In case you missed it …
The CDC is encouraging teachers to become transgender activists by advising them to participate Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) clubs and to use trans-inclusive language.
The World Economic Forum will discuss how to counter “misinformation” at its 2023 annual meeting. My prediction: It won’t be good for free speech.
Happy New Year, We're All Gonna Die: “60 Minutes” this week featured biologist Paul Ehrlich warning that we’re headed for extinction. Then again, he’s been doing this since the 60s.
The latest Twitter Files release showed Adam Schiff’s office asked the company to ban an investigative journalist.
Dear Friends —
First, I hope you had a great new year and were able, as I did, to spend more time with family & friends than with politics.
Yesterday, members of Congress wrangled over which Republican would be the next Speaker. While this decision is important, its influence on the future of our country pales in significance to the information wars.
Controlling the narrative.
The control of information transcends political fights because it shapes how those fights are framed. It essentially establishes the rules of the game.
If you can, for instance, classify skeptical claims about the efficacy of masks against Covid as “extreme” or “misinformation”, you’ll live in a different world than if you can’t.
If you can convince people to use the phrase “gender affirming care” to describe children getting sex change operations, that defines the debate. The fights over words have a massive effect on our eventual public policies.
Censorship as a weapon.
The left has discovered that it’s a whole lot easier to control the narrative when they can encourage an outright ban on those on the other side.
It’s why people freaked out over Elon Musk buying Twitter and announcing slightly fewer restrictions on posting there. It’s why those same people have screamed about silencing Fox News, despite being able to find leftward news on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, and nearly every local news station.
If you find it very odd to see journalists actually encouraging the White House to go after Musk for daring to let information flow, it’s because it’s a very odd time in America, where the mainstream journalists care more about politics than they do about truth.
The old media is staying left, but shrinking.
For the past few decades, you could only hear conservative voices on AM radio and Fox News, and that really hasn’t changed much in either television or print. Most of the players, as we’ve often discussed, have gotten more political, which means most shifted from leaning slightly left to being outright partisan.
But their years are numbered. Younger people don’t get their news from radio or television, and while still powerful, each year those mediums become a bit less relevant. Your kids won’t be watching the evening national news broadcast and likely won’t even be watching cable.
The biggest fights will be over the new media, which is still growing.
Our first years of the internet were a breath of fresh air after the staid gatekeepers of the old media. But nowhere has censorship been more evident than in the social media giants, powered by young San Francisco workers.
For at least the past five years, the major players — Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and YouTube — implemented not only their own values and censorship, but did it hand-in-hand with Democrats in government. It was a solid cabal, but cracks have appeared.
They now have tiny but growing competitors in Rumble, Truth Social, and a handful of other startups. Facebook has plummeted in value and popularity. And in one fell swoop, they lost control of Twitter, and with it, the ability to pretend their political influences and censorship was just how the internet worked.
Fox News exposed the television news game, and Twitter may very well do the same for social media. That’s why you’re seeing the vitriol and hyperventilating.
One other particularly bright spot is the podcasting world, where the decentralized nature of it has, so far, kept the censorship crew largely at bay.
Finally, there are the financial and “backbone” companies.
This one’s even more scary because it invokes the idea of the Chinese “social credit” score that determines much of your life. Canada came close to one, with Trudeau shutting down the bank accounts of citizens supporting Canadian truckers and other protesters last year.
Here in the U.S., we’ve seen financial censorship on a limited basis, but it’s coming. Many people applauded Kanye West being dropped by his banks after anti-Semitic comments … but you don’t have to agree with Kanye to see how dangerous that precedent is.
The fights will be with sites like PayPal, which still has a policy that lets them fine you $2,500 if they decide you promoted “intolerance” or “hate” (all at the definition and discretion of PayPal.) GoFundMe routinely squashes conservative causes and Airbnb has banned people like conservative activist Michelle Malkin for speaking to the wrong group.
Those are the battle lines. That’s what we’ll be concentrating on here. They’re where the fight for America’s future is happening, every day.
— Ken
We have our kids reading anything and everything from the Tuttle Twins to help teach them how to spot the double talk and misinformation, even if it is something they want to hear.
Been so since day 1 since Trumps first campaign to date
Rerun 2020