By Jo Nova

Finally, they admit that Free Speech is more scary than climate change

The WEF, being the billionaire’s ski club — are of course, talking about the worlds greatest threat to them, not to you.

In the WEF Global Risks Report they asked 1,490 experts and leaders and their the list of biggest risks in the next two years was misinformation and disinformation. Forget bioweapons, nuclear bombs, wars, corruption, asteroids, inflation and global boiling — the thing that keeps the favored “experts” awake at night is whether people will point out their flaws and the rorts* that put them at the top of the pile.

The “Misinformation and Disinformation” line is dressed up as a concern that AI generated or false information is the problem, but note the giveaway — those in authority are most worried about public opinion shifting to distrust those in authority — as if “authority” could never be wrong. Blind trust is how you build nations right?

Persistent false information (deliberate or otherwise) widely spread through media networks, shifting public opinion in a significant way towards distrust in facts and authority. Includes, but is not limited to: false, imposter, manipulated and fabricated content.

Fake news has been around since the StoneAge, and the only way to deal with it is to correct it with better information, not with gatekeepers of truth or government rules. Free speech works because anyone caught spreading lies got a bad reputation, and everyone else was free to repeat that.

How is it that those who control the research grants, the media licenses, and one third of the whole economy could be unable to defend themselves?  Do they lack a thousand paid agents with supercomputers, guns and security passes to find out the truth? Nay, these are the poor poppets who only have whole institutions, ministries, and public broadcasters with budgets of billions to tell their side of the story.

Their greatest fear is that you might hear the other side

Imagine the billionaires have puppets and allies among politics and bureaucrats, and have set up a system of grift and graft where they creamed off nice profits for fixing the weather, say, while they flew on their jets and cruised on their yachts. Imagine the plumbers and truckies found out that the medicines they were forced to take were contaminated, the climate was controlled by sun, not their car, and their children were being taught to hate the country the plumbers and truckies had built.

The WEF want to stop the workers getting angry, not by fixing the problem but by keeping the workers in the dark:

Misinformation and disinformation may radically disrupt electoral processes in several economies over the next two years.
– A growing distrust of information, as well as media and governments as sources, will deepen polarized views – a vicious cycle that could trigger civil unrest and possibly confrontation.
– There is a risk of repression and erosion of rights as authorities seek to crack down on the proliferation of false information – as well as risks arising from inaction.

Javier Milei, the new President of Argentina, used his free speech as a call to arms. He warned that the Western world was in danger, and that the socialists changed their agenda and instead of dividing us by class, they created other social divisions instead — like women against men, (and presumably race against race). Collectivism and socialism, he said, were the path to poverty. And Argentina, with all it’s riches and skills lost the free market and still ended up poor.

His speech was a call to arms of the businessmen to stand up to the political class:

Do not be intimidated, either by the political caste or by parasites who live off the state. Do not surrender to a political class that only wants to stay in power and retain its privileges. Do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution. The state is the problem itself. You are the true protagonists of this story and rest assured that as from today, Argentina is your staunch, unconditional ally.

He warns of tyranny:

Today, states don’t need to directly control the means of production to control every aspect of the lives of individuals, with tools such as printing money, debt, subsidies, controlling the interest rate, price controls, and regulations to correct so-called market failures. They can control the lives and fates of millions of individuals….

The whole speech is at Chiefios, but also published at RealClearPolitics, Washington Examiner. H/t Another Ian and Kim.

*For foreign readers — a rort is a  “a fraudulent scheme or a trick”.

Photo of Klaus Schwab by Evangeline Shaw on Unsplash