Shove it- Fact Checkers and Shadow Bans!

The censorship of dissent

I’ve never been banned on Facebook or Twitter. Never even been warned, despite posting material that is consistently controversial. Some of my posts have the “fact checkers” warning on them, but that’s about it. Same for Twitter. Then I started hearing about “shadow banning.”

These social media giants sometimes opt not to outright ban someone, or even send them to Facebook or Twitter “jail.” Instead, they severely restrict the number of people who can see your posts, and/or delay them from being seen. When the COVID narrative first hit, I was instantly skeptical, and my posts about bogus numbers, empty hospitals, and dissenting doctors garnered a lot of attention on Facebook. I started being besieged with friend requests, and soon reached my limit of 5,000 friends.

However, after a few months, I noticed that my posts suddenly were attracting very little attention. I thought it was me- maybe people had grown tired of this angry naysayer, or they finally swallowed the propaganda and got the warp speed vaccine. Then, a few people mentioned to me that I must have been shadow banned. “I never see your posts,” they’d say, “or they sometimes show up days later.” So, I pretty much stopped posting on Facebook, other than the occasional personal item, or to promote my show or an interview.

I strived to become more active on Twitter, skeptical but trying to be a little hopeful that maybe it would become more open once Elon Musk took control. Recently, I’ve become aware that I am shadow banned there as well. Almost always very few reactions to my tweets, and again people told me they don’t see them. It’s a nice little tool for celebrities, and “normies” of all stripes, but it’s almost worthless for truly independent thinkers. They won’t let us play in any of their reindeer games.

Like all other parts of our crony capitalist marketplace, social media platforms are obviously rigged. No competition allowed, and first and foremost this means no competitive thinking. No competing thoughts or opinions. Color within the establishment’s approved lines. Or we’ll delete your tweet. If you fail to get the message, we’ll ban you. Or, we might just stick a permanent shadow ban on you. Tweet to your heart’s content. You’ll never get more than a few reactions.

But You Tube is perhaps the worst of a bad lot. When I live stream my show “I Protest” every Friday, from 5-7 pm eastern, by far the most response comes from the You Tube live stream. The problem is, if anything is said at all about COVID, I get slapped with peddling “medical information” and they mark another strike against my channel. The same thing goes for talking about 2020 electoral fraud, which results in you being charged with “promoting false claims.” I was banned altogether, but shockingly won my appeal. However, I haven’t been allowed to live stream since.

The CEO of You Tube, Susan Wojcicki, advertises her lust for censorship as openly as Bill Gates raves over unlimited vaccines. After one round of her cleaning out the alternative thinkers on You Tube, Wojcicki had the audacity to declare that free speech was a “core value” of the video-sharing platform. Unless you expose corruption, or criticize any authority, that is. Then it’s labeled “misinformation” and can decimate your upcoming social credit score. You Tube, of course, is now owned by Google, whose commitment to controlling debate can be seen in every search. “Free speech,” like “democracy,” is in the eye of the beholder.

The “marketplace of ideas” doesn’t allow a lot of those ideas. Some ideas are more equal than others. This hardly seems like a level playing field. “Journalists” who act like Arkham Asylum escapees, such as Stephen Colbert or Keith Olbermann, get the largest platforms out there, to regurgitate their state-approved rants. It’s very easy to prevail in such a marketplace, if you have power over who can and can’t play. It’s like the rigged stock market. The plutocratic “investors” who accumulate billions, do so through insider knowledge. It’s impossible to lose when the dice are loaded for you.

Imagine being a sports team, and having the power to choose your opponents. That’s basically what the establishment has set up, in both their controlled media, and their controlled two-party duopoly. Long before internet censorship, the Pat Buchanans and Ralph Naders were being denied the right to participate in the laughable presidential “debates.” Like Cynthia McKinney, or Dennis Kucinich, or Ron Paul, they must not be permitted to enter the executive washroom. Any of those candidates would have triggered the Bob Doles, John McCainiacs and Bill Clintons to flee the stage in terror. There is no answer for truth. But if truth is not allowed to play….

Electoral fraud begins with ballot access. If you’ve had any experience with Third Party efforts, or even tried to get a real renegade running as a Democrat or Republican on the ballot, you know how hard they make it. They are petrified of real debate, and any honest candidate is going to make their manufactured puppets look even dumber than they make themselves look. The last thing they want is an alternative view in presidential debates, and so they set up unreasonable obstacles, usually based upon their rigged and meaningless pre-election polls.

When the internet was born, and remained astonishingly free for more than two decades, I was confident we’d come up with a form of communication they couldn’t control. No FCC to restrict what you could say on blogs, and forums, and social media. But then, in one of the countless authoritarian reactions to the actor Trump, the crackdown on free expression online began in earnest. When Alex Jones was deplatformed, and virtually no one- most notably the actor Trump- complained, I knew what was going to happen next.

Sure enough, You Tube especially cleaned house of all the supposed “Qanon” believers, and used that as an excuse to censor everyone who’d built a big audience, if they were objecting to the criminal corruption of our leaders. Facebook hired “fact checkers,” mostly college-aged relatives of elitists who’ve profited from the rigged system. Elon Musk was supposed to save Twitter, but I still see people getting censored and banned. We aren’t quite at the level of the FCC on social media, but it is definitely heading in that direction.

As I’ve said many times, they aren’t going to stop at the big social media platforms. They’ve essentially got them under control now, and no one really objected. They will be coming for blogs, especially a free speech platform like Substack. It must irritate these eugenicist snobs to no end, that common riff-raff like me can post my observations in an unfettered form, without getting Deep State approval. The same thing goes for pod casts, and live stream shows like my own “I Protest.” These shows go out all over the world, and no one censors what we say. Picture society matrons aghast at the Three Stooges crashing their party. None of us were invited.

For a nation that at least paid lip service to free speech, America has a sad tradition of censorship. Renowned writers like Mark Twain, Henry Miller, DH. Lawrence, George Orwell, and others have faced the wrath of what we used to call “blue noses.” The Hays Code prevented filmmakers from portraying a lot of things when it went into effect in 1935. But the likes of the Catholic League of Decency pale in comparison to the “Woke” tyrants who want to crush anyone or anything they don’t like. Where is the Catholic League of Decency now? I’m sure they don’t approve of transgenderism.

We’ve gone from irate southerners burning Beatles records in the mid-1960s to pussy hat wearing zealots screaming incomprehensibly. It’s often unclear just what they’re screaming about, but they certainly are angry. But in the old days, it wasn’t half the country that wanted to censor a musical group, or a comedian, or a film director. Now at least half the country is fully on board with “cancelling” those they disagree with. If the issue is important enough to them, they want you fired. Or perhaps imprisoned.

I’ll keep trying to use these giant social media platforms. It’s the most effective way to reach a lot of new people. I have a few tricks to get around the shadow ban, but they only work part of the time. I’ve tried Gab- nothing seems to be going on there. My few posts have elicited crickets. And, as I’ve remarked so many times, we’re preaching to the choir there, and on Rumble, Parler, etc. We need to reach people who aren’t fully awake yet, but might be able to be awakened. Here on Substack, I hope I’ve found a few random readers who weren’t familiar with my work.

My friend Dustin Nemos had started the Stop Bit Burning campaign a few years back. I haven’t heard any updated information about it- I know they were planning on perhaps launching lawsuits. But again, those lawsuits must be heard in one of our courts of injustice. What is the likelihood of getting that extremely rare judge who isn’t committed to corruption and unfairness? Republicans- who are supposed to be the opposition to the Social Justice Warriors- are largely silent about censorship. Donald Trump’s Truth Social has supposedly censored people as well.

If the masses are exposed to populist truth, many of them would eventually come around. To wake up at least partially. But that would mean that we’d have to be given access to major television networks. I’m agonizingly close to that. Several of the people I’ve interviewed, or have interviewed me, have been on Tucker Carlson’s show. My friend Naomi Wolf is on there a lot. His producer has had my book Survival of the Richest for a couple of years now, and seemed interested. And Laura Ingraham’s producer asked me to come on her program in 2020, and then cancelled a few hours later, after I’d told the whole world. They’ve never contacted me again.

Jimmy Dore’s producer has Survival as well, and he was supposed to interview me I think in late 2019, as guest host for Jesse Ventura’s RT show. Again, they cancelled, and I’ve never heard from them again. RT was the only television network to have me on multiple times, mostly on Jesse’s old show. But the last two times his people asked me to come on again, they cancelled at the last minute, without explanation. And they asked me again, near the end of last year, but didn’t set a date and never answered my follow up emails. Beirut television had me on twice in 2020, and actually paid me both times. I haven’t heard from them since.

I hear from people, who tell me I should have a bigger platform. My friend John Barbour thinks I should have more viewers than Joe Rogan. Many ask me what they can do to help. Well, they claim that the public can still influence television producers. If so, you can certainly do that. The more my name is mentioned in these circles, the more likely it is that they think of me when they need a guest. I’m confident I can handle myself in those situations, but I have to be given a chance.

So maybe if some of you contacted Tucker or Ingraham’s producers, and mentioned having me on, they might be interested. You might mention that Naomi Wolf, whom they seem to love, wrote the Foreword to Survival of the Richest, while Ron Paul wrote the Foreword to another of my books. It’s about cracking the door open; each one of us that gets access to the biggest platforms can potentially wake up many people on their own. My old elementary school chum Kevin Shipp was the one who talked me up to Ingraham’s producer, but he hasn’t been on Fox News for years now.

I played a lot of sports in my youth. It doesn’t matter how good you are, if the manager doesn’t let you step up to the plate. You can’t possibly get a hit, let alone a home run, when you’re sitting in the dugout. You can’t score a basket, a touchdown, or a goal, from the bench. To a large degree, it’s always been a case of “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” I met some incredibly talented musical artists when I was trying to shop my songs around decades ago. Performers that would have shamed most of those Grammy award winners with little appreciable talent.

But the internet was supposed to be different. You don’t have to depend on the unlikely connections it takes to meet an influential band manager, or casting agent. Instead, you have access to the same cyberspace as anyone else. Theoretically, the web was the first truly open source of communication. And for a while, it worked that way. People like my friend Sean of SGT Report, built a base of close to a million subscribers on You Tube. Only to see them vanish in one fell swoop, when their tyrannical CEO clamped down on dissenting views.

We have to each step up and counter anyone who says “the First Amendment doesn’t protect hate speech.” Ask them who gets to define “hate speech.” Hate is a human emotion we all have, and is in the eye of the beholder. An Orwellian concept like “hate speech” is incompatible with free speech. As is “misinformation.” Again, who defines it? And I hear all the time, “free speech has consequences.” What consequences? Who gets to determine that?

Robert F. Kennedy said, “Hand in hand with freedom of speech goes the power to be heard, to share in the decisions of government which shape men's lives.” We not only are losing freedom of speech, but don’t the power to be heard, outside of these kinds of precious platforms. We have never had the power to be heard by the platforms controlled by the FCC. There was the hope that the internet, in its glorious egalitarianism, would amplify that power beyond the blogs and forums.

Anyone can still create a blog. Or write here, as I do regularly. But the clock is ticking. They are coming first for the Glenn Greenwalds and Naomi Wolfs. Eventually, they’ll get to the Don Jeffries of the world. Unless we oppose them in a concerted effort. Promote the work of alternative writers and talk shows. In a real marketplace of ideas, the putrid establishment hacks cannot honestly compete. Their only chance is to wield their power against those who threaten their own undeserved positions.