by Ben Shapiro
Something similar happened at Politico when that publication asked me to guest-host its prestigious Playbook in late December 2020. The publication was, an editor explained, having a series of guest editors including MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor, and CNN’s Don Lemon, among others. I thought the project might be fun. But, as always, I warned the editor that the blowback he received would be immense.
My day to write the Playbook fell the day after Trump was impeached for the second time in the House of Representatives. I wrote about the generalized Republican unwillingness to vote to impeach, and explained that unwillingness by pointing to the belief by most conservatives that impeachment was merely a way of lumping together Trump supporters more broadly with the Capitol rioters: conservatives correctly saw impeachment as merely the latest club for the Left to wield against an opposing political tribe.
The blowback was, predictably, immense. Within minutes, Politico was trending on Twitter. Within hours, Politico leadership was hosting a conference call for some 225 staffers enraged over my name sullying the sacred Playbook.36 Some of those participants compared me to Alex Jones and David Duke, adding that to print my words cut against their journalistic mission—which was to shut me up. “I’m spending all this time trying to convince them that we’re here for them, and that there’s a difference between what Ben Shapiro is doing and what Alex Jones is doing and what Politico is doing,” one Politico staffer fumed. “I don’t even know how to go tell them now not to listen to Ben Shapiro because we published Ben Shapiro.”37 Two weeks later, the staff at Politico was still fuming. More than one hundred staffers wrote a letter to the publisher, demanding an explanation for why I had been platformed.38
Most of the establishment media agreed: as Erik Wemple of The Washington Post sneered, “You know, if you want to hear Shapiro’s opinions, there’s a place to go for that.”39 Karen Attiah wrote in The Washington Post that platforming me in Politico granted legitimacy to white supremacy, and called it “willful moral malpractice,” adding, “I am reminded that in this country White people once gathered to watch the public lynching of Black people, and even made souvenir postcards of the events. I am reminded that, in America, White racism against minorities is titillating, not disqualifying—because it is profitable.”40 Less than three months before writing those words, Attiah was joking with me on Twitter about grabbing drinks and finding new common ground.
She couldn’t have proved my point better.
Now, this little hubbub had no effect on me. I do have an outlet, with extraordinarily high traffic. But the goal of such public shaming rituals is to prevent adventurous editors from even conversing with conservatives. And, as it turns out, that’s precisely what happened: I later found out that Guy Benson and Mary Katherine Ham, both mainstream conservatives who had been asked to guest-write the Playbook after me, were ghosted by the editors. In effect, they were preemptively canceled.
Liberals are being ousted or cowed into submission across the media.
The same week James Bennet resigned, Stan Wischnowski, top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, stepped down from his position for the great sin of having published an op-ed titled “Buildings Matter Too,” complaining about BLM rioting and looting. The Inquirer’s editors issued a groveling apology, mewling, “We’re sorry, and regret that we [printed it]. We also know that an apology on its own is not sufficient.” That apology followed staff members calling in sick to protest the editorial, and issuing an overwrought letter stating, “We’re tired of being told of the progress the company has made and being served platitudes about ‘diversity and inclusion’ when we raise our concerns. . . . We’re tired of being told to show both sides of issues there are no two sides of.”41
One month later, as the fallout from the BLM purge continued, opinion writer and editor Bari Weiss, a traditional liberal, resigned from The New York Times. Her parting letter was a Molotov cocktail tossed in the middle of the Times editorial structure. Weiss stated that she had been hired to usher in a variety of viewpoints to the Times, but that the newspaper of record had surrendered to the woke. At the Times, Weiss wrote, “truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.” Calling Twitter the “ultimate editor” of the paper, she tore into her colleagues—colleagues who had labeled her a Nazi and a racist, and some of whom had publicly smeared her as a bigot. “[I]ntellectual curiosity,” Weiss wrote, “is now a liability at The Times . . . nowadays, standing up for principle at the paper does not win plaudits. It puts a target on your back.” Weiss concluded, “The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people.”42
The newspaper’s lack of defense for Weiss stood in stark contrast to its vociferous defense of woke authoritarian leftist thoughtleader Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project. That effort billed itself as a journalistic attempt to recast American history—to view the country as being founded not in 1776 but in 1619, the year of the first importation of an African slave to North American shores. That idea was in and of itself egregiously flawed: America was founded on the principles of the Declaration of Independence. While chattel slavery was a deep, abiding, and evil feature of America during that time and before—as it was, unfortunately, in a wide variety of countries around the world—it did not provide the core of America’s founding philosophy or institutions. But the 1619 Project not only insisted that slavery lay at the center of America’s philosophy and that its legacy inextricably wove its way into every American institution—it lied outright in order to press that falsehood forward. The project compiled a series of essays blaming slavery and endemic white supremacy for everything from traffic patterns to corporate use of Excel spreadsheets to track employee time.
Then there were the blatant errors, ignored or defended by the Times. Five historians, including Pulitzer Prize winner James McPherson and Bancroft Prize winner Sean Wilentz, as well as famed founding-era historian Gordon S. Wood, wrote a letter to the Times blasting the accuracy of the project, including its mischaracterizations of the founding, Abraham Lincoln’s views of black equality, and the lack of support for black rights among white Americans. The historians asked that the Times correct the project before its distribution in schools.43 Hannah-Jones then derisively referred to McPherson’s race in order to dismiss the criticism. Jake Silverstein, editor in chief of the New York Times Magazine, then acknowledged that “we are not ourselves historians,” but added that Hannah-Jones “was trying to make the point that for the most part, the history of this country has been told by white historians.”44 Similarly, historian Leslie Harris of Northwestern University wrote that she had warned Hannah-Jones that her contention that the American Revolution was fought in large part to preserve slavery was simply false. Hannah-Jones and the Times ignored her.45
In the end, after the Times spent millions of dollars to publicize the 1619 Project, the Pulitzer Prize committee gave the pseudo-history its highest honor. After all, the narrative had been upheld, and its critics chided. When the Times printed a piece from its own columnist Bret Stephens critical of the 1619 Project in October 2020, the publisher of the newspaper weighed in to call the project a “journalistic triumph that changed the way millions of Americans understand our country, its history and its present,” and called the project “one of the proudest accomplishments” of the Times generally. The New York Times guild actually attacked Stephens personally, stating that “[t]he act, like the article, reeks.”46 Hannah-Jones is currently in a development deal with Oprah Winfrey and LionsGate to develop the 1619 Project into multiple feature films, TV series, and documentaries.47
JOURNALISTS AGAINST FREE SPEECH
Authoritarian leftists often claim that “cancel culture” isn’t real—that deplatforming isn’t a problem, because conservatives and traditional liberals can simply present their ideas elsewhere. Tha
t argument is the height of gaslighting. It also happens to be utterly specious on its face: it is indeed a cancellation to be barred from participation in the most widely read outlets thanks to dissent. But consigning conservatives and traditional liberals to non-establishment outlets has a rather unfortunate side effect for the authoritarian leftists: conservatives and traditional liberals begin consuming nontraditional media at record rates. In the days when the media had a monopoly on the distribution of information—three TV networks, a few national print newspapers—cleansing conservatives would have been the end of the story. But with the rise of the internet, podcasts, and cable news, conservatives have been able to construct media of their own. Websites like the Daily Wire generate enormous traffic because the media have silenced conservative voices.
And so the authoritarian leftists must go one step further: they must destroy conservative and traditional liberal voices outside traditional media. They first force those they hate into ideological ghettos. Then, when it turns out the ghettos create their own thriving ecosystem, they seek to level them.
To that end, our journalistic New Ruling Class have become full-scale activists. Instead of reporting on the news, they generate it by working with activist groups to motivate advertisers, neutral service providers, and social media platforms to downgrade or drop dissenting media. They claim that the very presence of conservative ideas in the public square ratchets up the possibility of violence—and then they seek to blame advertisers, neutral service providers, and social media platforms for subsidizing the unwoke or allowing them access to their services. When that fails, they call for outright government regulation of free speech. The Founding Fathers would have been astonished to learn that the greatest advocates for curbing free speech in the United States are now members of the press.
The authoritarian leftist activist journalists pick their targets well.
They begin with advertisers. For nearly two decades, Media Matters, a pathetic hit group started by unstable grifter David Brock and backed by Hillary Clinton’s team, has spent every waking minute monitoring conservative media for opportunities to push advertiser boycotts. That generally involves cutting conservatives out of context, then letting media allies know about those out-of-context quotes, spinning up controversy—and then creating a fake groundswell of outrage directed at advertisers, who generally wish to be left alone. The tactic has been sporadically successful when directed at hosts ranging from Rush Limbaugh to Sean Hannity to Tucker Carlson, and over time other groups have joined in the game as well. Major media outlets routinely use Media Matters as a source for coverage;48 an ex-employee of Media Matters bragged in February 2012 that the activist group was “pretty much writing” MSNBC’s prime time, and coordinating with The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, and reporters from the Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, and Politico, among others. (Media Matters also reportedly held weekly strategy calls with the Obama White House communications director, and now Biden chief spokeswoman, Jen Psaki.)49
Members of the media don’t merely crib off of Media Matters’ out-of-context clips—they then target advertisers, asking them why they are continuing to spend their dollars with conservatives. Naturally, such questions aren’t designed to elicit a response. They’re designed to elicit a cancellation of the advertising dollars. And the media cheer when they start an advertiser cancellation cascade against a conservative. Their glee is fully evident.
Members of establishment media cheer on this tactic. In fact, they go further: they call for anyone who provides services to the unwoke to stop doing so. They call for Comcast to stop carrying Newsmax, One America News, and Fox News. Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times recently wrote that in order to dampen the extremism of the Republican Party, “advertisers should stop supporting networks that spread lies and hatred, and cable companies should drop channels that persist in doing so. As a start, don’t force people to subsidize Fox News by including it in basic packages.” Sure, Kristof acknowledged, this could create a slippery slope. But the slippery slope was a lesser risk than Kristof’s opponents being able to make a living.50 Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post agreed, calling Fox News a “hazard to our democracy,” and demanded that “[c]orporations that advertise on Fox News should walk away, and citizens who care about the truth should demand that they do so.”51 Max Boot of The Washington Post believes that “large cable companies . . . need to step in and kick Fox News off.”52 CNN’s Oliver Darcy joined the chorus, stating that “TV companies that provide platforms to networks” like Fox News ought not escape scrutiny: “it is time TV carriers face questions for lending their platforms to dishonest companies that profit off of disinformation and conspiracy theories.” Darcy even called up cable platforms to attempt to pressure them.53
This stuff is fully delusional: were conservatives to be deprived of Fox News, they’d seek similar conservative outlets. But that delusion is consistent with the authoritarian Left’s true goal: a reestablishment of the media monopoly it had before the death of the Fairness Doctrine and the rise of Rush Limbaugh. Many on the authoritarian Left celebrated when Limbaugh died, declaring him “polarizing.” The reality is that they were polarizing, but they had a monopoly . . . and Limbaugh broke that monopoly. Now they want to reestablish it, at all costs.
This is why the media grow particularly vengeful when it comes to distribution of conservative ideas via social media. A shocking number of media members spend their days seeking to pressure social media platforms into curbing free speech standards in order to reinstitute an establishment media monopoly. Now, blaming social media platforms for violence is sort of like blaming free speech for Nazis: yes, bad people can take advantage of neutral platforms to do bad things. That doesn’t mean the platforms should be restricted. But for pseudo-journalists like Joe Scarborough of MSNBC, the platforms bear primary responsibility for violence: “Those riots would not have happened but for Twitter, but for Facebook . . . Facebook’s algorithms were set up to cause this sort of radicalism to explode.”54
By citing the danger of free speech, our establishment media can close the pathways of informational dissemination to those outside the New Ruling Class. These media members consider anyone outside their own worldview an enemy worth banning. Mainstream media members simply lump in mainstream conservatives with violent radicals—and voilà!—it’s time for social media to step in and get rid of them. Kara Swisher of The New York Times spends her column space, day after day, attempting to pressure Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook to set restrictive content regulations in violation of free speech principles. “Mr. Zuckerberg,” Swisher wrote in June 2020, “has become—unwittingly or not—the digital equivalent of a supercharged enabler because of his enormous power over digital communications that affect billions of people.” And, Swisher added, Zuckerberg shouldn’t worry about free speech as a value—after all, the First Amendment doesn’t mention “Facebook, or any other company. And there’s no mention of Mark Zuckerberg, who certainly has the power to rein in speech that violates company rules.” Free speech is the problem. Corporate censorship is the solution.55
And what sort of content should be restricted? The tech reporters believe the answer is obvious: anything right of center. That’s why, day after day, Kevin Roose of The New York Times tweets out organic reach of conservative sites, trying to pressure Facebook into changing its algorithm. It’s why The New York Times ran a piece by Roose in June 2019 titled “The Making of a YouTube Radical,” linking everyone from Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and me to Alex Jones and Jared Taylor. Roose lamented, “YouTube has inadvertently created a dangerous on-ramp to extremism.”56 The goal is obvious: get everybody right of center deplatformed. And threaten the platforms themselves in order to do so.
It won’t stop there. Media members have now decided, in the post-Trump age, that it’s time to rewrite the First Amendment bargain altogether. Jim VandeHei of Politico acknowledges that Blue America hopes desperately to rethink “politics, free speech, the def
inition of truth and the price of lies.”57 The First Amendment must be rethought. In 2019, Richard Stengel—now the head of Joe Biden’s transition team for the US Agency for Global Media—contended that America ought to embrace hate speech laws, since free speech should not “protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another.” New York University journalism professor and MSNBC contributor Anand Giridharadas questions, “Should Fox News be allowed to exist?” Steve Coll, dean of Columbia Journalism School, now believes that those in journalism “have to come to terms with the fact that free speech, a principle we hold sacred, is being weaponized against the principles of journalism.” Bill Adair, founder of the highly biased news fact-checking source PolitiFact, now believes that the government should use “regulations and new laws” to fight the “problem of misinformation.”58
Curbing free speech has two particular benefits for the establishment media: first, it boots their competitors; second, it purges the public sphere of views they dislike. It’s a win-win. All they require is ideologically authoritarian control.
CONCLUSION
On January 18, 2019, during the March for Life, something frightening happened: a group of high school boys wearing MAGA hats swarmed around an innocent Native American man, taunting him, laughing and dancing. Reports suggested that four black protesters had also been harassed by the cruel white students. The Native American man told the media that he had confronted the students while they shouted, “Build the Wall!” And the journalistic world went to work, journalisming as hard as they could. Kara Swisher tweeted, “[T]hose awful kids and their fetid smirking harassing that elderly man on the Mall: Go f*** yourselves.” Joe Scarborough tweeted, “Where are their parents, where are their teachers, where are their pastors?” The New York Times headlined, “Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous People’s March.” CNN called the incident a “heartbreaking viral video.”59