Lefty journalists (which are most journalists have turned against any journalists that do hold to the entire lefty woke line.
Glenn Greenwald explains:
On Wednesday, I wrote about how corporate journalists, realizing that the public’s increasing contempt for what they do is causing people to turn away in droves, are desperately inventing new tactics to maintain their stranglehold over the dissemination of information and generate captive audiences. That is why journalists have bizarrely transformed from their traditional role as leading free expression defenders into the the most vocal censorship advocates, using their platforms to demand that tech monopolies ban and silence others.
That same motive of self-preservation is driving them to equate any criticisms of their work with “harassment,” “abuse” and “violence” — so that it is not just culturally stigmatized but a banning offense, perhaps even literally criminal, to critique their journalism on the ground that any criticism of them places them “in danger.” Under this rubric they want to construct, they can malign anyone they want, ruin people’s reputations, and unite to generate hatred against their chosen targets, but nobody can even criticize them...Back in November, the media critic Stephen Miller warned: “It’s only a matter of time before the media tech hall monitors turn their attention to Substack.” And ever since, in every interview I have given about the success of Substack and every time I have written about journalist-led censorship campaigns, I have echoed that warning that they would soon turn their united guns on this platform. Miller’s prediction was prompted by a Columbia Journalism Review article entitled “The Substackerati” which claimed that Substack was structurally unfair because “most” of “the most successful people on Substack” are “white and male; several are conservative” and “have already been well-served by existing media power structures...They cannot stand the fact that journalists can break major stories and find an audience while maintaining an independent voice, critically questioning rather than obediently reciting the orthodoxies that bind them and, most of all, without playing their infantile in-group games and submitting to their hive-mind decrees. In fact, the more big stories you break while maintaining your independence from them, the more intense is the contempt they harbor for you: that explains, among other things, their willingness to watch Julian Assange (who has broken more major stories than all of them combined) be imprisoned for publishing documents.
That they are angry and upset is irrelevant. It only matters because these resentments and fears that they are losing their monopolistic power over public thought are translating into increasingly concerted and effective censorship campaigns.
As it turns out, we did not have to wait long for the initiation of the censorship campaign aimed at Substack. It has arrived...
A long-time tech reporter at BuzzFeed who was fired by that outlet in June for serial plagiarism, Ryan Broderick, wrote an article on Wednesday night warning that Substack is now dangerously providing a platform to a “cadre of writers” which, in addition to me, includes such societal menaces as “Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, Jesse Singal, and, I’d argue, Slate Star Codex writer Scott Alexander Siskind.” He darkly notes: “There are more.” This group of writers, he says, is “focusing on culture war Twitter drama about being ‘canceled’ and trans people in bathrooms and woke college students.”
Greenwald probably has a reason for not calling them lefty journalists but these are the journalists that are part of the cancel culture. (I hasten to add there have been conservative censors in the past but although they had fury, nothing like the extreme lefty fury of the present).
The modern-day mainstream left is radical and exclusively about power grabs rather than intellectual debate and that is why the cancel tool is used by them across the board.
They don't want debate. They want power and any opposition, be it non-extreme lefty journalists or businessmen and politicians who speak out against the prevailing social justice movement, are targets of cancellation by any methods immediately at the hands of lefties.
This war, fully the responsibility of the radical left. will only get more vicious. The left is terrible when it comes to understanding how society works but they are well steeped in understanding the strategy and tactics of power grabs. We are seeing this now.
The opposition to this power grab is fragmented, it is not clear if it has what it takes to defeat the attack.
If the history of Mao's China, Lenin's Russia and Hitler's National Socialist movement is any guide, there is serious trouble ahead for freedom lovers.
To stop the attack against freedom, a counterrevolution of the type never before seen would have to be launched.
-RW
Baba Ram Dass tells this great story about a particularly ruthless General that was murdering Buddhist monks in village after village. Word got out, and in anticipation of his advance, monks would flee to the mountains.
ReplyDeleteAt some point, he came to a village where all the monks fled but one. The General was furious and he sought out the insolent monk. He found the monk in his garden, approached him and said, "Do you know who I am? I could pull out my sword, run it through your belly, and not even care at all."
And the monk replied, "and don't you know who I am? I could have your sword run right through my belly, and not even care at all." And with that the General bowed and left.
Now the woke Left has not even the honor of this fictitious General, but the attitude of the courageous monk is needed. If there is to be a counterrevolution, it must come from liberty lovers who have no fear of what the lefties might do to them.
When has there never been "serious trouble" for freedom lovers?
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