In 2014, a white police officer shot to death eighteen-year-old Michael Brown; Brown had assaulted the officer, attempted to steal his gun, fired it in the officer\u2019s car, and then charged the officer. Members of the media repeated the lie that Brown had surrendered to the officer with his hands raised. The slogan \u201cHands Up, Don\u2019t Shoot\u201d became shorthand for the accusation that Brown had been murdered, and for the broader proposition that police across America were systematically targeting black Americans. And the sports world followed suit: five players on the St. Louis Rams walked out during the pregame introductions with their hands raised in the \u201cHands Up, Don\u2019t Shoot\u201d pose. The NFL quickly announced there would be no consequences, with NFL vice president Brian McCarthy explaining, \u201cWe respect and understand the concerns of all individuals who have expressed views on this tragic situation.\u201d This wasn\u2019t out of a generalized respect for free speech values, however\u2014it was about catering to wokeness. In 2016, after a Black Lives Matter supporter shot to death five police officers, the NFL rejected the Dallas Cowboys\u2019 request to wear a decal paying tribute to the victims.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
By 2020, after the killing of George Floyd in police custody resulted in nationwide protests, virtually every sports league mandated wokeness. The NBA festooned its sidelines with the phrase \u201cBLACK LIVES MATTER\u201d\u2014a semantically overloaded phrase suggesting that America was irredeemably bigoted against black Americans. That was in and of itself a rather shocking contention coming from an 80 percent black league60 in which the average salary is $7.7 million per season. NBA players were told they could emblazon woke slogans on the back of their jerseys, limited to: Black Lives Matter, Say Their Names, Vote, I Can\u2019t Breathe, Justice, Peace, Equality, Freedom, Enough, Power to the People, Justice Now, Say Her Name, Si Se Puede, Liberation, See Us, Hear Us, Respect Us, Love Us, Listen, Listen to Us, Stand Up, Ally, Anti-Racist, I Am a Man, Speak Up, How Many More, Group Economics, Education Reform, and Mentor. Thus, it became a common sight to see Group Economics blocking Justice, and I Can\u2019t Breathe throwing up an alley-oop to Enough. How any of this had anything to do with sports was beyond reasonable explanation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
In response to the death of George Floyd while in police custody, massive protests involving millions of Americans broke out in cities across America. Never mind that even the circumstances surrounding Floyd\u2019s death were controversial\u2014the police had been called to the scene by a shop owner after Floyd passed a counterfeit bill, was heavily drugged on fentanyl, resisted arrest, asked not to be placed in the police vehicle, and was in all likelihood suffering from serious complicating health factors.1 Never mind that there was no evidence of racism in the actual Floyd incident itself. The impetus for the protests was rooted in a false narrative: the narrative that America was rooted in white supremacy, her institutions shot through with systemic racism, that black Americans are at constant risk of being murdered by the police (grand total number of black Americans, out of some 37 million black Americans, shot dead by the police while unarmed in 2020, according to The Washington Post: 15).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Police officers, realizing that even a proper arrest, if effectuated by a white officer against a black suspect, could result in a media-led crusade against them and their departments, stopped proactively policing. As a result, thousands of Americans died in 2020 who simply wouldn\u2019t have died in 2019. As Heather Mac Donald observed in The Wall Street Journal, \u201cThe year 2020 likely saw the largest percentage increase in homicides in American history…..Based on preliminary estimates, at least 2,000 more Americans, most of them black, were killed in 2020 than in 2019.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
So when the media\u2014quite properly\u2014expressed outrage at the insanity of the January 6 Capitol invasion, Americans with an attention span longer than that of a guppy could see the hypocrisy and double standard a mile off. The media, it seems, is fine with political violence when it is directed at one side.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Skewing of journalism makes its purveyors, quite literally, Fake News. They pretend to be news outlets but are actually partisan activists. It would be difficult to find a single bylined staffer at The New York Times who voted for Donald Trump. The same holds true at The Washington Post. Certainly, CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press\u2014none of them are hotbeds of Republican activity. According to a 2020 report in Business Insider, a survey of political donations from establishment media members found that 90 percent of their donated money went to Democrats (the survey included names from Fox and the New York Post). In 2013, a survey of journalists showed that just 7 percent identified as Republican. And by 2016, according to Politico, \u201cmore than half of publishing employees worked in counties that Clinton won by 30 points or more,\u201d with just 27 percent of employees working in a red district.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Americans aren\u2019t blind. They distrust the media for a reason. Members of the media frequently blame Trump for endemic American mistrust of the fourth estate. They neglect the simple fact that Americans, particularly on the right, had justified trust issues long before Trump ever rose to prominence in politics. In 2013, for example, only about 52 percent of Americans trusted traditional media. Today, that number is 46 percent; only 18 percent of Trump voters trust the media, compared with 57 percent of Biden voters. Six in ten Americans believe \u201cmost news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Establishment institutions declare themselves objective, and thus trustworthy. But in reality, sometimes partisan hacks can print truth, and self-appointed \u201cobjective\u201d outlets can print lies; \u201cobjective\u201d journalists can lie through omission, favor allies through contextualization, focus on stories most flattering to their own political priors. Bias is simply inseparable from journalism. Some journalists do a better job than others at attempting to remove their own biases from the stories they cover. Virtually all fail\u2014and over the past few years, they have begun to fail more and more dramatically. The establishment media\u2019s slavish sycophancy for Barack Obama, followed by their rabidly rancorous coverage of Donald Trump, followed again by their absurd ass kissing for Joe Biden, has ripped the mask away.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Five historians, including Pulitzer Prize winner James McPherson and Bancroft Prize winner Sean Wilentz, as well as famed founding-era historian Gordon S. Wood, wrote a letter to the Times blasting the accuracy of the project, including its mischaracterizations of the founding, Abraham Lincoln\u2019s views of black equality, and the lack of support for black rights among white Americans. The historians asked that the Times correct the project before its distribution in schools. Hannah-Jones then derisively referred to McPherson\u2019s race in order to dismiss the criticism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
In the end, after the Times spent millions of dollars to publicize the 1619 Project, the Pulitzer Prize committee gave the pseudo-history its highest honor. After all, the narrative had been upheld, and its critics chided.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
For nearly two decades, Media Matters, a pathetic hit group started by unstable grifter David Brock and backed by Hillary Clinton\u2019s team, has spent every waking minute monitoring conservative media for opportunities to push advertiser boycotts. That generally involves cutting conservatives out of context, then letting media allies know about those out-of-context quotes, spinning up controversy\u2014and then creating a fake groundswell of outrage directed at advertisers, who generally wish to be left alone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
This stuff is fully delusional: were conservatives to be deprived of Fox News, they\u2019d seek similar conservative outlets. But that delusion is consistent with the authoritarian Left\u2019s true goal: a reestablishment of the media monopoly it had before the death of the Fairness Doctrine and the rise of Rush Limbaugh. Many on the authoritarian Left celebrated when Limbaugh died, declaring him \u201cpolarizing.\u201d The reality is that they were polarizing, but they had a monopoly… and Limbaugh broke that monopoly. Now they want to reestablish it, at all costs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Curbing free speech has two particular benefits for the establishment media: first, it boots their competitors; second, it purges the public sphere of views they dislike. It\u2019s a win-win. All they require is ideologically authoritarian control.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
This is dangerous stuff. It\u2019s dangerous that the guardians of our democracy\u2014the media\u2014aren\u2019t guardians but political activists, dedicated to their own brand of propaganda. It\u2019s even more dangerous that they now work on an ongoing basis to stymie voices with whom they disagree, and use the power of their platforms to destroy their opponents at every level. A thriving marketplace of ideas requires a basic respect for the marketplace itself. But our ideologically driven, authoritarian leftist media seek to destroy that marketplace in favor of a monopoly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
One month before the 2020 election, the New York Post released a bombshell report\u2014a report that could have upended the nature of the election. That report centered on Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee. According to the Post\u2019s report, \u201cHunter Biden introduced his father, then\u2013Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by the Post.\u201d A board member of Burisma, the company on whose board Biden sat, sent Hunter Biden a note of appreciation to thank him for the introduction. The bombshell rebutted Joe Biden\u2019s consistent statements that he knew nothing about his son\u2019s business activities abroad, and that Hunter\u2019s activities had all been aboveboard.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The Biden campaign and its media allies responded by calling the Hunter Biden story \u201cRussian disinformation.\u201d The story, needless to say, was not Russian disinformation; there was no evidence that it was in the first place. In fact, about a month after the election, media reported that Hunter Biden had been under federal investigation for years\u2014CNN reported that the investigation began as early as 2018, and that it had gone covert for fear of affecting the presidential election.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The Hunter Biden story never fully broke through into the mainstream consciousness. According to a poll from McLaughlin & Associates, 38 percent of Democratic supporters weren\u2019t aware of the story before the election; by contrast, 83 percent of Republicans were aware of the story. There was a reason for that: social media companies such as Twitter and Facebook simply shut down the story cold.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
When the Post tweeted out the story, Twitter itself suspended the Post\u2019s account. The company went so far as to prohibit users from posting a link to the story itself. Twitter tried to explain that it would not disseminate stories based on hacked materials\u2014even though the Post\u2019s story was not based on hacked materials.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Then, a few days later, Twitter did the same thing with the Post\u2019s follow-up story. Those who attempted to post the links were met with the message, \u201cWe can\u2019t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Meanwhile, Andy Stone, the policy communications director at Facebook\u2014and an alumnus of the Democratic House Majority PAC, former press secretary for Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), and former press secretary of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee\u2014tweeted, \u201cWhile I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want to be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook\u2019s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.\u201d He added, \u201cThis is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation. We temporarily reduce distribution pending fact-checker review.\u201d In other words, Facebook admitted to curbing the reach of the Post story before it had been fact-checked at all. It had no evidence the story was false\u2014as it turns out, the Post story was true. But Facebook restricted the reach of the Post piece anyway.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The real story of the Hunter Biden saga, as it turned out, was not about Hunter Biden per se: it was about the power and willingness of an oligopoly to restrict access to information in unprecedented ways.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Facebook\u2019s mission statement for its first decade was \u201cto make the world more open and connected.\u201d Twitter said that its goal was \u201cto give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.\u201d Google\u2019s working motto was simple: \u201cDon\u2019t be evil.\u201d For a while, it worked. The social media giants were essentially open platforms, with a light hand in terms of censorship. Then the 2016 election happened. The shock that greeted Trump\u2019s victory in 2016 fundamentally altered the orientation of the social media platforms. That\u2019s because, up until that moment, the personal political preferences of executives and staffers\u2014overwhelmingly liberal\u2014had meshed with their preferred political outcomes. But with Trump\u2019s win, that math changed dramatically.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
In February 2017\u2014just weeks after the inauguration of President Trump\u2014Zuckerberg redefined Facebook\u2019s mission. Now, he said, the goal of the company was to \u201cdevelop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.\u201d This was a far more collectivist vision than the original vision. And it called for new content standards to help reach this utopian goal, designed to \u201cmitigate areas where technology and social media can contribute to divisiveness and isolation.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
In a congressional hearing in April 2018, Zuckerberg went so far as to state that \u201cwe are responsible for the content\u201d on the platform\u2014a direct contravention of Section 230.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
In 2020, Dorsey cut a $10 million donation to Ibram X. Kendi\u2019s \u201cCenter for Antiracism Research,\u201d29 which has to date presented no actual research. Kendi\u2019s website explains, \u201cOur work, like our center, is in the process of being developed.\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
According to a Senate report in 2018, for example, the last month of the 2016 campaign generated 1.1 billion likes, posts, comments, and shares related to Donald Trump, and another 934 million related to Hillary Clinton.33 In total, according to a report from New Knowledge, of Russian-created posts from 2015 to 2017, 61,500 posts from the Russian influence operation garnered a grand total of 76.5 million engagements. Total. Over two years. That\u2019s an average of 1,243 engagements per post\u2014an extremely low total.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The iron triangle of informational restriction has slammed into place: a media, desperate to maintain its monopoly, uses its power to cudgel social media into doing its bidding; the Democratic Party, desperate to uphold its allied media as the sole informational source for Americans, uses threats to cudgel social media into doing its bidding; and social media companies, generally headed by leaders who align politically with members of the media and the Democratic Party, acquiesce.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
By 2019, according to the Pew Research Center, 55 percent of adults got their news from social media either \u201csometimes\u201d or \u201coften,\u201d including a plurality of young people. Establishment media saw an opportunity. By targeting the means of distribution\u2014by going after the social media companies and getting them to down-rank alternative media\u2014they could reestablish the monopoly they had lost.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
In December 2016, Facebook announced that it would partner with a slate of fact-checkers to determine which sources were most trustworthy. According to BuzzFeed, Facebook would verify \u201cparticipating partners\u201d; those participating partners would then have access to a \u201cspecial online queue that will show links Facebook determined may be suitable for a fact-check.\u201d How do links end up in the queue? Users report them as false, or the link goes viral. It\u2019s easy to see how such a system can be gamed: just put together an action response team, email them to spam Facebook\u2019s system, and then refer conservative links to fact-checks by left-wing organizations. And that\u2019s precisely how the fact-checking business works. Facebook\u2019s original \u201cparticipating partners\u201d: the Associated Press, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, Snopes, The Washington Post, and ABC News.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
When President Trump was banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube in the aftermath of January 6, none of the companies could explain precisely what policy Trump had breached to trigger his excision. Zuckerberg simply stated, \u201cWe believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great.\u201d Twitter explained that it had banned Trump \u201cdue to the risk of further incitement of violence.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The media, in their ever-present quest for authoritarian rule, use social media as both their tip line and their action arm. They dig through the social media histories of those they despise, or receive tips from bad actors about \u201cbad old tweets,\u201d and proceed to whip the mob into a frenzy. Then they cover the frenzy. The same media that declaim their hatred for misinformation and bullying engage in them regularly when it comes to mobbing random citizens with the help of social media.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Justine Sacco, a thirty-year-old senior director of corporate communications at IAC, watched her life crumble after sending a tweet joking about AIDS in Africa to her 170 followers. The tweet read, \u201cGoing to Africa. Hope I don\u2019t get AIDS. Just kidding. I\u2019m white!\u201d The tweet was apparently supposed to be a joke about the insufficiency of Western aid to Africa. Nonetheless, when she got off her eleven-hour flight, she had been targeted with \u201ctens of thousands of tweets.\u201d She lost her job.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Our social media oligopoly\u2014cudgeled, wheedled, and massaged into compliance by a rabid media and a censorious Democratic Party\u2014threatens true social authoritarianism at this point. In a free market system, the solution would be to create alternatives. Parler attempted to do just that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
After the January 6 riots, based on vaguely sourced reports that Parler had been an organizing place for the rioters, Apple, Amazon, and Google all barred Parler. Apple\u2019s App Store barred Parler on the basis that Parler\u2019s processes were \u201cinsufficient\u201d to \u201cprevent the spread of dangerous and illegal content.\u201d Amazon Web Services used its power to kick Parler off the internet entirely, denying it access to its cloud hosting service. Amazon\u2019s excuse: Parler had allowed \u201cposts that clearly encourage and incite violence,\u201d and that it had no \u201ceffective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.\u201d None of the big tech companies could explain what, precisely, a minimum standard would have looked like.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Facebook has 2.8 billion monthly active users; more than 90 percent of all web searches happen via either Google or its subsidiary YouTube; fully 70 percent of digital ad spending goes to Google, Facebook, and Amazon.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
To be politically incorrect means to say that which requires saying, not to be a generic, run-of-the-mill jackass. There is a difference between making an argument against same-sex marriage and calling someone an ugly name. In fact, conflating the two grants the authoritarian Left enormous power: it allows them to argue that nonliberal points of view ought to be quashed in order to prevent terrible behavior. Fighting political correctness requires a willingness to speak truth and the brains to speak the truth in cogent, clear, and objectively decent language.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
When it comes to the authoritarian Left\u2019s desire to cram down \u201cdiversity training\u201d that discriminates based on race, for example, lawsuits are fully merited. If companies force employees to attend training sessions segregated by race, or in which white employees are taught of their inherent privilege, white employees ought to seek legal redress. So-called anti-racism training often violates the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 by explicitly discriminating on the basis of race.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"These highlights are from the Kindle version of The Authoritarian […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":15162,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"yoast_head":"\n
"The Authoritarian Moment" Highlights<\/title>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n