1984: Thread

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Mon May 15 23:57:57 PDT 2023


America’s Powerful Intellectual Class Finds 'Joy In Making Us Obey And
Be Compliant,' Warns Scholar

https://www.theepochtimes.com/americas-powerful-intellectual-class-finds-joy-in-making-us-obey-and-be-compliant-warns-scholar_5264284.html

https://www.theepochtimes.com/thomas-harrington-the-treason-of-the-experts-and-the-cudgels-of-disinformation-and-misinformation_5252442.html

https://www.theepochtimes.com/twitter-files-alleges-collusion-between-government-stanford-project-to-censor-covid-vaccine-misinformation_5130844.html

Authored by Jan Jekielek and Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times

America’s intellectual class has been given so much power by the
public that their misuse of such power is threatening the fundamental
freedom of speech in the country, says scholar and author Tom
Harrington.

“It’s absolutely remarkable how easily we’ve gone from free speech to
asking, ‘How can I make my way around the censorship that’s here?’”
Harrington said in a recent interview with Jan Jekielek on “American
Thought Leaders” that premiered on May 11.

“Sometimes, there’s this idea that reality just is. That’s partially
true but in the cultural realm, there’s always someone developing it
and distributing it who has more access to power.

“Those people generally are well-educated people who we hold up as
exemplars of knowledge. They have a lot of power and they are deferred
to quite readily.”

Harrington warned that people are delivering a lot of their power into
the hands of “experts” who tend to have a “flipness” with which they
have used such power.

“Worse than flipness, there seems to be almost a perversion and a joy
in making us obey and be compliant for compliance’s sake. This is very
troubling in a society.

“You need the intellectual class or the credentialed class to have the
reality of their status back up the title of their status. It seems to
me these two things have separated in these last few years, and that’s
really troubling to me.”

Harrington pointed out that censorship and cancellation are “two
cudgels” used against the public.

“We’re beginning to see that a lot of this hooting down is not as
spontaneous as many of us would like to believe. With the recent
‘Twitter Files,’ and the case that the attorney generals of Missouri
and Louisiana are trying now, we’re finding out that this was anything
but spontaneous. There were a number of government actors working in
concert with private actors to achieve a censorship that, frankly, for
those of us of a certain age, is unimaginable.”

On March 17, investigative journalist Matt Taibbi released a version
of the so-called “Twitter Files” exposing the alleged collusion
between Twitter and Stanford University’s Virality Project (VP) to
censor what they deemed to be misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.
VP is also found to have colluded with the U.S. government.

“Though the Virality Project reviewed content on a mass scale for
Twitter, Google/YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Medium, TikTok, and
Pinterest, it knowingly targeted true material and legitimate
political opinion, while often being factually wrong itself,” Taibbi
stated on Twitter.

The initiative “accelerated the evolution of digital censorship,
moving it from judging truth/untruth to a new, scarier model, openly
focused on political narrative at the expense of fact.”
Reliance on Experts

Harrington, who is a Hispanic studies emeritus professor, pointed out
that true experts do not impose their reality on anyone. Experts must
be able to keep their ego impulses in check and ensure that they are
using their power to help the people. “It seems that that line has
been crossed,” he said.

“There’s a lot of ego gratification that is interfering with what
should be a real sober taking of responsibility for a gift of power,”
he said about the nature of today’s experts.“Power is a gift in a
democratic society. It’s not something you own, and it’s not something
there to make people obey you. It’s a gift you have that hopefully you
can use in constructive ways that preserve the dignity of those who
don’t have as much power as you do.”


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