Mechanisms of Information Distribution
A review of The Liberal Media Industrial Complex

1,665 words

Mark Dice
The Liberal Media Industrial Complex
The Resistance Manifesto, 2019

Fellow travelers on the Right should be cherished. They may have inexplicable beliefs or regrettable habits, but that’s okay. If they’re willing to tolerate you, then that tolerance should be reciprocated and appreciated. I’m talking about the Christian Right, or, more specifically, those Christians who reject the Left in its entirety and refuse to condemn white identitarians as found in today’s dissident Right. They’re also not afraid to stand up against anti-white racism. They may disagree with the dissident Right and think they can turn the dissident Right to their point of view; and that’s fine. The dissident Right may feel the exact same way about them. We should just remember that there’s not a whole lot of difference between being pro-white and anti-anti-white—as long as people are staunch about it. And one of the staunchest on the Christian Right is Mark Dice.

Aside from his unparalleled ability to mock the Left, one of Dice’s strengths is analyzing the media and how what he calls “the mechanisms of information distribution” shape minds and influence history. In 2019’s The Liberal Media Industrial Complex, Dice provides a thorough assessment of how the Left has co-opted the media to suit its political ends. “Algorithm manipulation, double standards, liberal bias, and censorship”—it’s all there. If you are on the Right in any capacity, you should realize that the media is controlled by the enemy. The last thing one should expect from it is truth or justice. And Dice makes this clear on every page.

Despite being written five years ago, much of the book’s information remains valid today, notwithstanding all the monumental events which have occurred in the intervening years: The COVID hysteria, the Summer of Floyd, the stolen 2020 election, and the J6 crackdown, to name the most noteworthy. The leftist media playbook has not changed much since 2019, so Dice is doing the Right a great service by cataloguing all the insidious things leftists get away with on their platforms. In fact, The Liberal Media Industrial Complex retains even greater relevance because most of the events it covers are not as monumental compared to what came later. If not for people like Dice, much of that would have been completely forgotten.

For example, how many of us remember how the Southern Poverty Law Center leaned on Spotify in 2017 to selectively censor its content?

How will they determine which bands and songs to censor? Whatever the Southern Poverty Law Center tells them to. Not surprising, the SPLC got their tentacles wrapped around Spotify and other streaming services to “help” them keep a lookout for “hateful” content.

Other streaming services like Apple and Pandora followed suit, banning supposed “white power” music, while allowing rap music that blatantly calls for the murder of police officers from people like Ice-T, NWA, and Snoop Dogg, who recently depicted himself murdering President Trump in one of his videos.

How many of us remember when The New York Times excluded from its bestseller lists books which were inconvenient to its narrative? After reporting on how conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly and Republican senator Ted Cruz found their bestselling books omitted by the Times nearly a decade ago, Dice writes:

The New York Times also omitted a bestselling book about the Philadelphia abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell who killed babies that were born alive during his attempted abortions and was found to have kept baby body parts in jars around his office. He was later convicted of three counts of murder and one count of involuntary manslaughter but the liberal media paid little attention to the trial because it cast abortion in such a horrific light.

This was back in 2013—a nice nugget to keep in one’s pocket when considering the stranglehold the Left has over our media.

How many of us remember how Out Magazine in 2019 absurdly responded to President Trump’s efforts to decriminalize homosexuality around the world? Dice gives us the quote and then comments:

“Rather than actually being about helping queer people around the world, the campaign looks more like another instance of the right using queer people as a pawn to amass power and enact its own agenda.” You can’t make these lunatics happy!

The whole book goes on like this. Only the Ace of Spades can equal Mark Dice’s tireless zeal for exposing mendacity and hypocrisy in the leftist media. Of course, Dice does not skip the big stuff, like the media’s skewed coverage of black crime and illegal immigration, the great Alt-Right crackdown after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, the Left’s outright war against Donald Trump and his supporters, and all the insidious ways conservative perspectives are downplayed, discouraged, or banned on social media. BuzzFeed is a frequent subject of Dice’s ire—especially since in 2019 it doxed a fourteen-year-old girl for mocking social justice warriors and being critical of homosexuals.

And at end of his chapter on Dorsey-era Twitter, Dice gets downright prescient:

There may be only one way for the Liberal Media Industrial Complex to silence Donald Trump, which is why they are constantly painting him as the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, and incessantly calling him a fascist dictator, because they are hoping to incite some unhinged lunatic who believes what they say to assassinate him.

I know, not exactly Nostradamus –or Bill Shakespeare, for that matter—but when you’re right, you’re right.

But nothing compares to Dice’s treatment of YouTube. Oh, boy, does Mark Dice let YouTube have it. In the longest chapter of the book—and probably the most fun to read as well—Dice relays the history of the platform and describes how dominant conservative and right-wing content really was until the YouTube higher-ups decided to intervene behind the scenes. Being a content creator himself, Dice includes many personal anecdotes of his YouTube misadventures, from getting unwarranted strikes to noticing sneaky algorithm changes which harmed his channel. Furthermore, Dice describes how “authoritative channels” (meaning leftist-aligned ones) were artificially boosted at the expense of conservative and more conspiracy-minded ones. He provides the example of a documentary critical of the Federal Reserve called Century of Enslavement. This disturbed quite a few powerful lefties who then, predictably, pressured YouTube to de-prioritize it. According to Dice, “. . .the 90-minute video espouses the idea the Federal Reserve was formed in secret by powerful, often Jewish, banking families in the early 20th century, causing America to spiral into debt.”

What I find most endearing about Mark Dice however is his tolerance of white identitarians. In The Liberal Media Industrial Complex he makes it clear that he is not one himself, but rather an “ordinary constitutional conservative.” (I’d quibble over how “ordinary” Dice is, but that’s a point for another day.) Still, if a law-abiding white identitarian gets victimized by the Left, Dice will go to bat for him. At least a couple times in his book he treats Jared Taylor sympathetically, describing him as “a mild-mannered senior citizen who is just pushing back against anti-white racism, and celebrating European culture and achievements.” He has similar nice things to say about Red Ice, Generation Identity, Tommy Robinson, Lauren Southern, and other dissidents who have stood up for whites in one way or another. Anti-white racism is one of Dice’s primary concerns—and not just in The Liberal Media Industrial Complex­. He expounds upon it on his YouTube channel as well. I also appreciate how he employs scare quotes around “white supremacy” and other anti-white slurs, and makes it clear that it is perfectly acceptable to appreciate whites not just as individuals, but as an entire race. I know he’s not perfect. He may not be /ourguy/, but /ourfellowtraveler/ maybe?

Of course, The Liberal Media Industrial Complex has its limitations. It often reads like Dice was merely dictating as he was speaking off the cuff. He didn’t seem to place a terribly high priority on editing. The book would have also benefitted greatly from an index. The Liberal Media Industrial Complex—and his other works, I’m sure—offer not just kryptonite to the Left, but an antidote for the memory hole. And indexes, if anything, help us remember. When gathering evidence to articulate a rightist perspective in mixed company, an index would have made it much easier to internalize the grand treasury of leftist media misdeeds which Dice has collected.

Another sticking point for me is cover design. To put in bluntly, The Liberal Media Industrial Complex cover is crude, cartoonish, and lacks vision. As someone who has designed covers for three (going on four) of my own books, I know the amount of work and imagination which goes into quality covers. Dice on the other hand seems to care little about this. And that’s a shame, since I’d like for him to sell more books. When a book looks like it was designed by an amateur graphic designer who snagged public domain images and fonts from the Internet and slapped them together in Microsoft Paint, it might depress sales just a bit.

The Liberal Media Industrial Complex may not be a book for all time, but it is for our time, and splendidly so. There is stuff to learn here, and Dice should be taken seriously as a media analyst. He does more than just remind us of leftist outrages. He also dips into theory, offers some excellent background information, and uncorks a few research gems. For example, he writes at length about the tragic censorship phenomenon called the “spiral of silence.” He provides a clear and succinct description of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and explains its relevance to Big Tech’s control over the media. He also offers an stunningly relevant prophesy from Revelation 13:17, which, if his warnings in The Liberal Media Industrial Complex are not heeded soon, may very well come to pass:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

Indeed.