There is no moral equivalence here. It is members of the left, not people in MAGA hats, who are threatening and attacking those who disagree with them. If they were intellectually honest, they would admit that liberals don’t fear voicing their opinions in a college classroom or any other public place. Notice that Congressman Yarmuth is not the least bit reluctant to call President Trump a racist and hater because he knows he will suffer no consequences. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Trump exercises restraint by not reacting even more aggressively to the constant, baseless attacks leveled against him.
“THE VOICE OF RAW POWER… IS WHAT WE SHOULD FEAR THE MOST”
In December 2018, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) bestowed its first “Courage Against Hate” award to Apple CEO Tim Cook because he had “championed inclusion and diversity at Apple, investing in educational opportunities for students of all ages and backgrounds, and ensuring Apple offices and stores are open and welcoming to everyone.” This was an interesting tribute considering that Cook quickly declared, “We only have one message for those who seek to push hate, division, and violence: you have no place on our platforms, you have no home here.”5 Every person listening to Cook knew exactly what he meant, since the left defines “hate” as “positions the left disagrees with.” And his statement squarely contradicts the lofty sentiments of the award presenters—because Apple isn’t welcoming to everyone, only those who share its social and political views.
The First Amendment protects even noxious opinions, so Cook was on thin ice. Apple, like other social media entities, comes under the protective umbrella of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This law exempts social media companies from liability for the content that users post on their platforms. Like phone companies, they are open to all contributors regardless of their views. Social media companies are not content providers—but when they censor participants’ political views, that’s precisely what they become. Despite warnings from Republicans that they risk losing their exemption if they continue in this mode, the tech giants arrogantly persist and deny discriminating against conservatives.
Leftists regard their views as sacrosanct and opposing ones as aberrant. They confuse their subjective notions of morality with objective truth. Cook displayed this attitude in accepting the ADL award. “My friends, if we can’t be clear on moral questions like these, then we’ve got big problems,” intoned Cook. “… I believe the most sacred thing that each of us is given is our judgment, our morality, our own innate desire to separate right from wrong. Choosing to set that responsibility aside at a moment of trial is a sin.” Andrew Klavan finds these comments “chilling.” “Only a man worth over 600-million dollars could spout such simplistic horse manure without someone telling him he’s a chucklehead,” writes Klavan. “Of course we all have an inner moral voice. Throughout the centuries, people in the sure and certain faith in that voice have set each other on fire for disagreeing with religious doctrines, loosed dogs on them for the color of their skin and gassed them to death because of their religious heritage. Each of these killers thought he was doing good.” Klavan further notes that the question isn’t whether people support “hate” but who gets to decide what constitutes hate and when it should be silenced.
That’s exactly right. Cook was purportedly referring to anti-Semitism and white nationalism—repulsive sentiments, but the left often finds them where they don’t exist and ignores them where they really are. The left believes “fascism” is a right-wing ideology, though it is decidedly left-wing, so when Cook self-righteously denounces fascism, he is clearly referring to the mainstream political views of Trump supporters. Leftists often set themselves up as ultimate moral arbiters whose judgment obviates First Amendment protections, which is arguably more dangerous to the fabric of society and our liberties than whatever tiny pockets of “white nationalism” exist. Klavan trenchantly summarizes the danger: “Tim Cook’s is not the voice of morality, but the voice of raw power. It’s that voice—not the voice of ‘hate’—we should fear the most.”6
Apple displayed its bias by reportedly removing from its platform the app “Inconvenient Facts,” which countered climate alarmism. The app’s content was based on the book Inconvenient Facts: The Science That Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know by geologist Gregory Wrightstone. Noting that Al Gore is an Apple board member, Wrightstone claims many inferior pro–climate change apps are available on the app store, and that other apps are only rarely approved and later removed, as his was. “A key takeaway here is that Apple has a monopoly over iPhone apps and the Apple App Store is the only place to get them,” said Wrightstone. “It appears that Apple has chosen to weaponize its control over purchasing apps to stifle science that doesn’t conform to its politically correct notions.”7
HUGE TEAMS ADJUST SEARCH RESULTS
Conservatives have good cause to complain about the liberal bias of social media giants Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, and even Pinterest. For example, Twitter temporarily suspended the investigative journalism team Project Veritas for tweeting Pinterest internal communications in which an employee called Ben Shapiro a “white supremacist.” Project Veritas also found that Pinterest removed Christian-related terms from auto-fill search functions and that it banned pro-life group Live Action’s posts for a day because they may have “detrimental effects on health and public safety.” Live Action’s Lila Rose notes that they did not ban posts from abortion clinics, including ads for the abortion pill RU-486.8
One reporter’s encounter with YouTube is also instructive. Slate’s April Glaser contacted YouTube to complain that too many anti-abortion videos surfaced when she used the search term “abortion.” Afterward, she noticed a marked change. “Anti-abortion content meant to enrage or provoke viewers was no longer purely dominating the results,” she said, “though they still looked very different from the generally more sober Google results.”9
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that YouTube, which is run by Google, manipulates search results. This contradicts the sworn congressional testimony of Google CEO Sundar Pichai that Google does not “manually intervene” on any particular search result. A leak from an anonymous Google engineer alleging that the term “abortion” was added to a “blacklist” file for “controversial YouTube queries” also casts doubt on Pichai’s testimony. The engineer reportedly called the manipulation of search results on abortion a “smoking gun,” confirming that the change occurred after the Slate reporter’s inquiry.10
One Google employee in a leaked discussion thread said it “seems like we are pretty eager to cater our search results to the social and political agenda of left-wing journalists.” While a Google spokesperson adamantly maintained that Google has never manipulated search results or content to promote a particular ideology, one participant in the leaked discussion confirmed Google maintains “huge teams” to adjust search results for subjects that are “prone to hyperbolic content, misleading information, and offensive content.”11 It is unsettling that Google’s spokesperson actually believes banning or limiting “offensive content,” which to leftists means conservative views, is not promoting a particular ideology. This is the same type of self-deception that induces mainstream media figures to believe they are unbiased journalists.
When the YouTube community posted its 2018 YouTube “Rewind” video, which was full of social justice messages, it received a record number of dislikes. The Gillette ad on toxic masculinity also racked up an enormous number of dislikes—some 1.3 million at one point, compared to 700,000 likes. As a result of these incidents and others, YouTube considered deleting its dislike button, claiming that “dislike mobs” descend on the platform to spread negativity.12
Google’s skewed political climate has reached a comical extreme. When a company executive used the term “family” in a company-wide presentation about a children’s product, employees objected that the statement implied families have children and was therefore homophobic. One female employee said, “It smacks of the ‘fa
mily values’ agenda by the right wing, which is absolutely homophobic by its very definition. It’s important that we fix our charged language when we become aware of how exclusionary it actually is. As a straight person in a relationship, I find the term ‘family’ offensive because it excludes me and my boyfriend, having no children of our own.”13
In light of these examples, it’s unsurprising that Google worked hard to elect Hillary Clinton and that her loss to Trump caused a large-scale meltdown at the company. A leaked video showed Google was involved in targeted turnout operations designed to increase voter participation in Democratic areas in the 2016 election. One top Google employee referred to the operation as a “silent donation” to the Hillary Clinton campaign.14 When Trump won, the company convened an all-hands meeting with despondent employees and executives. A video leaked to Breitbart showed Google’s VP for Global Affairs Kent Walker trying to buck up his demoralized troops, insisting history was on their side and that they must work to ensure that populism and nationalism were just a historical “blip” and a “hiccup.”15 The Daily Caller further reports that Google employees debated whether to suppress Daily Caller articles and other conservative media in Google’s search function after Trump’s victory. Employees also allegedly sought to interfere with search results to help thwart Trump’s travel ban.16
In another Project Veritas sting, a senior Google executive was caught on video apparently suggesting that Google try to prevent “the next Trump situation” in the 2020 election. “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,” said Jen Gennai, Google’s head of “responsible innovation.”17 Senator Ted Cruz grilled Google’s UX director Maggie Stanphill about the Project Veritas revelations. Stanphill claimed she was aware of them but was too busy to review the matter. She said she didn’t believe it is Google’s job to ensure that someone like Trump never comes to power again. “Conservatives aren’t stupid,” comments Beth Baumann at Townhall. “We know our content is being suppressed. We know our thoughts and values threaten the Left’s agenda. If it wasn’t, they wouldn’t feel the need to keep us from spreading our message.”18
In a particularly alarming development, Dr. Robert Epstein, a psychologist and liberal Democrat who supported Hillary Clinton, testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Google generated a minimum of 2.6 million votes for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election through deceptive manipulation of search results. He claimed that if big tech companies like Google and Facebook coordinate behind a certain candidate, they could influence up to 15 million votes.19 Epstein’s warnings should cause all Americans great concern.
A growing part of our political debate today occurs on Twitter, which conservatives have long believed discriminates against conservatives and conservative opinion. It’s not much of an open question—Vice News reported in July 2018 that the platform had shadow banned (that is, limited the appearance in search results) numerous conservatives, including “[t]he Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel, several conservative Republican congressmen, and Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesman.”20 After that story became public Twitter removed those shadow bans, but it has also outright ejected a number of conservatives from the platform, including Houston radio host Jesse Kelly. Senator Ben Sasse likened Kelly’s expulsion to the de-platforming common on many college campuses.21
Other conservatives have abandoned Twitter amidst this pressure, including prominent columnist and blogger Glenn Reynolds, a.k.a. “Instapundit,” who deactivated his account to protest the “crappy SJW types” who, he argued, are stifling free speech.22 Likewise, conservative actor James Woods, who had amassed more than two million followers, left Twitter after being repeatedly suspended and censored. “The irony is, Twitter accused me of affecting the political process, when in fact, their banning of me is the truly egregious interference,” Woods declared. “Because now, having your voice smothered is much more disturbing than having your vocal cords slit. If you want to kill my free speech, man up and slit my throat with a knife, don’t smother me with a pillow.”23
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey denies that political ideology affects Twitter’s decision-making process, “whether related to ranking content on our service or how we enforce our rules. We believe strongly in being impartial, and we strive to enforce our rules impartially.” People aren’t buying it. A Pew poll in June 2018 found that 72 percent of Americans believe social media firms censor certain views, and four times as many respondents believe such firms favor liberals over conservatives rather than the reverse.
Richard Hanania, a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University, researched the issue, and his findings “make it difficult to take claims of political neutrality seriously. Of twenty-two prominent, politically active individuals who are known to have been suspended since 2005 and who expressed a preference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, twenty-one supported Donald Trump.” Hanania argues that leftists’ abusive internet behavior is unsurprising considering their uncivil and violent behavior off-line. “It is unthinkable that we would allow a telephone or electricity company to prevent those on one side of the political aisle from using its services. Why would we allow social media companies to do the same?”24
Senator Ted Cruz and other Republican lawmakers have blasted the bias of social media companies. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on social media censorship, Cruz said he’d considered whether some big tech companies had committed antitrust violations, and he suggested removing their immunity from liability under the Communications Decency Act. “What makes the threat of political censorship so problematic is the lack of transparency, the invisibility, the ability for a handful of giant tech companies to decide if a particular speaker is disfavored,” Cruz said.25
Indeed, the pushback against online censorship seems to be gaining steam. In late July 2019, the Department of Justice announced it would investigate “market-leading online platforms” for anticompetitive conduct and federal antitrust violations. The DOJ said it would address “widespread concerns” of “consumers, businesses, and entrepreneurs” concerning the practices of “search, social media, and some retail services.” The Washington Free Beacon reports this investigation will run in addition to an existing antitrust investigation into Google.26
COLD CASE PC DETECTIVES
Sanctimonious leftists treat their own pronouncements as holy writ. No matter the cause, their message is righteous and compelling. All must align with their viewpoint or be chastised. In December 2018, the Monterey Bay Aquarium posted a photo of a sea otter and tweeted, “Abby is a thicc girl. What an absolute unit. She chonk. Look at the size of this lady. OH LAWD SHE COMIN. Another Internetism!” Responses were favorable to the humorous tweet, which provoked a lively discussion about otters. A group of pseudo-pious academics, however, was insulted that the aquarium fat-shamed the otter with “appropriative language.” One person called the tweet “digital blackface.” Another said it contributed to a “hostile environment” for minorities because organizations that are not run by blacks or focused on black audiences have no right to do such things.
The aquarium eventually surrendered and apologized. When some Twitter users insisted the apology was unnecessary, it replied, “As an organization that seeks to educate, we absolutely welcomed the perspective, information and open discussion. If we want people to listen to us, we have to be willing to listen to them.”27 Sounds wonderful, but this was pure bullying, and the aquarium obviously decided it wasn’t worth the risk of resisting and getting into further PC hot water.
A willingness to listen is not the same as a duty to capitulate. The aquarium staff could have listened instead to the majority of people who scoffed at the manufactured controversy, but they knew there was no risk in bucking them. In the leftist PC world, the frequent call for “dialogue” and “national conver
sations,” as we’ve observed, is loaded with PC meaning. These terms are code for, “You will be made to embrace the social justice warriors’ message. If you don’t, it’s because you didn’t listen.” To disagree with leftists is, by definition, being unreasonable, as there is only one reasonable position on a given issue—theirs.
Fat-shaming seems to be the next faddish offense. British actress Jameela Jamil of The Good Place is on a crusade against this insidious malfeasance. When Avon released an ad saying, “Dimples are cute on your face (not on your thighs),” Jamil went ballistic. “And yet EVERYONE has dimples on their thighs, I do, you do, and the CLOWNS at @Avon_UK certainly do,” she exclaimed. “Stop shaming women about age, gravity, and cellulite. They’re inevitable, completely normal things. To make us fear them and try to ‘fix’ them, is to literally set us up for failure.” Of course, Avon groveled with the mandatory, profusely apologetic tweet: “Hi Jameela, we intended this to be lighthearted and fun, but we realize we missed the mark. We’ve removed this messaging from all marketing materials. We support our community in loving their bodies and feeling confident in their own skin.”28
Isn’t Jamil taking this a bit too far by likening “fat-shaming” to hate speech? Jamil obviously doesn’t think so, considering she launched an entire new company based on the idea. “I’m turning ‘I Weigh’ into a company, and one of our main goals is to work towards a policy change that means this way of talking about people’s bodies is considered hate speech. Fat-phobia is real, it is pervasive and prevalent and is damaging the mental health of millions,” she tweeted.29
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