Online Censorship BACKFIRES On Democrats, Party Being FRACTURED By Far Left
Online Censorship BACKFIRES On Democrats, Party Being FRACTURED By Far Left. New reports from CNN and the NYTimes show us that the Democratic party base is actually fairly moderate and older yet for some reason the top Democratic 2020 hopefuls seem to be chasing after far left and social justice policy.The reason seems to be that social media censorship and bias is skewing the conversation so far to the left that politicians believe that the fringe far left minority make up a larger portion of their base. There is no better example than the Green New Deal and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While the Democrats aiming for 2020 almost entirely support the bill, the largest federation of labor unions denounced it and not ONE Democrat voted for it. In fact three Democrats voted against the Green New Deal.But it's a combination of the squeaky wheel getting the grease and censorship forcing the conversation to the far left that is fracturing the Democratic party. While many are scared to reject the regressive left orthodoxy others are being challenged by far left democrats aiming to remove them from office in a "primarying"While the bias against conservatives shows us surface level problems. It seems that the censorship may actually be backfiring on Democrats who continually call for censorship by skewing their perspective away from what mainstream Americans actually want.
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We've seen many videos of Twitter employees talking about their bias against conservatives.
There have been many stories where Facebook staffers reveal the platform is biased against conservatives.
Now on the surface, we get why this is bad.
You're restricting access to public discourse for only one political faction, and that skews public discourse to the far left.
But as we dig deeper, it seems like this might actually be backfiring on the left, or at least the Democratic Party, and may precipitate the Democratic Party's destruction.
Recently, many of the top 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls endorsed the Green New Deal.
But the largest federation of labor unions denounced it.
Where did that disconnect come from?
It seems like as the discourse shifts to the far left, many in media start repeating these lies, and Democratic politicians, thinking it's true, repeat it, and this ostracizes the Democratic base, which, according to news stories from the New York Times and CNN, are actually fairly moderate and working class.
It would seem like the Democrats are being manipulated into moving away from their own base.
Today, let's take a look at the latest stories from the New York Times and CNN, which may show us censorship is actually backfiring on the Democrats.
Now before we get started, I want to give a quick shout out to today's sponsor, Virtual Shield, who helps make this podcast possible.
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But now, back to the story.
The New York Times published very interesting data today.
This story.
The Democratic electorate on Twitter is not the Democratic electorate in real life.
A detailed look at the voters with the numbers to decide the 2020 Democratic nominee.
In their first visual, they show us, on social media, this is how Democrats behave.
We can see that there is a very large group of blue-colored people.
And they're saying things like stack the court, end the electoral college, impeach Trump, etc.
But a little bit more than half, it would seem, are gray.
They're not really saying much at all.
This is what Democrats think their base is like.
All of these conversations happening, they believe, represent the will of the Democratic Party.
But they're wrong.
The next graphic shows us reality.
The Democratic electorate off social media.
And progressive activists make up a tiny, tiny fraction of the entire group.
Other Democrats who are more moderate or conservative make up the overwhelming majority of the base.
This is going to present a problem for the Democrats as they chase after these blue votes.
Think about it.
Let's say the Democrats succeed in getting every one of these blue people to vote for them.
They will lose 80 plus percent of the actual Democratic base.
They go on to say Democrats who do not post political content to social media are more likely to identify themselves as moderates or conservatives, 53 percent of Democrats.
70 percent of Democrats that are not on social media say that political correctness is a problem.
But again, it skews on social media to only 48 percent.
It would seem that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is extremely active on social media, and this is convincing the Democratic Party that's who they need to chase after.
But it's just not true.
The New York Times shows us many more stats of other Democrats, how they're less likely to be white, less likely to be educated.
And less likely to say they've become more liberal.
There's a similar story over on CNN.
The Democratic electorate is older and more moderate, less educated than you think.
Listening to Joe Biden, you might come away with the sense that he is out of touch with the Democratic Party's electorate, which many believe is younger, further left, and better educated than it used to be.
Indeed, the party's voters may be all of these things.
But as HuffPost's Kevin Robillard wrote, that might not be a bad bet.
president seems to be making a bet that there are still plenty of older, more moderate and
less educated Democrats who can help him win the nomination.
That might not be a bad bet.
In one section, they say, "...Democratic Party voters are more moderate than very
liberal.
Whether it be the exit polls, Gallup or the Pew Research Center, there's no doubt Democrats
are more liberal than they once were."
In the exit polls, for example, the percentage of Democratic voters who identify as liberal rose by double digits between the Democratic midterm blowouts of 2006 and 2018.
Still, moderates and conservatives make up about 50% of all Democrats.
In the 2018 midterms, the exit polls found that moderates and conservatives made up about 54% of those who voted Democratic.
Pew similarly put moderate and conservative Democrats as 54% of all self-identified Democrats and independents who leaned Democratic voters in 2018.
Gallup's 2018 figures had moderates as 47% of all adults who self-identified as Democrats.
And they go on to say, while those numbers may be true, according to a Quinnipiac poll, people who identified as very liberal were only 19% of all Democrats and independents who lean Democratic.
But let's break out of the numbers and simplify this quite a bit.
The progressive wing of the Democratic Party are few and far between, at least relative to the moderates and the conservatives.
According to Hidden Tribes, the initial data we saw from the New York Times, it's about 8% of the U.S.
population that is progressive.
But they dominate the conversation on Twitter and other social media.
Because of this, we see the impact it has on journalism.
This story the other day from the Daily Wire.
Far-left activists, Democrats, media spread deceptively edited clip of Trump calling MS-13 gang members animals.
Now this is a specific story, but it exemplifies this phenomenon.
In this story, we can see that far-left activists inaccurately spread this video where Trump was talking about MS-13 but claimed he was talking about asylum seekers.
Kirsten Gillibrand then claimed that's the case.
Pete Buttigieg also played into this narrative.
David Hogg and Tom Perez, many people were acting as though this were true, even though the story is over a year old and was already hashed out.
We then see CNN's Anna Navarro making this similar false claim, and we see MSNBC's Joy Reid making this false claim.
People on social media are going to see those tweets, they're going to hear that story, and it's going to further radicalize them.
However, back over at the New York Times data, we see something very interesting.
In this section it says, Democrats who do not post political content to social media sites are more likely to...
Say they don't follow news much.
59% of other Democrats.
That means more than half of all people aren't following the fake news and they aren't hearing these lies about Donald Trump.
But what about the politically engaged Democrats who are watching the news, who are appearing on the news, who are active on Twitter to try and engage with their base?
They're not only hearing the lies, but they're engaging with them and repeating them as though they're true.
In a graph from Quartz, we can see the divide growing between Democrats and Republicans, but something really interesting happens from the 90s onward.
From 1970 until 90, we can see there was some overlap.
There were even Republicans more liberal than Democrats, and Democrats more conservative than Republicans.
But around 92, that split broke.
And over time, the median conservative moved slightly to the right.
However, The most conservative element has actually retracted a bit in recent time.
But look at what's happening to the Democrats.
There's a massive swing to the far left that wasn't seen even two years ago.
But now look, the median Democrat hasn't shifted.
It would seem that the politicians are chasing after this block over here on the left by endorsing things like the Green New Deal, even though zero people voted yes for it.
The median Democrat is staying where it is because there are still much, much more moderate and conservative Democrats who do not agree with the far left.
And Tom Perez, one of the people who repeated the lie about Trump, said this last year, Ocasio-Cortez represents the future of our party.
That may be true, but it's also possible this is based off of his skewed perspective as he repeats lies about Donald Trump on Twitter.
It seems like even Tom Perez, DNC chair, is out of touch with mainstream normal Democrats.
Beyond the regressive and far-left identitarians, Twitter has also created another phenomenon, Russia gators, a sect of the Democratic Party that are convinced there is a grand conspiracy and that Donald Trump or others in our government may be working for the Russians, something that people still will not let go.
Even though the Mueller report was submitted, a summary was released with a quote saying there's no evidence to suggest collusion or conspiracy.
I'm paraphrasing the quote.
But at this point, we are well beyond a reasonable doubt.
There is no collusion.
Yet you still have MSNBC pushing as hard as they can, entertaining this narrative.
It's not just the far-left democratic socialists or identitarian left.
It's also the fringe conspiracy Russiagators that are also fracturing the democratic base.
This point was brought up by Jon Favreau on Twitter.
He said, read the whole piece.
The outspoken group of Democratic-leaning voters on social media is outnumbered roughly two to one
by the more moderate, more diverse, and less educated group of Democrats who typically don't post political content
online.
Twitter has deeply, deeply warped our sense of political reality.
And remember, that's what is happening, not what should happen.
Political reporters should pay attention to this too, as I've seen analysis pieces that attempt to depict political reality based entirely on musings from activists and pundits on Twitter, as opposed to voters and organizations who aren't as online.
And yes, I do this too.
Now let's jump back to this graphic, and let me tie this back together.
As social media companies restrict access to conservatives on these platforms for their various ideas, it would seem like there are less conservatives to restrain this far-left group of Democrats that have entered the party.
We can see lies repeated unchecked as bubbles form.
And conservatives, facing the censorship, find other ways to coalesce around a set of ideals.
In fact, Fox News is a really good example of this.
There are very few large conservative outlets where conservatives can consume media.
They're not going to watch MSNBC for the most part, or CNN.
And then you look at the growth of sites like The Daily Wire, and conservatives are mostly getting their ideas and their news from the same space.
On the left, however, they're running wild on social media while conservatives aren't there to push back, and in fact, moderates aren't even really engaging.
Politicians and media then repeat these lies and are convinced they're saying the truth, when in reality, moderate Democrats are just being completely left behind.
And that's kind of how I felt for a long time.
I'm probably one of the rare, moderate, left-leaning individuals who is watching all this but willing to politically engage and speak up.
The far-left group on Twitter then tries to claim that moderate leftists, center leftists, are fringe-right or alt-right adjacent, and it's kind of weird.
When I go to hang out with my friends who are almost entirely former Bernie supporters and left-leaning, they're not engaging anymore.
They don't care.
They don't spend time on Twitter and they don't get into Twitter debates.
This is left to the most politically active, which, as long as these social media platforms are going to ban conservatives, will skew to the far left, because even moderates aren't allowed to engage in certain conversations.
The New York Times story says, This group's lower levels of news consumption mean fewer opportunities for the activist-backed candidates to make their case.
A majority of such voters might not even have an opinion about Mrs. Ocasio-Cortez.
Their weaker ideological predilections mean these voters are often less likely to buy the message even if it reaches them.
Of course, the Democratic Party has moved to the left in recent years.
It has moved far enough left that there's plenty of room for a progressive candidate to win the nomination.
It would be a mistake to dismiss Mr. Sanders' chance of winning the nomination just because white progressives have generally fallen short in the past.
The name recognition he earned in 2016 will be an asset that prior outsider candidates haven't been able to count on, and so will his impressive small donor fundraising.
But it would also be a mistake to assume that outrage on social media means outrage throughout the broader electorate.
And it would be a mistake to assume that more moderate Democrats are out of step with the party's electorate.
No, in fact, polls show us Democrats are moderate.
They're just not involved.
It is rare to see someone like me who would align with more moderate and center-left Democrats.
Not a big fan of the corporate Democrats, by the way.
Those super millionaires who somehow became millionaires in Congress.
Don't get me started.
But I lean slightly left, and I'm politically homeless.
Because in the mainstream discourse, moderate and conservative ideas are censored very often.
Feminists even get censored for their ideas on Twitter when they talk about things like trans ideology.
This then skews politics in a direction that does not represent America.
This is why in the past I've made the following prediction.
I think Trump will sweep 2020.
There's been more than enough economic models and predictions that Trump is set for a blowout in 2020.
But I think if we stay on this course, Democrats won't even be able to win in 2024.
We're seeing a civil war in the Democratic Party.
Moderate Democrats feuding with progressive Democrats because they are not aligned.
People like Ocasio-Cortez got elected through an exploit with only 16,000 votes in a district of over 750,000.
This does not represent America.
And so long as Democrats think it does, They're probably going to keep losing.
But let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
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