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Ten Years of American Pravda and The Unz Review

By

The Unz Review

June 6, 2023

My original American Pravda article was published just over ten years ago and that same mark is rapidly approaching for the website as a whole. With such a double anniversary now upon us, I think it’s worth explaining the origins of those two interrelated projects and recapitulating how they unfolded.

For nearly three decades I’ve been heavily involved in various political undertakings, and until the last few years I usually operated through the media, speaking with journalists and publishing my own pieces, especially targeting elite outlets such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. This had been the basis of my highly successful campaign more than a quarter century ago to dismantle America’s longstanding system of Spanish-almost-only so-called “bilingual education” and ensure that immigrant children were taught English from their first day of public school. Last year I summarized that history in a lengthy review-essay.

My most recent success came about a dozen years ago when I’d resurrected the nearly-abandoned Minimum Wage issue, arguing for its powerful appeal both on political and policy grounds, then launched a 2014 national media campaign a couple of years later that managed to restore it to the center of the Democratic Party’s agenda while also attracting the public support of a critical mass of influential conservative Republicans. As a result, big Minimum Wage hikes soon swept across most of our larger states, dramatically raising the economic prospects of our lowest paid workers.

A couple of years later in 2016, I undertook an even bolder effort aimed at transforming American higher education. I recruited Ralph Nader to head a full slate of candidates for the Harvard Board of Overseers, with one of our main planks being the elimination of undergraduate tuition, a fiscal triviality given the gigantic size of the university’s endowment and its annual income. The launch of our campaign was heralded by a front-page story in the Times, and if we’d won, America’s other most elite universities probably would have followed Harvard’s lead and also eliminated tuition, while the political ripple effects that would have drastically cut college costs all across the country. But we lost.

The other half of our 2016 platform had demanded that Harvard increase the transparency of its extremely opaque and biased admissions system. Back in 2012, I’d provided strong evidence that Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League maintained what amounted to an Asian Quota; this prompted a New York Times symposium on that subject and a year later a group of Asian American plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the university. The discovery motions triggered by that lawsuit eventually revealed that an internal 2013 Harvard study had confirmed my accusations of apparent racial bias against Asian applicants, but the university administration had suppressed and ignored those findings. Now a decade later, the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to rule on that racial discrimination lawsuit within the next few weeks, a decision that many believe may severely restrict the use of Affirmative Action within higher education after a half-century of its seemingly inexorable growth.

In late 2006 I’d become the publisher and primary financial backer of The American Conservative (TAC), a small but well-regarded opinion magazine, and a few years later I’d begun writing major articles for that publication, notably including the ones that laid the intellectual basis for the Minimum Wage issue and the Asian Quota lawsuit against Harvard.

These lengthy pieces had often led to the subsequent appearance of closely-related articles in other outlets, bringing my arguments to the attention of much larger audiences:

During that same period of time, I’d also published a variety of other major articles in The American Conservative on other contentious subjects, some of which attracted considerable attention and provoked widespread debate.

I’d been very pleased with all these articles, which had earned me a solid reputation as an influential analyst on important policy issues. However, by 2013 my research and writing efforts had also begun to take a very different turn. Much of my time over the previous dozen years had been devoted to a software project aimed at digitizing the archives of many of America’s most influential publications of the previous 150 years, and as I’d explored those publications I’d gradually come to realize that the standard historical narrative that I’d always accepted without question was severely flawed, suffering from massive distortions and gaping omissions. As I later put it:

I sometimes imagined myself a little like an earnest young Soviet researcher of the 1970s who began digging into the musty files of long-forgotten Kremlin archives and made some stunning discoveries. Trotsky was apparently not the notorious Nazi spy and traitor portrayed in all the textbooks, but instead had been the right-hand man of the sainted Lenin himself during the glorious days of the great Bolshevik Revolution, and for some years afterward had remained in the topmost ranks of the Party elite. And who were these other figures—Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov—who also spent those early years at the very top of the Communist hierarchy? In history courses, they had barely rated a few mentions, as minor Capitalist agents who were quickly unmasked and paid for their treachery with their lives. How could the great Lenin, father of the Revolution, have been such an idiot to have surrounded himself almost exclusively with traitors and spies?

My confidence in our mainstream media had already been shaken by the revelation of the non-existence of Saddam’s WMDs in the wake of our disastrous Iraq War, and I had also been shocked to discover how much of the justification for the conflict had been based upon outright lies. A year or two after becoming TAC publisher, I’d summarized much of this criticism in a tribute I published to my old friend Bill Odom, the three-star general who had run the NSA for Ronald Reagan but had been banned from the media for his fierce opposition to that misbegotten war.

Soon afterward, I was further shocked when I discovered Sydney Schanberg’s remarkable expose of John McCain and the Vietnam War POWs. Despite Schanberg’s stature as one of America’s most respected journalists, a former top editor of the New York Times, the mountain of credible evidence he had compiled supporting that gigantic scandal was totally ignored by our entire mainstream media.

  • Was Rambo Right?
    Ron Unz • The American Conservative • May 25, 2010 • 1,300 Words

The combination of all these factors—together with the alternatives sources of information increasingly available from the burgeoning Internet—led me to publish my original American Pravda article near the end of April 2013, just over ten years ago. I argued that our media might often be little better than the widely ridiculed propaganda organs of the late and unlamented Soviet Union.

  • Our American Pravda
    Ron Unz • The American Conservative • April 29, 2013 • 4,500 Words

In that article, I emphasized that so much of our apparent reality was constructed by the media, which was often far less reliable than many of us had once believed.

Aside from the evidence of our own senses, almost everything we know about the past or the news of today comes from bits of ink on paper or colored pixels on a screen, and fortunately over the last decade or two the growth of the Internet has vastly widened the range of information available to us in that latter category. Even if the overwhelming majority of the unorthodox claims provided by such non-traditional web-based sources is incorrect, at least there now exists the possibility of extracting vital nuggets of truth from vast mountains of falsehood. Certainly the events of the past dozen years have forced me to completely recalibrate my own reality-detection apparatus.

This article attracted more readership than all but a handful of TAC’s previous pieces and it was also republished by the popular ZeroHedge website, while drawing favorable notice from writers in the Atlantic, Forbes, as well as a New York Times columnist.

But the deep and controversial issues I was raising were moving dangerously close to the “conspiracy theories” considered so poisonous in DC journalistic circles, and thus may have raised alarms in certain quarters. So a few weeks later on June 12, 2013 I was suddenly purged from my position at TAC and lost access to the outlet I had previously led. I later published my account of those unfortunate events.

At the time of my purge, I’d been doing a great deal of writing with many more pieces planned, but the main outlet for that work had been my own magazine, giving me an urgent need for a replacement. After considering my options, I launched The Unz Review webzine later that same year, though this required months of my time to design and build the customized software system, incorporating numerous features I’d thought might be useful. Since I typically wrote long articles at irregular intervals, I decided to make my new webzine a content distribution channel and commenting platform for alternative perspectives of all ideological types. This would allow it to draw readership on a daily basis, providing a built-in audience for the articles of my own I intended to publish at much longer intervals.

The immediate trigger for my purge from TAC had been a long article I’d written providing an innovative statistical analysis of racial crime rates, which I’d subsequently made available on my small personal website. Once my new publication was released in late 2013, I immediately republished it there.

I had originally planned to continue my writing, but instead I soon launched my Minimum Wage campaign, which occupied almost all my time. Afterwards I became preoccupied with other projects, and then began planning and preparing my Harvard Overseer campaign. As a result, my own writing on other topics was minimal for the first couple of years of the webzine’s existence, though in early 2015 I did publish one important and well-received article on the hidden history of Sen. John McCain.

Our subsequent defeat in the Harvard Overseer campaign in 2016 left me somewhat adrift, but then a couple of months later on July 10th I was saddened to read Sydney Schanberg’s obituary in the New York Times, and was struck that the long and glowing description of his illustrious career had totally avoided any mention of the journalistic project that had dominated the last quarter-century of his life. This prompted me to write a piece on the implications of that striking omission.

I followed this up with a couple of additional pieces on Schanberg’s work and this began my American Pravda series. Over the next couple of months, I published nearly a dozen articles focusing on some of the important stories ignored or suppressed by the media, drawing from material that I’d come across in previous years.

I also produced an overview of the political/media strategy I had followed both in launching my series and creating the website itself, arguing that our mainstream media constituted a very powerful barrier to any political change and focused on the urgent need to break its hold on the American public.

Traffic on this new alternative media website rose rapidly during 2016, spurred by the huge growth of on-line activism provoked by Donald Trump’s unexpectedly strong Presidential campaign. Although I didn’t think much of Trump myself and never wrote anything about him, many of our columnists and commenters were quite enthusiastic, establishing us one of the very few publications considered supportive of his effort, with an article in The American Interest characterizing us as “a Trump-friendly, highbrow online journal with a devoted following.”

Unfortunately, the huge growth of readership and commenting we experienced put severe strains on the software system I’d built and this led to repeated crashes, forcing me to spend a month or two modifying the system to handle the very heavy traffic. Having thus been diverted into software issues, I then decided to enhance the architecture of the system in various other ways. For example, I extended my software design so that it could easily handle full books in HTML format and added a library of these, making available older or especially controversial volumes that might not otherwise be conveniently available for reading. I also updated the design of the content-archiving system I had created a decade earlier and merged it into the same website.

Afterward I began doing some further reading and research on various historical topics that had long been of interest to me, laying the groundwork for the future articles I planned to write in my American Pravda series, while making arrangements to license the rights to republish some important books in the new, web-based system that I’d developed.

Due to the combined impact of this software work and my new background reading, my major writing went into abeyance for more than a year and a half, and I only was ready to finally resume it by mid-2018, almost exactly five years ago.

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Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, served as chairman of English for the Children, the nationwide campaign to dismantle bilingual education. He is also the founder of RonUnz.org

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