Elites losing control of the narrative?

 John Daniel Davidson:

If you want to know how well our elites are managing to control the discourse, consider this: a pair of “Let’s Go Brandon” anthems shot to the top of iTunes chart rankings this week.

Rapper Bryson Gray’s song hit number one despite getting banned from YouTube on the ridiculous pretext that it contains “medical misinformation,” while rapper Loza Alexander’s “Let’s Go Brandon” hit number two. Both of them beat out Adele’s “Easy On Me,” which was knocked down to number three. (Another version of Alexander’s song nabbed the number four spot.)

So three of the four top iTunes songs this week are “Let’s Go Brandon” anthems. Truth be told, the songs are not all that good. Their popularity has more to do with what they represent, which is a firm rejection of the idea that we can simply be told what to do and how to think by a cultural and political elite who hate us, and that we have no control over the public discourse or the narratives that define our times.

Big Tech’s efforts in this regard are especially notable for being utterly ham-fisted — from YouTube’s penchant for banning everything from Gray’s rap to anything else its censors deem to be “medical misinformation,” to Twitter’s transparently hypocritical enforcement of its rules against abuse and harassment, to Facebook’s absurd censorship of a meme blaming President Joe Biden for high gas prices.

Billionaires, it turns out, have a penchant for desperately trying to control information. LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman and left-wing financier George Soros, a couple of billionaires with a history of peddling lies and manipulating the media, this week announced the creation of a creepily named venture, “Good Information Inc.,” which according to Axios will “fund and scale businesses that cut through echo chambers with fact-based information.” Heading up the operation will be former Democratic strategist Tara McGowan.

As my colleague Tristan Justice noted, this crew comes to the “misinformation” game with considerable baggage. McGowan ran a left-wing nonprofit backed by Hoffman called ACRONYM that botched the Iowa Democratic causes in 2020. Before that, Hoffman financed an actual misinformation campaign in the 2017 Alabama Senate special election, in which fake online accounts were made to appear as Russian bots supported by Republicans.

Although these billionaires are perhaps the worst possible spokesmen for combatting “misinformation,” their efforts are part of a larger, increasingly desperate movement among our elite managerial class to control information and narratives. In each case, the obvious motive is to quash ideas and opinions — even memes and jokes! — that leftist elites in Silicon Valley and corporate boardrooms don’t like.
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I  do not recall any of these censorious leftists ever labeling the fraudulent Russian collusion story as "misinformation."  In fact, many of the false stories got Pulitizer prizes.  What these people are are people wedded to the false narratives of the left and attempting to suppress opposing views.  They have no credibility.