Never heard of this before. Of course the Left communication their talking points and knows immediately who to cancel and why, but how does it happen? Who coordinates the message - propaganda - that we are subjected to? The Blue Stack.

The Blue Stack Strikes Back

The welding of media, government bureaucracy, big corporations, and banking together into a partisan weapon to punish dissenters points the way toward an ugly future

ZAID JILANI

Tablet, FEBRUARY 08, 2022

… These activists know how to play the game. If you look back at any of the recent controversies over free speech—from QAnon to COVID to the last two presidential elections—this is how things work when a development or outcome is seen as unfavorable or undesirable by the favored political camp:

First, activists create a panic about misinformation or offensive speech. Second, the social media platforms try to meet them halfway by introducing measures measures like warning labels. Third, the activists realize they’ve drawn blood, and continue to push for outright censorship. Finally, the social media platforms give in and remove the offending voice from their platforms altogether.

The institutions successfully driving this push for ideological conformity across American life—progressive nonprofits, large portions of the news media, woke corporations, Democrats in government—can collectively be called the “blue stack,” which represents an enforcement mechanism for the ruling ideology to express hegemony over American democracy.

The blue stack presents America’s elite with something they’ve always craved but has been out of reach in a liberal democracy: the power to swiftly crush ideological opponents by silencing them and destroying their livelihoods. Typically, American cultural, business, and communication systems have been too decentralized and too diffuse to allow one ideological faction to express power in that way. American elites, unlike their Chinese counterparts, have never had the ability to imprison people for wrong-think or derank derank undesirables in a social credit system.

But the alliance between the media, progressive activists, certain government officials and bureaucrats, technology firms, and other powerful institutions like business and banking now allows them to shape events through what Tablet’s Wesley Yang has called the vertical messaging apparatus.vertical messaging apparatus.

Even America’s payment processors have joined joined the ranks of the stack. If you find yourself too far astray from the ideas that the blue stack deems acceptable, GoFundMe might take you off their platform; Paypal might refuse refuse to process your payments. Donors who gave millions of dollars to support a nonviolent protest led by Canadian truckers were surprised to find that GoFundMe abruptly terminated the fundraiser, earning praise from Canadian authorities, who are functionaries in their own closely related blue stack.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the emergence of this vertically integrated aristocracy threatens the liberal democratic nature of the United States. Institutions like the news media, major corporations, and the government don’t naturally align in this way except in the most extreme circumstances when the general public itself may be naturally united, like in the immediate aftermath of an external shock such as Pearl Harbor or 9/11.

But to the functionaries of the blue stack, every day might as well be 9/11. There’s always some form of crisis that demands complete uniformity of thought across all sectors of U.S. society. If anyone steps out of line, they can be disappeared. Even the president of the United States was subject to a virtual ban across almost all sectors of social media. What makes anyone think that they are any less vulnerable than he was?

Trying to berate and bully ordinary people and the outlets they enjoy into submission will only push them into ever darker modes of thought. For the sake of democracy, we have to find a way to break up the blue stack and reinvigorate pluralism in the United States.