The Manipulators

by Peter J. Hasson

  Big Tech vs. Susan B. Anthony

  The Susan B. Anthony List (SBA List) is a national network of more than 700,000 pro-life Americans.28 The group’s president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, launched the group as a way to help pro-life women win elected office.29 Facebook deleted multiple ads from the Susan B. Anthony List, just before the 2018 midterm elections. One of the ads contrasted Democratic Senate candidate Phil Bredesen’s support for taxpayer-funded abortion with Republican candidate Marsha Blackburn’s support for ending partial-birth abortion.

  “SBA List has faced repeated censorship over the last few weeks and now our ad supporting Marsha Blackburn has been disapproved, even after more than 90,000 had viewed it. Facebook must immediately stop its censorship of pro-life speech. All the information presented in our ads has been factual, if surprising to those unwilling to face the reality of pro-abortion extremism. Facebook is censoring the truth and political free speech,” SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser said at the time.30

  Facebook blocked another two SBA List ads as well. The videos shared the stories of two babies, Charlotte and Micah, who survived premature births. Facebook dinged them for violating policies against “sensational” content.31 As far as pro-life ads go, they were pretty boilerplate, but that was still too extreme for Facebook’s speech police. Only after intense public pressure from conservative media did Facebook reverse course and apologize for the “mistake.”

  In October 2017, Twitter blocked an SBA List advertisement from running because it contained the words “killing babies.”32 As Dannenfelser recounted: “No advertiser is permitted to use the phrase ‘killing babies’. That’s what Twitter told us when they censored one of our videos.”33 The objective truth about abortion is it kills an unborn baby. Twitter would rather people didn’t see that truth.

  “Some organizations seem determined to censor the pro-life message. The people who run these mega-companies manipulate the national discussion to conform to their political leanings and use their platforms to steer public opinion in their favor,” Arizona Republican congressman Andy Biggs warned in a January 2018 op-ed.34 It’s only gotten worse since then.

  Facebook blocked producers of the movie Roe v. Wade from buying ads promoting their film.35 The movie was notable for taking a pro-life and anti-Planned Parenthood perspective.36 Once again, Planned Parenthood’s allies came to the rescue. They’ve done so repeatedly.

  In 2017, Twitter blocked a Marsha Blackburn campaign video, hiding “behind the farcical argument that her pro-life rhetoric was ‘inflammatory’ and that it could ‘evoke a strong negative reaction,’ ” noted the Washington Examiner’s Becket Adams.37 While at the same time, Twitter allowed ReproAction, a pro-abortion political group, to buy inflammatory ads urging Twitter to bar Blackburn from buying pro-life ads.38 The Texas-based pro-life group Human Coalition has repeatedly seen its content censored by tech companies. On February 21, 2018, Twitter removed three pro-life Human Coalition ads for allegedly violating company policies against “inappropriate content” and placed the group’s advertising privileges “under review.” Twitter informed Human Coalition the group would receive an email “when the review is complete.” That email came March 22: Human Coalition’s account was suspended from running ads—any ads—on Twitter. Human Coalition appealed but to no avail. Five days later, I reached out to Twitter’s press team and asked three questions:

  What, specifically, was the policy violation that led to this action?

  It’s my understanding that Planned Parenthood (@PPFA) is eligible to run advertisements. Is that the case?

  If so, what is the difference between @PPFA and @HumanCoalition?

  Two hours after my email to Twitter, Human Coalition received a surprise update: Twitter reversed their suspension and cleared them to run ads again. Twitter assured me that the timing was a coincidence. Anyone familiar with Big Tech’s handling of censorship knows better.

  Among Facebook’s fact-checking partners (more on that in the next chapter) is a left-wing outlet called Health Feedback. To give you an example of how this bias manifests in fact checks, consider what happened when Health Feedback evaluated a Live Action video that asserted, “abortion is never medically necessary.”39 To “fact check” that claim, the left-wing fact checker turned to—who else?—left-wing abortionists. Among them: Dr. Jennifer Gunter, an abortionist who openly advocates for pro-lifers to be censored online, and who had attacked Lila Rose as “ignorant and evil.”40 An investigation by the International Fact-Checking Network (yes, that’s a real thing) found that Health Feedback’s fact check of Live Action for Facebook “fell short” of the IFCN’s standards.41

  Big Tech’s Coziness with the Abortion Lobby

  Big Tech’s hostility to pro-lifers isn’t terribly surprising in light of how close it is with Planned Parenthood and the rest of the abortion industry. Google employees openly support and fundraise for Planned Parenthood inside the company. “Employees at Google organized to raise funds for Planned Parenthood and launched internal initiatives under the Tech Stands with Planned Parenthood campaign,” Planned Parenthood’s 2016-2017 annual report noted. “Many other tech supporters have continued to show their support through local partnerships with Planned Parenthood affiliates, hosting matching campaigns, and more,” the report said.42

  Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg is a longtime donor to Planned Parenthood and donated one million dollars to the abortion giant in early 2017.43 In June 2019, Sandberg announced she was making another million-dollar donation—this time to Planned Parenthood’s political arm. Sandberg cited the recent wave of state-level pro-life bills as her reason for the donation. “I think this is a very urgent moment where the rights and the choices and the basic health of the most vulnerable women—the women who have been marginalized, often women of color—are at stake,” the Facebook executive told the HuffPost. “And so all of us have to do our part to fight these draconian laws.”44 Of course Sandberg is not alone at Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife donated $992 million in Facebook shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a liberal donor network that doles out millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood and its affiliates every year.45

  Lila Rose told me that because Sandberg is “publicly aligning herself with the biggest pro-abortion corporation in the country, a scandal-ridden organization that is extreme in its political lobbying to expand abortion in this country… it’s no wonder that confidence in the words of these platforms is low.”

  To Big Tech, Planned Parenthood and abortion are sacrosanct and should be promoted and protected at all costs. But when it comes to pro-life groups striving to inform people about the reality of abortion and about the moral case for defending human life, Big Tech thinks they need to be silenced.

  CHAPTER SEVEN Speech Police

  Progressive activists are working overtime to scare companies from advertising on conservative television shows and websites. They turn every advertisement that airs on a remotely conservative program into a political statement, regardless of the advertising companies’ intent. If a company advertises on Fox News at 8:15 p.m. on a weeknight, it’s no longer treated for what it is: a simple attempt to sell a product to the massive audience that tunes into Tucker Carlson. Instead, progressive activists contort a company’s decision to market its product into de facto endorsements of everything that a host says on a show. It’s a ridiculous standard that is applied only to conservative media.

  In April 2018, Internet sleuths dug up and published a slew of homophobic posts that left-wing pundit Joy Reid wrote on her blog before she joined MSNBC. Reid responded to the story by lying, claiming her social media accounts had been hacked. But the Internet sleuths kept finding more offensive posts published under Reid’s name and archives documenting that the blog posts weren’t the result of hackers. If this controversy had involved a conservative Fox News host, there’s no doubt that left-wing activists would have whipped up an outrage mob, demanded her resignation, and launched a press
ure campaign against all of her advertisers. Every advertiser on Reid’s show would have been forced to answer some version of the following question: “Joy Reid has a history of anti-gay posts and attempted to lie her way out of it. Are you going to continue advertising on her show?” Once one company said “no,” others would follow. Liberal journalists would publish running lists of companies boycotting her show and companies that remained and that “were on the wrong side of history.” And the campaign would end with Reid getting fired.

  But none of that happened, because Joy Reid is part of the left-wing media establishment. To be clear, I don’t want Reid to lose her job, but the fact that left-wing activists showed no interest in applying the same standards to her as they would a Fox News host speaks volumes. They’re unprincipled political hitmen, whose job is to silence the opposition. It’s a cynical and dishonest strategy. But it’s effective.

  After the 2016 election, the left-wing activist group Sleeping Giants launched a campaign to convince companies to stop advertising on the pro-Trump website Breitbart News. In the first two months of 2017, 90 percent of Breitbart’s advertisers capitulated to the left-wing pressure and blacklisted the site.1 Sleeping Giants did not let up. The group urged universities and other institutions to boycott a hedge fund because its chairman, Robert Mercer, was a primary investor in Breitbart. It didn’t take long before Mercer resigned from the hedge fund.2

  The founder of Sleeping Giants, Matt Rivitz, remained anonymous until July 2018 when I identified him after an extensive investigation.3 (As it turned out, Rivitz was working as an advertising executive.) More than three years after Trump took office, Sleeping Giants’s boycott campaign continues to slowly pick off Breitbart’s remaining advertisers.

  Liberal activists use similar tactics with Big Tech companies when it comes to policing speech. The activists have significant leverage, because Facebook, Twitter, and Google (and therefore YouTube), rely heavily on ads for revenue, and, of course, Big Tech is largely sympathetic to the activists’ goal of making corporations responsible for limiting free speech. That means, in practice, that companies are expected to guarantee that they won’t finance, through advertising, speech that liberals deem unacceptable. The tactic isn’t new, but it’s rapidly gaining steam. The left-wing group Media Matters (founded by liberal hatchet man David Brock4) has waged advertisement boycotts against Fox News for years, and other leftist groups have waged similar campaigns against popular conservatives online. Time and again, corporations have bent the knee to left-wing activists.

  The SPLC

  Groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center often assist these campaigns. The SPLC is a once-respected discrimination watchdog that has long since devolved into a smear-mongering fundraising mill.5 The SPLC routinely labels mainstream conservatives as “extremists” and Christian organizations as “hate groups.”

  The SPLC doesn’t even pretend to police the left: a spokeswoman for the company admitted to Politico in a June 2017 story that the SPLC is “focused, whether people like it or not, on the radical right.”6 And liberal millionaires throw their money at the SPLC for that very reason—to prove how progressive they are. It’s laughable that Big Tech uses the SPLC as a referee: the SPLC makes no pretense of being impartial, and its “facts” are often wrong. In November 2016, the SPLC published a list of “anti-Muslim” extremists that was so wildly inaccurate that it would have been funny if Big Tech, the liberal media, and Democratic lawmakers didn’t promote the SPLC as an authoritative voice. The list of alleged-Islamophobes included Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a celebrated human rights activist who survived the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation and works incessantly to save other Muslim girls from suffering a similar fate. Nobody familiar with Hirsi Ali could argue that she is anything other than a hero and a champion of women’s rights. And yet, the SPLC casually included her on a list of what the SPLC alleged were extremists linked to inciting anti-Muslim violence. “This misinformation and hateful rhetoric have consequences. When huge numbers of Americans believe that a majority of Muslims are terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, it can hardly be a surprise that some percentage of them engage in hate crime attacks,” the SPLC guide warned. “After all, they learned of the threat they believe Muslims pose from sources who were presented by the media as authoritative experts.”

  That rationale is absurd on at least three counts: first, it denies that individual Muslims are responsible for their own actions. Second, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is far more authoritative on the subject of female genital mutilation than anyone at the SPLC. Third, there’s much more evidence linking the SPLC to hateful violence than there is for any link between Hirsi Ali—an award-winning human rights activist—and violence against anybody, much less Muslims (though radical Islamists have threatened her). In 2011, a fervent left-winger named Floyd Lee Corkins walked into the Family Research Council with a plan to shoot the conservative employees who worked there, and then—having murdered them—wipe Chick-fil-A sandwiches in their faces. A heroic security guard was all that prevented a massacre. After his arrest, Corkins told authorities that he chose the conservative nonprofit from the SPLC’s list of “hate groups.”7 Yet, despite the fact that the SPLC’s inaccurate characterization of a Christian group almost caused the mass murder of its employees, the SPLC still had the gall to accuse Ayaan Hirsi Ali of being a violence-inciting “extremist.” And when the SPLC was called out for its falsehoods, the group refused to admit that it was wrong.

  In April 2018, the SPLC finally removed the “anti-Muslim extremist” list that had been on its website for nearly two years. It did so because of threats of legal action from another individual on the list, Maajid Nawaz, himself a Muslim. The SPLC’s Heidi Beirich gave a speech at Duke University where she claimed that Nawaz “believes that all mosques should be surveilled. In other words, his opinion is that all Muslims are potential terrorists.” Both of those statements are false, and not only is Nawaz not an extremist, combating extremism has been a focal point of his career.8 The SPLC’s falsehoods were so blatant that the group agreed to settle Nawaz’s suit for $3.3 million in damages, in addition to removing Nawaz’s name from its website and publicly apologizing to him. The SPLC still hasn’t offered a similar apology to Hirsi Ali.

  The smear jobs against Hirsi Ali and Nawaz weren’t isolated incidents. The SPLC routinely smears conservatives and other critics of left-wing identity politics because that’s how the group makes money. Ultra-wealthy leftists write massive checks to the SPLC to demonstrate their wokeness because the SPLC is to identity politics what Planned Parenthood is to abortion. In August 2017, Apple CEO Tim Cook pledged $2 million to the SPLC, prompting Hirsi Ali to criticize Cook in a New York Times op-ed, saying that the SPLC was “an organization that has lost its way” and that now engages in “smearing people who are fighting for liberty.”9 Nevertheless, the SPLC’s fear-mongering is a lucrative operation, and one that’s tax-exempt to boot. The SPLC has more than $400 million in assets, including a cool $90 million stashed in offshore funds.10 Liberal donors keep signing checks, and the SPLC keeps churning out smears as if it’s their job—because it is.

  In February 2018, the SPLC tried to smear respected liberal feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers as an extremist, because she’s an open critic of left-wing identity politics. “In a report on ‘Male Supremacy,’ an ideology that the group says ‘advocates for the subjugation of women,’ it included American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, calling her someone ‘who gives mainstream and respectable face to some [Men’s Rights Activist] concerns,’ ” the Weekly Standard reported.11

  “This is a group I used to admire. They once went after Klan members and Nazis and now… [they go after] people like Ben Carson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. It’s absurd,” Sommers told the Standard, adding: “They’re blacklisting in place of engaging with arguments. They blacklist you, rather than try to refute you.”12 Dr. Ben Carson, who now serves as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development unde
r President Trump, was labeled an anti-gay “extremist” by the SPLC in October 2014 for stating his belief that marriage is a religious sacrament that occurs between a man and a woman.13 To most people, Carson is not an extremist, but an inspiring real life example of the American Dream. He was raised in inner city Detroit by a single mother, and could easily have ended up in prison: at age fourteen, for instance, he tried to stab a classmate.14 But he reformed himself, overcame the odds, and became an award-winning neurosurgeon, thanks to support from his mother, who pushed her sons to prioritize education and their Christian faith. In short, Ben Carson is an American success story that should inspire each and every one of us. But he, too, was labeled an extremist for simply stating the traditional Christian belief that marriage is the sacramental union of a man and a woman. The SPLC kept Carson’s name on its list of “extremists” for four months before negative publicity finally convinced the SPLC to remove it.15

  While the SPLC’s smear artists have repeatedly lied about conservatives, they’ve also lied about themselves and what they represent. This became apparent in March 2019, when the SPLC fired its co-founder Morris Dees for unspecified “conduct issues.” Two weeks later, SPLC president Richard Cohen resigned. Current and former SPLC employees accused the organization of turning a blind eye to corruption, sexual harassment, and racial discrimination within its own ranks.16 In a scathing essay published in the New Yorker, former SPLC staffer Bob Moser described the SPLC as a “highly profitable scam” that was “ripping off donors.”17 Working at the SPLC, Moser wrote, came with “the guilt you couldn’t help feeling about the legions of donors who believed that their money was being used, faithfully and well, to do the Lord’s work in the heart of Dixie. We were part of the con, and we knew it.”18