I found out yesterday that Carl Benjamin (aka youtuber Sargon of Akkad and here and here) got "de-platformed" at Patreon, which means that he just got booted off for no good reason. Patreon is a crowdfunding site which supports internet "creators" of content. Benjamin's content is political. He is a "classical liberal" in the John Stuart Mill sense. Benjamin's youtube channels have not been removed—yet—but he has effectively been de-monetized, which is the more subtle strategy for suppressing free speech.
But that's not the story authoritarian alt-liberals want you to believe (political philosopher John Gray's term). No, these so-called liberals want to tell you Benjamin is an alt-right fascist, or a gateway to white supremacy or some such nonsense, which is a beautiful example of the primitive defense mechanism called projection.
Projection is the misattribution of a person’s undesired thoughts, feelings or impulses onto another person who does not have those thoughts, feelings or impulses. Projection is used especially when the thoughts are considered unacceptable for the person to express, or they feel completely ill at ease with having them. For example, a spouse may be angry at their significant other for not listening, when in fact it is the angry spouse who does not listen.
Projection is often the result of a lack of insight and acknowledgement of one’s own motivations and feelings.
The rule of thumb is simple—always focus on what people do, not what they say. This rule of thumb is right there in the flatland model of human nature if you properly understand that model. Straightforwardly—
those suppressing freedom of speech on the internet are the dangerous ones, not those exercising their right of free expression.
Asserting the principle that free speech is indispensable in a free society is what the important free speech movement at Berkeley in the 1960's was all about.
So, what is my warning to humanity? Again, straightforwardly, if you want to preserve free speech, if you want to preserve due process and the presumption of innocence, if you want to be protected from arbitrary arrest for imaginary "hate" crimes, if you want to keep your precious Western Civilization, such as it is, and you don't want to see the large-scale political "mistakes" of the 20th century repeated in the 21st, then you should be very alarmed about the suppression of free expression on the internet. Your rights are not guaranteed. There is nothing natural about them. Indeed, it is human nature to try to take them away from you.
History tells us that dangerous repressive things like internet censorship always start out small and then snowball. Experience tells us there is a slippery slope. At the start everyone has rights, then some people have rights and some people don't, and then, lo and behold, there comes a day when nobody has rights except self-appointed gatekeepers who then tell you what you can or can not say or do.
I could not have published DOTE if there were not freedom of speech rights in the United States. Surely some repressive do-gooder busybody would have tried to shut me down for saying, among many other things, that humans like them suck.
I stopped reading, listening to or watching mainstream media about a year ago. I went cold turkey. I get all my news on youtube now. Using only "alt-media" has been a revelation. While I understood that the corporate-owned media was corrupt, biased and therefore heavily edited, I did not realize the full extent of it. For example, only one mainstream outlet even mentioned that Carl Benjamin was de-platformed at Patreon. That was vice.com, who said only this—
The accounts of British conspiracy theorist YouTuber Carl Benjamin, better known as Sargon of Akkad, and U.S. far-right political commentator James Allsup, were removed Thursday.
The ban will be a particular blow for Benjamin, who was earning more than $12,000 a month from the crowdfunding site [Patreon]. Benjamin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
I have watched lots of Benjamin's videos. I have never heard anything even close to a "conspiracy theory" in those videos. In fact, this conspiracy theory bullshit is yet another projection (definition above). The only conspiracy happening here is to suppress the free speech rights of people like Benjamin who hold non-politically-correct views. The mainstream media routinely misrepresents or totally distorts the views of people like Benjamin and all others who refuse to go along with an increasingly intolerant "social justice" agenda. That can not be an coincidence.
At this point, labels like "nazi" or "nationalist" and so on have completely lost their meanings because anybody to the right of Pol Pot is routinely called a nazi or alt-right or far-right or some similar delusional ad hominem bullshit on Twitter. I hope you realize just how dangerous this corruption of true meaning is.
And when Apple CEO Tim Cook tells you his company won't tolerate "conspiracy theorists" (like actual conspiracy theorist and wacko Alex Jones) on Apple's platforms, you had better watch your back because today's classical liberal can easily be cast as tomorrow's conspiracy theorist.
You have been warned.
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