The {Censored} of {Censored}

How Media Oligarchs Manipulate Politics

We live in a democracy, and one of the core tenets of democracy is that politicians are supposed to represent the will of the people. If the people want more homeless shelters, for example, they elect somebody who promises to build homeless shelters, and presumably when they are elected those homeless shelters get built. (The inability of many politicians to keep their promises is a topic for a separate thread - right now, we are just talking about the “platonic ideal” version of politics.) If the people want lower taxes and fewer social services, they elect somebody who promises those things. Or if they want more social services and higher taxes, they elect somebody who promises those things instead.

So far, so good. This seems like a reasonable summary of the democratic process. But I do notice one flaw in this formulation: what if people want to elect a politician to hurt somebody? There doesn’t currently seem to be a very good method of translating the will of the people into direct action when it comes to making sure bad people get what’s coming to them.

For example, I believe a lot of people hate Cancel Culture, to the point where I could probably run a reasonably successful political campaign simply by promising to hurt certain people involved in Cancel Culture. I might say “Hey, you know Ibram X Kendi? I think that guy is a racist and he deserves to be punched.” Or “You know Patrice Cullors? The woman who started BLM? I think she’s a con artist and a grifter and she ought to be arrested for embezzling money.”

The trouble is that in our modern world, dominated by social media which is run by unaccountable CEOs, we aren’t allowed to appeal to people’s negative emotions so directly. Any post you made about punching Ibram X Kendi or arresting Patrice Cullors would very quickly be taken down for “racism” or “hate speech.” This means that if you want to harvest those sweet votes from all the voters who hate those two people and want their elected officials to punish their behavior, you have to dogwhistle that you will hurt them in a very roundabout way. For example, a political candidate trying to signal that they are going to hurt Ibram X Kendi or Patrice Cullors might say “I think that BLM is a scam, and that some black demagogues are race-baiting grifters who are simply trying to exploit white guilt for their own personal enrichment.”

The problem with this approach is that it is not very specific, so there is often a disconnect between what the politician is signalling and how voters interpret it. For example, I dislike Ibram X Kendi and Patrice Cullors, and if I were to be elected president, I would hurt those people. But I could never say that directly on most social media networks because my comment would undoubtedly be removed for “hate speech”, and if I used a dogwhistle like the one above in my political campaign, it would be vague enough that I would also seem to be targeting a lot of people in the black community whom I don’t intend to target. For example, I support Michael Render (aka the rapper known as Killer Mike) for his success at teaching advanced financial literacy to the black community. But like all people, I have minor points of disagreement with him, and I’m mature enough not to let those minor points of disagreement impact my overall impression of the gentleman. Michael Render has in the past supported BLM, so obviously I disagree with him on some minor aspects of his political views, even though overall I think we would agree on more things than we disagree on. Unfortunately, if I was running for office and used the anti-BLM dogwhistle described above, some voters would assume I was targeting people like Michael Render instead of Patrice Cullors, and I would be unfairly branded as a racist.

That’s the problem with dogwhistles: they’re very imprecise. Because you’re not allowed to communicate your message directly and clearly, a lot of your message frequently ends up getting mistranslated or misinterpreted. So why force people into using dogwhistles in the first place? Why do social media CEOs not just let our politicians publicly say “Person X is bad, and if you elect me, I will hurt them”? It seems to me like this kind of clarity would be very beneficial for aligning the expectations of voters with the promises of politicians. And in fact, people *are* allowed to say this kind of thing all the time… as long as they choose the right targets. I frequently hear lots of left-wing politicians basically saying flat-out that J.K. Rowling or Elon Musk are bad people and that these politicians will find ways to punish them if they get elected into office. Why is it socially acceptable to call for J.K. Rowling or Elon Musk to be targeted for financial and political destruction, but not Patrice Cullors or Ibram X Kendi?

I’ll avoid mentioning the obvious racial component, because contrary to what our elites would have you believe, not everything in our country is about race. Instead, I think it is about narrative. The people who control social media have a specific agenda that they want to push. If your words further their agenda, they will allow you to speak very plainly and directly, even if you are calling for targeted violence against a person or group. However, if your words would hinder their agenda, they will censor your speech, forcing you to resort to dogwhistles in order to convey your agenda to your target audience. These dogwhistles make it far more likely that your message will be miscommunicated, because you are unable to be highly specific about whom you want to hurt and why. This lack of specificity makes it easier for our elites to run a smear campaign and depict you as a bigot, because when you are trying to dogwhistle that you plan to hurt evil people like Ibram X Kendi, a lot of people will mistakenly think that you are talking about hurting good people like Michael Render. Do you understand what I’m saying? By censoring certain political views and forcing people with those viewpoints to speak in covert dogwhistles that can be easily misinterpreted, it becomes far easier for our evil oligarchs to perform a smear campaign against the people who oppose them and misrepresent those people’s viewpoints.

This is a huge problem for society, because the vast majority of society’s problems are caused by a handful of bad people in positions of power, and the solution to society’s problems is for those bad people to get badly hurt until they change their antisocial behaviors. As I wrote in an earlier post, hate is not necessarily something that we should feel embarrassed or guilty about: on the contrary, it is actually quite healthy and beneficial to hate people whose existence or behavior is at odds with your best interests. In fact, I would go so far as to say hate can be a highly adaptive emotion that human beings evolved specifically to help eliminate bad people from our societies. It’s good to hate bad people because frankly they’re terrible human beings who make life worse for everybody else in society, and the reason we evolved the emotion of hate in the first place is to help improve society by targeting social punishment against the people who deserve it.

This leads to an interesting question. Why are so many of the wealthy elites who control social media so frightened and alarmed that some politicians in our society might state the obvious: that bad people exist in our society, and that part of the role of an elected representative is to hurt those people until they make better choices? Could it be that these wealthy elites are bad people, and they are simply trying to prevent any politicians from openly acknowledging this fact and targeting them for punishment? And why do these wealthy elites who control the media often allow open calls for violence and punishment against some groups, but not other groups? Could there possibly be some hidden agenda here?

I will leave that question as a exercise for the reader to contemplate themselves. My main point in writing this article is simply to explain why I’m such a firm believer in free speech and why I deeply oppose Cancel Culture and social media censorship. Every mature grown-up acknowledges that bad people exist and need to be punished, and the most important conversation that society needs to have at this point in time is whom those bad people are, and what needs to be done about them. This is a very important conversation that needs to take place at both the national and global level, and I don’t believe that wealthy oligarchs who control our media ought to be allowed to artificially manipulate this discourse and exclude themselves from the list of people who might deserve punishment.