
Do they really believe that the guy in that house is un-American, he's a bad guy?
No, they're just under orders, or they've just accepted the routine.
This is what we do as FBI agents.
This is how I get my pay.
This is how I get my promotion.
They will persecute the greengrocer either because it is expected of them or to demonstrate their loyalty or simply as part of the general panorama.
They will spew the greengrocer from its mouth.
This is the system. They will punish him for his rebellion.
Why? What is the real rebellion?
What is this greengrocer?
He's one guy. Let's say he doesn't put the sign up.
So what? There are many other signs everywhere else.
But, says Hayek, by breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game.
As such, he has exposed it as a mere game.
He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system.
Our system, too, here in America relies on all these appearances.
There's the COVID illusion.
There's the election integrity, most secure election in history.
Oh, we're suppressing your free speech for your own benefit.
Misinformation is very bad.
So, when you sort of bust out of the system, says Hayek, he has demonstrated that living a lie...
He's living a lie. He's broken through the exalted facade of the system.
He's exposed the real base foundations of power.
So, ultimately, says Hayek, you're exposing that power is not allied with truth.
Power is only power.
Power needs truth to affirm, oh yeah, what the government is telling us is true.
Yeah, what these health authorities and lab coats are telling us is true.
Yeah, what the FBI is telling us is true.
But it's not true. And so what this one guy does by saying no is he separates power on the one side.
Yeah, you've got brute force.
You've got the FBI. You can raid my house.
But you don't have truth on your side.
You're living a lie and everything you say is a lie.
By his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world.
He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain.
He has shown everyone it is possible to live within the truth.
And then Hayek makes a point about a fellow dissident.
This is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, my hero.
And Hayek says, why was Solzhenitsyn driven out of his own country?
Think of it. Solzhenitsyn was kicked out of Russia.
He went into exile.
In fact, he came to live near Dartmouth.
He lived in Vermont for many years.
It's only when communism collapsed, the Soviets repudiated that system, that Solzhenitsyn went back to Russia and lived out his last year's In post-Soviet Russia.
But why did the Russians, why did the Soviets push him out in the first place?
Here's Hayek's reason.
Certainly not because he represented a unit of real power.
That is, not because of any regime's representatives felt he might unseat them and take their place in the government.
In other words, they didn't think Solzhenitsyn was going to displace them, overthrow the regime, mount a coup d'etat.
Think about, for example, these January 6th guys.
Oh, they're going to take over the government.
It's a lie. It's a lie because even the people who say it, no, they're not going to take over the government.
That really wasn't their purpose.
So, says Hayek about Solzhenitsyn, Solzhenitsyn's expulsion was something else, a desperate effort to plug up the dreadful wellspring of truth, a truth which might cause incalculable transformations in social consciousness.
As long as it seals itself off hermetically, the entire society, it appears to be made of stone.
But the moment someone breaks through in one place, one person cries out, the emperor is naked.
When a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game, then everything appears in another light.
So this essay is ultimately a defense of bravery, of truth, of speaking out, of calling a spade a spade, of not being willing in the end to give up your dignity and your soul, not being in the end willing to live a lie.
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