Francis Menton
manhattancontrarian.com
About a year ago I had a series of posts covering some of the more audacious deplatformings and cancelations then occurring in the realms of progressive orthodoxy enforcement. Examples of prominent victims of such conduct cited in my posts of February 22, 2021 and March 4, 2021 included: The Epoch Times (“demonetized” by Google, apparently as a result of relentless criticism of the Chinese Communist Party), Project Veritas (a constant irritant to the Left, shut out by Twitter), Catholic World Report (locked out by Twitter after calling President Biden’s nominee for Assistant Secretary of HHS “a biological man identifying as a transgender woman”), Ryan Anderson (politically incorrect book on transgender issues, “When Harry Became Sally,” suddenly removed from sale at Amazon without explanation), and multiple others. The takeaway was that the Big Tech censors had lost all sense of constraint, and had decided to see how far they could push the envelope to remove mainstream conservative thought from the public square.
Lack of further posts from myself on this subject should not be taken as an indication that the situation has improved. Indeed, if anything it has gotten worse. However, in recent days there has come some reason to hope that new outlets may provide a way around the Big Tech roadblocks.
First, a small round-up of recent deplatformings and cancelations of note:
Heroes of Liberty. On January 3 the New York Post published a column by Bethany Mandel reporting that, just before Christmas, Facebook had disabled advertising for this start-up publisher of children’s books. Mandel indicates that she is one of the people behind the Heroes of Liberty project. Among the books published by Heroes of Liberty were children’s biographies of Ronald Reagan, Thomas Sowell, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Mandel reports that the only notice received by the publisher was a “curt e-mail message.” The e-mail states that “This ad account, its ads and some of its advertising assets are disabled because it didn’t comply with our policy on Low Quality or Disruptive Content.” Heroes of Liberty took an “appeal,” after which it was informed that the exclusion was “final and permanent.” Here is the content of that e-mail: “After a final review of this ad account, we confirmed it didn’t comply with our Advertising Policies or other standards,” the message reads. “You can no longer advertise with this ad account and its ads and assets will remain disabled. This is our final decision.”
There is some good news to report on this one: After a substantial blow-back, resulting from the New York Post and other reporting, on January 4 Facebook walked back and re-instated the Heroes of Liberty account. According to Fox News here, a Facebook spokesperson named Drew Pusateri stated that the previous exclusion of Heroes of Liberty was “in error.” Just an honest mistake! Do you believe them?
Robert Malone/Joe Rogan. Robert Malone is a doctor who claims to be an inventor of the mRNA technology that underlies the Covid-19 vaccines. He is also an opponent of mandates for the vaccines (although he is vaccinated himself). And he also, at least until recently, has had a substantial presence on Twitter, with over 500,000 followers. Joe Rogan is a podcaster who apparently has the single most popular podcast in the country, with approximately 11 million average daily listeners/viewers in Q3 2021. (This compares with the very highest-rated cable news show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, which had 3.24 million average daily viewers during the same period, and with CNN’s primetime average of 0.82 million viewers.).
On New Year’s Eve, Rogan posted a three-hour-plus podcast interview with Malone. In the interview, Malone, among other things, compared the U.S. response to Covid to what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. For a full run-down on the interview, including a link to the full video version, check out the reporting in the Daily Mail. Here is one of the more “controversial” quotes:
It was from, basically, European intellectual inquiry into what the heck happened in Germany in the 20s and 30s. Very intelligent, highly educated population, and they went barking mad. And how did that happen? The answer is mass formation psychosis.
YouTube has removed the video of the Rogan/Malone interview. Twitter suspended Malone’s account permanently.
This particular story may also have a happy ending. I’ll discuss at the end of the post.
Frances Widdowson. You probably haven’t heard of this woman, who was a professor at a Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. But she is a political scientist who is a notable dissenter from left-wing orthodoxy on issues of indigenous affairs in Canada. Among her books are Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation (2008), and Separate But Unequal: How Parallelist Ideology Conceals Indigenous Dependency (2019). But it seems that Widdowson’s most unforgivable crime was contesting the assertion that there was something nefarious about a number of unmarked graves of Indian children that were discovered in Kamloops, British Columbia, since at the time poor children of all races with no family to claim them were buried in unmarked graves. Challenging the orthodoxy earned Widdowson the charge of “genocide denier.”
Widdowson was fired from her job at MRU a few days before Christmas. At Minding the Campus, Bruce Gilley has a long post on December 29, with a history of the affair. Let’s say that Gilley pulls no punches. The title of his post is “Disrobing the Aboriginal Stalinists on a Canadian Campus.” Excerpt:
Mount Royal University was serious in training its many guns on any dissenters. . . . Powerful forces of Woke ideology across Canada’s left-liberal establishment were apoplectic about Professor Widdowson’s truth-seeking scholarship. For all these deeply entrenched groups in the Canadian mainstream, it is far better for Widdowson to be purged, all in the interests of the Party.
Widdowson is just the latest in what is now a very long list of cancellations in academia. At the National Association of Scholars, a guy named David Acevedo has been compiling a list of these. The latest version of Acevedo’s list, dated December 14, contains 207 examples of academic cancellations. Looks like Widdowson will make 208.
Returning to the Rogan/Malone affair, it appears that after the Google and Twitter actions, Rogan set himself up on a new platform called GETTR, and some 500,000 of his followers immediately followed him there. Admittedly the 500,000 are just a small part of Rogan’s 11 million average daily viewers; and apparently he has not abandoned YouTube, at least for now. But as the Big Tech giants continue to push the envelope to see how far they can get in suppressing conservative dissent, at some point they could start to lose market share very quickly.