Washington Examiner investigative reporter Gabe Kaminsky has blown the lid off a stealth operation in which supposedly “nonpartisan” left-wing organizations are blacklisting conservative news outlets. The idea is to persuade advertisers to shun them. Then, offending right-wingers must either knuckle under and parrot fashionable orthodoxies or be forced out of business.
The false pretext for this damaging, malicious, and secret attack is that conservative outlets, including the Washington Examiner, spread “disinformation.” An example of what the leftist groups, such as the Global Disinformation Index, object to is a perfectly acceptable opinion article execrating the Left’s obsession with sex and gender, in which author Quin Hillyer challenges many of its assumptions and assertions. Read it for yourself and decide if the opinions should not be allowed in a free society.
Suppression of unfashionable opinion is arrogant and dangerous, especially in America, which enshrines free speech as its primary foundational value. The arrogance and danger are compounded by the refusal of GDI and other censoring organizations, such as DoubleVerify and IAS, to accept challenges and explain their case. Instead, they act as judge and executioner, refusing to let the accused rebut their accusations.
America’s ideological and media landscape has become a place of suppression. Leftists do not see differences of opinion as needing to be debated, for logical argument triumphs over nonsense, and our postmodern Marxist masters would thus enjoy limited success. So, they prefer not to explain or argue and instead do what they can to silence antagonists and inflict financial and social pain on them.
This reminds me of a comment the late Sir Roger Scruton made to me in an interview a few years ago. He said that to the Left, conservatism “isn’t actually a possible position — because it is not wrong, it is evil.” That is, opinions that don't line up with the Left are regarded as beyond the pale of polite discussion, so revolting and malicious that they must be extirpated rather than considered honestly and defeated in argument.
On a wide range of subjects, disagreement is now unacceptable. The opinions of those on one side of the spectrum — I am confident they account for more than half the population — are treated as ultra vires.
Thus, one gets headlines such as this one from the Associated Press: “Montana bill would let students misgender classmates.” Associated Press reporting, which has become a corrupt servant of the Left where once it provided news, uses the loaded word “misgender” as though it were a fact. It is, however, nothing more than a derogatory label. The language of this headline asserts that saying a transgender woman is a man is incontrovertibly wrong — that’s what the suffix “mis” means. But it isn’t. Indeed, all persuasive evidence and traditional human understanding assert that it is right.
The revolution that now disallows differences of opinion brought us “fact-checking” organizations that broke out like a nasty rash some 15 years ago. It is possible for these useless and tendentious bodies to thrive only in an epoch that treats unorthodox, traditional, unfashionable, and logical opinion as simply wrong or evil.