Approved opposition and the fake speech platforms

An Idka commenter is dubious about the new "free speech" social media sites:

Just saw a video with the Parler CEO. Only watched a few minutes because it feels off enough to be uncomfortable and the pattern is so clear. There is a lot of wizardry here – the weird hypnotic rhythm, the micro-expressions not really matching the surface conversation, the selective framing, Alex Jones going too far at times… This would be the Turning Point wing of the fake right – the prominence of Candace Owens isn’t subtle.

It looks targeted to whatever is left of “traditional” civnat conservatism. Mostly Boomers at this point, I’d assume. The fake framing is that “the system” is real, the base problem is “censorship”, “the left” has gone too far, and we need to get back to what America looked like on t.v. in the Reagan era. It’s basically discourse in the fake academic sense as fly paper. Incidentally, I’d never really noticed the crazy eyes/oversized mandible that is common on deranged globohomo women.

The most disappointing thing about it is how obviously inverted it is. Right down to the veiled decadence of the homosexual host. It’s like there was an Owen sketch called The Cuck and the Sodomite, only not funny.

He's right to be dubious. Parler and Thinkspot are exactly analogical to the Intellectual Dark Web. They are fake opposition to the mainstream, approved alternatives created to allow those who are shaky in their loyalties to the Narrative to feel as if they are standing against it without actually doing so.

Notice, in particular, the way these "upstart new platforms" are being treated very, very differently than the likes of genuine alternative platforms such as BitChute, Gab, Fediway, Mastodon, and Infogalactic.

Breitbart News recently spoke with the CEO of upstart social media platform Parler about the company’s plans and what makes Parler different from Big Tech’s social media platforms. Breitbart News will begin actively posting on its official Parler account in the near future.

Paypal deplatforms BitChute

It doesn't matter how neutral or moderate you attempt to present yourself, if you have not submitted to the SJW narrative, you WILL be targeted and deplatformed:

A few hours ago BitChute received a notice that our PayPal account has been permanently limited, with immediate effect, and that we will no longer be able to accept or send payments.

The notice included the following information: “The User Agreement for PayPal Service states that PayPal, at its sole discretion, reserves the right to limit an account for any violation of the User Agreement, including the Acceptable Use Policy.” This decision seems to be final although we will try to appeal.

BitChute has had a Paypal account since 2016, we have used it to settle payments and to receive subscription payments from supporters along with other discretionary payments. It’s our belief that it is our stand against the current trend in censorship that has resulted in this action.

I suspect that BitChute was deplatformed because they offer an alternative to Paypal's SJW ally YouTube. In the end, everyone to the right of CNN will be deplatformed by Paypal. You must take the Mark of the Beast if you wish to buy or sell, after all.

This is wrong, of course. But from an economic point of view, it is disastrous. Far from being the pathway to the future, the Internet economy has become an unpredictable, unreliable Third World economy.

So much for those lofty principles

It took just over one year for Andrew Torba to climb down from his untenable high horse of "free speech uber alles":

Andrew Torba @a
This is unacceptable and we have taken action against this account. Targeting individuals with threatening language and behavior behind an anonymous account is cowardly and foolish. Users that do this will face accountability from Gab. 

Whatever happened to "suck it up, crybaby?" What a hypocritical moron. This is why Gab is doomed to failure. You simply can't expect an organization to succeed, let alone a startup, when it is run by someone as immature, hot-headed, and totally unable to anticipate the obvious as Torba.

Andrew Torba @a
I don’t want to hear it from the people who want to play semantic games about what is actually a threat and what isn’t. The intent here is very clear and aimed at a specific individual user. It’s malicious and designed to terrorize someone into silence. The person who recieved these (and many more,) did feel threatened and did contact us about it.

Of course he doesn't want to hear from everyone who is capable of remembering his oft-expressed previous position from all of six months ago. Gab is a train wreck in a dumpster fire and it will never be capable of becoming a genuine alternative to Twitter. My only regret is that I didn't continue to ignore Torba when he was lobbying Spacebunny to get me to pay attention to his emails.

Thanks to Oneway's brilliant ongoing developments, Infogalactic will soon be offering a Twitter alternative that will actually work in the not-very-distant future. And no, we will not be promising free speech to social rejects and retards, to the contrary, we promise to clamp down relentlessly and remorselessly on all social media jackassery, trollery, and bantz because we are more than happy to leave that time-wasting, mind-numbing gamma nonsense to Gab and whatever other sites wish to cater to the unpleasant and the unproductive.

Mailvox: well, no

I was somewhat amused to receive a request to promote someone's IndieGoGo campaign this morning. I didn't take any offense at the request, and I'm sure it's a perfectly good campaign and all, but I have to imagine that he hasn't been aware of what's been going on around here lately. Please consider this my standard reply to anyone who would like me to promote a campaign on IndieGoGo.

Dear X,

I'm sorry, but I will not promote anything on IndieGoGo. Nor would I recommend that anyone use them. They retroactively cancelled our successful campaign there and refused to give us the money that we raised from our backers, then made false and contradictory accusations in order to try to retroactively justify that refusal. So, I hope you'll understand that we will not promote the platform of someone who has deplatformed us.

Best regards,

Vox

And for those of you who missed AH:Q 2.0, just be patient. We'll introduce 2.1 later this month. Everything is in order. Trust the plan.

The Killstream gets KIAd

This channel does not exist.

Further evidence of the complete inutility of virtue-signaling. It will not save you once you have been targeted for deplatforming.

Killstream is known for both its controversial guests and similarly toxic chat. Users have been known to take advantage of YouTube’s Super Chat system to buy and pin toxic messages in the live chat, further defaming the stream’s reputation.

This prompted show host Ethan Ralph to fight back by holding a charity stream to benefit St. Jude’s, a research hospital for children with catastrophic diseases. However, YouTube’s new policy on harmful Super Chats has caused a major rift between Ralph and the platform, as well as the Wall Street Journal - which he is now accusing of taking money away from sick children.

Ralph claims that an upcoming article from the Wall Street Journal pressured YouTube into taking action against his stream, causing the company to cancel over $26,000 in donations, which St. Jude’s is now reportedly refunding.

An email taken from a journalist at the WSJ claims that the Ralph Retort livestream is featured in an upcoming piece, which will detail how the alt-right is using YouTube’s Super Chat function to spread to ‘problematic’ ideology.

Of course what the Wall Street Journal did was wrong. Of course it was ridiculous that St. Jude's refused the donation. Of course it is wrong for YouTube to deplatform Ethan.

What about any of this is even remotely a surprise? Stop virtue-signaling. Stop trying to appease those who hate you. Start utilizing independent platforms and concentrate on supporting those who are doing the same.

From Infogalactic to Castalia House, we are actively working on this. That's why Castalia House Direct exists, that's why we are considering the best way to offer an alternative to Kindle Unlimited, and that's why Voxiversity and the Darkstream are on BitChute instead of relying solely on the vagaries of YouTube's Trust and Safety Council or whatever they call their thought police. We're also working on other projects about which we have not yet said anything.

But we can't make anyone stop using Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and YouTube. All we can do is offer an alternative.

Facebook bans Proud Boys

Don't complain about being deplatformed, build your own damn platforms!

Facebook has started banning both individual accounts and pages, as well as associated groups, that are affiliated with the far-right extremist group the Proud Boys. The news was first reported today by Business Insider, which noted that members of the Proud Boys and adjacent online communities had begun complaining about the takedowns on Twitter.

The removals come in response to an act of violence in New York City earlier this month, in which members of the Proud Boys assaulted anti-fascist protestors outside a Republican club in Manhattan where Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, also an original co-founder of Vice Media, was speaking. Facebook confirmed to The Verge that it was banning Proud Boys members and affiliated groups and pages from both its main social network and from Instagram. McInnes’ personal page is still active, but a number of high-profile groups, pages, and accounts have begun to disappear today.

“Our team continues to study trends in organized hate and hate speech and works with partners to better understand hate organizations as they evolve,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “We ban these organizations and individuals from our platforms and also remove all praise and support when we become aware of it. We will continue to review content, Pages, and people that violate our policies, take action against hate speech and hate organizations to help keep our community safe.” The company is citing violations of its rules on hate speech and the organizing of groups that spread hate both online and offline as the reason for the bans and removals.

The social media giants need conservatives and other right-wingers on their sites more than we need to be on them. We have repeatedly demonstrated that. The Darkstream has become popular enough that YouTube is now throttling recommended videos there and it is probably only a matter of time before that channel is deplatformed, which is why it has been on BitChute for the last few months.

People follow content, not platforms. Platforms are worthless without content. Yes, a change of platform will reduce one's audience, but the part of the audience lost, the part that can't bother to follow you to the new platform, is the trivial and largely irrelevant part. I'd rather have 2,500 staunch followers than 250,000 casual fans. Being deplatformed from Twitter and losing my 33k followers there did not harm me or slow me down in the slightest. I've never used Facebook for anything important. This blog is already backed up in multiple locations and we will not even break stride if Google forces Blogger to shut it down... although you should subscribe to either Castalia Book Club or the Daily Meme Wars to be alerted to the new site when the time comes.

When, not if.

Everyone needs to stop expecting fairness from their self-declared enemies or thinking that cucking just a little will cause them to spare you. If the next wave of deplatformings doesn't affect you, then the one that follows the social media giants' fury and despair when the Blue Wave fails to appear very well may.

A flawed business strategy

Mike Cernovich recognizes that while the deplatforming craze among the converged corporations is a bad thing, there is a silver lining in even the darkest cloud.

I blocked Gab's CEO months ago as he was reporting accounts on Twitter to try get people banned. That was his business strategy. He's a piece of sh-t with no vision or leadership. He should still be able to run his hell hole website, and it's unfortunate he can't.

True story. Gab's CEO was reporting accounts to Twitter for "hate speech." He tried getting me banned, thinking I'd post to his shithole website where people called my beautiful daughter a "mud baby."

Gab is garbage.

And it has a right to exist.

What happened today is bad.

Sometimes bad things happen to bad people. That doesn't mean that what has happened to them is positive. Life isn't math.

GoDaddy bans Gab

Add GoDaddy to the list of corporations deplatforming Gab:

Gab, the far-right social network that the suspect in Saturday’s mass shooting at Pittsburgh synagogue used to share anti-Semitic posts, has gone offline after GoDaddy gave it 24 hours to find a new domain provider. GoDaddy’s decision comes after PayPal, Medium, Stripe, and Joyent banned Gab’s accounts over the weekend.

I'm not going to pretend that I don't find this extremely amusing, or that I did not anticipate this result when Andrew Torba refused to remove libel, pornography, and fake rape photoshops from his site at my request. As I said more than a year ago, Torba lacks the temperament and the detachment required to run a company, particularly in testing times such as these. But the Gab deplatforming is merely a minor symptom of the real problem, which has been decades in the making.

As I mentioned in the Darkstream last night, what these corporations are doing is literally destroying the basis for a developed economy. And not only what they are doing now, but what they have been in the process of doing for the past 15 years. The EULAs, the Terms of Service, and the selling of software of a service, and the SJW convergence have all collectively routed around the rule of law which is necessary for sustained economic growth over time.

In countries with strong rule of law:

1. Property rights over land, equipment, and personal items are clear and protected by law.
3. Contracts between people, businesses, and the government are effectively enforced by the legal system.
3. Political accountability is high and corruption is low.
4. Business regulations are clear and enforced in a transparent manner.

In such environments people make long-term investments and build large organizations. In contrast, if the property rights and contracts are not enforced and the business regulations are not clear, most of the economy consists of small family owned firms with little modern equipment. A high-tech, prosperous economy would not develop.

Effectively, there are no contracts anymore in the digital economy. There is no predictability anymore. There is no accountability. There is no responsibility. There are no requirements for performance anymore. In sum, the US digital economy is rapidly becoming the equivalent of a third-world economy, complete with crony capitalism and digital robber barons.

They can't say I didn't warn them

Gab is discovering that its firm and unshakable commitment to free speech - which is to say its foolish decision to freely permit unrestrained libel and pornography - is simply not tenable:

In the last two weeks both of our payment processors have threatened to or have frozen our service. This is why we are crowdfunding from You, The People, to build our own free speech-friendly infrastructure.

Paypal did not terminate our service--yet. They threatened to a few weeks ago over a meme from 2012 called "Navy Seal Copypasta." They took the meme literally like idiots who know nothing at all about basic internet culture. We refused to censor the meme because the context and intent were very clear. We have not heard back since we told them this 11 days ago and our account is still active as of now.

Stripe, our other payment processor, is demanding quote:

"Modification of your terms of service to indicate that adult or illegal content cannot be streamed through GabTV or otherwise distributed through the Gab service. The implementation of reasonable controls to ensure that no adult or illegal content is being streamed through GabTV or otherwise available on the Gab service."

You may recall that I long ago warned Andrew Torba he was absolutely going to have to rein in the slanderers and the trolls, and not because Spacebunny and I were being targeted by the Alt-Reich nasties. Instead, he very publicly chose to embrace them in the name of Free Speech. So, I have no sympathy for Gab whatsoever; unlike others whose accounts have been terminated by the payment processors for dubious reasons, Gab has been in open and avowed violation of their terms of service almost from the start.

Hell, I quit using Gab for precisely the same reason that Stripe is now refusing them service. They were refusing to moderate photoshopped images of gang rape, just to give one example. And as I said at the time, Torba is temperamentally unsuited to run a business and is totally unready for prime time. His childish response to Paypal and Stripe again demonstrates both.

It's somewhat of a mystery why conservatives are willing to throw away hundreds of millions of dollars on political campaigns, but refuse to simply build a viable alternative infrastructure. Don't whine, cry, bitch, or complain about these things, roll up your sleeves and help build the alternative platforms and organizations!

Smells like tortious interference

Soros and David Brock appear to be behind the recent social media takedowns:

A confidential, 49-page memo for defeating Trump by working with the major social-media platforms to eliminate “right wing propaganda and fake news” was presented in January 2017  by Media Matters founder David Brock at a retreat in Florida with about 100 donors, the Washington Free Beacon reported at the time.

On Monday, the Gateway Pundit blog noted the memo’s relationship with recent moves by Silicon Valley tech giants to “shadow ban” conservative political candidates and pundits and remove content.

The Free Beacon obtained a copy of the memo, “Democracy Matters: Strategic Plan for Action,” by attending the retreat.

The memo spells out a four-year agenda that deployed Media Matters along with American Bridge, Shareblue and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) to attack Trump and Republicans. The strategies are impeachment, expanding Media Matters’ mission to combat “government misinformation,” ensuring Democratic control of the Senate in the 2018 midterm elections, filing lawsuits against the Trump administration, monetizing political advocacy, using a “digital attacker” to delegitimize Trump’s presidency and damage Republicans, and partnering with Facebook to combat “fake news.”

Quashing ‘fake news’ with ‘mathematical precision’

The Free Beacon in its January 2017 story said Brock sought to raise $40 million in 2017 for his organizations.

The document claims Media Matters and far-left groups have “access to raw data from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites” so they can “systemically monitor and analyze this unfiltered data.”

“The earlier we can identify a fake news story, the more effectively we can quash it,” the memo states. “With this new technology at our fingertips, researchers monitoring news in real time will be able to identify the origins of a lie with mathematical precision, creating an early warning system for fake news and disinformation.”

Media Matters met with Facebook, which boasts some 2 billion members worldwide, to discuss how to crack down on fake news, according to the memo.

The social media giant was provided with “a detailed map of the constellation of right-wing Facebook pages that had been the biggest purveyors of fake news.”

Brock’s memo also says Media Matters gave Google “the information necessary to identify 40 of the worst fake new sites” so they could be banned from Google’s advertising network.

The Gateway Pundit pointed out that in 2016, Google carried out that plan on the Gateway Pundit blog and other conservative sites, including Breitbart, the Drudge Report, Infowars, Zero Hedge and Conservative Treehouse.

Facebook, meanwhile has changed its newsfeed algorithm, ostensibly to combat “fake news,” causing a precipitous decline in traffic for many conservative sites.

Relying on the left-wing big social platforms is inherently fragile. Get off Twitter and Facebook, get on Oneway for public stuff and Idka for private groups. Edit Infogalactic instead of Wikipedia. Getting anti-fragile is the key to future success. I'd rather have 10k followers on BitChute than 100k on YouTube, but a 20k email list would be better than either.

Darkstream: Two strikes against Stefan

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

What we have to understand is that if Pewdiepie is not important enough to the platform providers,  nobody is. If Alex Jones is not important enough to the platform providers, nobody is, and that means we have to always be ready to build the platform. We have to build our own platforms, and now maybe I made a mistake a couple years ago in focusing first on replacing Wikipedia. You know, I always have a strategic perspective, maybe sometimes it's an excessively strategic perspective, but we chose to do Infogalactic first because it was one of the more challenging ones. Twitter, one of these will pop up left right and center. YouTube is difficult because of the way that it's run at such huge losses. Facebook, you know, we figured it's doable but a lot of people were also attempting to do that

Now if you look at Oneway, you can see how easy it was for them to have a Twitter functionality yeah there was Freez Peach there was all kinds of stuff, so with Infogalactic what was important to us was making sure that people had a non-SJW-controlled information source and now we do. We haven't started really pushing it yet because our functionality is not yet different, but the important thing is you need to always be ready. The Darkstream is already on BitChute; most of the the archived videos are already on BitChute, we only really bothered with the last two months or so, you know, that's kind of when we found our our groove as it were, but we're ready.

 If you're listening to this and you're not subscribed to the BitChute Darkstream channel I would encourage you to do so, because we don't know how long YouTube is going to permit me to stream. They might leave me indefinitely, you know, I have a small audience and it's quite possible that they've decided the press attention that it would give me would actually be worse than just letting me continue with my three, six, ten thousand whatever subscribers. It's very clear that they are primarily concerned about the people with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, for the most part, but this thought policing is not going to stop!

There are some who are theorizing that this is only taking place in preparation for the midterm elections, and that once the midterm elections are done and it's not possible for the big social media influencers to affect the election in any way that they'll ease up and that sort of thing, but the reality is that they're not going to ease up. Because they're going to be very disappointed when the long-prophesied Blue Wave does not arrive, when they realize that the 2018 elections indicate that Trump has overperformed and is almost certain to be reelected in 2020. I believe that we are  going to see the SJW-controlled Left go completely berserk after their  disappointment from the 2018 midterms, and so this isn't going to stop, and it's important - I stress again, it's important - for the Right to be thinking actively in terms of building and supporting infrastructure.

Strike one, strike two...

I'm sorry, but I simply can't find the energy to pretend to be either surprised or outraged when SJWs do what SJWs do whenever they have amenable authorities to whom they can appeal. It isn't as if we haven't been amply warned, after all. Stefan Molyneux is the latest target:

Within 24 hours, my @YouTube channel has received two community guidelines strikes - likely as a result of a mass flagging campaign - and is now on the verge of total deletion. Please respectfully contact @TeamYouTube and alert them to this injustice.

Team YouTube is not concerned with justice. Team YouTube is concerned with victory. This is why the Right has to build its own platforms. The bigger and more successful you are, the more the Left wants you off their platforms, regardless of what you have done or not done. No amount of rhetoric and emotional pleading is going to dissuade them.

Almost immediately after returning from a speaking tour of Australia and New Zealand, and after getting my final all-clear cancer checkup, the YouTube strikes against Freedomain Radio - the world's most popular philosophy show - began.

Apparently, I had "violated community standards" by publishing a short video last year entitled "The Death of White Males," which discussed the decline in life expectancy for white males, in part due to the opioid crisis.

The next day, Wednesday, I awoke to another strike, this time for a discussion I had with UK journalist Katie Hopkins. Now, as I write this, two other Freedomain Radio videos have been set to 'Private' by YouTube and locked. One was called "What Pisses Me Off About the YouTube Child Sex Scandal," and the other was a chat I had with Tom Golden, a psychotherapist and the author of "Helping Mothers be Closer to Their Sons: Understanding the Unique World of Boys" and "The Way Men Heal."

I have poured 12 years of my life into my YouTube channel, with thousands of videos, hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and hundreds of millions of views. In particular, I am proud of promoting Peaceful Parenting, convincing countless parents to stop hitting their children, and start negotiating instead.

As it stands, I am unable to publish to YouTube for two weeks. Today my channel hangs by a thread and could be destroyed at any moment. Whether it survives is not up to me, since I have always striven to tell the truth. The future of philosophy is now up to YouTube, and it is up to you.

You can help me, Freedomain Radio, philosophy and the world by letting YouTube know what you think. Please do so firmly, politely and respectfully by contacting @TeamYouTube.

This is a time for community action. YouTube is making a terrible mistake, but it's not too late to save philosophy. Please act now - tomorrow may be too late.

If the future of philosophy is up to YouTube, then philosophy is dead. Cerno is right.

Big channels with massive videos are under target. It never stops with Alex and it won't stop with Stefan. People are going to start flagging left wing channels, too. The new form of communication in America isn't sharing ideas, it's spending time shutting down others.

Warning the Left about consequences never being the same has never worked. The answer is the same as it was in 2015: build your own platforms and keep the SJWs out. That's why the Darkstream and Voxiversity are both available on BitChute.

This is why the big guns of the Right should have been participating in building up the alternative institutions rather than focusing on expanding their reach on compromised platforms.

The futility of social media bans

I'm not surprised that the well-publicized social media bans aren't harming Alex Jones. The truth is that social media doesn't actually matter all that much for those who already have a strong base of supporters. It's the content that matters much more than the medium.

Some of the nation’s largest technology and social media companies have tried to stop Alex Jones and his conspiracy theories. But in a digital world, their attempts seem to have barely slowed him down.

After YouTube, Facebook and others this week removed content by Jones and his website, the InfoWars leader, talk show host and Austin resident fired back, accusing the companies of censorship and urging his audience to fight back against what he called an “unprecedented attack.”

Meanwhile, Jones’ website and other online platforms have remained popular destinations.

InfoWars continues to see more than 1 million page visits per day and has trended upward this month, according to Amazon’s Alexa website traffic report, which also said InfoWars averages more than 25 million page views per month.

Being banned from Twitter last year and having links to my blog blocked by Twitter and Facebook haven't had any serious effect on my blog either. Last year at this time, the monthly traffic average for VP alone was 2,500,791. Now it is 2,604,358, which represents 4.1 percent annual growth.

Given the massive Twitter audiences that Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec have developed - I had 33k when I was banned - it's likely that the bans have somewhat slowed the growth of the blog and Voxiversity. But they obviously haven't stopped it, which I suspect is one reason why the tech media giants have only engaged in fairly limited banning in response to the demands of their SJWs, who would prefer to ban everyone who is a Republican, who ever voted for a Republican, or is to the Right of Che Guevara.

These bans are a very delicate balancing game for the social media giants. They already know we have built a few alternative platforms and have the ability to build more. And they are very well aware that there is a tipping point somewhere at which too many bans will trigger a snowball effect that will more than decimate their user bases. After all, both Facebook and Twitter are already in decline.

CNBC describes the drop at Facebook as “severe” and goes on to round out its list this way: “The five websites receiving the most traffic in the US in the last several years have been Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo and Amazon, in that order. However, Facebook has seen a severe decline in monthly page visits, from 8.5 billion to 4.7 billion in the last two years, according to the study. Although Facebook’s app traffic has grown, it is not enough to make up for that loss, the study said.”

What else did you expect?

I am rolling my eyes at the hysterics that have greeted the news that YouTube has banned the Infowars channel in coordination with Apple and Spotify banning its podcasts and Facebook banning its Facebook page.

Paul Joseph Watson✔@PrisonPlanet
The Alex Jones Channel has been permanently DELETED by YouTube. This is a coordinated PURGE. This is political censorship.

Paul Joseph Watson✔@PrisonPlanet
Apple, Spotify, Facebook and now Google (which owns YouTube) - all within 12 hours of each other. A coordinated purge. This is a total abuse of power.

BFD and book-freaking-hoo. When Alex asked me what the next step would be, I told him that they would be deplatforming the Right and attempting to defund it. This was not merely predictable, it was obvious. This is the exact opposite of a surprise. Complaining and crying about it will accomplish precisely nothing.

This is why we have to build our own platforms, as I have been advising for years. This is why you are shortsighted and strategically-challenged if you allow yourself to be dependent in any way on the platforms of your enemy, even if doing so maximizes your profits and is in your immediate short-term interests.

UPDATE: Before anyone starts worrying that I've been banned by Facebook, I deactivated my account myself. I would have deleted it, but the damned DELETE ACCOUNT page would not load no matter which browser I tried. I'll delete it when I get the chance.

Startup = sellout

Megan Fox covers the Stripe 180 on PJ Media:

Every time reports of conservatives being silenced on social media platforms come out, a large percentage of libertarians shout, "but private companies can serve whoever they want! Build your own platforms." It is a constant criticism of anyone saying that social media and Silicon Valley need regulation or that political viewpoints need protection under the law. But when marginalized voices create their own platforms, the puppet masters of Silicon Valley who control all the infrastructure shut them down.

Vox Day, a contributor at BitChute and popular author of SJWs Always Double Down, told PJM, "The denial of payment services on ideological grounds is a significant blow to the libertarian idea that private companies can be permitted to operate without government oversight." Day has significant experience being deplatformed on the major social media sites....

Stripe claimed in their notice of cancellation to Bitchute founder Ray Vahey that it was their "financial partners" who objected to Bitchute's business model. "We are politically neutral, and have many creators from across the political spectrum," Vahey told PJM. "Our site is still operational in terms of video streaming, but we have not been able to accept money since the Stripe termination," he explained. "They gave us only 5 days notice, even though our account was in good standing and we had not broken any of their rules or laws or even had any customer complaints."

The notice he received from Stripe was strange, filled with rambling excuses for termination with no specifics. Stripe employee "Gus" wrote:

Unfortunately, we won't be able to overturn our decision regarding your account. Our financial partners have some fairly strict limitations on the type of businesses we can work with, and sadly your business type falls into a category which our financial partners consider to be high-risk. I'm truly sorry about that... this is a restriction imposed upon us directly from our financial partners, who use have [sic] an archaic and frankly antiquated view of non-traditional businesses.

Stripe refuses to say who the "financial partners" are. PJM also reached out to Stripe but received no response.

This tends to indicate the situation is as I suspected. Stripe is looking to cash in, so they are doing whatever their investors and prospective buyers want them to do. Which, in this case, is shutting down the services that allow people to bypass both the ideological gatekeepers as well as the financial gatekeepers.

It's not an accident that they are attempting to shut down the crowdfunding sites, beginning with the alternative ones. That's primarily what this is about. Rest assured, they have their sights on Kickstarter and Indie-Go-Go too.

Darkstream: Stripe and Operation Chokepoint

From the transcript of the Darkstream.

There's a lot of folks, especially on the Right, who would have a tendency to say, "well you know, what's the problem with that? I mean everybody has a right to sell to whoever they want to etc etc etc." Right, and that's true if you're looking at it from a theoretical point of view, but the reality is we don't live in a free economy, we don't live in a society where you are simply allowed to go and set up a bank with 200 dollars and begin payment processing and issuing credit and all that sort of thing anymore.

I don't think it was even a hundred years ago - somebody mentioned this on the blog - barely a hundred years ago it was possible to set up a bank for 200 bucks, start making loans, and that was how Regions Bank was founded originally. But you can't do that now because the banks - just like the hairdressers and just like every other self-interested group of people - have arranged to set up tremendous regulatory barriers, huge barriers to entry. For example, in, I believe it was Georgia, you needed to have 1,500 hours of training in order to be allowed to braid hair professionally!

Now this is ridiculous, as anyone who has been around junior high school girls for more than about 20 minutes will know. They sit around braiding each other's hair all the time, they don't need to spend fifteen hundred hours to be able to do it, and so what we are seeing is a private version of what was described as Operation Chokepoint by the Obama administration. Operation Chokepoint was a plan to deny banking and financial services to companies that were selling guns. If you're in the gun industry in any way, they were planning to target those companies, and in fact they are actually still doing so, but again on a private level because Hillary Clinton is not President, and so that's why you're seeing companies like Intuit, which owns Quicken, Intuit targeted I believe it was a gun retailer and possibly some gun manufacturers as well, and they're simply not working with them now.

You know, this is absolutely ridiculous considering that we have been indoctrinated for the past however many years, it's been 58 years or so, that you have no right to deny service to anyone for any reason. Suddenly now that the Left has completed its long march through the institutions, suddenly they are going to deny all that, they're going to attempt to deny the financial oxygen to all the  companies and all the people they don't like now. I'm not shocked by this. I'm not alarmed by this, you know, I'm a Christian and  we've been we've been told about the Mark of the Beast and and being
denied the ability to buy things, that that sort of persecution would happen since I was a kid at Sunday school. Now I have to admit I didn't expect to see it taking this kind of form, but it is.

Stripe cuts off Freestartr and Bitchute

So much for Stripe as a Paypal alternative.

I thought I might share a few thoughts with you on what I regard as the biggest issue of our time: tech apartheid.

Silicon Valley wants you to believe that it is a force for good but the evidence of its bias and fraudulent dealings couldn’t be more obvious even to a fair, impartial observer.

Most recently this duplicity concerns payment processing, namely the fraudulent company Stripe which canceled FreeStartr’s account despite record low chargebacks. FreeStartr wasn’t alone. All of those companies who had their accounts suspended — Bitchute (a YouTube competitor), MakerSupport (a Patreon competitor), and FreeStartr.com (a Patreon, Kickstarter competitor)– were created by Trump supporters.

This canceling of our business was done for political reasons by Edwin Wee, a Democratic political operative turned Stripe employee, and it exposes the libertarian lie that one can simply just go and create a competitor if one dislikes Silicon Valley ventures. You can’t. We need to get over that canard.

I’ll delve into the parochial issues concerning FreeStartr’s banning from Stripe later, but I am thoroughly convinced that if action isn’t taken in the very near future, our politics will be permanently titled to the far left for the foreseeable future. Ask your congressmen, your friends, to speak out on this issue and take necessary corrections.

We’ve had other discussions about the censorship and Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and yes, those trends are extremely worrisome. But what I’m talking about here as concerns Stripe and PayPal is far more dangerous both for politics and for our society writ large.

Every regime has scapegoats, and ours is no different. Whether you’ve participated in a Twitter mob and/or been its target, you know its power. Ours is a herd based species, and it is quite disturbing the speed with which mores can shift. What was once commonplace — big game hunting, smoking, corporal punishment, etc., — become frowned upon, then the province of cranks, and ultimately unthinkable. There is increasingly good social science evidence for how this process unfolds — where a small minority changes the standards of behavior in a population. Sometimes these changes are so abrupt as to be jarring and yes, even violent. Twitter mobs force you off of their platforms and begin the practice of targeting your employment, your spouse’s employment, etc. until you are ruined. There is no due process here.

One has to wonder what the people at Stripe are thinking. If they're just going to be another arm of SJW enforcement, there is simply no need for their services. One might as well not use Paypal as not use Stripe, after all....

Voxiversity supporters, I think the smart move is to wait and see how Freestartr handles this before we come up with any alternative plans in order to keep the video offensive going.

June Brainstorm

Tonight we're having a Member's Only Brainstorm to discuss the latest developments in Alt-Movies. Invites have been sent out. I THINK I've finally got the time zone thing straight, but regardless, the event will be at 7 PM Eastern time.

For those of you who are interested in the subject, we'll be holding an event that is open to everyone interested in supporting the project next week. Tonight's meeting is to lay the groundwork for that one, so just be patient.

The GitHub purchase

It's not as if GitHub isn't already moderately converged, but the Microsoft acquisition of it is unlikely to make things any less subject to converged policing:

AFTER A WEEKEND of rumors, Microsoft officially announced Monday that it will acquire the code repository site GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock. The platform is an important resource for some 28 million developers and home to billions of lines of open source code. It's in many ways a natural fit for Microsoft, which has in recent years warmed up to open source.

But the beloved developer platform may also introduce moderation headaches. Microsoft will soon need to formally decide what will happen to the many GitHub repositories that conflict with its own interests. The tech giant will face similar content moderations challenges that peers like Facebook and Google have, but with code instead of speech.

Created over a decade ago, GitHub is where developers at nearly every major software organization, from Google to NASA, collaborate. It hosts projects as diverse as Bitcoin's code and all of the German government's laws and regulations. The platform functions as a kind of social network for coders; their contributions to the site can serve as a stand-in for a traditional resume. Anyone can publish open source code to GitHub for free; the platform makes money by charging individuals and corporations to keep their code private.

GitHub's 85 million repositories help to make it one of the world's most popular websites. They include, however, projects that GitHub's new owner might take issue with.... "GitHub isn't a perfect defender of censorship, but they still host Tiananmen Square stuff. That's likely to disappear under Microsoft," says Rob Graham, CEO of Errata Security, who helped trace the 2015 DDOS attack to China. GitHub has also been censored in a number of other countries where Microsoft has business interests, including Russia and India.

This is one of the challenges facing Alt-Tech. The conventional startup objective of selling out to a tech company for billions conflicts with the objective of creating something that is not subject to corpocracy and convergence. On the plus side, it should mean that there will tend to be fewer Silicon Valley snake oil salesmen pushing their sites on the Right.

Faith Goldy banned by Patreon

Two days ago, Christian Canadian commenter Faith Goldy was banned from Patreon. In my opinion, the egregious nature of this action makes it clear that it is time for everyone of the Right to STOP USING PATREON! Stop using it to raise money. Stop using it to give money. Stop using it, period.

It took almost two years, but even as powerful an organization as the NFL finally caved to the financial pressure of fans turning off the TV and refusing to buy tickets, which shows the power that comes from refusing to support the enemy. After facing less than one week of mass rejection, the production behind the horrible Show Dogs movie removed the pedophilic grooming scenes from the so-called "children's film" and has apparently been removed by more than a few theater chains as well.

On the other hand, rumor has it that Disney is now planning to add a Show Dogs display at Disneyworld and Disneyland where children can be felt up by Mickey and Goofy as well as a Show Dogs on Ice tour.

That is why, if you support someone on Patreon, I suggest that you cancel that support and TELL the person you were supporting exactly why you did so. Encourage them to move to some other platform that is not converged and let them know that you will be happy to resume your support there.

There is no warning the Left. There is no fixing the Left. There is no way to productively work or partner with the Left. Leave it to dry up and die.Thanks for the info. All Patreon pledges of support cancelled.

UPDATE: Every journey begins with but a single step. A reader emails:

Thanks for the info. All Patreon pledges of support cancelled.