05/29/2018
In his rebuttal of Andrew Lawler’s recent Washington Post smearing of the much-loved Virginia Dare legend as “white nationalist,” Peter Brimelow noted that the nasty reference to VDARE.com was not hyperlinked although other publications were and added “not that we care because MSM readers are notoriously incurious.” Brimelow is right that American patriots are abandoning the Main Stream Media, but he is wrong not to care, as I will now explain.
There is a James Kirkpatrick blog I am quite fond of called, “Cuckservative Logic--Mitt Romney’s Frame of Defeat.” If you like it, consider bookmarking it, because searching for it online is an uphill battle. Here are the results when you search for it by its exact title on DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Google:
Interestingly, Google’s results are the least censored. Whereas Bing and DuckDuckGo did not list the page that our search was obviously looking for at all, Google listed it at the top.
But take a close look at the two subsequent results from Google. Both omit the first two words of the search (“cuckservative” and “logic”) and “frame.” This transforms the searched phrase into “Mitt Romney’s Defeat,” since “of” and all other articles are always cut out.
“Mitt Romney’s Defeat” and “Cuckservative Logic--Mitt Romney’s Frame of Defeat” are very different search items. So, although Google bit the bullet on search result number one, the next two results manage to be generic articles from the Main Stream Media about Romney losing.
DuckDuckGo and Bing, to their credit, at least understood that “cuckservative” was central to our search — even if they want the results to come from anywhere but VDARE.com. Google took a different approach: show me the article I wanted — but also show “good” articles without “bad” words such as “cuckservative,” even if said articles are obviously not very relevant to our search, hoping we will go down the rabbit hole of acceptable opinion.
Other searches where VDARE.com should be the top hit prove equally interesting. For example, here are the DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Google results for when you search the phrase “Moses of the Alternative Right” in quotes. The phrase was coined by Hubert Collins, here on VDARE.com, to describe Paul Gottfried, in his blog: “Three Cheers For Paul Gottfried’s REVISIONS AND DISSENTS.”
Bing’s results are especially bad. The top three results are totally unrelated. The fourth is a blog post from the Jewish Forward, Leader Of Richard Spencer’s White Nationalist Group Was Inspired By A Jewish Intellectual. That post notes that Gottfried has been “dubbed” the “Moses of the alternative right,” but fails to say by who (Hubert Collins), or where (VDARE.com), and provides no link for curious readers.
DuckDuckGo has that Forward post as its top result. Then a reposting of it on a forum. Then a reposting of it on Luke Ford’s blog. Then comes the original VDARE.com post all three prior results are quoting.
Google’s top hit is the same Forward piece. Its second hit is the listing of that piece on another page on Forward.com. Then, as with DuckDuckGo, comes a repost of it on a forum and the repost of it on Luke Ford’s blog. Then there’s a repost of it on yet another forum. Then comes the original VDARE.com post all prior results quote from.
A few things are worth mentioning about these curious results.
The first: all search engines strive to show original content first, and quoted or reposted material dead last. For VDARE.com, however, that best practice does not seem to be in play; more like the opposite.
Second: part of the way search engine algorithms determine what is original and what is not is by seeing how many other websites link to something — because websites invariably link back to other sites they quote and reference.
That is part of the reason the Main Stream Media often avoids linking to VDARE.com even when quoting from the site: they are doing their part to sink VDARE.com’s search engine rankings.
In the case of the Forward post quoting VDARE.com, this tactic proved quite effective. By not linking to the piece it quoted, it helped lower the ranking of the original. Then, since the Forward is vastly bigger than VDARE.com, the article was reposted in many different places, making the algorithms see the Forward as the original and authoritative source of the information. So now, when you search a quote that appears in both the original VDARE.com post and the Forward post, the Forward piece shows up first. As some would say, “Clever girl."
In this manner, even without search engines deliberately pushing relevant results from Dissident Right sites to their back pages (which does seem to be the case), the MSM can help manipulate the results of searches in their favor. To do so entails them ditching journalistic integrity by not citing or linking to their sources, but journalistic integrity is not the point. The point is to diminish the power and relevance of dissenting views by any means necessary.
This can be proven quite simply. Email this article to the author of the Forward piece (Sam Kestenbaum: ), the editor of the Forward (Jane Eisner: ), and the executive editor of the Forward (Dan Friedman: ). See if they are at all embarrassed, or feel compelled to change the Kestenbaum article I discuss here.
Again, the relevant names and emails are:
Sam Kestenbaum:
Jane Eisner:
Dan Friedman:
My bet: no action is taken. After all, as Steve Bannon said, “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country.” (Did you see what I did in that last sentence? I linked to a website I do not like for the sake of proper and accurate attribution.)
Chris Roberts writes for American Renaissance. You can follow him on Twitter @RobertsAmRen.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.