Conservatives Panic After Government Announces Crackdown On Misinformation

Conservatives, particularly those at Fox News, spent a good portion of this past week freaking out and trying to convince their audiences that we are living in George Orwell's 1984. The issue? The Department of Homeland Security has created a new division to combat rampant misinformation in the United States, so it makes sense that the purveyors of the lies would be scared. Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

So the folks over at Fox news, as well as other conservative media personalities across the country started freaking out about halfway through the week. Once the department of Homeland security announced that they were creating what is called a disinformation governance board. Now that kind of seems low, scary on the surface, right? Or at least Republicans want you to think that that is why people like Tucker Carlson, Brian killed me, kill me, Sean Hannity, Candace Owens. And so many other people were out there referring to this as the ministry of truth from George Orwell's classic novel, 1984. Literally all of them use that the ministry of truth. It's 1984 coming to America right now with the Biden administration policing speech and telling us what we can and cannot say, well, of course they're exaggerating what this, you know, disinformation governance board would actually be one of the big things that the governance will be trying to combat.

They say, you know, this is from the official announcement, uh, is Russian misinformation that could influence elections. Okay, fair enough. I'm okay with that. They also said they wanna fight back against COVID 19 misinformation. Okay. Fine with that as well. But I think the reason that these conservatives are freaking out is not, of course, because they think the government's actually gonna come and censor them and shut them down. It's because they're the biggest purveyors of misinformation. And they don't want to get hit with little warning labels for their audiences. You know, this was determined to be untrue because I don't think, I mean, I, I could be totally wrong on this, but I don't think the government's actually gonna come in and shut anybody down unless they find somebody, you know, cranking out fake articles like they did in 2016 and in 2020 people running these farms overseas to create fake news for the United States to digest because we're so freaking stupid, you know?

Yes. Those kinds of things, they would shut down. Are they gonna shut down on Fox news? Absolutely not. Hell. They're probably not even gonna put disclaimers on them. But if you're a purveyor of misinformation of somebody who, you know, keeps giving people knowingly false information, I can understand why you'd be a little scared right now, which is I think exactly what is happening at Fox news. Now having said all of that, I will say, I don't like this. I don't, you may disagree with me and that's totally fine. We don't have to agree on a hundred percent of everything, but let me tell you why I don't like this idea. I do like the idea of fighting misinformation. I do like the idea of slapping labels on things that are knowingly false. So the public can understand, Hey, this is bad. Problem is a lot of people in the public.

Pretty much everybody on the right isn't gonna believe those labels. They will view it as the liberal controlled government trying to censor Republicans. Republicans will phrase it as such. Democrats are horrible at messaging demo. Uh, Republicans already have the upper hand here and they're gonna be able to portray themselves as the victim. So that's reason. Number one, I hate this idea because Republicans have already captured the narrative. This is government censorship. So they're gonna win the messaging battle and they get to play the Vic and they'll get more sympathy from it. Reason. Number two, uh, Democrats are not always gonna be in charge. Are they folks? So you're creating this new group within the department of Homeland security, knowing full well that there's a great chance. It could be in the hands of Republicans in 2024. So then what happens? We know Republicans love misinformation.

So are they gonna start slapping labels on everything? That's the actual truth, but goes against their narrative. That's that's the slippery slope. And that is an exceptionally slippery slope. And it's one that the Biden administration has decided to create for themselves.