by Ben Shapiro
In December 2020, a recent high school graduate, Mimi Groves, found herself the subject of an interminable hit piece from The New York Times. Groves had, back in 2016, just received her learner’s permit to drive. She took a video of herself on Snapchat, jocularly exclaiming, “I can drive, n***ah.” As the Times reported, the video “later circulated among some students at Heritage High School,” but it didn’t raise any hackles—after all, she was a fifteen-year-old girl mimicking the tropes of rap.
But one student—an utterly despicable douche bag named Jimmy Galligan—held on to the video. Galligan, who is black, decided to post the video “publicly when the time was right.” That time came in 2020, by which time Groves was a senior, headed to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to be part of the cheer team. During the Black Lives Matter protests, Groves made the critical error of supporting BLM; she posted to Instagram urging comrades to “protest, donate, sign a petition, rally, do something.”
And so Galligan struck. He posted the old video to Snapchat, TikTok, and Twitter. Groves was booted from the University of Tennessee cheer team, then withdrew from UT altogether thanks to the social media frenzy. An admissions officer said that the university had received “hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public.”
The Times reported this story, not as a horrific attempt by a vicious grandstander to destroy a girl’s life, but as a referendum on the “power of social media to hold people of all ages accountable.” Galligan is portrayed as a hero, standing up to the threat of endemic white supremacy.50
This story should raise two questions, one about social media, and one about the media. First, why has social media become such a flaming dumpster fire of visceral hatred? Second, why have the media degraded themselves to the point where nonstories about individual high school students are worthy of national coverage?
For social media, the answer lies in virality. Social media companies encourage such activities, treating them as a source of traffic and news. Twitter’s trending topics are a perfect example of how minor issues can quickly snowball; Twitter highlights the most controversial stories and elevates them, encouraging minor incidents to become national stories; velocity of attention matters more than sheer scope of attention. Thus, for example, topics that garner tons of tweets day after day don’t trend; topics that spike in attention from a low baseline do. So if there’s a random woman in a city park who says something racially insensitive and garners two thousand tweets for it, she’s more likely to trend than President Biden on any given day. And it’s not difficult for two thousand tweets to become 20,000, once a topic starts to trend: social media rewards speaking out, and devalues silence. On social media, refusal to weigh in on a trending topic is generally taken as an indicator of apathy or even approval.
It doesn’t take much to form a mob, either. Social media mobs form daily, with the speed of an aggressive autoimmune disorder. Where in the past, people had to find commonality in order to mobilize a mob, now social media provides a mob milling around, waiting to be mobilized. The cause need not be just. All it must do is provide an evening’s entertainment for several thousand people, and a story for the media to print. Justine Sacco, a thirty-year-old senior director of corporate communications at IAC, watched her life crumble after sending a tweet joking about AIDS in Africa to her 170 followers. The tweet read, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” The tweet was apparently supposed to be a joke about the insufficiency of Western aid to Africa. Nonetheless, when she got off her eleven-hour flight, she had been targeted with “tens of thousands of tweets.” She lost her job. She experienced PTSD, depression, and insomnia.
Which brings us to the second question: why do the media cover this stuff?
The answer: they are, in large measure, social authoritarians who use social media as a cheap and easy way of both creating traffic and finding stories.
Sacco’s tweet only became a worldwide trend because a tipster sent it to Sam Biddle, a writer for Gawker Media. He promptly retweeted it. Biddle later explained, “It’s satisfying to be able to say, ‘OK, let’s make a racist tweet by a senior IAC employee count this time.’”51 Too many in the media have the same perspective. Twitter has enabled our journalistic establishment to play at both crusader and reporter with a single retweet. That’s why whatever the latest Twitter trend, it’s likely a media member will have the top tweet.
Singular events that chart on social media also allow members of the media to manipulate the narrative. The media overwhelmingly believe the woke tale that America is systemically racist—but the data for such contentions are vanishingly hard to find. In America, the demand for racism from authoritarians seeking social control wildly outstrips the supply of actual racism. To that end, media members seek out individual, non-national stories and then suggest they are indicative of broader trends, citing social media attention as the rationale for the story in the first place.
In the real world, Twitter trends rarely used to matter. But as social media becomes our new shared space, and as our media treat the happenings on social media platforms as the equivalent of real life, social media mobs become real mobs with frightening momentum.
THE NEW INFORMATIONAL OLIGOPOLY
Our social media oligopoly—cudgeled, wheedled, and massaged into compliance by a rabid media and a censorious Democratic Party—threatens true social authoritarianism at this point. In a free market system, the solution would be to create alternatives.
Parler attempted to do just that.
Angered at the capricious nature of Twitter’s management, Parler began as an alternative. In 2020, as big tech began to unleash its power in the election, Parler steadily gained adherents: in late July, Parler saw over a million people join in one week. After the 2020 election, as big tech moved to stymie alternative media, conservatives jumped to Parler: Parler hit the top spot in Apple’s App Store, and jumped by more than 4.5 million members in one week. Parler’s chief selling point: it would not ban people based on political viewpoint. Parler’s CEO, John Matze, said, “We’re a community town square, an open town square, with no censorship. If you can say it on the street of New York, you can say it on Parler.”52
Until you couldn’t.
After the January 6 riots, based on vaguely sourced reports that Parler had been an organizing place for the rioters, Apple, Amazon, and Google all barred Parler. Apple’s App Store barred Parler on the basis that Parler’s processes were “insufficient” to “prevent the spread of dangerous and illegal content.” Amazon Web Services used its power to kick Parler off the internet entirely, denying it access to its cloud hosting service. Amazon’s excuse: Parler had allowed “posts that clearly encourage and incite violence,” and that it had no “effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.”53
None of the big tech companies could explain what, precisely, a minimum standard would have looked like. And none of them could explain why Parler was supposedly more dangerous than the far larger platforms Facebook and Twitter—especially since, as Jason King has reported, nearly one hundred people involved in the January 6 riot used Facebook or Instagram, twenty-eight used YouTube, and only eight used Parler.54
The informational monopoly is being reestablished in real time. And alternatives are being actively foreclosed by social media companies determined to invoke their standard as the singular standard, a media that knows it can co-opt those standards, and Democrats who benefit from those standards. After having killed Parler, members of the media have turned their attention to Telegram and Signal, encrypted messaging services. All streams of dissent—or uncontrolled informational streams—must be crushed.55
Perhaps the only good news is that most Americans know they’re being manipulated by the gatekeepers in social media. Fully 82 percent of adults told Pew Research that social media “treat some news organizations differently than others,” 53 percent said that one-sided news was a “very big problem” on so
cial media, and 35 percent worried about “censorship of the news.” Some 64 percent of Republicans said that the news they saw on social media leaned to the Left; 37 percent of Democrats agreed. Just 21 percent of Democrats said that the news they saw via social media leaned to the Right.56
The bad news is that social media will remain the biggest players on the stage so long as they have the most eyeballs—and with alternatives increasingly foreclosed, that means for the foreseeable future. Facebook has 2.8 billion monthly active users;57 more than 90 percent of all web searches happen via either Google or its subsidiary YouTube;58 fully 70 percent of digital ad spending goes to Google, Facebook, and Amazon.59 Building competition in the face of that oligopoly won’t be easy.
What’s more, our government actors have an interest in upholding the oligopoly: it’s easy to control a market with just a few key players. And our media have an interest in upholding the oligopoly, too: these companies are run by like-minded allies, all of whom are either committed to or can be pushed into support for woke authoritarianism.
And these companies, as it turns out, aren’t the only ones.
The Choice Before Us
In early February 2021, actress Gina Carano made a fateful decision.
She posted a meme on Instagram.
Carano, who played popular character Cara Dune on Disney+’s hit series The Mandalorian, had been verging on the edge of cancellation for months. That’s because Carano is conservative. She’d jokingly posted that her pronouns were beep/boop/bop in order to mock woke authoritarians pressuring strangers to list their gender pronouns. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, she’d posted on Twitter, “We need to clean up the election process so we are not left feeling the way we do today.” She’d posted a meme challenging the elite consensus on Covid by suggesting that Americans were putting masks over their eyes.1
All of this had already made Carano persona non grata with Disney+ and Lucasfilm. According to The Hollywood Reporter, citing a person inside the companies, the bosses had been looking to can Carano for two months; Disney+ and Lucasfilm had scrapped plans for Carano to star in her own spin-off inside the Star Wars universe in December.2
Carano’s fatal error came in posting a meme citing the Holocaust. The picture showed a Jewish woman running away from a crowd of Germans, and carried this caption: “Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors. . . . even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”3
Now, comparisons to the Holocaust are generally overwrought. But Carano’s post certainly was not anti-Semitic (as a recipient of more anti-Semitic memery than perhaps any person alive, I can spot anti-Semitism a mile off). The post was making the point that oppression of others doesn’t start with violence. It starts with dehumanization of the other. That’s a fairly generic and true point, even though Carano—as she herself acknowledged—shouldn’t have invoked the Holocaust.
The blowback was immediate and final.
Disney+ and Lucasfilm fired her outright. They stated, wrongly, that she had “denigrat[ed] people based on their cultural and religious identities.”4 They could not explain precisely how she had denigrated anyone, particularly Jews. But authoritarian leftism requires only an excuse for cancellation, not a real justification.
One might think that Disney was merely setting a standard that overwrought Holocaust comparisons were forbidden on social media. Not so. Pedro Pascal, star of The Mandalorian, tweeted in 2018 comparing the Trump border policy with regard to children to Nazi concentration camps. To the sound of crickets.5
Normally, in our authoritarian culture, this is where the story would end.
But that’s not where the story ended.
As soon as I heard what had happened to Carano—we’d never met before—I reached out to her personally; my business partner reached out to her business manager. And we offered Gina a job. To push back against Hollywood’s absurd cancel culture, we would partner with her in producing a film, to star her. Gina’s statement tells the tale:
The Daily Wire is helping make one of my dreams—to develop and produce my own film—come true. I cried out and my prayer was answered. I am sending out a direct message of hope to everyone living in fear of cancellation by the totalitarian mob. I have only just begun using my voice which is now freer than ever before, and I hope it inspires others to do the same. They can’t cancel us if we don’t let them.6
They can’t cancel us if we don’t let them.
This should be our rallying cry. Because if we say it together—liberals, centrists, conservatives—the authoritarian Left loses.
Our institutions have been remade in the mold of authoritarian leftism by elites who deem themselves worthy of holding the reins of power. But we don’t have to acquiesce in that power grab.
We can say “no.”
After announcing our partnership with Gina, tens of thousands of Americans joined Daily Wire as members. I personally received hundreds of emails from people asking how they could help—and hundreds more from people in Hollywood asking if they could escape the system. Americans recognized not just that we were attempting to challenge Hollywood on its own terms, but that we must all act in solidarity—that while we are individualists by ideology, cohesive action is necessary if we wish to make a consolidated counterattack on the authoritarians.
So, how exactly do we go about wresting control of our institutions away from an authoritarian Left hell-bent on American renormalization? We begin with an educational mission. And then we get practical.
EDUCATING AMERICA, REDUX
The authoritarian Left has successfully pursued an educational project: inculcating Americans into embarrassment at America’s founding philosophy, her institutions, and her people. Their argument—that America is systemically racist, that her institutions fundamentally broken—has won the day on an emotional level. To even challenge this argument is deemed vicious. But the argument is fundamentally wrong.
America is not systemically racist. Racism does exist; slavery was one of history’s greatest evils; history does have consequences. It’s terrible and sad that gaps between white and black success remain a feature of American life. All of those things are undeniably true. And the solution to all of those evils is not the overthrow of all existing American systems. In fact, the “anti-racist” policies the authoritarian Left loves so much have been tried—and they have failed miserably. That won’t stop the authoritarian Left from calling you a racist for pointing that out.
The solution is the same as it was in 1776: a government instituted to protect the preexisting rights of its citizens, and a commitment to both virtue and reason. America was not founded in 1619; it was founded in 1776. The principles of American liberty are eternal and true. The fact that America has not always lived up to those principles isn’t a referendum on the principles themselves. And the greatness of America—the greatness of her individual freedom, of her powerful economy, of her moral people—represents the unique outgrowth of those principles.
The sins of 1619—the sins of brutality, of bigotry, of violence, of greed, of lust, of radical dehumanization—are sins that adhere to nearly all of humanity over the course of time. Human beings are sinful and weak. But we are capable of more. It is not a coincidence that America has been history’s leading force in favor of human freedom and prosperity. The great lie of our time—perhaps of all time—is that such freedom and prosperity are the natural state of things, and that America’s systems stop us from fulfilling their promise. Precisely the opposite is true.
So, how do we—the new resistance—fight back against an authoritarian Left that has embedded itself at the top of our major institutions? How do we stop an authoritarian Left dedicated to revolutionary aggression, top-do
wn censorship, and anti-conventionalism?
We reverse the process begun by the authoritarian Left so long ago: we refuse to allow the authoritarian Left to silence us; we end the renormalization of our institutions and return them back to actual normalcy; and we pry open the doors they have welded shut.
OUR REFUSAL IS A WEAPON
The first step in unraveling authoritarian leftist dominance of our institutions is our refusal to abide by their rules. The authoritarian Left engaged in a three-step process directed toward cudgeling Americans into supporting their agenda. First, they relied on the Cordiality Principle—the principle that Americans ought to be cordial, and thus inoffensive—to make Americans uncomfortable about dissenting from prevailing social views of the New Ruling Class. Next, they made the argument that to speak up against the New Ruling Class amounted to a form of violence. Finally, they argued that failure to echo the New Ruling Class was itself a form of harm—“Silence is violence.”
We must reject each one of these steps, in reverse order.
First, we must reject the imbecilic notion that “silence is violence.” It isn’t. All too often, it’s sanity. When it comes to children—whom radical authoritarian leftists all too often resemble—bad behavior should be met with a simple response: ignoring them. This is a tough principle for parents to learn (I know, I’ve had to practice it routinely): the natural tendency when faced with radical behavior is to engage. But it’s precisely our attention that often gives radicals their power. Imagine if, instead of rushing to respond to the pseudo-urgent needs of the latest establishment media–driven mob, we simply shrugged. Imagine if, next time someone declared that they had been harmed by mere dissent, we chuckled at them and moved on. Their power would be gone. We don’t have to engage. And we certainly don’t have to echo.