Good news! Thinking for yourself is no longer necessary.
The new heroes of the Internet will do it for you—companies you’ve never heard of, but who are watching out for your best interests.
Meet one of them. They call themselves NewsGuard. A perfect name. Because that’s what they do. They “guard” the news.
They make sure you only get the good stuff. The stuff you can trust. Best of all, NewsGuard is backed by Big Pharma, Big Tech, the teachers' unions, and even the government. So, if Newsguard says something isn’t safe to read, you know you should scroll on. I mean, if you can’t trust the government who can you trust?
Wait … you don’t like what I just described? Sounds more like a nightmare than the world you want to live in? You like to do your own thinking? You’re perfectly capable of figuring out which sources are credible, and which aren’t.
That, you say, is the right and obligation of a free citizen in a free country. If so, welcome to my world. We’re fighting against companies like NewsGuard every day. We didn’t pick the fight. They did.
We have our own take on the events of the day and on the events of yesterday. We’re happy to have you make your own judgment on whether we’ve got it right or whether we’ve got it wrong. But there are many organizations that don’t have that attitude.
Like the aforementioned NewsGuard.
Let’s look a little more into this company which, by the way, is a for-profit enterprise. PragerU is a 501c3, a non-profit. We’re big fans of profit. Profit makes the world go round. But if your business is, say, promoting COVID vaccine efficacy, and your biggest client is the public relations firm for Pfizer, it’s fair to ask whether you would be completely unbiased when judging a story questioning the safety of COVID vaccines.
But that doesn’t trouble NewsGuard. They’re convinced their judgments are free from any taint. Just ask them. They’ll tell you. But who are “they”?
Their co-founder and CEO is a Democratic party loyalist. He’s on record dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop as likely a “hoax . . . maybe even . . . perpetrated by the Russians.” The NewsGuard staff, not surprisingly, is mostly comprised of left-leaning activists and ex-journalists.
And guess who they don’t like?
Yeah, they really don’t like PragerU, The Daily Wire, Breitbart, The Federalist, and other news and opinion sources that are not on the left. But let’s not be too harsh. If you stray from NewGuard’s way of seeing things, they will give you a chance to redeem yourself.
Here’s how it works.
Out of the blue, they’ll send you a list of accusatory questions on some hot-button issue. Could be Covid, global warming, or the World Economic Forum. If you play their game and respond they’ll ignore your answers and then pose new questions. If you don’t respond, well, that just confirms NewsGuard’s judgment that you’re not a reliable source.
Heads they win, tails you lose.
If you fail their test—and you will—NewsGuard informs their clients—PR firms, ad agencies, major corporations—that you’re toxic, and they should run in the opposite direction.
For news and opinion operations like Breitbart, The Daily Caller, or American Greatness that live largely on advertising, that can get very expensive, very fast.
It might drive you out of business … if you don’t comply. But, of course, that’s the plan.
Mark Hemingway, an editor at The Federalist, went through this inquisition. He calls NewsGuard “an extortion racket.”
Having also lived through this experience, I can confirm that assessment.
NewsGuard works in another insidious way:
Big Tech titans don’t like taking grief from the public or from politicians who complain that their companies are censoring non-left viewpoints. Now, thanks to NewsGuard, an enterprise Big Tech funds, they have a place to hide.
They say “We didn’t make any judgments. We hired this third-party fact-checker, and they told us this story, or that website can’t be trusted.” In short, NewsGuard enables them to censor speech without leaving any fingerprints.
Awesome.
And now the government has gotten into the act. The Defense Department paid NewsGuard over $700,000 to monitor “misinformation” trends online, which is an Orwellian way of saying information that the Defense Department doesn’t like.
Same thing for the teachers’ unions. One of the largest, the American Federation of Teachers, has made a deal with NewsGuard to screen content that comes into classrooms. It’s hard to get more left than the AFT. No need to guess what perspective they’re counting on NewsGuard to screen out.
So, if you don’t want to think for yourself anymore, NewsGuard has got you covered.
But if you do want to think for yourself, you’ve been warned.
If NewsGuard has red-flagged a source, all you need to know is that the left doesn’t want you to read it, watch it, or hear it.
And what does that make you want to do?
