Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, you’re prescient here. The first thing I read over the weekend was a review of a movie called Munich. And the review of the movie says that the goal of the movie is to rehabilitate Neville Chamberlain.
And as I read the review that they’re trying to say that Neville Chamberlain was actually very clever, and what he was really trying to do is buy additional time so that the British could rearm for the Second World War, that he wasn’t really a pacifist and a fool and all the other things that have typically been ascribed to Neville Chamberlain.
And so I sat there and looked at that, and I said, you know, that’s kind of interesting, because that gets into this whole question of misinformation and disinformation. Then I thought about FDR.
And FDR was the president who, along with the allies, defeated Hitler, and then conquered the Empire of Japan. And he should get great credit for doing those two things. But when people say that he is the person responsible for getting us out of the Depression, that is misinformation, because that’s false.
What got us out of the Depression was [that] World War II destroyed the industrial base of every country in the world except ours. So we were the only ones left standing. And so that’s what got us out of the Depression.
His policies kept us in the Depression. When Roosevelt became president, the top marginal tax rate was 25 percent. He raised the top marginal tax rate and tax rates in general throughout his presidency.
And you can’t raise taxes and pull out of a recession or a depression. And so he threw us back into a depression in 1937 and 1938. But this begs the question, what is the difference between misinformation and disinformation?
Misinformation is if I spread a falsehood, but I believe that the falsehood, at the time I spread it, is true. I am misinforming people. Now, that’s not good, but it does not go to my integrity. It doesn’t go to my motive.
It goes to my laziness to not find out what the truth is before I start spreading what I believe to be the truth. This information, on the other hand, is making up a falsehood, generating a lie in order to persuade people to act in a certain way.
For example, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party created the Steele Dossier out of whole cloth. They paid for it, then they gave it to willing members of the media, who then proceeded to report that there was Trump, Putin, Russian collusion, over and over again.
We now know that the origins of that falsehood were disinformation. That is, outright lies. The spreading of it could be done, and you could call it misinformation because the journalists who spread it were too lazy to go back and look at the original source to determine whether or not it was, in fact, authentic.
And so this is a very interesting time that we’re getting into, because Biden says that he’s going to stop disinformation. Well, disinformation actually cannot exist until it exists, and so you can’t stop it.
You can only identify it after it has become misinformation. So what he’s trying to do is, he wants to control all speech, and that won’t work. That’s not how our country works.
And Nancy Pelosi, it will be kind of funny to see if they try to put it into law because the president of the United States swears an oath of office to faithfully execute the laws of the United States.
He doesn’t have a law that says he can do this. Now if Congress passed a law that said he could, my guess is the Supreme Court would then go to the First Amendment that says Congress shall pass no law regarding blah, blah, blah, blah blah.
So this is really a fascinating display. The Babylon Bee could not have thought of this ahead of time. It is so over-the-top preposterous. But apparently, Biden appeared at the national press dinner or whatever they call it, and the media is still absolutely in the tank for a guy that doesn’t believe in anything that is American.
So this gets back to our earlier commentary last week about what is the definition of un-American. We have these three words now. We have un-American, disinformation, and misinformation. And we must identify and define those words properly if we’re going to use them in a political discussion.
Listen to the Crommentary:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
