“It’s a podcast economy right now,” Adam Baldwin declares, “and why shouldn’t anyone be able to put out their two cents?” That’s a great question, and it’s also the new front in the war on free speech by the Left. The Brookings Institution has begun a new fact-checking project aimed at popular podcasts seeking out “false, misleading, and unsubstantiated” claims. That standard itself has already been hopelessly compromised and manipulated by mainstream-media “fact checkers,” and the new Brookings effort amounts to just another way to shut down inconvenient opinion.
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Welcome back to my VIP video series “The Amiable Skeptics,” featuring my friend Adam Baldwin! Adam is well-known for his long and storied Hollywood career, starting with My Bodyguard, and especially for his roles in Full Metal Jacket, Firefly, its film sequel Serenity, Chuck, and The Last Ship.
“They use three terms that are very, very different,” I point out. “You can say it’s ‘false’, but you can also just say that it’s ‘wrong’. Everyone’s wrong at one point or another.”
“Yeah,” Adam replies, “but you cop to it. If you know that you’re wrong and you make a misstatement or a mistake, you’ll correct the record as soon as you can.”
“But when you’re talking about ‘misleading’ statements and ‘unsubstantiated’ statements, what that means is you’re saying [someone is] using a set of facts to reach a conclusion with which I don’t agree,” I say. “And you see this all the time in fact checks, professional fact checks, you’ll see where some somebody, some Republican says something and they get fact check false on it, even though it’s literally, they will say literally true, but “in context” it’s false. Those aren’t fact checks,” I say, “those are opinions. They don’t like the conclusion that somebody reaches. And I have a very big sneaking suspicion that the ‘misleading’ especially the ‘unsubstantiated’ standards are about taste and about opinion.”
Be sure to watch it all, and join the conversation in the comments!
