Not “right wing” but “unbiased”

People like to call providers/platforms like Substack and Rumble “right wing”, when what they really are is that they are “unbiased”. These platforms don’t ban casters for having the wrong views or for saying the wrong things. They therefore end up having the casters that other platforms have banned. Since those platforms constantly designate themselves as “left wing”, the people who they ban are, de facto, “right wing”, even if they are self-evidently not.

Look, some of them are, but almost all of them are most definitely not. There are only a handful of really vile sites that I’ve seen pointed out. Most of them have zero audience. The danger is, of course, that they won’t stop at banning outright Nazis. They never do. Not once they get a whiff of power.

And it’s always the dumbest, most basic, most kowtowing-to-power of opinions who get to choose who to ban. They’re servants of power and don’t even realize it. Just painfully basic—and utterly unaware of the fact.

Once they’ve managed to ban everyone with an opinion that you don’t like, then you can freely call them all the “neofascist and authoritarian right”. Any platform that does host them is therefore also, by definition, fascist.

Nazi even.

Why not? You’re in control of the narrative. Go nuts.

Where are they going to complain? Not on your platforms! 🖕

They can go ahead and post on their little Nazi platforms as long as they can—until we get them, my pretty, and their little dogs, too.

Case in point is this fool I’ve been following for decades, who occasionally posts some neat cultural stuff[1], just looks goddamned stupid every time he reminds me of how basic his politics are. The post Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign. by Jason Kottke references the sure-to-be-scintillating analysis in the “article” Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign by Mike Masnick (TechDirt). Jason thinks this citation is pithy, not noticing the irony.

“The key point: your reputation as a private site is what you allow. If you allow garbage, you’re a garbage site. If you allow Nazis, you’re a Nazi site.”

Jason’s is not a Nazi site, but it’s slowly becoming a garbage, /r/politics, libtard, woke-ass, basic site. He’s now referencing TechDirt for insights into what it even means to support free expression, to run a business that hosts web sites without endorsing those web sites. Being a Nazi is not illegal. Hosting their web site does not enable them any more than hosting fucking TechDirt enables lowbrow, manipulative, censorious, and outright fascist, straight-up, unironically 1984-style opinions about what constitutes thoughtcrime.

And you know what’s neat? It never, ever, ever—not once—occurs to them that some of us might take offense to the platforming of most of them! You know, the thought leaders that brought us the Iraq War, that brought us the financial crisis, that brought us the disinformation boondoggle of the COVID years—oh, yeah, they’re still so smugly in denial about having mad a single misstep there—and about fucking Russiagate.

They cannot shut up about the “nonsense peddlers preying on the most gullible people to get their subscriptions”, but they only point to certain nonsense peddlers, the ones that offend them. The nonsense peddlers that agree with them? Why … those are invisible! Of course, they get to keep their platforms. Of course they get to fail upward! They’re friends! They’re fellow travelers! We all went to school together!

Thomas Friedman's stupid mustacheThomas Friedman still has a job. He has a huge platform. His opinion has caused more damage than we can ever know. No-one—no-one who matters in the liberal, elite world—has ever talked about de-platforming his ass. The entire stable of opinion writers at the New York Times is full of deranged, warmongering lunatics who dress themselves up as liberals.

But they’ve pulled off the grand trick of getting their hordes of slavering, unquestioning, basic lunatics to attack the comparatively tiny Substack. All of Substack doesn’t have a tenth of the reach of the New York Times. The handful of offensive sites on Substack is about 1‰ of even Substack’s content. And yet, I can’t stop hearing about it.

No-one talks about the literal piles of misinformation coming from the mainstream media. While it’s barely started writing in any honest way about the Israel conflict, it can’t bring itself to be at-all honest about the dumpster fire that is the Biden administration, nor what a boondoggle of death they supported in the Ukraine war.

All of these people—who’ve never seen a war they didn’t absolutely love, who’ve never seen a self-enriching scam that they didn’t absolutely love—still have their platforms. No-one’s clamoring for them to lose their platforms, but they get to send their minions on a hunt for Nazis. And those foolish minions think that they’re all doing the Lord’s work. You can’t make this stuff up.

Once you give into them on eliminating outright Nazi content—you know, with actual Hakenkreuz logos and shit—they’ll line right up and start ordering you to ban what they consider to be Nazi-adjacent content. Pretty soon, you’ll have all of the people who fled the mainstream media take to their heels again as these self-selected and unbearably smug Elect manage to impose their will on yet another corner of the Internet.

Kottke probably doesn’t even realize what a fucking tool of these Elites he is, with his mindless regurgitation of “ban the Nazis”. Please. Have you actually visited one of these sites? I visited a couple. The one that had been updated most recently hadn’t been updated since Februrary (10 months ago). There are, I believe, sixteen sites that might be considered Nazi sites. And they all have what amounts to zero traffic.[2]

And these liberal fucking fascists still have to ride Substack about it, not realizing that it’s going to blow right back in their faces when people get sick of being told what they can and cannot read. We are talking about grown fucking adults here. We are talking about web sites that no-one visits because they suck. The problem has solved itself.

This hysteria is exactly how the right-wing stirs itself up with drag queens at story hour. This furor about those dangerous Nazis that still lurk online are the exact liberal equivalent. They just all love to censor. They just all love to tell everybody else what to do.

Land of the free, my ass.[3] None of you dipshits would know freedom if it bit you in the ass. You’re all on the intellectual level of hall monitors, eternally asking people for their hall passes and glorying in the power of turning them down and sending them back where they came from.

Even if you don’t care about the principle—which I’m sure most of you don’t—what about self-preservation? Don’t you realize that it will be your sites that might be banned when the tide turns? Don’t you realize that there is no end to banning stuff? That stuff you like will be banned when you’re no longer in charge? It’s far better to have a world where Thomas Friedman keep writing his little essays than to have a world where someone decided that he can’t.