In their coverage of Thursday’s Faculty Senate debate around the presence of Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Mercer on the Hoover Institution’s Board of Overseers, The Stanford Daily and the Stanford Report offered a number of quotations from President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Hoover Director Condoleezza Rice that form the basis of this essay.

Murdoch had been criticized for facilitating the spread of dangerous misinformation about the 2020 Presidential election. He had admitted as much under sworn deposition during the defamation lawsuit brought against Murdoch’s Fox News by Dominion Voting Machines. Mercer was criticized because her own media empire has promoted the dangerous “Great Replacement Theory,” a virulently antisemitic, white supremacist doctrine that holds that white people are being “replaced” by Jewish people and other racial groups. This theory has been evoked by various mass murderers in the manifestos. A resolution was presented that “the association of Rebekah Mercer and Rupert Murdoch in all positions of responsibility or honor at Stanford University be terminated due to their promulgation of dangerous, racist, and antisemitic disinformation.”

Although I have strong objections to Mercer, I have chosen to focus on Murdoch because his case allows us to adjudicate whether Stanford does or does not condone misinformation. Based on the test case presented yesterday, apparently it does, via this sleight of hand—misinformation is welcomed at Stanford if it is framed as simply one viewpoint amongst many and protected as free speech. The repetition of exact phrases and terms leads one to believe that Tessier-Lavigne and Rice are reading from the same script: