No Gods, No Masters
Our new media landscape is the wild west. Should we really be pinning a sheriff’s badge on anyone?
by Walter Foley / photos by Ford Fischer
This article originally appeared in RQ Vol. 2 // Issue Four: RENAISSANCE, Spring 2021. Purchase a copy and subscribe to the magazine here.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” — Michael Crichton
“To expose your brain to modern information systems without a full suite of epistemic skills is like walking into the infectious diseases wing of a hospital without a hazmat suit, and licking all the doorknobs.” — Someone on Reddit
On July 4, 2020, Ford Fischer filmed a rally near the Capitol in Richmond, Virginia, where around 200 people were protesting gun-control laws as well as police violence.1 Armed Black Lives Matter protesters marched alongside a group of Boogaloo Bois—a loosely organized anti-government movement identifiable by its members’ mixture of Hawaiian shirts and combat gear.
Fischer has been filming single-shot, unedited footage of protests all over the U.S.—left-wing and right-wing; pro-police and anti-police—while streaming it to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube simultaneously. Raw footage, he believes, can be used to hold high-profile news outlets accountable if they edit something out of context.
“My philosophy is: When you convert anything into any kind of medium, it essentially becomes fiction,” Fischer, 26, told me over a video call in January. “You have to acknowledge that, and then you should try to use your medium to subvert the fictionalizing element of [the] medium.”
Among the protesters’ signs and within the filmed conversations are mentions of Breonna Taylor and Duncan Lemp—a black woman and a white man who were killed in separate police raids under similar circumstances.
This is exactly the sort of multilayered, complex situation Fischer hopes to capture. This is not a simple narrative: The chapter of BLM that attended this rally—Black Lives Matter 757—is sometimes disavowed by others, likely for marching with firearms and allying themselves with groups like the Boogaloos. The Boogaloo movement is also multifaceted and fractured: If you’ve heard of it through legacy media, you might assume it’s strictly a far-right group with white supremacist leanings. They are sometimes mistaken for the Proud Boys, the group that Donald Trump advised to “stand back and stand by.”
Fischer has met many Boogaloos, and he believes they are too decentralized to be described as one thing. The Boogaloo worldview that one might encounter online—the version most likely to be studied by academics researching hate groups—indeed often does ally itself with racist ideology.
“When you convert anything into any kind of medium, it essentially becomes fiction.”
— Ford Fischer
A militia group known as the Not Fucking Around Coalition forms a perimeter after an accidental firearm discharge in Louisville last July.
But the Boogaloos who attend street protests often have their own ethos: They’re essentially hardcore libertarians, socially progressive, anti-tax, and usually anti-Trump, Fischer said. Some express support for LGBTQ inclusion, and many espouse solidarity with Black Lives Matter. The movement’s non-cohesive nature has also been observed by JJ MacNab, a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.2
At one point in Fischer’s July 4 footage, a smaller, unaffiliated group—the Propertarians—are seen giving speeches with thinly veiled white nationalist themes regarding “our people,” “our civilization,” “our heritage.”
This prompts the Boogaloos and BLM activists to lead the crowd in a chant of, “White supremacy sucks!”
This was a deeply complicated, subversive, and, at times, beautiful event. Was it a kumbaya moment? A ruse? Something else?
In the most charitable interpretation, the footage shows a fringe militia group clearly and publicly rejecting racial identitarianism. But even in the most mundane interpretation, the footage can be seen as a human-interest piece quite a few notches above “squirrel rides miniature waterski.”
So, where was the press?
“Fox News was there. … I don’t think they ended up using any of their footage from that event,” Fischer said. “But what was more interesting to me was there was a local CBS outlet in Richmond that showed up, and my estimation is they were there for maybe 20 minutes out of the two hours.”
CBS’ coverage of the event amounts to a minute-long clip that bears little resemblance to what Fischer recorded at length.3 The news anchor describes it only as a pro-gun rally, with no reference to anti-police-brutality messaging, and no reference to participation from pro-gun Black Lives Matter activists. During CBS’ closing segment, the camera focuses on one BLM activist, standing on a structure with his fist in the air. The voiceover says, “A group of counter-protesters also showed up, as you can see, but nothing really developed beyond a brief, verbal exchange.”
Fischer’s much longer video, however, makes it clear that the Boogaloos were expressing support for this activist. The group that caused the most tension at the event were the far-right Propertarians, who were ridiculed by many at the rally. But CBS seemed unable or unwilling to differentiate them from the Boogaloos.
How could CBS have reported this so poorly?
Right-wing groups gather to preserve a Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, GA, in August.
“At absolute best, they could say, ‘We only showed up for 20 minutes, and we literally didn’t realize what we were filming. We thought it was a counter-protester, and so we weren’t lying,’” Fischer said. “Or, at worst, they literally just lied, either because it would be a more interesting or convincing narrative, or just because it was simple. ... ‘Let’s just describe Black Lives Matter as counter-protesters, then we can close the book on that.’”
CBS’ coverage of the event has remained on YouTube without issue. Fischer’s livestream recording, however, was removed entirely, and his shorter compilations from the event were only allowed back on the site after he reuploaded them with a content warning.
He has been in a constant battle with YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, who have often pulled his videos or outright banned him, yet his work is demonstrably valuable to the larger media landscape. His footage of the 2017 Unite the Right rally was used in the Emmy-winning PBS special “Documenting Hate: Charlottesville,” as well as in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, and his shots from the Conservative Political Action Conference appeared in the second Borat movie. He also served as consulting producer for a new Frontline special called “American Insurrection,” his fifth contribution to the program.4 Nevertheless, his YouTube channel has been demonetized multiple times—meaning he could no longer earn revenue through advertisements—making him reliant on funding through Patreon, a crowdfunding platform that also has a history of sanctioning users for their political beliefs.5 Often his social media accounts are restored after he issues public complaints, but he is rarely given a clear explanation of what rules he’d broken.
Fischer thinks this issue is primarily caused by: 1) Faulty automated moderation, and 2) Lazy, incompetent, or politically biased human moderators. Neither category is equipped to understand the historical necessity of recording the often abhorrent aspects of the political fringes.
No Gatekeepers Here
Trust in news media is abysmally low,6 and why wouldn’t it be? Many of us can easily name instances of breathtaking incompetence from legacy media outlets, which seem to have lost their way amid budget cuts that have removed investigative journalists and copy editors,7 a trend that has accelerated during the pandemic.8 We’re now faced with clickbait and endless thinkpieces analyzing the day’s social media regurgitations, often from a handful of high-profile people who all seem to live in NYC or DC.
For the latter half of the 20th century, news media was supported by an advertisement model, which relies on capturing one’s attention. Corporate consolidation of news media—which began in the Reagan administration and amped up after Clinton’s 1996 Telecommunications Act—pushed this model toward sensationalism and hyperpartisanship. Few would be surprised to learn that 93 percent of people who get their information from Fox News are aligned with the Republican Party; perhaps less widely known is that blue-state media is now nearly identical in its conformity: 91 percent of New York Times readers and 95 percent of MSNBC viewers align with the Democratic Party.9
Larry Platt has spent most of his career working at publications that relied on advertisements and newsstand sales, but had something of an awakening when he was about to turn 50 and serving as editor of the now-defunct Philadelphia Daily News.
“The job became—at least twice a week—putting an unflattering photo of Eagles then-coach Andy Reid on the cover with some double entendre coverline about his weight,” Platt told me, “and then sending it immediately to Angelo Cataldi at WIP—this sports talk-show yak-a-thon—so that he could talk about it at 7 a.m., so that by the time I got into the office at 10 a.m. for our morning meeting, I had a report on our clicks.”
Platt now serves as co-executive director of The Philadelphia Citizen, which hopes to garner readers’ trust by being transparent about its funding from corporate sponsors and foundations through its nonprofit status. Large corporate donors, such as Comcast, will be acknowledged as such in articles that comment on the telecommunications giant, he said. Wealthy individual donors who also sit on the Board of the Citizen, such as the attorney Ajay Raju, are made to sign a “non-interference pledge.”
Although all funding models have their faults, Platt believes the nonprofit model allows the Citizen to approach “mission-driven” media and eschew the “myth of objectivity.”
[Fischer] has been in a constant battle with YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, who have often pulled his videos or outright banned him, yet his work is demonstrably valuable to the larger media landscape.
“We are fair but not objective,” he said. “So that makes this whole issue part of the public discourse. So, rather than pretend that we’re offering some omniscient narrative of objective truth, this discussion about who we are and what we believe is front and center. And I think, in my experience, that enhances credibility. Readers are not necessarily as opposed to bias as they are annoyed by the bullshit denial of it.”
Another media model has emerged over the past two decades: With the rise of alternative, independent voices within the online realm—first with blogs, then with podcasts, YouTube commentary, and email newsletters—we see individuals and small enterprises raising funds directly from their audiences. This subscriber-based model is useful in that it gives voice to those challenging the status quo, but it has its own market-based pitfalls, often incentivizing the development of isolated narratives. It is vulnerable to “audience capture,” wherein subscribers demand that their favorite content producers stay within the worldview that made them popular.
Crucially, both the advertisement model and the subscriber model tend to feed one of our most intense, ancient emotions: outrage.10
As media companies hook their audiences with in-group bias—and in turn amplify out-group hatred—they unwittingly create market niches within the free-for-all of self-publishing. This niche is filled by the outlets that people flock to when they realize they’re being played: On the positive side is the emergence of transgressive voices who criticize and correct the sensationalism of the dominant media sphere. On the negative side is the ever-more embellished commentary from unedited, unaccountable wingnuts.
We’re asking quite a lot from people if we expect them to navigate this space. Who has time to develop and consistently hone their epistemic toolkit during a period of exponential informational output? Most people with jobs and families would probably prefer to have a small number of trusted outlets where they can establish a baseline sense of reality, and then move on to the more important business of living. Establishing this baseline reality was, for a mere blip of history, thought to be the job of newspapers and broadcast journalism.
“Clearly the gatekeeping by traditional journalism has failed, because people have gone outside the industry and created their own channels to voice their opinions as to what’s news. And so The New York Times has no control over QAnon, [which] now has a channel that it didn’t have ten years ago,” said Jeffrey M. Berry of Tufts University, co-author of the 2014 book The Outrage Industry. He believes traditional journalistic outlets still offer the best-available account of the truth. “I also think some of the popularity—a lot of the popularity—of nontraditional media is not because people want to read hard-hitting investigative journalism by Glenn Greenwald, but because they’re lazy, and they don’t want to bother reading The New York Times every morning. It’s a lot easier to read a few tweets and Facebook posts.”
Keep the Customer Satisfied
Widespread loss of trust in institutions isn’t just an American phenomenon. Wherever there are internet connections, you’ll find frustrated truth seekers. But their primary arena in which to work, social media, is full of its own hazards.
Crucially, both the advertisement model and the subscriber model tend to feed one of our most intense, ancient emotions: outrage.
“The internet tends to cultivate and encourage a consumer identity and a consumer mindset about creators,” said Angie Speaks (her online alias). The 27-year-old Londoner makes longform video essays from a Marxist/leftist perspective on her YouTube channel and co-hosts a podcast called Low Society. “So I’m a product, and the people who are watching me are the consumers. And, you know, the customer is always right within this neoliberal framework.”
The biggest obstacles for such commentators involve the economic models of their hosting platforms—YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc.—and the behaviors they incentivize, which play to in-group bias and obsessive behavior.11
Angie Speaks collects donations through Patreon, where more than 300 people contribute a little over $1,000 per month. While the subscriber model can give people like her an avenue to share their messages, most such creators can’t make a living this way. Many are also turned off by the accompanying market forces, which result in social dynamics that creative people tend to find constraining.
“You’re really supposed to carve out your own little fiefdom, in a way,” she said. “There’s a punitive aspect to the discourse as well: If you fail to validate, if you fail to kowtow to the specific demographic or milieu that you’ve entered into, you’re often subject to things like harassment, bullying, pile-ons, hate campaigns. So it makes it incredibly difficult to cultivate real political discourse that’s rooted in intellectual curiosity and exploration.”
When Angie Speaks began posting commentary a few years ago, she was quickly noticed within the leftist/socialist YouTube culture known as BreadTube (a reference to the 1892 book The Conquest of Bread by Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin). But she wanted to voice a more class-based critique, as opposed to the identity-centered framework that has become dominant in many left-of-center spaces. This latter worldview contains elements of intersectionality, critical race theory, and third-wave feminism—“woke” is the colloquial term, now often used as a pejorative by critics. She soon became exposed to fierce in-fighting among online leftists, which can be broadly summarized as “people who want to focus on economics and redistribution” vs. “people who want to focus on race and gender identity.”
“Class reductionist” is a term often used to deride people within Angie Speaks’ political sphere,12 one of many accusations that in effect stifles debate and dismisses widely held criticisms of corporatism and economic exploitation.
She is also increasingly concerned about a censorious culture emerging from Silicon Valley. It’s well known that the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol resulted in widespread purging of far-right/fringe-conspiracy social media accounts, but much less publicized is the purging of leftists—often the ones who argue for radical wealth redistribution and against militarism.13 In Philadelphia, socialist activist Akin Olla was recently unable to communicate through Facebook for ten days, with no explanation from the platform as to why he was silenced.14
Angie Speaks believes that liberals have been conditioned during the past four years to embrace censorship in the name of fighting Trumpism and related movements—only to sacrifice their civil liberties in the process.
“It’s very easy for them to pose this ridiculous ideology like QAnon or any of those other things,” she said. “It’s almost like a Trojan horse to introduce more forms of censorship in more places. It’s a way of squashing all political dissent and labeling all political dissent as dangerous, or as rooted in bigotry, or as rooted in disinformation. … All forms of political dissent are now lumped under this wide umbrella of the ever-expanding category of the ‘basket of deplorables.’ That’s something that I find terrifying.”
Another reason why class-based politics have failed to gain traction, she believes, is because leftists tend to be unversed in the language of spirituality, symbolism, and ritual, all of which can motivate people to see their shared interests.
“The reasons why the right—and elements of the far-right—become so attractive is because they’re very good at telling stories. And, humans, we absolutely love a good story,” said Angie Speaks, who is an eclectic neo-pagan. Her practice involves a blend of traditional African spirituality with occultism from the British Isles, reflecting her homelands by ancestry and birth, respectively. “We’re also animated by ideals and symbols. And it’s a power that the left has surrendered and has viewed with suspicion. … The contingency of the left that hates and despises anything that’s tied to any traditional or historical throughline is incredibly loud and incredibly powerful.”
Many have argued in recent years that the left seems to have adopted identity politics as an ultimately unfulfilling new religion, complete with purity tests and scapegoating rituals.15 This will be one of the dynamics explored by Australian filmmaker Mike Nayna in his upcoming feature about how political movements interact with the online ecosystem. He’s released a number of short films on YouTube about the type of left-identitarianism that has garnered attention at campus protests and within corporate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” training sessions.
“I see many level-headed people with one foot in it, and others playing apologetics on its behalf from the outside,” Nayna, 36, wrote to me in an email. “But if you investigate the more extreme corners of the movement, you’ll find a growing subset of people that behave in an unmistakably fundamentalist way.”
Nayna adds something like a gonzo element to his films, inserting himself into the story and rejecting the previous era’s “view from nowhere” attempt at objectivity. Through the lens of a drunken confrontation he filmed on a crowded bus in 2012, Nayna explains in his first film, Digilante, the bizarre ways in which professional and amateur media commentators spin content into something unrecognizable and often combative in the hopes of going viral.
He plans to explore the ethical and epistemic implications of his rejection of the conventional approach in his upcoming film.
“If I had to get analytical about it I’d say I see myself as a storytelling device,” he said. “I’m the perspective from which the chaotic events can be strung together and made sense of. As I make sense of it, the audience can, too.”
Ford Fischer photo remix courtesy Michael Wohlberg.
The Big Tech Raid on Free Speech
Henri Mattila, 27, publishes the Philadelphia-based online magazine Merion West, which derives most of its profit through ads. Having been previously accepted into Google News, Mattila thought that his outlet had reached a point at which it was considered legitimate in the eyes of the tech giant. But his team noticed a drop in web traffic in May 2020, and has yet to receive a clear answer from Google—which, notably, also owns YouTube—as to why his site was being demoted in the search rankings.
“It’s just a guessing game, frankly,” he said, “talking to other publishers and website owners out there in the world, asking, ‘Hey, how was your traffic affected? Did you notice your traffic go down?’”
Merion West’s primary niche is to publish opinionated essays from a wide range of political philosophies—from socialist to capitalist; rationalist to anti-Enlightenment—though it doesn’t publish anything that Mattila or Editor Erich J. Prince consider to be hateful or otherwise outside the scope of reasonable public discourse. Mattila suspects that his site’s inclusion of conservative opinions resulted in its categorization alongside right-wing outlets such as The Federalist, which experienced a similar downturn in Google traffic during the same period.
“The question is, then, is it even right for Google to start delisting conservative opinions?” Mattila said. “I don’t know. It’s a private company; they can do whatever they want. But since they have this monopoly status, and its users don’t even know that they’re manipulating results, I think it’s probably not good for free discourse and the freedom of speech ideals that we, in theory, hold so dear in the country. ... It’s very, very random and incredibly secretive how the search algorithm functions.”
Albert Eisenberg, 30, publisher of the conservative/libertarian outlet Broad + Liberty in Philadelphia, is worried about what might happen if progressives and conservatives are forced into separate online realms, where their fringiest elements can fester.
“That’s the folly of what Twitter and Facebook and everybody else is doing,” Eisenberg told me. “You’re going to drive people off onto our own platforms. ... And the same is happening on the left, especially the far-left. It’s a short-term solution to try to stamp out thought you don’t like; it’s just going to drive it underground, and I think it’s going to get uglier.”
Eisenberg thinks conservatives in this majority-blue city need to form their own alternatives to compete against both violent far-right movements and legacy media outlets, the latter of which he believes function primarily to echo the opinions of government officials and shut out countering viewpoints.
“Every step of the way we need to game out, ‘Okay, what’s the cat-and-mouse?’” he said. “How are they going to catch us next and suppress us? What’s the social pressure they’re going to be applying?”
In the wake of Silicon Valley’s emboldened censoriousness following the Capitol riot, we must now confront the common assertion that, “They’re private companies; they can do whatever they want.”
“All forms of political dissent are now lumped under this wide umbrella of the ever-expanding category of the ‘basket of deplorables,’ that’s something that I find terrifying.”
— Angie Speaks
There is relevant legal precedent on this topic. The director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, Ben Wizner, recently stated that, “While the First Amendment does not apply to voluntary choices made by a private company about what speech to allow or prohibit, it does bar the U.S. government from coercing or threatening companies to censor.”16 Glenn Greenwald is a former attorney who now writes about civil liberties and surveillance issues; he’s also one of the founding editors of The Intercept, which he left after ascertaining that his voice was not free there. He has argued that this year’s congressional hearings involving Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and Sundar Pichai (Google) indicate that the coercion Wizner describes is already being applied and approaches First Amendment infringement.
This isn’t to say that Big Tech should never be scrutinized by the government. It’s rather to highlight the fact that our government is finding new avenues to restrict speech that it doesn’t like, and it wishes to seize some of Big Tech’s emotional-manipulation infrastructure to do so.
“Using a combination of statutory inducements and regulatory threats, Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution,” wrote Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld, a tech entrepreneur and a constitutional scholar at Yale Law School, respectively.17
The difficult task we face is in liberating ourselves from both sorts of coercion: the market forces that have learned best how to steal our attention on social media, as well as the federal forces that wish to limit our scope of reality as a means of preventing an uprising while maximizing GDP.
The View from Nowhere
On Jan. 6, Ford Fischer filmed Trump’s now infamous speech in DC, which is said to be a key moment in inciting violence at the Capitol. Rather than fix his camera on the podium, Fischer spent much of the 75-minute shot focusing on the audience, in order to capture their reactions to Trump’s words.18
He considers this footage—which was, once again, blocked by YouTube for a period—to be historic, offering important insight into the event that prompted Trump’s second impeachment trial. Who were these people? What did they want? Which parts of the speech caused what sorts of energy?
No matter your political tribe, the video will show you what you want to see.
I have some friends and family who support Trump, and to me the footage is fairly benign and boring. There are a lot of variations on the American flag, one of which depicts Trump as Rambo; another is tattered and upside-down. The next most popular flags are of the dark-blue “Trump/Pence” variety, along with the common yellow “Don’t Tread on Me.” Nobody is frothing at the mouth, and although there is some military imagery, I don’t see any actual weapons. Somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of attendees are wearing masks. Trump bloviates, and the crowd cheers when he flatters them, as well as when he makes fun of the media, the Clintons, and “weak Republicans.” He lists many events that he claims amount to election fraud, each one later deemed nonsense by the relevant authorities.19 The crowd really liked when he used the word “bullshit,” so they started chanting it. He tells them that it’s time to march toward the Capitol, but he says to do it peacefully. There is a mediocre response when he calls Biden an “illegitimate president.”
It looks stupid, and I’m glad I wasn’t invited. But what the hell was this thing?
It seems unfair to characterize the Capitol riot as rooted primarily in fascism or authoritarianism when a significant number of those involved oppose government and police. This is one important hypothesis as to why the Jan. 6 attack was handled so poorly by security forces: They weren’t prepared for a right-wing crowd that would physically assault someone in uniform; they had been primed to believe that it was only the Antifa crowd that hurls objects at law enforcement.
It also seems unfair to characterize the Capitol riot as a unique problem among conservatives. Government buildings in Portland were subjected to repeated attacks from left-leaning groups for the better part of a year while local law enforcement was often given orders to stand down.20
Terrifying things happen when our sense of reality is upended and abused, and when it’s kept from us by unaccountable, powerful forces.
Trump supporters breach barriers and climb toward the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
It’s illuminating to recall which sorts of media you turned to on Jan. 6 to find out what was going on. Was it talk radio? Podcasts? Legacy media? Reddit forums? An eccentric acquaintance who seems to have a strong grasp on this sort of thing?
Commentators rushed to compare it to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Arnold Schwarzenegger likened it to Kristallnacht; Anderson Cooper said it reminded him of the Rwandan genocide.
None of these comparisons seem accurate or even ethical. The event was ugly, strange, frightening, and—yes, during some isolated moments—funny. Some of the rioters, upon entering the building, seemed bewildered as to how they were getting away with it. There is video of some of them strolling in an orderly fashion between the velvet ropes of the walkway, as if unaware of the many laws they had already broken to get inside.
While this turned indisputably into a violent riot led by jackasses, a few key details have been challenged in the fallout. Although many referred to it as an “armed insurrection,” there have been surprisingly few firearms charges connected to the riot, and the only shots fired in the Capitol were from police. And there were no known “assassination” teams among the protesters, despite widely circulated claims.21
Yet Jan. 6 was a terrifying day—just not for the reasons hyped by corporate media.
Rather, terrifying things happen when our sense of reality is upended and abused, and when it’s kept from us by unaccountable, powerful forces. Our narratives carry emotional weight. We shouldn’t be surprised when people, no matter their political affiliation, become scared or hostile in the face of aggressive manipulation. We shouldn’t be surprised when we see confused, frightened citizens—who have nothing to lose—scrambling up the walls of the power structure, desperately searching for a story or a savior amid chaos.
1 “Armed ‘Boogaloo’ and BLM Activists Join for Rally Against Police Violence and Gun Control in Richmond.” Ford Fischer, News2Share, July 4, 2020
2 “Assessing the Threat from Accelerationists and Militia Extremists.” Committee on Homeland Security, homeland.house.gov, July 16, 2020
3 “Group Protests Virginia’s New Gun Laws.” WTVR CBS 6, YouTube, July 4, 2020.
5 “A Top Patreon Creator Deleted His Account, Accusing the Crowdfunding Membership Platform of ‘Political Bias’ After It Purged Conservative Accounts It Said Were Associated with Hate Groups.” Business Insider, Dec. 17, 2018
6 “Confidence in Institutions.” Gallup, 2020; “Media Trust Hits New Low.” Axios, Jan. 21, 2021
7 “Newsroom Employment at U.S. Newspapers Dropped by 51% Between 2008 and 2019.” Pew Research Center, April 17, 2020
8 “Here are the Newsroom Layoffs, Furloughs, and Closures Caused by the Coronavirus.” Kristen Hare, Poynter, Feb. 10, 2021
9 “U.S. Adults Who Name Fox News or MSNBC as Their Main Political News Source are Equally Partisan.” Pew Research Center, March 31, 2020
10 Hate, Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another. Matt Taibbi, OR Books, 2019
11 Center for Humane Technology
12 “A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk About Race. It Ignited a Fury.” Michael Powell, The New York Times, Aug. 18, 2020
13 “The Left Should Oppose Censorship by Big Tech Companies.” Ben Burgis, Jacobin, Jan. 28, 2021
14 “Facebook Restricted a West Philly Activist as it Grappled with Fallout from the Capitol Riots.” Christian Hetrick, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 2, 2021
15 The Elect: The Threat to a Progressive America from Anti-Black Antiracists. “Chapter Two: The New Religion,” John McWhorter, Feb. 23, 2021
16 “Congress Escalates Pressure on Tech Giants to Censor More, Threatening the First Amendment.” Glenn Greenwald, Feb. 20, 2021
17 “Save the Constitution from Big Tech,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 11, 2021
18 “Crowd Reacts to Trump January 6 Speech Ahead of Capitol Insurgency - Includes New Warning.” News2Share, YouTube, Feb. 6, 2021
19 “Trump’s Falsehood-Filled ‘Save America’ Rally.” FactCheck.org, Jan. 6, 2021
20 “Dispatches from Portland,” Nancy Rommelmann
21 “Federal Official Walks Back Allegation Rioters Intended to ‘Capture and Assassinate.’” NBC News, Jan. 15, 2021
This article originally appeared in RQ Vol. 2 // Issue Four: RENAISSANCE, Spring 2021. Purchase a copy and subscribe to the magazine here.
When ordering physical copies of books, such as those cited in the article above, we recommend supporting your local bookstores; resources are available through your regional independent booksellers association.
For those in the Philadelphia area, the 'Renaissance’ issue featured an article from RQ Community Engagement Editor Diana Lu on four local, independent bookstores: The Head and the Hand, Giovanni’s Room, A Novel Idea, and Books & Stuff.