Unwittingly: The Erasure of the Comment Section and How it Will Affect Populism

 

by Joshua Brown

Originally entitled: How to Grow My Alt-Right Youtube Channel

I was banned from Twitter over a year ago now. Of course I've tried a few times to get back on, two times just to follow Bitcoin related accounts. Both of those were banned most likely due to IP address and fingerprinting but it's impossible to tell at this point.

 

 

I was banned from MILO's Telegram channel chat recently for mentioning Stefan Molyneux in a positive context. In that case, I personally reached out to MILO and asked for a special exception due to the fact that what I was saying and doing where almost entirely innocuous.

 

I've found that many people have become BAN heavy, including the groups like Owen Benjamin's, and specifically one named Seanathan Cory on Telegram which I was recently banned from commenting in.

 

There are a lot of Telegram channels, Twitter accounts and other content producers who now block or never enable ANY commenting. Even the grand migration by alt sites from Youtube to podcasting includes a technological divorce of the content from it's community commenting.

 

I've watched many public figures regress to pre-internet commentary. Boring, political, pandering. Was this intentional in any way?

 

Public figures that have censored themselves to remain public figures puzzle over why things aren't how they expect it to be. The worst Youtuber I've seen to deal with this is VivaFrei. Especially during the trucker convoy, he completely missed that his relevance to the entire situation was what CNN's relevance was to the election of Trump. VivaFrei's channel is a warning to people watching, not a standard bearer for a courageous army.

 

The civilian leader of the most powerful military in the world was banned by Twitter. Guns, nukes and aircraft carriers can't defend us. The constitution doesn't work.

 

Let me take a step back again, back when everything started escalating again.

 

The Boogaloo boys were starting to divorce their identity from the Back the Blue crowd. A libertarian was shot and killed by the pigs. His lover was invoked and I stated that they were wrong for committing fornication: having sex before marriage. Someone tagged her and she started responding. I maintained my position. I began to get screenshots of my children and my parent's home. Death threats. Someone ordered pizza to my parents house.

 

 

 

 

These were the people I would have depended on to defend me from the State, now they were using my children to try to blackmail me PUBLICLY on Twitter for everyone to see. No one defended me.

 

Sorry, you don't get to invoke Christianity and then take offense for someone holding you to the morality that Christianity itself preaches.

 

While no harm fell on me or my children, I did dramatically increase the amount of false information about who I was and what I was doing to misdirect the violence that was rising against me.

 

I used to check in with Infowars every once in a while during the pandemic, but every time it was air raid sirens just flooding my body with feelings of anxiety and dread. Now the only time I'll listen to Alex Jones is when he is a guest on someone else's show.

 

In my position, I've arranged my life to be portable and opaque. But that life was dependent on a quantum network of information: info streams would flick on and flick off for me. More and more I find that we are approaching a significant information balkanization potential.

 

When you become a president, the military decides for you what you can and cannot consume as content. Supposedly this is to protect you from certain propaganda.

 

This is happening to you. This is happening to your content creators. Maybe overtly but certainly via advertising dictates.

 

The Owen Benjamin crowd, maybe well meaning, is telling people to just abandon their voice. Beartopia is overtly pro-CIA agiprop. I don't know him or his family, maybe he's being blackmailed. Maybe we do need a small faction of people who reengineer farming without corporations. So I'm not cursing him, but let's call a spade a spade, these alt communities are echo chambers.

 

I grew up in a non-ecumenical doctrine, so I understand what the messaging is around group purity. Our in-group testing was music: if you listened to music with drums you weren't one of us.

 

Recently I've been thinking a lot about Russia and Ukraine. Not because I have a particular view one way or the other. I listen to Michael Malice and Lex Friedman who are both Ukrainian. Prior to the current events, I've bought merch from Ukrainian artists. Honestly I've never heard anything but propaganda from the Ukrainian government and the Putin messaging that I've heard is him calling out my own governments propaganda.

 

What bothers me re: the above issue is not who Putin or Killary is or the fact that the NYT is scrambling for relevance after the NYP broke the HB laptop from hell story and then we all watched it get blatantly bastardized for what appeared to be no reason. Rather, it's the fact that these "careful" content producers now think that they are the resistance, but really they are just the compartmentalized tools filling the crater of institutions.

 

People like Quite Frankly and Stefan Molyneux have maintained to some degree their relevance by either actively subverting the censorship or overtly accepting it as a sign of societal decay. But if you are a content producer in 2022, you have been compromised, if only by the censorship of your commentariat on the platforms you use. 

 

A couple years ago I watched this channel called Truthstream Media, but it just kept getting more and more depressing. They kept complaining about how Youtube was keeping them from peoples feeds but I just kept thinking to myself "you're a good channel but you're just making depressing content lately" but finally they posted a super giving up type video and I unclicked subscribe. 

 

Of course censorship is real, of course we don't want the fake ass Talk Show cotton candy content, but all of us creating and consuming content on platforms big and small should really take a look at what we're doing, maybe get some constructive feedback for once in our life, take a break from making money for shareholders and reevaluate who's interests we are serving OTHER than our own (not that our own interests don't matter!)

 

So the next time you hear someone smear Putin yet again, just remember, you're not the courageous one. The fact that the conversation is even taking place is evidence that you've compromised and tucked tail too many times before. Pat yourself on the back all you want for virtue signalling against "oligarchs" and "corruption" and "the imprisonment of political enemies."

 

We are watching and we will remember.

 

We will remember January 6.

We will remember the McMichaels.

We will remember BakedAlaska.

I think we can all understand if someone has a argument or disagreement with any of the above topics, but there are content producers who dance hard around the subjects and desperately desire reasonable peoples support. Sorry, we watched the Covington kids, we saw Philip DeFranco, we know what's going on here. 

You are protecting the platform at the expense of your credibility and then pretending you didn't lose your credibility. Sure, go ahead, but you are literally the mainstream media now. That is the relevant comparison. You to Russia-Ukraine is as Fox to Operation Enduring Freedom.

Many of us will remain completely skeptical of those remaining on Youtube and Twitter until finally Telegram fully becomes controlled opposition as well (RT is banned on Telegram, at least for me)

Back in early 2021, I was escorted out of my work, by police, for not wearing my mask over my nose. Simple enough, I made a video about my situation and posted it on my personal youtube channel which I shared with friends. My video was immediately and permanently disabled for "medical misinformation." This was clearly an intimidation technique. My video contained no medical recommendations at all. In it I demonstrated that I was wearing a mask and that the police removed me for the mask not being "properly" over my nose.

And such is the life of many of us I'm sure, many of us who have no sponsors, no advertising income, no parents basements to live out of. So we watched our beloved truth tellers drift off into their own world, completely unaware of their unmooring from this little swamp of reality. They may never come back, but here I'll stand waving a mirror, firing off a few remaining flares, hoping they escape the strict military information diet before, well... that gets cut off as well.