Annals Of Orwell: NBC News & Google Team Up To Deplatform 'The Federalist' For Honesty On Looting, Rioting & Woke White Delerium

(picture courtesy of New York Times) 

Is looting a racial trope to be avoided because it encourages unhealthy stereotypes about “vulnerable and underrepresented groups?” Or is it a racially-inflected reality that merely makes woke newsrooms uncomfortable---and gives the lie to media narratives about “peaceful” protests? Judging from NBC News’s efforts to get Google to demonetize the conservative website the Federalist for the journalistic sin of accurately reporting on the looting across the country during last week’s George Floyd riots, it’s the latter. Here’s the Federalist’s reporting & commentary on the looting. Below is a description from today’s Wall Street Journal, written by the Federalist’s co-founders on how NBC News’ “Verification Department” teamed up with Google and the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a British anti hate website to act the censor. And how NBC compounded that bit of intellectual reprehensibility by reporting inaccurately on the whole sorry affair before walking back its initial report. 

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NBC Tries To Cancel A Conservative Website 

by Ben Domenech and Sean Davis 

NBC News attempted this week to use the power of Google to cancel our publication, the Federalist. The effort failed, but it should serve as a warning about the unchecked power of big tech companies, particularly when they can be manipulated by partisans, including partisan journalists.

On Monday we received a request for comment through our general media email account from NBC reporter Adele-Momoko Fraser. The message asserted that Google had demonetized our site—preventing us from earning money through Google ads—for violating its rules.

On Tuesday, NBC published an article claiming that Google had made a formal decision to demonetize the Federalist, that we had been formally warned that we were in violation, and that our content—specifically, articles criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement and media coverage of recent riots—was a violation of Google’s rules.

Google subsequently sent a statement to NBC saying all these claims were false. The network updated but hasn’t retracted the story. Ms. Fraser, who works for an NBC division with the Orwellian name “Verification Center,” tweeted her story and expressing thanks for the “hard work and collaboration” of a London-based advocacy group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which promptly issued a fundraising appeal based on its purported deplatforming of a conservative media organization.

Whatever the network or the center knew about Google and the Federalist, it was more than Google told us. Google never formally notified us that we had run afoul of any of its rules. Only when we sought guidance from Google about the NBC News story were we told that our comments section—which is run by a third party and isn’t monitored or moderated by us—violated its policies. We asked if adjusting the comments section would address the alleged rule violation and were told that it would. For now our comment section doesn’t appear on our site. We intend to bring it back.

NBC News colluded with a foreign left-wing group in an attempt to destroy us because it disagrees with our political commentary and media criticism. The episode illustrates how dangerous the combination of partisan media and monopolistic tech companies is to America. We survived the attack because our organization is well-known. 

This is only the latest example of media outlets using social-media platforms to attack and destroy Americans who don’t kowtow to left-wing orthodoxy. Ask Brendan Eich, who was fired from a Silicon Valley job in 2014 for contributing to a referendum against same-sex marriage six years earlier, or Nicholas Sandmann, who at age 16 was labeled a bigot by journalists for CNN and other outlets for attending a pro-life rally in D.C. and politely staying silent while an adult berated him and his classmates. 

These attacks target not only individuals but free speech itself. 

Sorrows of Woke: Extraordinary Popular Delusions & The Madness of Crowds

From Extraordinary Popular Delusions & The Madness of Crowds, by Charles MacKay, 1841

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go Like mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

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We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one Like object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.

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During seasons of great pestilence men have often believed the Like prophecies of crazed fanatics, that the end of the world was come.

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Credulity is always greatest in times of calamity. Prophecies of all sorts are rife on such occasions, and are readily believed, whether for good or evil. During the great plague, which ravaged all Europe, between the years 1345 and 1350, it was generally considered that the end of the world was at hand.

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Thus did they nurse their folly, as the good wife of Tam O’Shanter did Like her wrath, “to keep it warm.”

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Nations, like individuals, cannot become desperate gamblers with Like impunity. Punishment is sure to overtake them sooner or later.

Annals of Anarchy: 'Crowds & Power' Still Rocks

From Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti (1960) 

It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it. 

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The Crowd is the same everywhere, in all periods and cultures; it remains essentially the same among men of the most diverse origin, education and language. Once in being, it spreads with the utmost violence. Few can resist its contagion; it always wants to go on growing and there are no inherent limits to its growth. It can arise wherever people are together, and its spontaneity and suddenness are uncanny. 

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The Crowd, suddenly there where there was nothing before, is a mysterious and universal phenomenon. A few people may have been standing together-five, ten or twelve, not more; nothing has been announced, nothing is expected. Suddenly everywhere is black with people and more come streaming from all sides as though streets had only one direction. Most of them do not know what has happened and, if questioned, have no answer; but they hurry to be there where most other people are. There is a determination in their movement which is quite different from the expression of ordinary curiosity. It seems as though the movement of some of them transmits itself to the others. But that is not all; they have a goal which is there before they can find words for it.  

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It is only in a Crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite. The Crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd, too, whose psychical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch. Ideally, all are equal there; no distinctions count. Not even that of sex. The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body. 

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First there is the lying in wait for prey; the prey is marked down long before it is aware of our designs on it. With feelings of pleasure and approval it is contemplated, observed and kept watch over; it is seen as meat whilst it is still alive, and so intensely and irrevocably seen as meat that nothing can deflect the watcher's determination to get hold of it. Already while he is prowling round it he feels that it belongs to him. From the moment he selects it as his prey, he thinks of it as incorporated into himself. 

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A murder shared with many others, which is not only safe and permitted, but indeed recommended, is irresistible to the great majority of men.