The Profitable Market In Bashing Liberals

This morning at The Libertarian Republic we published a podcast called “15 BS Myths That Liberal Weenies Want You To Believe.” It was a show we produced that was a response to an article by shock jock Gavin McInnes, wLeft-looneyhose piece “15 Myths Millenials Accept As Fact,” was enormously popular on TakiMag.com. In it, McInnes broadsides liberal tropes and bromides about American history and cultural stereotypes. We named it that in part because we agreed with it, but also because we’ve noticed that recent articles we’ve written bashing liberals have almost always gone viral.

You see, TLR is a website that was founded for a very specific reason, to help spread the ideas of economic freedom and personal liberty in a way that made them accessible to regular people. Too often I’ve found that libertarians are willing to endlessly (and sometimes viciously) debate our ideas such as fractional reserve banking or the definition of aggression with one another while ignoring the fact that our fellow citizens don’t understand what we’re talking about. We’ve done pretty well, but there are competitors who are doing much better, and they’re doing it by taking the low road.

TLR is supposed to be an accessible path to libertarian ideas that doesn’t stoop to the level of straight Upworthy style clickbait that would easily generate us way more revenue. Not that there’s anything wrong with clickbait inherently, and we don’t consider ourselves above a viral video craze, but for us the idea is that no matter what we post it must fall in line with our mission. We don’t always hit that mark, but I’d say we do so with about 95% accuracy.

Still, it would be much easier to just publish specifically liberal-bashing clickbait. Why?

The clicks, and the money.

One difficult to ignore phenomenon is the fact that any article that bashes “liberals” on TLR will almost always go viral, or at least generate more traffic than a normal piece that day. It’s a buzzword that generates an immediate knee-jerk response. Knowing this fact, it’s extremely tempting for us to devote most, if not all, of our time bashing liberals. After all, our conservative competitors who are vastly more successful in terms of social media follows and website traffic publish the most asinine memes and content. They create mindless drivel with meritless attacks on Obama personally, or they delve into ridiculous conspiracy theories about the president’s birthplace. The temptation for publishers is to emulate success by recreating the same type of content.

Also, the other issue is that it creates a disincentive for us to criticize conservatives, even when we think they’re very wrong. We haven’t fallen prey to this, just yesterday TLR published a broadside against Senator Mike Lee for his very anti-free market legislation that would institute a federal ban on online gambling. But because most of our audience are great fans of Senator Lee, the show was nowhere near as popular as today’s cannonade against liberal myths.

It’s very tempting to abandon any criticism of the right, in order to not lose and fans or readers. After all, a shrinking fan base is a shrinking revenue base. As an idealist libertarian, it’s depressing to think that selling out would mean engaging in vitriolic, unintellectual attacks on the character of people for whom I hold no love. It would be easy to follow the herd since the market is obviously telling us to behave a certain way. If we simply stopped attempting to reform the right and focused on liberal democrats, we’d do much better in terms of traffic for our site. Still, inwardly, the pain from intellectually dishonesty would be too great to bear. After all, it is our sincere hope that one day the word liberal will return to where it rightfully belongs, to libertarians, who believe in individual liberty.

No matter what the market signals may be, there are two things that no fiat money or Bitcoins can buy. Character and trust.

I will resist this market signal and continue my mission in reforming both the left and the right – no matter the consequences to TLR’s bottom line. Our audience trusts us to report the news as objectively as possible while still standing firm on the side of liberty. Articles that are critical of-off message conservatives will continue, despite their unpopularity. And we’ll absolutely keep up our attacks on social democrats who want to centralize economic power in the hands of the state. Sometimes that may look like liberal bashing, but rest assured we will always remain fair and balanced towards what Judge Andrew Napolitano calls “True North” libertarianism, which sees flaws in both conservatism and liberalism.

In order to avoid creating lowbrow content, I’ve begun creation of something that I am hoping will enable our team of freedom fighters to maintain the moral high ground, while still having access to the sweet spot that is the realm of the coveted clickbait cashola. Starting next week our experiment LibertyViral.com will officially be launched.

We hope that the market will reward our attempt to keep informing people about important stories in a format that satisfies the marketplace while still maintaining the moral high ground. We don’t promise perfection, but we do promise greatness. So if you’d like to support us in this mission, like Liberty Viral on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

Together we can make a better world, and we can do battle with the forces of big government with pride, honor and with intellectual honesty.

[about_austin]

 

3 comments

Leave a Comment