It’s Time to Retire ‘Misinformation’, by Pierre Kory

It’s so much easier to toss around terms like “misinformation” and “conspiracy theory” than it is to actually address evidence and arguments. From Pierre Kory at brownstone.org:

This article was co-authored with Mary Beth Pfieffer.

In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled, and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.

We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him. 

Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”     

These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media, and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.

Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll. 

Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?     

Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection. 

Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The US and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to-consumer” TV ads. 

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