The Descending Iron Curtain of the Left's Totalitarianism (Part I of II)

By An Old Friend

Tue, Mar 24, 2020 11:36 p.m.

The descending iron curtain of the Left's totalitarianism (Part I of II)

The lengthy article below, from November, is by Edward Ring, a writer I increasingly find interesting and significant.  He's a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness and co-founder (2013) of the California Policy Center.

Below is the first ~60% of what's at the link below.  The remainder is an interview of Lana Lokteff that I'll put into a second email.

I think Ring's commentary about the totalitarianism that the Left is speedily imposing upon us is wise.  But also below is an astounding factual claim: 75% of Silicon Valley's tech workforce is foreign born.  (I can't access the San Jose Mercury-News article that's the source of the claim.  If someone can make a PDF of it, I'd like to have a copy.)

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/16/the-youtube-channel-that-never-happened/

The YouTube Channel That Never Happened

The Southern Poverty Law Center and Media Matters called it a "hate site." YouTube agreed and wiped out hundreds of videos with more than 300,000 subscribers and millions of views. Now Red Ice TV co-founder and co-host Lana Lokteff answers the charges, makes the case for freedom of unpopular speech, and reveals what it's like to be "canceled" by Big Tech.

By Edward Ring • November 16, 2019

"Six hundred years ago, when elsewhere they were footing the blame for the Black Death, Casimir the Great—so-called—told the Jews they could come to Krakow. They came. They trundled their belongings into the city. They settled. They took hold. They prospered in business, science, education, the arts. With nothing they came and with nothing they flourished. For six centuries there has been a Jewish Krakow. By this evening those six centuries will be a rumor. They never happened."

–Amon Goeth, "Schindler's List" (1994)

Invoking the Holocaust as analogous to cancel culture is a tasteless stretch. Or is it? We hear the analogy applied almost every day to climate skeptics, who are stigmatized as "deniers." And when it comes to online censorship, Amon Goeth's quote from Steven Spielberg's masterpiece is too evocative to ignore. Because when someone is "canceled" online, they don't just lose their ability to publish new material. Their entire body of work, their history, their audience, their past, present and future, is wiped out. Almost as if they never happened.

On October 18, 2019, the YouTube channel Red Ice TV was erased. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Red Ice TV is a white nationalist hate site, promoting racist views. At the time of "cancelation," Red Ice TV had 334,000 subscribers and its videos had been viewed nearly 50 million times.

Today, Red Ice TV is just the latest YouTube channel that never happened. The online megaphone that can reach the world instantly and for pennies, can also in an instant delete you without a trace. If you click on the link to Red Ice TV's YouTube channel, you get a generic screen with the message "This channel does not exist."

But why doesn't this channel exist? Why is it as though it never happened? Why has Lana Lokteff, Red Ice TV's co-host and co-founder, been wiped out by YouTube, and every other major online platform?

YouTube Channels That Flourished, And Then Never Happened

YouTube has been playing a game of cat and mouse with channels they deem to produce "white nationalist" content. Earlier this fall, they deplatformed three similarly labeled channels, then admitted two back. "Replatformed" were The Iconoclast and Way of the World. Gone forever, along with 450,000 subscribers and nearly 75 million video views, was James Allsup.

Red Ice TV and James Allsup can now be found on BitChute. But who watches BitChute? Conservatives and nationalists—and, shall we say it, globalism skeptics—are dangerous when they spread their ideas on a video platform that everybody watches. That platform is, and only is, YouTube.

Standing up for the right of these vloggers to operate without being deplatformed by YouTube, which by any reasonable standard now constitutes a monopoly, is not an endorsement of the content these vloggers produce. But so what? Whether you are defending what they say, or just defending their right to say it, there's no recourse.

The trouble is, government intervention would probably create more problems than it would solve. Conservative politicians want to regulate YouTube, possibly taking away its exemption from publisher's liability, because it censors too much. Liberal politicians are also threatening to take away YouTube's platform exemption, because it doesn't censor enough. It's hard to imagine government intervention ending well.

But the status quo isn't turning out very well for free speech, either.

Vincent James, whose Red Elephants channel has nearly 300,000 subscribers despite being demonetized and algorithmically suppressed by YouTube, explained how leftist activists use "mass flagging campaigns" to take down conservative online platforms.

"What online activists do is post something on Reddit or a 'discord server' which is an encrypted online messaging app," he said, "these mass flagging campaigns will originate from activists using these forums to say 'all of you go and flag this channel.'" When the platform administrators receive a high volume of complaints, they suppress or erase the channel.

There is no similar sort of online attack mob operating on the Right to silence left-wing voices, and these grassroots online flash mobs have become highly effective at shutting down conservatives online. In the case of sites without large fan bases that can raise objections, the power of the mob to erase is near absolute, and nobody knows how many of these smaller sites are gone as a result. In Red Ice's case, it didn't matter that thousands of their fans objected.

Ultimately, if new federal regulations are problematic and online flagging warriors successfully attack channels even if they haven't violated the First Amendment, YouTube's managers would be responsible for doing the right thing. In this case, that would mean reinstating Red Ice TV, no matter how repugnant the channel may seem to them. As YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki very recently asserted, "it's more important than ever that YouTube remains open to anyone."

While nothing in this report, or the interview that follows, is intended in any way to endorse the views expressed by Red Ice TV, judgment of any kind is not the point. The question we should be asking is simply this: Does Red Ice TV have a First Amendment right to say what its proprietors are saying, and if so, does YouTube have an obligation to offer them a platform?

As Adam Candeub and Mark Epstein, writing for City Journal, put it, "Exemption from standard libel law is extremely valuable to the companies that enjoy its protection, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, but they only got it because it was assumed that they would operate as impartial, open channels of communication – not curators of acceptable opinion."

Maybe there is a general consensus that some of the content produced by Red Ice TV does not constitute "acceptable opinion." But it should be obvious that supporting someone's right to speak their mind does not mean you agree with everything he has to say. It should also be obvious that some of the things they have to say need to be said.

How Big Tech Smacks Down the "Right-Wing"

The online platform war began in earnest after the 2016 presidential election, when the liberal management of the social media giants—often egged on by their even more liberal workforces—realized that conservatives, inexplicably, had mastered the art of online political campaigning and did a better job of it than the liberals. Notwithstanding the incessant finger-pointing at the Russians, the smarter heads in Silicon Valley knew they were legitimately outplayed, and vowed never to let that happen again.

The stepped-up attacks on right-wing online content include subtle measures that are hard to detect, harder still to prove, but have huge impact.

Alex Jones and his website InfoWars offers an important example. In November 2016 InfoWars attracted 125 million views. This was the high-water mark for Jones. By July 2018, Jones was still attracting an impressive 25 million views a month, but that represented an 80 percent drop in just 20 months. According to Advertising Age, the decline was because the platforms that drove viewers to InfoWars, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube search, "clearly were trying to reduce his impact."

Up until summer 2018, most of the steps taken against right-wing content creators took this relatively soft approach, using manipulated results in Google searches, throttling down appearances in news feeds and YouTube recommended videos, shadowbanning on Twitter, and deboosting on Facebook.

But with the 2018 midterm elections looming, the tech giants decided to take off the gloves.

For the first time, the major online platforms coordinated their efforts. Within a few days in early August 2018, InfoWars was expelled from Apple podcasts, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube. On September 6, Twitter followed suit. On September 8, Apple banned the InfoWars app from its App Store. Jones was virtually erased. He had 2.4 million YouTube subscribers, all gone; 830,000 Twitter followers, purged; his Apple podcast archives were deleted; his Facebook page, with 2.5 million followers, wiped out.

According to the Los Angeles Times, by mid-October 2018, Facebook purged more than 800 accounts and pages pushing "political messages." Matt Lamb, director of communications for Students for Life of America, provided dozens of examples of biased deplatforming in a guest editorial for USA Today titled, "Google, Twitter and Facebook should just be honest if they don't like conservatives."

Other noteworthy casualties in late 2018 included Sargon of Akkad, whose YouTube channel has over 1 million subscribers, and Milo Yiannopoulos. Sargon, whose real name is Carl Benjamin, a 40-year-old British political commentator, eventually got his channel back. Yiannopoulos did not, although he has fitfully attempted to pick up the pieces with new online ventures.

The Strange Case of Milo Yiannopoulos

The Yiannopoulos case is telling, because nobody with a sense of humor would consider him to have ever engaged in "hate speech," much less exceeding First Amendment free-speech protections and advocating violence. Yiannopoulous, denounced by his critics as a right-wing extremist, proudly describes himself as a gay man with Jewish heritage who is specifically attracted to black men. He was offensive, he was outrageous, but it would be hard to claim he was a hardcore homophobe, or anti-Semite, or racist.

For a few brief months in 2016 and early 2017, Milo was arguably the most famous troll in the world. To those who agreed with his politics, he was hilarious. For everyone who wanted Yiannopoulos to disappear, however, his cavalier comments on the subject of pedophilia, which came to light in February 2017, were the last straw. Even Yiannopoulos knew he'd gone too far, and issued a rare apology to no avail.

Whether Yiannopoulos was defending pedophilia, or, only slightly less revolting, was just making light of it, is not really the point. Because to those who found him disagreeable, his articulate, widely shared denunciations of political correctness were a threat, and that is the point. The other takeaway from the Yiannopoulos story is the preposterous double standard that his erasure exemplifies.

In a culture dominated by the Left, we now have "tolerant" parents across America taking their children to "Drag Queen Story Hour," and flamboyant prepubescent transvestites are celebrated by the mainstream U.S. media. Are these practices, highly sexualized and arguably inappropriate (to put it mildly), which directly involve very young children, any less objectionable than Milo's fatal transgressions which were made on forums that cater exclusively to adults? Apparently, it depends on who you ask.

Milo Yiannopoulos was making it cool to mock the Left, and his message was influencing tens of millions of people. But by the end of 2018, when Facebook and Patreon kicked him off their platforms, he had already been reduced to a rumor. And then he never happened.

The Intellectual Dark Web

About this time a new term was entering common usage: the "Intellectual Dark Web." On the website "KnowYourMeme.com," the Intellectual Dark Web, or IDW, is described as "a phrase coined by mathematician Eric Weinstein referring to a loosely defined group of intellectuals, academics, and political commentators who espouse controversial ideas and beliefs surrounding subjects related to free speech, identity politics and biology."

This happened in mid-2017, shortly after Eric Weinstein's brother, Bret, had been harassed for refusing to participate in the "Day of Absence" at Evergreen College in Washington state, where he was a professor. Organized by campus leftists, the "Day of Absence" sought to exclude white people from the campus for a day—apparently to further their efforts at achieving social justice. Stung that his brother's unwillingness to be banned from the campus where he taught was considered "controversial," Eric Weinstein identified the Intellectual Dark Web as an antidote.

In May 2018, the New York Times published an opinionated but detailed exposé of the Intellectual Dark Web. It remains one of the definitive mainstream descriptions of the IDW. Here are some of the topics and premises the article lists as typical fare for the IDW: "There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart."

A more detailed description of how the tech giants have partnered with financial intermediaries and internet service providers, all the while taking direction from a powerful coalition of activist left-wing nonprofit pressure groups, can be found in an April 2019 American Greatness article "The Establishment War on the Intellectual Dark Web."

The Establishment Reactionaries

The 20th century produced two writers of uncommon vision who wrote books about the future that have become cautionary classics. In his novel, 1984, George Orwell imagined a hellish future of endless war, where the people are oppressed by a tyrannical regime that erases history, engages in constant surveillance, and punishes "thought crimes."

Aldous Huxley imagined an equally dystopian future in his novel Brave New World, but where Orwell's regime used brutality, Huxley's tyrants used seduction. Huxley's government of the future employed psychological manipulation, along with abundant drugs and sex, to pacify a population where people led lives devoid of true love or purpose. What both of these authors shared, however, was the belief that future regimes would rely on Pavlovian conditioning.

It would be fascinating to observe either of these literary giants taking a trip into our time (what would have been the actual future for them), to see just how right they were on that fundamental premise.

For a while, the internet was an unambiguously revolutionary phenomenon. Everyone could broadcast truth to the world. What social media has done more recently, however, threatens the internet revolution in two ways: The interactive, personal, instantaneous, and perpetual access to an infinite audience has disrupted the human psyche in ways we are only beginning to understand. And the Pavlovian control of this interaction by a small handful of social media platforms in Silicon Valley has given those companies almost indescribable power.

Virtually all Americans between the ages of 18 and 65 use social media. YouTube is used by 73 percent of U.S. adults, Facebook 69 percent, Instagram 37 percent, Pinterest 28 percent, LinkedIn 27 percent, Snapchat 24 percent, Twitter 22 percent, WhatsApp 20 percent, and Reddit 11 percent. It isn't uncommon for Americans to use all of these platforms. Among smartphone users in the United States, the average time spent with their device is an astonishing three hours and 10 minutes per day. This is an addiction that has swept through the American population in barely a decade, and it has changed everything.

The ironic surprise in all this is how Silicon Valley's tech companies have dealt with their incredible power. They have embraced a reactionary politics which is reflected in the choices they've made. Who they promote. Who they erase. What online behaviors they reward, and where they direct the herd. To understand why they have a reactionary political agenda, one must understand how the American Left, over the past 10-20 years, moved from opposing globalization to fully endorsing it. This shift, gradual but steady, came into the open with the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

Trump Catalyzed the Revolution Against Globalism

Donald Trump's heresy was to focus on the negative impact globalism was having on Americans. He catalyzed a revolution by challenging what had become truisms for the establishment—trade deficits don't matter or can actually be beneficial, free trade is always good, mass immigration helps more than it harms.

What the establishment had ignored was that the benefits of trade deficits are financial bubbles (as American asset prices are bid up by foreign investors) that only enrich wealthy speculators. Free trade isn't free when other nations cheat. Mass immigration only benefits businesses who want cheaper labor. Meanwhile, homes become unaffordable debt traps, good manufacturing jobs migrate overseas, and immigrants take away jobs from America's most vulnerable workers.

Trump clarified the debate over globalization by forcing the progressive Left to reveal its true colors. It became clear that the Left's only concern was how globalization affected the developing world, and exposed their indifference, even hostility, toward the workers in their own nations.

You can make a moral case that globalization should harm the workers of the developed nations more than it harms the workers of developing nations. You can turn that unavoidable truth into an altruistic virtue, although one that is rather hard to defend in the nations that are being harmed. You can also embrace globalization on those terms because it does the bidding—and attracts the generosity—of the wealthy elites and multinational corporations who are most enriched by "free" trade and open borders.

America's progressive Left did both. They've disguised the agenda that disenfranchises American citizens within their own nation by attacking "white privilege" and by accusing those who object of being "white nationalists." They've come to accept the premises of the free-trade economists they'd once despised, with the caveat that climate activism and all that it entails—namely, the mass redistribution of wealth—will mitigate the impacts of globalism on developing nations which had once bothered them so much.

The Silicon Valley, which by 2019 had a tech workforce reaching an incredible 75 percent foreign-born, epitomizes a culture where leftist globalism is perceived not just as inevitable, but already here. Close behind, fully embracing globalism in all its ramifications, and scrambling to become as woke and worldly as the tech monopolies, are every other major corporation in America, every elite academic institution, every influential entertainer, every so-called mainstream media property.

These are the new empire. These are Big Brother. This is the Brave New World the online censors are protecting. Their path to power was smooth and relentless. And in the face of an alt-right, nationalist insurgency, they are the reactionaries, and Trump along with his supporters are the revolutionaries. Everyone in the world who questions globalism, whether they are right-of-center or left-of-center, are revolutionaries, with all the moral frissons and enticing glamour that being a revolutionary implies.

No wonder Milo Yiannopoulos was so dangerous. He demolished political correctness and revealed its tyrannical hidden agenda, all the while making people laugh. No wonder Alex Jones was a threat when, in between his riffs on human-pig hybrids, he was methodically exposing the supranational networks that are supplanting national governments. No wonder their flourishing electronic footprints were deleted. No wonder they never happened.

The Inconvenient Truths That Must Be Silenced

When considering what truths are inconvenient enough to silence, globalism versus nationalism is the context in nearly every case. An excellent example of this is the experience of Carey Wedler, who has, so far, hung onto her YouTube channel, but was recently banned from Facebook and Twitter.

Wedler is a left-leaning critic of the mainstream media and an outspoken opponent of America's so-called endless wars. She infers that Facebook and Twitter are both working closely with the shadowy Atlantic Council and that the media and social media giants are engaging in "soft censorship" to remove content that isn't illegal but the government doesn't like. Facebook and Twitter never told Wedler why she was banned from their platforms.

Could it be that the active deplatforming and soft censorship being practiced by the social media monopolies, while correlated with their leftist bias, is more accurately described as focused on suppressing anti-globalist content?

If you examine the list of channels, compiled by the Red Elephants' Vincent James, that are either banned, demonetized, or algorithmically suppressed by YouTube, there is a common thread, and it isn't stereotypical right-wing content, or "hate speech." The common thread, stretching from the acerbic James Allsup to the erudite Stefan Molyneux are ideas that question the globalist agenda (as opposed to globalization, which is an economic phenomenon). The narratives of globalism skeptics are dangerous to the reactionary empire. That is the threat.

But what if the majority of ordinary people don't want open borders? What if they would like the facts, not a bunch of skewed BS, regarding how immigration policies affect the economy and social cohesion? What if they want balanced opinions, or just want to hear the other side for a change, on the issues of multiculturalism, race, feminism, gender "equity," and "social justice"? What if they sometimes find an unrepentant critic of identity politics to be a breath of fresh air? What if they believe there should be a robust and honest debate over globalism, or over climate change?

What if the phony gravitas and one-sided outrage that pours forth from the overpaid thespians who masquerade as top-tier news journalists—think David Muir, Lester Holt, Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, and the like—is transparently false to anyone who views alternative media?

What if the uncanny unanimity of all these mainstream media sources, at the least, exposes a disturbing degree of consensus, if not actual conspiracy? What if fake news is indeed fake news? So fake, in fact, that it insults the intelligence of anyone paying close attention?

If the mainstream offline media spins the same controlled, agenda-driven stories year after year, and they do, it's not hard to conclude that social media companies are trying to influence public opinion in much the same manner, in favor of a globalist progressive agenda. No national borders. Anti-racist racism. Anti-sexist sexism. Anything to combat "climate change." Gender "fluidity." Corporate socialism. And of course, that tasteless, ubiquitous stretch, "Trump is Hitler."

The Difficult Conversations That Must Be Had

Which brings us back to Lana Lokteff and her cohorts at Red Ice TV. Are they racist? Are they anti-Semitic? Are they "white nationalists?"

Lokteff claims she is neither racist nor anti-Semitic, although she acknowledges that she is white, and that she is a nationalist. But she asks why those labels are allowed to be used to stigmatize anyone critical of groups claiming to represent a particular race or religion, or to stigmatize anyone critical of an individual who belongs to a particular race or religion. This is a fair question, but it doesn't necessarily get to the heart of the matter.

To silence her critics, or at least to silence a few of the honest ones, Lokteff and others who are white and who are nationalist may want to strive to visualize an America where they win. What would the nation look like then?

It is reasonable—or it should be reasonable—to expect a nation to defend its culture, its language, and its borders, to care for its citizens, to respect its traditions. So how would people fit in who aren't white, or who aren't Christian? To accept someone as an American citizen, what constitutes an acceptable range of behaviors and beliefs? What are reasonable terms for inclusion in the American family?

This is one of the most important questions of our era: If globalism, pushed primarily by the Left, is poised to erase national and ethnic identities, then what sort of push back can preserve nations and ethnic groups in a way where the solution isn't worse than the problem? What does it mean to be a citizen of a nation? Can nationalism be inclusive without becoming meaningless? Can nationalism be compassionate, offering a better model for the evolution of "global civilization," and still be authentic nationalism? Is there a version of economic nationalism that nonetheless nurtures global prosperity?

One thing ought to be certain: Denying people like Lana Lokteff the ability to voice her observations and opinions on YouTube is a dangerous mistake. Because the concerns voiced by the globalism skeptics are based on hard facts and sound logic, no matter whether they are expressed with grace or with fury. To silence them defers a much-needed debate about globalism and its consequences, at a time when current globalist policies are becoming increasingly unsustainable.

You can't have mass immigration while at the same time expanding a welfare state. You can't have mass immigration at the same time as environmentalist laws make it nearly impossible to build the enabling housing and infrastructure to accommodate them, and instead mandate rationing and a higher cost of living.

You can't have mass immigration at the same time as the unionized public education system, dominated by leftist globalists, teaches immigrant children that they have arrived in a hostile, racist nation. You can't fundamentally change the ethnic proportions in the nation within two generations, yet demand perfectly proportional representation of all ethnic groups in every facet of American life, from wealth and income to geographic distribution to hiring, promoting, college admissions and contract awards.

All of these things are socially and economically unsustainable; all of them weaken America. To enforce them requires the soft tyranny of Pavlovian conditioning, backed up by a ruthless and pervasive police state. Small wonder that dissident glitches in the online matrix become merely rumors, caricatures, channels that don't exist; channels that never happened.

In the lengthy interview to follow, Red Ice TV's co-host and co-founder, Lana Lokteff, expresses opinions that in everyday public discourse are repressed. For most people, the opinions Lokteff expresses generate a conditioned response and are dismissed without further consideration. In reality, the issues she's confronting are extraordinarily complex and carry epic consequences. By suppressing discussion about them, and by demonizing people who bring them up, these issues, and the policies that have created them, remain unresolved.

After speaking with Lokteff, two things relating to internet censorship seem especially noteworthy:

First, whenever monopoly platforms like YouTube decide to wipe out one of their channels, they ought to be required to publicly disclose specific examples of what that channel did to get itself wiped out. Is YouTube afraid that such disclosures would reveal and expose its bias?

Second, if online censorship moves beyond just enforcing explicit violations of the First Amendment, and it has, then, as Lokteff pointed out, we risk "creating desperate people doing radical things to be heard."

Here, then, is the story of Red Ice TV, in Lana Lokteff's own words. Readers are invited to identify, if they can—and since YouTube would not—exactly where she engages in "hate speech" that is too dangerous to be permitted in public discourse. And if all her opinions are not opinions we would share, do we really want to drive these opinions underground? Was the First Amendment only designed to protect the speech with which we agree?