President Biden’s initiated bilateral summit with Xi Jinping this week in San Francisco, as both attend the 30th Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders’ meeting, provides considerable risks for the United States’ national security. Ironically, the risks should be all on Xi’s side as his increasing paranoia and purging of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has warped the Party and government, coupled with the collapse of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) economy and other major social, demographic problems that place Xi in a uniquely vulnerable position. In reality, Xi should be treated as the supplicant in dire need of continued U.S. investment and trade as a lifeline for the continuation of his dictatorship and the brutal rule of his illegitimate Party.
Unfortunately, as reflected in Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s remarks last week which embraced economic engagement with the CCP, what is likely to occur in the Xi-Biden summit is the lamentable continuation of the warm embrace Biden administration officials have provided the CCP—where investment and trade will continue to be erroneously sold as being the only path forward for global security. In the military realm, the same spirit of engagement is being promoted by team Biden. For instance, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force General C.Q. Brown stated during his visit to Tokyo that he is hopeful that military-to-military engagement with the PRC’s will resume. The new Chairman justified this hope as being “hugely important” for ensuring “there is no miscalculation” between the PRC and USA. What the General failed to provide was any evidence that the CCP would alter their behavior simply by talking to their American counterparts. A worrisome assumption given a 40-year track record to the contrary.
Which makes the pursuit of the resumption of mil-to-mil engagement all the more surprising given that the PRC specifically ended such engagements in protest of U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August 2022 visit to Taiwan. For Chairman Brown, it appears he believes that if mil-to-mil can be restored he would have accomplished a victory akin to Saratoga, San Juan Hill, or the Battle of the Bulge.
Regrettably, Chairman Brown noted that he does not believe Xi will resort to force to seize Taiwan but will rely on other means. This can only be characterized as an “own goal” as this statement can only aid the PRC’s political warfare campaign by injecting more doubt among U.S. partners and allies regarding U.S. willpower. It was a perfect occasion to state that the U.S. will resist aggression in all its forms, including kinetic war.
Furthermore, Chairman Brown’s remark stands in stark contrast to warnings from other U.S. military leaders regarding the danger Taipei faces imminently. It is important to recall former U.S. Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Philip Davidson’s warning in 2021 that the PRC would attack Taiwan by 2027. U.S. Air Mobility Command Commander, General Mike Minihan provided another strategic warning, a leaked January 2023 memo that the PRC would attack Taiwan in 2025. U.S. allies and partners must be scratching their heads at the mixed messages stemming from Washington. They are on the front line and are cognizant that the Biden administration’s apparent weaknesses will only entice a war by Beijing.
While the Biden administration seeks to convey to the PRC that it is its Best Friend Forever (BFF), the PRC is providing shaping signals of its own. For instance, the aircraft carrier Shandong transited the Taiwan Strait in an important signal to Taipei, Tokyo, and Washington, after conducting operations east of Taiwan with nearly dozen other Chinese warships. Additionally, there has been a surge of Chinese Coast Guard vessels at Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea. This expanding presence threatens to strangle the Filipino military and evict our allies in Manila from their sovereign territory.
In contrast to the Biden administration’s actions and statements, Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida this past week concluded a visit to the Philippines to further enhance a closer military-to-military relationship with Manila, including funding for the construction of Filipino Coast Guard ships. All of which makes Washington’s supplications to Beijing stand out as bizarre, especially given the Chinese Coast Guard fleet is executing the similar bullying tactics against Japanese territory in the East China Sea. This naked aggression is not new, as it matches the same types of aggression used by Japan, Germany, or the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s—to use military force to threaten and intimidate their adversaries, even up to the point of a metal-on-metal confrontation.
Recent comments by U.S. Navy Admiral Samuel Paparo, presently the Commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, and whom the Biden administration has nominated to be the next Commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, stand in stark contrast to the “official narrative” from Washington. Admiral Paparo’s unambiguous warning is clear—that PRC military pilots and crews are “increasingly provocative” against U.S. and allied forces as ordered by their seniors in the PLA and CCP. This statement of unvarnished truth by Admiral Paparo is backed up by recent actions by the PRC where PLA air forces have conducted dangerous intercepts of a U.S. Air Force B-52 and Canadian helicopters in the South China Sea. All of which is to demonstrate that the CCP is increasingly reliant on the use of military power to implement their grand strategy.
The fundamental rule of strategy is to not aid your enemy. The Biden administration rejects the principles of strategy in its determination to keep Xi’s dictatorship afloat and to sustain the tyranny of the CCP. This twisted and obscene belief that U.S. prosperity is tied to the PRC’s invites Beijing’s aggression, which will cause a war akin to World War II. Biden’s policy, like Obama and others before him, is the path of ruin for U.S. national security, for our allies and their national security interests, and will lead to the death of U.S. servicemembers and of the American civilian population.
The bilateral summit meeting should be seen as worse than appeasement as it represents an almost suicidal effort for supporting one’s primary existential enemy. Tremors often precede cataclysmic earthquakes and so provide an indication of what is to come. In San Francisco, the American people have had a warning before the cataclysm of kinetic war. They should demand a response to this forewarning and compel the Biden administration to alter course as the earthquake may come far sooner and with greater effect than the great power wars of the last century.
Women around the world are having fewer than two children. But while population decline is well underway in most nations, there are a handful of nations that are still experiencing a population explosion. The implications of this challenge the foundations of cultural and national independence, most particularly in nations whose populations have stopped reproducing. The nations still experiencing rapid population growth have cultural traditions that stand in stark contrast to the nations with stable and declining populations. These profound demographic and cultural differences, when combined with a massive and ongoing transfer of people from high birth-rate nations into low birth-rate nations, introduces the potential for polarization on an almost unimaginable scale.
It isn’t as if the demographic trends haven’t been obvious for a very long time. In 1986, Ben Wattenberg published “The Birth Dearth,” where he pointed out that while America’s population was increasing in that decade, it was because the huge numbers of babies born during the post-WW2 baby boom were all grown up and having children. Population growth was not because young women were having lots of children. It was because a lot of mothers, born during the baby boom, had reached peak childbearing age. Per mother, children were not being born at replacement rates.
What Wattenberg was getting at can be visualized using what demographers refer to as population pyramids. Depicted below is a 2023 population pyramid for Europe. Women of prime childbearing years are shown in the 3rd and 4th rows from the bottom, where their percentage of the population is represented by the stacked red bars on the horizontal axis.
As can be seen, women aged 20-24 represent 2.5 percent of Europe’s population, and women aged 25-29 are 2.7 percent of the population. But men and women who are beyond the age when families are typically started represent larger percentages of the population. European men and women between the ages of 35 and 65, as counted in five year age groups, each represent around 3.5 of the population. The difference between Europeans aged 0-5 and those aged 60-64 is dramatic. There are nearly 60 percent more women aged 60-64 than girls aged 0-5. This is a population in rapid decline.
While overall, the population pyramid for the world indicates below replacement birthrates are already here, with an absolute population decline only one or two decades away, it would be a grave mistake to assume these demographic shifts are uniform across nations. The next population pyramid, depicted for the African continent, makes this dramatically clear. The population of Africa, already twice that of Europe, has quintupled since 1960, and continues to rapidly increase.
As shown on the chart below, the number of African women currently of child bearing age, about 4 percent of the population, is twice that of their mothers, who represent around 2 percent of the population, yet is only about half that of the babies, representing 7 percent of the population. Africa’s population is exploding, while in most of the rest of the world the population is imploding.
Even Elon Musk, a zillionaire whose fortune, at least that portion represented by his Tesla shares, would benefit from spreading climate alarm, has said that population collapse is a bigger challenge. In August 2022 he tweeted “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”
Demographers who ought to know better have ridiculed Musk for his concerns over a population implosion. From the Stanford academic journal MAHB, “Elon Musk is wrong about population growth.” From Wired, a slightly more emphatic “Elon Musk Is Totally Wrong About Population Collapse.” The general thrust of these articles is Elon Musk should stick to rockets and cars (and tunnel boring machines and AI and social media, but never mind), because there is the “joy of smaller, older populations,” and “pronatalist” policies never work.
These demographers have no credibility. For example, South Korea’s current fertility per woman is a dismal 0.78, and those are extinction-level numbers. At that rate of reproduction, for every 1 million Koreans of childbearing age today, there will only be 51,000 great-grandchildren. South Korea is on track to disappear in less than a century.
The Demographics of Polarization
There are two problems where mainstream demographers are in apparent denial. The first problem – how can the economy get bigger, or even just stay healthy, when the population is getting smaller – is easier to solve, which isn’t saying much because it compounds a perennial question that has ignited countless wars. The perennial question is what constitutes a just and equitable political economy that optimizes freedom and prosperity for all individuals.
The bloody legacy of that debate is written across the centuries, but through it all, there was a reliable assumption: every new generation will be more numerous than the one that came before it, which meant there was always growing opportunities to start businesses, find more customers, and generate wealth. And there were always more young people available to care for old people. It’s almost as if economic growth required a demographic pyramid scheme. And now that’s ending.
But there is a second, bigger problem with global demographics in this era, which is the uneven pace at which populations are shifting from growth to decline. And small wonder that Elon Musk’s warnings on this topic are dismissed as uninformed rants, because the fact that Africa’s population is exploding at the same time as the rest of the world’s population is collapsing is a phenomenon that will make any cautiously inoffensive analyst squirm. Here is a map of the nations of the world, color coded according to each nation’s rate of population growth:
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination, much less formal training in demographics, to understand what this map documents. Apart from a few nations in South and Central America, and Papua New Guinea, every nation on earth has a below replacement birth-rate. That is, until you examine the nations in Africa and parts of the Middle East and Central Asia.
It is disingenuous for demographers to suggest that slow population decline is manageable, and leave it at that. After all, maybe it is. Maybe we need to discover how to maintain economic health in a world with slow population decline. But to say it’s going to take a century before the population of the world begins to significantly drop ignores two Elephants in the room. First, as things currently stand, within a century, if not sooner, the majority of people on earth will be African, and that reality will be exacerbated by the fact that by then the overwhelming majority of people under 25 will be African, and the only segment of the global population pyramid where there might remain a majority of people who are not African will be among the very elderly.
Clearly, this is an extrapolation, and extrapolations aren’t always predictive. But they’re also not based on imaginary data. These trends are playing out at breathtaking speed around the world. In Germany, where the nation-extinguishing low birth rate has risen slightly in recent years, the recent waves of immigrants are the reason why. Fully 27 percent of Germany’s newborns in 2022 were from mothers who were born somewhere else – primarily Africa and the Middle East. This percentage understates the impact of immigration is already having on Germany’s ethnic and cultural demography, because millions of mothers born in Germany are themselves children of recent immigrants.
In Western nations, the solution to population decline is to import millions of young and fecund Africans, Middle Easterners, and Central Americans. People are being transferred, en masse, from nations with rapidly growing populations into nations with declining populations. That seems logical, although it only defers the ultimate question, which is what happens when even people from these nations stop having children. Asian nations have chosen to restrict immigration, and instead are learning to cope with declining populations through, among other things, robotics and AI. What they are not doing is replacing themselves via mass immigration.
Which brings us to the hundred trillion dollar question. Is it desirable to replace the population of Europe with the population of Africa? Is it desirable to replace the population of the United States with refugees from the swelling populations of failed, chaotic, destitute nations? And if so, is it prudent to abandon the melting pot ideal of assimilation which worked so well for the first two centuries of America’s existence as a nation, and replace it with a multicultural ideal that in has devolved into something extremists use to deliberately nurture mutual resentment between immigrants and the host population? Or if assimilation is reestablished as a universally shared national priority, can it still work? Can Americans, more diverse than ever, rediscover and embrace common values and national unity?
Over the past few weeks we have seen literally millions of Leftists join forces with millions of Middle Eastern immigrants to flood the streets of American and European cities in support of Palestine. Underlying the anti-Zionist passion of these mobs is a related but deeper shared understanding: The privileged whites of Western nations are oppressors. They are culpable for the travails of the world, from devastated ecosystems to desperately poor nations. Their culture, their capitalism, their colonialism, and their Christianity are all engines of oppression. All of it must be utterly destroyed.
At what point do tribal hatreds, or just an unprecedented level of differences in tradition and culture between immigrant and host populations, erase the potential for reconciliation and unity? What brand of charismatic leadership can motivate millions of bitter rivals to abandon ages of murderous feuds and choose to unify, and how rare is that? Can debates over what constitutes an optimal political and economic system, inherent in any democracy but enough by itself to periodically engulf nations in civil conflict, withstand in addition to that historic instability the added challenge of tribal conflicts?
This is the modern face of multiculturalism. Perhaps diversity should be a strength to be celebrated, but in practice it has become polarizing. Even 20 years ago, such demonstrations of anti-Western power in the heartlands of Western nations would have been unthinkable. But demographic shifts, propelled by a plummeting population of Americans and Europeans and a burgeoning population of Africans and Middle Easterners, enabled by corporate and political special interests in the West who believe their economic survival depends on mass migration, have turned the unthinkable into reality. And it has only just begun.
One item stood out at last week’s Republican presidential primary debate: There was not an explicitly nor implicitly identified libertarian candidate. Ron Paul represented the libertarian faction in Republican debates in 2008 and 2012, and his son Rand Paul assumed the mantle in 2016. Prior libertarian-leaning Republican primary candidates include Barry Goldwater in 1964, Jack Kemp in 1988, and Steve Forbes in 1996 and 2000, yet no such candidate can claim the position in this year’s Republican primary. The lack of a libertarian candidate is emblematic of the right’s shift away from free-market fundamentalism and toward a more robust social conservatism.
My own ideological evolution is demonstrative of the right’s shift away from libertarianism. Eight years ago, The Federalist published my essay making the Christian case for libertarianism. At the time, libertarianism seemed ascendant in contemporary politics. The New York Times wondered aloud if America’s “libertarian moment” had arrived, and Time Magazine featured Sen. Rand Paul on its cover describing him as “The Most Interesting Man in Politics.” But libertarianism’s political triumph was short-lived.
There are many possible reasons for this shift away from libertarianism, but among the most decisive were the disruptive events of the Covid-19 pandemic. America’s response to the pandemic exposed two fundamental truths that libertarianism was ill-equipped to answer: First, our institutions have been seized by ideological activists who have weaponized them against core American values; second, the left is on an evangelizing mission to impose its values across society unless resisted.
Institutions Are Broken
Covid exposed the deep moral rot of key institutions, such as academia, journalism, science and medicine, and corporations, among many others. In a liberal society, these institutions play a vital role in tempering concentrated political power by serving as neutral actors leveraging their unique expertise and interests to better society. During the pandemic, however, these institutions revealed themselves as political activists weaponizing their unique positions of authority to enact the left’s political agenda.
This rot was evident when public health officials published a public letter during the height of the pandemic insisting that the George Floyd riots did not violate their previously asserted guidance against mass gatherings because the rioters were rioting for a supposedly virtuous cause. This letter exposed those bureaucrats as mere political activists rather than the neutral experts they claim to be.
When critical race theory (CRT) became a polarizing, mainstream issue, many libertarians claimed CRT was protected by academic freedom. But that’s not true. Public school curriculums are inherently political because public officials ultimately decide what is taught in a public school. But for decades, curricula have been developed by progressives leading to a left-wing indoctrination of students evident in declining civic knowledge and patriotism.
The activist takeover of institutions allows leftists an additional avenue to exercise political power without ever explicitly enacting legislation. Therefore, conservatives must be willing to cripple their ability to exercise power by either externally dismantling these institutions or through their own hostile takeover. Neutrality toward these corrupt institutions will only allow the left to continue to subvert conservatives’ political interests.
The Left Won’t Leave You Alone
Recent years have also made it clear that the left won’t leave you alone. Leftists have a missionary zeal to impose their mores upon society. Again, the George Floyd riots are demonstrative. In their aftermath, the left demanded that you demonstrate your solidarity with leftist social causes or else you’re complicit in systemic racism.
Lavishly funded “diversity, equity, and inclusion” consultants infiltrated corporate boardrooms to inject racial identity politics into the workplace. Then the left came for your children, secretly using public schools to compel children into experimental mutilation under the guise of gender theory. Parents who objected to this radicalism were deemed domestic terrorists or threatened by Child Protective Services. There is nowhere to hide. Leftists insist on your acquiescence.
The left’s cultural aggression is a product of the right’s refusal to assert our own cultural values. Adherence to a neutral public sphere under the guise of secularism only creates a vacuum for the left to leverage the powers of the state to promote their own values. When the state stopped promoting traditional Christian values, the left filled the void by promoting cultural Marxism.
A less libertarian conservatism must leverage tools such as public school curricula, public television, military ethics training, and other professional training in the bureaucracy, etc. to educate Americans on traditional virtues.
Liberty Requires Virtue
Institutional rot and the left’s missionary zeal thus resurface a timeless wisdom: Liberty requires virtue. Absent said virtue, institutions and culture will inevitably culminate in tyranny and social disorder. In recent years, conservatives have relearned that a culture cannot sustain degradation without catastrophic effects to individual liberty. By contrast, libertarianism is at best agnostic on the need for a state to cultivate individual virtue.
Social righteousness as a prerequisite for liberty is an insight our Founding Fathers understood. In his farewell address, George Washington implored that America must be a virtuous nation for the republic to endure. He wrote:
… And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
Of course, libertarians and the left will accuse conservatives of wanting to enact a Christian theocracy, but that’s a lazy smear. Again, George Washington is illustrative. In his first annual address to Congress, President Washington wrote that Americans must understand the difference between order and oppression, and also liberty and licentiousness. He wrote:
… by teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority; between burthens proceeding from a disregard to their convenience and those resulting from the inevitable exigencies of Society; to discriminate the spirit of Liberty from that of licentiousness, cherishing the first, avoiding the last…
Libertarianism fails to heed Washington’s advice by mistaking all encroachments on personal behavior as oppression. On the contrary, the conservative appreciates that in a free society, the state must proactively promote social virtue to prevent society from descending into cultural degradation. Disorder and licentiousness inevitably result in tyranny.
A New Libertarian-Conservative Fusionism
Despite these critiques, libertarianism still offers a lot to the right. The free market remains the greatest path toward material prosperity, and the right’s ability to promote wealth creation is among our biggest political advantages that should not be ceded. But of course, conservatism’s goal is about more than material wealth. Rather, it’s about shaping the conditions for human fulfillment. Any such new fusionism between libertarians and conservatives requires finding libertarian solutions to conservative objectives.
For example, among the right’s policy priorities is to rebuild the natural family. While this can be done via the tax code through an expanded earned income tax credit, or paid family leave policies, libertarians might help deregulate childcare services to drive down the cost of childcare.
Surely there are plenty of ways libertarians and conservatives can and should find common cause, but any shared agenda between libertarians and conservatives must aim toward retaking institutions, restoring social virtue, and rebuilding the family. Absent those objectives, libertarianism offers little to the right in our current political moment. America’s current state is characterized by cultural decadence and institutional rot that can only be remedied by an aggressive conservative agenda unafraid to assert its values throughout society.
As much as some in conservative circles want it to be true, libertarianism is not on the way out. In fact, the liberty movement has plenty of opportunities to start making inroads and winning over more minds if it approaches politics differently from what it has in the past.
I came across an article by Brian Hawkins in The Federalist in which he argues that libertarianism is “ill-equipped” when it comes to saving America. The author rightly acknowledged that in this current election cycle, there is “not an explicitly nor implicitly identified libertarian candidate” and pointed to past races in which leaders like Ron Paul, Jack Kemp, and Steve Forbes took up this mantle.
Still, he goes on to assert that “libertarianism’s political triumph was short-lived.”
It is true that, at least for a season, more Republicans were adopting more libertarian approaches to issues like marijuana, criminal justice reform, and foreign policy. In several ways, they still are. But from where I sit, most with libertarian leanings, including myself, became disenchanted with a Republican Party that still wanted to embrace more government that we were comfortable with.
However, if the GOP is getting less libertarian, it does not necessarily mean that the ideology isn’t still an essential component of saving America.
The first reason Hawkins gives for the shift away from libertarianism is the COVID-19 pandemic:
America’s response to the pandemic exposed two fundamental truths that libertarianism was ill-equipped to answer: First, our institutions have been seized by ideological activists who have weaponized them against core American values; second, the left is on an evangelizing mission to impose its values across society unless resisted.
The author goes on to argue that the pandemic “exposed the deep moral rot of key institutions” that have “revealed themselves as political activists weaponizing their unique positions of authority to enact the left’s political agenda."
Hawkins is absolutely spot-on in this observation. But then he brings up the critical race theory issue and said, “Many libertarians claimed CRT was protected by academic freedom.”
While some did make this assertion, many more found fault with the overall effort to indoctrinate children through the government-run school system. Indeed, this doesn’t only involve race but also sexuality and gender ideology. Libertarians like myself had no problem with most of the laws intended to stop actual indoctrination, but we also pointed out that these laws in and of themselves would do little to address the issue. I have pointed out how teachers are getting around these laws and continuing to include this ideology in their teachings.
From a liberty-focused perspective, the most powerful weapon parents have against leftist indoctrination efforts is school choice – the ability to send one’s children to schools that aren’t telling them that they are oppressors and oppressed and that they can switch their gender at will. When parents can place their children at sane private schools or homeschool more easily, then it becomes almost impossible for leftists to brainwash them into their ideology.
Hawkins also points out that leftists “won’t leave you alone” and that they have “a missionary zeal to impose their mores upon society.” Again, he is absolutely correct. But the solution is not to continue empowering the government they are using to force their silly beliefs on the rest of us. Rather, the right move is to actually weaken the government and nullify its overreach.
So if libertarianism isn’t the solution, then what is? The author notes that “liberty requires virtue” and that without virtue, “institutions and culture will inevitably culminate in tyranny and social disorder.”
Then, he makes the contention that “libertarianism is at best agnostic on the need for a state to cultivate individual virtue.”
Hawkins then notes that “the conservative appreciates that in a free society, the state must proactively promote social virtue to prevent society from descending into cultural degradation.”
His first point is incorrect.
As libertarians, we are not “agnostic” on the idea that the state should use force to “cultivate virtue,” we are adamantly against it. Yes, we do believe that a virtuous society should be the objective – but we do not believe that a small group of flawed people calling themselves the government should possess the authority to compel people to be virtuous. Indeed, by definition, one cannot be virtuous because someone is using the threat of state violence to force them to be virtuous.
If we wish to be a people of virtue, then we must take that on ourselves as a community and nation instead of outsourcing our morality and goodness to this small group of people, most of whom aren’t very moral or good themselves. In my estimation, the most pernicious mistake we have made as a country is abdicating our responsibility to the state to address societal ills such as prostitution, drug addiction, and others. In this way, believing we can use the power of the government to compel people to behave has made us less virtuous.
Of course, this isn’t to say a governing authority should not check human behavior. The proper role of a government is to protect our rights from those seeking to violate them, not to control someone’s morality. The state should punish and stop those who kill, steal, and destroy. But when it comes to personal morality, it is up to the individual and society to regulate themselves instead of relying on men with guns and badges to do it.
In May 2021, L. Gordon Crovitz, a media executive turned start-up investor, pitched Twitter executives on a powerful censorship tool.
In an exchange that came to light in the “Twitter Files” revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, touted his product, NewsGuard, as a “Vaccine Against Misinformation.” His written pitch highlighted a “separate product” — beyond an extension already on the Microsoft Edge browser — “for internal use by content-moderation teams.” Crovitz promised an out-of-the-box tool that would use artificial intelligence powered by NewsGuard algorithms to rapidly screen content based on hashtags and search terms the company associated with dangerous content.
How would the company determine the truth? For issues such as Covid-19, NewsGuard would steer readers to official government sources only, like the federal Centers for Disease Control. Other content-moderation allies, Crovitz’s pitch noted, include “intelligence and national security officials,” “reputation management providers,” and “government agencies,” which contract with the firm to identify misinformation trends. Instead of only fact-checking individual forms of incorrect information, NewsGuard, in its proposal, touted the ability to rate the “overall reliability of websites” and “’prebunk’ COVID-19 misinformation from hundreds of popular websites.”
NewsGuard’s ultimately unsuccessful pitch sheds light on one aspect of a growing effort by governments around the world to police speech ranging from genuine disinformation to dissent from officially sanctioned narratives. In the United States, as the “Twitter Files” revealed, the effort often takes the form of direct government appeals to social media platforms and news outlets. More commonly the government works through seemingly benign non-governmental organizations — such as the Stanford Internet Observatory — to quell speech it disapproves of.
Or it pays to coerce speech through government contracts with outfits such as NewsGuard, a for-profit company of especially wide influence. Founded in 2018 by Crovitz and his co-CEO Steven Brill, a lawyer, journalist, and entrepreneur, NewsGuard seeks to monetize the work of reshaping the internet. The potential market for such speech policing, NewsGuard’s pitch to Twitter noted, was $1.74 billion, an industry it hoped to capture.
Instead of merely suggesting rebuttals to untrustworthy information, as many other existing anti-misinformation groups provide, NewsGuard has built a business model out of broad labels that classify entire news sites as safe or untrustworthy, using an individual grading system producing what it calls “nutrition labels.” The ratings — which appear next to a website’s name on the Microsoft Edge browser and other systems that deploy the plug-in — use a scale of zero to 100 based on what NewsGuard calls “nine apolitical criteria,” including “gathers and presents information responsibly” (worth 18 points), “avoids deceptive headlines” (10 points), and “does not repeatedly publish false or egregiously misleading content” (22 points), etc.
IMAGE CREDITNEWSGUARD
Critics note that such ratings are entirely subjective — The New York Times, for example, which repeatedly carried false and partisan information from anonymous sources during the Russiagate hoax, gets a 100 percent rating. RealClearInvestigations, which took heat in 2019 for unmasking the “whistleblower” of the first Trump impeachment (while many other outlets including the Times still have not), has an 80 percent rating. (Verbatim: the NewsGuard-RCI exchange over the whistleblower.) Independent news outlets with an anti-establishment bent receive particularly low ratings from NewsGuard, such as the libertarian news site Antiwar.com, with a 49.5 percent rating, and conservative site The Federalist, with a 12.5 percent rating.
As it stakes a claim to being the internet’s arbiter of trust, the company’s site says it has conducted reviews of some 95 percent of news sources across the English, French, German, and Italian web. It has also published reports about disinformation involving China and the Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Hamas wars. The model has received glowing profiles in CNN and The New York Times, among other outlets, as a viable solution for fighting fake news.
IMAGE CREDITNEWSGUARD
NewsGuard is pushing to apply its browser screening process to libraries, academic centers, news aggregation portals, and internet service providers. Its reach, however, is far greater because of other products it aims to sell to social media and other content moderation firms and advertisers. “An advertiser’s worst nightmare is having an ad placement damage even one customer’s trust in a brand,” said Crovitz in a press release touting NewsGuard’s “BrandGuard” service for advertisers. “We’re asking them to pay a fraction of what they pay their P.R. people and their lobbyists to talk about the problem,” Crovitz told reporters.
NewsGuard Starves Disfavored Sites Of Ad Clients
NewsGuard’s BrandGuard tool provides an “exclusion list” that deters advertisers from buying space on sites NewsGuard deems problematic. But that warning service creates inherent conflicts of interest with NewsGuard’s financial model: The buyers of the service can be problematic entities too, with an interest in protecting and buffing their image.
A case in point: Publicis Groupe, NewsGuard’s largest investor and the biggest conglomerate of marketing agencies in the world, which has integrated NewsGuard’s technology into its fleet of subsidiaries that place online advertising. The question of conflicts arises because Publicis represents a range of corporate and government clients, including Pfizer — whose Covid vaccine has been questioned by some news outlets that have received low scores. Other investors include Bruce Mehlman, a D.C. lobbyist with a lengthy list of clients, including United Airlines and ByteDance, the parent company of much-criticized Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok.
NewsGuard has faced mounting criticism that rather than serving as a neutral public service against online propaganda, it instead acts as an opaque proxy for its government and corporate clients to stifle views that simply run counter to their own interests.
The criticism finds support in internal documents, such as the NewsGuard proposal to Twitter, which this reporter obtained during “Twitter Files” reporting last year, as well as in government records and discussions with independent media sites targeted by the startup.
Beginning last year, users scanning the headlines on certain browsers that include NewsGuard were warned against visiting Consortium News. A scarlet-red NewsGuard warning pop-up said, “Proceed With Caution” and claimed that the investigative news site “has published false claims about the Ukraine-Russia war.” The warning also notifies a network of advertisers, news aggregation portals, and social media platforms that Consortium News cannot be trusted.
But Consortium News, founded by late Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Robert Parry and known for its strident criticism of U.S. foreign policy, is far from a fake news publisher. And NewsGuard, the entity attempting to suppress it, Consortium claims, is hardly a disinterested fact-checker because of federal influence over it.
NewsGuard attached the label after pressing Consortium for retractions or corrections to six articles published on the site. Those news articles dealt with widely reported claims about neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian military and U.S. influence over the country — issues substantiated by other credible media outlets. After Consortium editors refused to remove the reporting and offered a detailed rebuttal, the entire site received a misinformation label, encompassing over 20,000 articles and videos published by the outlet since it was founded in 1995.
The left-wing news site believes the label was part of a pay-for-censorship scheme. It notes that Consortium News was targeted after NewsGuard received a $749,387 Defense Department contract in 2021 to identify “false narratives” relating to the war between Ukraine and Russia, as well as other forms of foreign influence.
Bruce Afran, an attorney for Consortium News, disagrees. “What’s really happening here is that NewsGuard is trying to target those who take a different view from the government line,” said Afran. He filed an amended complaint last month claiming that NewsGuard not only defamed his client, but also acts as a front for the military to suppress critical reporting.
“There’s a great danger in being maligned this way,” Afran continued. “The government cannot evade the Constitution by hiring a private party.”
Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News, observed that in previous years, anonymous social media accounts had also targeted his site, falsely claiming a connection to the Russian government in a bid to discredit his outlet.
“NewsGuard has got to be the worst,” said Lauria. “They’re labeling us in a way that stays with us. Every news article we publish is defamed with that label of misinformation.”
Both Lauria and Afran said that they worry that NewsGuard is continuing to collaborate with the government or with intelligence services. In previous years, NewsGuard had worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. It’s not clear to what extent NewsGuard is still working with the Pentagon. But earlier this year, Crovitz wrote an email to journalist Matt Taibbi, defending its work with the government, describing it in the present tense, suggesting that it is ongoing:
For example, as is public, our work for the Pentagon’s Cyber Command is focused on the identification and analysis of information operations targeting the U.S. and its allies conducted by hostile governments, including Russia and China. Our analysts alert officials in the U.S. and in other democracies, including Ukraine, about new false narratives targeting America and its allies, and we provide an understanding of how this disinformation spreads online. We are proud of our work countering Russian and Chinese disinformation on behalf of Western democracies.
The company has not yet responded to the Consortium News lawsuit, filed in the New York federal court. In May of this year, the Air Force Research Lab responded to a records request from journalist Erin Marie Miller about the NewsGuard contract. The contents of the work proposal were entirely redacted.
Asked about the company’s continued work with the intelligence sector, Skibinski replied, “We license our data about false claims made by state media sources and state-sponsored disinformation efforts from China, Russia and Iran to the defense and intelligence sector, as we describe on our website.”
Punishing An Outlet That Criticized A NewsGuard Backer’s Pharma Clients
Other websites that have sought to challenge their NewsGuard rating say it has shown little interest in a back-and-forth exchange regarding unsettled matters.
Take the case of The Daily Sceptic, a small publication founded and edited by conservative English commentator Toby Young. As a forum for journalists and academics to challenge a variety of strongly held public-policy orthodoxies, even those on Covid-19 vaccines and climate change, The Daily Sceptic is a genuine dissenter.
Last year, Young reached out to NewsGuard, hoping to improve his site’s 74.5 rating.
In a series of emails from 2022 and 2023 that were later forwarded to RealClearInvestigations, NewsGuard responded to Young by listing articles that it claimed represent forms of misinformation, such as reports that Pfizer’s vaccine carried potential side effects. The site, notably, has been a strident critic of Covid-19 policies, such as coercive mandates.
Anicka Slachta, an analyst with NewsGuard, highlighted articles that questioned the efficacy of the vaccines and lockdowns. The Daily Sceptic, for example, reported a piece casting Covid-19 lockdowns as “unnecessary, ineffective and harmful,” citing academic literature from Johns Hopkins University.
Rather than refute this claim, Slachta simply offered an opposing view from another academic, who criticized the arguments put forth by lockdown critics. And the Hopkins study, Slachta noted, was not peer-reviewed. The topic is still, of course, under serious debate. Sweden rejected the draconian lockdowns on schools and businesses implemented by most countries in North American and Europe, yet had one of the lowest “all-cause excess mortality” rates in either region.
Young and others said that the issue highlighted by NewsGuard is not an instance of misinformation, but rather an ongoing debate, with scientists and public health experts continuing to explore the moral, economic, and health-related questions raised by such policies. In its response to NewsGuard’s questions about the lockdown piece, Young further added that his site made no claim that the Hopkins paper was peer-reviewed and added that its findings had been backed up by a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Yet to NewsGuard, Young’s site evidently posed a misinformation danger by simply reporting on the subject and refusing to back down. Emails between NewsGuard and the Daily Sceptic show Young patiently responding to the company’s questions; he also added postscripts to the articles flagged by NewsGuard with a link to the fact checks of them and rebuttals of those fact checks. Young also took the extra step of adding updates to other articles challenged by fact-checking non-governmental organizations. “I have also added postscripts to other articles not flagged by you but which have been fact checked by other organisations, such as Full Fact and Reuters,” Young wrote to Slachta.
That wasn’t enough. After a series of back-and-forth emails, NewsGuard said it would be satisfied only with a retraction of the articles, many of which, like the lockdown piece, contained no falsehoods. After the interaction, NewsGuard lowered The Daily Sceptic’s rating to 37.5/100.
“I’m afraid you left me no choice but to conclude that NewsGuard is a partisan site that is trying to demonetise news publishing sites whose politics it disapproves of under the guise of supposedly protecting potential advertisers from being associated with ‘mis-’ and ‘disinformation,’” wrote Young in response. “Why bother to keep up the pretence of fair-mindedness John? Just half my rating again, which you’re going to do whatever I say.”
NewsGuard’s Skibinski, in a response to a query about The Daily Sceptic’s downgrade, denied that his company makes any “demands” of publishers. “We simply call them for comment and ask questions about their editorial practices,” he wrote. “This is known as journalism.”
The experience mirrored that of Consortium. Afran, the attorney for the site, noted that NewsGuard uses an arbitrary process to punish opponents, citing the recent study from the company on misinformation on the Israel-Hamas war. “They cherry-picked 250 posts among tweets they knew were incorrect, and they attempt to create the impression that all of X is unreliable,” the lawyer noted. “And so what they’re doing, and this is picked up by mainstream media, that’s actually causing X, formerly Twitter, to now lose ad revenue, based literally on 250 posts out of the billions of posts on Twitter.”
The push to demonize and delist The Daily Sceptic, a journalist critic of pharmaceutical products and policies, reflects an inherent conflict with the biggest backer of NewsGuard: Publicis Groupe.
Publicis client Pfizer awarded Publicis a major deal to help manage its global media and advertising operations, a small reflection of which is the $2.3 billion the pharmaceutical giant spent on advertising last year.
The NewsGuard-Publicis relationship extends to the Paris-based marketing conglomerate’s full client list, including LVHM, PepsiCo, Glaxo Smith Kline, Burger King, ConAgra, Kellogg Company, General Mills, and McDonalds. “NewsGuard will be able to publish and license ‘white lists’ of news sites our clients can use to support legitimate publishers while still protecting their brand reputations,” said Maurice Lévy, chairman of the Publicis Groupe, upon its launch of NewsGuard.
Put another way, when corporate watchdogs like The Daily Sceptic or Consortium News are penalized by NewsGuard, the ranking system amounts to a blacklist to guide advertisers where not to spend their money.
“NewsGuard is clearly in the business of censoring the truth,” noted Dr. Joseph Mercola, a gadfly voice whose website was ranked as misinformation by NewsGuard after it published reports about Covid-19’s potential origin from a lab in Wuhan, China.
“Seeing how Publicis represents most of the major pharmaceutical companies in the world and funded the creation of NewsGuard, it’s not far-fetched to assume Publicis might influence NewsGuard’s ratings of drug industry competitors,” Mercola added, in a statement online.
