by Devin Nunes
Their success depends in part on a revolution in publishing. We talk all the time about advances in computer technology, and how a smart phone, for instance, has the same power as super computers from half a century ago. These new technologies have also profoundly impacted how we collect and distribute information. Now every individual with a laptop or a smart phone is a publisher.
Think of the effect the printing press had on civilization – it was a technology that spread knowledge far and wide and leveled out social differences. The same is true with the smart phone – now anyone anywhere in the world can type out a few words on Twitter and instantly reach tens of millions of people. A homemade video on YouTube can reach more viewers than any major television network on its best day.
Unfortunately, it’s not the message itself that determines the size of the audience it reaches. Rather, the audience size is dictated by tech company administrators who control the flow of information and decide who sees and hears which videos, posts, and tweets. Radio talk-show host Dennis Prager’s educational initiative “Prager University” sued YouTube for violating its First Amendment rights when it flagged some of its videos as “inappropriate.” But the court ruled that tech platforms like YouTube aren’t bound by the First Amendment.
The internet was supposed to create a digital marketplace of ideas, not banish conservative voices from the virtual town square. So what went wrong?
Remember some of the slogans from the 1990s, such as “information wants to be free?” Tech optimists saw the internet as a technology bringing together people from around the world and across the political spectrum. They’d be able to promote their causes, the thinking went, and the most powerful ideas and most convincing advocates would carry the day.
Now we can see there wasn’t enough tech skepticism. Too few were looking at the challenges presented by the rise of the new media. The internet made more information available, and the new computing technologies made it easily accessible. But social media helped consolidate control of that information, creating a near monopoly of information and a new class of tech oligarchs determined to shape the information ecosystem in accordance with their political beliefs – to the detriment of millions of Americans.
Media outlets quickly became dependent on social media as their main content distributor – who wants to pay for subscriptions and carry a physical newspaper when you can access a galaxy of news stories for free right on your phone? The ensuing decline in subscriptions and advertising devastated newspapers’ finances. Today the major social media platforms own a virtual monopoly over the advertising market. Facebook, for instance, is worth almost $700 billion – nearly 100 times the $7.21 billion market capitalization of the New York Times.
With the traditional press going bankrupt, it became a mere content mill feeding social media distribution centers. And what are they feeding them? As the press became more politicized and less financially secure, they increasingly turned to opposition research firms like Fusion GPS, which conveniently supplies free information that’s useful for information warfare operations against Republicans and conservatives. The perverse significance of Fusion’s Steele dossier is that it marks the historical moment when the media crossed the line from news collection and distribution to political operations.
Social media is essentially a parasite – which is one of its big advantages. It doesn’t have to pay infrastructure and production costs, like paper for newsprint, video and other studio overhead for broadcast media, or even content. It either recycles content created by traditional media brands, which give their content away for free because they have no choice, or it disseminates content created by people like you and me.
Another huge advantage social media has over traditional media is that it has no legal responsibility to provide reliable information.
Tech visionaries and their allies in Congress were concerned that social media platforms wouldn’t be able to survive if they were constantly being sued for allowing users to post objectionable content. So when lawmakers passed the Communications Decency Act in 1996, they included Section 230 in order to “promote the continued development of the internet and other interactive computer services and other interactive media.” Also known as the Cox-Wyden Amendment, Section 230 stipulated that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
So social media companies were absolved of liability for what appears on their plat forms – which also made those platforms ripe for abuse. With no responsibility for ensuring the information they provide is accurate, the tech firms have turned their platforms into syndicates for disseminating socialist propaganda.
Further, as the Prager University v. You-Tube case shows, social media wants to have it both ways. When it’s convenient, it’s not a content provider, so it can’t be sued like a publisher can. But when it wants to act like a publisher and shape an editorial message by promoting and spreading one side of the debate while suppressing, de-boosting, and shadow banning the other side, it claims to enjoy impunity from all lawsuits that would impose accountability.
Social media platforms have to be forced to decide: if they want to enjoy continued protection under Section 230 then they should offer, as the law stipulates, “a forum for a true diversity of political discourse.” But if they’re going to act as political propagandists for one viewpoint and one political party, which is what they’re doing now, then
THE DISINFORMATION FUNNEL FLOW
Around 55 percent of the American population is completely cut off from viewpoints and arguments that contradict the socialist narrative.
On the opposite page, see how the socialists achieve that dominance.
UNIVERSITY SYSTEM: The academic Left indoctrinates the student body, especially in humanities and the liberal arts departments, where identity politics and socialist ideology dominates research institutions. These academic institutions process and pass on activists to traditional media (the Washington Post, the New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, etc.) and social media brands (Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc.).
THE MEDIA: Socialist activists at traditional media organizations design content to be passed through social media platforms and distributed to the public. Headline writers play an important part of the process since the headlines are typically used as the basis for social media messaging. The majority of social media users, 60 percent, who pass on a link in a tweet or post do not click through the link to the article. It’s fair to say that the social media messaging is more important than the original article, often written, it seems, solely as a basis for the social media.
CONTENT FILTERERS AND AMPLIFIERS: Political activists employed at social media platforms like Google and Facebook filter out information that doesn’t conform to socialist ideological preferences. While social media executives claim that its algorithms dictate how stories are ranked and rotated through news feeds, their employees have repeatedly been caught on camera admitting that they regularly suppress conservative news.
DELIVERY MECHANISMS: Every individual with a laptop, tablet, or smart phone can now act as a publisher able to immediately reach large audiences. Those delivery mechanisms are also receivers, connecting users to each other, and to the information distribution centers served by social media platforms.
YOU: This is what the Disinformation Funnel is designed for – to influence you and shape your decision-making about your family, your community, and the country we all share.
legally they should no longer be treated differently from traditional publishers.
As I mentioned earlier, a primary reason why I wrote this book is to completely bypass the Disinformation Funnel to get out my message. This is my unfiltered message to you, and I hope you’ll share it with your family and friends. Just like the tech visionaries of the 1990s said, information wants to be free. So do Americans. And to ensure our liberties, we need real
news and information, free of the filtering and amplification of the socialist ideologues poisoning our information ecosystem.
CHAPTER FIVE
Information Desert
THE RECENT FATE of my home state of California should serve as a warning sign to all Americans of the power of the Disinformation Funnel to affect public perception and government policy.
As I mentioned, I live in central California’s San Joaquin Valley, a lush agricultural region that’s home to the most productive land anywhere. We feed a lot of the country, and in fact, a lot of the world.
But due to a lack of water, the region is naturally a desert. It became the breadbasket of the solar system through the construction of the world’s most sophisticated irrigation system, comprising pumping stations, aqueducts, pipelines, and storage facilities. This network takes water originating in the snow-pack of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, stores it, and transports it widely for use by California’s 40 million residents.
For decades, this system has been targeted by radical environmentalists who want to drive farmers away and return the land to its natural, desert condition. This is characteristic of the socialists’ environmental extremism, in which the overall goal is to impose population controls.
Citing as a pretext the supposed need to protect a three-inch baitfish called the Delta smelt, environmental organizations filed a succession of lawsuits beginning in the 1990s that forced the state to divert billions of gallons of water away from farmers and families and dump it into the Pacific Ocean. Over the years, the crisis worsened due to environmentalists’ opposition to new water storage projects and restrictions on groundwater pumping implemented by former Governor Jerry Brown.
As a result, the San Joaquin Valley is ensnared in a years-long water crisis. Two-hundred-fifty thousand acres of productive land have been idled, and a million acres in total – one-third of the Valley’s farmland, an area bigger than the state of Rhode Island – will have to be abandoned if the current trajectory continues. The crisis has created high unemployment in the Valley and a host of other social ills as the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people – many of them farmworkers – have been ripped away.
Beholden to the environmental lobby, Democrats in Congress have blocked passage of countless Republican bills to alleviate the water crisis. President Trump, however, became the first president in decades to take action, ordering reforms to the biological opinions that formed the basis of the environmentalists’ most damaging court actions. Issued in early 2020, the new opinions would resolve a big part of the problem and significantly increase the water supply. Shockingly, California’s governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, filed a lawsuit to cancel the opinions that would ease the water crisis in his own state.
The Valley water crisis has spread throughout the state, since many other areas depend on the Sierra Nevada snowpack for their water. Statewide water restrictions have been approved, including limits on personal indoor water use, restrictions on watering lawns and driveways, and even rules on washing cars.
Yet outside the San Joaquin Valley, Californians don’t seem particularly upset by the crisis or by their own governor’s pitiless determination to ensure it continues. The plight of their fellow Californians in the Valley, the water restrictions, the jeopardy to their own cities’ water supply, and the specter of major reductions to their food supply haven’t been enough for voters to demand change and impose accountability on their representatives.
How is this possible? Having spent years talking about this issue with Californians from all walks of life, I know the answer: after being relentlessly fed socialist propaganda without any opposing views, many people simply don’t know the real causes or consequences of the crisis.
California socialists, and the media that represents them, have a low opinion of farmers. In the media’s presentation, farmers are either ignorant cowboys with boots, hats, and guns, or somewhat contradictorily, are rich corporate shills – part of the nefarious “Big Agriculture” conglomerate – who are greedily using up all the state’s water. The radical environmentalists, naturally, are noble activists fighting for a selfless cause.
The media often ascribes the overall problem to drought or global warming, neither of which are true. The irrigation system was designed to withstand five years of drought by capturing water in wet years and storing it for use in dry ones. The problem is that the government is preventing us from using the system to full capacity, and it’s politically impossible to get new storage projects approved.
The media also darkly warns of various environmental catastrophes if more water is diverted back to human use. What they don’t mention is that 80 percent of the water from the Sierra Nevada snowpack is dumped into the Pacific Ocean, but if that number were merely reduced to 75 percent, there would be plenty of water for everyone – farmers, cities, and the environment. The need for drastic water restrictions is being entirely manufactured. There is no actual water shortage – in fact, with proper use of the irrigation system, there is far more water available than we need.
I’ve spent years going up and down California trying to inform anyone who will listen about the true causes of the water crisis. But it’s an uphill battle – it’s tough for one person to reach millions of citizens who are bombarded, day in and day out, with disinformation. With a propaganda campaign that’s sustained long enough, and supported by enough activists, media figures, and resources, people’s minds can be poisoned to the point that they’ll willingly go along as their own state is systematically and deliberately deprived of water. If you tell a lie enough times with enough conviction and block out the truth, a lot of people will believe you because they just don’t have any other information to challenge the propaganda.
The disinformation campaign is so overwhelming that many Californians don’t even realize they really live in a desert. In fact, without Sierra Nevada water, the Los Angeles water supply would reach a critically low level in a few months and San Francisco would encounter the same disaster in less than a month. Yes, you heard that right – socialist activists in L.A. and San Francisco are attacking and constricting the very water supply that sustains their own communities.
* * *
The purpose of this book is to put information in your hands directly. That’s what a broadside is for, after all. The golden age of the broadside was the eighteenth century, when it became an important form of popular media, a one-page sheet pasted to a wall or distributed to the public. During the American Revolution, they were used to spread news, recruit troops, announce laws and regulations, celebrate events, and inspire the men and women who founded our country. They were direct, unfiltered messages between authors and their audience.
Probably the most famous broadside in American history is named after John Dunlap, the Philadelphia printer who, on the night of July 4, 1776, published one of the most important documents in world history – the Declaration of Independence. After the Second Continental Congress ratified the text, it ordered that Dunlap’s broadside be distributed to the Continental Army and the thirteen states and to be posted in public areas for citizens of the new republic to read. And they read:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That’s still news 244 years later.
I ask you to spread the news by sharing the information in this book. It’s an example of how Americans can find the news they need to make important decisions about our country, communities, families, and ourselves. Get it directly from sources you trust – blogs, websites, and newspapers – even if you don’t always agree with them. There is a group of investigative reporters outside the mainstream media who got the truth out about the Russia collusion operation when the rest of the press was furiously peddling the hoax. There weren’t many of these contrarian reporters, but they reached enough people to have a major politica
l effect. Without them, to be honest, the operation may very well have succeeded in removing the president.
Don’t click on what’s promoted on social media or what’s sent to you on an automated email list – that’s not the news, that’s the Disinformation Funnel. Although it’s not easy to navigate the Internet without Google, to whatever extent you can, avoid using it for researching the news. Whenever possible, use alternatives to the main social media networks. For example, you can join me on Parler, an alternative platform to Twitter, and let’s build that up into a viable place where Americans from across the political spectrum can talk freely.
If there’s one lesson to take from my broadside, it’s to stay out of the Disinformation Funnel – it’s powerful and destructive. It can confuse and misinform people even about the most basic facts and most crucial issues related to the place where they live. Those same mechanisms are no doubt playing a large role in the 2020 presidential campaign.
If you’d told me at the beginning of 2020 that violent protestors, often publicly backed by the Democratic Party, would rampage through American cities and destroy statues of our founding fathers and other American heroes, I’d have predicted that support for Trump would be at 60 percent. As I write, in the midst of a relentless media campaign to excuse or champion the rioters and statue topplers while blaming Trump for the problems they cause, he’s at 45 percent. That tells me the Funnel is in full effect, and the Democrats know it.
The Funnel explains why the Joe Biden campaign doesn’t have a real platform, why the candidate barely leaves his basement, and why his party isn’t even planning to hold a real convention. The socialists think they have a winning hand by keeping their candidate underground and messaging through the Funnel. And you’ve heard the message, it’s the same thing they’ve been saying for four years – Trump is a fascist, all Republicans are racist, and the answer to all our problems is warmed-over socialism that’s failed everywhere else in the world. It defies all logic, but that’s how powerful the Funnel is. It’s convincing people that the societal meltdown engineered by Democrat mayors and governors is all Trump’s fault.
