The increasingly authoritarian tendencies of our elites and the institutions they control is a sign of their weakness and impotence and loss of control.
If you want to know how well our elites are managing to control the discourse, consider this: a pair of “Let’s Go Brandon” anthems shot to the top of iTunes chart rankings this week.
Rapper Bryson Gray’s song hit number one despite getting banned from YouTube on the ridiculous pretext that it contains “medical misinformation,” while rapper Loza Alexander’s “Let’s Go Brandon” hit number two. Both of them beat out Adele’s “Easy On Me,” which was knocked down to number three. (Another version of Alexander’s song nabbed the number four spot.)
So three of the four top iTunes songs this week are “Let’s Go Brandon” anthems. Truth be told, the songs are not all that good. Their popularity has more to do with what they represent, which is a firm rejection of the idea that we can simply be told what to do and how to think by a cultural and political elite who hate us, and that we have no control over the public discourse or the narratives that define our times.
Big Tech’s efforts in this regard are especially notable for being utterly ham-fisted — from YouTube’s penchant for banning everything from Gray’s rap to anything else its censors deem to be “medical misinformation,” to Twitter’s transparently hypocritical enforcement of its rules against abuse and harassment, to Facebook’s absurd censorship of a meme blaming President Joe Biden for high gas prices.
Billionaires, it turns out, have a penchant for desperately trying to control information. LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman and left-wing financier George Soros, a couple of billionaires with a history of peddling lies and manipulating the media, this week announced the creation of a creepily named venture, “Good Information Inc.,” which according to Axios will “fund and scale businesses that cut through echo chambers with fact-based information.” Heading up the operation will be former Democratic strategist Tara McGowan.
As my colleague Tristan Justice noted, this crew comes to the “misinformation” game with considerable baggage. McGowan ran a left-wing nonprofit backed by Hoffman called ACRONYM that botched the Iowa Democratic causes in 2020. Before that, Hoffman financed an actual misinformation campaign in the 2017 Alabama Senate special election, in which fake online accounts were made to appear as Russian bots supported by Republicans.
Although these billionaires are perhaps the worst possible spokesmen for combatting “misinformation,” their efforts are part of a larger, increasingly desperate movement among our elite managerial class to control information and narratives. In each case, the obvious motive is to quash ideas and opinions — even memes and jokes! — that leftist elites in Silicon Valley and corporate boardrooms don’t like.
These efforts can seem scary and dystopian at first, and in some ways they are. Billionaires are powerful people. But the trend is best understood as a futile bid to control a discourse and a medium that cannot be controlled — not even by the most powerful people in the world.
Like the clueless reporter who pretended the NASCAR crowd was chanting “Let’s go Brandon,” not realizing she was creating an epic meme with a life of its own, the efforts of our erstwhile gatekeepers, however slick and well-funded, will ultimately backfire.
You see their desperation cropping up everywhere lately: the hand-wringing over Dave Chapelle’s wildly successful Netflix special “The Closer,” the legacy media’s ongoing unhealthy obsession with Substack, CNN’s aggressive lying about Joe Rogan taking “horse dewormer” to recover from COVID-19.
You see it in our politics, too. This week Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, a boomer leftist who’s been in Washington since 1982, defended Attorney General Merrick Garland’s now-discredited memo targeting parents, insisting there is indeed a dire nationwide problem of violence at local school board meetings.
How does Durbin know? Because he went online and typed “school board violence” into “one of the search engines” and found “page after page” of reports. Never mind that the National School Board Association letter that prompted Garland’s memo was later disavowed by the NSBA, Durbin’s got an internet connection and by golly he’s going to use the search engines! (For his part, Garland’s justification for his shocking memo amounted to what he saw on the tee-vee.)
Between Durbin and Garland, it’s hard to imagine a pair of powerful people more clueless and out of touch than this:
Or consider the self-important, unintentionally funny “open letter” published by NeverTrump blog The Bulwark this week, listing a bunch of things the signatories don’t like about Republican-backed efforts at election reform. Noam Chomsky signed an open letter with Bill Kristol and Max Boot. It sounds like the setup to a bad joke, and it is.
Setting aside the letter’s actual misinformation about such GOP efforts, the idea that in 2021 an open letter signed by a bunch of self-styled public intellectuals would matter to anyone outside their own circumscribed milieu is laughable. It certainly will have no effect whatsoever in the real world.
(Speaking of The Bulwark, McGowan suggested it’s just the type of outlet that Good Information Inc. might fund as part of the billionaire-backed effort to fight “misinformation.”)
But when all’s said and done, when all the open letters have been signed by all the top credentialed people, when all the wrongthink songs have been banned by Big Tech censors and all the bad memes have been blocked, none of it will matter. What our sclerotic elite don’t understand is that they can’t control the medium, so they can’t control the message. No one can.
Maybe that’s a good thing, maybe not, but the bell can’t be un-rung — no matter how much George Soros and Reid Hoffman juice The Bulwark. Let’s go Brandon.
Better pronoun usage won’t help US counter hypersonic missiles, congressman says, urging intelligence to focus on security threats
The US intelligence community’s focus on “woke obsessions” like “pronoun etiquette” and “white rage” has affected its ability to effectively tackle national security challenges, congressman Devin Nunes (R-California) warned.
During a House Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday on diversity in the security agencies, the committee’s ranking member cautioned that the “utterly destructive”politicization of America’s national security apparatus had “severely eroded trust” in its institutions and distracted from its mission to counter the “international threat matrix.”
Noting that this “tendency” had also been seen in the military, State Department and other agencies, Nunes said the country’s enemies would not “take a time out” while national security agencies were “enthralled by critical race theory and pronoun etiquette.” He suggested that woke ideas were the “proper jurisdiction of faculty lounge Marxists.”
As proof of such “woke obsessions”, he listed seminars offered at West Point that focused on “white supremacy” and “systemic racism” and cited Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley’s defense of such classes. Nunes also noted the State Department’s commemoration of ‘International Pronoun Day’ and ‘Intersex Awareness Day’ as an example.
The remarks came the same day Milley described China’s test of a hypersonic weapon over the summer as being “very close” to a “Sputnik moment,” suggesting the US has fallen behind in the 21st century arms race. On Tuesday, the Pentagon had confirmed that close to 450 Americans are still trapped in Afghanistan after the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal in August.
Meanwhile, the State Department on Wednesday issued its first gender-neutral passport, allowing applicants to pick an ‘X’ instead of the traditional male or female options. Its spokesman Ned Price marked the event as a demonstration of American “commitment to promoting the freedom, dignity, and equality of all people – including LGBTQI+ US citizens.”
“The indications, ranging from trivial recruitment videos to major intelligence estimates, show an infatuation with left-wing dogmas and politicized actions that have nothing to do with deterring our enemies and winning wars,” Nunes said.
Warning that the traditional emphasis on merit in the security establishment had been “devalued”, he urged the gathering of agency directors to “stay out of politics” and tackle “real enemies” who have “no interest in global warming or race and gender intersectionality.”
But CIA director Bill Burns noted that diversity and inclusion was both the “smart thing to do”and the “right thing” for an “agency with a global mission” that “represents and defends our diverse society.” Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said diversity was “essential to our mission and our values.”
“Simply put, we can’t be effective and we’re not being true to our nation’s ideals if everyone looks like me, talks like me and thinks like me,” Burns said, echoing comments by the committee’s Chairman Adam Schiff (D-California) who termed diversity as America’s “greatest national strength.”