The aims of leftist labeling and censoring of conservative pundits as extremists
For a while, the phenomenon of leftist censorship of the right concentrated on potential speakers at college campuses. The mechanisms were boycotts, demonstrations, disruptions, and demands that they not be allowed to speak there at all because it was too disturbing, because it was hate speech, because they were fascists and bigots, and because people would be triggered—the whole panoply of accusations from leftist activists.
Lately, de-platforming and/or de-monetizing from various social media and internet sites such as YouTube is all the rage, and it’s driven not so much by students at a particular university but by those who control the sites. In the buildup to the 2020 election,this seems more important than ever.
On [June 5], YouTube announced a sweeping ban on all content it deems “hateful” or “supremacist,” resulting in a reported “thousands” of channels being shut down. The announcement came the same day that YouTube demonetized conservative comedian Steven Crowder — one of the most popular independent content creators on the platform — after a writer for Vox complained that he had repeatedly mocked him for his identity…“YouTube has always had rules of the road, including a longstanding policy against hate speech,” the company announced Wednesday in a statement. “Today, we’re taking another step in our hate speech policy by specifically prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status.”…But conservatives have noted a pattern by YouTube, along with other dominate social media platforms, of focusing mostly on voices from the right —and often lumping in mainstream conservatives with the far-right. Among those blasting YouTube over ideological bias is outspoken conservative Dana Loesch, who declared the progressives pushing for deplatforming as “the modern day book burners.”…“YouTube’s statement on [Steven Crowder]: OK, we admit he didn’t violate our standards, but people were mad at us, so we just backfilled a rationale for demonetizing him with Orwellian doublespeak,” [Ben] Shapiro tweeted Wednesday. “This is essentially YouTube admitting that they exercised the heckler’s veto. They can’t point to how [Crowder] broke their rules, so they just made up new rules based on the fact that a bunch of people whined to them.”
Here’s what Andrew Klavan has to say about the phenomenon:
On Sunday, just as YouTube was threatening to pull down thousands of “hateful” (i.e. conservative) videos, The New York Times printed a breathless and idiotic piece supposedly charting a YouTube viewer’s descent into right-wing radicalism…This suspiciously timed piece — clearly designed to give cover to YouTube’s censorship plan — featured a collage of faces of right-wing radicals. These included such raving hate-filled alt-right evil-doers as mild-mannered gay centrist Dave Rubin and of course Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro — whom various left-wing outlets have repeatedly identified as the one and only orthodox Jewish Nazi in all the universes!But while branding Dave and Ben alt-right may be absurd, it’s not unintentional. It is part of a strategy. 1. Convince people that hate speech should be silenced. 2. Define hate speech as alt-right. 3. Label powerful mainstream conservatives “alt-right.” 4. Silence powerful mainstream conservatives……[A]s 2020 approaches and Trump continues to expose our corrupt press and reach the people, panic is beginning to set in and the next phase of Operation Don’t Speak is in play: a massive and collusive move to define mainstream right-wing speech as hateful and shut it down.
There’s another point that is a bit more subtle. Once a news outlet or a periodical or a pundit gets labeled as extreme right-wing or alt-right, and therefore (fill in the blanks) a purveyor of hate speech, a racist, a bigot, a religious zealot, a wild and crazy conspiracy theorist, etc., then even if that person isn’t actually blocked by the site, the hope is that people will react to the labeling itself by shunning that person’s work.
So one of the goals isn’t just actual blocking by the sites, but a de facto censorship by the individual consumer, in which people refuse to listen or read the work of a certain person because it’s been labeled extreme and hateful. Why waste time reading the work of someone bigoted or crazy or stupid? Don’t you have better things to do with your time?
That way it’s easy to keep the maximum number of people insulated and protected from any ideas on the right that are factually and logically correct and might even persuade a person to change a long-held idea—or, in some cases (such as that of left-to-right political changers) to change one’s mind politically in a more fundamental way. That’s why it’s even more important to label the more moderate, thoughtful conservatives as extreme and offensive than the ones who actually areextreme and offensive, because an open-minded reader or listener will probably be able to find out and decide on his/her own which pundits and writers really are extreme and offensive, and which ones are making good points. It’s that latter group the left and the MSM is most afraid of—the ones who could change the opinions of a lot of people, if they were to be given a forum and listened to with an open mind.
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