Karen had a great write-up from Davos of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema high-fiving each other over the protection of the filibuster, and David has a very good piece on Davos becoming too elite for even some of the elitists.

But Manchin has raised a lot of eyebrows in the last day or so from Davos for another reason, and it’s hard not to see why:

Problem, you say? Open press and basically all of the platforms? Huh. I could spend the rest of the column mocking the idea that we have a free press today, and that the Associated Press isn’t being paid millions of dollars each year by environmentalist groups to write one-sided climate change stories, or even how fair and equitable the legacy media has been in applying the Trump classified document rule to Joe Biden. It hasn’t. It has basically restored the Trump rule, now that Biden is front and center in the mishandling of classified information, back to the Clinton rule, which is to cover it, with a pillow, until it stops moving, to quote David Burge (@Iowahawk) on Twitter.

Before we tap dance on the West Virginia senior senator for his anti-American apostasy, let’s give him a little credit for realizing his mistake as soon as he said it…almost. Shortly after his remarks were clipped and posted all over social media and the internet, he realized he had been a little less than artful in what he intended to say. Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo happens to be in town covering the Davos annual Woodstock festival for rich people, and gave him the opportunity to do a little clean up on aisle 9.

Well, now, why didn’t he say that before? That’s so much better. The pith of his gist is that I’m sorry, didn’t mean to criticize free speech, that bedrock of democracy, but it’s just that so many people have access to it these days. That’s the problem.

Uh, first rule of holes, Senator.

Are there cranks online whose opinions and recommendations should be avoided? Absolutely. Should they be banned and/or prevented from being able to express them? Not unless you want to live in an authoritarian state in the near future, because that’s the only place that thought experiment ends. There really is no other middle ground.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was part of the Davos panel and opined along similar grounds, bemoaning about how much free speech and free press is turning into the equivalent of the Wild West these days.

Guterres went on to later say that social media companies had to change their algorithms in order to become less evil. This coming from a guy who runs an organization that has Cuba, Qatar, and China as member states on the current roster of the UN Human Rights Council. And I could go on for days about Brian Stelter at Davos railing against disinformation, but that would be a waste of time, mainly because he’s a potato.

Media, legacy and social, and a lot of right-wing media for that matter, have become rather noisy, inefficient affairs that attract a lot of nuts who harbor dangerous viewpoints. But in the ongoing angst of what to do about those dangerous viewpoints, the single most dangerous viewpoint of all seems to be the solution all these Davos elitists gravitate toward, and that is that someone needs to step in and shut down all the stuff we the elites don’t like and deem to be disinformation. Why that’s the most dangerous viewpoint, of course, is because we very soon get to the overarching question, which is who gets to decide what is disinformation or not? Who are the ones who get to decide what speech is acceptable and what speech is to be banned? Here’s a hint. That truth arbiter isn’t going to end up being you or me, or anyone conservative.

Justice Louis Brandeis in the Whitney opinion famously wrote, “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

“Trust the people,” Randolph Henry Spencer, Lord Churchill said in a legendary British speech in 1884. It was true then, and it’s true now.

Even God gives recommendations, and even commandments in some cases, regarding what we should and shouldn’t say on occasion, but ultimately gives us free will to choose what we say and do. And if there is a being that actually has the capacity to regulate speech, I’m fairly confident God could if He wished.

I continue to have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. I love the immediacy of it – the ability to create lists of people I choose to follow, and have that populated list become a newsfeed of sorts, one of many that I use to inform myself every day. It’s not perfect. There are things that I know not to be true that slip through, and yet I have a brain in my head that’s able to discern what’s true and not, and that same filter can also be applied when I watch MSNBC and CNN as well.

I’ve been in and around media for enough decades that I can usually tell when someone is feeding me a line of bull or not. I certainly do not need anyone censoring stuff on my behalf so that I’m not easily fooled, and I trust others to make that same decision on their own. Are there some people that are gullible and will be fooled by charlatans online? Without a doubt. But I could apply that same concern to climate alarmists like John Kerry who are scaring people unnecessarily, and are fooling some into believing that we are all going to die in the next 10 years. We’re not. And yet I’m not calling for John Kerry to be silenced or removed from circulation online. I laughed with glee when I learned he deems himself and his fellow Davos elites to be anointed to lead on climate change because they were abducted by space aliens. Why in the future electoral world would I ever want to silence speech like that? Who am I to declare that to be disinformation? Let a thousand intergalactic voices bloom, I always say.

Joe Manchin may have recognized that he stepped in it with his free speech and/or press is the problem line, and felt he needed to revise and extend his remarks on Fox. He didn’t really help himself, because deep down, he doesn’t trust the people like Churchill’s father said. He’s not willing to let people make their own choices when consuming information. It’s fine for media to do their thing, so long as it’s a finite world of people who have access to and become part of the overall evolution of media. In short, he wants the riff raff offline and back on the street corners shouting out loud where no one will hear us like the good old days. Free speech is fine so long as the crazy people don’t have a volume knob to turn up.

In the meantime, Manchin, along with his other Davos elites, wish to step in and become the ones to protect us from ourselves when it comes to what is to be seen, read, or believed. And the span to travel between protection and enslavement is a small and decreasing distance indeed.