Thoughtcrime and Learning to Think – The Daily Cartoonist

We are an information society, and Moudakis is right that disinformation is strewn throughout the world, though you don’t have to hunt for it. It will find you.

I’ve often wondered not so much who starts gossip, because growing up in a small town you knew who the gossips were, both the hateful Almira Gulch types and the blowhard Baron Munchausens.

But how did they come up with their stories and to what extent did they believe their own lies?

Globally, Russian troll farms intentionally and purposefully invent propaganda with which they flood social media, and they do a fine job of spreading disinformation, aided, according to this Newsguard report, by AI chatbots that indiscriminately pass along Pravda fiction as genuine news, and by individual suckers who repeat without verifying.

Not that our own government is faultless. When Attorney General Pam Bondi insists that a man with no criminal record is both a violent criminal and a member of a gang, although that has not been verified, and glosses over the fact that even criminals and gang members are constitutionally entitled to fair trials, is she deliberately lying or was she hired as a useful idiot?

And if people trust her word, what difference does it make?

To bring the issue within the specific scope of this blog, consider this

Juxtaposition of the Day

Note the assumption that Kilmar Ábrego García is guilty, despite his never having had a trial and the flimsy, discredited rumor of his gang affiliation, and the assumption that criticizing a nation’s policies is condemning that nation’s people. That’s the mentality of a lynch mob.

But regardless of who did what or said what or wrote what, that planeload of prisoners apparently included many, perhaps a majority, of innocent people, none of whom received a fair trial.

That’s the mentality that fills concentration camps.

The cartoonists assume that those who oppose this type of extralegal action are all Democrats, and are demanding special treatment despite knowing these people are guilty. Whether that accusation is accurate or not, they frame it in a way that seems a deliberate attempt to divide the nation into “good people” and “bad people” based on party affiliation.

Good people are Republicans who want to send violent criminals to the gulag. Bad people are Democrats who want violent criminals let loose among you, your children and your aged parents.

It’s not necessary to repost Tom Toro’s now-classic cartoon: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”

Because those who get it already get it, and those who don’t never will.

After the liberation of the concentration camps, General Eisenhower ordered that British and American politicians, as well as German civilians in the adjoining towns, tour the camps and see the horrors they had ignored and thus permitted.  

“I think people ought to know about such things,” he said, and he wanted to build a bulwark against those who, inevitably, would deny the facts of the Holocaust.

But even eyewitnesses can’t stop determined liars and propagandists.

Those who learn from history may know that Justice Robert Jackson, seen here in his role as U.S. Chief of Counsel for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, also dissented from his fellow Supreme Court Justices in the 6-3 decision in Korematsu v. United States, in which the court confirmed FDR’s sending of Japanese-Americans to concentration camps, and was part of the 9-0 decision in Brown v the Board of Education that struck down segregation in schools, though he doubted a change in the law could lead to a change in people’s hearts.

Mister, we could use a man like Robert Jackson again.

Instead, we’re seeing the rebirth of the Know-Nothing Movement and, in addition to villainizing and victimizing migrants and LBGTQ+ citizens, the administration has declared war on universities that permit free speech, free press and free examination of issues.

Although the administration is firmly against universities seeking to admit a diverse group of students, it is adamant in demanding that universities practice selective hiring of professors who will teach conservative points of view.

Columbia knelt to kiss the ring, but Harvard has refused to knuckle under, and Weyant suggests a change in their traditional good-luck gesture.

The demands made of Harvard are that it go in the opposite direction of universities, where the free exchange of even controversial ideas is how students learn to think and evaluate the world around them. Rather, the Trump administration demanded that they disband clubs which do not reflect proper conservative values and that they teach conservative courses which encourage compliance, not debate.

At the Public Notice Substack, Lisa Needham refers to this as “White Guy DEI,” claiming that it elevates one group because of their identity rather than by merit. Her sarcasm makes good reading, but her reasoning is rock-solid.

In my student days at Notre Dame, Father Hesburgh was praised by conservatives for his “15 Minute Rule,” which stated that protesters preventing other students from exercising their rights would get that amount of time to rethink things, after which they would be subject to expulsion and could be charged as trespassers.

Some of my fellow students complained mightily, but for all the national praise the rule got, it was only invoked once during my time, and here’s more than you wanted to know about that.

More to the point, Theodore Hesburgh literally stood with Martin Luther King Jr and other civil rights figures, and resigned as chair of Nixon’s Civil Rights Commission when he could no longer countenance the group’s inclinations.

Moreover, he concelebrated Mass along with dissenting students during the Student Strike in 1970, and was known for conversations with students who came to his office after seeing his lights on late at night.

In his world, we were expected to think, not simply to obey. That’s how you teach people to evaluate truth and lies, and not get sucked in by propaganda.

Perhaps you had to be there. Not everybody seemed to be, which may be why they now see such simple solutions in such a complex world.