Tag Archive for: YouTube censorship

The Delightfully Inclusive Media Version of America’s “Far Right”

A recent post on Twitter by comedian Lou Perez suggests a hilariously subversive mind at work. In a retweet, he presents a chart that purports to quantify the height/income trade-offs that govern the attractiveness of the human male to the human female. Apparently, as Perez puts it in his summary tweet, “A man who is 5 feet 6 inches tall needs to earn an additional $175,000 per year to be as desirable as a man who is about 6 feet tall.”

Everything about this screams foul to the woke and sensitive crowd, starting with the presumption of a gender binary. The presumption of the male income being a predominant variable, rather than the female income. The inferred acceptance of the gender pay gap. The unconscious and toxic bias in favor of exclusionary heterosexual attraction. In terms of milking this for hilarity, Titania McGrath, who specializes in politically incorrect gender humor, could give Perez a run for the money.

And like McGrath, Perez has stepped on the toes of the woke many times. So many times, in fact, that he recently published a guest column in the Wall Street Journal entitled “How I Became a Far Right Radical.” Unlike the study correlating male attractiveness to male earnings, which was a serious but humorous bit of scholarship coming from the University of Chicago back in 2006, when scholars had more latitude than they do today, Perez has been tagged in a more recent, equally serious but utterly humorless study.

In this study, released in November, involving scholars from Harvard, Temple, and others, along with corporate collaborators including Microsoft, Perez was listed as a “far right radical.” Entitled “Evaluating the scale, growth, and origins of right-wing echo chambers on YouTube,” the massive three year study followed the viewership patterns of over 300,000 unique YouTube users, who watched over 21 million videos on nearly three million unique YouTube channels in over 8 million sessions.

Wading through over 6,000 words of extremely dense academese, not including lengthy appendices, the general message of the study appears to be that “the far-right echo chamber is somewhat smaller than the left and centrist communities, it is rapidly growing in population size and watch time. Moreover, its users are more engaged and more likely to stay engaged in the future than users in other echo chambers, especially when they are exposed to bursts of content.”

But how did Perez, a funny guy, end up on the expansive list of “far right” YouTube channels listed in the concluding exhibits of this study? Apparently, as he explains in his WSJ column, for five years through October 2020, he was head writer and producer of a YouTube channel called “We the Internet TV.” As he puts it, “Our comedy channel made fun of everybody—left, right, center.” Material that earned Perez a Webby Award in 2017 became threatening enough by 2020 to earn him a place among America’s hard-core right wing.

How Perez expands on the fundamental dishonesty of this study that drags several hundred people into its net and tags them all as “far right” is worth repeating here. He explains that the words “fascism,” “racism” and “terrorism” are missing from the paper, even though those words are linked to the far right. But then, as he puts it, “I realized it was a smart (and cowardly) move on the part of the authors to leave them out: just use the umbrella term ‘far right’ and allow your readers to fill in the tacit isms. That way, you don’t risk being called out for labeling people who are not fascists, racists and terrorists as such. Instead, the study is peppered with nebulous adjectives like ‘extreme’ and ‘radical,’ which allow readers to see their own bogeymen.”

If you read the list of “far right” YouTube channels listed in the study you will immediately notice that hundreds of them have already been deplatformed by YouTube. And if you keep track of these channels, you will also notice there are many more that the scholars omitted. Where, for example, are the many “Q” channels? They’ve all now been banished to alternative platforms, but were all present, and popular, on YouTube during the period under analysis.

And if the scholars who conducted this study were not being paid to offer a reductionist, biased message, they might acknowledge that the so-called far right YouTube channels they’ve identified constitute an incredibly diverse and inclusive list. As Perez puts it, “In the study’s view, former Evergreen College professor Bret Weinstein – a self-described progressive and Bernie Sanders supporter – is far-right too. Joining us are neuroscientist Sam Harris (a self-confessed liberal), podcast host Joe Rogan (who considers himself ‘pretty liberal’) and Bloggingheads.tv (whose regular contributors include Vox co-founder Ezra Klein ).”

Perez is right. If you read the list, dozens if not hundreds of names jump out that have no business being tagged as far right, unless “far right” simply means “free thinker.” Prager University, Ben Shapiro, Turning Point, Conversations with Bill Kristol. Really? Kristol’s neither a free thinker nor far right. Bill Kristol? Far right?

And then there are those genuine intellectuals, along with Sam Harris and Bret Weinstein, such as Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux, who have never, ever engaged in “far right” rhetoric. Rather, they have followed truth into uncomfortable corners. And why, for that matter should the X22 Report or Black Pigeon Speaks, which delve into forbidden topics involving central banks but never engage in hate speech or calls to violence, be stigmatized as “far right.” Why should any of these four channels be banned from YouTube, a fate that has already befallen Molyneux and X22?

Even those website that might qualify as far right by most conventional standards, such as Vincent James Red Elephants or Lana Lokteff’s Red Ice TV, as well have never engaged in hate speech or calls to violence. Moreover, their acquaintance with facts, as opposed to propagandistic drivel, is far more finely developed in James and Lokteff than it is in, say, David Muir or Norah O’Donnell.

The sheer diversity of the channels listed as “far right” by these supposed scholars makes any attempt to generalize about them an exercise in misinformation. What these many people offer is interesting content. They offer thoughts unfettered by fears of having to be politically correct, and instead are typically inspired by what are harmless or even uplifting motives, ranging from an irreverent but clever joke, to explorations in how to build character, to love and concern for one’s heritage.

Mr. Perez appears more bemused than offended by his designation by these academic heavyweights as a member of the far right. That is an appropriate reaction. The “far right,” as defined by this impressive feat of academic hackery, is a huge and diverse group that like any large and diverse group includes a small percentage of scallywags, but for the most part are some of the most interesting and passionate people you’ll ever meet.

Ultimately, the purveyors of this study have provided us another place to look for the good guys. That was certainly not their intention, but we thank them for their service.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Is Another YouTube Purge Imminent?

Get ready for the new euphemism for social media censorship: “no longer commercially viable.” YouTube on December 10 reportedly will implement new terms of service that allow the video-sharing goliath to end creator accounts summarily if they cannot be monetized. And how will YouTube decide if an account cannot be monetized? By removing ads from a channel ahead of the changing terms.

British nationalist Laura Towler sounded the alarm on Wednesday and urged her viewers to subscribe to her BitChute account after receiving a notification from YouTube of the impending changes. Towler reported that her videos were still monetized as of Tuesday. But after she received the notice, she discovered that YouTube had peremptorily removed all of the ads on her videos.

As a result, her channel is “no longer commercially viable.”

Since 2016, and with increasing frequency, conservatives and nationalists are seeing their YouTube channels erased, often with no warning or explanation. In the blink of an eye, years of work creating content and building an audience are lost, often along with the related income.

Towler is not the first right-of-center vlogger to warn of another impending purge. Earlier this month, Chadwick Moore, a columnist for Spectator USA with 51,100 Twitter followers, tweeted: “Any political YouTubers with remotely interesting, controversial, or right-of-center content needs to set up their @bitchute or other alt account now and start moving videos over and promoting their new platform. Sources say massive purge is starting mid-December. Worse than ever.”

The timing makes sense. With the Christmas season getting into full swing and the 2020 primary elections beginning in January, everyone’s a little busier than usual and might not notice that their favorite YouTube channel has disappeared.

In the depleted field of content creators that YouTube has still permitted to post despite their unwelcome content, who will be left standing?

The Nonaggression Pact Between Social Media Monopolies and Establishment Conservatives

If the entire weight of America’s libertarian-conservative billionaire network were deployed to defend the First Amendment and resist the decisions by social media monopolies to purge nationalist content, they might still do it, but they’d have a fight on their hands. But just as Molotov and Ribbentrop agreed to carve up Poland in 1939, it appears there is, at the least, a tacit nonaggression pact in place between establishment conservatives and the social media giants.

As an aside, and to show just how much has changed in American culture, there was a time when the ACLU would have defended Lana LokteffJames Allsup, and all the rest of YouTube’s digital desaparecidos.

Over the past few years, and especially during 2019, Google and Facebook have been buying their way into conservative and libertarian circles. Within the network of think tanks and PACs known as “Conservatism Inc.,” who knows how much money they’re throwing around. It’s a smart business move for these social media monopolies. When people who develop ideas are getting paid, they tend to develop paid for ideas.

Google and Facebook can afford to buy their way into pretty much anything. Google’s value as a company now exceeds $900 billion, and their most recent balance sheet shows they are sitting on an astonishing $109 billion in cash. Facebook, way behind Google and yet rich beyond comprehension, has a market value of $567 billion, with a mere $41 billion in cash lying around.

Several weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting two Google operatives who were staffing a table in the networking hall at a national libertarian/conservative conference which shall remain unnamed. Apparently these two Google employees had been experiencing nothing but warm affirmations of their private company prerogative to censor whomever they want, but they became uncomfortable when asked about their YouTube subsidiary’s systematic deplatforming of various independent channels such as Red Ice TV (still available on BitChute). The more poised of the two promised to refer me to someone in the Google organization who “would love to talk with you.”

Pick Your Purge

After multiple follow up emails sent in the subsequent weeks, a brief reply directed me to “press@google.com.” Following many more emails and voicemails left with Google’s press relations office, the following reply came on November 21:

“Hi — Per Susan’s Q3 Creator Letter, YouTube is built on the premise of openness. Based on this open platform, millions of creators around the world have connected with global audiences and many of them have built thriving businesses in the process. But openness comes with its challenges, which is why we also have Community Guidelines that we update on an ongoing basis. And over the last few years, we’ve been investing significantly over the past few years [sic] in the teams and systems that protect YouTube. This work has focused on four pillars: removing violative content, raising up authoritative content, reducing the spread of borderline content and rewarding trusted creators. Thanks, Google Press Team”

First of all, do these sound like the words of a platform, or a publisher?

Exactly what “Community Guidelines” were “violative” in the removal of Allsup and Red Ice TV? Could it be this?

“Our products are platforms for free expression. But we don’t support content that promotes or condones violence against individuals or groups based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, nationality, veteran status, caste, sexual orientation, or gender identity, or content that incites hatred on the basis of these core characteristics.”

The operative words here, to justify deplatforming, would not be to “promote or condone violence,” because channels are banned that haven’t done that. They must be “content that incites hatred on the basis of these core characteristics,” and there’s a huge problem with this. Because anything nowadays can be said to “incite hatred.”

YouTube is not a publisher. It is a platform and this means it is exempted from liability for whatever content appears on the channels of individual creators. If content doesn’t violate the First Amendment, it supposedly cannot be removed from a platform. The only reason YouTube can get away with it is that its parent company is sitting on $109 billion in cash and can overwhelm any legal challenge.

But who would challenge them? Not libertarians, because Google is a “private company”—as if that justifies violating the conditions of its platform exemption. Would Conservatism, Inc. challenge Google, or not? Is Google now pouring some of that $109 billion in cash into donations to the charitable foundations and PACs that dole out money to conservative groups?

The legal questions just got more subtle, however, with YouTube’s new “terms of service.” Who is to deny advertisers the right to demand their ads avoid various types of content? Who is to deny a platform the right to deny a forum to channels that lack “commercial viability”? Can you occupy part of the public square, if you don’t pay for it? But don’t taxes subsidize the internet?

And who will pay for the attorneys to make these arguments on behalf of the banished, if the ACLU and other powerful left-wing pressure groups, establishment conservatives and libertarians, and every major corporate online advertiser in America are paying legal fees for the other side?

Censorship Validates Extremist Rhetoric, Honest, Open Debate Does Not

YouTube and its parent company, Google, had better think carefully about what they’re about to do. Because the nationalist Right will consider another round of silencing not only to be a validation of their perception of a double standard, whereby social media monopolies hold conservative content to a different standard than liberal content but also that this shows how social media monopolies have bought off the more moderate right-wing. In other words, they will view the moderate right-wing as complicit in the corporate muzzling of free speech. Then what?

The strange case of Nick Fuentes offers a glimpse into what could come next. Only 21 years old, Fuentes likely would not have such a high-profile if not for the social media giants’ aggressive deplatforming efforts. It was only after other voices were silenced that he rapidly accumulated millions of views on his YouTube channel and his website attained an Alexa ranking that your average libertarian think tank only dreams of achieving. Fuentes not only became part of a shrinking set of alternative voices still active, all of his pronouncements—from inconvenient facts to outrageous invective to outright racism—gained credibility.

One of the best summaries of what Fuentes has done can be found on the channel of an anonymous British YouTuber with 61,000 subscribers who goes by the name “On the Offensive.” He presents a 30 minute series of video clips of college events hosted by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, where nearly every person during the Q&A asks uncomfortable questions about immigration and other issues where they feel betrayed by what they allege is a co-opted conservative establishment.

Thanks to Fuentes and others, including the more studious Vincent James, there is now an intensifying civil war between what might be described as the nationalist right vs the globalist right, despite the fact that both parties to this war are largely comprised of Trump supporters.

Red Ice TV’s Lana Lokteff, in a recent American Greatness interview, had this to say about deplatforming: “If an idea is harmful or just awful, best to talk about why that is and air everything out from every angle. The best argument wins. The truth should not fear any inquisition. If we do not, that is what creates desperate people doing radical things to be heard.”

You can agree with that sentiment even if you disagree with everything else.

Google, Facebook, and the rest of the social media giants, along with, perhaps, their new partners in Conservatism Inc., need to realize an historical truth. Every time you mow down another voice, the replacement voice arrives immediately, it grows faster and uses the censorship threat as justification for even more extreme speech.

Censorship validates extremist content, both for the producer and the consumer.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Interviewing the Host of the Channel That Never Happened

Six hundred years ago, when elsewhere they were footing the blame for the Black Death, Casimir the Great – so called – told the Jews they could come to Krakow. They came. They trundled their belongings into the city. They settled. They took hold. They prospered in business, science, education, the arts. With nothing they came and with nothing they flourished. For six centuries there has been a Jewish Krakow. By this evening those six centuries will be a rumor. They never happened.
Amon Goeth, Schindler’s List, 1994

Invoking the holocaust as analogous to cancel culture is a tasteless stretch. Or is it? We hear the analogy every day applied to climate skeptics, who are stigmatized as “deniers.” And when it comes to online censorship, Amon Goeth’s quote from Spielberg’s masterpiece is too evocative to ignore. Because when someone is cancelled online, they don’t just lose their ability to publish new material. Their entire body of work, their history, their audience, their past, present and future, is wiped out. They never happened.

On October 18, 2019, the YouTube channel Red Ice TV was erased. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Red Ice TV is a white nationalist hate site, promoting racist views. At the time of “cancellation,” Red Ice TV had 334,000 subscribers and its videos had been viewed nearly 50 million times.

Today, Red Ice TV is just the latest YouTube channel that never happened. The online megaphone that can reach the world instantly and for pennies, can also in an instant be deleted without a trace. If you click on the link to Red Ice TV’s YouTube channel, you get a generic screen with the message “This channel does not exist.”

But why doesn’t this channel exist, as if it never happened? Why has Lana Lokteff, Red Ice TV’s co-host and co-founder, and the subject of an in-depth interview to conclude this article, been wiped out by YouTube, and every other major online platform?

YouTube Channels That Flourished, And Then Never Happened

YouTube has been playing a game of cat and mouse with channels they deem to produce “white nationalist” content. Earlier this fall, they deplatformed three similarly labeled channels, then admitted two back. “Replatformed” were The Iconoclast and Way of the World. Gone forever, along with 450,000 subscribers and nearly 75 million video views, was James Allsup.

Red Ice TV and James Allsup can now be found on BitChute. But who watches BitChute? Conservatives and nationalists – and, shall we say it, globalism skeptics – are dangerous when they spread their ideas on a video platform that everybody watches. That platform is, and only is, YouTube.

Standing up for the right of these vloggers to operate without being deplatformed by YouTube, which by any reasonable standard is a monopoly, is not an endorsement of these vloggers. But so what? Whether you are defending what they say, or just defending their right to say it, there’s no recourse.

For example, government intervention would probably create more problems than it would solve. Conservative politicians in the U.S. want to regulate YouTube, possibly taking away its exemption from publisher’s liability, because it censors too much. Liberal politicians in the U.S. are also threatening to take away YouTube’s platform exemption, because it doesn’t censor enough. It’s hard to imagine government intervention ending well. But the status quo isn’t turning out very well for free speech, either.

Vincent James, whose Red Elephants channel has nearly 300,000 subscribers despite being demonetized and algorithmically suppressed by YouTube, explained how leftist activists use “mass flagging campaigns” to take down conservative online platforms. “What online activists do is post something on Reddit or a ‘discord server’ which is an encrypted online messaging app,” he said, “these mass flagging campaigns will originate from activists using these forums to say ‘all of you go and flag this channel.'” When the platform administrators receive a high volume of complaints, they suppress or erase the channel.

There is no similar sort of online attack mob operating on the right to silence left wing voices, and these grassroots online flash mobs have become very effective at shutting down conservatives online. In the case of sites without large fan bases that can raise objections, the power of the mob to erase is near absolute, and nobody knows how many of these smaller sites are gone as a result. In Red Ice’s case, it didn’t matter that thousands of their fans objected.

Ultimately, if new federal regulations are problematic and online flagging warriors successfully attack channels even if they haven’t violated the First Amendment, YouTube management has to take it on themselves to do the right thing. In this case, that means reinstating Red Ice TV, no matter how repugnant they may seem. As YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki very recently asserted, “it’s more important than ever that YouTube remains open to anyone.”

While nothing in this report, or the interview that follows, is intended in any way to endorse the views expressed by Red Ice TV, judgement of any kind is not the point. The question that should be being asked is simply this: Does Red Ice TV have a First Amendment right to say what they’re saying, and if so, does YouTube have an obligation to offer them a platform? As Adam Candeub and Mark Epstein, writing for City Journal, put it, “Exemption from standard libel law is extremely valuable to the companies that enjoy its protection, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, but they only got it because it was assumed that they would operate as impartial, open channels of communication—not curators of acceptable opinion.”

Maybe there is a general consensus that some of the content produced by Red Ice TV does not constitute “acceptable opinion.” But it should be obvious that supporting someone’s right to speak their mind does not mean you agree with everything they have to say. It should also be obvious that some of the things they have to say need to be said.

How Big Tech Smacks Down the “Right-Wing”

The online platform war began in earnest after the 2016 presidential election, when the liberal management of the social media giants – often egged on by their even more liberal workforces – realized that conservatives, inexplicably, had mastered the art of online political campaigning and did a better job of it than the liberals. Notwithstanding the incessant finger pointing at the Russians, the smarter heads in Silicon Valley knew they were legitimately outplayed, and vowed to never let that happen again.

The stepped up attacks on right-wing online content include subtle measures that are hard to detect, harder still to prove intent, but have huge impact. Alex Jones and his website InfoWars offers an example. In November 2016 InfoWars attracted 125 million views. This was the high water mark for Jones. By July 2018, Jones was still attracting an impressive 25 million views a month, but that was an 80 percent drop in 20 months. According to Advertising Age, the decline was because the platforms that drove viewers to InfoWars, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube search, “clearly were trying to reduce his impact.”

Up until the Summer of 2018, most of the steps taken against right wing content creators took this relatively soft approach, using manipulated results in Google searches, throttled down appearances in news feeds and YouTube recommended videos, shadowbans on Twitter, deboosting on Facebook. But with the 2018 midterm elections looming, the tech giants decided to take off the gloves.

For the first time, the major online platforms coordinated their efforts. Within a few days in early August 2018, InfoWars was expelled from Apple podcasts, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube. On September 6th, Twitter followed suit. On September 8th, Apple banned the InfoWars app from their App Store. Jones was virtually erased. He had 2.4 million YouTube subscribers, all gone; 830,000 Twitter followers, purged; his Apple podcast archives were deleted; his Facebook page, with 2.5 million followers, wiped out.

According to the Los Angeles Times, by mid October 2018, Facebook purged more than 800 accounts and pages pushing “political messages.” Matt Lamb, director of communications for Students for Life of America, provided dozens of examples of biased deplatforming in a guest editorial published by USA Today entitled “Google, Twitter and Facebook should just be honest if they don’t like conservatives.”

Other noteworthy casualties in late 2018 were Sargon of Akkad, whose YouTube channel has over a million subscribers, and Milo Yiannopoulos. Sargon, whose real name is Carl Benjamin, a 40 year old British political commentator, eventually got his channel back. Yiannopoulos did not, although he has fitfully attempted to pick up the pieces with new online ventures.

The Strange Case of Milo Yiannopoulos

The case of Milo Yiannopoulos is telling, because nobody with a sense of humor would consider him to have ever engaged in “hate speech,” much less going beyond First Amendment free speech protections and advocating violence. Yiannopoulous, denounced by his critics as a right-wing extremist, proudly describes himself as a gay man with Jewish heritage who is specifically attracted to black men. He was offensive, he was outrageous, but it would be hard to claim he was a hardcore homophobe, or anti Semite, or racist.

For a few brief months in 2016 and early 2017, Milo Yiannopoulous was arguably the most famous troll in the world. To those who agreed with his politics, he was hilarious. For everyone who wanted Yiannopoulos to disappear, however, his cavalier comments on the subject of pedophilia, which came to light in February 2017, were the last straw. Even Yiannopoulos knew he’d gone too far, and, to no avail, issued a rare apology.

Whether Yiannopoulos was defending pedophilia, or, only slightly less repugnant, was just making light of it, is not really the point. Because to those who found him disagreeable, his articulate, widely shared denunciations of political correctness were a threat, and that is the point. The other takeaway from the Yiannopoulos story is the preposterous double standard that his erasure exemplifies.

In a culture dominated by the Left, we now have “tolerant” parents across America taking their children to Drag Queen Story Hour, and flamboyant prepubescent transvestites are celebrated by the American mainstream media. Are these practices, highly sexualized and arguably inappropriate (to put it mildly), which directly involve very young children, any less objectionable than Milo’s fatal transgressions which were made on forums that cater exclusively to adults? Apparently it depends on who you ask.

Milo Yiannopoulos was making it cool to mock the Left, and his message was influencing tens of millions of people. But by the end of 2018, when Facebook and Patreon kicked him off their platforms, he had already been reduced to a rumor. And then he never happened.

The Intellectual Dark Web

About this time a new term was entering common usage, the “Intellectual Dark Web.” On the website “KnowYourMeme.com,” the Intellectual Dark Web, or IDW, is described as “a phrase coined by mathematician Eric Weinstein referring to a loosely defined group of intellectuals, academics, and political commentators who espouse controversial ideas and beliefs surrounding subjects related to free speech, identity politics and biology.”

This happened in mid-2017, shortly after Eric Weinstein’s brother, Bret Weinstein, had been harassed for refusing to participate in the “Day of Absence” at Evergreen College in Washington state, where he was a professor. Organized by campus leftists, the “Day of Absence” sought to exclude white people from the campus for a day – apparently to further their efforts at achieving social justice. Stung that his brother’s unwillingness to be banned from the campus where he taught was considered “controversial,” Eric Weinstein identified the Intellectual Dark Web as an antidote.

In May 2018, the New York Times published an opinionated but detailed expose of the Intellectual Dark Web. It remains one of the definitive mainstream descriptions of the IDW. Here are some of the topics and premises the article lists as typical fare for the IDW: “There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.”

A more detailed description of how the tech giants have partnered with financial intermediaries and internet service providers, all the while taking direction from a powerful coalition of activist left-wing nonprofit pressure groups, can be found in an April 2019 American Greatness article “The Establishment War on the Intellectual Dark Web.”

The Establishment Reactionaries

The 20th century produced two writers of uncommon vision who both wrote books about the future that have become cautionary classics. In his novel, 1984, George Orwell imagined a hellish future of endless war, where the people are oppressed by a tyrannical regime that erases history, engages in constant surveillance, and punishes “thought crimes.”

Aldous Huxley imagined an equally dystopian future in his novel “Brave New World,” but where Orwell’s regime used brutality, Huxley’s tyrants used seduction. Huxley’s government of the future employed psychological manipulation, along with abundant drugs and sex, to pacify a population where people led lives devoid of true love or purpose. What both of these authors shared, however, was the belief that future regimes would rely on Pavlovian conditioning.

It would be fascinating to observe either of these literary giants taking a trip into the actual future, for them to see just how right they were on that fundamental premise. For a while, the internet was an unambiguously revolutionary phenomenon. Everyone could broadcast truth to the world. What social media has done more recently, however, threatens the internet revolution in two ways: The interactive, personal, instantaneous, and perpetual access to an infinite audience has disrupted the human psyche in ways we are only beginning to understand. And the Pavlovian control of this interaction by a small handful of social media platforms in the Silicon Valley has given those companies almost indescribable power.

Virtually all Americans between the ages of 18 and 65 use social media. YouTube is used by 73% of U.S. adults, Facebook 69%, Instagram 37%, Pinterest 28%, LinkedIn 27%, Snapchat 24%, Twitter 22%, WhatsApp 20%, and Reddit 11%. It isn’t uncommon for Americans to use all of these platforms. Among smartphone users in the U.S., the average time spent with their device is an astonishing 3 hours, 10 minutes per day. This is an addiction that has swept through the American population in barely a decade, and it has changed everything.

The ironic surprise in all this is how the Silicon Valley’s tech companies have dealt with their incredible power. They have embraced a reactionary politics which is reflected in the choices they’ve made. Who they promote. Who they erase. What online behaviors they reward, and where they direct the herd. To understand why they have a reactionary political agenda, one must understand how the American Left, over the past 10-20 years, moved from opposing globalization to fully endorsing it. This shift, gradual but steady, came into the open with the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

Trump Catalyzed the Revolution Against Globalism

Donald Trump’s heresy was to focus on the negative impact globalism was having on Americans. He catalyzed a revolution by challenging what had become truisms for the establishment—trade deficits don’t matter or can actually be beneficial, free trade is always good, mass immigration helps more than it harms.

What the establishment had ignored was that the benefits of trade deficits are financial bubbles (as American asset prices are bid up by foreign investors) that only enrich wealthy speculators. Free trade isn’t free when other nations cheat. Mass immigration only benefits businesses who want cheaper labor. Meanwhile, homes become unaffordable debt traps, good manufacturing jobs migrate overseas, and immigrants take away jobs from America’s most vulnerable workers.

Trump clarified the debate over globalization by forcing the progressive Left to reveal its true colors. It became clear that the Left’s only concern was how globalization affected the developing world, and exposed their indifference, even hostility, toward the workers in their own nations.

You can make a moral case that globalization should harm the workers of the developed nations more than it harms the workers of developing nations. You can turn that unavoidable truth into an altruistic virtue, although one that is rather hard to defend in the nations that are being harmed. You can also embrace globalization on those terms because it does the bidding – and attracts the generosity – of the wealthy elites and multinational corporations who are most enriched by “free” trade and open borders.

America’s progressive Left did both. They’ve disguised the agenda that disenfranchises American citizens within their own nation by attacking “white privilege” and by accusing those who object of being “white nationalists.” They’ve come to accept the premises of free trade economists that they’d once despised, with the caveat that climate activism and all that it entails—namely, the mass redistribution of wealth—will mitigate the impacts of globalism on developing nations which had once bothered them so much.

The Silicon Valley, which by 2019 had a tech workforce that had reached an incredible 75 percent foreign born, epitomizes a culture where leftist globalism is perceived as not just inevitable, but already here. Close behind, fully embracing globalism in all its ramifications, and scrambling to become as woke and worldly as the tech monopolies, are every other major corporation in America, every elite academic institution, every influential entertainer, every so-called mainstream media property.

These are the new empire. These are Big Brother. This is the Brave New World the online censors are protecting. Their path to power was smooth and relentless. And in the face of an alt-right, nationalist insurgency, they are the reactionaries, and Trump, along with his supporters, are the revolutionaries. Everyone in the world who questions globalism, whether they are right-of-center or left-of-center, are revolutionaries, with all the moral frissons and enticing glamour that being a revolutionary implies.

No wonder Milo Yiannopoulos was so dangerous. He demolished political correctness and revealed its tyrannical hidden agenda, all the while making people laugh. No wonder Alex Jones was a threat, when in between his riffs on human/pig hybrids, he was methodically exposing the supranational networks that are supplanting national governments. No wonder their flourishing electronic footprints were deleted. No wonder they never happened.

The Inconvenient Truths That Must Be Silenced

When considering what truths are inconvenient enough to silence, globalism vs. nationalism is the context in nearly every case. An excellent example of this is the experience of Carey Wedler, who has, so far, hung onto her YouTube channel, but was recently banned from both Facebook and Twitter.

Wedler is a left-leaning critic of the mainstream media and an outspoken opponent of America’s so-called endless wars. She infers that Facebook and Twitter are both working closely with the shadowy Atlantic Council, and that the media and social media giants are engaging in “soft censorship” to remove content that isn’t illegal but the government doesn’t like. Facebook and Twitter never told Wedler why she was banned from their platforms.

Could it be that the active deplatforming and soft censorship being practiced by the social media monopolies, while correlated with their leftist bias, is more accurately described as focused on suppressing anti-globalist content?

If you examine the list of channels, compiled by the Red Elephants Vincent James, that are either banned, demonetized, or algorithmically suppressed by YouTube, there is a common thread, and it isn’t stereotypical right-wing content, or “hate speech.” The common thread, stretching from the acerbic James Allsup to the erudite Stefan Molyneux are ideas that question the globalist agenda. The narratives of globalism skeptics are dangerous to the reactionary empire. That is the threat.

But what if the majority of ordinary people don’t want open borders? What if they would like the facts, not a bunch of skewed BS, regarding how immigration policies affect the economy and social cohesion? What if they want balanced opinions, or just want to hear the other side for a change, on the issues of multiculturalism, race, feminism, gender “equity” and social justice? What if they sometimes find an unrepentant critic of identity politics to be a breath of fresh air? What if they believe there should be a robust and honest debate over globalism, or over climate change?

What if the phony gravitas and one-sided outrage that pours forth from the overpaid thespians who masquerade as top tier news journalists – think David Muir, Lester Holt, Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, and the like – is transparently false to anyone who views alternative media? What if the uncanny unanimity of all these mainstream media sources, at the least, exposes a disturbing degree of consensus, if not actual conspiracy? What if fake news is indeed fake news? So fake, in fact, that it insults the intelligence of anyone paying attention?

If the mainstream offline media spins the same controlled, agenda driven stories year after year, and they do, it’s not hard to conclude that social media companies are trying to influence public opinion in the same manner, in favor of a globalist progressive agenda. No national borders. Anti-racist racism. Anti-sexist sexism. Anything to combat “climate change.” Gender “fluidity.” Corporate socialism. And of course, that tasteless, ubiquitous stretch, “Trump is Hitler.”

Which brings us back to Lana Lokteff and her cohorts at Red Ice TV. Are they racist? Are they anti Semitic? Are they “white nationalists?” In the interview to follow, Lokteff claims she is not racist or anti Semitic, although she acknowledges that she is white, and that she is a nationalist. But she asks why those labels are allowed to be used to stigmatize anyone critical of groups claiming to represent a particular race or religion, or to stigmatize anyone critical of an individual who belongs to a particular race of religion. This is a fair question, but it doesn’t necessarily get to the heart of the matter.

To silence her critics, or at least to silence a few of the honest ones, Lokteff and others who are white and who are nationalist may want to strive to visualize an America where they win. How would this nation look? It is reasonable – or should be – to expect a nation to defend its culture, its language and its borders, to care for its citizens, to respect its traditions. So how would people fit in who aren’t white, or who aren’t Christian? To accept someone as an American citizen, what constitutes an acceptable range of behaviors and beliefs? What are reasonable terms for inclusion in the American family?

The Difficult Conversations That Must Be Had

This is one of the most important questions of our era. If corporate globalism, primarily pushed by the Left, is poised to erase national and ethnic identities, then what sort of push back can preserve nations and ethnic groups in a way where the solution isn’t worse than the problem? What does it mean to be a citizen of a nation? Can nationalism be inclusive without becoming meaningless? Can nationalism be compassionate, offering a better model for the evolution of global civilization, and still be authentic nationalism? Is there a version of economic nationalism that nonetheless nurtures global prosperity?

One thing ought to be certain: Denying people like Lana Lokteff the ability to voice her observations and opinions on YouTube is a dangerous mistake. Because the concerns voiced by the globalism skeptics are based on hard facts and sound logic, no matter whether they are expressed with grace or with fury. To silence them defers a much needed debate about globalism and its consequences, at a time when current globalist policies are becoming increasingly unsustainable.

You can’t have mass immigration at the same time as the welfare state grows. You can’t have mass immigration at the same time as environmentalist laws make it nearly impossible to build the enabling housing and infrastructure to accommodate them, and instead mandate rationing and a higher cost of living.

You can’t have mass immigration at the same time as the unionized public education system, dominated by leftist globalists, teaches immigrant children that they have arrived in a hostile, racist nation. You can’t fundamentally change the ethnic proportions in the nation within two generations, yet demand perfectly proportional representation of all ethnic groups in every facet of American life, from wealth and income to geographic distribution to hiring, promoting, college admissions and contract awards.

All of these things are socially and economically unsustainable; all of them weaken America. To enforce them requires the soft tyranny of Pavlovian conditioning, backed up by a ruthless and pervasive police state. Small wonder that dissident glitches in the online matrix become merely rumors, caricatures, channels that don’t exist; channels that never happened.

In the lengthy interview to follow, Red Ice TV’s co-host and co-founder, Lana Lokteff, expresses opinions that in everyday public discourse are repressed. For most people, the opinions Lokteff expresses generate a conditioned response and are dismissed without further consideration. In reality, the issues she’s confronting are extraordinarily complex and carry epic consequences. By suppressing discussion about them, and by demonizing people who bring them up, these issues, and the policies that have created them, remain unresolved.

After speaking with Lokteff, two things relating to internet censorship seem especially noteworthy:

First, whenever monopoly platforms like YouTube decide to wipe out one of their channels, they ought to publicly disclose specific examples of what that channel did to get itself wiped out. Is YouTube afraid that such disclosures would reveal and expose its bias?

Second, if online censorship moves beyond just enforcing explicit violations of the First Amendment, and it has, then, as Lokteff pointed out, we risk “creating desperate people doing radical things to be heard.”

Here, then, is the story of Red Ice TV, in Lana Lokteff’s own words. Readers are invited to identify, if they can – and since YouTube would not – exactly where she engages in “hate speech” that is too dangerous to be permitted public discourse. And if all her opinions are not opinions we would share, do we really want to drive these opinions underground? Was the First Amendment only designed to protect the speech we agree with?

Interview with Lana Lokteff, co-host and co-founder of Red Ice TV

1 – Red Ice TV has been banned from YouTube. What happened? What outside groups may have pressured YouTube and what are their tactics?

We had no “strikes,” we were in good standing with YouTube. Then one morning we woke up and our channel was gone. The outside groups that pushed YouTube to ban us include the corrupt and communist Southern Poverty Law Center, Media Matters, the Anti Defamation League, along with Antifa outlets such as the Daily Beast and the Huffington Post. Their tactics are to lie, defame, and snip together partial quotes out of context to justify why you should be banned and then get you banned on the platforms you’d use to defend yourself. Their friends at Google also rig the search results so when you search for us, you only find the lying defamatory sources. That’s one of the reasons it’s aggravating when conservatives, who know that the media lies, nonetheless rely on the media to look for information on us. None of this ever applies to the other side.

2 – Did you anticipate this, and were there any warnings or last minute indications that this was going to happen?

We were expecting it. Many of our top videos (we had several videos with a million views or more) were deleted. We even had a video featuring the Dali Lama’s comments about refugees ultimately having to go back home to rebuild, which YouTube deleted. Anyone on our side of politics is going to eventually be banned and have to go elsewhere. They have deleted a few channels, then brought them back after there was an outcry from their supporters, sometimes even months later. People made a ruckus for us too, but we haven’t received any response from YouTube. In general, YouTube appears to have more leniency for people who are extra careful to censor themselves and who knowingly tone it down, or are vague in their vocabulary. Well, I thought we were doing that lately too. Some of their reinstatements may be so they can create the illusion of tolerance and it’s also possible that their programmed AI systems are flagging channels and holding them for review.

3 – How many subscribers did you have? What recourse is there?

We had 334,000 subscribers despite having the algorithms rigged against us. There’s not a lot you can do if you’re up against YouTube and their parent company Google. They are a beast of a company with way too much power and they receive government subsidies too. It would take a class action lawsuit or government stepping in to change their treatment of us.

4 – Leading up to this, what other steps had YouTube taken? When and how were you demonetized? When did algorithmic suppression begin and how much did your views fall?

We started producing video content in 2016, so all of this happened in a matter of a few years. Prior to that we were doing mostly podcasts. We never monetized the channel as we didn’t want our viewers to see commercials, nor did we want to become dependent. The trouble really started after Trump’s election. YouTube realized that the most popular political channels were on the right (because you can get the leftist narrative everywhere else). So they started fiddling with our ratings, search results, notifications and we stopped coming up in recommended videos. They have stated that they are trying to ‘disrupt people from going down the rabbit hole.’ To some extent this has backfired on them, because when they try to ‘deradicalize’ viewers by recommending videos such as one by a transgendered liberal with pink hair pushing a SJW message, people only feel more extreme against the left. They are helping to create their own worst enemy.

5 – What other platforms have you been banned from?

It’s an unbelievable list and this includes not only Red Ice but my small online clothing store and in some cases us personally. YouTube, Paypal, Braintree, Venmo, Zelle, iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Wells Fargo, Coinbase (yes the supposed anti establishment crypto wallet), Skrill, even Pinterest and iHeartRadio. There’s others too.

When Wells Fargo banned all of our accounts, they sent letters saying we will not do business with you anymore. People in their service department said they had never seen this before, that the directive came from high up and the reason was ‘sealed,’ meaning only higher levels of management could find out what happened. The SPLC, ADL, and other leftist activist groups are tied in with bankers, have connections and put pressure on all of them to ban us.

6 – Did YouTube state what specifically led to your deplatforming? What exact content crossed their line?

Despite days of fans hammering them with messages demanding a response as to why were banned, they did not respond. Meanwhile they respond on Twitter to other tiny accounts asking petty questions. If you go to the channel now a banner might still show that says something about this channel is gone for multiple and excess hate speech. But of course they never prove that nor were there any strikes that we could appeal. It’s not hate speech but speech they don’t like.

7 – Do you believe you have ever engaged in hate speech or advocated violence?

No. We have never advocated violence or specifically targeted anyone with violence. If anyone says we engage in hate speech they cannot prove it. For example, there are never any examples of so-called hate speech in the negative articles about us.

However, there are countless channels openly saying they hate white people or hate Trump and that is never hate speech. Hate speech is a lie used by leftists to silence their opposition.

8 – Are you a white supremacist?

I did a funny video about this titled ‘Am I A White Supremacist’ to respond to this which you can find on BitChute and RedIce.tv. The definition of a white supremacist keeps changing, now it seems to mean a white person who doesn’t hate themselves for being white. It also seems to mean that if you say something like ‘I want European nations to remain European’ that is also somehow a supremacist view. If you’re asking if I want to lord over nonwhites with a stick, of course not.

No other race gets attacked for loving their people and not wanting them to become a minority in their own nation. No other people would accept this. In fact, non-Europeans write and support our cause often and think white people have lost their minds advocating for suicidal immigration policies. It was called genocide in Tibet, Palestine, and now Kashmir.

We frequently hear from other nationalists around the world who aren’t white. They write and ask why are you doing this to yourselves? When it happened in Tibet it was called genocide. The Dalai Lama knows exactly what it feels like and that is why he defends Europeans and their right to not become a minority.

I have yet to meet an actual white supremacist, that is, someone who thinks they are better than all the other races and wants to oppress them. I don’t know where those people are.

9 – Are you a white nationalist?

I am a European, white and a nationalist. I want European people to remain a majority in the countries their ancestors built and an immigration policy to protect the nation’s founding demographics. Demographics are destiny. I don’t care what people want to call me.

But no one ever charges blacks, Jews, Asians, Latinos, or any other people for being a black nationalist, Jewish nationalist, Asian nationalist, and so on.

In Europe they call themselves Swedish Nationalists, German Nationalists and so on because they aren’t a generic white, they are a specific ethnicity with their own culture and language and history. They do not like the term ‘white nationalist.’ A European nationalist is one who wants their country to remain the country of their people, an ethnically homogeneous nation, the way it always has been. To carry on their tradition, heritage and culture.

Most European nationalists are fine with a small percentage of nonwhite immigration but not to where it upsets the core demographics of the nation. America’s founders would not have accepted this. All of this demographic transformation is new. We rapidly began changing with the Hart-Celler act of 1965, which was pushed on Americans without their consent. And by the way, the founders of America were also white and nationalist. They didn’t need to call themselves white nationalists because it was self evident or how about the Naturalization Act of 1790 which stated ‘free white person[s]… of good character.’ They founded the country with European people in mind. The thought of one day becoming a minority was unthinkable.

10 – Are you a white separatist?

We’ve been so programmed to hear this loaded phrase which is never applied to any other people on the face of the Earth even when they are violent racial separatists like Africans in South Africa.

People seem to think that just because one wants a homogeneous nation for white people that it means they don’t have friends of other races or can’t travel or have them come visit or trade. That’s a strawman absurd argument. This is never thrown at any other people but whites.

A homogeneous nation doesn’t mean you are cut off from the rest of the world, it just means you don’t support mass migrations of people to other countries displacing the natives.

If you don’t support mass migrations of people as a white person, you get called a separatist. Nobody is calling the Chinese or the Saudis separatists. We have always been separate nations but found ways to get along.

What needs to happen is a halt to immigration in the West. Legal immigration is an even bigger threat than illegal in terms of numbers. Countless studies like Robert Putnam’s have revealed that multiculturalism creates less trust and social cohesion. As if we need a study to tell us that. Mass immigration is dividing us as a people. We were once united. The problems we face with various groups fighting for their own is new, and a product of globalism.

11 – You once interviewed Jesse Lee Peterson. How would you describe that experience?

Jesse is great. We all love him. Sure we may have some points of disagreement but he too does not want European Americans to become a minority as he fears it would turn us into South Africa. His best interests coincide with whites being the majority. If all were like him, we wouldn’t have the problems we have today.

12 – In the Peterson interview, he said to you that “if you had an all white nation, you would just start fighting each other.” How do you respond to that?

The most homogeneous white and some Asian countries always top the list of the safest and most peaceful nations in the world. I never said it would be perfect but it would be much better than what it is now. White people will always have their differences but it’s the devil we know. Now we get to fight each other AND millions of foreigners in our country who also fight each other.

Now we have skyrocketing violence, a rape epidemic, and divisions like we’ve never seen before. Jesse also agreed that America was a better place before mass immigration. He also said he too didn’t want whites to become a minority as it wouldn’t serve his best interests either. He brought up Detroit and South Africa as examples of what would happen if white people were out of the picture.

13 – Do you believe it is possible for a multi-ethnic nation to preserve its European culture?

No, people are tribal, especially incoming foreigners who are ruthlessly ethnocentric pushing their interests, culture and religion. The mass majority of them align along ethnic and racial lines. It’s just the way it is and no free markets and liberal programming is going to change that.

White people are the most tolerant and the least ethnocentric. It’s why we’re in the mess we’re in. It’s why our statues are being torn down, traditions and holidays attacked, and ancestors who built the country being constantly denounced. It’s why white kids are learning about white privilege, white guilt, and being taught to hate themselves. It is child abuse and it is the worst racism we are witnessing today.

14 – There are millions of nonwhites who embrace America’s European culture and consider themselves fully American, sharing traditional values. What about them?

What about them? No one’s saying they have to be deported. If they love what made this country what it is… European culture, then they should be louder in our defense because that which they love is being torn down and it won’t be the same country anymore.

15 – How do you define globalism?

The total destruction of homogeneous nations, cultures, languages, people and the implementation of a global rootless, materialistic and degenerate culture that makes people dumbed down and easy to control. It means total control by a small group of elites. It also means the death of true diversity. These elites favor a people that is one race, one culture, one language and in one system. It is anti-diversity. It is the destruction of everything beautiful that nature and the Gods made.

16 – Are you anti-Semitic?

I wish white people had a word to shield their group from any and all criticism.

No, criticizing someone who happens to be Jewish or powerful elites and interest groups with massive power and influence does not mean you hate that entire group. We criticize anyone trying to infringe on our rights and freedoms, no matter their race or religion. We’ve also been critical of Islam and of course other white people. No groups should be off limits from criticism but if they are, it tells you the power they truly hold.

Awhile back, Former Israeli Minister Shulamit Aloni said of the term anti-Semitic, ‘it’s a trick, we always use it.’ Meaning Jews who don’t want to be judged for whatever they may be doing or saying, use it as a weapon to silence opposition. And it’s still being used for that purpose. Truth fears no open discussion and investigation.

There are a few individual Jews including rabbis who are critical of mass immigration into Europe but most do not speak up in our defense when Europeans are constantly defending Israel. I’ve heard Jews say they feel safer in multicultural societies because of their history of expulsion from Gentile societies in the past. They feel less likely to be singled out or noticed in a multicultural society. They are also very against nationalism in white countries because they think it is going to lead to a holocaust, meanwhile they have the ethnostate of Israel.

17 – Aren’t Jewish communities split on these issues just like white communities?

That’s what they say but at the end of the day they still have a very strong ethnic bond and support one another. They are highly loyal to their group. Yes, leftist Jews are critical of Zionism because they hate nationalism but I find it interesting that the Jewish Zionist Right also attacks us for wanting ethnic nationalism for Europeans. It is very hypocritical. Why don’t the Zionists, including Christians, support the same type of Zionism if you will for white countries? We are always trying to bridge out and have round tables and open discussion and debate on this subject but none of them will even talk with us. They just call us Nazis and white supremacists, just like the left.

18 – How do you respond to accusations that you are racist and anti-Semitic?

Does anyone really care about being called a racist anymore? It’s not racist to love your own people, not racist to want your culture, heritage and language to be preserved. It’s definitely not racist to say ‘it’s ok to be white’ and not feel guilty and not want your children to grow up and be a hated minority (thanks to cultural Marxist agitators).

And it’s not anti-Semitic, not judging or hating an entire group of people, to criticize or question elites who hold a lot of power and influence. I’m sure they see it that way, but then they call me a racist for pointing out things that are anti-white and defamatory to white people. Jews have thousands of organizations dedicated to only their interests. White people do not.

I never thought about race until everyone started blaming and hating white people for everything. If people are kind to me, I am kind to them.

19 – Can you imagine a future where America does assimilate its new arrivals and becomes a cohesive multiethnic but unicultural nation? How would that happen?

Not going to happen. Even in a country like Brazil that had years of migration from various places (without constant anti white indoctrination), they have all sorts of problems including one of the highest murder rates on Earth.

Throughout history, whether Rome, Egypt, or any place today where we see multiculturalism even in places like India/Kashmir, China/Tibet….multi racial, multi ethnic societies do not work and they do not last. People are different and we should just accept that. It’s just the way nature made us. In order to maintain true diversity, it requires some separation and division. That doesn’t mean we go to war, it means we respect each other’s differences and spaces. European nations learned to make peace with each other and we were prospering before we opened the door to globalism.

Yes America was a melting pot but a European one and we had shared European values and cultural understanding, and even then we had some issues.

In America white people are the glue that holds the current form of multiculturalism together (although countless studies show how multicultural societies create less trust, less social cohesion), but with us out of the picture, various groups will begin to fight each other for power. You can’t replace the people of a nation with 3rd world foreign peoples and think it’s going to be the same country. If it’s so great, why isn’t any other country pushing this ideology?

In order for something like what you’re suggesting to work (I still think it’s a utopian fantasy), every group must sacrifice everything; their heritage, their history, their language, anything that roots them to their people …. and surrender to a new rootless religion of globalism but even then there will still be divisions. Elites pushing globalism don’t want diversity, they’re just using it to destroy it (mainly in white countries). They ultimately want everyone to be the same. They want a mixed race man of the future where all true unique differences are erased forever. A man with no connection to his ancestors, and his past, is easy to manipulate.

I think it is probably too late for America. The damage has been done and we’re in for hard times BUT if all leftist agitation disappeared, if immigration stopped, if forced diversification stopped, you would see freedom of association and you would see people self segregating into their own pockets around the country. People are tribal and they will ultimately choose to live with others like them. Sure, there will be a few hipster multicultural pockets in the cities but that wouldn’t be the norm if people had a choice.

20 – What do you consider to be the taboo topics online?

Being a nationalist, loving white people, saying that white people are being demographically replaced, that white people should have nations that are their own, anything questioning the so called official view of historical events such as 911, any conspiracy theories, anything critical of Jewish elites and also anything fun and edgy making fun of libs or shitlibs as the kids call them. YouTube is even going after alternative health channels and those questioning vaccines and big pharma.

21 – Where would you draw the line on free speech? Anywhere?

No, I wouldn’t. I think the best course of action is to talk about everything out in the open, more talking. If an idea is harmful or just awful, best to talk about why that is and air everything out from every angle. The best argument wins. The truth should not fear any inquisition. If we do not, that is what creates desperate people doing radical things to be heard.

I also think we just need to uphold U.S. law and the UN declaration on human rights.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Big Tech Censors Strike Again

Earlier this week YouTube banned three more independent commentators. James Allsup, “The Iconoclast,” and “Way of the World.” Their crime? Outspoken defense of Western Culture, which apparently is now considered “hate speech.” Taken together, the videos posted by these three commentators had been watched over 100 million times.

The most prominent of these newly banished, James Allsup, had over 450,000 subscribers. Thanks to this latest move by YouTube, America’s defacto Ministry of Truth, nearly a half-million Americans now have less reason than ever to believe their first amendment rights will be protected, and, by extension, any of their constitutional rights. Do the Lords of YouTube fear “right wing extremism?” Then they need to stop taking extreme measures that provoke extreme resentment. They need to stop engaging in fascist censorship.

For those of us who have never considered ourselves extremists, and who don’t necessarily agree with everything that James Allsup and these other banished commentators ever did or said, this is nonetheless a matter of principle. It is intolerable to allow private business interests to lobotomize our collective consciousness in pursuit of their personal political agenda. That should not be happening here, in a nation that considers freedom of speech to be one of its founding principles.

One independent commentator who hasn’t yet had his tongue ripped out by the YouTube overlords, Vincent James, posted a scathing reaction to this latest act of censorship. Quote:

“The CEO of YouTube recently came out and talked about how they have an obligation to bring you the news, how they have an obligation to push down fake news and prop up authoritative news sources, and this sounds a lot like a publisher, and not like a platform.”

Later in his video, he elaborates:

“This is a matter of free speech in a new public town square that is the internet. There is no soapbox in the middle of the town square any longer, ‘town square’ is social media. These social media companies have gotten by far too long with this protection and immunity by the federal government for what their users post.

There’s a whole community of people who smoke meth, and film themselves on YouTube. This is illicit material, and those videos aren’t being taken down. If YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and all these different media companies were responsible for the content we post, they would be sued into absolute bankruptcy a long time ago. They have this blanket immunity from the federal government because they promote themselves as platforms, as a blank piece of paper where anyone can post anything as long as it follows the law of the land where they reside.

The law of the land in the United States does not include hate speech as a matter of fact the supreme court has ruled on this multiple times unanimously. The ‘hate speech,’ the ‘unpopular speech,’ is the speech that needs to be protected the most.”

Many free speech advocates may disagree with some of the commentary Vincent James has offered, but he is absolutely right about the first amendment, and he is absolutely right about these social media companies. They are either platforms or they are publishers. They cannot be both at the same time. This is a matter that requires executive action, or an urgent court battle, or legislative remedy. Don’t hold your breath.

Silencing online commentators takes many forms. They can be completely terminated, which is something occurring with increasing frequency. But they can also be deboosted, or shadowbanned, where the traffic to their sites is reduced. Some of the ways this is done are through manipulated search results, removal from “recommended videos,” removal from trending topics, or by throttling down their bandwidth. Sites can also be demonetized, where ads are no longer served onto their pages, or, even more insidiously, partially demonetized, where ads still arrive, just fewer of them. Unwanted commentators can also be attacked by throwing them off of subscription platforms such as Patreon, or even by expelling them from the payment processors such as PayPal.

Anyone who doesn’t think this is happening, and happening disproportionately to conservatives, is ignoring a mountain of evidence. Here, compiled by Vincent James, is a list of websites that have been censored by the social media companies. Here, published earlier this year by American Greatness, is a similar list of politically incorrect vloggers, and here is a list of politically inconvenient climate information websites.

There are alternative platforms, at least until the SJWs apply enough pressure to those to make them engage in similar censorship. BitChute now hosts James Allsup, Way of the World, and The Iconoclast. But BitChute is buggy, slow, and has a bad search engine. Its global Alexa traffic ranking is 3,790. Think that’s good? YouTube is #2, right after #1 Google.

BitChute will improve. But it is a fantasy to pretend these alternative platforms will challenge the monopolistic reach of Google search, or YouTube videos. They will be stigmatized as a right wing ghetto, and they will barely show up on search results. As a result, they will not offer the viral, serendipitous discovery to open minded virtual wanderers. How many of us found many of these powerful alternative voices by accident? Unless the monopolies, who reach everyone, change their ways, that will never happen again.

When principles as fundamental as the First Amendment are violated, there are consequences. The immediate consequence is a rising fury and potential radicalization of every American who is watching this travesty unfold and sees the injustice, and sees either indifference or active misrepresentation coming from the establishment media and establishment politicians.

The more far reaching consequence is the fact that if this isn’t stopped, right now, and reversed, moderate conservatives and moderate nationalists will develop increasing sympathies for their more extreme counterparts. Why wouldn’t they? Every shred of content coming out of the mainstream media and entertainment, social media, corporate marketing, academia, K-12 public education, and nonprofit advocacy groups is globalist pablum. It’s sickening to watch, and now, we are expected to tolerate censorship of the alternative voices found online?

An article published last month by the BBC comes embarrassingly close to revealing the motives behind escalating online censorship. They write: “The more mainstream these narratives become, the greater the tension will be over whether they really are extreme or whether they represent acceptable political discourse, and the views of a substantial number of real people.”

“These narratives.” That is the threat. What if we don’t want open borders? What if we would like the facts, not a bunch of skewed BS, regarding how immigration policies affect our economy and our social cohesion? What if we want balanced opinions, or just hear the other side for a change, on the issues of multiculturalism, race, feminism, gender “equity” and social justice? What if we find an unrepentant critic of identity politics to be a breath of fresh air? What if we believe there should be a robust and honest debate over globalism, or over climate change?

Everyone knows what these social media companies are doing. They are trying to influence public opinion in favor of a globalist progressive agenda. No national borders. Anti-racist racism. Anti-sexist sexism. Gender “fluidity.” Corporate socialism. And of course, “TRUMP IS EVIL.” It’s working. But they must stop. Because if they do not stop, there will be a credible case to be made that the upcoming 2020 election results are not legitimate. Remember how the Democrats made that claim back in 2016, because Russian “bots” allegedly affected a few thousand votes? Determined social media manipulation of the entire online public square will affect millions of votes.

YouTube, and all the rest – back off.

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