“If by the liberty of the press were understood merely the liberty of discussing the propriety of public measures and political opinions, let us have as much of it as you please. But if it means the liberty of affronting, calumniating and defaming one another, I, for my part, own myself willing to part with my share of it.” —Benjamin Franklin (1789)

Sometimes I am able to plan a topic more than 48 hours ahead of my deadline. This started as one of those weeks. But as with the best-laid plans, sometimes it’s necessary to alter them. (I’ll say a bit more on that original topic at the end of this column.)

The Patriot Post has, since the election of Donald Trump, been the target of thinly veiled efforts to undermine the reach of our conservative voice, especially by BIG Tech oligarchs and their social media silencers. This is the folly of the current iteration of censors who specialize in the redlining of free speech.

Most recently, that effort was played out in an tabloid, BuzzFeed, and a click bait review of The Patriot Post claiming that we’re “the biggest mystery in conservative media,” and raising questions about the team “behind one of the oldest conservative” online news organizations.

BuzzFeed’s Media Editor, Canadian Craig Silverman, its resident expert on “fake news” (I know, the irony is rich), has used their platform for his “investigative report” – basically a hit piece on The Patriot. (Our research team noted that weeks after the BuzzFeed social media post of Silverman’s article, there were only two comments, one of which called Silverman out for his petulant story. Maybe even some BuzzFeeders think that a “BuzzFeed Media Editor” is oxymoronic?

However, when a Leftmedia platform with a budget hundreds of times the size of our small grassroots organization targets us — a “David versus Goliath” contest, if you will — it creates a quandary. It also affirms that we must be right over the target!

We have a longstanding Patriot Post policy: “Don’t swap spit with a jackass.” But when the accuser has a huge platform, as one of our editors noted, “to leave misinformation uncontested is tantamount to suggesting that it’s true.” And while it’s likely that none of you, our readers, are even aware of the BuzzFeed accusations, much less BuzzFeed, rebut we must.

Sometimes criticism is intended to be constructive.

Last week, for example, I wrote about the rise of a new genre of self-appointed digital-media “arbiters of truth” and mentioned a new media monitor, NewsGuard, explaining how it worked. I further noted that whenever humans render opinions about the world around them, they inevitably bring a bias to that perspective.

However, undergoing NewsGuard’s process of evaluation was informative to our team. It employs a battalion of “journalists,” and their questions and suggestions helped us improve what we do, though it is clear NewsGuard is destined to morph into just another free-speech suppression outfit.

On the other hand, sometimes criticism is intended to be destructive. With BuzzFeed, and the leftist academic social-media “expert” who pointed them at us with a clear agenda, their intent was something other than constructive.

The inquiries about The Patriot Post started with BuzzFeed’s “fake news expert,” Toronto-based Media Editor Craig Silverman. He seems like a decent person whose left-of-center bias is mostly the byproduct of being caught in a massive Leftmedia echo chamber.

The timing of Silverman’s appointment to his current position is ironic, as it came just before BuzzFeed’s Leftmedia hacks published the infamous fake “Russian Dossier,” a completely fabricated opposition-research document funded by the Democrat Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign – and their deep state collaborators. That tabloid story provided the fodder that mainstream-media outlets like CNN and MSNBC needed to promote, as the basis for the Democrat/MSM propaganda machine’s bogus two-year Trump/Russia collusion investigation, a ruse to obstruct Trump’s MAGA agenda.

Suffice it to say that the fake dossier has since been completely debunked by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, but not before BuzzFeed issued yet another tabloid bombshell fabrication, prompting Mueller to take the unusual step of calling out the BuzzFeed report as fake news. Buzzfeed will never shed the ethical malpractice for its partisan “fake news” charades.

The false Russia collusion story is the subject of “Beyond BuzzFeed: The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story,” in which Glenn Greenwald notes: “The most challenging task is choosing the 10 worst embarrassments. The most notable aspect is that they all go toward promoting the same narrative.”

For his part, Silverman now distances himself from the term “fake news,” perhaps because even Silverman has limits to his hypocrisy as he is ostensibly part of that rag’s fake news division. And while Silverman may really want to eradicate some purveyors of misinformation, he’s leading that charge from one of the most prolific propagators of misinformation on the Web.

As you may know, BuzzFeed is having serious financial problems.

Founded in 2006 by Left Coast native Jonah Peretti, the company had over $300 million in revenues in 2018. Notably, $84 million of that was from Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Netflix, and yet, according to The New York Times, “the company still loses money.” Amid a decline in traffic, BuzzFeed is laying off hundreds of its news staff because, as Silverman told me, the profit is on the entertainment side.

As for BuzzFeed’s collaboration with Facebook, it is notable that the latter was just issued a $5 BILLION fine for privacy violations, which is why nobody should trust such platforms with any personal information. And if you think the new “FaceApp” facial recognition software developed by a Russian company is safe, think again. Cyber security advisors warn, if you have downloaded that app, you should delete it.

Notably, Silverman recently wrote a column critical of the fact Facebook deactivated search features that international law enforcement agencies use to pursue “War Criminals, Child Predators, And Other Bad Actors.” However, those features also violate the privacy of all the rest of Facebook’s users. Facebook has a long history of monetizing those violations, which, as noted above, is now costing its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and stockholders, $billions.

When Silverman considered The Patriot Post’s unusual model of accepting no advertising, he opined, “Refusing ads is a notable policy given that email lists are huge moneymakers … and The Patriot Post’s has been built up over more than 20 years.” But advertisers mine BuzzFeed user interests, just like they do Facebook users, and we are not going to subject our site users to such privacy violations, despite the loss of potential ad revenue.

Moreover, as for our principled editorial rationale for refusing advertising, I referred Silverman to our About page, which explains, “Our website pages and emails are certified ‘Ad Free.’ Because we do not depend on a single penny of ad revenue, we focus solely on providing you content that is actually newsworthy — worthy of your time — rather than constantly churning the ubiquitous topics which now dominate the Leftmedia’s relentless 24/7 recycled spin.” Additionally, “We are not sustained by any political, special interest, or parent organization, and we do not accept advertising to ensure our advocacy and editorial content is not restrained by commercial influence — as is the case with all mass media outlets. Our website and email editions are free of advertising clutter.”

In other words, our editorial positions are not subject to undue influence by advertisers, as is the case with every commercial media outlet, including BuzzFeed. Advertisers are the silent editors in every editing decision – but not at The Patriot Post.

Silverman actually lamented that BuzzFeed’s model is built on churning news to bait “viral” clicks and ad views to generate revenue. I appreciated his candor. (I would note that, unlike BuzzFeed, our unconventional model has kept us operating in the black since our first year on the Web — a decade before the advent of BuzzFeed and its brand of clickbait media.)

Regarding Silverman’s inquiry, one of his website followers asked a good question about his hit-job on The Patriot: “What was the point … to inform us a conservative news platform uses pseudonyms and doesn’t accept ad revenue? Okay … thanks for the info?” One of his social media followers noted: “That was an extremely long article for not actually having a point, other than ‘this media outlet that I disagree with doesn’t use real names.’ And?”

To help answer those questions, I asked Silverman who first brought The Patriot Post to his attention and why. He responded, “Professor Jennifer Grygiel” of Syracuse University, a leftist colleague who “tracks partisan media” and “teaches a course about BuzzFeed. … I previously spoke to her class.” He said he promised to give her a byline if he published a story about The Patriot Post.

So this inquiry did not originate at BuzzFeed. It started when a hard-left LGBT activist, an assistant professor of communications from upstate New York, who promotes herself as a social-media expert, fed Silverman the story. He says it was because of our social-media growth. But there are thousands of social media pages that are growing, so why is Grygiel so interested in The Patriot Post, and how many others has Silverman written about?

A few weeks ago, there was a complaint lodged against our Facebook page about a meme, which correctly asserted that there are only two genders. This resulted in a takedown and penalty from Facebook. Suspiciously, following that complaint, Grygiel contacted Silverman.

Grygiel, who prefers the fake pronoun pseudonyms “they/them,” identifies her areas of expertise as social media, memes, media regulation, police media, social justice, LGBTQ youth advocacy, race, and gender, but her specific expertise appears to be how to get social-media outlets to restrict content that doesn’t comport with her political and social views.

In short, Grygiel and her ilk are forming the new front against the First Amendment.

When I asked Silverman if he was aware of her political views, he responded. “I don’t know Grygiel’s political views.” Given their collaborative history, that reply seemed somewhat less than candid – or an outright lie.

To be fair, though, I also asked him what his impression of The Patriot Post was, and he responded, “I looked at recent issues of the digest and found them to be filled with interesting information and commentary. … So when it comes to your core product my personal opinion [is that] it seems to be of pretty high quality.”

He and Grygiel clearly did, however, find other Patriot Post viral memes offensive: “One meme mocking vegans,” they (by which I actually mean the two of them) reported, “generated more than 2.9 million shares, reactions, and comments, and another chiding Parkland, Florida, shooting survivor David Hogg attracted more than 2.1 million engagements.”

My response? The vegan meme was intended as humor, but most Leftists are humorless.

But let me state emphatically, the assertion that Hogg is a “shooting survivor” does a disservice to actual survivors, like my friend and Patriot Post writer Roger Helle, who, as a Marine in Vietnam, survived being blown up, shot on two different occasions, and bayoneted — three Purple Hearts. He, not Hogg, is a real “survivor.”

When I asked about the motive for and objective of his collaboration with Grygiel, Silverman insisted “straightforwardly there is no intent to reduce your publication’s reach or undermine you.” Their next move will establish if that is true.

Another major point of contention in Silverman’s inquiry was our writers’ and editors’ use of pseudonyms, the “Publius” model from The Federalist Papers. This is another unconventional practice, like not taking advertising, which he simply could not grasp.

I explained that, since our inception, as noted on our About page, “As was the case with The Federalist (Papers) in 1787, the premier resource for understanding the Liberty and Rule of Law enshrined in our Republic’s Constitution, and from which we derive much of our constitutionally constructionist editorial inspiration, The Patriot Post is published under the pseudonym ‘Publius,’ and many of our editors and advisors are listed likewise.”

I noted that as we’ve grown over the years, I began offering new grassroots contributors the opportunity to choose a pseudonym or use their legal name. Some have chosen the latter.

Based on his fascination with pseudonyms, I asked Silverman if he’d written about how his publication’s CEO had set up fake websites under the names of real people in order to slander them, including one that attacked Second Amendment advocate John Lott (which Peretti admitted in a legal settlement, including his apology).

Silverman responded, “I’m not familiar with the examples … you cited and couldn’t comment on them without more research.”

(OK, let me make The Patriot Post research easy for the leftist inquisitors: We are actually a Russian front operated by Markovich Alexanderovich. We set up shop two decades before Trump announced his 2016 candidacy, so we could ensure he would defeat Hillary Clinton.)

Another point regarding our decision not to promote personalities… President Ronald Reagan, on his Oval Office desk, kept a small engraved plaque with the words, “There is no limit to what a man can do … if he does not mind who gets the credit.” That simple axiom defined how Reagan conducted his presidency: It was about the ideas, not about him.

That same plaque sits in front of my office computer today — where it reminds me, it’s about Liberty, not about us. That’s the “Publius” principle, the Reagan model, and our practice. But again, the MSM self-promoters can’t begin to fathom that.

Silverman also asked if I would put him in touch with some of the conservative leaders who provided favorable comments about The Patriot Post in years past. I contacted them, and predictably, nobody expressed an interest in talking with anyone associated with BuzzFeed.

However, the most widely known of those who offered praise for The Patriot, responded, “They are relentless and use Gestapo tactics.” But these speech-suppression methods are more akin to Stalinist tactics, which are also the inspiration for the “antifa movement thugs” — the self-styled anti-fascists who are actually fascists.

Indeed, the effort of leftists to silence Christians and conservatives, especially grassroots Patriots who promote Liberty, is relentless. (Ironically, Silverman recently devoted a column to the topic, “Vulnerable Groups Could Be Targeted And Silenced Online Ahead Of 2020 Election,” but was referring to “Muslim and Jewish” social media pages and made no mention of Christian pages subject to the same “silencing.”)

But as another notable stalwart advised me to tell our team, “We’re all in this together. Onward!” And onward we go.

Finally, imagine, if you will, what the American political landscape would look like if our national mainstream media outlets were actually neutral in their reporting – conducting themselves as journalists rather than ranting political puppets. It would look much more like what our Founders intended – a nation where protecting Liberty and the Rule of Law enshrined in our Republic’s founding documents, was chief among the concerns of our people.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

Editor’s Update

As of 2021, Craig Silverman has “moved on” from BuzzFeed, and according to his glowing bio, is now plying his trade with ProPublica, another leftist outfit attempting to silence free speech – though it is a more serious organization than BuzzFeed. In his capacity there, Silverman will be the resident expert on elections disinformation, but I doubt he will write a word on the Democrats’ massive bulk-mail ballot fraud strategy.

Regarding the Silverman/Grygiel inquiry, this column originally contained a link to the that article but we removed the link not just because of the surfeit of “misinformation” and “contextual errors of omissions,” as one might expect from tabloid media. We are not linking to their inquiry because Silverman and Grygiel maliciously doxed the names of staff and family members even though they knew there were no financial or material connections between The Patriot Post and those family members. (While we know who the Silverman and Grygiel families are and where they live, doxing them would be far beneath our ethical standards.) They also doxed the location of our humble storefront in Tennessee, despite the fact (or because) they knew that created risks to our staff and their families. (They have since removed that information from the article.)

Additionally, Silverman and Grygiel implied that we had misused two short quotes about The Patriot Post obtained 15 years ago without contacting the individuals who were quoted. That is not correct. Regarding the use of pseudonyms by some of our authors, which is explained on our about page, we asked Silverman his opinion about “journalists” who have built their entire careers around unnamed sources, and have become masterful self-promoters, but he did not answer. Silverman also implied that our use of pseudonyms is nefarious, despite the fact Mark Alexander has always been identifiable through public media, and on our about pages, as Mark Alexander Caldwell, president of Publius Press, publisher of Patriot Post – which ironically, is how Silverman knew how to contact us. The ownership of our publishing company has always been a matter of public record. Again, the “Publius principle” has never been about not revealing individuals, but about not promoting individuals, something “media personalities” of Silverman’s ild simply can’t understand.

According to Grygiel’s bio, which avoids any pronouns that might betray her actual gender, as of 2022 she is still preaching her poison to youngsters at Syracuse University.

UPDATE: BuzzFeed is shuttering its leftist “news” operations: Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed Inc., announced in April of 2023 that the company is shutting down its BuzzFeed News division due to declining revenue. That is an understatement given that its stock has collapsed, trading at less than a dollar a share. BuzzFeed News is now refuse on the waste bin of junk-media history.

(Updated)