“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free … it expects what never was and never will be.”

Thomas Jefferson, 1816

Recently, Facebook announced the ending of its fact-checking initiative. Independent sources had reviewed millions of posts to weed out misinformation, disinformation, and outright fabrications. Zuckerberg, a favorite tech bro of the President-elect, complained that this institutional practice of META had proven to be politically biased. Checking accuracy is biased? I think it is more appropriate to say that the system was proving inconvenient to the richest (and most powerful) men in the world. The search for factual information surely is not easy, and certainly can be irritating to those seeking absolute power. However, it is seldom intentionally biased.

On the other hand, I must say that my personal experiences with FB’s community standards program bordered on the bizarre. I had three runs on this still popular platform, each of which ended badly. During my first, I reached 30,000 friends and followers, adding probably 50 new followers each day toward the end before they banned me for life. I snuck back on and quickly reached 7,000 plus friends and followers. Then, I was banned for life a second time, after being sentenced to their gulag (periods where my access was restricted) numerous times.

My despicable post on this occasion of my second life ban is found above … a picture of the iconic American hero Jesse Owens receiving one of his 4 gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. His Homeric performance in front of Hitler has been seen as a brave affront to one of the most despicable authoritarian regimes and philosophies in history … one based on the myth of Aryan dominance. My comment attached to the post was totally benign. I noted that FDR never invited Jesse to the White House but that was understandable (though still lamentable) given the President’s need for support from Southern Democrats to pass legislation designed to get us out of the great depression.

It is very difficult to detect why such a post would get anyone banned for life, never mind for a day. Of course, there is the German athlete giving the Nazi salute. In reality, this man wound up becoming a good friend of Owens, giving him suggestions that helped the Black athlete win gold in the long jump event, while he settled for silver much to the displeasure of Herr Hitler. And despite the salute, he was no Nazi. When his political perspective became all too clear, he was sent to the front and died fighting in the Italian campaign.

Most recently, my third forced exit, I was not banned formally. I merely found that I could no longer log into my account any longe. Neither could I change my password nor create a new account. I have become a permanent Facebook exile. And so, I have migrated to bluesky.com. I like it a lot. It seems less of a money grab and more of a place to connect intelligently with like-minded folk. And so far, they have not assigned me to social media jail, deselected any of my posts, nor banned me for life.

Facebook’s community standards program, on the other hand, has always been seen as a joke. You would be assigned to their gulag for using obvious irony, obvious to anyone with an IQ over 75 that is. I remember one clearly. I posted something along the following lines: All Democrats will vote next Tuesday, November 5. All Republicans will vote the following day, Wednesday. Any idiot would see the humor in this except for the geniuses at FB. They must have a terrible impression of just how dumb their audience might be. My legion of followers would continuously share horror stories on their incredible, almost incomprehensible, ineptness.

Their fact-finding, it should be noted, was separate from their community standards initiative and never struck me as so obviously incompetent. On occasion, I would have a post removed after being found to be suspect by independent fact checkers. That was rare, however, and it is true that I oft did repost information which I did not verify myself. On the whole, though, I did see this service as helpful since I didn’t want to become a conventional Republican who routinely distributed misinformation or, worse, disinformation.

Now, fact-checking is gone. The logic behind its removal remains suspect in my eyes … political bias? Really? Accurate information is politically biased? No! I suspect Zuckerberg’s motives are quite transparent. You cannot become a core member of the new oligarchic ruling elite if your platform is dedicated to bringing truth to the American people. Unvarnished facts are the bete noir of those who wish to exercise control over the body politic. And today, that control depends on controlling broad-based social-interaction platforms. Social media giants such as X and Facebook are essential to controlling the political narrative in a world dominated by a small elite. After all, how else can you manipulate the masses into supporting people and policies that obviously go against their self-interest.

The developing collaborative alliance between the billionaire tech bros and the new Administration assuming formal power on the 20th of January has rather deep roots. From the earliest days of political parties, newspapers oft aligned with one normative perspective or the other. They signed on as mouthpieces for Jefferson and the Democratic- Republican gang or Adams and the Federalists. Facts seldom got in the way of attacks on the enemy. Newspapers became propoganda outlets.

Times changed. The media eventually did become more neutral, professional, and fact-based during the 20th century. But mid-century, especially in the aftermath of civil rights successes and the extraordinary activism of the 89th Congress, conservatives organized to fight back at the liberal agenda. The start of this counter revolution is credited to Lewis Powell, a tobacco lawyer whom Nixon appointed to the Supreme Court in 1972. Powell saw how badly Goldwater’s conservative insurgency fared in 1964. Lyndon Johnson swept nearly all states with more than 60 percent of popular votes cast. Lewis saw a need to alter the default political narrative at the ground level.

The year before his appointment to the Court, he wrote an influential memo that became the long-term blueprint for, in his terms, saving capitalism, which he saw as being on the verge of extinction from leftist attacks. At the core of his strategic plan lay a call for conservatives to take control of key institutions … the courts, the media, and the places where ideas are formulated (e.g., think tanks and universities for example). Only in this way could the basic framework through which people saw government might be altered.

Supported by the uber- wealthy, the elements of this counter-revolution were quickly put in place. A host of organizations were established or strengthened starting in the 1970s … the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, the Heritage Foundation, Manhatten Institute, AEI, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Honors Trust, the Federalist Society, the Judicial Crisis Network, the Republican State Leadership Committee, Alliance Defending Freedom, the 85 Fund, the State Policy Network, and so many more. In one way or another, they were all designed to reframe the dominant political narrative in America. It was the start toward a cultural transformation of the foundational narrative established by FDR in the New Deal.

New ideas (or old ideas repackaged) were one thing. Controlling the systems for disseminating those ideas was another. Picking up steam in the 1980s, right-wing zealots began to develop new media outlets or assumed control of existing options. The Sinclair conglomerate purchased hundreds of local TV stations. The billionaire Dickey Brothers bought up scores of local radio stations. Now, some 1,500 radio stations across the country are spewing right-wing propoganda continuously. Then, of course, we have Rupert Murdoch and Fox News to be followed by Breitbart, One America, and a host of blatantly hard-right propoganda outlets. As has been noted often, you can drive from the Atlantic to the Pacific while being assaulted continuously by local, right-wing talk shows. This shower of misinformation might occasionally be interrupted in a few major cities, but not often.

The right got some things correct from the beginning. I had an academic colleague who spent a moment or two at the University of Wisconsin before returning to Washington D.C. for her first love … liberal politics. She asserted back in the 1990s that Democrats and liberals were missing the boat. Those on the left communicated with one another. They presumed that their audience was as sophisticated as they were and would be moved by logic and evidence. In their arguments, they appealed mostly to the mind.

She thought that notion to be irredeemably naive. Conservatives, she noted, were writing opinion pieces and letters to the editors of smaller newspapers, not the NYT or the Washington Post, and in simple language. They focused on appealing to emotions, not the intellect. The liberal set very often saw change as a top-down movement where you first convinced the intelligentsia of your (evidence-based) truth before it was inevitably adopted and enacted by national elites.

Conservatives, on the other hand, saw the struggle from the bottom up. Work on the fears and historic prejudices of common folk. The right saw the battle in terms of effectiveness, not correctness. They certainly did not wallow in the realms of abstract principles such as fairness, rights, or justice. Conservatives never lost sight of a traditional, well tried, tactic. Keep people scared and continually offer them up scapegoats for them to fear. Then, of course, offer them a convenient savior at the proper moment. 🙄

I can’t recall any moment in my life when the mechanisms of social control have been cornered by an ideological perspective to such an extent. In addition, the redistribution of resources from average folk to the economic elite is, if anything, accelerating. We have not seen such inequality of wealth and opportunity since just before the great crash of 1929. That grand depression turned the prevailing political narrative on its head. This combination of control over information flows with unlimited resources poses the most distinctive threat to democracy in my experience.

Thus, I’m not sanguine about our current situation. Should I wish for a collapse of the economic order? I hate the thought of such widespread suffering. Yet, what else might turn us away from the impending oligarchic regime that threatens to consume? Money will flow upward at increasing rates given the proclivities of those assuming power. And the right’s increasing control of information and news portends that dystopian world George Orwell predicted early in my life. Reason will be upended while justice and equity will become faint, elusive apparitions. War will be peace: black will be white: up will be down. Even now, we see political projection on a grand scale. Republicans accused the Dems of weaponizing the Justice Department as Trump salivates at the thought of ending a government based on the law while punishing his many real and imagined enemies.

Eliminating fact checking on one of our largest social media platforms is merely a minor skirmish in this larger war. Our ability to nurture and sustain an informed public might already have been lost. But I might luck out. After all, I might not last another four years. Perhaps I won’t see the final end of the American experiment where Trump’s promise to his Evangelical supporters will be realized. Vote for me one last time, and you won’t have to worry about voting again. At linh last, the dictatorship of the hard right will be sold as our bright and shining future, our city on the hill.

Dictatorship is Democracy!