The Manipulators

by Peter J. Hasson

  To my parents, Seamus and Mary Hasson

  CHAPTER ONE The Establishment vs. Free Speech

  In June 1998, Matt Drudge announced in a speech to the National Press Club: “We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices. Every citizen can be a reporter, can take on the powers that be. The difference between the Internet, television and radio, magazines, newspapers, is the two-way communication. The Net gives as much voice to a [onetime] thirteen-year-old computer geek like me as to a CEO or speaker of the House. We all become equal. And you would be amazed what the ordinary guy knows.”1

  Less than five months earlier, Drudge had single-handedly sent the political and media worlds into turmoil. His website, the Drudge Report, not only broke the story of President Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, but revealed that Newsweek magazine had been sitting on the story. In one fell swoop, Drudge delivered a shattering blow to both the political and media establishments. That, Drudge reflected in June, was the power of the Internet: one man and a laptop could expose facts that important people wanted ignored.

  Six years before Facebook was founded, seven years before Google launched YouTube, and eight years before Twitter existed, Drudge predicted the effect that platforms like theirs would have on public knowledge and the media industry. “And time was only newsrooms had access to the full pictures of the day’s events. But now any citizen does. We get to see the kinds of cuts that are made for all kinds of reasons—endless layers of editors with endless agendas changing bits and pieces, so by the time the newspaper hits your welcome mat it had no meaning. Now, with a modem, anyone can follow the world and report on the world—no middleman, no Big Brother. And I guess this changes everything.”

  On October 13, 2016, eighteen years after Drudge’s comments, legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen, in a speech at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, delivered a prescient warning about the “most urgent free speech question of our time.” That question, Rosen said, is how to “protect First Amendment values in an age where… young lawyers at Google and Facebook and Twitter have more power over who can speak… [and] be heard, than any king, or president, or Supreme Court justice.” Rosen warned that Google, Facebook, and Twitter were facing “growing public pressure, here in America and around the world, to favor values such as dignity and safety rather than liberty and free expression” on their platforms.2 As a result, the great challenge would be “to ensure that the American free speech tradition—which is so necessary for the survival of American democracy—flourishes online, rather than atrophying.”

  Rosen’s “great concern,” he told his audience, was that he was “not confident that the public will demand First Amendment and constitutional values—such as transparency, procedural regularity, and free expression—over dignity and civility. In colleges in America, and on digital platforms around the world, public pressure is clamoring in the opposite direction, in favor of dignity rather than liberty of thought and opinion.” His speech centered on an ominous prediction of the future:

  As public pressures on the companies grow, they may increasingly try to abdicate their role as deciders entirely, to avoid being criticized for making unpopular decisions. I can imagine a future where Google, Twitter, and Facebook delegate their content decisions to government, to users, or even to popular referenda, in order to avoid criticism and accountability for exercising human judgment. The result would be far more suppression of speech, and less democratic deliberation than exists now, making the age of the deciders look like a brief shining age, a Periclean oasis before the rule of the mob with a dictator.

  Rosen’s pessimistic vision didn’t take long to become reality.

  Donald Trump’s election in 2016 sent a shockwave through the liberal political and media establishment. That establishment suddenly realized that it had lost control of the national conversation. Panicked, it turned to Big Tech to censor and suppress open debate on the Internet in order to control it and bring it in line with the left-liberal consensus of the media, the Democratic Party, and public education, which has long been hostile to “politically incorrect” thinking and speech.

  If they succeed, it will be bad news for people who believe in freedom and diversity of opinion, because the mainstream media, the Democratic Party, and the education establishment are among the most intellectually narrow-minded institutions in American life. Even the Washington Post has acknowledged that “liberal intolerance is on the rise on America’s college campuses, with data showing that college students have steadily become more intolerant of controversial speech in the last half century.3 Although the average American is more likely to be a self-described conservative than a self-described liberal, left-leaning professors outnumber conservative professors in academia more than five-to-one.4 Ten times as many professors are registered Democrats than are registered Republicans.5 Public school teachers, many of whom graduate from left-wing schools of education, are also overwhelmingly on the left.6

  Viewpoint diversity is no greater within the media: most every cable news program slants leftward. (In fact, Fox News tops the cable news ratings precisely because it’s the only major network that speaks to the right side of the aisle.) A 2014 study found that between 2002 and 2013, the percentage of mainstream journalists who were registered Republicans fell from 18 percent to 7 percent.7 Other studies confirm that the average journalist is much more likely to be left-wing than the average American.8

  The left’s stranglehold on education and media has serious consequences for the lives of everyday Americans. It’s how ideas like “toxic masculinity,” “white privilege,” and “preferred pronouns,” leak into mainstream discourse: they germinate in the offices of far-left academics, migrate to the news and editorial desks at the New York Times, buzz into the minds of Democratic politicians, and then are stamped into the mandatory curriculum at your local high school. Of course, not every journalist or public school teacher is a leftist, but the data make clear that most are, especially at the upper levels of their professions. The power players in these industries are all on the same ideological team, and they are all part of the same liberal establishment that has driven America’s national discourse for decades.

  The advent of Internet search engines like Google, video-hosting sites like YouTube, and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, produced new ways around the left’s information monopoly; they empowered private citizens to report events, express opinions, and reach broad audiences on a scale that had traditionally been reserved for network news anchors, print reporters, and prominent intellectuals.

  Social media represents a real threat to the political monoculture enforced by elite institutions. Absent an editorial tilt, social media is pure democracy. That’s why social media, more than any other medium, is where conservatives have gained their strongest foothold, and it’s also precisely why the progressive left feels the need to censor online speech so urgently.

  CNN commentator Kirsten Powers, herself a liberal, confessed that seen through the “narrow and intolerant lens” of people on the “illiberal left,” “disagreement is violence. Offending them is akin to physical assault. They are so isolated from the marketplace of ideas, that when confronted with a view they don’t like, they feel justified in doing whatever they can to silence that speech.”9

  That’s why there’s a push on many university campuses—where the illiberal left dominates—to make “microaggressions” reportable to the campus police department. It’s also the premise upon which left-wing agitators try to shut down Chick-fil-A franchises because the company’s owner supports traditional marriage. And that’s how you get New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio boycotting Chick-fil-A after it opened a franchise that provided jobs in h
is city.10

  At the ideological heart of the left today is the theory of intersectionality, which holds that interlocking systems of oppression determine most of the world’s outcomes. White women are victims, but less so than black men, who themselves are less marginalized than black women, who have more privilege than black transgender women, and so on. The more boxes you check that identify you as a member of a marginalized group, the more oppressed you are. And the more oppressed you are, the more deference your views should receive. Individuals who are more “intersectional” have a greater right to speak than those who score lower on the intersectionality scale.

  If your goal was to create the opposite of a self-help philosophy, you’d land on intersectionality. The way to change your life for the better isn’t to work hard, practice good habits and make good decisions—the way to change your life is to overthrow the systems of oppression that are keeping you down, and the way to gain moral authority among your peers is to achieve a higher level of victimhood. Because all oppressions are interlinked, the way to solve an issue is to chop away at our capitalist, racist, misogynistic system, no matter how narrow your concern may be. Once you overthrow the system, then your life can improve. As New York Magazine’s Andrew Sullivan observes, intersectionality has a quasi-religious element to it that necessitates silencing heretics:

  It posits a classic orthodoxy through which all of human experience is explained—and through which all speech must be filtered. Its version of original sin is the power of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., “check your privilege,” and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay. The sin goes so deep into your psyche, especially if you are white or male or straight, that a profound conversion is required.

  Like the Puritanism once familiar in New England, intersectionality controls language and the very terms of discourse. It enforces manners. It has an idea of virtue—and is obsessed with upholding it. The saints are the most oppressed who nonetheless resist. The sinners are categorized in various ascending categories of demographic damnation, like something out of Dante. The only thing this religion lacks, of course, is salvation. Life is simply an interlocking drama of oppression and power and resistance, ending only in death. It’s Marx without the final total liberation.

  It operates as a religion in one other critical dimension: If you happen to see the world in a different way, if you’re a liberal or libertarian or even, gasp, a conservative, if you believe that a university is a place where any idea, however loathsome, can be debated and refuted, you are not just wrong, you are immoral. If you think that arguments and ideas can have a life independent of “white supremacy,” you are complicit in evil. And you are not just complicit, your heresy is a direct threat to others, and therefore needs to be extinguished. You can’t reason with heresy. You have to ban it. It will contaminate others’ souls and wound them irreparably.11

  Sullivan is one of the few voices in the establishment press willing to call attention to the toxic mob culture of the far left and its growing influence. National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson, for instance, barely lasted two weeks working at The Atlantic before left-wing mobs got him fired for his views on abortion. Williamson’s left-wing detractors argued that his mere presence in the office could make his female colleagues unsafe.12 On campus, things are even worse. Across the country, campus administrators have set up “bias reporting” hotlines for students to report their classmates for perceived thought-crimes, while left-wing academics admit to discriminating against conservative Ph.D. candidates.13 When conservative speakers aren’t routinely disinvited from speaking on college campuses, mobs of left-wing students have repeatedly used violence or intimidation to try to silence them.14 In one famous incident in 2017, students at Middlebury College attacked author Charles Murray and a professor at the school, a liberal woman, who tried to help Murray escape the mob.15

  As on college campuses, so too in public life when it is dominated by the far left. For example, I reported on how an independent, reformist candidate for city council in Seattle campaigning against “the ideologues” dominating city politics felt compelled to drop his candidacy after left-wing activists threatened his wife and children. As he said in a statement, “They’ve made vile, racist attacks against my wife, attempted to get her fired from Microsoft, and threatened sexual violence. They have even posted hateful messages to my eight-year-old son’s school Facebook page. I know that as the race progresses, the activists will ratchet up their hate-machine and these attacks will intensify significantly.”16 When Trump supporters were attacked by violent protesters during the 2016 presidential campaign, the left often treated it as an open question as to whether it was the rioters or Trump’s incendiary rhetoric that was at fault.17 Of course, when you believe that speech that opposes your point of view is a form of violence, then you can justify real violence—or censorship—as a matter of self-defense.

  Free speech, however, appeared to have a sanctuary on the Internet. Many of the popular political commentators on YouTube and Facebook had one thing in common: opposition to political correctness and the left-wing censorship it produced. When a video of Professor Jordan Peterson protesting mandatory “gender” speech codes went viral, he became a Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter sensation. Christina Hoff Sommers, a respected feminist scholar, and liberal-libertarian, garnered millions of views for her videos critiquing left-wing arguments on such topics as the alleged male-female wage gap and “toxic masculinity,” and pointing to the feminist culture’s “war on boys” in America’s schools.18 Ben Shapiro made viral internet videos his calling card, aiming them especially at college age viewers looking for thoughtful, alternative arguments to what they heard from professors, liberal politicians, and media talking heads. His success led to the creation of the popular website the Daily Wire, which combines traditional online news commentary with podcasts from Shapiro and others.

  Left-wing extremists have sometimes prevented Peterson, Shapiro, and Sommers from speaking on college campuses, but they haven’t been able to stop them from speaking online (at least not yet). Nor could they stop the explosion of right-of-center media outlets online—like Breitbart, Daily Caller, Townhall, and many others—that filled a gaping hole in the media market.

  * * *

  The activist left was slow to realize the extent of the right’s online success. Most progressives fawned over President Obama’s use of Twitter and Facebook and assumed that their domination of establishment media would extend to online media, so they focused on trying to silence and discredit Fox News. Then the 2016 election happened.

  Social media is one big reason that explains how candidate Donald Trump became President Donald Trump, as both the president and his 2020 campaign chair, Brad Parscale, have acknowledged. Parscale was the campaign’s digital chief in the 2016 campaign. “I understood early that Facebook was how Donald Trump was going to win,” he said in an October 2017 60 Minutes interview. “Twitter is how he talked to the people. Facebook was going to be how he won.”19 He added: “I think Donald Trump won [on his own], but I think Facebook was the method—it was the highway… his car drove on.”

  Hillary Clinton captured 96 percent of newspaper endorsements but lost the election.20 If the result had been left up to the newsroom editors and cable TV anchors, Clinton would have won overwhelmingly. But it wasn’t up to them, and she didn’t, because of social media that helped candidate Donald Trump deliver his message—of economic nationalism, immigration enforcement, a stronger national defense, an America first foreign policy, the appointment of originalist judges, and support for pro-life policies and social conservatism—and reach voters disaffected from the mainstream media that preferred to dismiss all his policies as simply stupid and racist.

  When Trump won the election, Democrats were furious because they had assumed they would win the White House in a landslide. Journalists were stunned because no one they knew ha
d voted for Trump. And Silicon Valley was horrified, with many tech employees feeling guilty, wondering whether they should have done more to stop Trump on the platforms they controlled. Most important, left-wingers, both inside and outside of Silicon Valley, lost what little patience they had for conservative speech. They rationalized their intolerance by branding Trump and the nearly sixty-three million Americans who voted for him fascists, dupes of the Russians, or white supremacists. An honest response to the 2016 election from the left-liberal establishment would have been to realize that conservatives succeed online because they provide an alternative point of view that many Americans want to hear and that the mainstream media largely excludes. The media establishment could have done something to redress this imbalance and narrow its gap of trust with half of the country. Instead, they declared war on Trump and his supporters. The liberal mainstream news media became a propaganda arm of the Democratic National Committee, and the leftist mob has turned to the giants of Big Tech—and Big Government—and demanded that they silence voices on the right.

  Jeffrey Rosen’s prediction that a “mob with a dictator” would come to end free speech on the Internet has come to pass. The two major questions at this point are: 1) How far will this dangerous trend go? 2) What can be done to stop it?

  CHAPTER TWO Rigged

  For better or worse, social media is the new public square. 68 percent of American adults use Facebook; 73 percent use YouTube, and a quarter use Twitter. Those already high numbers are much higher for adults under fifty.1 Two-thirds of American adults and roughly four-in-five adults under fifty use social media to consume their news.2 Facebook plays such a pivotal role in Americans’ daily lives and social interactions that CEO Mark Zuckerberg felt comfortable comparing it to religion in a June 2017 speech.3 Three-quarters of Facebook users are on the site every day (not just Sunday),4 and Twitter users have a disproportionate influence on the media because so many journalists are on Twitter.