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July 11, 2024

The House Judiciary Committee reveals the leftist alliance to silence conservatives

By Andrea Widburg

Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee, under GOP guidance, released a study about the way tech tyrants and corporations are working together to silence conservative speech using an organization called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (“GARM”) as their vehicle. It’s been a hugely successful effort, as we here at American Thinker can attest. It’s actually a very simple process: GARM tags as irresponsible disinformation anything that comes from conservative sites and then, citing to that GARM label to justify their actions, big advertisers refuse to place ads on those sites.

You can read the Judiciary Committee’s 39-page report here, but I’ll summarize the executive summary:

GARM came into existence in 2019 (not coincidentally just as the Democrats were gearing up for the 2020 election). Every major advertising agency holding company belongs to it, occupying seats on its “Steer Team” (i.e., its board of directors). Four major corporations—Unilever, Mars, Diageo, and Procter & Gamble—are also represented on its Steer Team.

Image (edited) from the public domain.

In addition to the high-powered Steer Team members, GARM reports its conclusions to the World Federation of Advertisers Executive Committee, which includes representatives of most of the world’s largest corporations and household brands.

In other words, GARM touches every big advertising dollar in the Western world. Your local dry cleaner isn’t involved with GARM, but everything else is.

Boiled down to its essentials, GARM’s mission statement is that it’s there to ensure that brands are safe from the stain of misinformation. It acknowledges that the purity tests it conducts to help brands stay safe might affect content monetization. Significantly, its leadership views the U.S. Constitution and the entire concept of free speech as problematic obstacles in the way of this ideological purity, especially because both are the product of white men.

To protect advertisers from the toxin of free conservative speech, GARM has recommended that its members avoid Elon Musk’s Twitter, Joe Rogan’s show, and any platforms, news outlets, and candidates that express views that do not align with the Democrat party’s values and goals. GARM wants to use AI to advance its ability to maintain ideological purity for its member corporations and advertisers.

GARM’s reach extends to ensuring that social media companies, even if they’re trying (hah!) to remain honest, have an economic incentive to cut conservative content. Thus, they want to ensure that advertisers “‘don’t inadvertently support’ certain content on social media platforms.” In other words, when Facebook refuses to allow you to post an American Thinker article (which blocks both your ability to share ideas with friends and send traffic to our site), Facebook may be up to its old censorship tricks, or it may be trying to preserve its ad revenue.

I’ve pasted below a thread from the House Judiciary GOP that gives you more detailed information about what GARM is doing and how it affects advertising revenue. American Thinker is not listed in either the report or the thread, but I can assure you that we’ve been badly affected. Before 2020, as longtime readers remember, our pages weren’t crawling with ads. And as those who work for American Thinker can attest, they used to get raises and bonuses.

However, in 2020, our ad revenue dried up. Because we were no longer getting a few good, big ads that would help pay the bills (and it costs a lot to run a site such as ours), we were reduced to taking as many small-dollar ads as possible (and believe me, we’re very grateful to them). Even with those ads, though, we’ve been hanging on by the skin of our teeth for a while and, despite inflation, I can assure you that raises no longer happen.  

The Judiciary Committee points out that what GARM and the advertising agencies and corporations have done and are doing violates the Sherman Act because it constitutes an unreasonable restraint on trade. (As an aside, GARM’s conduct could make the basis for a nice defamation claim.) While Merrick Garland has done and will do nothing (he likes this), the Judiciary Committee’s report is a warning shot that, unless this conduct stops immediately, every person and corporation involved will find itself in an honest DOJ’s crosshairs.

Elon Musk isn’t waiting. He’s announced that he will file suit immediately:

It’s to be hoped that other conservative media outlets with pockets deeper than ours will do the same.

Meanwhile, all we can do is ask you, our readers, is either to tolerate the plethora of ads or get a subscription. Once you have a subscription, the ads go away, and you can post comments if you desire. And of course, we get a reliable revenue stream. That’s a win-win.

Finally, here’s the House Judiciary GOP thread:

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