You’ll be shocked to hear…

Everybody is out to get theirs. And for “our” side, it has always been thus. A critique of post-suit Alex Berenson.

When I was suspended from Twitter last week for a Tweet asserting that the Covid-19 vaccines weren’t really vaccines, as we’d long understood the term, and in fact were barely even therapeutics, my Twitter pal, Adam Baldwin, forwarded info about my suspension to Alex Berenson, who’d famously sued Twitter for issuing a permanent ban to his own account. Berenson, who was reinstated when Twitter settled the lawsuit (not only did discovery yield proof of a long suspected collaboration to control Covid messaging between our government and Big Tech, but between other journalists and Big Tech), had himself become untouchable by Twitter, and he’d taken to taunting Twitter censors by posting Covid takes that would get others suspended or even permanently banned. He did this, on occasion, to demand suspensions be lifted: if Berenson could post it, he reasoned, then the suspended account he was highlighting had been unfairly suspended.

In this way, Berenson could present himself as a hero to the cause of free speech — and a savior to the Twitter tormented.

— provided — and here’s the catch, as it’s become clear — it could benefit him.

I may not have been the first to say so, though I was certainly among the first, but after Berenson’s reinstatement — which gave Twitter cover to suggest it can and will right certain egregious wrongs — I noticed a dramatic uptick in suspensions of other vaccine skeptics, many of them prominent Covid treatment doctors or researchers, but nearly none who’d been “verified.”

Verification on Twitter is a coveted position: once verified, you’re given a checkmark, purportedly to show that you are who you claim to be. This, in turn, signifies your importance or prominence to Twitter users.

But as Twitter often suspends indefinitely any requests for verification, in reality, a Twitter checkmark is an anointing process; those with check marks are serious people — most often journalists, politicians, or celebrities — while the remaining dross floating through the Twittersphere represent the filthy masses, and as such, they can be suspended or banned with little pushback and with virtual impunity.

And here’s where Berenson came in: he could, by virtue of having hold of Twitter’s shorthairs, advocate for the immediate reinstatement of some wronged party. And he was successful! Twitter feared him!

But who did Twitter not fear? Any vaccine critic not in Berenson’s orbit, which they tested by increasing their suspensions and bans — then only reconsidering for reversal, in their “comprehensive review process,” those tapped by Berenson himself. In this way, Alex has become both hero and god, a martyr and a savior.

And that’s gotta be one helluva rush.

But something disturbing happened along the way: Berenson, while frequently highlighting his own power, which he’d grafted publicly to both his own beneficence and his championship of speech, began also to show a disdain for the speech of his lessers, or of those he deemed unsavory. For Berenson, eg., Alex Jones had his speech justifiably censored by major Big Tech platforms. Argued Berenson, Jones’ conspiracy mongering made his job more difficult — as if it was Jones’ obligation as a public figure since the early 1990s not to muddle the speech landscape for purveyors of Truth like Berenson was laying claim to.

The irony being that what differentiates Jones and Berenson is precisely the success of Berenson’s lawsuit: his reinstatement to Twitter is the objective correlative, in his mind, to his vindication: he is no longer a conspiracy theorist like the monstrous Mr Jones because Twitter was forced to suggest as much by reinstating him.

Does Twitter — along with our government censors — still consider him a conspiracy theorist? Most likely, yes. But his lawsuit protects him, while other lesser beings are still banned with impunity.

Disappointingly — at least to me — has been Berenson’s almost magisterial online countenance since he began feeling the Tiger blood flowing through the veins of his public persona. He now will routinely declare one Covid critic “conspiracy-minded,” as he has Naomi Wolf recently for her misreading of some contested miscarriage data, while presenting himself as the arbiter of what is legitimate questioning of Covid science and what is, conversely, the icky Alex Jones-like pressuring of the official State public health narrative.

The thing is, while Alex Jones has certainly been wrong about things, his willingness to question sanctioned narratives has given us insights into actual conspiracies being deployed against us. No one has been more out in front of the Great Reset, The 2030 Project, and the origins of climate alarmism, eg., than Jones. And yet for Berenson, a self-styled and now empowered voice on free speech, there should exist a deplatforning and unpersoning of certain types; and speech that makes his job more difficult, as he tells us, needs to be constrained or even fully censored.

That such a position now holds so much cultural cachet among even those themselves previously vanquished as unhinged nutters, is problematic.

And so when I emailed Alex the other day, noting my permanent Twitter ban for retweeting a post from a publication carrying no “misinformation” label — and in light of my follow-on Tweet in which I linked the literal counter argument to the first Tweet — I made the argument that I believed I was being targeted by Twitter.

Now, to be clear, I recognize that Berenson is a busy guy: his stock has clearly risen since his legal victory, and there are those like me who could certainly use his influence.

That being said, I knew when I sent my email to him (which you can read in a previous post) that I wouldn’t hear back.

I’d asked him only for information about his legal team. But I carried no checkmark, the currency of the realm — and indeed, no Twitter account, having been permanently suspended without any real review. So why on earth would Berenson pay me any mind?

In my email, I made the argument that “worse than outright censorship, in my view, is the censorship companies like Twitter, working in tandem with our government, condition us to engage in — namely, the necessity to self censor so as not to anger self-proclaimed speech gods. 

“A free republic cannot withstand such an assault wherein even those who are never openly persecuted are nevertheless being trained to surrender their individual autonomy. Free speech within a context of approved speech is not free in any meaningful sense. It’s fascism”.

I had written about this before on my old blog, protein wisdom, which — unlike my Twitter feed — at one point did carry the weight of a checkmark. In fact, PW was one of the most widely read blogs in the conservative / libertarian online space, and was a go to site on questions of language, hermeneutics, and how our understanding of such things form the basis for how our thought is structured.

In 2009, in a guest essay for Hot Air, I’d made a similar point in a very widely-read piece in which I argued the dangers of self-censorship some conservatives were promoting as a strategy to win over “moderates”:

“[…] even were Republicans to begin winning elections based on their newly found ability to negotiate a hostile media bent on misrepresenting them, they’d be compelled to maintain the practice of carefully parsing their words, which means they’d always be at the mercy of those looking to attack and discredit. And such has the effect both of chilling speech and of determining in what way a message must necessarily be delivered.

“When your opponents are making the rules, you are necessarily playing their game.

“To put it more forcefully, it is a fact of language that once you surrender the grounds for meaning to those who would presume to determine your meaning for you, you are at their mercy.”

As far back as I can remember, I’ve been warning about the dangers of ceding language to the left. And as far back as I can remember, we non-collectivists have continued to do so.

And this is because, in my opinion, we lack the ideological cohesion of the left, just as we lack its narrative discipline. In many ways, this speaks well of us: we are individuals with individual thoughts and arguments, making each of us less likely to be swept up into an emotionalist mob. We are independent minded. We aren’t intellectual lemmings.

Conversely, precisely because we aren’t collectivists, we seek as individuals to capitalize on our successes, and become protective of our advantages. In my experience — particularly on Twitter — the result is that the new age of 280 character influencers on the conservative side tend to mostly hang with their own: checkmarks retweet checkmarks; they carefully wield their kingmaking powers, only selectively engaging with randos who carry no significant currency for them to bank.

As a result, the conservative sphere of influence, perhaps perfectly, is a trickle down social economy. And in such economies, those doing the trickling have more power and influence than those being, well, trickled upon.

In 2005, while critiquing the growing power of identity politics, I wrote: “An obvious problem with the grievance aspect of identity politics is that the grievance needs to be perpetually maintained in order to justify the identity aspect of the politics.” In some ways, the same holds true for the maintenance of social or intellectual status: to remain relevant as a thinker and influencer, it becomes important to maintain an indispensable position on certain topics. To allow others in is to water down that power and make you individually more dispensable than you were before new voices gained purchase.

The contemporary conservative / classical liberal movement has a few warriors who care little about status and are far more concerned with outcomes.

From where I sit, though, those types are too few and far between. We can’t defeat the left without galvanizing around specific ideas and those who can best articulate them; and yet we may never find those who best articulate important ideas because we police the barriers to entry.

Of course, cream can always rise to the top on its own. Sometimes, though, we miss the cream rising because we’re constantly having our cups topped off in the 24/7 information cycle.

Twitter hasn’t gotten better because Alex Berenson had the financial backing to sue the company and win. That simply benefitted Alex Berenson, his speech, and the speech of those whose cause he chooses to champion. At least to this point.

For the rest of us it’s gotten even worse. And in the end, that’s what leftism and its mechanisms have always been about: creating and maintaining hierarchies.

When “winning” a battle on speech leads to our losing the war, perhaps it’s time to take stock of our stale, predictable battle plans.

Or maybe it’s time to adopt a fatalist’s calm, then go and quietly tend one’s own garden, knowing the power to change big things is largely illusory.