Wilfred Reilly is a fact-driven political scientist. And I’m referring to old-fashioned kinds of facts. I have followed him for several years and I enjoy his comments and candor. At The National Review, Reilly recently commented on the supposed conspiracy theories involving Twitter, which repeatedly denied that it was shadow-banning users:
Wilfred Reilly Exposes Twitter’s Information Control
What is newsworthy, however, was that the Big Lie of information neutrality was just that: a lie. Probably for decades now, conservative and heterodox thinkers have been called weird paranoids for doubting “the science ™,” “the experts,” “the trends,” “the (new) dictionary definitions,” “what the search results obviously show,” and so forth.
We now know that those lonely cynics were largely correct: the Great Barrington Declaration and the Hunter Biden laptop, among many other things, never “trended” because they were not allowed to. More broadly, almost all of the information we see on a daily basis is greatly shaped by the people who allow access to it. This is not a “conspiracy theory” — it is a fact.
Definitely don’t stop tweeting and searching and reading the morning paper with your eggs — but also never forget that fact, consider the DuckDuckGo option that actually shows you all of the results, and remember also that libraries still exist. And, if I can give one last piece of takeaway advice in this first column: Buy a hard-copy dictionary and encyclopedia from before about 2012, and never let those bad boys go.
