Hey Hillary, Greetings From Shadow Ban Land!
America’s reigning Ice Queen again reveals the progressives’ obsession with prohibiting speech they consider antithetical to their worldview. The insidious impact of their perverse power grab can be seen across virtually every platform, including the one you are reading right now.
By Mark Cromer
Hillary Clinton’s sly slip of the tongue on CNN the other day came as a warning that the failure to not compel Big Tech to implement further speech restrictions would result in the unthinkable for progressives who now control of the Democratic Party: “We lose total control.”
It’s a fear the once promising public servant turned reigning Ice Queen has likely harbored at least since the days when she began verbalizing her ideations of “vast rightwing conspiracies,” paranoiac outbursts which demonstrate she was again ahead of her time as it now a standard issue talking point among the Left.
A veteran power player, Clinton correctly grasps the threat such a loss of total control would pose to the Democratic Party’s progressive agenda, one that would dwarf the details of any of Jeffrey Epstein’s 17 visits with her husband in the White House and would be far more devastating than even the release of video capturing Bill having a ball at the Clintons’ timeshare on Epstein Island.
The Left just can’t have it.
Whatever collective contact high progressives experienced when Parler was whacked out as soon as its nascent ascendance became a problem for them in 2020 has since been erased by their sheer panic and resulting hysteria over Elon Musk’s purchasing of Twitter—even if he promptly pulled a New Coke by rebranding it ‘X’—and actually improved the platform by ending much (but not nearly all) of the Left’s algorithm-driven purge patrol.
With the 2024 election now just a few weeks away, the prospect of not tightening the already iron grip that progressive pedagogy maintains across most of the digital universe is unthinkable to Clinton and she is damn sure not going to let the wonks with wallets in Silicon Valley forget their obligations to La Causa for even a moment.
Clinton in particular will never forget that in the fall of 2016, the titans of tech may well have been behind her but they were not aggressively enough in front of her, proactively clearing her path to the White House and securing Democratic Party hegemony inside Imperial Washington. This is where the old digital campfire story that holds Clinton lost in 2016 because Russian agitprop mills created fake Facebook accounts that preyed upon Americans fear that their country was being overrun by mass illegal immigration was born.
It wasn’t until 2018, more than a year after the Democrats’ Nakba with the GOP’s assumption of power that stretched from the Oval Office to the Senate and to the House, that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg began running full page ads in The New York Times ominously announcing that the social media giant would begin rolling out initiatives designed to dial back what he called ‘disinformation’ or ‘misinformation’ and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey accelerated the great purges of the Twittersphere that Big Tech truly stepped in to help deliver one party rule to the Democrats, a complete political weaponizing of their platforms that came too late for Hillary Clinton.
The relentless campaign against alleged ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ that the Left has advanced since 2018 follows a familiar pattern progressives established long ago: identify and target platforms that allow writers and illustrators that dare to air politically heretical viewpoints uncensored and force those platforms to severely restrict the intellectually adversarial content or ban the thought criminals outright.
The highly coordinated and very public annihilation of Parler was carried out much like a gruesome mob hit or cartel massacre: its swift and total destruction was designed to send a message. The Republicans’ evangelical preachers of free markets and level playing fields yielding the bounty of competition unsurprisingly did absolutely nothing than watch from the sidelines as Parler was destroyed in front of them.
The proof of concept for the progressive’s tactic of targeting platforms publishing politically heretical positions was largely conducted at first on the editorial pages of newspapers across the country—back when newspapers were still offering meaty servings of print that mattered—and across broadcast outlets where multiple competing perspectives were whittled down to essentially one standard party line. Largely in response to the Left’s conquests of the editorial boards and on-air analysts and guests, conservatives retreated to their redoubt in talk radio, a migration that reinvigorated the format by reaching tens of millions of Americans daily with full-throated defenses of the traditional American way of life.
It was a development that only served to further outrage the Left, which declared talk radio to be ‘hate radio’ (that train is never late) and launched withering campaigns against networks and stations that programmed forbidden political thought. Unable to repeat the successes of their previous purges, progressives briefly attempted that rarest of things among the Left: to actually ideologically compete by launching their own national radio network on the cusp of George W. Bush’s reelection, dubbing it Air America as a not-so-subtle play off the name of the CIA’s cutout company that The Agency used for aerial transport to supply its operations in Indochina.
If you don’t remember the Left’s attempt at commercial talk radio that’s likely because while the CIA’s Air America lasted 30 years in the clandestine skies, the progressive radio network Air America crashed and burned just six years after takeoff, with prominent progressive personalities like Rachel Maddow managing to crawl away from the blazing wreckage as Rush Limbaugh lit another stogie and laughed.
While the Internet certainly was a digital wild west in the years following its mass consumer rollout, it didn’t take terribly long for progressives to see the promise of the platform as a potentially deadly peril to their agenda: gatekeepers are very powerful only until there are no more gates to keep.
Hillary Clinton’s latest admonishment was rooted in that reality and her declaration again revealed the radical Left’s unwavering desire for “total control” over the medium.
The range of individuals that have been targeted by progressives over the past decade-plus is of course a long one that also features the odd Liberal or Libertarian who ran afoul of the speech enforcement squads, but most self-identify as conservatives of one varietal or another.
Some of the marquee names of that have appeared in Shadow Ban Land are well known writers such as Ann Coulter, whose sudden Twitter hemorrhage surpassed even her being blackballed at Fox News at the behest of Donald Trump. It is important to note that Coulter is an actual author, versus the Fox News talking heads branded as authors to peddle ghostwritten books for the network’s book of the month club. She has repeatedly topped The New York Times bestseller list with a baker’s dozen of her wickedly delicious tomes in which she fearlessly employs hard facts to illuminate cold truths about hot-button issues and arrive at indisputable conclusions that are to progressives what sunshine is to vampires.
So naturally progressives targeted Coulter and she watched her Twitter ‘follower’ count go from growing by tens of thousands each week to rather suddenly hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of followers of her Twitter feed over months. Superficially, it was inexplicable. The quality of Coulter’s writing hadn’t diminished, her wit had not receded, her style hadn’t been jettisoned and the audience for her work had not suddenly collapsed—quite the opposite, it was only growing, even as her numbers were plummeting.
Of course, the explanation for her massive bleed-out of followers was obvious to Coulter and virtually anyone else really paying attention: she had been shadow banned by the platform.
Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022 didn’t immediately staunch the ghost bleeding of Coulter’s feed, though she has since recovered some of the ground that she lost to progressive sabotage and is currently back to more than 2 million followers.
But just as the conservative Big Game like Coulter that the Left has long loved to stalk, take down and adorn their lodge walls alongside the many trophies of their deplatforming campaigns demonstrates the relentlessness of their pursuit of an ideological purge, the subtle restrictions and slow suffocation of microcosmic media offers a compelling indication of the true scope and depth of progressives’ offensive.
I have encountered some of this from the vantage point of The Cromer Reader, this bijou and non-commercial site that I launched in March 2016 as a casual showcase of selected works from my career as a professional journalist and writer, one that would feature a variety of my stories, columns and essays previously published in newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly to magazines such as The Nation, Artillery, Details and Southern California Magazine, among many others, supplemented with new material that I can post whenever the mood strikes.
The Cromer Reader’s genesis lay in a suggestion from my old friend Brian Brandt, one of the most successful trial lawyers in California, to my circle of LA journalists, writers, attorneys and film-makers that my long-running ‘late night’ riffs, raves and ruminations on politics, culture, sex and rock n’ roll that were fueled by Russian mineral water and shared via email seemed ripe for presenting to a broader public.
From Dusk to Dawn: The Wild Rides of Mark Cromer. Something along those lines.
My old friend and former colleague Sam Anson, another journalist-turned-corporate intelligence operator (and the son of famed journalist Robert Sam Anson, who was taken prisoner by communist forces in Cambodia in 1970 while covering the war in Vietnam for Time) agreed and set about early development on what he would eventually dub ‘The Cromer Reader’ back in 2011, writing me a couple of nice checks along the way to secure development rights.
Another old pal of mine, the late author Charles Rappleye, was also enthusiastic about the project and joined Anson and me in the process of collecting and editing a bulk of dispatches that spanned 1995 to 2010. But as life would soon have it, Charlie was diagnosed with cancer and Sam launched his own intel outfit and I dove deeper into my role as the founding Senior Investigator at Sapient Investigations, Inc., a boutique firm headquartered in Santa Monica, and thus the prospect of publishing my dispatches from the edge just faded away like the many fine evenings that spawned them.
In the spring of 2016, with Anson in the wind, Rappleye on his way out and the rights to The Cromer Reader entirely mine again, I decided to revisit the idea and launched the site as a compendium of some of my work, past and present, and with an emphasis on long reads as an act of intentional counter-programming against a culture that celebrates shrinking attention spans and media catering to shriveling intellectual curiosity.
In an era marked by publishers affixing stories with estimated reading times as a warning label for people whose heads begin to hurt after more than 180-seconds of sustained reading or begin to feel frightened and lost by sentences with more than 15 words, I launched The Cromer Reader at least partly channeling my hero Osbourne Cox as he escalated his war against “the league of morons” he had been fighting his whole life. It was my contribution to the counter-insurgency Oz had ignited in Burn After Reading.
Almost immediately after launching the site I created a Facebook page for it to help promote The Cromer Reader and hopefully drive some traffic to it, at least initially. And that’s when I first really became aware of the controls that even then were in place to monitor admission and enforce the pass laws that determined one’s range of access.
Since Facebook had a verification badge that was offered ostensibly to authenticate a users’ identification and thus bestow a greater sense of legitimacy to their site, I applied and submitted the requested information along with my state-issued identification. Not long afterward I received a polite notification from Facebook alerting me that my verification application had been denied, without explanation. If I wanted to appeal the denial, Facebook advised, I could do so and receive what now seems unthinkable: a phone call from an actual Facebook employee to discuss the matter.
I did and not long after, at the scheduled time (they called you, naturally, not wanting to provide users with a phone number to a human interface), I received said call from Facebook and still recall the surreal nature of the brief conversation. After confirming my information and reviewing my site and the Facebook page I created to support it, the representative said she was not sure why my application had been denied but noted that my Facebook page had less than 100 ‘followers.’ I replied that it was a new page created to support a new, non-commercial literary website and I was following Facebook’s own stated instructions to obtain a verification badge—not a “most popular” sticker.
“What does it matter how many followers the page has if this is about verifying the authenticity of the user, which you acknowledge I have successfully completed?” I asked.
The youngish sounding female on the other end of the line mused “I am not really sure. I just know they tend to give verification badges to sites that have large-scale traffic.”
She recommended that I use Facebook’s pay-to-promote feature on my page in order to drive traffic to The Cromer Reader and then reapply for verification once I had more followers on my page.
“How many followers do I need?” I asked.
Again, she really couldn’t say, but she encouraged me to try again down the road after I had more followers.
In that one and only phone call I’ve ever had with Facebook I was made aware of just how intentionally nebulous their user guidelines were in actual practice and that even something as straightforward as authenticating identification was entirely subjective and dependent upon an opaque metric not available for public consumption. But since The Cromer Reader has always been a side project and casual platform for me, I didn’t much care beyond making the mental note that Facebook was clearly skewing its guidelines or user terms of service in order to further its own agenda.
The arbitrary and subjective nature of its guidelines aside, The Cromer Reader began to grow a small but steady readership from 2016 through the fall of 2018, with most stories that I posted quickly rolling up a few hundred reads that would then expand to a few thousand reads within a month or two. Some of my columns, essays and short stories were picked up and shared by others through links on Facebook, resulting in some pieces garnering a readership in the tens of thousands over time and ‘likes’ and ‘follows’ on the Facebook page for the The Cromer Reader was growing steadily if modestly by dozens each week while the actual stories on my site were amassing hundreds and sometimes thousands of ‘likes.’
That all began to change as the 2018 mid-terms rolled around and Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to going all out to support the progressive party line became much more visible across Facebook, as well as other popular platforms.
The first thing I noticed, in terms of The Cromer Reader, was a dramatic slowing of reads accumulated within a week or two of posting a new story or column. Instead of rolling up several hundred reads or even a thousand per day for a new piece, the traffic dropped by more than half, and even when I paid Facebook to promote a new post it delivered significantly less bang for the buck.
Just as mysterious was how my small site suddenly began to lose ‘follows’ with each successive new post, turning the trend over the previous two years completely on its head. I might still add a dozen new ‘follows’ with a new post, but suddenly lose 20 ‘follows’ for a total net loss of eight, thus being confronted with the same dynamic Coulter experienced on Twitter albeit on a vastly smaller scale: the more stories I posted, the more ‘follows’ I lost.
By the fateful year of 2020, I began to occasionally experiment with Facebook’s boost feature to test my theory that the platform was increasingly rigged, using some old stories that had previously been promoted on the platform without problem and sure enough discovered that more often than not the new promotions were rejected without explanation. Appeals also denied, with no explanation of how a post that had previously been fine to promote was now no longer eligible.
The latest surprise from Facebook came just a few weeks back, when I discovered that literally every single story, column and essay on The Cromer Reader (roughly 200+ pieces) had been stripped overnight of all their ‘likes.’ So, works of mine that had garnered anything from 50 ‘likes’ to more than 1,000 ‘likes’ now all have a goose egg. If you look around the site today, you’ll see stories that more than 30,000 people have read and until a few weeks ago had thousands of ‘likes’ but now, no mas. Tumble weeds in a ghost town.
How did that happen? Only the shadow knows.
And that’s perhaps the most glaring feature that’s now been consistent among large tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter for years: they keep users in the dark as to just how it works, what metrics are applied, what standards are considered when a post is run through the algorithm.
But it’s no mystery at all which way the program is weighted politically.
While extreme violence and explicit sex remains ubiquitous and unfiltered throughout many tech platforms, what should be the most protected form of speech—political perspectives and cultural critiques—are conversely the most targeted, restricted, limited and banned.
Want to post a video of a 400-person orgy or of a man raping a goat? No problem! Want to post some screen grabs from the latest cartel beheadings in Mexico? Go for it!
Want to post a column that makes the case that a man wearing a wig, sporting falsies and waltzing around in a dress declaring himself a woman is not a woman at all but rather just a man in a wig and a dress who’s either goofing, grifting or, if he believes it, mentally ill? Well, forget about it. That’s hate speech and it cannot be platformed, to use a term that the progressive Left has been suckling on for years now.
Any and all speech that progressives object to; be it spoken, written or captured on any medium from canvass to celluloid, must be attacked as ‘platforming hate.’ Further, progressives have insisted that even being challenged to defend their positions is a non-starter because debating would not only ‘platform hate’ but ‘legitimize’ now forbidden perspectives, arguments and positions.
And that brings me back to Ms. Hillary.
Ah, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Politically speaking, well, I suppose I have bigger regrets in my voting history.
In the Democratic presidential primary of 2008, I cast my ballot for then Senator Clinton, plus made a small investment in her campaign by buying a bunch of Hillary merch to festoon my house in Claremont with as a polite rejoinder to the sea of Obama signs, banners, bunting and illuminated dashboard Obama Jesuses that were popping up like mushrooms throughout my neighborhood in our quaint college town.
I had left the Democratic Party just over a year earlier, re-registering as ‘Decline to State’ (California’s very California way of saying ‘independent’) in protest over the party’s accelerating abandonment of the working class, its escalating contempt for white Americans, its elevation of criminal scumbags as revolutionary folk heroes and its orgasmic embrace of mass immigration that was designed to demographically relandscape the nation.
But supporting and voting for Hillary in the winter of 2008—in California the Democrats had an open primary allowing non-Democrats to cast their ballots in that race—wasn’t a difficult call for me.
The prospect of voting for a Republican in the presidential race was still a non-starter for me in 2008 and particularly a bloodthirsty neocon war pig like Sen. John McCain, who when he wasn’t taking bribes from the sleazy savings and loan baron Charles Keating was busy deriding Americans demanding to see the nation’s borders secured as: “The Crazies.”
Faced with the impressive if wholly unexpectedly potent challenge from a young backbencher in the Senate that was upending Clinton’s anticipated cakewalk to the nomination, Hillary pivoted to the white working-class voters that had long been the electoral backbone of the Democratic Party. She made sure voters got the point; she was sinking shots of Crown Royal whiskey at Bronko’s Lounge in Crown Point, Indiana, while Obama was in San Francisco taking checks from the effete liberals who never tired of looking down their noses at the rubes of flyover country.
It did not go unnoticed by working white Americans, particularly of the rural variety, when she rebuked Sen. Barack Obama for his characterizations of an embittered folk out in the hinterlands, where they clung to their guns and their God as dusk settled across their land.
Clinton comfortably swept Southern California and won the state, though the delegate split was tighter, and came tantalizingly close to securing the nomination that year, losing to Obama by just 41,622 votes out of the more than 35 million cast for the two of them, or 0.1%.
After Obama beat the feeble coward McCain with less effort than the Maître d’ employed at the Hanoi Hilton, where some of McCain’s fellow veteran alumni maintain he had an extended residency as a lounge singer known as ‘Golden Throat John’ that was beloved by the NVA troops he entertained, Hillary would go on to accept the plum second place award of Secretary of State and lay the ground work for her second coming.
But eight years later she would come up short again after turning on the very white working-class Americans that resuscitated her 2008 primary campaign, infamously disparaging them as a disposable band of deplorables. If Donald Trump’s resulting victory in 2016 destroyed Clinton’s life-long dream, it was old Joe Biden who would deliver her final political humiliation when his own campaign deftly defeated Trump’s reelection bid even while their severely cognitively impaired candidate rarely emerged from the basement and looked confused and sounded agitated when he did.
So, no one should have been surprised that it was a resentful Clinton who once again spoke the previously quiet part aloud and referred in earnest to the progressive priority of eliminating free speech and subsequently strangling the honest intellectual inquiry that unhindered discourse ultimately fosters.
The progressives that now effectively control the Democratic Party’s platform on domestic issues—from law enforcement policies to gender identity issues in schools and from mass immigration to racial preferences in hiring—have worked diligently to ensure that all voices not speaking in their Jonestown vernacular while proselytizing their Neo-Marxist narratives are silenced.
That’s what Hillary was really tipping her hat to the other day on CNN, acknowledging that “total control” was what’s at stake. Her chips are on the table and she’s all in.
As for me, well, I’m just fine doing my thing with The Cromer Reader, my sloop on the digital sea, sailing wherever I please and flying whatever flags I fancy, and happily feeling a little more like Osbourne Cox each day.
It’s actually quite liberating.
