Censorship: How Top-Down Culture Demands Compliance

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Thus all progress depends on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw

When I was ten years old and living in Sherbrooke, Que., our local radio station was CKTS (King of The Townships). Not sure how I got the number, but I managed to call directly into the studio live. The startled DJ took my call and agreed to play my request. I don’t even recall the song, but he played it.

We also had a music store where you took a 45 off the wall to a booth where you could listen to a record the manger had suggested. And we had a book store where a clerk would recommend his latest favourites. The local English newspaper (Conrad Black’s Sherbrooke Daily Record) had original interviews with president LBJ.

Yes, kiddies, there was a time when your playlist wasn’t decided by a software programmer in Hollywood. Your book choices weren’t selected by the owner of the chain living in New York. Your political opinions went up, not down the food chain. It was a time of organic opinion and bottom-up culture. This, not Trudeau’s shopworn salad, was diversity.

Richard Nixon understood organic onion. His famous phrase was “Will it play in Peoria?” Nixon knew you were elected in rural Illinois, not in a TV newsroom in New York. Peoria is now part of Flyover country, a place today’s opinion purveyors pass on their way between the coastal enclaves. It’s why the 2016 election of Donald Trump was such a shock to the coastal elites. They’d never been to Peoria. Or Paducah. Or Platte.

The Good Old Days? Yes, there were some hives that had more effect on what worked in the public forum (Ed Sullivan, you know who you are). But there were still dynamic music producers in other centres. When I made that phone call to CKTS there was Motown, Stax, Nashville, Chess, Muscle Shoals and so on across the U.S.  

The newspaper chains in Canada had strong regional voices— the Halifax Chronicle, the Winnipeg Free Press, the Calgary Herald among them. Ditto the U.S. They spoke with variety and authority. They employed journalists dedicated not to seeing their name on the story but getting the names in the story right. So did the regional radio stations— even left-leaning CBC locals. 

The current urban hubs of news have now gotten so remote from real people that news directors beg their J-School grads to call someone, anyone, they know outside 416/ 905/ 813 to get stories that don’t send like the emerged from a coffee shop in St. Lawrence Market.

If  news outlets still exist, they get their story lineups from Toronto or New York or DC. They’ve jettisoned their staff, hired a network consultant in Toronto to spit out news bites. Music stations are likely being programmed from elsewhere by a software geek using centralized algorithms spread over hundreds of channels that never intersect

I could go on, but suffice to say the culture is now constricted by gate keepers. There are far fewer places to safely express yourself. Institutional memory at most outlets has been obliterated, replaced by eager young things who don’t want to tell you the news but to tell you what to think of the news. 

The American Idol/ The Voice phenomenon has likewise honed a homogenous brand of music meant to all sound the same . National bookstore chains— those that still exist— dictate shelf space and unit buying from head office. Hollywood produces a river of racialized films that play in Manhattan or Manhattan Beach but stiff in Manhattan, Kansas.

Social media seemed to be the antidote to this convergence of opinion. For a time it was. Podcasts. Twitter, Facebook surged with a range of opinions. A communications renaissance was born. People were free to exercise their right of free speech. Not so fast.

The problem was that social media quickly became captive of a few monopolies based in the Woke Silicon Valley. Monopolies whose ownership was heavily skewed to progressive politics. Under pressure from activists in their movement they began to create a Cancel culture where anything not taught in Critical Race Theory is deemed disinformation or Russian propaganda. Received wisdom was top down, all the time.

This enabled armies of online howler monkeys to enforce compliance through intimidation, boycotts and outright slanders of their targets. Just ask Canadian author and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson. It has proven a devastating formula.

The reveal came during the 2020 election campaign. After four years of highly partisan media coverage of president Donald Trump the gatekeepers at Twitter, Facebook and YouTube began censoring stories that implicated Joe Biden in pay-for-play schemes with his son Hunter and worse. Videos of Joe getting “hands-on” with women were vapourized. Trump was banned for all the top social media sites.

There were dozens of similar cases of conservatives being silenced as Nazis, their ads being rejected, their supporters being blacklisted. Google subtly diverted your search to a liberal site. It worked.

The election result for Joe Biden did not, however, satisfy the hubris of the cancel-culture crew. Soon, employees of  Big Tech began censoring the mask opinions of medical scholars from Yale, Stanford and other colleges as “disinformation”. Why faceless bots within these companies were now interpreting the First Amendment was never explained.

[UPDATE: Facebook is no longer allowing users to share the New York Post story about BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors' recent $3.2 million real estate binge.]

The pattern of cancel culture has now accelerated as the mob hounds Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis for refusing to buckle to them or Fox News host Tucker Carlson for exposing their agenda. Having narrowed the lanes of acceptable discourse the progressive mob are enforcing consensus on “settled science”, gender fluidity,  racial purity.

Liberals who cheered the defeat of #OrangeManBad ignore the implications of this Big Tech censorship— or the possibility that they will be next for the wood chipper. Hey, they feel like winners. Good luck with that. Next time, instead of asking for a record request they could be begging for their lives behind barbed wire. 

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx