You are correct, but should you be allowed to advocate a political opinion you don't actually believe when you say it (however specific you want to be) but are merely trying to act crazy to get people to watch your show for money?
As frustrating as it is all th people grifting woke nonsense for example orea making gay pride cookies when in all likelihood they don't give an actual shit. They should have the right to do this.
As the nation gets more qndmore divided it will also likely become necessary to lie about your beliefs. While the right have the urge to squash dissent. The left tends to want to squash it in a much more insidious way. The left would have you forced to do a humiliation ritual where you have to actually promote their beliefs when you disagree with them.
Its one of those forgotten artifacts of successful leftist revolutions that often are ignored in coverage of them. And we can see seeds of it here already. During BLM for example the left was encouraging people to confront relatives who were quiet on the issue. You will see the right at their worst repress opinion, but there is something odd about the lefts need to be validated. I suppose it is why Ayn Rand advocated to always be honest with them.
She showed an example in atlas shrugged where a tycoon was forced to sell off or nationalize 75% of his business and he pointed out he did it at the barrel of a gun and it triggered the leftist judge who wanted him to say what she was doing was right.
It's not just a legal protection against that sort of contradiction between internal and external beliefs. There are strategic reasons to do it that are important, but even when the strategic reasons are not important it is of value to have it as a freedom.
Clinton for example stated she had a public opinion that differed from her private opinion. Shockingly only a small amount of the left was outraged by this. I thought when the news came out people would be in arms. I also personally thought it was okay for her to lie about opinions on topics she had no hope of ever making politically viable.
For example. I believe ín privatization of schools. If I campaigned for presidency I might mention some levers I would pull to improve the school system but I wouldn't advocate for privatizing schools nor if I was elected president would I make even a single step towards doing it.
Why is this?
For a few reasons
1. Privatizing schools wouldn't turn out good in th longterm without making a lot of other changes to society that needs to come along with it. Javier milei has so much room to do what he wants in Argentina he could make that work but I couldn't make it work in th United States.
2. Making changes such as privatizing schools if it did work in the long term the public is really stupid so the short term negative impacts would result in a lot of losses for my side of the ticket. We should always look at 100 year impacts butmost people are really tepid and only look at near term impacts.
3. I can't realistically privatize schools with a single term in office so it I pointless to donate for
I don't believe those are unethical reasons to present a different public view especially considering how stupid the public and the media is.
The media doesn't understand nuance due to them mostly being low IQ. So if they asked me on the campaign trail if I wanted to privatize schools I would say yes but add in the caveats I mentioned above. The media is also a little evil so it would just immediately cut right after me saying yes and then your opponent is evil so negative campaign ads would say stuff like . "If wylted was elected he has promised to eliminate public schools"
So it's just better to lie and say you don't believe in it since it won't affect your policy making anyway.
Also what if I have some stupid obscure belief and billions of dollars. Why shouldn't I have the right to publicly back people who would disagree with my message but be good at pleading it. For example I start an online newspaper and pay a reporter 6 figures to promote my views. Why should she she have to turn down the opportunity to make a good living?
