Fact-Checkers Are Information Cops for the Ruling Class

Politically inconvenient truths become morally disqualified facts when all that matters is ensuring elite rule in perpetuity and eternal supremacy of the Church of Progress™

Norah O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan of CBS News moderated the vice-presidential debate between Sen. JD Vance and Tim Walz | Brendan McDermid/Reuters

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We need to talk about last week’s vice presidential debate. Specifically, an exchange that occurred between J.D. Vance and regime hack Margaret Brennan, which, incredibly, is still being amplified by the Left as an example of why the modern Democrat is a morally and intellectually superior specimen, and why “fact-checkers” are essential to “civic health.”

The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum

Some brief background: In the run-up to the debate, CBS News announced to the rest of the media that its moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, would not “fact-check” or correct misstatements by one candidate or another in real-time, as they spoke. Per the Associated Press: “CBS said the onus will be on Vance and Walz to point out misstatements by the other, and that ‘the moderators will facilitate those opportunities’ during rebuttal time.”

A bold position to take, all things considered, but I was certainly happy to hear that CBS had instructed its moderators not to put their fingers on the scale.

And yet they still couldn’t help themselves. Margaret Brennan, beholden as she is to the impulsive hall monitor/morality police psyche that is all too common among self-styled champions of Our Democracy™, just had to try to fact-check Vance, and, in so doing, made a complete ass of herself because she was wrong and Vance was right.

The two VP candidates had been debating illegal immigration in the context of Springfield, Ohio, where Haitian illegals have economically migrated by the tens of thousands, overwhelming schools, hospitals, and shelters.

As Vance finished speaking, Margaret Brennan tried to end the segment with a jUsT tO cLaRiFy tag:

This was, for me at least, the most memorable part of the debate. My jaw dropped. Brennan flagrantly broke her network’s own rules in the most dishonest, partisan way possible; Vance not only called her out for it, but demonstrated a remarkable mastery of the federal immigration code and briskly, succinctly, lucidly refuted an incorrect broadside that he was told not to expect from the moderators; and then Brennan, sporting a revolting patrician smile, cut his mic off and had the gall to thank him “for describing the legal process,” as if Vance had simply reinforced her point.

Let’s be clear: What Vance was explaining is NOT legal. I’ve previously written about the CBP ONE app, which is a major Biden initiative to circumvent our immigration laws while hiding the ball. Basically, this administration decided that because the historic numbers associated with its welfare-incentivized voter importation scam were becoming a political problem, and because the numbers are based on apprehensions made by Border Patrol, the solution was to simply stop apprehending people.¹ By way of the CPB ONE app, illegals are simply paroled into the country despite the fact that the president’s parole authority is limited to allowing individuals in “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” Only Congress has the power to expand that authority, and yet Biden has gotten away with it through edict.

Migrant use the CBP ONE application in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, February 22, 20. | Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters

Using the app, migrants schedule their illegal entry into the country. Some come through the border ports, while others are flown in. All are given a work permit. The administration says that migrants using the app are “seeking to enter the United States lawfully through a U.S. port of entry,” but this is a lie. You don’t have the right to enter the United States simply because you show up at a port of entry. You must go to a consulate and get a visa. And as Rich Lowry notes, illegals who use the CPB ONE app aren’t counted as part of the illegal-immigration problem.

So yes, Vance was right.² But CBS did not issue any kind of post-debate correction, nor did any of our other venerable mainstream outlets.

It couldn’t be more obvious that far from being apolitical interventions conducted by social stewards concerned about the nation’s “cognitive infrastructure,” fact-checking is a wholly partisan exercise in service of the ruling party and left-wing interests. The practice is beloved by legacy media clowns like Margaret Brennan, Glenn Kessler, and Daniel Dale because it fortifies their bias with a veneer of authority, allows them to safeguard regime-friendly figures by caking their falsehoods with rich layers of propagandistic contextualizing, and serves as a tool to shape the contours of public debate in ways that advance left-wing agendas.

It’s absurd to think that members of our Lügenpresse, who so often seem to take a perverse pride in their ability to spout prodigious bullshit independent of shame, should be treated as dispassionately objective operatives seeking to purge the commons of untruths. When Margaret Brennan tried to undercut J.D. Vance on live television, it wasn’t out of some profound sense of civic duty; it was because she and her ilk have essentially been repurposed as Democratic Party compliance officers tasked with legitimizing the ruling ideology and ensuring that the parameters of thought and speech are limited to the propagation of Progress™. Their first and foremost responsibility is convincing the public that the progressive views of 10% of the country are actually the views of 90% of the country. As Jacob Siegel has written, a key driving force behind fact-checking is “the necessity of enforcing loyalty to progressive ideas that can’t survive on their own. Stripped of their specialized language and social and bureaucratic context, key articles of Progressive Church faith are repulsive to most ordinary voters, regardless of gender or race.”

And so pardon me if I have a hard time accepting bumptious Margaret Brennan’s erroneous fact-check was due to ignorance rather than a deeply held conviction that, as an educated member of America’s illustrious journalist class, she’s obligated to prevent J.D. Vance from sharing information unfit for plebian consumption because it will lead to changes in belief and behavior that are “bad.”

This haughty diagnosis of ordinary Americans as sheep in need of shepherds is endemic among the mainstream press and the unimpeachable vanguard of left-leaning intellectuals who predominantly make up today’s ruling caste. As Matt Taibbi has often pointed out, “there are no working class censors.” This is particularly noteworthy because political attitudes/ideological orientation have displaced consumption patterns as the principal way that people signal class sensibility. Our noble fact-checkers and “disinformation experts” are overwhelmingly cut from the same cloth: progressive-minded managerial elites who believe themselves to be a kind of infallible “elect” endowed with the divine right to determine what you should think and believe, all of whom are convinced that their providential destiny justifies ongoing efforts to manipulate public perception (for totally altruistic reasons, of course), which they try to accomplish through both the selective deployment of propaganda that buttresses officially sanctioned narratives and outright deception.³

These people genuinely consider the layfolk polluted specimens infected by that most toxic byproduct of modernity: unfettered speech. If only the contemptible, hapless, benighted masses — the bumpkins, the chuds, the rubes, the heartland hicks — would just shut up and come to grips with the fact that they’re too thick to know what’s good for them, too thick to understand that being morally right is more important than being factually right, too thick to realize that the First Amendment and Bill of Rights have been rendered quaint and inoperative by a high-speed info-sphere in which bad ideas can lead to “epistemic and moral deficiencies” metastasizing among the public.

What it really comes down to is the cataclysmic expansion of information and communication technology introduced by the internet, which has resulted in the rapid dissolution of institutional authority and elite power. The digital big bang’s information tsunami greatly diminished the authoritative aura of previously select sources. Elites went from enjoying what might as well have been a monopoly on a relatively tiny info-sphere to finding themselves smack dab in the middle of an epistemic free-for-all in which humble peasants like yours truly can use the new digital participatory culture to highlight their failures and incompetencies.⁴

Narrative control through the gatekeeping of contemporaneous information has always been essential to ruling class power. But thanks to the internet, authoritative institutions no longer play an intermediary role in the way citizens receive and process information, and new communication channels allow for competing narratives to emerge. It goes without saying that an American psychosphere where the layfolk can rally around one another on digital participatory mediums and challenge institutional authority has not been a favorable development for elites. When government officials and bureaucrats and the media and the intelligentsia lost their vice grip on society’s knowledge pipeline, their claim to power was dealt a near-fatal blow. They’re no longer perceived as prophetic and in command.

With the previously established order and its grand hierarchies thrown into chaos, an anti-democratic reaction began to emerge among professional managerial class (PMC) types. The election of Donald Trump intensified that reaction tenfold. As N.S. Lyons has brilliantly detailed, these people “went into a frenzy over the danger allegedly presented by ‘populism’ and launched their own revolt, declaring a Schmittian state of exception in which all the standard rules and norms of democratic politics could be suspended in order to respond to this existential ‘crisis.’ In fact, some began to question whether democracy itself might have to be suspended in order to save it.” The result has been not only an “abrupt U-turn on the value of free speech and deliberative democracy” among America’s elites, but the “replacement of old order classical liberalism with an open embrace of total technocratic managerialism.”

Mass managerial regimes depend on narrative hegemony for power. Which is why the Censorship Industrial Complex (CIC) was created without the public’s knowledge. The censorious patricians responsible for this have tried to explain away such a repressive authoritarian apparatus by framing it in vaguely salvationist terms—basically, in order to protect Our Democracy™ the public must be saved from itself, and this can only be done by reshaping Americans’ informational context and helping them make “informed” decisions. In reality, the goal is to combat the scourge of populism empowered by the internet, resurrect the hierarchies of knowledge, and restore regime-friendly “experts” to their rightful role as Truth Oracles so that they can correct the untutored preferences of the masses and ensure dissemination of proper facts.

Maybe I’m imagining it, but I sense the PMC-driven censorship-of-the-many-under-the-aegis-of-the-few crusade is becoming outright malevolent, as if the regime has turned inward and the federal government is playing the role of an increasingly paranoid colonial administration that’s alienated from and hostile to the local population. There’s been a social engineering vibe to mainstream media coverage over the past few years, with more and more outlets and publications subordinating ethical considerations to the overriding imperative of ensuring that only the right kind of people rule the country—an endeavor that requires collectively fabricating a false reality so that the hoi polloi come to the correct political conclusions. This, combined with the Soviet glee club let-the-masses-eat-joy Kamala Harris campaign, makes it feel as though the upcoming election is a final offer to peaceably manufacture “consensus,” which if rejected will result in a variety of new, brazenly repressive measures meant to legitimize authority, along with the creation of artificial conditions that the regime will use to justify ruling in a state of exception because it cannot accomplish what it wants within the commonly understood confines of a constitutional republic.

1. Note well that the term “apprehended” means nothing because the vast, vast majority of illegals encountered at the border are released into the country despite the fact that federal law mandates detention until the conclusion of their legal proceedings. The awareness of the likelihood of being released is what’s driving the hordes to the border. This administration has even explicitly undermined Border Patrol, ordering agents to focus on transporting and processing migrants rather than policing the border. In other words, Border Patrol has effectively been turned into a busing and administrative service because Democrats have rebranded “illegal immigration” as “asylum seeking.”

2. To understand why and how so many Haitian illegals ended up in Springfield, Ohio, I recommend this excellent IM-1776 piece. Christopher Rufo also has a new City Journal article out about how the same thing has happened to Charleroi, Pennsylvania.

3. Any degree of success can be attributed to Democrats controlling what Curtis Yarvin calls “The Cathedral”—prestige media and academic institutions that collectively define and enforce in cultural and moral terms what counts as truth and lies, acceptable and unacceptable positions, with those distinctions sliding inexorably in a leftward direction over time. Propaganda is laundered through and ratified by these “sense-making institutions” and becomes a sort of distributed knowledge.

4. No book does a better job of explaining this than The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri.