The Inevitable Collapse

I'm tired. 

I've been railing for years about the direction our culture is heading in. Looking around at how quickly every undesirable trend has accelerated this year, I think it's too late to stop a complete collapse. 

Consider...

At a time when we should be having an open and vibrant discussion about managing a virus, we instead have monopolistic social-media companies silencing members of the medical community for not promoting the "correct" agenda. Whether it's a doctor being canceled because he advised the president, a Chinese scientist discussing the potential origin of the virus, or a group of physicians chronicling their success with a decades-old generic, if it doesn't fit the narrative, it'll be attacked as somehow endangering the public. (And if you wonder why a cheap generic drug would be vilified, just count how many big-pharma ads you see on your TV every day.) 

You, too, will be fact-checked or canceled if you question how the numbers have been juiced to keep the fear ramped up -- whether it's the fact that hospitals have labeled the cause of death as C-19 even when other conditions were present, or how positive test numbers have been inflated, or how the CDC admitted that only 6% of U.S. C-19 deaths have actually been from C-19 alone, with all other patients having co-morbidities. Did you know that over 90% of all C-19 deaths happen to those who were over 55 and/or already ill? Did you know that the survival rate is around 99.7%? Probably not, because that would let the fear narrative slip away and people could get back to a normal life. 

Or consider that the city of Nashville just recently got caught suppressing the numbers of cases attributable to bars and restaurants -- precisely because the numbers were so low. Never mind that small businesses are dying and the economy has crashed. Never mind that your life is still locked down. Psychopathic control freaks drunk on power have to keep you afraid and controlled, even if there's no justification for it whatsoever.

This is where we are. Science and medicine have thus been politicized and weaponized, with the aid of social media and mainstream TV, to condition you to accept one narrative and reject all others. 

Think, too, about how after we "flattened the curve," the media moved the goalposts. Instead of the incessant drumbeat on the number of deaths, the message shifted overnight to the number of cases, as if cases were the same thing as deaths. 

Apparently the media thought no one would notice. And apparently they were right. Within a month, a fearful public was conditioned to believe that masks work, even though the medical talking heads told us at the height of the pandemic that we didn't need them and they really weren't effective. 

And now we've gone from "you don't need a mask" to mask mandates, with the threat of fines and arrests for noncompliance. From there we went to stores refusing you entry for not masking even if you have a medical exemption, violating the spirit of the ADA and treating their customers like lepers. And from there we've gone to Australian police forcibly masking handcuffed violators in the streets. 

The slippery slope has never moved quite this quickly before. The UK, emulating Communist China, is now forcing its citizens to use QR-based tracking apps and submit their personal information just to enter retail establishments. 

Not to be outdone, Australia -- after already flying spy drones to make sure people were masked and not leaving the assigned perimeter from their homes, after sending the military into private homes to ensure compliance, and after arresting a pregnant woman in front of her family and using a battering ram to break down another man's door, both for merely expressing anti-lockdown opinions on social media -- is now considering a bill to arrest people who might be likely, based on their online activity, to dare to protest the government's draconian measures, creating a real-life Minority Report. 

If you don't think those measures won't come to the USA, just think about how many people were conditioned in such a short amount of time to accept a shutdown of our economy, and then to accept universal masking, and now to being encouraged to use Stasi-style snitch lines that let you report mask violations. 

Some people will accept any encroachments on their freedoms, and the freedoms of others, if they're kept fearful enough. 

Again, think about how absurd and heavy-handed the TSA's airport security measures felt after 9/11. Yet the public, fully conditioned by media fearmongering, came to accept the absurd and abnormal as the "new normal." 

Nearly 20 years later, the absurd is now routine, and any alternative seems unthinkable. Twenty years from now, will we be considering how unthinkable it once was to ever go unmasked in public, to not have universal tracking of people's movements, to not have vaccine passports? Because those are the things we're setting up to become the next "new normal" -- all over a virus with a 99.7% survival rate. 

Children are being masked in school even though they're the lowest-risk group of all. College kids are being kicked out of school if they leave a delineated perimeter around campus, turning colleges into the equivalent of minimum-security prisons. 

Do you really think this is ever going to end? Do you think any of this really has anything to do with a virus anymore? Or is it simply about power and control over the masses? 

Colleges are where another fight emerges, as institutions that were once centers of free inquiry increasingly fire teachers and expel students for refusing to bow to a rigid and divisive agenda of political extremism. 

Top schools are dropping admissions tests because arbitrary immutable characteristics matter more than academic excellence, while curriculums shift their focus from imparting knowledge and skills to indoctrinating students with "critical race theory."  

That same agenda has fanned the flames of destruction across the land, as the movement exploits a tragic case of police brutality to attempt to guilt the entire nation into rejecting the very Enlightenment values it was founded on. 

And rather than shun it for the violent extremism it is, companies, organizations, and communities bend over backwards to show their support and endorse the destruction of our very way of life. 

We're not just dealing with upset activists demanding positive change. We're dealing with extreme radicals who oppose the nuclear family, who want to abolish the police that help keep our streets safe, and who believe the United States is irredeemably racist and want to tear down everything it stands for. 

This isn't about reform. It's an open revolt against the very foundations of Western civilization. 

The postmodern radicalism of this movement first told you that biological sex doesn't exist and would cancel you if you disagreed. Now they want to tell you that your pigmentation inherently makes you a racist, all while its advocates openly work to dismantle civil-rights and equal-protection laws. 

Now it's woke to have segregated spaces for minority groups -- the "coloreds only" lunch counters of half a century ago were bad, but a "persons-of-color only" cafe at the University of Michigan is enlightened and progressive. 

Meanwhile, in California, lawmakers cheered the creation of a ballot proposal to remove the anti-discrimination clause from the state constitution -- so that institutions can openly discriminate in favor of minorities. 

All this does is move us backwards to a pre-civil rights era where the old discriminations are stood on their head and hailed as justice and progress. 

A new supremacy is emerging to take the place of all our work toward equality. Think about how Black is now capitalized and white still isn't: That's the best summation I can think of for where we are right now. The goal is revenge, not equality. 

But question any of it and of course you're a racist. Question the ongoing unrest in the nation and you'll be told it's mostly peaceful protests. Question the double standard of communities that praise shoulder-to-shoulder race protests while anti-lockdown protests are met with media shaming and even further political crackdowns, and you're a dangerous right-wing white supremacist. 

Want to go to church? Try it and we'll shut down your church. Want to reopen your business so you can feed your family? Try it and we'll strip your business license. Want to burn down churches and businesses? No problem. And it's all Trump's fault anyway. 

Businesses not allowed to reopen are being reduced to ashes, while statues of the Founding Fathers topple. The mainstream media actually, literally, defends looting, while radical DAs press charges against armed citizens protecting their homes against roving mobs. 

And the establishment cheers it all on. 

They also cheer on the gutter filth that passes as entertainment, while calling you an uptight backwards hick for opposing its cultural normalization. Netflix releases a movie about the exploitation of young girls by exploiting young girls -- a movie so explicit that it's recommended for adults only. Think about that. A movie starring children is not suitable for children. Little wonder, when it goes so far as to feature underage nudity. A regular person in possession of the same material could be arrested. But Netflix releases it, and the critics gush with praise. 

And have you heard of the new hit song called "WAP"? I won't dignify the song by quoting any of the lyrics, because it's nothing but a long narcissistic string of the basest pornography you can imagine. And yet once again, the critics heap on the praise, calling it a powerful statement of "sex-positive" female "empowerment." If reducing a woman to her genitals and what she does with them in explicit, crude detail is female empowerment, then we're definitely moving backwards as a society. There's nothing the least bit clever, symbolic, or thought-provoking about the lyrics -- nothing that could even begin to attempt to elevate them to some kind of artistic statement. 

The worst part, though, isn't even the song itself, but the fact that it's been No. 1 on the Billboard chart for three weeks. That means people are actually giving this sewage an audience. And that's a deeply distressing sign of just how rotten the foundation of our society has become. This foundation can't hold for much longer before everything comes crashing down.  

And let's be perfectly clear about one thing. 

The people praising porn as entertainment... 

The people justifying riots and calling you a racist... 

The people who want to cancel you for having the wrong opinion... 

The people who fact-check out of existence every narrative the corporate establishment disapproves of... 

The people who call riots peaceful protests while threatening to arrest you for so much as complaining about the lockdowns and mandates... 

The people who continue the lockdowns long after the curve was flattened, destroying the economy over a virus that the overwhelming majority will completely recover from... 

The people who order you to wear a useless mask, with no end in sight... 

The people threatening more violence if Trump wins... 

They're all the same people. 

They're a puritanical cult of political inquisitors, dividing us with the poison of identity politics and demanding complete ideological conformity, from you and from everyone else. 

The masks that they insist you wear couldn't be a more fitting political symbol: They want you to shut up, obey, and conform. 

And the worst part is, it's probably too damn late to stop them. We've let them take control of virtually everything in our culture, from the media and entertainment to science and medicine to just about every major corporate boardroom and academic institution. These woke Marxist psychopaths, direct descendants of Mao's Red Guard, will not rest until they've imposed their insane ideology on every one of us. 

Brace yourself, because it's going to get even uglier. 

Things are never going back to the way they were.

Social-Media Alternatives to the Silicon Valley Censors

If you use Facebook, you've probably seen the addendum to its terms of service, set to take effect Oct. 1.

There's been plenty of speculation about why Facebook is telling everyone that their content, and even their accounts, could be throttled for pretty much any reason whatsoever. The part at the end about mitigating "adverse legal or regulatory impacts" makes it sound suspiciously as if Facebook expects to be stripped of its Section 230 protections.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields Facebook and other similar services from legal liability for what their users say and do on their platforms. In short, if I go on Facebook and say I'm going to kill someone, and then I go out and do it, Facebook isn't legally liable for having given me a platform to say what I said. 

The catch is that to be protected under Section 230, Facebook and its peers are supposed to act more or less like neutral platforms, not like publishers who curate content. And as Facebook and others have ramped up the censorship of their users, the Trump administration has fired back and essentially demanded a review of Section 230, since Facebook and others increasingly appear to be violating the good-faith agreement not to behave like publishers. That's exactly what they're doing if, as it looks, they're deliberately targeting people for their political opinions.

AT&T is going before the FCC this week to argue for a reworking of Section 230 that would lessen social media's legal protections. So my guess is that Facebook is covering its behind should Section 230 change. 

Of course, Facebook could just avoid the legal drama altogether if it would simply stop censoring its users over things that are perfectly legal and acceptable to say. But just like the rest of the Woke Universe, Facebook and its allies hate free speech and will shut up anyone it disagrees with.  

Or this could be a more sinister move to ramp up the censorship of conservative voices heading into the election. What, you think Facebook wouldn't engage in the same kind of election meddling it accused Russian bogeymen of doing in 2016?

Ben Garrison

De-Zuck your life

The best thing you can do to fight the inevitable upcoming escalation in censorship is to simply stop using Facebook and its censorious brethren in Silicon Valley. Hit them in their pocketbook. Money and power are the only things organizations like this understand.

I get it, though. Getting Silicon Valley out of your life is a pain. Most of us are deeply dependent on the tech monopolies like Facebook and Google. And that might not be so bad if Facebook and Google were benevolent titans. But Google cooperates with authoritarian regimes around the world. It regularly shuts down YouTube channels based on its own ever-widening definitions of "hate speech" and "misinformation." And it spies on you.

Facebook, meanwhile, has been kicking people off its platform for ever more flimsy reasons. Having come under pressure from a score of woke corporations that demanded Facebook censor more speech on its platform, Mark Zuckerberg and his leftist cronies have shut down anti-mask and anti-lockdown pages, "militia" (read: armed constitutional patriot) pages, QAnon conspiracy pages, and many more, typically under the guise of the pages' having somehow broken the terms of service or engaging in whatever Facebook's definition of "hate speech" is.

Most recently, Facebook has actually been "fact-checking" the CDC's revelation that only 6% of U.S. C-19 fatalities had only C-19 as the sole cause of death; all the rest had underlying conditions. To say this on Facebook -- to share the CDC's own information -- is to spread "misinformation that could cause public harm." Of course, controlling the C-19 narrative isn't new -- we know that all of Silicon Valley has banned any information related to hydroxychloroquine as a potential C-19 treatment, even when actual practicing medical doctors present the information.

And Kyle Rittenhouse? Facebook has un-personed him, while GoFundMe shut down his legal-defense fundraiser. Facebook doesn't want to glorify violence, you see -- even though they let BLM, Antifa, and other assorted far-left mobs celebrate violence all the time with no repercussions.

On top of all that, don't forget: Since they're both free services, you're Google's and Facebook's product.

The usual argument from those defending Google and Facebook is that, as private companies, they can do whatever they want. But we all know that's a bogus comeback, because no company can do whatever it wants. Every company has to follow labor laws, anti-discrimination laws, and so on. Another thing they're not supposed to be able to do is engage in monopolistic practices.

But as we've seen, over and over again, no one in Washington appears to have the guts to invoke antitrust law against these companies. Because let's face it -- when a company has grown so large that it essentially controls the public narrative, it's time for that company to be broken up. No one should have so much power over public discourse to be able to change and control it through algorithms and selective censorship.

So what do you do?

Well, I can tell you what I've done.

Getting started

So far, I've taken care of the easy stuff -- shifting from Chrome and Google search to a privacy-based browser and search engine in Brave and DuckDuckGo. There are plenty of others to pick from, and I may migrate to other services once I get more comfortable with them. But for now, Brave and DDG are "good enough" solutions.

Meanwhile, I've just about moved all my email contacts away from Gmail. That's taken a while. If you've had a Gmail account for any amount of time, you'll find that as soon as you think you've updated your email address to everything you want to keep track of, something else you forgot about pops up one day. Now, my everyday stuff -- subscription emails, company offers, Amazon, eBay, and all the rest -- goes to Yandex. ProtonMail, based in Switzerland, is for personal stuff in my inner circle.

(I'll address a few inevitable questions at this point. Yes, Yandex is a free service like Google. But Yandex is based in Russia, so I don't really care if Yandex tries to market me, as it'll never affect my daily life the way Google does. Heck, I don't even care if Yandex wants to send my emails to the FSB. Russian intel doesn't easily cooperate with American intel, and that suits me just fine. As for ProtonMail, well, the Swiss are of course noted for their privacy protections.)

The things that remain to be done are to get Android off my phone, replacing it with an open-source operating system. And then there's this blog. Moving eight years of posts to another site is going to be a monumental chore. But once I get those two things done, I'll have de-Googled myself as much as possible.

Next steps

Now let's address social-media replacements. After the last round of Facebook censorship, I've seen a lot of people in groups I belong to wondering where they should go. They know it's just a matter of time before they too get fitted with the Silicon Valley woke muzzle.

Well, there are scores of other social-media services out there. But since Facebook is such a massive monopoly, everyone is there -- which means everything is happening there, which means it's very difficult to get people to move to a new platform. How you do that, I don't know. Maybe it'll take another wave of mass Facebook censorship to get its reluctant users to finally wake up and migrate someplace else. Right now, most of the alternative platforms are comparative wastelands -- because people aren't moving to them. It's a lot like getting people to vote for third parties. They argue that it's a wasted vote and the candidate will never win -- but that just becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy when no one will make the leap and cast a vote in the first place.

If you want to keep your Facebook account open, or you need to wean yourself off, my advice would be to use Facebook for completely innocuous stuff, like pictures of your cats, or posts complaining about your neighbors, and move the activism -- or anything even remotely controversial and thus subject to Silicon Valley censorship -- to an alternative site.

So let's make this as easy as possible. I could go through dozens of alternative platforms, but I'm going to focus on the few that I think are the most viable.

Twitter replacement: Parler.

Parler.

Parler (not "Parlor" -- the site's name is the French word for "to speak") works a lot like Twitter. It's built around sharing short blurbs. But Parler won't censor or fact-check you. If you're not doing something illegal, chances are no one is going to bother you.

I have a Parler account. I never liked Twitter, so I don't care so much for Parler. Aside from the fact that Twitter is a censorious cesspool, it's just not the type of social media that appeals to me. And as of now, it feels like an echo chamber for conservative ideas. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and it's most assuredly a result of all the censorship of conservative voices on other platforms. But I enjoy the push and pull of debate. If you want a Twitter-like experience where you don't have to worry about being silenced by a bunch of woke nannies, Parler might be the place for you.

YouTube replacements: Bitchute and banned.video.

Neither one is nearly as big as YouTube, and they can both feel a little bit clunky to use. But this is where all the video producers go after YouTube silences them. Bitchute is a combination of banned creators and folks just using an alternative to YouTube, while banned.video is exactly what it says it is. Twitter won't even allow you to link to Bitchute -- which of course only proves the need for services like Bitchute and banned.video. David Icke, for one, is there. Stefan Molyneux is at Bitchute. Alex Jones' InfoWars outfit is at both.

Reddit replacements: Ruqqus, Quora (sort of), idw.community (ditto), Voat (with huge caveats).

If you like discussion-based communities but don't want to deal with Reddit's woke censorship, you have options. Following Reddit's mass "hate speech" purge at the end of June, droves of users headed to Ruqqus, which is pretty much as close to a Reddit clone as you're going to find -- with the added bonus that you won't get banned.

Quora is a little bit different from Reddit. It's more of a Q&A-style site, with thoughtful and well-sourced answers getting upvotes and poorer responses being collapsed.

idw.community (also accessible through slug.com) is more focused on big-idea political debates. The "IDW" stands for "intellectual dark web," the group of thoughtful pundits and intellectuals that includes such names as Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Dave Rubin. It's about as anti-woke of a site as you're going to find.

(Not gonna lie -- Quora and idw.community are two of my favorite social-media sites.)

Voat is like Ruqqus in most ways, except that it seems to have turned into a haven for racists and fringe conspiracy theorists. Approach at your own risk.

And finally...

Facebook replacements: Minds, MeWe, Gab, VK. 

Minds.

MeWe.

MeWe and Minds are very similar to Facebook in how they work. You have a news feed, and you can join and create groups. The major difference between then is that MeWe's focus is on privacy -- MeWe won't sell your information or bombard you with targeted ads, nor does it use algorithms to manipulate what you see -- while Minds' mission is anti-censorship. If it's not illegal, you can say it at Minds, and no one will shut you up.

I have accounts at both MeWe and Minds. If I had to pick one over the other, I'd go with Minds. That's in part because of its commitment to free speech. But it also lets you create a blog, which I'm thinking about doing as a short-term solution to getting off Blogger for good. And I think it's also easier to make connections on Minds. Because others can pay to promote their feeds on Minds, you won't have to create your world from scratch -- you'll have something you can build on. At MeWe, it's pretty much all on you to build a network of contacts and groups.

Gab.

Gab is a very interesting place. It's a little like Facebook, with groups and a news feed, but it also feels a little bit like Twitter -- maybe because there's so much strident political discussion. Like Parler, though, the discussion feels like an echo chamber, since so many people displaced from the Silicon Valley giants have ended up here. And you will find your share of racists and fringe crazies here, though they haven't taken over the place like at Voat. Gab's founder is a hardcore free-speech absolutist, so if you come here, you're going to have to deal with the folks at the extremes.

As you can see off to the right, Gab has a merch store. It also has its own Dissenter privacy-based browser -- and a merch store for Dissenter, too. But I'm not going to knock Gab for any of the merchandising. Like many of these alternative social-media sites, Gab is user-funded. And since Visa and PayPal have both blacklisted Gab, you pretty much have to use cryptocurrency or send a check in the mail. Free speech sometimes comes at a cost -- literally.

VK.

And here's the big wild card: VK. That's short for VKontakte. VK is basically Russia's Facebook. And it holds tremendous untapped potential for folks in the West.

Why? Because VK's format will be very familiar to those who use Facebook, right down to the blue color scheme. It has a messaging function, you can share images, you can create public events, you can join and create groups -- it's all there. It even has a marketplace and its own e-payment system.

And this is no fringe website that's going away anytime soon. It's among the top 20 most visited sites in the world, with over 500 million members, and it's the single most popular website in Russia.

So why have you never heard of it? Well, probably because the Western media doesn't want you to know about it. And, partially for that reason, most of its users speak Russian.

However, there are English-speaking folks there. Most of the ones I've found are from the UK and tend to be hardcore English nationalists and Brexit supporters. In contrast, I think I've connected with a grand total of two Americans so far.

But there's nothing stopping Americans from networking and building their own groups there. Best of all, since you'd be flying under the radar, no one is going to bother you, which means you get added protection against Western cancel culture.

VK doesn't easily censor people, either. You can find a lot of articles online that will tell you how VK, like a lot of other social-media alternatives, has become a haven for those on the fringes after they've been kicked out of mainstream sites. And I won't sugar-coat it: There are some serious racists on VK, posting things that wouldn't last for 10 seconds on Facebook. But as with Gab, free speech means you take the good with the bad. Other people get to say things you may not like. But basically, as long as you don't bash Vladimir Putin, you're going to be just fine on VK. Look me up if you're interested in trying it out. I haven't used it much yet. I'm waiting for others to come so I can get to know them and network with them.

The future of free speech

I don't have any faith that Google won't pull down this post. I can only hope that the people who need to see it actually do -- and that you might be able to find a new social-media home where you can start building new communities with friends and like-minded people, free of the censorship-happy Silicon Valley giants. See you there!