ArcaMax

PARIS – It’s once again that time of the U.S. presidential election cycle when federal officials start talking about alleged foreign influence by the usual suspects, notably Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. But the most effective solution seems to be flying right under everyone’s radar.

Law enforcement isn’t it, if only because a foreign leader can actually just stand in front of Congress and beg or demand that American politicians follow the marching orders of their foreign interests at U.S. taxpayers’ expense, and it’s totally cool, even cheered. One can also officially register in a U.S. government foreign agent or lobbyist database and proceed to attempt to twist the arms of everyone in Washington, and that’s just fine. What’s not OK is to do things on the down-low.

The bottom line is that it’s virtually impossible for government to protect citizens from all forms of foreign influence when all it takes is proper registration to legitimize the activity to the point where elected representatives start openly doing foreign bidding. America is a superpower with economic and political influence around the world. Part of that is structural and built into the global financial system, for example. But military operations, up to and including regime change, also represent heavy-handed foreign and global influence. So it would be naive to think that any foreign government wouldn’t want to actively work to ensure the best possible position for itself and its own people vis-à-vis this reality, given the impact of every American policy move around the world.

But stuck in the middle of all this are the average citizens, bombarded by noise from all sides and sources. The feds not only can’t protect them, but there’s a valid argument to be made that even the announcement effect in the selective prosecution of any perceived influence efforts can also serve to tilt the playing field. For example, if the alleged perpetrators favored a certain ideology, then it risks harming the legitimacy of that ideology altogether, sidelining it from the domestic battlefield of ideas through mere potential association and effectively awarding undue and unearned free rein to its opponents.

It’s hard to think of something more dangerous for democracy and stability than for a particular set of values to ultimately end up being conflated with foreign interference, leaving opposing ideas as the only “valid” ones. Because what happens if reality hits and those marginalized views end up most closely matching objective reality? “United wishes and good will cannot overcome brute facts,” wrote former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. “Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it. Ignorance may deride it. Malice may distort it. But there it is.”

Recent electoral gains in Europe, by the anti-establishment left and right, strongly suggest an erosion of trust in the same establishment that has routinely gone out of its way to suppress unfavorable narratives in the public square, to the point that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted in a letter to a congressional committee that he regrets bowing to Biden administration pressure to censor content on Facebook and Instagram related to everything from Covid-19 to the debate around Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Citizens who were denied access to a full and unfettered debate of contradictory ideas are now left with two choices: being angry with the censors or clinging to a position to avoid any adverse effects of cognitive dissonance.

So what’s the solution to protect the average citizen? More of what they’ve been trying to suppress: contradictory debate. A new annual report on college campus free speech by the US-based nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) finds that American schools are effectively cultivating a lack of critical thought – the kind that could serve as a firewall for any manipulative nonsense – both foreign or domestic. Harvard, Columbia, and NYU – classic establishment elite feeder schools – rank the worst for free speech – while the top grades go to University of Virginia, Michigan Tech and Florida State.

Every year, this report demonstrates the dismal state of free speech at institutions that are supposed to represent the epicenter of debate, with a whopping 69 percent of students now considering it acceptable to just shout down a speaker (up 6 percent from last year), and 52 percent feeling that they can just block others from attending a campus talk they may not like themselves. The end result? The voting base ends up getting treated like a bunch of dim bulbs who can’t figure things out for themselves and need constant nanny-state protection that just happens to serve as conveniently selective censorship.

The best firewall for American democracy is ultimately for the average person to be capable of openly considering every idea – regardless of source – and assessing whether it’s rubbish based on a specific set of tools and skills that they and their chosen pronouns are not currently getting in their educational safe spaces.