Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two part series based on an exclusive interview on The Uprising Podcast with Brent Bozell, Founder and President of the famed Media Research Center. In the first part, he discussed media bias gone wild. In this part, he warns of the growing internet censorship of conservative voices.
During the long-shot presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, there was always a seemingly peripheral question lurking in the background: if Trump somehow wins, how will the left react? Most conservatives rightly figured the left would be just as shaken about it as Trump voters would be about a Hillary Clinton victory. But few could have figured on the stone-cold determination of not just the leftist political class, but the establishment media, to destroy Trump by any means available, for any reason, no reason or invented reasons – anything to advance their borderline pathological hatred of the man.
But the searing hatred of the 45th President that runs through the bloodstream of the iron triangle – the political bureaucracy, media elites, and education hierarchy – is no longer limited to leftist politicians, or the familiar media vessels like The New York Times, Washington Post, and TV networks, or university campuses. It has now spread like a virus to the titans of social media, who have reacted to the Trump presidency by taking unprecedented – and frightening – steps to silence conservatives.
In an exclusive interview on The Uprising Podcast, the great Brent Bozell, Founder and President of the famed Media Research Center, spoke of the growing danger posed by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and their fellow social media mavens.
Tim: Brent, you and the Media Research Center are now beginning a new initiative to take on what you and many others, I might add, consider a clear and present danger in social media, the censorship of conservative voices. Describe the nature of the problem for us.
Brent: We don’t know the full nature of the problem yet. What we do know is that increasingly conservatives are stating that, across the spectrum of social media outlets they are starting to get banned. Now, we don’t know, sometimes, a conservative will say that, and you look into it, and they really don’t understand how the business model works. Sometimes, they really don’t have a good product.
Dennis Prager (left) and Arnold Schwarzenegger
But there are documented examples of this happening. The most blatant one being Dennis Prager and Prager University. He delivers these four and five minute videos, highly intellectual, highly intelligent. These are lectures that could be given at Harvard. He’s been banned by Google, and no one can quite understand why except some left wing group deemed him somehow a hate group for having done this. It’s starting to percolate in YouTube. You’re starting to see it on Twitter. You’re starting to see it on Facebook.
What is emerging Tim, is a form of censorship unlike the world has ever seen. Think about this. These are global media enterprises, and it’s only a handful that control the vast swath of social media that billions of people on it. Now, they are starting to make a determination of what is and what isn’t acceptable speech, and who is allowed to speak. When you start banning conservatives for doing things like supporting traditional marriage, you have got the kind of fascistic control of the media that the Nazis would love to have had, that the Soviets would have loved to have had. We have never in world history seen something like that. That’s how serious, how potentially serious the problem is. I do think it’s a five alarm fire for conservatives. I do think that it needs to be investigated very thoroughly before we reach conclusions on this, but the early evidence is cause for great concern.
Tim: Well, you now cite the Southern Poverty Law Center as largely responsible for the problem by labeling mainstream conservative organizations as hate groups, which then provides the pretext for these various leftist platforms like, Google and Facebook, to shut down conservative speech. Does the Southern Poverty Law Center really carry that much weight?
Brent: They really do. The Southern Poverty Law Center is one of those darling media organizations. The ACLU is another darling media organization. So many environmental groups are darling media organizations, which is to say, they can do no wrong. You’ll never see them labeled as a liberal group. Think about that for a second. Every conservative group gets labeled as a conservative, as almost like a warning label. I’m fine with that. I think we should be, but in equal measure this should apply to the Democrats and to the liberals, but never does. These are seen as objective organizations. Another one is Planned Parenthood. The Southern Poverty Law Center is so powerful, it has 800 million dollars in reserve funds. 800 million. It is a 64-ton gorilla. It has determined that it is going to decide who is and who isn’t a hate group. If you’re Christian, you’re a hate group. I mean, they really are the worst form of bigots. And they’re dangerous too.
Look, there was the gay activist, what three years ago who looked at their map, their hate group map in Washington DC, and went to the Family Research Council with a bag of Chick-fil-A sandwiches, and shot the security guard, and grievously wounded him. The security guard was able to stop him. This man had a bag of sandwiches. His intention was to shoot one employee after another, kill them, and place a sandwich next to them. This is how dangerous the far left has become. And, by the way, did you see a story on that? Have you seen the networks cover that? Just imagine. Just imagine if somebody from the Family Research Council had a map about left wing hate groups who attack traditional marriage, and a supporter took a gun and went to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and shot the security guard with the intention of shooting as many staff people as he could. Do you think it would be in the news?
Tim: Well, it’s sort of like saying, what if George W. Bush had used the power of the most powerful federal agencies to surveil John Kerry in 2004, or Barack Obama in 2008. I mean, it would have been only thing we heard about. It would have been all over the news. It would have been on 100% all the time, and yet, when we have almost unambiguous evidence that Barack Obama engaged in it, there’s a conspiracy of silence. Now, you’ve said, left unchecked that these tech and social media companies have the power to literally make the conservative movement cease to exist online. But given the explosion of free market internet sites, like your own CNS News, and our own libertynation.com, why is that not enough to counter the effects of social media censorship?
Brent: Well, on the one hand you can say that, look, if you believe in the free market system, and you create a market demand for an alternative, an alternative will appear. I suppose that’s right in theory.
In practice, however, you are talking about monster organizations that have the ability to gobble everything in sight, just think of the Miss Pac-man, Pac-man game. Facebook, Google, YouTube, Amazon, all of them, I mean, they are multi, multi, billion-dollar operations. Good luck competing with them. Good luck doing a startup with Facebook the size it is now. In fact, I think there needs to be some conversations and there needs to be some discussion about whether these companies are just too big, and whether we need some antitrust legislation. I don’t know that one can be competitive in this space anymore. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d like to know how it’s going to happen.
