The Triumph of Media Power
Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, September 8, 2022
https://www.amren.com/commentary/2022/09/the-triumph-of-media-power/
Democrats and their allied media are increasingly worried about “fascism.” One might think fascism, if it means anything, is the combined use of state, media, and corporate power to incite a never-ending campaign against invented enemies. At the risk of making the “Democrats are the real fascists” argument, it seems leftists are projecting. They’ve even got the optics figured out.
Tech companies censor information that challenges official orthodoxy on health, race, sex-change, and other questions. The government asks them to do this. Republican opposition stopped the Department of Homeland Security’s proposed “Disinformation” panel, but that was a minor victory, since progressives already control the information people can see and hear.
Democracy and self-government need a population that gets accurate information. If you aren’t allowed to make up your own mind, you’re not free. You can’t make up your own mind if you can’t hear all sides. Do we really have democracy or self-government? Did we ever? There is no “marketplace of ideas” when censorship smothers competition.
Elections outcomes may be downstream from culture, but culture is downstream from media control. The process is as crude and effective as a besieging army controlling the defender’s food supply. We may tell ourselves that hiding the truth won’t work, but with enough power, it can work. A defending army may be courageous, but it will die if supplies run out.
Race realists and white advocates believe the truth is on our side. Race is biological, there are race differences, and differences have consequences. However, “truth” is elusive in a democratic, media-dominated society. (Apparently, so are the concepts of male and female.) Racial differences in IQ are some of the most consistent findings in all of social science, but our rulers conceal them. Some may know they are hiding the truth; others may think they are hiding “disinformation.” The consequences are the same.
The most “woke” people in our society are white liberals. New findings indicate that they believe things that are obviously false. However, unlike dissidents, they don’t fear censorship. They know their sources of (dis)information will remain.
Zach Goldberg, perhaps the leading scholar of absurd American beliefs, reported years ago that white liberals prefer non-whites to whites. This attitude is unique among all people in the world, and perhaps in all history. It means white liberals may support policies because they makes things worse for whites. “Perhaps this is why white support for increasing immigration coincides with more negative feelings towards whites,” wrote Mr. Goldberg in 2019 in Tablet.
Mr. Goldberg recently reported that by 2020, white liberals had begun to believe that whites are more violent, lazier, and less intelligent than blacks.
He notes that this goes beyond egalitarianism and suggests anti-white animus.
One could argue that “intelligence,” “violence,” and “laziness,” can’t really be measured. However, if we accept the relationship between IQ and intelligence, crime rates and violence, and income and laziness, white liberals believe things that are provably wrong. Why shouldn’t they? They get little information telling them otherwise. It would be fascinating to see how white liberals justify their anti-white beliefs.
Some white advocates may comfort themselves by saying that while the “woke” are getting crazier, white conservatives are “waking up.” Not so. The data above show that white independents and conservatives are on the same path.
Propaganda works. Even absurdity works. If our rulers can persuade people to say things that would have been considered ridiculous even a year ago, they can persuade activists to do just about anything. “Wokeness” will not die because it’s wrong. It’s a political force. Truth has nothing to do with it.
Mr. Goldberg suggests that woke attitudes may be part of “an attempt to proclaim their [liberals’] anti-racist bona fides — which, interestingly, now seems to require expressions of anti-whiteness.” If all whites are racist no matter what we do, whites are the problem, and racism cannot be eliminated. Elites don’t expand their power by solving problems, but by inventing new ones that last forever. What would the civil rights industry do if we ever achieved the “post-racial” society we’ve long been promised?
John Robb of Global Guerillas writes that once people are in a “pattern matching network,” it is almost impossible to change their minds. Most people interpret new information to fit pre-existing mental frameworks in what is called confirmation bias.*
What Mr. Robb has called “The Long Night” could finally be upon us. In 2017, he said the danger is “an all encompassing online orthodoxy,” a “sameness of thought and approach enforced by hundreds of millions of socially internetworked adherents.”
CNN, The Guardian, Slate, and countless other powerful outlets celebrated the takedown of the site “Kiwi Farms.” It was a controversial forum that hosted what could be considered “hate speech” against “transgenders.” Cloudflare, which just a week ago said it would not pull its protection, reversed its decision after a few days of pressure. Cloudflare prevents distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. They are felonies. The pressure on Cloudflare for protecting Kiwi Farms was like persuading the police to look the other way while you ransack the house of someone you don’t like.
I don’t know much about Kiwi Farms, but critics accused it of obscenity, hateful speech, threats, and doxing. All that is fine, of course, if the victims are “racists.” Those with power respect no principles of free speech, legal norms, or what defines “hate.” We live in a world of arbitrary power. Our government’s boasts about democracy and a “Free World” are hollow.
At this point, it’s tempting to say that we will win because truth is on our side, but lies — at least for a time — can strengthen. It’s true that people usually make sensible choices in their own lives, when they buy houses in certain neighborhoods or send their children to “good schools.” But these choices don’t change policy.
If democracy is to mean anything, all legal speech should be permitted and protected by private industry and government. Today, when information is deliberately concealed, people must find the narrow, rocky path to the truth. Not even conservatives fight for free speech; they benefit when the competition is censored.
Free speech is nonnegotiable. Whites who demand a country of our own are far more realistic than anyone who thinks the government will stop discriminating against us when we become a minority. Working for a White Republic is more sensible than thinking our rulers will defend what every other generation of Americans took for granted. The hour is later than you think.
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* NEW YORK TIMES
May 27, 2017
You’re Not Going to Change Your Mind
Ben Tappin, Leslie Van Der Leer and
A troubling feature of political disagreement in the United States today is that many issues on which liberals and conservatives hold divergent views are questions not of value but of fact. Is human activity responsible for global warming? Do guns make society safer? Is immigration harmful to the economy? Though undoubtedly complicated, these questions turn on empirical evidence. As new information emerges, we ought to move, however fitfully, toward consensus.
But we don’t. Unfortunately, people do not always revise their beliefs in light of new information. On the contrary, they often stubbornly maintain their views. Certain disagreements stay entrenched and polarized.
Why? A common explanation is confirmation bias. This is the psychological tendency to favor information that confirms our beliefs and to disfavor information that counters them — a tendency manifested in the echo chambers and “filter bubbles” of the online world.
If this explanation is right, then there is a relatively straightforward solution to political polarization: We need to consciously expose ourselves to evidence that challenges our beliefs to compensate for our inclination to discount it.
But what if confirmation bias isn’t the only culprit? It recently struck us that confirmation bias is often conflated with “telling people what they want to hear,” which is actually a distinct phenomenon known as desirability bias, or the tendency to credit information you want to believe. Though there is a clear difference between what you believe and what you want to believe — a pessimist may expect the worst but hope for the best — when it comes to political beliefs, they are frequently aligned.
For example, gun-control advocates who believe stricter firearms laws will reduce gun-related homicides usually also want to believe that such laws will reduce gun-related homicides. If those advocates decline to revise their beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary, it can be hard to tell which bias is at work.
So we decided to conduct an experiment that would isolate these biases. This way, we could see whether a reluctance to revise political beliefs was a result of confirmation bias or desirability bias (or both). Our experiment capitalized on the fact that one month before the 2016 presidential election there was a profusion of close polling results concerning Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
We asked 900 United States residents which candidate they wanted to win the election, and which candidate they believed was most likely to win. Respondents fell into two groups. In one group were those who believed the candidate they wanted to win was also most likely to win (for example, the Clinton supporter who believed Mrs. Clinton would win). In the other group were those who believed the candidate they wanted to win was not the candidate most likely to win (for example, the Trump supporter who believed Mrs. Clinton would win). Each person in the study then read about recent polling results emphasizing either that Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump was more likely to win.
Roughly half of our participants believed their preferred candidate was the one less likely to win the election. For those people, the desirability of the polling evidence was decoupled from its value in confirming their beliefs.
After reading about the recent polling numbers, all the participants once again indicated which candidate they believed was most likely to win. The results, which we report in a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, were clear and robust. Those people who received desirable evidence — polls suggesting that their preferred candidate was going to win — took note and incorporated the information into their subsequent belief about which candidate was most likely to win the election. In contrast, those people who received undesirable evidence barely changed their belief about which candidate was most likely to win.
Importantly, this bias in favor of the desirable evidence emerged irrespective of whether the polls confirmed or disconfirmed peoples’ prior belief about which candidate would win. In other words, we observed a general bias toward the desirable evidence.
What about confirmation bias? To our surprise, those people who received confirming evidence — polls supporting their prior belief about which candidate was most likely to win — showed no bias in favor of this information. They tended to incorporate this evidence into their subsequent belief to the same extent as those people who had their prior belief disconfirmed. In other words, we observed little to no bias toward the confirming evidence.
We also explored which supporters showed the greatest bias in favor of the desirable evidence. The results were bipartisan: Supporters of Mr. Trump and supporters of Mrs. Clinton showed a similar-size bias in favor of the desirable evidence.
Our study suggests that political belief polarization may emerge because of peoples’ conflicting desires, not their conflicting beliefs per se. This is rather troubling, as it implies that even if we were to escape from our political echo chambers, it wouldn’t help much. Short of changing what people want to believe, we must find other ways to unify our perceptions of reality.
Ben Tappin is a graduate student, and Ryan McKay is a reader in psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London. Leslie van der Leer is a lecturer in psychology at Regent’s University London.
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