George Orwell, call your office. That’s my initial and slightly out-of-date response to news stories about the Biden administration’s efforts to stamp out “misinformation.” It’s an interesting irony that covert censorship should be undertaken enthusiastically by those who call themselves “liberal” or “progressive” and who claim the opposition would threaten the survival of liberal democracy.
But Democrats seem unembarrassed by his reelection campaign’s program for blocking “misinformation” on outfits like Facebook and Google. It’s being run, as my Washington Examiner colleague Byron York points out, by the same folks who systematically pressured social media “to curb the spread of misinformation” during the COVID pandemic.
Some of that pushback is designed to improve Biden’s dreadful job rating on the economy, and many in media are happy to help. As radio talk host Erick Erickson writes, “Every major news organization except Fox News has done multiple stories on how great the economy is.”
But as numbers cruncher Nate Silver points out, citing an egregious Washington Post story co-authored by reliable liberal cheerleader Taylor Lorenz using an apples-and-oranges comparison of McDonald’s, the administration line is contradicted by voters’ own eyes and government statistics: inflation is up 16% and personal consumption expenditures up 25% since Biden took office. No American under 60 has experienced such inflation in their adult lifetimes, and they reasonably conclude that Biden’s gusher of government spending is at fault.