Triggered

  Sometimes, of course, the stuff just comes out of thin air, which is what usually happens to me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people come at me with screenshots of things I’ve never said, jokes I’ve never made, or pictures of me doing things I’ve never done.

  When the left runs out of real things to be mad about, it’s all too happy to run with the fake stuff. If you need another example of that, put this book down and go google “BuzzFeed dossier.” See how much of what you read is true.

  Though it’s tempting to say that this addiction to outrage is just another both-sides issue, in which the right and the left are equally culpable, that clearly isn’t the case. You just don’t see conservatives—even the younger ones who know how social media works—using the same organized mob tactics used by left-wing SJWs. (This might be because most of us have jobs and don’t have time to sit around hashtagging all day.) But it’s also because at its very core, conservatism is striving toward something. We believe in freedom of speech for everyone, not just the people we agree with. Beyond that, it’s really just the same stuff we’ve been talking about for years: free markets, capitalism, Judeo-Christian values, and personal responsibility. Whenever conservatives get into an online scrap with someone, it’s usually to defend one of the things I just mentioned. We either win or lose that fight, and when the fight is over, we’re pretty good about letting it go.

  The Democrats, on the other hand, don’t really have that kind of animating principle. There are no bedrock values in the far-left social justice warrior movement. When you ask its adherents what they believe, they’ll usually say something like “equality for everyone” (which, in liberal speak, translates to “equality for me but not for thee”), but they can never tell you what that looks like or how to pay for it. They believe in a fictional place where everyone has exactly the same amount of money and we’ve all morphed into one androgynous gender identity. That place is sort of like the Soviet Union in the 1960s, only on Mars. All they really know is that the world isn’t fair and that someone—preferably someone white, male, and conservative—needs to be punished for it. They want everyone in the world to be as angry and miserable as they are. But they aren’t working toward anything, and they don’t know how to build things. Left with nothing tangible, liberals get more radical, hate more people, and keep lowering the bar for what’s considered “offensive.”

  Take, for example, this tweet from Randa Jarrar, a college professor at California State University, Fresno, who posted this just after former first lady Barbara Bush died (her account is now private):

  Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal. Fuck outta here with your nice words.

  Guess what Jarrar teaches? Creative writing. Perfect!

  Now, I’m not saying Twitter is inherently a bad thing. Without Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, we might very well have ended up with Hillary Clinton as president of the United States. During the 2016 election, the mainstream media were so slanted in one direction, so hell bent on twisting my father’s words and making him out to be the worst person who’s ever lived, that there was really nowhere else for him to go but Twitter. If it hadn’t been for the direct person-to-person communication that social media provided, my father might never have been able to break through the mainstream media and the Hollywood propaganda machine and reach as many voters as he needed to reach. So we should give these platforms their due, at the very least.

  But as soon as my father was elected, the tide turned. Twitter and Facebook decided to use all their power against him and any conservatives who support him. Now, we as a country have allowed Twitter, Facebook, and other tech giants, whose staffs are almost entirely liberal, to censor the opinions of conservatives without consequence. These days it isn’t just wild mobs of Twitter users who coordinate to take down conservatives; it’s the heads of the social media companies themselves. They ban the accounts of conservatives for fraudulent charges of hate speech, hide our posts via algorithms that no one understands, and write their terms and conditions to excuse the casual racism and violence of the left. In this day and age, when social media are the new public square, this “shadow banning” amounts to a complete suppression of freedom of speech. It can’t be allowed to continue.

  I wish it weren’t this way, where nearly all our public discourse happens on social media platforms. I really do. But sadly, that’s where we’ve ended up. When news breaks, Twitter is the first place I go to get real-time updates. When I have an opinion that I want to get out into the world and I don’t want the spinmasters at CNN or the New York Times to chop it up and rearrange it first, I post it on Twitter. There’s a reason why, when the Times thought it had caught me red-handed trying to fix the election with Russia, I posted all my emails (which, according to Robert Mueller and anyone else whose eyes are connected to their brains, completely exonerate me) on Twitter. Once they were posted, no one could alter them. Everything went right from me to my followers, and no one else got in on the transaction.

  At least that was how I thought it worked.

  I am now aware that with every day that goes by, Twitter and Instagram are removing more and more of my posts from people’s timelines. They’re doing the same thing to other people who speak out in support of conservative values. People who have liked or shared my posts have been reporting sudden problems with their accounts or temporary lockouts from their devices. People have even been suspended for things they tweeted years ago but that have only recently been highlighted.

  Here’s an example from my own Instagram account. As you will see, I followed the infamous Jussie Smollett story pretty closely on social. When CBS first reported that Jussie had actually paid his “attackers” (who supposedly wore MAGA hats) to attack him, I posted this:

  @DonaldTrumpJr

  Shocked, I really thought MAGA folks (who are all over downtown Chicago) were waiting with a rope/bottle of bleach to ambush a [rich] guy at 2am in minus 4 degrees because those are conditions where all people go out for Subway rather than order Seamless. Seemed so real.

  Instagram took the post down, citing violations and saying I was “putting people in danger.” I mean, seriously. Go look it up. Was anyone put in danger by that? When it was thought that Jussie’s attackers were real, Instagram didn’t touch the most vile, crazy, violent protests in his favor. But one conservative voice reposts a news story from the mainstream media that the attack was faked, and it removes the post.

  I was one of the first ones to call out shadow banning. About two years ago, I was looking at my analytics and I noticed something weird. I’d been posting with my usual frequency, and receiving my usual impressions, maybe 35 million impressions for the time period, and my new follower account registered zero. That’s impossible. You can’t have that many millions of impressions and have no new followers. So, after the usual spew of hate crap—“Nobody’s looking at your feed anymore!”—I put up a post calling out Instagram for manipulating the account. Within a week, I was magically back up to where I was, about twelve thousand new followers. Amazing how that can happen, right?

  So, fast-forward to the Smollett post. After I reposted it, and called them out for taking it down, I received an outpouring of thousands of comments and DMs, some even showing videos, of how Instagram was interfering with my following. Some weren’t allowed to like my posts or my father’s. The little heart would light up, and then it would flash back off. Some commented, “Hey Don, I had to follow you three times this week and I never unfollowed you.” With others, it was, “Don, I was blocked out of my account for twenty-four hours for liking one of your feeds.” What made it even crazier was, it didn’t have to be a political tweet! It could’ve been a photo of my kids with my dad! So, it was then that I realized the scale of Instagram’s interference censorship, and could only imagine what they were doing to my father. Take a minute and think about this: if they can do it to me with millions of followers, if they can do
it to the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!!!, do you think you’re safe from their biased influence? I didn’t think so. And, you know something, I can’t think of a single time of this happening to a liberal. Not once.

  After the damage was done, Instagram said it was a mistake. Funny how these mistakes happen only to conservative posts.

  I would like to believe that this is all a bunch of misunderstandings. After all, Twitter is relatively new, especially in company years. It’s been around only since 2006. In the old days, it wasn’t uncommon for a big tech company—say, Apple or Microsoft—to have a few hiccups along its road to success. Let’s remember that Apple almost went bankrupt two or three times before anyone ever knew what an iPhone was. If I didn’t know what I know, I would be happy to extend the same benefit of the doubt to Twitter and Facebook. But when you look around at the employees who work at these big tech platforms or you consider the fact that just about everyone who’s had problems with censorship has been conservative, it becomes clear that this is no accident or technological hiccup. It is a deliberate attempt by hipster liberals in Silicon Valley to shut down the voices that hardworking Americans want to hear.

  When it’s the liberals who engage in what the left likes to call “hate speech,” that’s all well and good. But when conservatives do it, they’re labeled hateful people and banned for life. Take, for example, the case of Sarah Jeong, an Asian American woman who was hired by the op-ed pages of the New York Times to write about technology. Jeong is an avowed liberal and SJW who made her career calling out racism—real and imagined—and oppression in the tech industry. She was a professional complainer who got a job at the perfect place. Then someone found these tweets, which Jeong had written over many months in 2014:

  Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.

  Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?

  #CancelWhitePeople

  White people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.

  Now, if you’re a normal person, those tweets might sound racist to you. At first glance, Ms. Jeong might seem like a textbook racist. All the ingredients are there. Needless cruelty? Check. Indicting an entire group for the actions of a few members of that group? Check. Stunning ignorance and lack of empathy? Double check.

  The liberals who run Twitter, however, didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with the posts. In fact, they took Jeong at her word when she said she had been only engaging in “satire” and “mimick[ing] the language of [her] harassers.” So a journalist is now a comedian, but an actual comedian like Kevin Hart is not? Okay, got it! Apparently, racist statements are racist only when they’re made by certain people against certain other people—usually with those in the first group being conservatives and those in the second group being liberals. Twitter decided that because Sarah Jeong was a liberal who’d just been hired by the New York Times, the mother ship of all brain-dead liberals, she would get a free pass. Would the newspaper have done that for a conservative? No way!

  They were not so kind to my friend conservative commentator Candace Owens, who decided to do a little experiment after Twitter demonstrated that it was okay with casual racism on its platform. Just a few hours after Twitter cleared Jeong—and was apologized for by the Times, which declined to fire her even as more racist tweets were being unearthed—Owens reposted some of Jeong’s most racist tweets word for word, with one small change.

  Read them again, and see what you think.

  Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old Jewish men.

  Are Jewish people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?

  #CancelJewishPeople

  Jewish people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.

  Within a few hours, the mob that keeps constant watch over Candace Owens’s Twitter account had reported those tweets to headquarters, where they were deemed too offensive to be seen. If you go looking for them now, you’ll get a message saying that they violated Twitter’s terms of service and can’t be displayed. Just for reposting those tweets with one small edit, Owens was banned from Twitter—something that never happened to the woman who wrote them in the first place.

  It would be bad enough if this were some kind of isolated incident. But it’s not. It happens all the time, and it’s getting more and more brazen. For instance, as Ted Cruz tweeted a while back, how come @RealJamesWoods gets banned and the actor Jim Carrey, one of whose paintings depicts Attorney General William Barr drowning in a sea of vomit, doesn’t? Last year, Facebook banned Jesse Kelly, a conservative talk show host, but kept Linda Sarsour after she declared a jihad against my father. Twitter lets Antifa keep its many accounts (even though violence is literally in its mission statement), but it bans alt-right organizations all the time. It even banned the conservative activist David Horowitz and didn’t give a reason. I can’t think of a liberal who’s been banned.

  For example, consider Kathy Griffin. Somewhere in the archives, I’ve got photos of her with Donald Trump before he ran for president, and she’s laughing it up as though they’re best friends. Then my father gets elected, and she holds up a fake severed head resembling him in a photo shoot. So much for friendship! You would think that doing something like that to the president of the United States would be a career ender, right? Not in the universe we live in. A year after she posted the photo, she boasted to a liberal television show that her hateful gag had helped her career.

  Look, I’m fine with free speech. Do whatever you want, say whatever you want. But the double standard is astounding. If a conservative did what Kathy Griffin did, he or she would certainly never work again.

  This biased censorship also shows up on YouTube, which is owned by Google. Take for instance, the plight of poor Carlos Maza. As a writer for the lefty online news site Vox, Maza is kind of a social justice policeman, scouring the web for content that upsets his fragile self-image. Not too long ago, he set his sights on the conservative vlogger and comedian Steven Crowder. Among other things, Crowder had called Maza a “lispy queer.” Okay, it’s offensive, but Crowder is an R-rated political shock jock. That’s his schtick. And Maza is a public person who is all about building his online presence. You think his motive might have included something more than just defending his being gay?

  Maza complained to YouTube, which at first refused to censor Crowder, stating that the vlogger was not urging his followers to harass the Vox writer and that his comedic commentary was not threatening. Maza wasn’t about to give up, though. He began shaming the gay employees of the world’s largest video service for allowing such a travesty to happen. Here’s what he posted to the employees: “YouTube has decided to side with the people who made our lives miserable in high school. It’s decided to use the platform you’ve helped create in order to arm bigots and bullies with massive megaphones. Why do you stick around? What are you going to do about it?”

  Hey, Carlos! I got news for you. If everyone tried to even the score from high school, we wouldn’t have time for anything else. Personally, I would be spending my whole day trying to get back at the seniors at the Hill School who kicked my ass when I got there as a smart-ass kid from NYC. Since Maza was targeting tech staff (who are as fragile as they are liberal), however, the strategy worked. YouTube immediately demonetized Crowder’s channel; in other words, they took away his ability to make money from advertisements. Following Maza’s tantrum, YouTube then changed its censorship rules: “Even if a creator’s content doesn’t violate our community guidelines, we will take a look at the broader context and impact, and if their behavior is egregious and harms the broader community, we may take action.” It also promised a servicewide review of other channels, and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki later personally apologized to t
he LGBTQ community.

  In other words, if what you say hurts the left’s feelings, pack your bags. As far as the online giants are concerned, the right is always wrong.

  In a survey conducted by Quillette, Professor Richard Hanania (of Columbia University, of all places) found that out of the twenty-two prominent political commentators who had been banned from Twitter during the period 2005 to 2017, a whopping twenty-one of them were supporters of my father. If we extrapolate from those few people to the wider internet, this could mean that over 95 percent of the time, when Twitter decides to ban someone, it’s for expressing a conservative opinion and usually for supporting Donald Trump. This is not only wrong; it’s so transparent that only a moron—or a social media platform that knows it has the full protection of the media and the political establishment—would ever try it. This seems like a deplatforming attempt, a trial run for 2020. These companies want to minimize the impact that someone like Trump can have so that the movement will never gain traction.

  If you’re one of my older readers and the whole Twitter thing baffles you, don’t feel bad. You’re not alone. Even Twitter doesn’t know what Twitter is. Facebook doesn’t know what it is, either. Just this year, testifying in front of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, tried to tell the world that Facebook is just a technology company that doesn’t intervene at all in the messages that are posted on its platform. I would bet a lot of money that his little speech was suggested by Facebook’s lawyers, because if it were true—which it’s not—Facebook and Twitter would enjoy some pretty cushy protections.