CHANGING MY TUNE

         It’s time to admit I was wrong. 

         From the beginning of Twitter in 2006, I was a complete fan and devotee of social media.  I didn’t use most of them, but I believed the creation of Facebook (2006), Instagram (2010), MySpace (2003), and others were a wonderful development in the spread of free speech and open expression.  I cherished the cacophony of voices because almost anybody in the world could say whatever they wanted and have it broadcast around the planet, without the intervention of governments and censors and other poopheads. 

 

         I didn’t care that much of it was lies or propaganda or the rantings of crazy people.  I could handle that.  In a sense, that is part of the truth also.  Since I haven’t awarded unthinking belief to anything I have heard on radio or TV or the internet for decades, I was never going to fall into a false reality constructed by a political party or the CIA or the climate-changers or Obama or Rush Limbaugh or the WEF or NBC or Anthony Fauci or Anderson Cooper or anybody else.  I don’t care what any individual tells me.  All I want is sources, and social media provided millions of them.  If you have enough sources and they can speak freely, you can learn the truth, and I generally do.  I guess it’s ironic, but if you don’t believe anything you are told, then ultimately, the truth will emerge. 

 

         And that’s what I loved about social media, and Twitter in particular.  It was especially useful for following live events like the terrorist attack on the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, because you would get tiny pieces of the story from cops and firemen and worried parents and injured people and even the bad guys and their sympathizers.  The official story, of course, gets all cleaned up and you don’t see it until the next day, but the real human story was being told by hundreds of people in a line or two of text.  This sort of information had never existed before, and I was fascinated by it. 

 

         Then I read the Coleman Hughes book “The End of Race Politics.”  (Highly recommended.)  In it, Hughes discusses “neoracists” like Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Nikole Hannah-Jones and others who use social media to indoctrinate those who might be susceptible to their message. 

 

         The centerpiece of his theory is polling on Americans’ feelings about race relations. Until 2013, well over two thirds of Americans believed race relations were good, and improving.  Then, the bottom fell out.  By 2015, the percentage of Americans believing race relations were good had fallen below 50% and has continued to fall.  He attributes this to the emergence of a critical mass of people with video-enabled smartphones and social media, which increased the speed at which “news” (i.e., lies), could spread around the country. 

 

         The point Hughes makes is that people whose political success depends on their ability to create rage now have a built-in advantage, and they use it routinely.  When a story taps into emotional triggers (e.g., white cop/black perp, violence, etc.), it spreads immediately to hundreds of millions, but the more-nuanced reality-based version may take months to appear, by which time most of the original audience have no interest in what really happened. 

 

         The example he uses is the Michael Brown story from Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.  The “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” version of this tale was embraced instantly by neoracists and progressives and BLM supporters, and it still is.  It took months for the Eric Holder Justice Department report to appear, and for some of us to learn Brown didn’t have his hands up, he punched the cop, he tried to steal the cop’s gun, and that the cop had no alternative but to shoot him.  But that report made little difference.  Today, years later, “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” is still chanted regularly at BLM and other race-activist demonstrations. 

 

         Another example, perhaps even a better one, is the story of Donald Trump’s comments after the Charlottesville clash of white supremacists and antifa demonstrators in 2017.  The cause of the controversy was the city’s decision to take down a statue of Robert E. Lee.  Concerning the issue of the statue, Trump said, “…[Y]ou also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” 

 

         This was reported around the world on social media and TV and newspapers as Donald Trump stating that the white supremacists were among the “very fine people,” even though he had already repeatedly condemned them.  Though the transcript of his press conference was available, almost no one reported what he had actually said, which was that there were “fine people” who wanted to take the statue down and “fine people” who thought it should stay up.  To this day, despite the efforts of many journalists and commentators to correct the story, most Americans (including every Trump-hater), believe the original falsehood. 

 

         In other words, my dream of the internet and social media as a forum for truth and free speech has been dashed by the facts of life.  The mob is still the mob, and the mob is not searching for truth.  It’s usually seeking to have its basest and most vicious beliefs validated: skin color matters; Jews are evil; the “experts” have our best interests at heart; scientists have no biases; capitalism makes us poor; the government just wants to help.  I can still use Twitter and other sites as resources in my search for the truth, but I must accept that most people have no interest in doing that.  

 

Another phenomenon has occurred that is even more troubling and dangerous.  In 2016, two events changed the view of Western governments toward the internet and social media.  These were, in June, the Brexit vote in the UK, and in November, the election of Donald Trump in the U.S.  These events shocked the globalists, the leftwing NGOs, and the buried elitist bureaucracies in the U.S., European governments, and the E.U.  It was at this point that the apparatus for censorship of social media began to be built.

 

Government censorship has focused primarily on two topics: COVID-19 and the 2020 presidential election, and any dissent to the official government narrative on these topics has been ruthlessly suppressed on-line---this is the subject of the case Missouri v. Biden, currently in the US Supreme Court. * 

 

So I was wrong.  (That was the point of this article---remember?)  The internet is not the boon to free speech I had hoped it was.  In fact, the totalitarians and censors are taking it over.  They get to talk and the rest of us don’t.  We just spout “misinformation,” you see, so they must shut us up.

 

Still, it’s not over.  Elon Musk seems to have a genuine commitment to free speech, though he is under attack by governments around the world.  But even if his efforts are shut down---well, there will be alternatives.  It may be more difficult to find the truth these days but it’s not impossible.  And if the situation gets even worse, we will still be able to talk to our friends or post our diatribes on telephone poles.

 

I hope.    

 

 

 

Copyright2024MichaelKubacki

 

 

*The process has been described in detail by Mike Benz in interviews, podcasts, and at 

foundationforfreedomonline.com, the organization he leads.