The Big Five

People often ask how the Left's fantasy ideas, nutty narratives and insane public policies have pervaded almost every major institution in the West. It didn't happen overnight, and it will continue to become more and more prevalent as time passes. But why?

I try to answer that question in my new book, Normalizing Insanity, when I write:

... the Left has captured virtually all modes of mass communication using entities and organizations that I call “The Big Five:”

Image generated using A.I.

Mainstream media. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, Reuters, AP, the BBC, Sky News, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and many, many others are decidedly Left in their editorial content and in their hard news reporting.  Ideological capture has been on-going in mainstream journalism. A study of 1600 journalists by Syracuse University found that only 3.4% identify as Republicans while 36.4% identify as Democrats.

Social Media and Google. The management and technologists who populate the workforce of all major social media companies (Twitter 1.0, Facebook, Instagram, Tic Toc, YouTube, and others) lean decidedly Left.  Google, the dominant search engine, biases its search results with content that supports ‘approved’ narratives, all promoted by left-leaning followers. Evidence uncovered over the past five years clearly indicates that these private companies worked to suppress narratives that threatened left-leaning political candidates or tried to amplify viral narratives  that had widespread support among progressives ... 

Academia. Fantasy ideas (e.g., Critical Theory and its derivatives) are often hatched by academics in a university setting. At many universities, left-leaning faculty outnumber their right-leaning counterparts by a ratio of 7 to 1. In addition, those same academics are teaching (indoctrinating?) undergraduate students. The result is a set of contradictions and outright hypocrisy that is very concerning. For example, “pro-Palestinan” protests on college campuses at the end of 2023 had students and faculty espousing blatantly anti-Semitic rhetoric. Those same professors and students roundly condemned anyone who used incorrect pronouns only months earlier. Two narratives, two different sets of rules. 

Entertainment. The entertainment industry has always leaned left, but in recent years, virtually all of it has been captured and turned into a megaphone to promote approved narratives and defend against any critique of insane policy ... 

Organizations within the Deep State. The term “deep state” is a catchall phrase for all unelected federal officials and agencies in the massive federal bureaucracy that often establish the policies and mandates derived from viral narratives. Although politicians and lobbyists define the broad strokes, it is the bureaucracy that addresses the minutiae that makes the difference between an effective policy and an insane one ... 

The Big Five work to amplify narratives that are promoted by left-leaning follower groups, including many that are based on fantasy ideas. At the same time, they work to criticize and de-amplify those narratives that voice opposition ... 

There are countless examples of The Big Five at work, but the most insidious is their continuing attempts to censor opposing opinion that conflicts with their preferred narrative. A recent example illustrates this.

With the singular except of 9/11, The Big Five has had a way of quickly memory-holing mass casualty terror attacks conducted by Islamist terror groups (e.g., Hamas or ISIS-K) throughout the West. They're warned by Islamist front groups like CAIR, that investigating such attacks keeps them in the public eye, and that leads to "Islamophobia." The Big Five complies by burying the attacks ASAP.

In 2021, Frontpage Magazine published a retrospective entitled, "Remember the San Bernadino Five." It began this way:

On December 2, 2015, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik drove up to the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, and began firing automatic rifles while still outside on the grounds. The American-born Muslim Farook and the Pakistani-born Malik, then barged inside where a holiday party was in progress.

There Farook and Malik gunned down Robert Adams, Isaac Amianos, Bennetta Betbadal, Harry Bowman, Sierra Clayborn, Juan Espinoza, Aurora Godoy, Shannon Johnson, Larry Daniel Kaufman, Damien Meins, Tin Ngyen, Nicholas Thalasinos, Yvette Velasco, and Michael Wetzel. The pair then fled in a black SUV and fired more than 100 rounds at police, wounding one officer.

Police took down the terrorists and inside their SUV found a trigger device to detonate bombs the Muslims had planted at the Regional Center. Had the bombs exploded, many others would have perished.

Because of that article and others critical of islamist terrorists, Google decided that Frontpage was not eligible for its Google’s AdSense advertising program. Okay, I suppose Google can choose who it works with. But it gets worse ... much worse. Daniel Greenfield writes:

The article, “Remember The San Bernardino Fourteen” by Lloyd Billingsley, like a lot of our articles, is blocked in Google Search. The Front Page article doesn’t come up when you type in its name. It doesn’t even appear when you do a site search for the exact title in quotation marks that has been entirely limited to the Front Page Magazine site. That means that Google likely specifically excluded it. And it’s far from the only one of our articles banned by Google.

It’s an extraordinary act of censorship for a company that claims to want to collect all the information in the world and make it easily available for everyone to find. But it’s also a silent act of suppression that is hard to confirm and easy to blame on technical factors or errors.

But now here it was, Google flagging “Remember The San Bernardino Fourteen” as “dangerous” and “derogatory” content, not to mention guilty of “unreliable and harmful claims”.

What’s dangerous, unreliable and harmful about “Remember The San Bernardino Fourteen”?

Published on Dec 3, 2021, around the anniversary of the Islamic terrorist attack, it contains fairly little editorial commentary and a great deal of uncomfortable facts.

When you ask how it is that the Left controls the narrative, just think back to this one case of outright censorship and them multiply it a thousand ... no, likely a million times. Frontpage is undoubtedly a conservative publication with a masthead comment from its publisher  that goes like this: "Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out" —David Horowitz.

Google's actions in censoring and suppressing free speech demonstrate that truism rather nicely.