Don’t Wait Until They Come for You

The problem may be that we understand and applaud those ideas and ideals but do not support the intellectuals and institutions fighting for them.

Have you considered that the American ideas and ideals that for two centuries ignited the hope of people everywhere, and forces of freedom, are daily under attack—and losing ground? The problem may be that we understand and applaud those ideas and ideals but do not support the intellectuals and institutions fighting for them. We do not support them actively, daily, with the effort and money warranted by their importance to us. Some of us are actively engaged, but essentially as spectators and occasional commentators.

There was a pivotal moment in time when the ideas of Ayn Rand became a force. Her novel, The Fountainhead, supported by an editor who risked his job to get it published, was on the market. Not much was happening—and for long enough, so that a typical publisher would write off the book. But, Ayn Rand tells us that then sales began to pick up. Not because of renewed advertising or publicity, which had long ceased. But because individual readers, clusters of readers, erupted here and there with the force of accumulated enthusiasm, spreading the word, forcing The Fountainhead into public notice.

Readers who made those decisions—recommending books to their friends, acting within their own sphere of influence, made The Fountainhead a modern classic. That ensured that when Atlas Shrugged finally was a finished manuscript, there was a competition for it among America’s top publishers. And that competition included guaranteeing investments in promotion. It was a foregone conclusion that Atlas Shrugged would get strong marketing—despite a cultural atmosphere inimical to it (as proved by the reviews of literary critics)—because of individuals who one by one acted to make The Fountainhead a success.

That power and influence today is attributed to social media like Facebook and Twitter. Individuals are empowered to reach others with their opinions without being caught and stopped in the multiple “filters” of the mainstream media. Whatever the actual power of individual opinion on social media, the historic and dominant mainstream media such as the New York Times, CNN, and the Atlantic were driven to rage and hysteria after the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Their contention was that untrammeled social media and “alt-right” media (e.g., Breitbart News, Fox News) enabled “fake news” to offset the “responsible,” “professional” mainstream media. And since then, we have seen what massive pressure has forced social media out of their role as “platforms” for individual opinion and into a role as edited, filtered, “responsible” publications (violating the legal terms of their mandate as neutral “platforms” for all individual opinion).” People migrated to newer platforms like MeWe and Parler.

Trump is considering creating a new social media platform. The understandable outrage of some 75 million Trump voters guarantees a powerful liftoff for the platform.

Breitbart News—now among the most objective, fact-based, balanced sources of news and opinion in America—reported today that former president Trump is considering creating a new social media platform. The wealth the Trump enterprises have earned means that the new company will become an overnight competitor with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others. The Trump reputation, and the understandable outrage of some 75 million Trump voters in 2020, guarantee a powerful liftoff for the platform. At the outset of the 2016 Trump candidacy, he and his advisors perceived that the country’s media, with few exceptions, were campaigning for Democrats, that they never would convey Trump’s words and ideas to the U.S. electorate. He ramped up his Twitter account with amazing speed and skill to bypass the media, reach voters directly, and react to media attacks instantly—not chasing media stories a day late with White House press releases interpreted by the mainstream media.

The proposal to launch a new Trump enterprise in social media is typical of Trump’s refusal to accept defeat. And it is typical of his counterattacks against the weakness of his opponents: the monopoly enjoyed by the traditional media and the massive inertia of habit that sustains them.

Another New York Times Purge

Almost daily, we get reports of purges, ideological cleansing, by our leading media. On the same day that the Trump organization announced the possibility of a new social media platform, a report came from the New York Times. After 45 years at the Times, a reporter, Donald McNeil was forced to resign in disgrace for using the “N-word” in 2019. McNeil always had been a “liberal; but the Times is no longer liberal. McNeil made his resignation letter public, explaining his mistake:

I was asked by a student whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she made as a 12-year-old in which she used a racial slur.

To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself.

I should not have done that. Originally, I thought the context in which I used the word could be defended. I now realize that it cannot.

And so, McNeil’s 45-year career at the Times is over. He used a racial slur in a clarifying context. It does not matter. He is finished.

Who makes this happen at the Times? Who destroys a 45-year veteran and intimidates all his colleagues, and the Times editors, into silence? John Nolte explains:

He was hounded out by … his own colleague, the hideous Nikole Hannah-Jones, the twisted and dishonest mind behind the debunked 1619 Project, who, according to the Daily Mail, refused to accept an apology or the fact he had already been (as we reported here) reprimanded, and threatened to launch her own investigation into him.

Yes, I agree, “hideous.” But Hannah-Jones and those who share her postmodernist ideology of “identity politics” are the new “establishment” in the mainstream media. Hannah-Jones conceived and coordinated the Times “1619” project, a proposal that the birth of America be dated not to the American Revolution, the U.S. Constitution, but to the year when African slaves first were brought to America. That is, the true birth and soul of America, the real key to our history, is slavery. This woman now wields the power at the Times to declare “guilty” any staff member who trespasses her view of the politically correct. Nor is this by any means the first of the “old-time” reporters shamed, forced, driven out of the Times by the postmodernist invasion.

It is laughable that mainstream media, which for decades saw “McCarthyism” everywhere on the “right,” never makes the connection with today’s persecutions and smears in the name of the politically correct left.

“Little More than White Identity Politics”

The cult of political correctness is an offspring of “postmodernism.”

The cult of political correctness is an offspring of “postmodernism.” And postmodernism stems from the “anti-Enlightenment”—the reaction against the Enlightenment—that began in Germany in the late eighteenth century. On the same day as the Trump social media proposal and Times story came this headline: “Enlightenment was ‘Little More Than White Identity Politics,’ ‘Racist Knowledge.’”

Britain’s inaugural professor of Black studies, Professor Kehinde Andrews at Birmingham City University, explains “The enlightenment was little more than White identity politics, yet its racist knowledge still underpins university education.” (Andrews earlier achieved notoriety by arguing that the British Empire did far more harm to the world, far longer, than Nazi Germany. And by the way, “Rule Britannia” is “racist propaganda.”)

The epitome of “Enlightenment” philosophy, for Prof. Kehinde, is the eighteenth-century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. It is true the history of philosophy rates Kant as one of the few “Enlightenment” philosophers in a nation and philosophical tradition identified entirely with the “anti-Enlightenment.” Kant was associated with the Enlightenment because he uses “reason” in the title of his major works and claims to “save” reason. But all his prominent students and successors were anti-reason, anti-individualism, and pro-statism—tradition that led in Germany to both National Socialism and communistic socialism.

For Prof. Andrews, the proof is economic: “It is blindingly obvious that the biggest problem for global inequality is racial: you can map poverty and race, and there’s a complete correlation. The white places are the ones with the highest GDP per capita. Africa has the lowest, and there is a hierarchy in between. This is the image of white supremacy from the Enlightenment.”

History dates the end of the Enlightenment at 1789 (the beginning of the Napoleonic wars). If, more than two centuries after the end of the Enlightenment, the ideas of Kant keep Black Africa at the nadir of world economic achievement, the reason is that Kantianism spawned statism and socialism. Those were not the products of the genuine Enlightenment in Great Britain and France, which produced capitalism and economic freedom, individualism, limited government, intellectual freedoms of all kinds, and belief in the efficacy of reason in all walks of life. If that does not describe today’s Black Africa, then forget about the Enlightenment as “white supremacy.”

The Battle for Individual Minds

The philosophical, cultural, and political battles, today, are going against those Enlightenment ideals. And these epic battles are fought within individual minds—yours and mine. See, for instance, Media Wars: The Battle to Shape Our Minds.

These epic battles are fought within individual minds—yours and mine. See, for instance, Media Wars: The Battle to Shape Our Minds.

What else do the mainstream media, or the professors in our universities, seek to rule but minds? That is the battleground. They fear and find contemptible any mind not entrained to “progressivism.”

Your mind and mine are the battlegrounds. The ground gained or lost on the field of battle is your assent or mine. The weapons, of course, are ideas and values.

Do you think, or sense, that the hour is late? That our ideas, principles, and values are on the defensive? Fighting, at best, a rearguard action? Four forces—college faculties, the mainstream media, new members of Congress, and activists—are militant, activist, and unrestrained by civility. One senses their self-righteousness, intolerance, and vengefulness. There is far less desire for discourse; the desire is to strangle any serious disagreement (disagreement in principle).

What the media and left activists have done to a remarkable degree is divide Americans into two camps. There are tens of millions (at least the 75 million who voted for Trump and observed the election and its outcome) for whom the left-liberal media have zero credibility. None. When not ignored, the media is viewed with anger and contempt, the equivalent of spitting. The rest of Americans, more or less, are a herd fed daily by the media in print, on TV and radio, books, and manipulated social media.

The response to left militancy and self-righteousness is the contempt of Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians. (I do not say the “right” because that so-called spectrum runs from socialism (communistic) on the left to socialism (national-socialism or fascism) misplaced on the right.

In the article on treatment of the 45-year Times veteran—a fellow journalist—John Nolte expresses astonishment and outrage but ends with real fear:

Listen to the deafening silence as no one at the New York Times or in the establishment media dares to display the moral courage to stand up for a colleague who was fired for doing nothing wrong. … Listen to the cowardice, the quislings, the appeasers hoping the Woke Nazis accept this Munich-like surrender and stop right there.

Newsflash …

It no longer matters what you do or say or write. … We’re all going down. All our social media accounts, all our websites. … They’re all doomed. We’re all going to get blacklisted. The question is no longer ‘if’ but ‘when.’

So you best stop whining and start preparing, start building, start creating your own thing …

Nolte gets still more vehement, evoking full fascist dictatorship “much sooner than you think.”

But focus, here, on Trump’s proposal to create a new social media platform. That is “creating your own thing.” In another sense, those purchasers of The Fountainhead created their own thing: they created a best-selling novelist whose next book, despite its incredible defiance of leftist trends, was grabbed by New York’s top publisher.

“Start Building, Start Creating Your Own Thing”

Together, the millions who voted for Trump (plus those for whom Trump was not libertarian enough) have the power to create assets for communication, persuasion, and education. If every American who voted for Trump spent $10 a year to support such assets that would be $750 million. Over the four Biden years, it would be $3 billion in new intellectual firepower.

Together, the millions who voted for Trump (plus those for whom Trump was not libertarian enough) have the power to create assets for communication, persuasion, and education. They can, if they choose, do so on every battlefront: online and print magazines, TV shows including documentaries, books, newspapers, online news and opinion sites, schools, colleges, foundations, think tanks, and institutes. After all, if every American who voted for Trump spent $10 a year to support such assets that would be $750 million. Over the four Biden/Harris years, it would be $3.0 billion in new intellectual firepower.

Admittedly, there are large U.S. organizations with a pro-free-market outlook: Cato, Heritage, the Koch Foundation, the Heartland Institute, Fox News, Breitbart News, National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial and opinion pages—and many organizations like Students for Liberty and the Institute for Justice. They tend to exist because of one or more wealthy contributors. Usually, they are alone, or one of a few, in an entire category.

The ultimate unrealized potential? It may be represented by those conservative, libertarian, and objectivist individuals and publications—excluded from mainstream media and conventional funding sources—whose impact remains small and severely limited decade after decade. Magazines and newsletters with impressive numbers of readers and authors whose books are bestsellers exponentially increase their intellectual influence because mainstream media are forced (at least so far) to acknowledge them as “part of the conversation” on an issue.

When the fallacies, long-refuted ideas, and politically correct assertions of leftists and postmodernists are in the same conversation, at the same time, as the most cogent libertarian ideas and viewpoints, it changes everything. To enable individuals and organizations to achieve the influence needed to break into the postmodernist monologue on TV news and op-ed pages should be our conscious, consistent strategy as individuals.

When such a breakthrough occurs, the hostility and near panic of the reporters, editors, columnists, and news show regulars—used to daily pumping out their bizarre viewpoints without serious opposition—is all the proof we need that the shell landed in the enemy trench.

Related Posts:

1. Has Australia become “Authorataria?” (An Audio Podcast)
2. Freedom in a Global Context: What Japanese Individuality and American Groupism Tell Us
3. Ayn Rand’s Aristotelian Philosophy of Human Flourishing

   

About the Author: Walter Donway

Walter Donway contributes to Savvy Street on political economy, science, and trends in fiction, film, and culture. Walter Donway’s most recent book is Donald Trump and His Enemies: How the Media Put Trump in Office (Romantic Revolution Books: New York, September 2017). His Amazon profile can be found here