It isn’t really unexpected news to hear that a recent study by the National Academy of Sciences of The United States of America exposed the simple fact that going hostile and negative gets more engagement.
The study reveals:
…. posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group. Each individual term referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%. Out-group language consistently emerged as the strongest predictor of shares and retweets: the average effect size of out-group language was about 4.8 times as strong as that of negative affect language and about 6.7 times as strong as that of moral-emotional language—both established predictors of social media engagement.
Click-bait that is negative about the out-group gets more clicks, therefore, to get more clicks, people use hostile out-group click-bait, and in doing so perpetuate the disintegration of society. We don’t just disagree, we condemn. We revile. Or so the theory runs.
But is this a chicken or the egg scenario? Does the penchant of the masses for more engagement about the out-group, a tendency for angry reactions to get more engagement, reflect sentiment or is the phenomenon of online flame wars actually the source of the division?
Considering the source of the study, one wonders if the conclusion being sought isn’t a new call to somehow further tighten the reins on speech while focusing only on the “angry out-group language” of the “right” while pretending it doesn’t come from the left.
However, to credit this study, conducted in November of 2020 and released in late January 2021, this phenomenon was documented across the board for left and right. Both groups tended to give more engagement, and therefor more clicks, to out-group hostility than to saying good things about their in-group.
Click-bait, which is content that is sensationalized to get clicks even though the truth is far from that sensational, tends toward out-group hostility. And, moreover, hostile out-group click-bait tends to get more engagement when the source is a leading political figure than if it is a news site.
But what if the “other side” really are being awful? What if the myth “it takes two to tangle” isn’t true, what of one group is in fact pushing all the wrong buttons and doing all the wrong things? If, for instance, our condemnation of woke neocomm totalitarianism, with outright demands to censor and cancel the right and sic the entire “anti-terrorism” apparatus on them, contributing to the division or is it actually just honest reporting?
We are certainly not guilty of only zinging the left for bad behavior, our true north is pro-freedom and anti-authoritarianism. When we see “the right” being authoritarian we are just as ready to decry that. For instance, the “war on terror”, the “Patriot Act”, and NSA spying, all favorites of the right in their inception, were always viewed by us as totalitarian responses.
But because our audience, and generally our content, tends to overlap more to the right than the left, albeit not entirely, content about authorian offenses by those considered on the right gets less engagement and fewer views.
The tendency of both sides to resort to ham-fisted reactionary and authoritarian policies in response to their political opponents is becoming worrying. Decrying this may get more clicks, but if the substance is truth, then the problem is with the trend toward authoritarianism.
On the other hand, many of the more outrageous content peddled by left and right to get clicks isn’t substantively true and only serves to falsely demonize the out-group.
The bottom line is that, while actual trends toward authoritarian reactions to things one’s political opponents do is growing, the use of hostile out-group click-bait is exasperating the problem and actually leading to more and more authoritarianism.
Chinese President Xi Jinping made a 100th anniversary speech on July 1 that set a new, more strident tone at home and abroad. Xi demanded loyalty, called for more militarism, threatened to return to a more Marxist economic system, threatened China’s neighbors, and called for the advancement of China’s totalitarian system around the world.
In essence, China is becoming as much an existential threat as the USSR, perhaps moreso because our country is so entangled with them economically and because our ruling class essentially want to be China, albeit with the corporate monopolies using the state and not the other way around.
Lest we forget, China’s Marxism is brutality at home and imperialism abroad, the aim being a global communist empire.
Missing from the festivities, as if celebrating totalitarian wokeness ala Mao Zedong is even possible, was the military parade. This may be a sign of growing disconent in the military ranks as, while being missing, the PLA was urged to show loyalty and devotion, which many mean this is a problem.
At home, Xi has been burnishing his image as a successor to Mao and has begun rolling back China’s liberalization of the economy and of any semblance of freedom. Arrests and a social credit system that suppresses dissent are all part of the Chinese system or absolute control. Many Americans of the woke communist variety can only envy Xi.
By this speech, Xi, in his effort to gain the support of the 95 million Party members who lord it over the rest of society, is signaling a fresh and open aggressiveness against internal and foreign foes on par with the worse days of the USSR.
Stocks in China and Hong Kong tumbled as news of the extreme language of the speech got out. Xi warned that anyone who tries to bully China “will face broken heads and bloodshed.”
It is often forgotten that China’s system is totalitarian Marxism. His own words confirm this view:
We must continue to adapt Marxism to the Chinese context. Marxism is the fundamental guiding ideology upon which our Party and country are founded; it is the very soul of our Party and the banner under which it strives. The Communist Party of China upholds the basic tenets of Marxism and the principle of seeking truth from facts. Based on China’s realities, we have developed keen insights into the trends of the day, seized the initiative in history, and made painstaking explorations.
We have thus been able to keep adapting Marxism to the Chinese context and the needs of our times, and to guide the Chinese people in advancing our great social revolution. At the fundamental level, the capability of our Party and the strengths of socialism with Chinese characteristics are attributable to the fact that Marxism works.
Of course there is nothing factual about Marxism and Marxism doesn’t work. China’s success is almost entirely to the credit of Western sycophants who traded short-term material gain for economic arrangements that benefited China at the expense of the American people. The “new model” for Marxism is not to just use the state but to proactively control and use the corporation.
China’s totalitarian vision with the triple threat of woke authoritarian platforms and their social credit system, the corporate and financial sector monopolism that serves the Party, and a ruthless state that labels dissent “domestic terrorism”, is envied by America’s ruling class.
But China is also announcing by this speech a drive for global empire, an international neocomm order controlled by Beijing, although puppets in “allied states” may be given autonomy. China seeks world domination, of that there cannot be any mistake.
China is returning to a more brutal totalitarianism and is moving outward toward a new communist imperialism aimed straight at the United States of America.
The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor, which our publisher has a joint venture agreement with, published the top 10 “crises” being used to increase total control over our lives by the ruling class.
The crises include things like immigration, the pandemic, and other “crises” that threaten a world on fire from destroying all life, or something that dire. From bogeymen to scapegoats, each crises is a way to turn the screws and increase pressure and confusion.
Some of these crises may be wholly real but exploited, partially real but somewhat manufactured, or completely manufactured. All seem overwhelming and cry out for some sort of massive, centralized response at the national to global scale.
The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor details each and explains their use. (You will need to subscribe to the free starter kit to see the details.) Other items in this issue are equally informative and will fortify you with a more predictive analysis of future and emerging trends.
From a Freedomist perspective, in general, when we start hearing the drums beat in harmony from all sources about a “crisis”, we tend to become very wary and suspicious of what is happening. Even if the crisis is real, the proposed solutions are always meant to transfer more wealth and power from those who create it through work to those who do nothing but lord it over society.
If it always seems the world is on fire, this doesn’t mean it is. It may also just mean the ruling class have found a new way to scare and bully people into surrendering more of their agency and spiritual sovereignty as people made in God’s image to human rulers.
Prescriptions for overcoming these crises and finding gaps for freedom are the focus of much of our content. The way these crises are manufactured or hyped through massive indoctrination is a real cause of concern as, manufactured or not, each crisis tends to hurt real and innocent people.
Preparedness for the things the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor predicts, and they have a good track record of accuracy for over 45 years, is about more than stockpiles of supplies. Having good connections and relationships to people who have each other’s back and pursuing a path of independency through mutual self-reliance and personal financial and material sustainability, outside systems of influence and control, is vital.
The top 10 crises whereby the ruling class seek to control us need not become crises that harm ourselves and our families.
The Soviet state was all about “protecting” people from “misinformation” because it was counter-revolutionary. The revolution was all good and everything not of the revolution was all bad and needed to be punished or banished, or exterminated. People who weren’t OK with all this were reactionaries, extremists, and traitors and all had to be canceled, as it were, from any place of good standing, sent to re-education camps, or eliminated.
What is disinformation? It’s whatever the rulers deem it to be. If they say a theory about the origins of a certain ailment plaguing society is misinformation, then you get canceled or banished for saying it. If later that misinformation proves to be accurate, they memory hole their first reaction and move on to the next things they deem misinformation.
Folks, welcome to Misinformation Is Counter-Revolutionary 2.0, where the Soviet state’s role is now played by the government and mega corporate monopolies, all working hand-in-hand to protect us poor slobs from anything that doesn’t support the ruling class.
If you are on social media platforms you have likely encountered this or you know someone who has. The effort to shun, shame, and bully people into towing the party line, or to banish those who won’t, is real. Unless you are slavishly devoted to the Party, a novel form of authoritarianism we can best desribe as corporate “woke communism”, you find the screws are turning against you.
The digital space is mostly governed by and for the benefit and advancement of the woke communists, by whatever name they call themselves. The end goal seems clear enough-suppress or remove any voices that conflict with their corporate aims, which also happen to be quite compatible with the woke communists.
But it’s not the digital space alone that is being impacted by this new breed of authoritarianism. The latest new US strategic vision for counterterrorism is to focus on the white supremacy bogeyman, and of course the definition for this domestic terrorism is essentially anyone who isn’t a woke communist or one of its corporate backers. Vague commitments to respect free speech are laughable. The ruling class desire more control and the woke communist ideology, ill defined and not at all identical to historic state-communism, is a convenient path to power. This new strategic vision for counterterrorism appear to hinge on terrorizing the dissenters.
The necessity of finding gaps for freedom, which are legal and technology-based solutions that make you more independent financially and materially, is becoming stronger. If you maintain dependency on the predominant structures, like social media or big finance, the corporate farm, and the such, it is likely your opportunity to be a free and spiritually sovereign person will shrink.
Fortunately, so far, the woke communists of our day aren’t yet taking to literally rounding people up on a mass scale and tossing them all into gulags. They are attempting to slow walk their revolution, every day showing new and more insidious, but not necessarily government imposed, restrictions aimed at “misinformation.”
It is true, there is a misinformation problem, and some of it isn’t the government and the corporate behemoths themselves. But most of it is coming from the very entities that spend the most time trying to find new ways to banish those they accuse of spreading this counter-revolutionary misinformation! The platforms acting as gatekeepers at the behest of the Democratic Party and the government really may fancy themselves as guardians against the hobgoblin of misinformation, but they are really just new Soviets and don’t even know it.
We must continue to work toward the emergence of new ways to connect and share information outside the control of the woke communist corporate backers. It is clear, their desire to control absolutely everything in the service of their authoritarianism is becoming greater. The woke communists, many of whom do not consider their view of the world to fit that description, have increasingly little tolerance for anyone who dares to spread what they call misinformation but what is really just opinions or facts that don’t support the Party Line.
Our response in part is this digital publication, The Freedomist, and our future platform, The Virtual Commonwealth of Upadaria, among other projects. We will build the digital gaps for freedom and we will use the existing platforms and digital space as best we can to draw an audience and present a path of freedom and prosperity.
We recognize that the woke communists are not all-powerful, many don’t even realize what spirit they are of, and that there remains many untapped gaps for freedom we can use to create and invent our way around their influence and control.
The myriad of federal and state laws and regulations individuals, let alone major corporate entities, have to follow mean it is impossible to follow them all unless you are a perfect human being. Basically this means we are all counted as suspects and if some prosecutor decides they want to take us down, they need only spend a few years and million of dollars to manufacture charges against us.
Based on the chicken-scratch “crimes” of not counting benefits properly and therefore not paying taxes on them, a New York political hack prosecutor has ginned up indictments against Trump Organization members and the corporate entity itself. The goal is to roast the victims until they offer something juicy to eventually put Trump in chains.
This is blatant abuse and this exposes how the massive, inarticulate, and confusing tax code, plus all the other codes, are not used to protect us but to hamstring us and make it easy to take us down when some hack gets a hankering for our hides.
To the right, as in to anyone on the right who becomes a vocal critic of the left, it’s all political prosecutions based on the smallest violations of laws and regulations none of us can possibly follow. But, to the left, even when laws are blatantly violated, as in Hilary Clinton’s illegal private server, the cover-up is in force, officials and prosecutors seek only to make it all no big deal.
One wonders how all this will play out, whether the intended victims, anyone to the right of Marx it seems, will take this lying down. If indeed a former President and billionaire can be taken down on some petty and inconsequential charges, when the likelihood every lefty billionaire is doing MUCH WORSE every day, then who is safe?
The need to destroy Trump is really a desire to put the rest of us in our place.
Moses told Pharoah, “let my people go!” His demand, prior to the Exodus itself, was simple: let the children of Israel worship (and, by extension, serve and live for) their God in peace. This demand did not necessitate losing the Hebrews as a work force or expelling them from Egypt.
In the realpolitik and reality of power of ancient Egypt, the children of Israel were slaves under the bondage of what was then one of the great superpowers of its day. Not only were the children of Israel exploited for their labor, but not even their basic religious sentiments and values were respected.
In the realpolitik and reality of power in America nothing looms larger as a cudgel aimed in hateful violence toward the heart of historic Christian moral and religious orthodoxy than the rainbow authoritarianism that demands silence of opponents and even willful participation as a sign of wokeness. Fascism has a new banner, a rainbow banner that must be worshipped on pain of banishment!
(Special note: we separate the rainbow fascists from the actual LGBTQ community who are, overwhelmingly, tolerant and decent people. Of course, the rainbow fascists will equate push-back against their blatant totalitarian intolerance to hatred of LGBTQ individuals, which is a patently absurd libel.)
Hatred against the faithful for their adherence to historic Christian orthodoxy out of a sincere desire to worship, serve, and live for their God in peace is pretty much the heart of the rainbow authoritarian agenda. The aim has never been to elevate some downtrodden class, it has always been to downgrade others and force the majority view into the closet.
We will always say, come what may, “an advanced culture is based on a man and women married for life raising their own biological or adopted children within the maternal enclosure of a nurturing extended family and larger community of trust. ” The gender-bent rainbow authoritarian culture (which is NOT representative of the LGBTQ individual) is a dystopian, savage, and barbaric throwback to primitivism and debauchery, in the eyes of advanced culture.
It remains true, that though we accept, not just tolerate, all people as spiritually sovereign individuals made in the image of their Creator, and though we ourselves would never countenance censoring or inerfering with the basic right of freewill participation by others, based on whatever their sociocultural values are, it will never be enough.
The rainbow authoritarians hate the faithful and yet do not love the people and communities they claim to represent. In fact many of the people in whose name these totalitarians act are among the first to disavow such anti-freedom bigotry. Rainbow fascism, as it is emerging, is more about hatred for those who adhere to historic Judeo-Christian orthodoxy than anything else.
People who are secure in their convictions and whose rights are respected have no need to impose on or punish anyone for merely disagreeing and for choosing their own way of life through their acts of individual conviction and freewill participation.
The punishment of speech that the rainbow fascists don’t like, because it is based on embracing advanced culture rather than what we may see as primitive self-indulgence (knowing of course not everyone agrees), is intolerance itself which we cannot abide and will never submit to.
It doesn’t matter that we have a live and let live attitude or that we don’t feel our concept and practice of what we see as advanced culture needs the coercive power of thr state to force compliance. It does not matter if we genuinely respect others who beliefs, values, and convictions differ. Unless we both applaud the rainbow culture and even participate happily, we are bigots and targets for cancelation.
The average person who may identify with some form of LGBTQ or etc (letters keep getting added), probably wants nothing to do with the rainbow woke cancel culture and its gross and intolerable authoritarianism. They literally do not care if someone disagrees with them as long as their rights are respected and they certainly don’t think a refusal to participate in their way of life is a sign of bigotry.
We who hold that advanced culture rests on marriage between one man and one woman who, unless they are not fertile*, raise their own biological or adopted children within an extended family and larger community of trust do not think people who disagree are bad or inferior or don’t have the same rights as we do. But, as noted, that’s not good enough for the rainbow fascists.
(*Marriage is not solely about children, it is a union between a man and woman that depicts the union between Christ and the Church and is, therefore, Holy in and of itself. Couples do not simply get married to raise children. The focus here is that children have a right and deserve to experience a loving home wherein a marriage mother and father, whether biological or adopted, raise them.)
You don’t agree with our view on the basis of advanced culture? So be it. We embrace the concept of a free and pluralistic society of equals, therefore you and whatever you deem a marriage or a family are free to proceed as you wish. You are not free to censor our beliefs on what constitutes advanced culture and your friendship with us should not be based on our agreement in this vital, but private, aspect of your life.
We do not agree with intolerance or bigotry. But the loose definitions of those terms, which are now crimes in the eyes of some, has become weaponized against mostly the Judeo-Christian who holds to historic orthodoxy. It is beyond the pale, it is a gross injustice, and is the very picture of what bigotry and intolerance look like.
If your views and beliefs are so weak that they cannot sustain refutation or refusal to participate, then you are the problem. This is true whether one is demanding adherence to the historical orthodoxy of the Judeo-Christian tradition or the new unorthodoxy of the rainbow culture.
But today, at this hour, it is not the Judeo-Christian faithful who have any power to impose their sociocultural norms and it is not this community that is seeking cultural hegemony by brute force. The rainbow fascists hate the faithful, that is why they continue to devise new ways to force people between bowing to the new rainbow culture or refusing to compromise their convictions and being canceled out of society, as if banished.
The rainbow fascists are not the LGBTQ folks, who mostly just don’t care about who agrees with them or not. The rainbow fascists are ideological extremists for whom the LGBTQ community is a perfect excuse for their totalitarianism.
The Collier County Commissioners are set to vote on July 13th to approve a “Bill of Rights Sanctuary” ordinance.
“Collier County has the right to be free from the commanding hand of the federal government and has the right to refuse to cooperate with federal government officials in response to unconstitutional federal government measures, and to proclaim a Bill of Rights Sanctuary for law-abiding citizens in its cities and county,” the ordinance reads.
The ordinance is different from the Freedom Sanctuary ordinance we would propose, but is very much in the same spirit.
There are 5 commissioners, 2 solidly for it, 1 who raises what some see as petty trifling “concerns” but who is afraid to be against it, 1 opposed but who has given some reasons for why they might support it, and one just opposed. As for the public, 25 people spoke for the ordinance and none spoke against it.
Predictably, the County’s head attorney opposes it and both warns of negative consequences while claiming the Sheriff cannot enforce the ordinance. The Sheriff stood in wholehearted support.
While public sentiment may favor this ordinance, which prohobits any county personnel or resources to be used to enforce laws that violate the Constitutional rights of citizens, it would appear the top County officials are looking for a way to block the ordinance without appearing to be opposed to its sentiment. It remains to be seen how the public comments and, frankly, weasal language of certain officials will play with the public and whether public pressure will mount to side with the ordinance.
The endless wars abroad, in which young Americans suffer and die battling enemies of the global oligarchy, are ramping up as Bomber Biden gets into his stride.
In the latest round of bombings, US troops set within a foreign land were set upon by angry, Iran-backed, local militias. The predictable outcome was a series of bombings by the US against bases held by these militias. While it is certainly true these militia thugs, backed by Iran, are bad people with bad ideas, it may not be true the US has any parochial interest ourselves in fighting them.
As for our country, suffering under growing inflation, a weird job crisis, and this internal sociocultural crisis launched by radicals who represent Biden’s core base, there is nothing the American people csn gain from choosing sides in Syria or Iraq.
Credit where credit is due, one Goerge Bush (the elder) began this adventurist wars in mostly Islamic lands debacle with the first Gulf War. The US fought and bled to liberate Kuwait after Iraq invaded in reason to Kuwait blatantly stealing millions upon millions of barrels of oil from Iraq through cross-drilling.
Perhaps letting a former CIA bigwig become President wasn’t the smartest thing the US ever did.
After 911 the US had every right to put a massive hurting to all those powers that either backed or otherwise enabled Al Qeuda and their Wahabist ideology. Backing the Afghanistanis who wanted to overthrow the Taliban, letting them do the fighting on the ground for their own freedom, was certainly within the scope of legitimate responses. But so also would severing ties with Saudi Arabia unless they abandoned their global effort to impart the Wahabist ideology, a key component of which was violent jihad.
As it stands now, after George the younger finished the destabilizing work his father started, which may itself have been the “justification” the Wahabist terrorists needed to gain recruits and funding, the entire scene became a quagmire. From Egypt to Afghanistan, the spector of Islamic Jihad and the destabilization of the entire Islamic world, set on fire mostly through “Western intervention”, has cost hundreds of thousands of innocent lives and hasn’t improved a thing.
Enter now one Joe “The Bomber”, Biden, or “Bomber Biden” for short. His war plan seems to be the same as Biden the elder, Clinton, Bush the younger, and Obama. Only Trump tried, somewhat, to steer a different course but our woke coterie of globalist generals blocked him at every turn.
Truly, the United States of America in all our economic and military power has become nothing more than a giant cudgel to browbeat the world into submission to a band of globalist oligarchs whose interests do not align with our country’s parochial interests.
This thirst for imperialist dominion over all things and all people for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many is what drives Biden’s War Plan. It is calculated by the needs and interests of this global oligarchy and their planned “reset”, which amounts to modern feudalism.
It it is no wonder that Biden threatens Americans who refuse to abide his wacko interpretation of the Bill of Rights as a permission slip to deny the right of self-preservation even as he bombs bad guys whose success or failure is of no real concern to America’s parochial interests.
His militarism, imperialism, and authoritarianism are precisely what his oligarch overlords demand of him!
There are things about our present culture that we don’t like. For socially conservative Christians especially, the present culture seems to want to basically trample on everything we see as holy while demanding we keep our mouths shut or even prove our wokeness by joining in the debauchery.
The bucolic village scene where everyone knows everyone and seems to have each others back, where when men and women still act like men and women and raise their own kids, and where wholesome values are even taught in school is far from the perfect picture of reality back in, say, the 1930s to the 1950s. But the myth of this bucolic life of innocence, love, hard work, and virtue is a powerful draw and is certainly more desirable than some of the slop being called “the evolution of the family” today.
If we feel right at home in the mythos of this golden age of American virtue, true Americana, this doesn’t mean we don’t know the difference between the myth and the reality. But that’s not the point. The mythos of this 21st century dystopian derangement that passes itself off as culture is definitely garbage compared to the idyllic picture taught by media and the schools, an idyllic picture that wasn’t reality but which was something people generally thought SHOULD be!
No, most people in the 50s didn’t life “Leave It To Beaver” realities, but this was the reality the culture presented as ideal. What’s our ideal compared to this? A bunch of drug addled, sexed-up woke genderless freaks running amok and rioting? Sorry to sound so rude and crass, but the mythos of the 21st century Western Person is really rather barbaric and savage and is disconnected from the necessity of marriage and the family, the pillars of any advanced civilization.
Like the Beav, most people aren’t living like the fictional and academic presentation of the mythos. But unlike the Beav, the truth is that if most people actually fulfilled the present mythos we would have chaos and collapse. People would all be accusing each other of anti-woke transgressions and canceling each other and would have little time to get much productive work done.
The objections to the 30s to 50s are sometimes legitimate but almost always ignorant. There were racial issues, sure, but the culture within the minority communities was still better than the culture of today. It was wholesome and lifez-affirming. Women have come a long way, but, sadly, they aren’t any happier and now it takes two people 40 hours a week to raise a family, if indeed raising a family is a thing any more.
It seems all the cultural changes have done, again aside from actual reforms that protect the rights of all people equally, is makes things worse. People are unhappy and sad, tired, and frustrated, and now, increasingly afraid to say or do anything that might get them canceled. Again, the Beav’s world was never perfect, but the wholesomeness of his life is much more preferable to the debauchery of this culture.
We cannot re-create the 30s to the 50s. But we can choose the wholesome values of faith, family, traditions, and virtues as our way of life. We can adopt our own modern version of that idyllic vision and extend that fairly and equally to all people.
What we propose is that the idyllic vision of wholesome values, deep love, and close connections through faith and tradition which so inspired America’s cultural golden age, is, in a modern form, the very path to true progress for our country.
Of course we can sift out the bad, remove any and all coercion, and not leave anyone, not any man or woman of any ethnicity or ancestry or race behind, and modernize our approach. But we should see in this golden age an ideal worth resurrecting in a new and better form than it was ever conceived of back then.
It’s not so simple to make things “the way they used to be” because this was always the ideal, never the universal reality, and not everyone equally enjoyed this idyllic vision. But that doesn’t make the vision, when it is adjusted to be inclusive of all who desire it, on a freewill participatory basis alone, a bad vision. It doesn’t mean our barbaric anti-culture is superior.
If we tend to lionize the great era of the 30s to the 50s as the golden age of Americana, it is, again, mostly because this ideal, if applied equally to all and expressed in a modernized form, is far superior to the woke cancel culture authoritarianism we endure today.
The battle against the woke technocracy is at an early stage and will require a long-term, multi-faceted digital guerilla marketing approach.
Even though we stipulate to the fact they have every right to be arrogant SOB’s within their platforms, while making outlandish claims of not being woke authoritarians, and even though we don’t necessarily think they outright want to ban all content that doesn’t agree with woke authoritarianism, we can’t warm up to these people. They are unlikeable in their weird arrogant self-importance.
But kvetching doesn’t usually solve anything. Our deep-rooted desire to overthrow the technocracy is far more parochial than merely being wound up about alleged bias and lack of transparency as to their idiotic “community standards”, which are both a joke in their content and their enforcement. We, and by this we mean more freedom-minded people who seek a decentralized web just as we seek a decentralized politics and a decentralized economy, simply don’t want a digital space owned by cretins who are not friendly or favorable to us.
Put another way, even if you wish to opine that big tech isn’t proactively anti-freedom, you cannot argue they are friends of liberty. This is especially true if your content tends toward a more staunchly, traditional, and socially conservative Judeo-Christian bent. As an example, even suggesting gender is purely biological can get you banned from Twitter. This is the tendency of the woke technocracy.
The desire to upend the marketplace and overthrow the technocracy, however, should not necessarily be about political sabre rattling. The truth many overlook is, done right, even platforms that compete for 5% of the market share could literally make their owners hundreds of millions of dollars. There is a lot of money to be made.
Our approach and focus on overthrowing the technocracy is all about the revenue. There are billions of dollars being funneled to people who got lucky, got in first, and who now want to shield themselves against any new competitors. If you really want to to find the bias of big tech, that’s it: they climbed the ladder of success and now they want to chop it down so we cannot follow.
Unless you have the means and technology to create your own platform, and if you do not like the woke technocracy, regardless of your reasons, then, to put is bluntly, you will need to become a patron of alt tech platforms, as a backer/investor, sponsor, or paid subscriber. We would add, not being willing to pay for content as a user is precisely how you keep big tech on top.
We may choose to zing the big tech overlords from time to time for their ridiculous woke authoritarian preaching and the way they talk down to everyone, but our focus is on the fact there is a massive market for digital content, digital services for self-expression and promotion, and digital tools for connecting with others.
Becoming even a tiny bit player in that space can be quite lucrative and if you do this in a way that serves freedom-minded people and builds freedom in general, advancing the freedom narrative and vision among more and more people, then so much the better.
We are motivated by a desire to broadcast a freedom vision, gather and serve freedom-builders, and advance a pro-freedom agenda in every arena, including the market, the digital space, and even politics. But we understand that the free market, not charity and certainly not kvetching, is the path to advancement for our cause. Of course you can back our efforts by becoming a subscribing here and accessing original, unique content you won’t find anywhere else.
Our voice is unique and will provide you real news and inspirational content that can actually benefit your life in the here and now.
The battle against the woke technocracy is a free market fight, waged through gaining viewers, subscribers, sponsors, and backers who want more freedom-building content and policies within the digital commons. But it’s not a head-to-head fight. We are essentially the digital guerillas huddling in the jungle, trying to avoid a far superior force in open battle.
The battle against the woke technocracy is in a guerilla stage. We therefore propose that, money being the driving force in the market, and money being far more alluring than woke ideology, the paid subscriptions model is our best bet. The paid subscription model both allows for smaller platforms to grow steady as their support base grows, while starting small, and creates enough real revenue that even biased payment processors don’t look askance at the revenue generated for them.
We would suggest that the alt tech, pro-freedom platform community, the community of actual alt tech and alt content providers, connect for mutual benefit and support in the form of freedom tech guild. This guild could leverage its collective weight and spending power so that one platform or digital content provider cannot be easily targeted by a woke payment processor. Or perhaps this group could form a consortium for payment processing, for legal defense and offense, for hosting, and even for a truly good alt tech search engine.
Getting to that place or convincing enough alt tech providers to join such a guild is way beyond our capability unless we ourselves command a large enough audience and paid subscription support base. But something like this, which allows a plethora of platforms to grow and prosper serving niche communities of people, is what will eventually become a thousand and thousands and tens of thousands of cuts that weaken the woke technocracy.
The “free speech platform” model is too complex and requires massive technical, financial, legal, and political firepower with which to rout the predicted monopolist response, which will include effort to cut off technology and all means of processing payments as well as massive demonization by the DNC Press. What makes this model so problematic isn’t just the technology, but the moderation and governance, not to mention the public relations blows that would be landed every day against the platform and its owners and builders.
In addition to all these problems, both real and artificially imposed by the woke technocracy and their allies, there is the fact the marketplace, the potential users, subscribers, and sponsors, don’t really want a free speech space they have to share with actual racists, neonazis, jihadists, chauvinists, nasty trolls, bullies, extremists, or even communists. The market may want more liberalized platforms for the general public than the woke authoritarians wish to provide, but they definitely don’t want the free speech limited only by whatever it’s “legal” to say and they may balk at the notion the government should dictate the moderation policies of platforms.
It is tempting to say the platforms are no different than the phone company, but when a phone call is over the content only exists if one or more parties record it and nobody is being asked to sponsor that content. Moreover, the users themselves are paying for access and use, which doesn’t occur with platforms today. Platforms are stuck with your content and if they want a brand-friendly product for sponsors, and if those sponsors, like most corporations, tend toward the woke authoritarianism spectrum, then content moderation must reflect sponsor wishes.
It’s a pity more and more corporations, perhaps also owing to their market dominance, only seem to care about the sensitivities and interests of a segment of the population while assuming everyone must buy from them because you can’t possibly boycott all the woke authoritarian corporations, but this is a fact of life we have to navigate and invent our way around.
As we see it, the only shortcut is for users to replace the corporate sponsors in such numbers that the total population of users on woke platforms decreases substantively enough to truly awaken the corporate backers to a new reality wherein they have lost access to a substantial plurality of potential customers.
This is not going to be accomplished by creating “one big system” (OBS) to defeat another OBS. What will have to happen is two things: users who are sick of the woke garbage will have to actually pony up and start paying for content and access and providers will need to find innovative ways to serve unique content and meet the needs of more niche communities in awesome ways.
The real problem may be that, even if providers truly do a good job, the user base will pin their hopes on government regulation to force free platforms to be nicer to them instead of the obvious path, which is to financially back friendly platforms and content providers who cannot afford to be free.
The path to overthrow the woke technocracy isn’t easy and there is no simple “fire and forget” solution. It will involve, we imagine, the following:
1. First and foremost, a willingness for users to become paid subscribers to niche platforms and content providers who are trying to compete with the woke technocracy
2. The innovation of providers who focus on niche platforms and/or truly unique content worthy of paid subscriber backing
3. The development of a guild or coalition of providers who share resources and form consortia (plural of consortium) to provide alternatives to the woke corporate payment processors, search, hosting, cdn’s, email list management, and the like
4. While not covered in this article, we also envision a common backbone based on api hooks that allows cross-posting on alt tech platforms, ways for users to create a homepage that collates content from those platforms, and ways to push content on or advertise on various alt tech platforms
For our part we offer unique content HERE for the freedom builder via paid subscriptions, we are building a niche platform for more Christian or socially conservative audience, and we promote other platforms and providers.
It only takes a spark, as they say, and we hope to join those who, together, in this guerilla stage of the battle against the woke technocracy, to be a part of that spark for a truly free and pluralistic digital commons.
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