By JAMES BARESEL
Peter Hasson’s The Manipulators: Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Big Tech’s War on Conservatives (Regnery: 2020); 256 pages. Available at https://www.regnery.com/books/ or call 202-216-0600.
That major Internet and social media companies work to restrict, suppress, and hide the expression of conservative ideas on the platforms they provide their users will not come as to news to readers of The Wanderer. If any readers have not yet heard that such companies do so in close cooperation with leftist politicians, particularly in France and Germany, that fact will come as no surprise.
Peter Hasson’s The Manipulators: Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Big Tech’s War on Conservatives goes beyond the obvious and well-known tip of the iceberg to show just how brazen and how domineering efforts at censorship are.
I see little point in providing some of the more telling examples that can be found throughout the book, examples I would urge readers to familiarize themselves with so they can demonstrate to others just how tyrannical the dominant leftist political, business, and media establishments are becoming. What I would rather do is focus on the positive side of the picture, on the reason why such steps toward censorship are being taken.
The reason is fear, a very authentic fear that is more than amply justified by the facts of life in the contemporary Western world — fear that the leftist order is tottering on the brink of collapse. It is a fear that widespread knowledge of the full truth about what is taking now place in the United States and Europe will result in increasingly powerful populist conservative and nationalist political movements attracting even greater support and obtaining majorities in more governments than they have during the course of their rapid rise over the past five years.
This rise is in large part a consequence of online social media’s ability to break the stranglehold, which a biased journalistic world long maintained over the wide diffusion of information. I know how during the 1964 presidential campaign an interview with the Republican candidate included questions about the Vietnam War. In one answer he mentioned that some want to use nuclear weapons and that he opposed doing so. Biased media reported only his factual statement about the ideas of others in a way that implied he agreed with them.
Much of the public remained under a misapprehension of Goldwater’s position on the matter when Election Day came. Today the public would know of the misrepresentation with a few days, if not a few hours.
While much of the Western media ignore the violence, rape, and creation of “no go zones” perpetrated by Muslim immigrants in Europe, the links between illegal immigration and organized crime at our border, the truth behind the efforts of Democrats to pervert justice to bring down Trump’s presidency, news of such matters spreads through the Internet.
This is not what the leftists in control of the media and of technology companies expected to happen. What they thought was that when people are able to freely express whatever views they want and freely look at the views of whoever else they want, they will inevitably gravitate to the left.
What they expected was that the “democratic” nature of social media, the ability of anyone and everyone to express whatever they think or to post whatever information they want, would “liberate” people from conformity to conservative views.
Instead of this happening, the spread of social media revealed that decades of indoctrination have failed to overcome, in society as a whole, the innate common sense upon which political conservatism builds — and that the more bizarre and extreme the left gets the more those who have not succumbed to the brainwashing will turn to the leaders who most vigorously attack the leftist monopoly on power.
What the spread of social media revealed was that even many of the irreligious and the sexually immoral take a realistic rather than a sentimentalist view of criminals, of Islam, and of border control, have not bought into the sentimental cult of “tolerance,” “inclusion,” and “diversity,” are adamantly opposed to widespread abortion on demand, and are more favorable to religious freedom than to the conformity demands of sexual deviants.
Within a few years of social media taking off, the Brexit referendum received a positive vote, then Donald Trump was elected president to be followed by Sebastian Kurz’s elevation to chancellor of Austria. Matteo Salvini spent a period as deputy prime minister and secretary of the interior in Italy, the National Front became the single most popular political party in France, and, most recently, nationalist traditionalists regained control of Britain’s Conservative Party and the House of Commons.
As of this moment, the left still has the power to attempt an extensive censorship of social media. In some cases the attempt is succeeding. In others it has been obstructed by widespread backlash. In all cases it is a matter of closing the barn door once the horse is already in the next county. Such efforts reveal the left’s weakness — implicitly admitting that only by stopping the flow of information can it maintain its stranglehold on the West.
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