What Were Once Conveniences Are Now Leveraged to Control Us

The conveniences and comforts of modern life are now being leveraged against us to control out political behavior.

Example: for many years, social media made it easier to keep in contact with one another, now the companies that own the platforms are proactively policing speech and political expression.

At first social media was a novelty, then it became essential to our daily lives. Life takes place online nowadays; you need to be on social media in order to stay connected. And that’s especially true if you are in the political sphere. Politics takes place on social media. That’s where the debate is.

But now, previously benign social media platforms, which used to simply sit back and allow virtually anyone to say basically whatever they wanted, are beginning to proactively enforce Uniparty political dogma on social media.

Social media companies realize how important they are to our daily lives, and the political debate in particular, and are leveraging their importance toward political ends.

There are strings attached now. If you want to use and benefit from social media, you must have the correct politics now. It wasn’t this way at the start, but now that the big tech companies have us hooked on their platforms, they are trying to control our thoughts and opinions–otherwise, you can kiss your Twitter and Facebook goodbye.

But now major American corporations are taking it a step further: it’s not just big tech that is using its power to play the role of Thought Police.

Now, it’s big payments processors “financially blacklisting” political dissidents:

“Can you imagine how scary it would be to live in a world where your livelihood depended on having the ‘correct’ politics? It’s the sort of thing you might expect of totalitarian regimes – Baathist Iraq under Saddam Hussain; everywhere that has ever tried communism; increasingly, Xi’s panopticon China – but definitely not of any liberal democracy in the 21st century.

That dystopian future, though, may be much closer than you think. I only properly appreciated this recently when the podcast I’ve been doing for the last few years was mysteriously dropped by my regular employer, forcing me to seek funding sources from elsewhere.

If I were impeccably ‘progressive’, this would be a doddle. I could monetize my content through ads on YouTube, I could crowdfund donations through Patreon, I could promote my work with regular appearances on CNN.  But if you’re snarky and irreverent and you won’t play the virtue-signaling game then your options are much more limited. Any deviation from the path of ‘woke’ righteousness – even just a misjudged joke or a remark taken out of context – can get you branded a ‘far right’ extremist and your audience won’t be allowed to pay you even if they want to.

This is what happened last month to the blogger/vidcaster Carl Benjamin – aka Sargon of Akkad – whose long-form meditations on everything from Brexit and feminism to Islam and video game politics have won him nearly 900,000 subscribers on YouTube. Benjamin’s primary funding source was Patreon, a website which enables donors to support projects they love with monthly contributions. But when one of Benjamin’s critics unearthed some audio of intemperate remarks he’d made in the course of an obscure interview where he’d been defending himself against neo-Nazis, Patreon de-platformed him for breaching its ‘terms of service.’

Instead of simply providing a neutral platform for creators of all stripes to get paid by their audiences, Patreon has decided that only those with the Correct Views can get paid for their work.

It would be one thing if these platforms like Patreon, Twitter, Youtube and Facebook were actually only trying to remove genuine violent/dangerous extremists. But they’re not. They’re simply labeling everyone who challenges Uniparty orthodoxy as a “right-wing extremist” and using that false label as justification for deplatforming them.

“Benjamin’s defenestration needs to be understood in the context of a much wider ongoing purge of right wing voices by Silicon Valley, which now likes to see itself as the world’s liberal bulwark against the dark, populist forces supposedly unleashed by Donald Trump.

Superficially, this might sound reasonable. As even our conservative tabloids are wont to ask, ‘When, oh when, are social media giants going to do more to combat hate speech?’ The more important question is, though: ‘Who gets to decide what is hate speech?’ From YouTube and Twitter to Facebook and Patreon, Silicon Valley’s answer seems to be: the kind of Social Justice Warriors who think any viewpoint to the right of Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn is literally Hitler.

“Combating hate speech” is merely the pretext, the fig leaf to provide some moral justification for waging war against free speech.

See, the American Totalitarians still want to maintain their delusions of moral superiority. They want to have it both ways: they want to silence anyone who disagrees with them, but they don’t want to feel like fascists while doing so. So they pretend the people they’re silencing are all Literal Nazis who need to be silenced, or else they’ll eventually start waging another genocide or something.

But it’s not just Patreon enforcing political orthodoxy. It’s much worse:

“Among those riding to the defense of Benjamin were two of Patreon’s leading beneficiaries – author and academic Jordan Peterson and vidcaster Dave Rubin. They are trying to launch an alternative crowd-funding platform to Patreon – one untainted by political bias. But this may not be easy because the rot goes much deeper than Patreon. The real pressure, it seems, comes from the payment providers – Visa, Discover, PayPal, especially Mastercard – which have taken to using financial blacklisting as a way of enforcing progressive ideology.

There isn’t space here to discuss why they are doing it. It is simply an observable fact that, as Breitbart writer Allum Bokhari puts it, ‘it has become increasingly difficult for individuals engaged in controversial yet lawful speech to fund their activities online.’ Even liberals are starting to worry. Banks and credit card companies, says the left-leaning Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), have become ‘de facto internet censors.’

Patreon is small-time compared to the big dogs Visa and Mastercard.

Payments processors and banks made life easier for us, now they’re leveraging our reliance on them to control our behavior:

Better think twice now before you use your Visa or MasterCard to legally purchase guns and ammunition. They got us hooked on their products because of how much easier they made our lives, and now they’re saying, “Either you readjust your political views or you no longer get to enjoy our now-essential services.”

And of course if you don’t like it, then go start your own global payments processing business. At least that’s what the True Conservatives™ will say.

If you think this will stop with social media companies and payments processors, you are wrong. Eventually hotels will start refusing rooms to dissidents. A judge in New York said bars are allowed to kick Trump supporters out.

We won’t be able to get loans from banks.

We will eventually be blackballed from commerce altogether.

The New Fascists will not stop until conservatives are completely excommunicated from American life altogether.

They want to make regular Americans conclude it’s simply not worth it to challenge the Uniparty establishment. Too much trouble. It’s about demoralizing dissidents.

They want us fired from our jobs and denied the ability to make a living–in addition to wanting us dead and our homelands overrun with Third Worlders.

The Ben Shapiros will say, “That’s absurd! Muh Free Market will prevent this! These companies will lose so much money discriminating against conservatives!”

Apparently the companies don’t care.

They’re willing to sacrifice profits to enforce Uniparty dogma.

Virtually every major multinational corporation will soon be an enforcer for the Uniparty Establishment.

And, of course, Teachers Pet do-gooder 30-year-old “journalists” at the New York Times are applauding it all.

They’re the same people telling us democracy dies in darkness and that they’re protecting us from tyranny.

They are the tyrants.

The fascists are completely convinced beyond all doubt that they are the good guys doing the right thing.

When the history of this era is written, they will be the bad guys. But not only are they unaware of it, they are so utterly certain that the complete opposite will be true; that they’ll be the Heroes and Good Guys.

No. No chance.

Sooner or later, the truth comes out.