Credentialism, Crisis and Censorship: How the Left Eliminated Debate. By Daniel Greenfield.
The problem is that the leftists created the infrastructure of a new truth using the three Cs, credentialism, crisis and censorship, to eliminate debate and the marketplace of ideas.
Credentialism has experts, activists, academics, members of leftist think-tanks and non-profits, wrongly described as non-partisan, and other interested figures with degrees, declaring that a leftist narrative, global warming, systemic racism, transgenderism in children, or election results is a fact backed by studies and research. A crisis is declared accompanied by dire warnings that questioning their manufactured truth will cost more lives. In the final stage, censorship, internet monopolies, allied with the media and politicians, suppress disagreement as misinformation.
Before, in between and after the media serves as the connective tissue, promoting partisan hacks as experts, hammering home the crisis and pressuring tech firms to censor dissent.
While pandemic lockdowns will quickly come to mind, the model was operating before then and has come to be used on virtually any issue from refugees to questioning elections (won by the media party) to crime and school sexualization. Everything the Left believes is now a fact and a crisis, disagreeing with it is disinformation, treason and terrorism. The crackdown swiftly follows.
Facts, we are often told, cannot be debated. And since everything the Left believes is a fact, there is no longer any room for debate. …
A manufactured consensus [ties] together the government, the media, think-tanks and non-profits, academia and internet monopolies in one totalitarian system. Progressive fascism suppresses disagreement in order to unilaterally impose its official “truths”. …
How the new journalism informs you about the wider word:
A simple bit of factual objective reporting might be that Bob X shot Jack Y in the head in the middle of Main Street. Caught on camera, what went on down is the indisputable truth. The new truth, the one that increasingly shows up in media coverage, is that systemic racism, income inequality and the lack of gun control laws led to a shooting on Main Street. Bob and Jack, like all individuals, are mere bit players in the larger leftist sociopolitical dramas of class and race.
The school shooter is an afterthought in the scramble to call for new gun control laws, the rapist is just a figment of abortion laws and misogyny, hurricane victims have to make way for reports about global warming. The traditional leftist belief that people are just pawns of the academic phenomena pervades the media because it represents the new truth.
The new truth treats a worldview as a fact. Individuals in the media have become types, irrelevant as people, vital only in that they convey the larger leftist worldview. A school shooting victim who advocates for gun control can easily gain a national profile, but one who calls for locking up criminals never will.
Journalists used to think that truths were personal, not political. The new truth has reversed everything with the ultimate truths being political and personal truths relegated to the anecdotal.
Who, What, When, Where, and Why has been reduced to only the last W. Only the ‘Why’ matters and the answers are always political. The ‘Why’ is systemic racism, global warming, a lack of gun control laws, the patriarchy, capitalism, homophobia, colonialism, and the rest of the attacks on civilization. The other four Ws are just there to provide examples to illustrate the fifth. …
Emerging in an era where scientific discoveries were changing the world, the Left has always garbed its prejudices, biases, drives and malice in the veneer of academic theory. Its genius has been to bridge the lower realm of the peasant revolt with the intellectualism of the salon, the mind and the heart, claiming the sanction of both reason and empathy when it has neither.
Postmodernism denies that truth exists. There is only power, comrade.
