by Devin Nunes
If you think about the Times’ actions in terms of traditional journalism, objectivity, and the presentation of diverse views, then it’s inexplicable – why would running an op-ed by a U.S. senator spark a company-wide crisis? Even if he advocated something controversial, he was only speaking for himself, not the Times. But if you think about this episode in terms of the New York Times’ main function being to run a huge information warfare operation for socialist Democrats, then it makes sense. The operation involved minimizing or praising the riots, so Cotton’s piece harmed the goal that the paper’s employees were working toward. For them, running the piece wasn’t informing readers; it was an act of self-sabotage.
As media outlets narrow the range of acceptable viewpoints, they find little use for staff members with contrary views. This is crystal clear in the depressing resignation letter written by former New York Times editor and columnist Bari Weiss. She’s a political centrist, with conservative views on some issues and liberal views on others, and she helped a handful of conservatives get articles published in the Times. In her letter, Weiss explained how that was enough to provoke the Times staff into bullying her, calling her a Nazi and a racist, and demanding she be fired. Weiss described a stifling ideological orthodoxy at the Times, where contrarians are intimidated into self-censorship.
One would think business realities would impose some discipline on media companies, since regularly insulting and dismissing the majority of Americans who don’t support a socialist agenda isn’t a great way to attract new readers. But that hasn’t happened – the publications just serve up increasingly extreme propaganda to an ever-shrinking pool of like-minded fanatics. Fake news outfits have shown they’ll go bankrupt rather than try to regain conservative and moderate readers with more balanced content. In fact, McClatchy filed for bankruptcy on February 13, 2020 – ironically, they filed hours after a court granted me discovery to get information from their private records about their coordination with Fusion GPS and other left-wing entities.
Having abandoned traditional journalistic principles, it’s unsurprising that the papers are willing to act as paid shills for authoritarian regimes in order to earn enough money to pay the bills. The Washington Post, for example, has accepted millions of dollars from Beijing to publish paid supplements of Chinese Communist Party propaganda called “China Watch.” The Post and the New York Times both also accepted payment to distribute a propaganda insert for, of all things, the Putin regime called “Russia Beyond the Headlines.” In short, the media would rather become a megaphone for Chinese Communists and a Russian tyrant than have any meaningful interaction with American conservatives.
The Post is also fortunate to have a billionaire backer, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who seems to have invested in the paper for the prestige and power rather than as a money making opportunity. This further reduces the business need for this outlet to broaden its appeal to readers outside its ideological straightjacket.
The end result of the media’s dereliction is that conservatives and even moderates are left voiceless. The only exposure millions of Americans get to conservative or centrist ideas and policy solutions is the caricatures that the media presents when they’re refuting or ridiculing them. On many issues, if you get your news exclusively from mainstream sources, you would not even be aware that there is a conservative point of view at all. The discussion is so one-sided that, for example, on the Black Lives Matter organization, you’d be totally unaware that the group is a Marxist organization that seeks to abolish the nuclear family and which has granted a seat on the board of directors of its fundraising operation to a domestic revolutionary terrorist and convicted felon, Susan Rosenberg. Nor would you know that the BLM website directs prospective donors to Act Blue, a fundraising mechanism for the Democratic National Committee.
With the proliferation of conservative news outlets, the mainstream media does not enjoy the monopoly it once did. However, their hold on the industry is still overwhelming, encompassing, by my calculation, 90 percent of the media. Alternative viewpoints are out there, but you have to seek them out. Millions of Americans are casual news consumers – they want to stay informed, but they’re busy with work, family, and other matters, and only have a limited amount of time to follow politics. Most of them are perfectly reasonable people who will consider a wide range of views, but they’re only being exposed to one viewpoint and they don’t have time to consult with conservative media to get the other side of every issue.
I can’t stress enough how big an effect this has on the political battles in Washington. Because of the media’s constant excusing, downplaying, and skewing of stories, Democrats routinely get away with actions and statements that would instantly end any Republican’s career. Consider a few recent examples:
In the midst of the Coronavirus shutdown, when millions of Americans had lost their jobs, Nancy Pelosi went on TV from her home and cheerfully displayed her huge assortment of high-end ice cream.
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar called for “dismantling the whole system of oppression” in America.
Senator Tammy Duckworth said we should “have a national dialogue” on tearing down statues of George Washington.
Amid a huge surge in violent crime and murder in New York City, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez characterized the appalling problem as hungry people stealing bread.
Joe Biden told a black radio host, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
I’ve been in Congress long enough to know that no Republican would survive these statements. But when a Democrat says or does something this heartless, offensive, or stupid, a legion of media hacks springs into action to explain why they’re not nearly as offensive or cruel as they seem when put in the right “context.” An army of “fact checkers” at left-wing think-tanks, socialist propaganda organizations, and media outlets jumps into the fray to decree why any criticism is unwarranted or false. Many mainstream media consumers never even see the criticism itself, just the socialists’ rejection of it.
Having withstood one of the more furious media attack operations, I’ve developed a simple strategy to counter them: no conservative or Republican should talk to any mainstream media outlet. Even when a mainstream reporter contacts my office for comment on some piece of false information, I won’t dignify them by denying it. And if they move forward and print a false claim, I sue them.
I’ll admit, many Republicans disagree with me on this. The way they see it, even if a story won’t be fair to Republicans, it’s a question of having at least some small voice in the story or none at all.
But it’s a losing battle to try to curry favor with reporters who operate as propagandists for our socialist opponents. There’s no difference between talking to the New York Times and talking to the writer of some official Democratic Party newsletter. The media’s only purpose in communicating with conservatives is ultimately to discredit them – that is the overall project in which they’re now engaged.
Our only option is to go around the mainstream media. Elected officials should communicate directly with constituents as much as possible through newsletters, direct mailings, podcasts, and other means. Meanwhile, we should speak exclusively to conservative media, since there really is nothing in the middle anymore. A lot of the “conservative” press isn’t even reliably conservative at all, but they still adhere to traditional journalism standards and they generally hold both sides accountable, which is all we can ask for.
We need to do everything possible to support non-mainstream media outlets – grant them interviews, provide frequent comments to them, and give them the scoop when there’s a big story. The conservative press only represents around 10 percent of the market, but the other 90 percent of the American population is consuming a terrible, manipulative product.
The media product itself is only one part of the problem. The means of distributing that product present additional challenges of censorship, disinformation, and
unfairness, as I’ll discuss in the next chapter.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Disinformation Funnel
AMERICA NEEDS a free, diverse press – we need the vital information and debate the media is supposed to provide in order to make decisions about our country. Instead, we have the fake news complex feeding its product directly into our information ecosystem. In the last chapter I discussed the manufacturing of fake news. In this one, I’ll explain the delivery system for that product – how it’s injected into the public sphere via the social media giants, especially Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Social media is the central component of the fake news chain. It’s the distribution center. Nearly 70 percent of Americans use Facebook, and more than half of all Americans use it as a source for news. Social media takes the radical, anti-American messages developed by socialist activists and disseminates them to the public at large. This process of developing and distributing propaganda is the key to the success of the fake news complex – I call it “the Disinformation Funnel.”
The purpose of the Funnel is to filter, refine, direct, and amplify propaganda ultimately disseminated through laptops, tablets, and smart phones. From there it goes directly into your brain, with the goal of leaving no room for anything besides socialist propaganda.
Interestingly, social media’s role in the Funnel was first exposed by none other than Barack Obama. Only two weeks after Trump’s 2016 victory, Obama complained to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, blaming Clinton’s loss on the supposed fake news posted on the social media giant. As we know, Trump later turned the phrase “fake news” against his opponents in the press and the Democratic Party politburo. But what was Obama driving at when he warned the tech oligarch about allowing disinformation on his platform?
Obama’s warnings had nothing to do with Russian disinformation. Russia spent a negligible sum on Facebook ads compared to the $28 million the 2016 Clinton campaign spent on the same platform. Further, as House Intelligence Committee Republicans showed, most of those Russian-bought Facebook ads were seen after the election. Obama wasn’t upset about the success of Russian propaganda – he was frustrated with the failure of Democratic Party propaganda.
Remember the context of Obama’s statement – it was after a devastating Democratic loss. Obama was simply complaining that Zuckerberg and his company lacked party discipline. Information that should not have gotten out, information that was not harmful to Trump and not helpful to Clinton, had reached the public. Facebook should not have allowed that. It was supposed to be pushing whatever helped Clinton and blocking anything that hurt her. Obama was angry because Facebook had failed to play its nakedly partisan role in the information ecosystem that had served the Democrats so faithfully during his time in office – what former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes called the “echo chamber.”
This was the first excuse the Democrats used to explain Trump’s victory – fake news and Facebook were to blame. This also marked when the Democrats decided they need to own the entire infrastructure of social media. It wasn’t enough that the press and big tech companies were uniformly left-wing. The Democrats needed to ensure the whole industry was locked down. So they pressured Zuckerberg, and the pressure is still on. In a sense, he’s a hold out – not because he’s a conservative but because he appears to understand that for the digital marketplace of ideas to work, it has to be fair. He’s being undermined, however, by his own employees, who view social media as a crucial instrument for re-engineering American society, one that cannot be allowed to go to waste.
This story also shows that conservatives do well with a relatively even playing field in the media. We get our message out and people like it. We have lots to say. But because of the Funnel, and the intervention of prominent left-wing ideologues like Obama, only a small fraction of that reaches American audiences. I estimate that 55 percent of the U.S. public has no exposure whatsoever to conservatives’ ideas and proposals. In other words, tens of millions of everyday Americans and their family, friends, and neighbors are enveloped by a poisonous, impenetrable bubble of socialist noise.
Google didn’t need to be reprimanded after Clinton’s loss – they did their best to try to help her beat Trump. Researcher Robert Epstein estimated that Google’s deliberate manipulations of data may have moved as many as 10 million votes into Clinton’s column. Google senior employees lamented her loss at a post-election cry-in at Google headquarters in Silicon Valley. Co-founder Sergey Brin told colleagues he was “deeply offended” by Trump’s election and compared Trump supporters to communists and fascists, while other executives promised to challenge Trump’s agenda through the company’s Washington, D.C. offices.
Google dominates all other search engines, controlling 91.54 percent of the market. The next closest is Bing at 2.44 percent. Google handles an estimated 2 trillion searches per year worldwide, 167 billion searches per month, 5.5 billion searches per day, 228 million searches per hour, 3.8 million searches per minute, and 63,000 searches per second. In the time it will take you to read this sentence, Google will field hundreds of thousands of searches.
Republican voters know that social media is stacked against them. Polls show that 75 percent of Republicans are skeptical about the balance of the news presented on social media, and two-thirds of Republican voters believe social media companies create a worse mix of news. And they’re right to be worried.
It’s hard to escape the tech giants’ dominance. How many times have you asked a question, and someone says “just Google it” – which simply leads you further down the Funnel, often to Wikipedia. Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia is extremely hostile to conservatives. Mark Levin, for instance, one of the great conservative intellectuals of the day, was subjected to a multiyear campaign on the website in which left-wing activists posing as disinterested editors continually revised his page to smear him.
I saw first-hand how influential Wikipedia is when Obama-era Pentagon officials copied directly from a Wikipedia entry to justify spending taxpayer dollars. I was investigating this spending with the House Intelligence Committee, but by the time I confronted them about plagiarizing from Wikipedia, the money had already been spent and decisions had already been made. It was a sharp reminder that the Funnel has real world consequences that shape key decisions determining our future, including national security.
The truth is, conservatives and moderates are at a huge disadvantage and have been for some time. The socialist propaganda that has overwhelmed the media is the result of the political indoctrination that’s taken place at universities, high schools, and even elementary schools for several decades. This brainwashing of at least two generations of American students has had a terrible effect on the country and its communities, families, and individuals. It’s corrupted the minds of many of our most talented young people and polluted the pool of content creators and other information workers – people we used to call journalists.
Hard as it is to believe now, there was a time when journalism was a blue-collar job. You can see it in the old black-and-white movies from the ’30s and ’40s: reporters came from the same world as the people they wrote about – policemen, firemen, local politicians, etc. That began to change in the 1970s as journalism became one of the professions, though it didn’t pay as well as law or medicine. And like most of the professions, it was dominated by liberals.
By the late 1990s, as the balance of power shifted from traditional media journalism to social media, the news industry began to attract a different kind of personality – people who saw media as a way to impose their view of the world on others. They’re not regular American liberals, but much further along the political spectrum – they’re socialist activists, even though they often reject the socialist label. Nor are they journalists – it’s more accurate to describe them as content providers who fill the Funnel with anti-American propaganda and filter and amplify it until it reaches its final destination – you.
Socialist propaganda
serves two purposes. First, it aims to isolate you by limiting your access to other perspectives about the state of our nation and our local communities. Second, by cutting you off, it tries to brainwash you into believing that the socialist worldview is normal. It’s not. If it were, the anti-American ideologues wouldn’t have to work so hard to make sure that’s all you hear and see in the news.
The paradox is that in this day and age, we have access to more information than ever before in human history. But the socialist Left has still managed to push propaganda down the throats of regular Americans. The process is very different from the way the Soviet Union controlled information, or the way present-day China does. Those are closed societies run by hard security regimes that censor information and dam the free flow of information to keep human beings enslaved to false ideas.
The system that blocks information from you and your family and friends works on a different principle entirely. Yes, there’s censorship, like shadow banning Republicans on Twitter, or even more extreme de-platforming of conservatives. But the more important – because it’s the most comprehensive – method they use to block conservative news and opinion is by flooding information zones with fake news and false knowledge.
