Censorship vs. the First Amendment right to free speech may be the great battle of our time. And it’s being waged from the top. Wall Street Journal editorial page writer Barton Swaim explains:

The preoccupation with “misinformation” and “disinformation” on the part of America’s enlightened influencers last month reached the level of comedy. The Department of Homeland Security chose a partisan scold, Nina Jankowicz, to head its new Disinformation Governance Board despite her history of promoting false stories and repudiating valid ones — the sort of scenario only a team of bumblers or a gifted satirist could produce.

Less funny but similarly paradoxical was Barack Obama’s April 21 address lamenting online disinformation, in which he propounded at least one easily disprovable assertion. Tech companies, the former president said, “should be working with, not always contrary to, those groups that are trying to prevent voter suppression [that] specifically has targeted black and brown communities.” There is no evidence of voter suppression in “black and brown communities” and plenty of evidence of the contrary, inasmuch as black and Latino voter participation reached record levels in the 2020 election.

One of the great ironies of American political life in the 2020s is that the people most exercised about the spread of false information are frequently peddlers of it. Their lack of self-understanding arises from the belief that the primary factor separating their side from the other side isn’t ideology, principle or moral vision but information — raw data requiring no interpretation and no argument over its importance. It is a hopelessly simpleminded worldview — no one apprehends reality without the aid of interpretive lenses. And it is a dangerous one.

The self-deception runs deep, says Swaim, and it’s worth understanding in order to contextualize the censorship.

The animating doctrine of early-20th-century Progressivism, with its faith in the perfectibility of man, held that social ills could be corrected by means of education. People do bad things, in this view, because they don’t know any better; they harm themselves and others because they have bad information. That view is almost totally false, as a moment’s reflection on the many monstrous acts perpetrated by highly educated and well-informed criminals and tyrants should indicate. But it is an attractive doctrine for a certain kind of credentialed and self-assured rationalist. It places power, including the power to define what counts as “good” information, in the hands of people like himself.

Moreover, he says, there’s an anti-democratic strain of intellectual arrogance that permeates today’s Left, though it began decades ago. “No politician,” Swaim says, “deployed the rhetoric of technocratic postpartisanship more openly than [Barack] Obama.” After giving a great example, he adds, “It was during the Obama years, not coincidentally, that ‘fact checking’ took firm hold in American journalism.” That point too is expounded.

Swaim gives a “more charitable explanation” for the new censors than simple bad faith: “The new censors sincerely mistake their own interpretations of the facts for the facts themselves.” He observes that this is a “strange outcome” because of the long-time academic trend of postmodernism, which “held that there was no objectively knowable truth, only subjective interpretation.”

This clash, he argues, was especially evident during the pandemic.

Such was the mental disposition of America’s enlightened politicos and media sophisticates when the pandemic hit in early 2020. The challenge of public policy, as they saw it, was not to find practical, broadly acceptable solutions. The challenge, rather, was to find and implement the scientifically “correct” solution, the one endorsed by experts. Sound policy, for them, was a matter of gathering enough data and “following” it.

But of course you can’t follow data. Data just sits there and waits to be interpreted.

When Covid-19 came ashore, the country’s political class, in thrall to the authority of public-health experts and the journalists who listen to them, was singularly ill-equipped to lead in a sensible way.

Finally, he concludes:

With the two-year pandemic response now all but over, what stands out most is the absence of any acknowledgment of error on the part of anyone who advocated these disastrous policies. There is a reason for that absence other than pride. In the technocratic, data-following worldview of our hypereducated decision makers, credentials and consensus are sure guides to truth, wisdom is nothing next to intelligence, and intelligence consists mainly in the ability to absorb facts. That mindset yielded a narrow array of prescriptions, which they dutifully embraced, careful to disdain alternative suggestions. They can hardly be expected to apologize for following the data.

WSJ subscribers can read the whole thing here.