The left likes to whine about alleged “book bans,” which are no more than decisions by wise educators and librarians to keep pornographic and sexually explicit materials out of the hands of minors. In their twisted world, kids should have access to anything and everything they demand. No child should be shielded from materials that could harm their development or pervert their innocent minds. Their ideas about “censorship” are bizarre, to say the least, and often seem more focused on scoring political points and virtue-signaling than protecting children.
Their caterwauling and hyperbole aside, there is a real censorship problem in America, one that you won’t hear about on the evening news or in legacy newspapers. It’s the dirty little secret of the modern internet age: Increasingly, advertisers are deciding which content you are allowed to read, listen to, and discuss. One big-tech company, whose name rhymes with Schmoogle, has been especially pernicious in preventing you from seeing certain topics discussed online. Their main targets? Climate change, transgenderism, and COVID. Pretty much any time we write anything suggesting that the climate-change panic might be just a wee bit overblown, the article is flagged and demonetized for “unreliable and harmful claims,” even though we cite scientists and quote reliable sources.
One recent example is this article from senior columnist Stephen Kruiser, who wrote:
Of all the lies the Democrats tell themselves, the “party of science” nonsense ranks second only to “the government always knows best.”
We’ll get to how wrong they were about all things COVID in a moment. Even before that, Democrats had essentially abandoned biology which, I just checked, is still a science. According to them, human embryos aren’t really human, there are 42,000,000 genders, and now men can get pregnant. That’s not merely denying science, that’s rejecting it altogether.
Then there’s the COVID mess. The leftist elites lied about who was truly at risk and then what the vaccine could and could not do. They also rejected the lack of science behind almost all of the preventative measures. The hive mind faithful lapped it all up, naturally.
They’ve been proven wrong about everything they spent three years censoring us science-denying nutjobs for but, bless their incurious little hearts, they keep pretending that none of it has happened.
Kruiser pushed back on New York Times propagandist Paul Krugman, who wrote that “climate denial has also become a front in the culture wars, with right-wingers rejecting the science in part because they dislike science in general and opposing action against emissions out of visceral opposition to anything liberals support.”
Kruiser responded, “Because Krugman is a Coastal Bubble simpleton who writes for Coastal Bubble simpletons, he uses phrases like ‘climate denial,’ which is idiotic. No one denies that climate exists. Those of us who he calls deniers not only freely admit that it does exist, but we also know that it changes and that there isn’t much we can do about it. What right-wingers are viscerally opposed to is the Democrats using climate change hysteria to justify the repeated abuse of American taxpayers.”
As the editor of this site, I have a decision to make any time Kruiser or anyone else writes on a topic that’s likely to get us demonetized: spike the article because I know it will likely be demonetized, or publish it and take the financial hit. My policy is to only spike articles that violate our own editorial policies—which almost never happens. But it’s a frustrating problem. The left thinks they can control the narrative by wearing us down and destroying our ability to profit from articles that go against The Narrative.
It would be easy enough for me to tell our writers to just stop writing articles that get us in trouble with Big Tech. Just stick to anodyne topics that are unlikely to provoke the left and increase our profitability. We could give everyone a raise, hire more writers, maybe even get some new laptops. No doubt more than a handful of conservative sites have decided to go this route. Others have just quietly gone out of business as the result of being demonetized or banned from social media.
But self-censorship is not the answer. At PJ Media, we believe in more speech, not less. We are in an existential fight for the soul of America, and we cannot back down.
And now I’ve got a favor to ask: Would you thoughtfully consider supporting our work here at PJ Media so we can continue to bring you stories on topics you and so many other patriotic conservatives care about? Stories that the Powers That Be do not want you to read. Stories that expose the government’s lies and disinformation. Stories that will help you make informed decisions about your healthcare, about how you live your life and parent your kids. With our Summer Sale, you can now save 50% on an annual VIP membership using the promo code SAVEAMERICA. That takes the price down to around $0.07/day for a VIP membership and $0.12/day for VIP Gold.
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