When Neither a Marketplace nor Ideas are Proffered
On the Promises & Platitudes of the So-Called Marketplace of Ideas

4,186 words

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A vast majority in American society remain confident in so-called First Amendment values. A foundational premise to this belief in free speech — not knowledge, but belief — is the concept of the “free marketplace of ideas.” This construct postulates that conflicting ideas or positions compete in an imagined arena of public discourse. This concept is predicated on the assumption that a sober, rational public, endowed with the benefits of a classical education and possessing a minimum, baseline level of intelligence, will ensure that the best ideas will triumph over the bad ones. Of course, few if any of those predicates are satisfied by the majority of people in our society today. With its origins in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, the phrase “marketplace of ideas” was stated specifically in a dissenting opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in Abrams v. United States, and later enshrined in the majority opinion of Brandenburg v. Ohio. This concept has become the bedrock of First Amendment jurisprudence that, this author would argue, has gone too far in protecting vulgarity and obscenity.

As one of many abiding myths of American exceptionalism, it would be a massive understatement to submit that a large segment of the population has absolute faith in this so-called “marketplace of ideas.” In one heated, acrimonious exchange, a certain mainstream, establishment conservative of note blithely told this author that the “free marketplace of ideas” is what has allowed for this nation to be as prosperous as it is. Not the petro dollar, or having two oceans, the largest naval fleet, and one of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals; not winning two world wars; not a long-haul Ponzi scheme of unsustainable debt propped up by mortgage-backed securities and other sleight-of-hand tricks in structured finance. The marketplace of ideas is why Americans enjoy so much prosperity (prosperity that is likely not long for this world).

Few things could be more preposterous, either in regards to such fantastical delusions about the secrets of American wealth and prosperity, or the enduring notion that this “marketplace of ideas” works to advance the best ideas. A brief survey of American public life over the past 80 to 100 years leaves any sane, clear-thinking person to wonder how seldom the best ideas, the best expressions in culture, politics, and thought do prevail. Victorian British society was less “free” than ours, but they produced some of the best literature and thought, even produced the pre-Raphaelite art movement. Since the end of the Second World War particularly, all aspects of culture, thought, and artistic expression in The West have devolved in spectacular fashion. Whereas Bismarck’s Germany had the music of Richard Wagner, American popular culture has Madonna, who seems rather quaint in comparison to the genres and “artists” that followed her, from vulgar rap “music” writ large, to Katy Perry, to Ariane Grande, to Doja Cat. Add Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and other fast-food poison to this ghastly mosaic of a culturally-bankrupt empire that somehow exports its Unkultur to Europe and the rest of the world, and a most vulgar picture has been painted, indeed.

With rare exceptions such as Breaking Bad, which does have some elements of good storytelling, a critical mass of society has been steeped in the veritable brain rot of generations of dumb-dumb American sitcoms, game shows, and, more recently, so-called “reality television.” Rather than immersion in biblical fables or figures in Greek mythology that are the basis of any classical education, every generation since the Boomers and especially Generation X and thereafter have marinated in such inane tripe as The Brady Bunch, Happy Days, Gomer Pyle, and Family Ties, followed by garbage such as Friends and Two and a Half Men. The suggestion that one can simply “turn it off” is defied by this challenge: Find someone who does not know who “the Fonz” is. Seinfeld is so popular and remains so to this day that any person who desires to relate with others in society and “get on in the world” would be well advised to familiarize himself with some of the better-known episodes; while the most celebrated episodes such as “Soup Nazi,” “Bizarro Jerry,” and “The Chinese Restaurant” are mildly amusing, despite the idiotic laugh tracks, most of the series is forgettable, obnoxious, Judeophilic dreck. And woe unto anyone who tries to get through the entire series of Parks and Recreation to understand why Ron Swanson has become an Internet meme, critically acclaimed and as popular as that show may be. Rather than boasting of any literary figures who could ever approximate in any way great authors such as Thomas Hardy, Johann von Goethe, or Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Danielle Steel and John Grisham remain two of America’s most famous contemporary authors, with the poorly-written female masturbation aid 50 Shades of Grey being one of the bestselling books of all time. Black nationalist Toni Morrison is taught throughout high school and college, while Cormac McCarthy’s literary career was ignited by Oprah Winfrey and her book club. The narratives and storytelling of his books are laudable, but his prose, riddled with run-on sentences and jettisoning basic rules of grammar regarding sentences, quotation marks, and commas is an affront to those more erudite readers capable of resisting ad populum fallacies and going against a consensus with no strong foundation on the merits.

Going beyond the cultural expressions that have been celebrated in this marketplace of ideas, a brief survey of conventional wisdom leaves one to wonder to what extent many people have any grasp of reality at all. Few maxims are more prominent in the mainstream American creed than the abject lie that “race is just skin deep.” A child should be able to compare and contrast the visage of Bill Cosby with a man of Northern European descent and immediately discern that nothing could be further from the truth. And yet few adages are so celebrated as “race is only skin deep” or “race is just a social construct.”

This lie is the foundation on which much delusion is founded, whereby a seeming majority believe that there are no real differences among the races; that blacks’ collective “racial commitment to crime” is exclusively a cultural thing, or somehow a byproduct of “systemic white racism”; and that significant differences in IQ among the races that persist through the generations and across the world are somehow attributable to something other than genetics and evolutionary biology. One might liken such collective delusion to a swimmer holding a ball under water — i.e. something that can only be done for so long, but quite remarkably, American society and culture have held this ball under the water for generations. The succession of race riots through the decades, incarceration levels that outpace that of China as well as the violent crimes that predicate such convictions, and other social ills stemming from delusions of race have done surprisingly little to disabuse the masses of this lie. Instead, Soros backed district attorneys and city councils in blue strongholds have reacted to this “racial commitment to crime” by simply decriminalizing a whole host of crimes, some of them directly related to quality-of-life interests, others including serious violent crime.

Readers will doubtlessly get the reference to an absurd but at times amusing film that wanted to send an important “anti-racist” message, but was more like a hapless football team that continuously scores “own goals” against its own side.

Other lies held as truth by the masses include the United States’ role in the First World War. Even to this day, many Americans, quite astonishingly, think Kaiser Wilhelm wanted to conquer the world.[1] Many have a perverted understanding of the Zimmermann Telegram as inviting Mexico to attack the United States, rather than a conditional proposal that would only apply if the United States entered the war against Germany, and was made in the context of the United States being neutral in name only as it provided aid to Great Britain. Few know about the Balfour declaration, or the terrible deprivations and depravities inflicted on the German people in the wake of the armistice and The Versailles Diktat, just as many have given nary a thought to how this government armed and supported Britan during the Great War up to and after the sinking of the Lusitania. So many decry Adolf Hitler — rightly so to some extent, though one should question if Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin were as bad or worse[2] — but so few understand the reasons why average, everyday Germans supported him (without of course a time machine or the advantage of hindsight). This author’s late grandfather, who served in the American armed forces during the Second World War, once disputed that Germans ever paid not a million, but a billion marks for a loaf in bread during the hyperinflation crises that Germany experienced during the Interwar Years, one of myriad hardships suffered by the German people that arose directly from this country’s foreign policy. Another was starvation from the Allied blockade between the armistice and the formal signing of the Versailles Diktat, which killed just under one million people.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.

Other preposterous lies, or at best mythologies, are stubbornly adhered to by a critical mass of people, from faith in the rags-to-riches trope, which originated from Horatio Alger’s books that suggest we all have opportunity in this country (a proposition seemingly at odds with the survivorship fallacy or bias), to widespread support for women in on-the-beat law enforcement and combat roles, a disastrous policy that has even led to co-ed barracks in the military. How many millions of Americans, most especially on the Left, blinded by support for abortion as a policy matter, insist that abortion is a constitutional right, without having read, let alone understood, Roe v. Wade, or Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health that rightly overturned the former? How many understand that Dobbs simply delegates abortion as a matter to be decided by state legislatures or Congress at the federal level?

Other preposterous ideas and falsehoods are not universally clung to but bitterly disputed, but it nonetheless reveals a critical flaw in the “free marketplace of ideas” model that such destructive ideas could be entertained by any number of people other than an outlying fringe. That large numbers of people, including a seeming majority of celebrities and other influential people, support and endorse transgender ideology and its myriad lies proves that a critical mass of people are incapable of the sort of cool, cerebral deliberation of the issues on their merits, as envisioned by John Stuart Mill and others, thus rendering the “marketplace of ideas” model unworkable. As stated earlier, widespread support for women in on-the-beat roles in law enforcement and combat duty in the armed forces is further proof that the truth often does not always or even often win, this truth of course being that humans are a sexually dimorphic species, with men enjoying, in the overwhelming number of cases, superior bodily strength, larger and denser skeletal frames and other biological differences that render them better suited to such things, to mention nothing of a plethora of considerations rooted in evolutionary psychology demonstrating why these are such very bad ideas.

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One fundamental flaw in the postulations made by Mill and other thinkers is an incredibly naïve view of humanity that does not take into account irrational attributes in human psychology, including most especially the herd mentality. Social contagion theory, perhaps better described as social contagion fact, demonstrates that irrational, destructive behavior of one individual or a few individuals can rub off on others for reasons utterly devoid of reason or intellect. Peer pressure is an immensely powerful aspect of this herd mentality, and it is a powerful force not just in children and adolescents, but adults as well.

Much has been written about the power of mass media, the power of advertising which totals hundreds of billions of dollars in yearly expenditures. Noam Chomsky, while an ideological enemy, brilliantly discerns the actual dynamic of this so-called marketplace of ideas, describing this power imbalance as “manufacturing consent.” Decades before, Oswald Mosley recognized precisely the same problem:

The Press will not be free to tell lies. That is not freedom for the people, but a tyranny over their minds and souls. Much humbug is talked on this subject. What is press freedom? In practice it means the right of a few millionaires to corner newspaper shares on the stock exchange and to voice their own opinions and interests, irrespective of the truth or of the national interest.

Of course, as powerful as these newspaper concerns and media of his time were, they pale in comparison to the hypnotic effect of modern mass media. Our troubles are infinitely worse than what they were in his day.

You can buy Greg Hood’s Waking Up From the American Dream here.

As Gregory Hood aka James Fitzpatrick points out, very often shifts in public opinion follow the messaging in mass media in lock-step fashion. Of course, neither Mill nor the figures who followed in his footsteps could imagine the hypnotic effect of either mass media or now more recently the social media phenomenon. When On Liberty was written, printed media was all there was. Radio was in its infancy when Oliver Wendell Holmes coined the term. Neither these figures nor the founders of the Constitution could have dreamed of what is known in the parlance of Constitutional Law as “vulgar, emotive expression,” ranging to some of the crasser, vulgar music videos of the 1980s and ‘90s to the greater degeneracy that has unfolded since then, not to mention the rise and later ubiquity of pornography in modern society. What intelligible ideas are really expressed by the likes of “Side by Side” by Ariane Grande, a song about a woman having sex with two men? In what ways does the vast majority of what comprises American popular culture articulate any intelligible thought or idea, such that any modern approximation of gentlemen and aristocrats could deliberate on them dispassionately in some Victorian parlor as envisioned by Mill? Of course, the infamous platform TikTok, limited to “shorts” of just a minute or two, does not lend itself to the sort of cool, intellectual deliberation of competing ideas envisioned by Mill or those who follow in his path. That platform, of course, has been a hotbed for fostering the transgender craze as well other manias associated with the far-Left woke crowd.

Aside from the masses gravitating towards ever more degeneracy that signifies nothing at all, the most crucial defect in this model is that there is no real marketplace to begin with — as there has not been for some time; not in the age of a few select multi-billion-dollar media conglomerates wielded by a hostile elite. Comcast and Disney are two of the biggest and most culpable media conglomerates, with net worths totaling $148 billion, and from $185.66 to $200 billion, respectively. The deleterious role Disney has had in the culture in recent years is well known and needs no further comment. This article, entitled “How a Company Called BlackRock Shapes Your News, Your Life, Our Future” sets forth in detail how this behemoth, endowed with almost ten trillion dollars, has a large stake in most mass-media conglomerates.

The vast disparity in wealth, totaling hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars, which therefore means a vast disparity in reach and audience, is daunting. Notwithstanding that, some insist that the truth somehow wins out regardless, that the best ideas always win in the long run, but there is no real evidence for that. Many in mainstream conservatism wax nostalgic about the 1990s, but many precursors to the normalization of homosexuality, the promulgation of so-called gay marriage, and the slide ever downward to greater deviancy and degeneracy were all set forth in the ‘90s, particularly with three episodes of dumb-dumb sitcoms Ellen, Roseanne, and Friends. Those episodes, entitled “The Puppy Episode,” “December Wedding,” and “The One with the Lesbian Wedding,” respectively, serve as watershed moments in the so-called gay rights movement. These episodes had views in the tens of millions each, and the effect of this reach is seen in what has followed since.

As the biblical proverb dictates, you shall “know the tree” by the fruit it bears. Not only is it not anything close to a fair fight, it is really no fight at all. The idea that rogue, vanguard commentators with followers in the thousands or even hundreds of thousands can compete in the long run is wishful thinking at its worst. Compound this with the rampant deplatforming on YouTube, Twitter before Elon Musk bought it out (although Jared Taylor, Counter-Currents, and Kevin MacDonald are still banned), and other social media platforms and the proposition that there is a free marketplace of ideas becomes even more laughable, as once-popular figures such as Stefan Molyneux have slinked off into relative obscurity since deplatforming.

Beyond the indomitable influence of the mass media just discussed, a critical mass of people often just bend their viewpoints to whichever way the winds of power blow. This propensity is not only demonstrated in historical examples of military occupation, such as how large swathes of the populations of France, the low countries, and others complied with German occupation, and later how the German populace adapted to occupation and after that their lot existing as vassal states of the Soviet and Western Allies. It is demonstrated in how popular opinion reacted at first negatively, then positively, to several controversial Supreme Court decisions of note. These Supreme Court decisions were very unpopular at the time but were very quickly accepted, indicating that merely handing down these opinions shaped public opinion irrespective of the merits or any consideration of the merits by most. Brown v. Board of Education was wildly unpopular at the time, so much so that President Eisenhower had to send in federal troops to enforce it.

Roe v. Wade was also very unpopular at the time, only to gain more supporters on the strength of the authority fallacy, sharply dividing the country for decades until it was finally overturned. Both of these rulings were of course advocated for by instruments of mass media since each decision was handed down, so the about-face in public opinion can be attributed to both the raw exercise of power and mass media propaganda working in tandem. Perhaps a better example of this phenomenon is Obergefell v. Hodges. Prior to that decision, gay marriage was quite unpopular, so much that even California passed Proposition 8 in 2008, amending the state’s constitution to ban so-called “gay marriage.” Then, in yet another fit of judicial activism, the Supreme Court handed down Obergefell with the same sort of spurious legal reasoning that can only be described as part of the legacy of Roe v. Wade. And without much fanfare, and without any real discussion of the legal reasoning of Obergefell or examination as to what the consequences of gay marriage would ultimately be, a seeming majority of Americans simply changed their minds. The Supreme Court ruled that so-called gay marriage is a constitutional right, so it must be so. That seems to be the extent of how most reflected on this before changing their position on this matter.

The hypnotic effect of mass media, as well as the media oligopoly which has procured over 90% of mass media outlets, are both significant, seemingly intractable problems never anticipated by Mill or those who came after him. Neither could Mill nor his successors foresee the overtly commercial nature of the vast majority of popular culture and what is conveyed by modern mass media. To be sure, individual artists, authors, and the like render their expressions not just to express themselves, but also to make a living. There is a fundamental distinction, however, between an expression created by an individual and something created by committee in a corporate entity such as Disney, Paramount, and the like, even though that distinction is not discerned by our flawed legal system. Pornography in particular does not at all convey an idea or thought, but is a commercial commodity produced as a sort of ersatz prostitution, used to titillate for masturbation or other purposes.

As Goethe wrote, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” Rather than empower the individual, these grandiose and ultimately false platitudes about “the free marketplace of ideas” serve to lull the masses into thinking they are free, while giving free reign to powerful interests that wield unimaginable wealth to lure our civilization into ruin and eventual collapse through the hypnotic, mind-destroying dreck propagated by way of the instruments of mass media conglomerates and the powerful interests behind them. Those who correctly discern this problem, who discern that our supposed freedom of speech is illusory, will seek different solutions as some reach different conclusions than others about what solutions will work or are at all realistic. Some question “free speech principles” outright, as they come to question the viability and desirability of democracy — i.e. indirect democracy and universal suffrage.

Maybe people — or rather corporations and mass media conglomerates — should not be allowed to advocate for transgender lunacy, promote miscegenation, or produce pornographic material. Others look for legal solutions that could potentially be implemented by this system, however improbable, either because they understand that neither the Constitution nor this regime are going away anytime soon, or because they believe that the form of government and values espoused by the Constitution are still somehow normatively superior or otherwise can solve our problems. One rationale more amenable to those of a more mainstream persuasion could look to divesting these multi-billion dollar conglomerates through an anti-trust rationale. Others might seek to find a way to reform the dubious legal precedent that corporations are viewed as a person,[3] a most preposterous but also pernicious legal fiction. Neither Disney, nor BlackRock, nor any corporate conglomerate are persons, as any such corporate entity should be placed under restrictions similar to that of the historical predecessor to the corporation, the corporate charter. Given the long-haul ballot-stuffing scheme of demographic replacement that has been instigated since the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965, to say nothing of the grip lobbying interests have on our elected officials and government, such reforms seem most unlikely under our current system.

Of course, corporations and government are deeply intertwined, as has been demonstrated in any number of scandals, from government collusion with Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson and Johnson to implement COVID vaccine mandates, to various affairs concerning Halliburton. The high fructose corn syrup monster is a product of government subsidies combined with tariffs and cane sugar imports. These and other considerations persuade many not only that government is not the answer, but that government is never the answer. A more radical perspective might suggest that this particular type of government is not the answer; that, no matter how staggering the odds, these problems in the marketplace, whether the marketplace generally or the so-called marketplace of ideas, require government oversight and regulation to prevent it from being a nihilist game where whoever has the most power and money wins.

Please see the author’s Substack, The Raven’s Call, which features additional writings from a hard-Right perspective.

Notes

[1] Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War by Patrick J. Buchanan does much to dispel common myths about both world wars.

[2] This author’s historical analysis and interpretations of the Second World War and the Third Reich are complex and defy most labels. To be sure, I denounce Hitler, but not for the reasons Abraham Foxman and Jonathan Greenblatt would have me do so, but for many of the same reasons that many of his best generals and officers did. Germany had legitimate territorial claims on Sudetenland and Danzig, and Austrians overwhelmingly supported the Anschluss, as the legacy of the Habsburg Empire is a curious criterion by which to determine what German-speaking populations are part of Germany and which are not. Barbarous treatment of European Slavic peoples is anathema to any sane person, as are the number of disastrous decisions by Hitler which ultimately involved Germany in a war with three peer powers simultaneously, a war she was doomed to lose with mathematical certainty once war was declared on the United States. Then there is the brutality he meted out to his own people at the end of the war, as well as the abhorrent, callous disregard he had for the lives of his own in senseless “stand or die” orders, among other outrages. On that last part, the memoirs by Heinz Guderian and Erich von Manstein, as well as David Fraser’s Knight’s Cross:A Life of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, are illuminating. I am told someone once asked in my absence “Who is Richard Parker?” Someone replied,“He is a Right-wing atheist who hates Hitler because he lost the Second World War,” a fairly concise statement of my position on the matter, although it only bears on a few points, leaving many others unaddressed.

[3] The book Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy by Ted Nace offers an excellent analysis of the history of the legal precedent dictating that corporations are recognized as people under the law.