How to Win the Information War
Editor's Note
We are living through a cold civil war — one waged less through elections than through institutions, language, and administrative power. In such a conflict, volume and moral display rarely determine outcomes. What matters is exposure: who is acting, under what authority, with whose money, and to what effect. As this essay from veteran journalist Geoffrey Ingersoll shows, many of the most consequential reversals of recent years did not come from protest or punditry, but from sustained reporting that forced reality back into view. The lesson is sobering and clarifying at once. In a war like ours, truth matters when it is made operational.
It was stunning in its simplicity and directness. As November was about to come to a close, Trump’s HHS published a deeply researched, deeply peer-reviewed 410-page report on so-called “gender affirming care.”
“The harms from sex-rejecting procedures — including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical operations — are significant, long term, and too often ignored or inadequately tracked,” it read.
This HHS report was the end result of several years of effort from dozens of center-right and skeptical center-left reporters. Together, bit by bit, story by story, year over year, they rooted out the facts, data, and horrible consequences of what appeared to be a universally accepted, yet woefully under-supported policy of sex-changing gender confused minors.
It’s hard to forget that so much of this actually happened during Trump’s first admin, although very little about it was known at the time. After years of doggedly reporting on the matter, HHS effectively decapitating the truly horrific movement was a satisfying victory, and yet, in it, I spotted a flagrant “well duh” moment.
“Sex-rejecting,” why didn’t I think of that?
You really could not devise a more concise, direct and subversive reversal to a bizarro linguistic inversion like “gender affirming,” the Orwellian phrase with which we’d been utterly bludgeoned over the years.
And yet here I was, in total victory, mad at myself for not thinking of it first.
It was around 2018 in the Daily Caller’s newsroom. A handful of reporters on the culture beat and I — then editor in chief — met to discuss the language we should use when covering the transgender medicine debate. It was a comprehensive discussion, covering all bases. One thing I loved was that we were going to start using the term “sex changes” to describe the treatments, which, as we know now, will be called anything from “social transitions” to “chemical and surgical transitions.”
To our minds, adults getting sex changes was itself a charged and controversial subject — never mind the kids.
However, while winning the battle over acceptable vocabulary is obviously important — not “justice shopping,” but simply “looting” — we must acknowledge that it’s not enough to win the day. If we really want to put points on the board in this debate, we can’t just shout against “sex changes for kids!” and knock off for the night.
No. What we need are facts. We need to know the key players, how they operate, what they’re doing and to whom and under what circumstances and, perhaps most importantly, who’s making the money.
And so what followed was a tidal wave of effort on several fronts, from several brands and several reporters, to drag into the light exactly who was doing these procedures, how they were being authorized, and who was profiting. How easy was it to get puberty blockers? Who decided schools shouldn’t inform parents? What were these “studies” that allegedly showed a benefit to castrating children?
Once we got answers to those questions, that’s when the real wins started piling up. Gender clinics closing. Hospitals nuking entire pages off their websites. Intrepid lawyers stringing together “detransitioners” into potential class action suits. Statehouses passing and governors actually signing new legislation.
For what it’s worth, child sex changes wasn’t the only policy debate in which bootstraps reporting from conservative media formed the concrete basis of eventual wins.
Journalist Chris Rufo and his City Journal team turned the “Diversity and Equity” movement into a parking lot in academia and much of the federal government. Daily Wire’s reporting on Loudoun County schools delivered an upset in the Virginia Governor race. The Federalist, Daily Caller and a hodgepodge of others, including some contrarian liberal reporters, outed the Russiagate hoax for what it truly was: a hoax.
I’m not entirely sure the public would even know about Ecohealth Alliance and its role in funding the Wuhan Lab with tax dollars if not for about six reporters in conservative media. Now basically the entire establishment acknowledges COVID was more than likely a leak — and quite possibly from an illicit bioweapons program — for which we provided the seed money.
As for Ecohealth, they’ve been disbarred from receiving federal funding. Its ousted president? “Unemployed” and “poor.”
That’s a stunning series of wins and, as much as I respect his memory, I’m not sure the Rush Limbaughs of the world would have achieved them. Hospitals didn’t stop giving sex changes to minors because of an angry conservative with access to a microphone and an audience. They stopped because they were exposed and outed by reporters who asked the right questions and dug up the right answers.
“National Review is founded to stand athwart history, yelling Stop” reads William F. Buckley’s founding statement for National Review magazine in 1955. It’s been 70 years. We’ve come a long way since then and a lot has changed.
As much as I respect Buckley’s legacy, our current, pugilistic policy environment demands a hell of a lot more than simply standing athwart and yelling. You can blow a blood vessel bellowing “illegal” every time you hear the word “undocumented,” and it won’t achieve anything compared to finding the rapist’s immigration record, finding the judge who let him free, finding the police officer who’d arrested him dozens of times.
Likewise, you can correct purple-haired transgender freaks by shouting “he” into oblivion, but it’s nothing compared to finding out the maniac in a sundress in the ladies locker room is actually a longtime sex offender. The new bar for conservative media is not simply identifying as conservative, using the correct lingo, and launching a new YouTube show or publishing your highbrow thoughts in glossy legacy magazines. The new bar is points on the board. Are you rolling back the madness? Have they been defunded yet? Has anyone been indicted? Are you getting wins?
If not, well then, you’re just another guy in front of a mic yelling “stop.”