Republican Ted Cruz was recently able to submit Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, to intense questioning on the integrity and purpose of his company’s censoring policies. When asked if he thought Twitter’s anti-conservative bias might in fact have a serious impact on the election, Dorsey said, with a perfectly straight face, no, not really, people can make up their minds for themselves. So Twitter, both before the election and afterwards when it has consistently warned that accusations of voter fraud are without basis, claims to have no impact on public opinion whatsoever even though everything it does is indisputably directed towards that end. Dorsey’s bold faced lie was truly appalling, indeed illustrates why communication between the Left and the Right is virtually impossible.
Kevin Roose, N.Y. Times journalist, recently stated that Facebook was teeming with Right-Wing misinformation, his purpose clearly being to incite that company to even further assaults on the principle of Free Speech. When it was pointed out that several of the posts he had denounced as lies were in fact 100% true, he responded that statements that are factually accurate can nevertheless be used in the service of evil. For Roose, as for all “progressives,” lies which support their agenda are actually preferable to the Truth.
Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo regularly mock the abject stupidity of those on the Right. Are there those worthy of such mockery? Of course. But the mainstream Left, not those on the outer fringes but icons such as Oprah, most of Academia and the drones it spits forth, most of the Hollywood community, Barack and Michelle and indeed Lemon and Cuomo themselves, are truly, appallingly, incapable of confronting reality with anything approaching sanity. And what makes them so dangerous is that they are utterly convinced that it is everyone else who is insane!
In a recent video Mike Huckabee cited a poll indicating that 86% of the American public no longer trusted the mainstream media. The rationale behind its skepticism was perhaps perfectly articulated in a letter written by Bari Weiss to the publisher of the N.Y. Times shortly after she resigned as an opinion editor for that paper. Claiming to have worked in an “illiberal environment” where those of dissenting views were subject to constant bullying, she captured the fundamental arrogance of the Left when she stated: “Truth isn’t a process of collective discovery but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job it is to inform everyone else.”
“Progressivism” is rooted in loathing for the abusive use of power of Western Socioeconomic Elites. Are the latter sometimes guilty of such? Of course they are, they’re human. The laughable, unconscionable Irony of the contemporary Left is that after arbitrarily granting itself the status of an Intellectual Elite, it mindlessly abuses that power day after day after tedious day.
Citing Trump’s “dictatorial” tendencies, Barack Obama, in one of his many rants against his successor, refers to the way he attempted to bully the press. Yes Trump, in his inimitable way, called various reporters liars, referring to their output as “fake news.” Leaving aside his own shaky relationship with the Truth, I would suggest his accusations generally had merit to anyone not consumed by bias. But he did not shut down the flow of information from the Left, did not used his power to de-platform any of his many critics. Sadly, the same cannot be said of the self-righteous proprietors of Google, Facebook, You Tube and Twitter, those whom Obama would never dream of accusing of “dictatorial” improprieties.
One cannot help but be embarrassed watching the bearded simpleton Dorsey squirm before Ted Cruz as he avers that Twitter, in censoring “conservatives,” was simply following its criteria governing what is deemed acceptable speech, that it was in no way attempting to sway public opinion against Donald Trump, indeed, golly gee, that it probably had little impact on the views of its millions of subscribers who are clearly able to think for themselves.
The fundamental arrogance of the Elitist Left which ironically purports to champion “the common man,” is that it doesn’t think the bulk of humanity can actually think for itself! Hence its laughably illiberal “dictatorial” tendencies!