Defining “Social Justice”

I’ve watched most of the videos from the recent G3 conference, but this one, “Defining Social Justice” by Dr. Voddie Baucham was clearly the best. “I do not think [that phrase, ‘social justice’] means what you think it means”, he says. “The biggest problem with the terminology ‘social justice’ is that it doesn’t mean what we think it means”.



“Those who have decided to go ahead and use the terminology, they want first for the terminology to be understood according to their [own] intentions”.

He unpacks the term in a variety of ways.

“The biggest problem with the term ‘social justice’”, he said, “is that there is a ‘social justice’ ‘movement’ and that ‘movement’ has a ‘mission’.” It is a mission that is not consonant with Biblical Christianity.

He cites this article from Kevin DeYoung: Is Social Justice a Gospel Issue? -- in which DeYoung clearly seems to miss the boat on what he is talking about.

The primary division, according to Dr. Baucham, is whether “justice” is being intended at an individual level (wherein God Himself works for justice for individuals) or for “groups” (and this is where the modifier “justice” comes into play – in the sense that “social” justice requires an arbiter – usually the state – to provide “justice” not for individuals, but for aggrieved “groups” (in the Marxist “oppressor/oppressed” paradigm).

The larger point is, we need to understand what our political opponents are talking about, specifically in the form of the language they use. Because those individuals who ought to be on our side, unwittingly find themselves advocating things that they normally would not advocate, if it were the case that they actually knew that they were using what I’ll call here, pre-loaded terminology.

As an analogy for this kind of confusion, one of the most frequently confused terms, I think, involves the various uses of “begging the question”. In a world that has some intelligent interactions with philosophy, “begging the question” is a technical term that means “petitio principii”, essentially using the premises of an argument to define its conclusion. However, at a more popular level, many people use that phrase in the sense that what has come to mean “raises a question” or “invites a question to be asked”. But for philosophers and those speaking in the philosophical sense, it decidedly does not mean that.

In the case of the term “social justice”, its usage by Christians is problematic, because, first, God demands justice. Injustice is sin. So if ‘social justice’ is truly justice, then disagreement is sin.

But that is not the case at all. As Dr. Baucham points out, the “social justice” movement is not about Biblical, Godly justice.

In short, the mission of the “social justice” movement sees its mission as one to facilitate “state distribution of advantages and resources to disadvantaged groups to satisfy their right to social and economic equality”

So as it is used on the left, the “social justice movement” is about societal (governmental) redistribution of virtually everything in society – not only goods and services, but all kinds of “advantages and resources”, including such things as access to education (through “affirmative action” programs), “reparations” for “slavery”, even such intangibles as prestige, ideology (weighted through “intersectionality” to provide advantages to those who can claim the most “oppression” in terms of the number of “oppressed groups” that they can claim membership in) and on and on.

So for “the political left”, the phrase “social justice” connotes their own use of the term with all the “Critical Theory” espoused by the “Frankfurt School”, otherwise known for its “Cultural Marxism” and the “Intersectionality” that goes along with it.

When Christians ask “is social justice a Gospel issue”, the phrase “social justice” does not imply actual justice. It is a “technical term”, a “code word” or even, say, a “dog whistle” for something far more well-defined and far more insidious.

Neil Shenvi has provided some helpful quotes from leading thinkers on the political left, illustrating how and why this is so.

We must not be afraid to confront our political opponents “on their own terms” and “in their own terms”. But we must also not be afraid to call a thing what it is, to say what it really is.

Are Evangelical “leaders” used as “useful idiots” by the political left?

Are Evangelical “leaders” used as “useful idiots” by the political left? Or do they take that role on without any prompting at all?

By one definition, “useful idiot is a pejorative term used to describe people perceived as propagandists for a cause whose goals they do not understand, who are used cynically by the leaders of the cause”.

The “twitterati” mob, with its characteristic speed and verbal violence, shows in a microcosm how such a thing happens, and Stephen Wolfe makes the case that Evangelical “thought leaders” certainly have been corrupted in this way:

A video that surfaced last weekend, showing teenage white boys in MAGA hats seemingly taunting an American Indian, set off a frenzy of vitriolic tweets condemning them for bigotry and even demanding that they’re punched in the face …

It was entirely unsurprising to me that evangelical leaders joined the mob. Thabiti Anyabwile, for example, tweeted that the boys demonstrated “racist incivility.” He retweeted (along with Alan Noble) a tweet implying that the boys’ actions manifested “white supremacy” and a video of Nathan Phillips lying that the boys chanted “build the wall.” Beth Moore tweeted, “To glee in dehumanizing any person is so utterly antichrist it reeks of the vomit of hell.” Karen Swallow Prior tweeted, “I’m sick to my stomach. Lord, help.” J. D. Greear, affirming with “Truly!” retweeted a now deleted tweet (though Greear’s remains visible) saying, “This is hate.” Duke Kwon called the incident “disturbing but not surprising.” I’d praise some for their silence, but it’s not clear at this point who has and hasn’t deleted tweets. Ed Stetzer, for example, suggests that he tweeted on the incident but later deleted them.

Later, more comprehensive videos showed “not only that the Indian, Nathan Phillips, lied about what occurred, but also that the boys were subjected to demeaning racial harassment from black supremacists for an hour prior to Phillips intentionally and without provocation walking up to the boys while beating a drum.”

After new videos surfaced, some of these evangelicals expressed regret. Greear tweeted that he’s “frustrated.” Karen Swallow Prior tweets that there are “lots of lessons in this whole mess.” Anyabwile seems to have doubled-down and then, with a tu quoque, claimed that “all” responses were ill-informed. I haven’t seen any hint of remorse from Beth Moore whose tweet was the most vilifying of them all.

Summarizing:

the evangelical elite use the same tactics as the world, rely on the same popular sentiment in rhetoric, and have arisen in relevance among evangelicals largely for two reasons: an engagement technique suitable for the new mediums of discourse (especially Twitter) and because they’ve merely Christianized the moral sentiments and ends of the Western ruling class. … they are the evangelical face of the upper-class interest. Being the court evangelicals to the ruling class, they take their cues from the world, and the world cued them on Saturday to join a mob of personal destruction. Their hasty reaction to the initial video was entirely predictable.

This response has harmful consequences for the rest of Christianity, which will tend to view these individuals as a kind of Christian “collective moral authority”. “[N]o collective failure can dislodge them from their eminent status as evangelicalism’s moral thought leaders. It’s quite remarkable, and since we’re all accustomed to elite dismal failures doing nothing to harm elite credibility, it’s almost imperceptible.”

“The Left” has gotten to where it is via a “long march through the institutions”. President Trump, in his own way, became God’s “useful idiot” insofar as he has espoused a largely conservative agenda, much of which serves as both a foil and an obstacle for these leftist elites. But Trump cannot last forever.

Here is the way out of this particular political mess:

The rest of us must realize that the resistance to the evangelical elite is a matter of deconstructing their rhetorical tricks and disclosing their delusions … we must challenge the rhetoric and deconstruct the sentiments and thereby point them to the true nature of things.

The Possessed

There are arresting and alarming parallels between the cultural elite in 19C Russia and the pop culture in contemporary America. An incongruous amalgam of moral nihilism, existential nihilism, and utopian totalitarianism. 

From what I've read, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great opened Russian high society to the French Enlightenment (e.g. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot). This, in turn, dovetailed with the restless decadence of the idle rich. Something Tolstoy knew firsthand and memorized in novels like War and Peace. In his Confession, he documents nihilism among the Russian upper class. And nihilism is a recurring theme in the novels of Dostoyevsky. 

Up-to-a-point I think European anti-clericalism was warranted. The venality of the Roman Catholic church was glaring. Both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky became deeply religious, albeit eccentric. Russian Orthodoxy was a flawed paradigm, so they had to fumble for something more satisfying. The novels of Dostoyevsky, as well as The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Tolstoy), are a quest for meaning. Notice the parallels between 19C Russia and the liberal establishment in 21C America:

From then onwards he realised that human life was not a movement from a backward past to a better future, as he had believed or half-believed when he shared the ideas of the radical intelligentsia. Instead, every human being stood at each moment on the edge of eternity. As a result of this revelation, Dostoyevsky became increasingly mistrustful of the progressive ideology to which he had been drawn as a young man.

He was particularly scornful of the ideas he found in St Petersburg when he returned from his decade of Siberian exile. The new generation of Russian intellectuals was gripped by European theories and philosophies. French materialism, German humanism and English utilitarianism were melded together into a peculiarly Russian combination that came to be called "nihilism".

We tend to think of a nihilist as someone who believes in nothing, but the Russian nihilists of the 1860s were very different. They were fervent believers in science, who wanted to destroy the religious and moral traditions that had guided humankind in the past in order that a new and better world could come into being. 

Dostoyevsky's indictment of nihilism is presented in his great novel Demons. Published in 1872, the book has been criticised for being didactic in tone, and there can be no doubt that he wanted to show that the dominant ideas of his generation were harmful. But the story Dostoyevsky tells is also a dark comedy, cruelly funny in its depiction of high-minded intellectuals toying with revolutionary notions without understanding anything of what revolution means in practice.

The plot is a version of actual events that unfolded as Dostoyevsky was writing the book. A former teacher of divinity turned terrorist, Sergei Nechaev, was arrested and convicted of complicity in the killing of a student. Nechaev had authored a pamphlet, The Catechism of a Revolutionary, which argued that any means (including blackmail and murder) could be used to advance the cause of revolution. The student had questioned Nechaev's policies, and so had to be eliminated.

Dostoyevsky suggests that the result of abandoning morality for the sake of an idea of freedom will be a type of tyranny more extreme than any in the past. As one of the characters in Demons confesses: "I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea from which I start. From unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism."

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30129713

George Gilder: Human Creativity, Christian Capitalism and “Life After Google”

After the mid-term elections last week, I’m sure we will now find ourselves being cast hot and heavy into the 2020 presidential election. The Democrats are going to have two key areas of focus.

On the economic front, their focus is going to be “Democratic Socialism”. This is portrayed as a “kinder, gentler” form of Marxism – less caustic than Soviet communism, because, well, we’ve got the “kinder, gentler” left-wing Antifa/Resist/“you’re not welcome here” Democrats running the show.

And on the cultural front, their program is “Cultural Marxism”, which is their version of morality. It features Marxism’s classical “oppressor/oppressed” paradigm, supplemented by the aggregation and advocacy of various “victim groups”, and modified what’s known as “intersectionality” – that is, a hierarchy of “the oppressed”, whose opinions, depending upon how many victim identities that they can claim, carry more or less weight vs. the key class of oppressors, largely white men of European descent.

Both of these thought systems are related, and they operate according to well-defined methods, that many of us see, but have historically had difficulty opposing. I’m sure we’ll be writing more about both of these phenomena on the pages of Triablogue.

One key feature to note is that both of these programs have clearly articulated communications objectives, strategies, and even “talking points”. How many of you have been called a “racist”, “sexist”, “homophobe”, “Islamophobe”, “xenophobe”, etc.?

This name calling is no accident; rather, the names are the tip of the iceberg of communications efforts that have been borne in university programs, which are repeated ad nauseam by thinkers and politicians on the left, and echoed endlessly in the media.

Too often, this form of juvenile name-calling (which tends to work on the uninitiated, even some Christian writers, because many of us still carry with us our childhood fears of being rejected) is rarely opposed. This is not an accident – it is the predicted outcome of a well-defined strategic and communications program on the left.

Even those Christian writers who ought to know better, when faced with such truly baseless accusations tend to hem and haw and say, “erm, uh, no, we’re not”, and they go to great lengths to explain why Christians are not racists, sexist, homophobic xenophobes” – and in the process, they become “useful idiots” for those on “the Left”, describing how “we support social justice” etc.

For our part, Reformed Christians need not only to be advocating a positive political program and agenda of our own, which needs to feature conservative Christian principles for sure, but which will need to be articulated clearly and winsomely, using Christian language, and not being sucked into using the language of “social justice”, in which case, we would already be cast on the losing side and put on the defensive.

“Christian Capitalism” as an Economic program to espouse

We seem to have a clear vision on the cultural/morality side, which ranges among us somewhere between extremes characterized by “theonomy” and what’s been identified as “R2K” (the “R” standing, alternatively, for either “reformed” or “radical”, depending on who is doing the writing). The notion is that Christians can and should be working at some level to have a positive (and Christian) influence on the broader culture.

However, one thing we don’t seem to have a good handle on, and that’s the economic program that needs to oppose “Democratic Socialism”. We seem to keep that under the heading of “Conservativsm”, and we have tended to allow that to be the realm of the “country club” Republicans, but in the Trump era, that positive program seems to have shifted somewhat, and the messaging that used to clearly advocated as “conservative” has now become somewhat muddled.

Reformed Christians need to advocate a particularly winsome economic program that Christians can espouse and advocate. In not doing so, those of us on “the right” often tend not to have a cohesive communications message – a positive program that is easily articulated and one that Christians can understand, espouse, and more importantly, advocate.

I believe that George Gilder, as a writer on business and economics over the past 40 years, is a seminal thought leader who can provide language and ideas, based in Biblical, Christian morality and even language, that we can use in the public sphere, that can clearly and succinctly serve as messaging that we can use (and more importantly, that politicians can use) to craft counter-messaging to “the Left’s”.

I think that program can be called something like “Christian Capitalism” – a free-enterprise system that’s based on Biblical principles of private property, hard work, thrift, the deferment of rewards, and sharing – all values espoused by Calvin and re-articulated in the form of “the Protestant Work Ethic”.

George Gilder: An Introduction

George Gilder is a prolific writer in the field of business, economics, and technology. I hadn’t heard of him until just recently, having read his work “Life After Google”.

He was a writer for Forbes Magazine, and also a thing called “Forbes ASAP”, which I had never checked out. It always seemed like an add-on to the real thing. Later he had his own technology newsletter, “The Gilder Technology Report”, his own publishing firm, and he later became a venture capitalist.

He is a co-founder of “The Discovery Institute” – yes, THAT same Discovery Institute that advocates for Intelligent Design (Stephen Meyer) and other leading conservative thinkers are represented (Michael Behe, William Lane Craig, Michael Medved, Nancy Pearcey, Bill Walton, and others).

Gilder writes on the business and technology side of that organization. Below are some brief descriptions of his works.

Wealth and Poverty

Gilder’s 1981 book “Wealth and Poverty” (which was not his first book, by a long margin) “advanced a practical and moral case for supply-side economics and capitalism during the early months of the Reagan administration and made him Ronald Reagan's most quoted living author”, according to Wikipedia (citing the publisher of the work, and probably echoing “a study of presidential speeches”).

I don’t own the book, but here is a YouTube video on “Wealth and Poverty” that has been edited down to provide the high points. These include such notions as “Capitalism was not simply a practical success. It is the supreme expression of human creativity” – it is not simply an efficient way to allocate goods and capital. It is “a moral good”.

Gilder explains:

Capitalism is ultimately altruistic; capitalists begin with an imaginative response to the needs of others. They have to forego their own consumption and save to assemble resources to deploy for a process, the outcome of which is determined not by themselves, but by customers and investors, neither of whom are under the control of the entrepreneur himself. The entrepreneur has to collaborate; the entrepreneur follows “the golden rule”. He wants others to succeed. Any business is completely dependent on the success of all the other around it. (adapted from the video).

On the other hand, while “greed” is often mis-attributed to Capitalists (who often become wealthy, but who more frequently see their businesses fail), is better attributed to socialism and the welfare state, where:

They seek comfort and security first. They collaborate with government to get special privileges and contracts (“crony capitalism”) and seats at the public trough … (adapted from the video).

From what I’ve read, Reagan purchased copies of this book and handed them out as gifts to many of his senior advisors. Here is a positive review of the book. Citing Gilder:

“Capitalism offers nothing but frustrations and rebuffs to those who wish because of claimed superiority of intelligence, birth, credentials, or ideals to get without giving, to take without risking, to profit without sacrifice, to be exalted without humbling themselves to meet the unruly demands of others in an always perilous and unpredictable life. It is not surprising therefore that the chief source of the misunderstanding of capitalism is the Intelligencia, one of the many aristocracies that preen themselves on the contempt for bourgeois or middle class values and that refuse to acknowledge the paramount role of individual enterprise in the progress of the race.”

Men and Marriage

In 1992, his “Men and Marriage” (which I have not read yet), some part of which Swindoll had cited approvingly, Gilder makes the following comments:

The crucial process of civilization is the subordination of male sexual impulses and biology to the long-term horizons of female sexuality. The overall sexual behavior of women in the modern world differs relatively little from the sexual life of women in primitive societies. It is male behavior that must be changed to create a civilized order…

In creating civilization, women transform male lust into love; channel male wanderlust into jobs, homes, and families; link men to specific children; rear children into citizens; change hunters into fathers; divert male will to power into a drive to create. Women conceive the future that men tend to flee; they feed the children that men ignore. George Gilder. Men and Marriage (Kindle Locations 160-165). Kindle Edition.

In this 2010 interview of Gilder at Acton.org, Gilder summarizes his beliefs about the destructive nature of feminism:

the woman holds in her very body a link to the long term future of the race. Her sexuality determines her long term goals. As a very physiological consciousness, she knows she can bear and nurture children. She has a central role in the very perpetuation of the species. The man is estranged from this process; his sexuality arises merely as a compulsive drive to pleasure. It’s short term by nature. It’s predatory and quickly gratified.

The Women’s Movement tragically reduces female sexuality to the terms of male sexuality. When this happens, she reduces herself to the male level of recreational sex. Paradoxically, when that happens the woman loses all her power over men and the reverence and respect toward the procreative potential of woman is lost. And that really destroys the family. But if the power of “choice” is given up, the woman actually ascends to a higher level of sexuality and her body attains an almost mystical power over men.

See also his more recent National Review article, “The Feminist Economy”

I haven’t noticed that Gilder cites Scripture, but he certainly advocates a robust Christian morality. Here is a summary of Christianity and the family:

Giving, beginning within the family and extending outward into the society, is the moral center of the system. It does not succeed by allowing the leading capitalists to revel in riches; if they hoard their wealth the system tends to fail. It succeeds by inducing the capitalist continually to give his wealth back to the system in the form of new gifts and investments. George Gilder. Men and Marriage (Kindle Locations 2363-2365). Kindle Edition.

The Israel Test

In his “The Israel Test”, Gilder suggests that Israel is hated (and anti-Semitism exists) not because the Jews have been dishonest or have dealt unfairly with the global culture at large, but because of the jealousy and envy of those who fail to put in the efforts to duplicate Israel’s successes.

… Israel represents one of the most extraordinary transformation stories in the history of economics. Just over sixty years old, with a population slightly over seven million, and located in a hostile region, Israel is home to more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other nation on earth and has surpassed the combined venture capital investment of France and Germany…

In a decade, Israel went from being a nondescript industrial economy to one of the world’s leaders in research and technological creativity on a per capita basis. Then-senator Joseph Lieberman, from Gilder, George. The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy. Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.

Gilder himself posits the difference:

The central issue in international politics, dividing the world into two fractious armies, is the tiny state of Israel. This central issue is not a global war of civilizations between the West and Islam or a split between Arabs and Jews. These conflicts are real and salient, but they obscure the deeper moral and ideological war. The real issue is between the rule of law and the rule of the leveler, between creative excellence and “fairness,” between admiration of achievement versus envy and resentment of it. Gilder, George. The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy (p. 1). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.

“Life After Google”

“Life After Google” is Gilder’s most recent work (very impressive, given that Gilder is now 78 years old), describing both the limits of Google and the new technologies in its wake.

In the work, Gilder first provides a history of Google, its ideas, its pseudo-religious underpinnings; then he shows the weaknesses of the system, the ways in which it is “maxing out”, and finally, he points to emerging technologies (such as virtual reality and blockchain) which are already in growth mode, and in which entrepreneurial Capitalists are creatively devising a new “distributed” computer architecture that is going to be more secure and more equitable than the mountainous system where all roads lead to Google.

Google has certainly had an impressive run. They have pushed existing technologies to their limits, and in the process, they have not only created the second wealthiest company in the world (with market capitalization second only to Apple’s), but they have also created what Gilder called “a new system of the world”, which supplanted the old (monetary-based) system, to create a system “where everything is free, you are the product” for sale, in the form of your privacy and the accumulated data they own on you, which is sold to advertisers.

On a deeper level, the world of Google—its interfaces, its images, its videos, its icons, its philosophy—is 2D (compared with a 3D world). Google is not just a company but a system of the world.

And the Internet is cracking under the weight of this ideology. Its devotees uphold the flat-universe theory of materialism: the sufficiency of deterministic chemistry and mathematics. They believe the human mind is a suboptimal product of random evolutionary processes. They believe in the possibility of a silicon brain. They believe that machines can “learn” in a way comparable to human learning, that consciousness is a relatively insignificant aspect of humanity, emergent from matter, and that imagination of true novelties is a delusion in a hermetic world of logic.

They hold that human beings have no more to discover and may as well retire on a guaranteed pension, while Larry Page and Sergey Brin fly off with Elon Musk and live forever in galactic walled gardens on their own private planets in a winner-take-all cosmos.Gilder, George. Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy (Kindle Locations 129-136). Gateway Editions. Kindle Edition.

All of these notions may be challenged, and in the process, Gilder deals with them. The foil for this kind of dull and deterministic technology is one that is distributed, entrepreneurial, and dependent more on human inventiveness and entrepreneurial creativity and generosity. My hope is to provide some overview of this vision in the near future.

Is George Gilder the C.S. Lewis of Christian Capitalism?

C.S. Lewis was an original thinker. But more than that, he characterized the Christian faith in ways that, even though he was a brilliant scholar, virtually anyone could understand what he was talking about.

The economic system that we live in has always had tendencies toward “Christian Capitalism” (with a “C”) – this is inherent in Calvin’s views of biblical wisdom, thrift, saving, and perhaps reinvestment – via “the Protestant Work Ethic”.

I think that because Gilder writes primarily in the Business/Economics space, folks in our circles (Reformed Christianity) haven’t run into him a lot, but there are cross-overs.

Gilder takes difficult financial and technological topics and explains them in relevant ways. He views human beings (“man”) as created in the image of God, and human creativity to be an analog to God’s creativity via, among other things, the mechanism of science:

Real science shows that the universe is a singularity and thus a creation. Creation is an entropic product of a higher consciousness echoed by human consciousness. This higher consciousness, which throughout human history we have found it convenient to call God, endows human creators with the space to originate surprising things. Gilder, George. Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy (Kindle Locations 1579-1581). Gateway Editions. Kindle Edition.

I believe that Gilder’s work gives us the kind of language that Reformed Christians can use in the public sphere, and to which we can attribute the various attributes of God (and to God Himself). Lord willing, I’ll be writing more about this in the coming weeks and months.

"Right-wing violence"

"America is plagued by right-wing violence. Pundits need to stop calling it a "both sides" issue." https://t.co/Kqxe7O2quS #politics #feedly

— Secular Outpost (@SecularOutpost) October 31, 2018

The anti-Semite that murdered 11 people in a synagogue yesterday was outraged about the "caravans". Do you think Trump's incendiary anti-refugee rhetoric bears *any* role in spurring such hateful radicalism?

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) October 28, 2018

They really believe this. How can they be that blindly one-sided? What about demonstrators who set fire to cars in Portland after Trump won? What about Antifa? What about the goons who firebombed Berkeley to prevent Milo from speaking there? And so on and so forth. 

Is it because they only watch leftwing "news" outlets? Is it because it flatters them to cast themselves in the role of the white hats v. the black hats? For a corrective:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-10-30/brief-history-leftist-political-violence-year

https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/10/30/im-jewish-and-i-think-the-biggest-increase-in-anti-semitism-is-from-the-left/

How Conservative Christians can help foster competition among the Social Media as a way of limiting their influence

Source: Statistica 2018

In recent days, we’ve heard a lot about the “liberal bias” of many social media platforms, such as Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter. Some of these seemingly have “the power to restrict free speech”, because they are private companies where leaders have liberal personal agendas, etc. They are headquartered in liberal Silicon Valley, and they are a part of the social elite.

Nevertheless, money talks, and while founders and some of the big names may have liberal agendas, it’s a sure bet that not all of the shareholders of those platforms have liberal agendas, and they are going to be more interested in profits and share prices than in “sharing the pure leftist agenda”.

The kind of money that businesses care about is the “net profit” line (or “retained earnings”, as some of the financial statements put it). It’s the money that a business owner puts in his own pocket, or that makes its way into shareholder earnings. All the rest of it is money that goes into someone else’s hands … to vendors, or utilities, or other suppliers.

But “net profit” is money in the bank. And so, if you want to send a message to the various social media, you want to focus your fire on their net profit. (I suspect this will work even in the age of social media).

Most of the social media earn huge amounts of money through advertising revenue. It’s the only real way they can monetize their platforms.

Ogilvy on Advertising Profit

Ogilvy on Advertising Profit

Back in the days before “social media” (as a way for technology companies to earn advertising revenue), there were print advertising, radio advertising, and TV advertising. And there was a rigid enough set of rules for ad agencies and clients to follow, that the advertising legend David Ogilvy could summarize them succinctly, as he did in his work “Ogilvy on Advertising” (Vintage Books, 1983).

These rules worked neatly enough for me to get jobs in advertising, first as a copywriter, then as an advertising manager, even though I had no experience or education in the field. (Back in the 1980’s, after I was graduated from college, I worked in a Christian ministry for the better part of a decade, earning neither money nor career experience.)

Ogilvy states his rule for clients (advertisers) in search of a good ad agency (and good advertising):

Ask what the agency charges. If it is 15 per cent, insist on paying 16 percent. The extra one per cent won’t kill you, but it will double the agency’s normal profit, and you will get better service (pg. 66).

Normally, agencies didn’t charge a fee in those days. They added 15% “commission” onto whatever the media outlet would charge. And that paid for the agency’s work (and their rich lifestyles). But agencies (like everyone) worked on a thin profit margin. The difference between 15% and 16% commission was the difference between 1% or 2% net profit.

That’s why Trump’s 4% economic growth is so much better than Obama’s 2% growth. It’s not just adding 2% to the bottom lines of businesses. It’s doubling the net profit (and for stockholders, it’s doubling what’s in their 401K accounts).

[This is how “trickle-down economics” works for the common person. It doesn’t increase their income. It increases net worth.]

The flip side of this can be applied to the Social Media that we are all growing to dislike, because of the “liberal bias”.

How Social Media Make Money

By opening up forms of competition, in the various media, we conservative Christians can significantly affect those bottom line numbers – at least to the kind of degree that will make a difference between 15% and 16%, or 2% and 4%.

There are ways that technology companies (and the “social media” are first of all “technology companies”). They can actually “sell” products … this is how Microsoft earned its fortunes. People were buying PCs, and there was Microsoft software to be sold on every PC. And many software companies would only write their programs for the Microsoft operating system --- because everyone was using it, and everyone wanted “interoperability”.

Microsoft’s monopoly existed insofar as everyone needed to use the same operating system and programs so that the information could be interoperable – so that everyone could read the same documents and spreadsheets.

The other way technology companies earn revenue today is to sell “advertising” on the “platforms”. “Platforms” such as Google.com (and spin-offs like gmail), Facebook, and Twitter, don’t really sell anything. They earn their money from advertising. They are paid by “views” or “eyeballs” on their various pages.

The more eyeballs, the greater the profits. The fewer the eyeballs, the less the profits. And in this regard, Ogilvy’s “pay your agency 16% instead of 15%” will work in reverse, too. If Google, or Facebook, or Twitter, lose just a couple of percentage points in terms of “eyeballs”, their bottom line net profit can be seriously affected.

And when that happens, the shareholders will notice.

(If there are enough conservatives to win all the elections that we won in 2016, there are certainly enough of us to affect market share. On the flip side of it, “the left” is currently making all the noise it can possibly make. They can not turn up this dial. Their method is now to limit conservative participation. This is where we need to work against them.)

Helping Google’s Competitors

In our free enterprise system, the way that these numbers are affected is simply through the addition of competition. And while it may not have been easy to add competition for Microsoft in the 1990s because of interoperability standards, we can still introduce “choice” (that magic word to which “the left” cannot object) by just simply giving our conservative eyeballs to other sources of advertising revenue.

Outside of its Android operating system, and phones (which have natural competition in the iPhone), Google doesn’t make money by charging you a nickel for each search that you make. It makes money because it charges advertisers (“clients”) for each search that you make.

So we see President Trump complaining about Google searches. This makes sense. In marketing, one of the new buzzwords is “content marketing”. The idea is to produce “content” (either written or video) that draws lots of eyeballs for you (and hence, revenue for the “platform”).

Perhaps the government can do to Google what they did to Standard Oil in the late 19th century, or to ATT in 1984 … break them into smaller components. But a government-led solution is not necessarily going to be a good one.

Here is how Google makes its money (contrary to how Microsoft gained its dominance):

When an “advertiser” (or “marketer”) gains lots of eyeballs for itself, it’s been demonstrated that those numbers can turn into “demand” (“demand generation”), “sales leads” (“lead generation”), and hopefully revenue (“top line”) and eventually “net profit” (see above).

THE way, in recent years, to gain “search engine optimization” (or “SEO”) was to look to Google’s algorithm. Google re-writes its algorithm on a regular basis – the algorithm is the set of rules that put a piece of content high or low on the Google search page. (A particular “search” may generate millions of “results”, but the only ones that really count are those on the “first page”, because most lazy people don’t continue to flip through the pages; they merely click on the first thing they see).

So for the last few years, marketers (“content marketers”) have been rushing, like lemmings (almost), to understand Google’s latest algorithm, and to write or produce “content” in such a way that is normal, natural, not repetitive, and informative.

(This perhaps is one reason why the journalistic styles of the NY Times and Washington Post may factor into the results so heavily. This may be a self-fulfilling kind of thing).

Regarding search engine market share, Statistica.com shows that Google “generated 63.5% of all core search queries in the United States“ in April of this year. However, this doesn’t take into account searches done on mobile phones. On “mobile devices”:

Despite Google's dominance of the U.S. search market, it is Microsoft's bing service that leads in terms of longer search queries. In terms of the mobile search market in the United States, Google leads again with an over 93 percent market share.

The alternative is to use other search engines. Make certain that those search engines (Bing, DuckDuckGo, Oath (formerly Yahoo), Ask, AOL, etc.) are generating higher traffic numbers.

One way to do this, even on Android phones, is to have those search engine apps handy on your phone, and to re-set some of your default settings.

It’s only a little bit of effort – maybe a lot for those of us who are technologically challenged. But the difference will be significant – Ogilvy’s 16% vs 15% for the competitors – or Trump’s 4% vs Obama’s 2% economy.

Similar tactics can be used for Facebook or Twitter. While there aren’t natural competitors for these platforms, we CAN affect the traffic … instead of shying away from “political discussions” on Facebook, we can add to them. As I noted above, “the left” is currently making all the noise it can possibly make. There are a lot of Christians simply staying away.

The response should not be to turn off social media. The response should be to turn up Christian messaging, to the point that it produces more eyeballs than those on “the left” can (in terms of noise).

Challenge your liberal friends and neighbors when they say something like “you’re a racist and a homophobe”. They are certain to lose that discussion, and you’ll generate more conservative “eyeballs” which, in turn, will persuade the shareholders that it’s in their best interests to eschew censorship and to foster free speech (“competition in messaging”).

Commonalities: Today’s “Cultural Marxists” and the Real Marxists of Yore

It seems to me that there are certain parallels between the Marxists of yore (I’m thinking late 20th century) and the “Cultural Marxists” of today. (Many of these “Cultural Marxists” of today are profiled and documented at the DiscoverTheNetworks.org site that I recently have mentioned).

To be sure, not all of them are the same, but on the other hand, we see certain commonalities, such as an overt belief in naturalistic atheism; a crafted message/agenda that offers certain but limited resemblance to true things – designed to suck in the ignorant, and from which deviation is a kind of betrayal and is punishable; a pure will-to-power (primarily through the use of governmental power – and the related shrill hatred for Trump that they feel – Trump being the ultimate “anti-Cultural-Marxist” of our day, but even a kind of power derived from shouting someone down on Twitter and destroying – to the extent that they are able – individual lives and careers); and even a willingness in some instances to resort to violence.

It’s easy for these groups to say, “we’re not like the Soviet Marxists; we have good intentions”. Well, that all reminded me of some of the things I’d read back when I was a kid in my late teens.

The following, from Václav Havel, may be considered to be a “worst-case scenario” given who the Cultural Marxists are and what they are doing, but the similarities are there. Havel was a poet and playwright from Czechoslovakia, under the Soviet regime. After the fall of communism, he was elected president of Czechoslovakia (1989-1992) and then president of the Czech Republic (1993-2000) when the country was split into two countries (Czech Republic and Slovakia).

“Discover the Networks” on “The [Political] Left”

A reader named “Top Quark” commented:

In other words, he failed to show the careful attention to facts, logic, argument, and theology that you usually demonstrate, in an effort to take a cheap shot at "the left" (whoever he envisions that to be). Obviously it's his blog [article] to do with as he wishes. It's my prerogative to call him out when he makes preposterously overbroad, empirically false, completely unprovable statements and to go elsewhere if he persists in doing so.

Whenever I refer to “The Left”, I’m referring to the network of networks among those individuals who consider themselves to be “thought leaders” – in universities, primarily, in some philosophy departments, “feminist studies”, Black studies, “gender studies”, etc. There are of course many others documented here in politics and media as well.

These are thoroughly-well documented in the DiscoverTheNetworks.org website, where individual thinkers, sources of funding, various groups devoted to various political issues are all mapped and documented. There is nothing “preposterously overbroad”, nothing “empirically false”, nothing “unprovable” at this site. Perhaps Top Quark’s curiosity can be sated with a quick perusal of this site.

“Tell the truth and pay the price”

This is a pretty good speech about the power of narrative to shape culture, and how “the left” has pretty much got a lock on untrue narrative. The title is “Tell the truth and pay the price” — I’m not able to embed it here, because it’s not on YouTube — but you should watch this if you can.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?449308-1/national-conservative-student-conference-andrew-klavan#

United by “Victim Status”. Where does your “victim status” rank?

In this approximately four-minute video, Ben Shapiro shines the light on “the multiple avenues through which racial and gender expression are experienced”, and how various victim statuses now work together under the umbrella of “intersectionality”, to enhance the political impact of the various victim groups that have been and are continually being created:

What we are up against: a brief history of cultural Marxism

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Ephesians 6:12 King James Version (KJV)

We fight against the powers and principalities of the air, but this video provides an historical overview of how they have developed over time. If Christians are to be smart, and to engage the world as Christians, we need to understand the topography. We need to understand the enemy placements. We need to know where they’re hiding. Where the scouts are. Where the strong points are. The weapons they intend to use. Where the ideas come from. How to address them. This video provides an overview of how one significant enemy thinks. This is their history, their various lines of reasoning.

“Liberals” vs “the Left” (Cultural Marxism)

Here is a phenomenon that we will want to watch.

It’s becoming more and more evident that there is a difference between mere “liberals” and “the Left”. It is “the Left” that has created and espouses a thing that I’ll call “cultural Marxism” – a political view that perceives “equality” as its highest good, and which works with relentless fervor to implement policies that effect its own interpretation of “equality”.

On the other hand, there is a growing number of “cultural liberals” – those who probably don’t believe in God, nor do they have any value for Christian morality. These folks think that they genuinely want to work toward a better, fairer future, and they have unwittingly bought into the agenda of “the Left” but they don’t quite “toe the line”.

There is a growing number of these folks who see the disjunction between “the Left”’s agenda and their own liberal beliefs. Bret Weinstein (in the video below) is one of these. A genuinely-persuaded liberal, he nevertheless got caught up in what he calls the “black supremacy” evidenced by the “Day of Absence” requirement at Evergreen College.

Weinstein, is a former professor at Evergreen (social studies, I think), who was ostracized and later forced out for not toeing the line. He tells his story in this video, and more tellingly, he articulates the agenda and methodology of “the Left”. This is a bit long, but I highly recommend it as a good diagnosis of what we are dealing with, from a cultural perspective.