History’s worst crimes are not usually carried out by cartoon villains. They are carried out by ordinary people who tell themselves they are only following orders, only keeping the peace, only doing what the moment requires. Jonathan Miltimore’s excellent piece The Science of Manipulation gets at a hard truth people do not like to face: evil does not usually arrive with horns. It arrives through weakness, fear, and conformity.
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A lot of people prefer the idea that evil is confined to a small class of monsters. It is a comforting theory because it makes evil feel rare and contained. If only a few mutant outliers are capable of atrocity, then we can relax. But the more frightening likelihood is that under the right circumstances, most of us can become cowardly, obedient, cruel, and yes, monstrous.
How Evil Works
The 20th century already taught this lesson. Adolf Eichmann, the administrator who organized the logistics of the Holocaust, was not a comic-book villain. In her discussion of the “banality of evil,” Hannah Arendt paints him as rather boring, bureaucratic, dutiful, and unimaginative—which is exactly what made him dangerous. Her framing was disturbing precisely because it stripped away the fantasy that evil must always be dramatic and obvious.
Psychologist Stanley Milgram’s classic experiments made the same point from another angle. Ordinary people, told what to do by an authority figure, kept administering what they believed were painful electric shocks to another person—even when that person was screaming in pain or appeared completely unresponsive. The shocks were fake, and no one was actually hurt, yet 65% of participants believed they were administering the maximum 450-volt shock. That is the ugly truth: people are far more willing than they want to admit to hand over judgment when authority, consensus, or fear tells them to.
The Pandemic Lesson
This same dynamic played out on a massive scale during COVID-19. Three policies caused incalculable harm, all driven by officials who followed orders and conformed rather than questioned.
Nursing homes were required to admit COVID patients, spreading the virus to healthy but vulnerable elderly residents. Deaths were undercounted by 50 percent. Vaccine mandates forced millions to choose between experimental vaccines and their jobs. Over 8,600 service members were removed from the military for refusing to be experimented on, in violation of the moral and legal precepts of the Nuremberg Code. School closures kept millions of children out of classrooms despite the data showing near-zero risk of severe illness. All of this was based on incomplete data, guessing, and fabrication that later proved wrong and dangerous.
Whatever the intent, the lesson was obvious: Administrators didn’t need to be evil people to do evil. They only needed to follow orders and conform.
The Digital Boss and the Leftward Tilt
Now look at the modern public square. Historically, people obtained their news and norms from a wide array of sources—family, neighbors, church, newspapers, public presentations, movies, legacy media, etc. These old institutions still matter, but their significance is fading. Increasingly, a single platform is overshadowing these traditional vehicles. That platform is digital, dominantly in the form of a 5” by 3” screen. It determines what gets seen, what gets repeated, what gets buried, what gets rewarded, and what gets punished. It is a structured, institutionalized system that shapes what billions of people can see, say, and believe.
Authors Michael Benz, David Samuels, Michael Shellenberger, Mathew Gasda, me, and others have referred to this system as “the Blob,” “The Information-Control System,” “The Censorship-Industrial Complex,” the “Digital Switchboard,” “The Propaganda Regime,” and “The Digital Leviathan.”
Benz, a former State Department official, has described how government agencies and private platforms coordinate to suppress speech across the internet. Samuels, writing in Tablet, described how Obama and Axelrod built a “digital switchboard” that concentrated public opinion control in the hands of a small class of operatives working through social media algorithms. Shellenberger, through his work on the Twitter Files, exposed how tech companies and government officials coordinated to censor and shape public discourse.
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This influence runs through three channels: news, search, and social media—all with a leftward tilt. That tilt is partly reflected in employee donations. According to OpenSecrets, during the 2023-2024 election cycle, 95% of Apple employee donations went to Democrats, 90% of Google employee donations went to Democrats, 88% of Microsoft employee donations went to Democrats, and 86% of Meta employee donations went to Democrats. Amazon employees donated some 12 times more to Democrats than to Republicans. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, in all three arenas, left-leaning narratives are pushed while conservative views are censored or banned completely, in many cases astonishingly so (see here, here, , , and here as but a very few examples).
If one worldview is consistently amplified across the platforms people use to understand reality, that worldview starts to feel like common sense. Opponents start to look not merely wrong, but dangerous, illegitimate, or deviant. This matters because these are not small, niche channels. This is a communication system that touches billions of people every day, multiple times per day. We are not just talking about media influence; we are talking about civilizational-scale narrative control.
Moral Demonization and Violence
When influential voices routinely call political opponents fascists, Nazis, pedophiles, etc., and then applaud people who talk about committing violence or actually do commit violence against them, or fail to condemn those people, something essential in a republic has already broken. That is not a debate. That’s a call for revolution.
Once that happens, coercion and violence start to feel like normal behaviors rather than evil or deviance. Recent CSIS analysis reported a sharp rise in left-wing political violence, with 2025 data showing left-wing incidents outnumbering far-right incidents. In its piece, “Left-Wing Terrorism is on the Rise,” The Atlantic reached the same conclusion after examining some 750 acts of violence against the United States between 1994 and 2025.
What To Do
The problem runs deeper than censorship or bias. It is the marriage of the human need for conformity and herd-belonging with the digital leviathan’s power to weaponize it. The digital world now rewards performative virtue and punishes independent judgment on an unprecedented scale. That is dangerous enough, but especially when so few sources are determining what constitutes virtue and vice.
When billions of users depend on a handful of digital sources to understand reality, and when those handlers lean unquestionably and often overwhelmingly to the left, the result is a leftist stranglehold on the digital public square—a phrase that is quickly becoming redundant.
Ordinary people are capable of great evil when social pressure and authority demand it. The most powerful platform in history is now the dominant force in setting those norms and authority. It is well past time to break that oligopoly.
Greg Salsbury, Ph.D., is a former president of Western Colorado University and Board of Advisor member for STARRS.US. He earned his Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Southern California and an M.A. from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC.
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Image created using AI.