The Power of "Anonymous"

It’s not who you are underneath, but what you do (and say) that defines you

Greetings, Screamers! Hope your Thursday is going well — you’ve almost made it to the end of the week! First, I want to apologize for not having this article out yesterday as planned, but something quite large came up — large enough for its own announcement later today, watch for it!

Last time we chatted, it was about Kathy Hochul and Nikki Haley wanting to dismantle the Bill of Rights so people don’t get their feelings hurt online. (Ostensibly, at least.) After her FOX news segment, Haley appeared on the Ruthless podcast and doubled down on her insanity:

First of all, we should dispense with the idea that government can’t figure out who you are and where you live if you go off the rails and start (REALLY) threatening people online. Government has spent billions of dollars on the censorship industrial complex, attempting to steer online discourse and ban dissenters — your Twitter username not being your real name is no barrier to apprehension at all. (By the way, Miss Haley — my friends and family already know my views quite well….and we agree you can shove this idea.)

THAT said, I think we should discuss WHY anonymous speech is so important to the idea of free speech. One of the most frustrating things about debate these days is the tendency for one side or another to dismiss what a person is saying because of who they are — as if one side has a monopoly on good ideas.

In some ways, this is a natural human response. Sometimes changing the attribution of a quote completely changes its meaning. Consider this example:

“This single shot will solve our problems.”
Jonas Salk

Means something different than

“This single shot will solve our problems.”
Bill Gates

Means something different than

“This single shot will solve our problems.”
John Wilkes Booth

And so I readily concede that sometimes, knowing who said something IS an important part of the context of the argument.

But most discourse is not like this. In the ‘marketplace of ideas’, most of those ideas stand or fall on their own. Cutting government spending is a good idea no matter if it comes from George Bush or Paul Krugman or Anthony Fauci. Impeaching Alejandro Mayorkas is a good idea — even if it comes from Marjorie Taylor Greene.

But how many debates have been derailed simply because of the participants?

“Donald Trump said jabs are good, but Donald Trump is a bad person, therefore I’ll shout and stamp my feet and take the opposite position — at least until Joe Biden mandates the same exact shot!”

“Scott Atlas is an ‘anti-science’ loon who wants to kill people — therefore I can just sling insults instead of looking at the official CDC data.”

“Rand Paul is a Russian stooge, so I can ignore everything he says.”

The great thing about anonymous speech is that it takes the focus off of the speaker (the least relevant aspect of the debate) and puts it on the idea (the most important aspect of the debate).

In our country’s history, we have a perfect example of this dynamic: The Federalist Papers, which were published anonymously in newspapers around the country to rally support for the US Constitution.

Click to enlarge - original link

This point is acknowledged by Ron DeSantis, who also leads me perfectly into my next point:

While I agree with DeSantis overall on this, these three men certainly WERE considered “national security threats” by the nation still at war with our fledgling association of states. Were the British authorities able, they certainly would have demanded the identity of “Publius” and thrown all three men into prison for the rest of their lives. (Nikki Haley would have gleefully led the charge.)

Sometimes one must remain anonymous because:

How many examples of this can you think of, just from the covid era? Here’s a brilliant reminder from Racket News media guru Matt Orfalea:

Of course, Donald Trump isn’t anonymous and he’s Donald Trump, therefore the media must attack, attack, attack…..even when ‘the experts’ are saying the exact same thing Donald Trump is. Props to Orfalea for mentioning the February 2020 New England Journal of Medicine article in which Fauci wrote this:

Where could that crazed lunatic Donald Trump have gotten the idea that the Case Fatality Rate of covid was under 1%? Why doesn’t he listen to “the experts” instead of “relying on his hunch”? (The better question is…..why didn’t the media report that Fauci wrote this?)

And while Donald Trump could (or ultimately couldn’t, maybe) stand the heat, many normal people didn’t even have an option. Doctors lost licenses if they dared parrot the information Fauci or the CDC published (since it somehow ran against CDC ‘guidance’). Here’s a semi-local example that just hit the papers:

Note that Miller isn’t even alleged to actually have hurt any of his patients, his ‘crime’ was being right when the established authorities were wrong. For funsies, here’s Washington’s hospital utilization chart with data up to May 11, 2021 — just one day after Miller spoke out against mask mandates and social distance learning:

There was never any hospital spike

This is also after Washington state moved the goalposts and started keeping track of only adult staffed acute care beds………silently admitting that kids didn’t go to the hospital because of covid. (And effectively removing thousands of beds from our supply, making the stats seem scarier than ‘58% of our beds are full’.) Yet Miller is being punished for saying that kids didn’t need masks and social distancing anyway. (Yet another thing Fauci knew in February 2020.)

In the face of such unrelenting pressure and propaganda, it’s no wonder that doctors (and many others) were forced to adopt pennames to disseminate information to the people. This didn’t just protect them from (some) government retaliation, but from (more) retaliation of the online mob who tried to cancel your business for not sufficiently enforcing a mask mandate that never made a difference with regards to the virus.

We saw the exact same censorious dynamic with the ‘debate’ around Ukraine. Perfectly logical and reasonable speech about the reality of the situation (Ukraine was never going to ‘win’ the war) made you a “Putin stooge”, prompting angry mobs to attempt to get you thrown out of society. (Even Elon Musk!)

Yet here we are a year after Musk’s post, and the ‘experts’ are slowly being forced to admit that Ukraine can’t win, and that the best option for peace is to do something exactly like Musk (and many others) suggested long ago. (Of course, that would have shut down the money laundering scam….and I think the scam is the actual goal.)

In both cases — covid and Ukraine — the dissenters were right….and we could have gotten to reality much quicker with a free and open discussion. These delays came with a real cost — children missed an entire year (or more!) of school, and tens (or hundreds) of thousands of Ukrainians are dead — and this only barely touches on the damage done by the censors since 2020.

But ultimately I’m a pretty diplomatic sort of guy, so I’ll admit Haley’s idea does have SOME merit. In fact, I can I think of one group of citizens that should immediately be deanonymized: government officials in Freedom of Information Act requests. These are public servants who are (supposedly) doing a job on our behalf, in public. Why do THEY — and their correspondence — get to remain hidden from the people who ultimately pay their salaries?

“As of 1115 hours, partner agencies indicated [XXXXXXX] dressed in black, some with orange has, are present on Capitol Complex grounds.” Sure would be neat to know who that was, wouldn’t it?

So here’s my compromise:

Instead of telling Nikki Haley and the rest of the authoritarians in government to go shove their idea of ‘transparency’, I’ll instead tell them —

“You first.”

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I simply can’t wait until Monday’s positive post to share this video:

I bet Trudeau wishes HE could be anonymous.