Tea Leaves In The Dawn Drizzle

     (Yeah, yeah, they’re soggy. So what?)

     I’ve written before about the Left’s tactic of infiltrating institutions and corrupting them to its purposes. While no institution is outside the Left’s scope, its priority targets are institutions that support communication, education, and entertainment: the arteries of public information and knowledge. Once the Left has gained control over such an institution – usually by weight of numbers within its ranks – it uses that control to “enhance” outputs that favor it and suppress outputs that disfavor it. That’s how the Fabian socialists gained control of Britain’s Labour Party and, eventually, of Britain itself.

     The explosion of the Internet was a major blow to the American Left. It was a bypass of the established media that funneled unfiltered, unbiased information and arguments to the consumer. It promised to do more damage to the Left’s totalitarian program than talk radio ever had or could. When the Web became effectively bidirectional, such that the proprietors of Websites could solicit comments from their readers, it was plain to the Left’s strategists that “something must be done.” But what?

     The “what” has surfaced, and it’s not pretty:

     As the fallout from the failed Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia last weekend continues, leftist-controlled tech and social media outlets have started mass censoring right-wingers and banning them from their platforms. While sites such as Twitter have been hostile to the right for a long time, the events in Charlottesville—where alt-left agitator Heather Heyer was killed by rally attendee James Alex Fields, Jr.—have given leftist-run sites the excuse they need to ideologically cleanse their websites.

     As of this writing, numerous right-wing websites and personalities have been banned from PayPal, Twitter, Paypal, Stripe, Facebook, Instagram, Mailchimp, Soundcloud, Uber, and countless other platforms. To make matters worse, domain registrars and website maintenance companies such as CloudFlare and GoDaddy have no-platformed The Daily Stormer, keeping the site offline since Sunday. It’s clear that ideological dissidents are going to have to change their tactics in order to keep their websites and other platforms online.

     Please read the whole article. You need the information; take my word for it. But for those disinclined to do so, I’ll include one more snippet:

     To make matters worse, leftists have begun attacking web hosts, domain registrars, and other infrastructural services that right-wingers rely on to keep their sites online. Rootbocks and Hatreon, two free-speech alternatives to GoFundMe and Patreon, respectively, have been forced to switch domains and webhosts after being banned due to their unwillingness to ban right-wingers. Free speech Twitter replacement Gab has been subjected to several DDoS attacks for the same reasons, and the Alternative Right blog was deleted from Blogger last night. [Emphasis added by FWP]

     Liberty’s Torch is a Blogger blog. Its readership isn’t enormous – perhaps 400 readers per day – but many of those readers wrote, in response to this piece, to plead with me not to quit. I want to do as they’ve asked, but with Google now fully engaged in the Left’s campaign to silence conservative opinion on the Web, how long will it be before they get around to us who command smaller audiences? When they do, where can I turn?

     Don’t imagine for a moment that other easy-to-use blog hosts such as Wordpress won’t enlist in this campaign. Neither is Hosting Matters, where Eternity Road was sited, a reliable choice. First, I have no expertise with PHP or blogging software generally, and second, the Left will surely be after such large, popular blog hosts in their turn. I suppose I could go back to the style of the old Palace of Reason: a “webzine” done entirely in HTML, without the support of blogging software, but that seems a bit retrograde for the times.

     I need suggestions.

     If you want to see these tirades continue while I have life enough in me to emit them, give me the benefit of your thinking. (If you’re adept with blogging software, I could benefit from your expertise.) We “know not the day nor the hour” when Google will withdraw its indulgence from your humble Curmudgeon Emeritus. Remember this passage from Atlas Shrugged:

     "Since the deadline for the signing of the national Gift Certificates expires tonight at midnight," said Dr. Ferris, in the tone of a salesman extending a special courtesy to a customer, "I have come to obtain your signature, Mr. Rearden."
     He paused, with an air of suggesting that the formula now called for an answer.
     "Go on," said Rearden. "I am listening."
     "Yes, I suppose I should explain," said Dr. Ferris, "that we wish to get your signature early in the day in order to announce the fact on a national news broadcast. Although the gift program has gone through quite smoothly, there are still a few stubborn individualists left, who have failed to sign-small fry, really, whose patents are of no crucial value, but we cannot let them remain unbound, as a matter of principle, you understand.”

     [Emphasis added by FWP]

     I’d like to take prophylactic action while there’s still “no rush” to do so.