But somewhere along the line, the leaders of these news organizations—from the New York Times and the Washington Post to CNN and MSNBC—abdicated their roles as seekers of truth and chose instead to use the influence of their platforms to push liberal agendas. Major news organizations became nothing more than liberal echo chambers. Over time, reporters at the New York Times started selecting their story assignments based on politics, letting their points of view seep into what was supposed to be “unbiased” news stories. The same thing happened at places like the Washington Post and CNN. Before we knew it, the mainstream media in this country had become nothing more than a propaganda arm for the Democrat party. I talked about reporters literally running stories by the DNC during the 2016 elections in my last book, Liars, Leakers, and Liberals. New York Times senior home page editor and self-described “curator of the front page” Des Shoe admitted in 2017 her paper had been extremely biased against Trump. “Our main stories are supposed to be objective. It’s very difficult in this day and age to do that,” said Shoe, adding, “the last couple years it’s changed for the bad.”8
Shoe said the Times’ business model was built on delivering news the subscribers want to hear and that the subscribers were liberal. She called the spike in subscriptions due to people seeking to hear negative news on Donald Trump after his election the “Trump bump.”
And if you don’t believe me, just look at the numbers.
Trump put the liberal media on full tilt, but their bias certainly didn’t start with his candidacy or presidency. In a study conducted in 2013 by two professors from Indiana University, only 7 percent of journalists in the United States identified as Republican.9 Of the other 93 percent, about a third self-identified as liberal, while 50 percent of respondents identified as independent.
Considering that the split in the country at large usually runs about fifty-fifty (that’s why we don’t have any huge landslide elections) this number is absurd. It’s the kind of bias that should make any news organization want to go out and hire a staff that bears at least some glancing resemblance to the country they’re writing about. And if you think for a second that the 50 percent of journalists who responded independent aren’t just as liberal as the ones who admitted their bias outright, think again. There are numbers on that, too, and numbers do not lie.
After the 2008 election, the Washington Examiner, one of the few right-leaning newspapers in the country, kept track of how much money was leaving the pockets of top journalists and going to Democrat candidates. The results were shocking—but only if you hadn’t been paying attention. Of the roughly $1.2 million that was donated by journalists and TV executives during that election cycle, about 88 percent of it went to Barack Obama and other Democrats.10 Donations to Democrats from television journalists came to just over a million dollars that year, while the Republican total was just under $150,000. With numbers like that, I find it very hard to believe—in fact, impossible to believe—that there isn’t a liberal bias in the mainstream media.
It’s not a coincidence that the American public’s trust in the media plummeted to all-time lows during this period. In a survey taken in 2018, the Knight Foundation reported that 69 percent of all adults (95 percent of Republicans) in the United States had lost some trust in news media over the preceding decade.11 That’s not quite as bad as their loss of trust in Congress.
Clearly, there was a problem. The organizations that once served as our public square—the place where we air our ideas and share our thoughts on issues—had become so corrupted by one side of the aisle that it simply wasn’t a fair fight anymore. They lied about Republicans and conservatives, demonizing half the country.
The Internet and the rise of social media disrupted this. It broke the stranglehold the traditional, liberal media had over the flow of ideas. It had certainly helped Barack Obama get elected, but it also helped fuel the rise of the Tea Party (which, last I heard, hadn’t beaten anybody up) and the Republican takeover of Congress. The Internet didn’t just bypass the information gatekeepers, it trampled the fences.
Nobody exploited social media better than Donald Trump. Over the two-year period spanning 2015 and 2016, using nothing but the Twitter app on his Samsung Galaxy smartphone, Trump rewrote the rules for running a presidential campaign. He perfected the art of bypassing the liberal-controlled media and talked directly to the voters. By the time the 2016 campaign really got going, the future president had already amassed nearly seven million followers on Twitter.12 That’s more than double the online readership of the New York Times!13 It was the kind of audience anyone with an opinion column or a television show (including yours truly) would kill to have.
Donald Trump’s interaction with his audience demonstrated not only the true power of social media but the Trump marketing genius for the first time. Trump bypassed the mainstream media’s lies and distortions by talking directly to his followers. It was the next best thing to being in the room with the man. You didn’t have to turn on a television, buy a newspaper, or sit and wonder whether the “objective” journalist who was reporting on the story was giving you the real story.
No wonder the media hate him so much. He not only tells the unvarnished truth about progressive policies, destroying political correctness in the process, he all but renders the legacy media (newspapers, radio, television, etc.) obsolete. Not since President Roosevelt began having his “fireside chats” with the nation via radio had a politician been so able to manipulate a new medium to his own ends.
Instead of trying to beat the media at its own game, Donald Trump created a brand-new game. By the end of the 2016 election cycle, we had a new public square called Twitter, and it operated according to the rules of the free market. Everyone in the world had an equal opportunity to express their ideas freely, and there was virtually nothing standing between candidates and voters.
The Left’s Revenge
From the Left’s perspective, something obviously had to be done. Allowing this free market of ideas to continue would be fatal to the progressive agenda. Why? Simple. Conservative ideas are better. They work. The failures of progressivism and the monumental success of Donald Trump’s policies provide a pretty stark contrast when the public is allowed to examine them in the light of day. Somehow, the Left had to find a way to reimpose its liberal filter over social media the way it had over the legacy media.
Fortunately for the Left and unfortunately for America, the management of the Silicon Valley tech companies who control Google, Facebook, Twitter and other dominant web search and social media platforms are dyed-in-the-wool, far-Left Democrats. They found a way to leverage their market dominance to once again tilt the playing field heavily in the Left’s favor.
When you sign up for an account on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube (which is owned by Google), you agree to about 4,900 words of legal jargon. When you accept the terms of these agreements, you’re accepting that Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have the right to kick you, or anyone else, off their platform whenever they see fit. This means that if you post something that the people working at either of these companies deem “offensive,” they can remove your posts, suspend your account, or even delete your online profile permanently.
Because these two companies have a virtual monopoly on social media throughout the world, once you’re banned, there’s nowhere else to turn. It’s not like you can go sign up for Twitter’s main competitor in the marketplace, because there isn’t one. When it comes to the digital public square, Facebook, Twitter, and Google are the only games in town.
We have antitrust laws in the United States that govern every other type of corporation. When the phone company AT&T got so big that it eliminated competition in the marketplace, the government broke it up into smaller phone companies. The same thing happened to U.S. Steel at the beginning of the twentieth century. But so far, antitrust laws have not been applied to Google, Facebook, or Twitter, even though some Democrats are calling for them to be broken up. In June 2019, House Democra
ts initiated a review of Facebook, Google, and Twitter to, according to the Washington Post, “determine if they’ve become so large and powerful that they stifled competition and harm consumers.”14
Regardless of what you think about the antitrust side of this case, one thing is certain. In our current political climate, when so many important interactions happen via Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, a ban from just one of these platforms is the digital equivalent of a life sentence in Siberia. They are such a part of daily life that some legal theorists have even attempted to classify them as “public utilities,” the way we do with things like electricity and water. I’m not so sure about that, but I get the point.
There is a case to be made that when you remove a person from one of these platforms, you are damaging our republican form of government. Think about it. Some of the most vital announcements and conversations occurring in our country today are happening on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. There are so many that it’s often impossible for legacy media companies to keep up. Banning someone from one or more of these 24-7, nonstop platforms deprives them of information they need to make decisions about whom to vote for, what policies to support, or even who is running. You’re also taking away their ability to contribute to those conversations, which are migrating online in larger numbers than ever before.
Charlie Kirk, a young activist and founder of Turning Point USA, a conservative movement on over 1,400 college campuses across the country, has frequently appeared on Justice. He is a warrior who fights in the trenches every day to make sure that free speech is alive and well on college campuses, and in virtual spaces like Facebook and Twitter.
When asked about what a digital ban might mean, he compared Twitter to a small airline. If one airline has a complete monopoly on a small town in Montana, he said—meaning it’s the only airline that flies in or out, so you have no other options—and that airline bans someone, the airline has effectively cut off that person’s access to an entire town.
This is what is happening in the United States today. Social media companies—the airlines—get to decide who they want to let on their planes and who they don’t, and there is really nothing any of us can do about it. This means that our access to the various “small towns” of the Internet, whether it’s a discussion on an issue that matters greatly to us or just the Twitter feed of a presidential candidate, can be restricted at any moment. The irony here is Google started out with the motto, “Don’t be evil.” They’ve recently removed that in an apparent acknowledgment of their evil ways.15 God, I love the truth!
It might not be so bad if the people who made decisions about what is “offensive” or “inflammatory” did so in a rational, unbiased way. But clearly, they don’t. In an investigation done in 2017, three professors at the Stanford Graduate School of Business studied the political leanings of people who work in Silicon Valley. What they found should surprise no one. On almost every issue, the respondents leaned far to the left. They supported welfare and opposed gun rights; they are pro-globalism and favor wealth redistribution.16 Oddly enough, the single issue on which they are not liberal is their view of monopolies. None of these Big Tech founders seemed to believe that the government should be allowed to step in and break up companies when they got too big.
Gee. I wonder why they think that.
It’s not like the founders of these companies don’t know what’s going on. In several interviews conducted in early 2019, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, admitted publicly that the workforce at his company is overwhelmingly liberal. He tried to make the case that this liberal bias doesn’t affect the platform and talked about the few conservatives who work there. “We have a lot of conservative-leaning folks in the company as well,” he said. “And to be honest, they don’t feel safe to express their opinions at the company. They do feel silenced by just the general swirl of what they perceive to be the broader percentage of leanings within the company, and I don’t think that’s fair or right.”
Maybe Jack is being sincere, but when you catch employees of these tech giants speaking off the cuff, when their guards are down, the answers you get are much less carefully worded. That’s just what Project Veritas found out when they secretly recorded senior Google executive Jen Gennai with a hidden camera, who had this to say on video:
We all got screwed over in 2016, again it wasn’t just us, it was, the people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over, like, everybody got screwed over so we’ve rapidly been like, what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again.
We’re also training our algorithms, like, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?17
Gennai says Elizabeth Warren’s desire to break up big companies like Google would be counterproductive because, “smaller companies don’t have the resources” to “prevent the next Trump situation.”18
It doesn’t get any plainer than that, folks. This is real meddling in an election and Project Veritas has sent a letter to eleven members of Congress expressing concern over that and Google’s possible violation of federal laws like the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA).19 We’ll have to see how concerned the Left really is with “saving democracy” from potential foreign intervention, given that Google is a multinational corporation with plenty of foreign stockholders.
Google’s Gennai makes one thing very clear. When someone is banned or disciplined because they have said something liberal activists have deemed “offensive” (which, these days, is pretty much everything), it is really because they have dared to stray from the Left’s radical agenda or because they support the traditional, conservative values held by the people who voted for Donald Trump. They are determined Trump or anyone like him is never elected again. Fortunately, Americans are catching on.
Lo and behold, as we go to publication, Twitter announced it would make some of President Trump’s tweets harder to see by making users click through a “public service announcement” warning about “abusive behavior” before seeing the content.20
According to a study conducted in 2018 by the Pew Research Center, 72 percent of Americans believe that social media companies “censor views they don’t like,” and people are four times more likely to believe that these companies censor conservatives over liberals.21 This belief doesn’t come from nowhere. Another investigation by a research fellow at Columbia University reports that out of the twenty-two major political accounts that have been permanently banned since 2005, twenty-one belonged to conservatives.22 The one outlier, by the way, was the actress Rose McGowan, who was suspended merely because one of her posts contained a private phone number, which is an actual violation of Twitter’s terms of service.23 She was quickly reinstated after the tweet in question was removed.
Democrats have little to fear in terms of being banished from social media, no matter how extreme their views or whom they harass. Op-ed writer Sarah Jeong was hired by the New York Times despite several openly racist, hateful, and possibly threatening tweets. Among them were, “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men,” “Dumbass f****** white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants,” and “#CancelWhitePeople.”24
What exactly does it mean to “cancel” a whole race of people? Can any reasonable person conclude James Woods “#HangThemAll” hashtag was more threatening than this? Honestly, neither Woods nor Jeong likely intended their hyperbolic tweets to be taken literally but look at the clear double standard. When Candace Owens, a black conservative activist, posted the same message but swapped out the word white for Jewish, she was banned for racism.
Twitter verified Jeong with its blue check mark after this controversy was publicized.25 For anyone not familiar with what this means, Twitter verifies the accounts of public figures whose identities might be used for fan or parody accounts with a blue check mark next to the person’s screen name. This gives the verified account advantages in Twitter’s
algorithms. While Twitter denies the blue check mark is an endorsement, it removed Laura Loomer’s status for promoting “hateful content.”26
When a liberal engages in racism, it’s just good fun and irony. But when a conservative merely points out racism, she gets banned for hate speech. This double standard shows up all the time, and it’s disgusting. When conservatives push the envelope, they’re purged. Liberals, on the other hand, are defended.
Shadow-Banning
The bias on web search and social media platforms isn’t limited to outright bans. These Left-leaning corporations also have more surreptitious means for eliminating conservative speech. One is called “shadow-banning,” wherein giant tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter filter out content from prominent conservatives, meaning their websites don’t show up on web searches or their social media posts don’t reach their followers on social media platforms. This truly Orwellian practice allows these companies to make conservatives “disappear” online, as if they don’t exist. President Trump himself called out the tech giants for this sinister practice, writing on Twitter that he had received “many complaints,” and that the White House would be looking into the practice.27
If you hadn’t heard about shadow-banning, you’re not alone. Even most tech company employees aren’t quite sure how it’s done. But the main thrust of it is this: when social media platforms have an issue with someone, say a prominent conservative writer, but that person hasn’t done anything that explicitly violates the platform’s terms of service, the platform cannot technically ban them. So, they resort to methods that are much more difficult to detect.
Radicals, Resistance, and Revenge: The Left’s Plot to Remake America Page 21
