I wrote a couple weeks ago about the excommunication of Alex Jones from pretty much every controlling organ of the Internet – and that regardless of your opinion about Alex Jones, the issue isn’t Alex Jones. The issue is the precedent set by what has been done to Alex Jones.
He was punished by the entities – just a handful of them, all working in concert – to silence him or at least, make it much harder to people to read and listen to what the man has to say.
The argument that this does not constitute censorship because the entities – Gooo-guhl and Twitbox and Gesichterbuch – are privately owned is as risible as the idea that the airwaves are private property.
What you get to read and hear online is controlled by these entities and unless the argument is that the Internet is their private property then the idea that they have the right to shut people up – and only certain people, who invariably happen to be people who speak and write in ways that aren’t “politically correct” – then what is occurring is indeed censorship and worse than that, actually. It is economic as well as ideological warfare practiced by entities furious that that non-PC thoughts are finding a receptive audience – and that this audience is growing.
Rather than attempt to sway back the audience with their own ideas, these entities are now resorting to the bully’s tactic of the electronic beat-’em-up. Prevent them from reaching their audiences – and prevent them from earning a living.
The practice is called “demonetization” – shut down all online advertising on the non-PC site, which advertising is almost entirely controlled by the same entities which control what you get to read and hear online.
And now that precedent is being expanded upon and will soon become practice, if not pushed back and hard.
Amazon is proscribing books it doesn’t like – no matter how many people want to buy them.
I here reprint an article from today’s InfoWars:
Fahrenheit 2018: Amazon Begins Banning Controversial Books
Roosh V’s dating advice books memory holed for unspecified offensive content
Paul Joseph Watson
PrisonPlanet.com
September 11, 2018
Amazon has officially entered dystopian territory by banning an entire range of dating advice books because they violate unspecified “content guidelines.”
Controversial author Roosh Valizadeh revealed the ban last night, tweeting, “Amazon has removed 9 of my books from sale, including my newest book Game, which was ranking in the top 1000. They won’t tell me the specific reason. Many of the books were on sale for 5+ years.”
Roosh
✔@rooshv
Amazon has removed 9 of my books from sale, including my newest book Game, which was ranking in the top 1000. They won’t tell me the specific reason. Many of the books were on sale for 5+ years. @CreateSpace & @AmazonKDP: can you tell me why the books have been removed?
Valizadeh later received an email from Amazon informing him that “content guidelines” were broken, but was again given no specifics.
“I feel like I’m in a Franz Kafka novel,” he tweeted.
Roosh
✔@rooshv
Amazon Has Banned 9 Of My Books Without Explanation http://www.rooshv.com/amazon-has-banned-9-of-my-books-without-explanation?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=twitter%20dlvrit%20rss … pic.twitter.com/qKzwAxXVTd
Roosh
✔@rooshv
I just got a new email from Amazon. They absolutely refuse to tell me which “content guidelines” were broken, but they encourage me to randomly guess what is wrong and start from scratch. I feel like I’m in a Franz Kafka novel. pic.twitter.com/Y9e0GvpMOK
According to Amazon’s guidelines, illegal content and porn are banned (none of which appear in Valizadeh’s books), so the only guideline he could be in violation of is “offensive content”.
“What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect,” states the guideline, a completely vague description which could literally be anything that one person deems offensive.
“I believe the bannings began because the launch of Game was extremely successful. I sold 2,000 books in the first two days and hit the top 700 on Amazon paperback on the first day. Even before Friday’s launch, Game was already in Amazon’s top 10,000. As far as I know, Amazon didn’t receive a single complaint about the content, but they removed it anyway,” wrote Valizadeh, adding that Amazon sells all kinds of books which contain details of violent rape and sexual abuse.
“None of my books contain child rape scenes, physical abuse, pornography, or sexual violence, and yet they were banned. Were they banned because they were effective at helping men? Was it because executives at Amazon disagree with my political opinions? Was it an action from a rogue employee? They won’t tell me,” said Valizadeh.
The author also noted that a 2015 petition lobbying Amazon to ban his books received over 250,000 signatures at the time, suggesting that a similar effort may have been successful this time around given the intense climate of censorship against conservatives that has accelerated over the last month.
Roosh
✔@rooshv
In 2015, a petition with over *250,000* signatures tried to get my books banned. Multiple media articles went out, urging Amazon to do so, but they took no action. What has changed since then?
The move has brought comparisons to Nazi book burning or dystopian classics like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, where the state had a unit of firemen dedicated to burning books.
Back in 2009, Amazon made headlines after it erased digital copies of 1984 from Kindle devices, although that was over a copyright issue. This is much worse.
“Did anyone reasonably foresee that Amazon of all places would ban books? It’s going to get so bad that you can’t imagine how bad it’s going to get,” tweeted Mike Cernovich.
Mike Cernovich
✔@Cernovich
Did anyone reasonably foresee that Amazon of all places would ban books?
It’s going to get so bad that you can’t imagine how bad it’s going to get.
Apparently though according to many conservatives, so long as it’s giant corporations and not governments banning everything and removing everyone’s ability to have a platform or engage in commerce, everything’s just fine.
Paul Joseph Watson
✔@PrisonPlanet
Social media giants ban people.
“At least it’s not the government.”
App stores ban apps.
“At least it’s not the government.”
Amazon bans books.
“At least it’s not the government.”
Paul Joseph Watson
✔@PrisonPlanet
Credit card companies ban customers.
“At least it’s not the government.”
ISPs ban websites.
“At least it’s not the government.”
Universities ban speakers.
“At least it’s not the government.”
Valizadeh also posted a YouTube video talking about the ban, which can be viewed below.
Infowars has been banned by Facebook. Please help by sharing this article on your own Facebook page.
Eric,
I’m late to the party here, but I remember when Alex Jones was banned. Fortunately, he and his organization had the means to establish their OWN platform, so they can still get the word out. The best one is http://www.banned.video, which features the various Infowars personalities and their videos. You just click on the person you want to watch, e.g. David Knight, and you’ll be taken to their videos. You can watch whole shows if you have time. If you don’t have time, you can click on the various guests and subjects, so you can see the “best of”.
What I found both lamentable and delightful (in the sense of schadenfreude) was how conservative pundits like Ben Shapiro (I can’t STAND that little worm!) either had no problem with AJ being banned, or they DEFENDED it! They said that the Tech Giants were private companies, so they could do what they wanted. These conservatards were too dumb to see that they were next! Those who purported to be for our rights didn’t defend AJ when it would’ve done some good.
Oh, and BTW, soon after Alex was banned, 800 other sites were taken down. Though most of them were conservative sites, there were a fair amount of libertarian and liberal left sites taken down too. What was the common denominator? They were all against foreign wars, the MIC, and were politically incorrect. Hence, they were banned.
Shit, just this week, those two CA MDs (the ones who questioned the WHO’s assessment of the Coronavirus) were banned off YouTube! These two MDs have lots of experience; they’ve seen many patients; and they own like 20 clinics in CA. They’re on the ground, so they know what the REAL deal is. What’s even better is that a CA news program interviewed them! They shared their findings with the world. Ah, but since they didn’t toe the Chicom/WHO line; since they questioned the orthodoxy; YouTube banned ’em after 5 million views. Oh, and here’s the best part: YouTube BRAGGED about banning that video! YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki was on Brian Stelter’s CNN program, “Reliable Sources”, flat out saying that they’d take down any video that didn’t conform to the WHO.
WRT banning and private companies, that would wash if the Big Tech companies weren’t monopolies. If they were smaller companies with comparable, worthy competitors; if people REALLY had another place to go; the private company argument would wash. However, between them, the tech giants have like 95% of social media traffic. Facebook also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, among other things. Google owns YouTube. And on it goes. With that kind of dominance, they’re more akin to public utilities rather than private companies. Just like the electric or gas company can’t deny you service if you pay for it, the Big Tech companies shouldn’t be able to ban people.
Oh, and this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone here: Big Tech didn’t have an organic start; they didn’t simply build a better mouse trap. They had help from our gov’t. CIA front venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, provided a lot of the seed money for them. Facebook started when the gov’t program, LifeLog, ended. The gov’t would like to throttle our rights, but they can’t; they have these things called the Constitution and Bill of Rights standing in their way. So, they can’t engage in censorship. They got private firms to do it for them instead. The proof in the pudding is that we don’t see any anti-trust action taken against them. DoJ would be well within its rights to do so. This hasn’t happened because they’re doing the government’s bidding.
Oh yeah, I was banned from Twitter again. It happened a while ago now. I had an account, and it was banned. I got another one, and it too was banned. I don’t know why, because I only had 520 followers on it the 2nd time. I spouted politically incorrect stuff on there, and they didn’t like it. Even before I was booted, I think that they were shadow banning me. I subsequently went to Parler (like Twitter but sans the PC Police), a much smaller platform, yet I have over 1,100 followers on there. Twitter has hundreds of millions of users, yet I only had 520 followers. Parler has like a million, yet I have over 1,100 followers on there.
Okay, that ends this rant…
This is nothing new. I’ve had a 500+ wishlist on Amazon full of controversial books that I notice from time to time has holes in it where it won’t even say what the title of the book removed was. And I don’t remember every title in my list. You can take a guess on what the book topics were about, a small nations creation leading up to WWII….
It’s not just Alex, it’s not just Roosh, it’s not just Eric. So many people are being outright banned or just shadow-banned (even my comments are shadow-banned on SOME YouTube videos, and I’m a nobody) from the means of communicating, marketing, or making a living online. Everyone being banned has the correct enemies, though, therefore I’m with them all. Don’t need to agree with everything they say. They wouldn’t fight to take away my right to speak, or sell a book, unlike the people banning them. So I have to stand with them.
Censorship and manipulation everywhere. Type in “elon musk smokes weed” on YouTube and its all corporate media videos now, as opposed to individual users. Have to go to the bottom of the results to get an unadulterated clip.
So until someone that values freedom creates a bank/payment processor (government approval required), a domain registrar (need to be rich), and an internet service provider (need to be rich and have government approval) are we pretty much screwed? They can (and will) do this to any of us.
If we lived in a free market, one could of course do these things. But we live in a corporatist/fascist society.
Is there anything we can do?
These days if you’re not getting banned, shadowbanned, downranked, etc somewhere you’re doing something wrong or never venturing outside of like minded people.
That’s a good point Brent, guess I should consider it a badge of honor. It’s like reassurance you’re on the right side of history.
It all started with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The DMCA made ISPs responsible for the content posted on their servers in exchange for being classified as an “Information Service” instead of a common carrier. If Hollywood saw that a user posted some of Hollywood’s content on an AT&T supplied server (running a web server or NNTP), they issue a legal letter telling them it has to be removed. So instead of setting up an army of people to monitor these servers, the ISPs just shut them down. This opened the door to MySpace, Geocities and a few others to host web pages in exchange for advertising. They were willing to police the boards. Then came the War On Terror®, and the modern surveillance state. Now not only did these companies have to watch out for copyright violations, now they had to look for terrorists too. And because of the global growth they probably had a hard time keeping up. So some very smart people go to Facebook and Google and set up machines to sort though the haystack. And they managed to get Hollywood and the MSM to move into the sandbox, so copyright violations become a moot point. But that didn’t work as advertised but now they’re big enough and have enough revenue to start employing an army of people to view and approve all the content.
I’m not sure what can be done at this point. I know I try to get friends and family to move away from FB, but it is so ingrained in society now I don’t think anything but another version of big centralized sites will come along. And most of the distributed systems are so difficult to set up no one will bother, even if they could do it for free and on a $35 Raspberry Pi computer.
Not at all to insult the guy but just from watching the video he seems to give off a strong vibe of being a bit of an annoying womanizer. I would imagine that somewhere along the way he really royally pissed off some girl who now she has connections in Amazon and is taking it out on his bank account.
Hi Moose,
Yes, I think Roosh is a “red pill” MGTOW dude…hence very politically incorrect. But that is just the point. He is being banned because his views hurt the feelings of the PC Priesthood. Just as I got banned by GM, for similar reasons.
The PC crowd probably seeks to make “womanizing” – sleeping with lots of chicks – some sort of hate crime. Even if it’s entirely consensual. Interestingly, this – sleeping with lots of women, consensually – is exploitation and even abuse by the PC Priesthood. But – wait – aren’t women equal? Can’t they also make informed decisions – just like men? And if a woman chooses to sleep with a man, how is the man abusing her? Or is she too addled and feeble and frail and delicate to make such a decision? Is she too addled and frail and feeble to not be gulled by the man who wants to get in her pants?
In which case, she isn’t equal… is she?
Yeah I mean womanizing in a sociopath kinda sense. Not that they all don’t manipulate each other anyway. In this situation I could see where he would really piss off an ex. I agree censorships way outta hand–It’s just when he says that the petition got so much support and still failed previously, I’m wondering if it’s really PC motivated or just vengeance motivated.
Roosh is a PUA (Pick Up Artist) and that’s the crowd his website caters to. The PUA’s are men who use the current conditions and female nature to get sex. That is they spend a lot of time and effort figuring out ways to please women at the lowest cost to them personally. Feminists don’t like this because it teaches men how to appear and act to be in the top 10% men. Much like women use makeup, clothing, cosmetic surgery, and much more.
As a rule PUAs hate MGTOWs. PUAs believe in the ‘man up’ philosophy. That is whatever women want, men need to ‘man up’ and provide it. If you’re not getting laid you need to ‘man up’ because something in you is deficient. It is still as female oriented as ‘blue pill’ just with small differences. PUAs will admonish MGTOW for not manning up, for being weak and afraid for not entering into marriage and such. To the PUA it’s all about ‘game’ and those with a strong ‘frame’ won’t ever have to worry about divorce. They are aware of the laws of divorce, family courts, and so on and do not like them, but not that they raise the price too high.
The one thing PUAs have right more or less is the SMV (Sexual Marketplace Value) idea. What they don’t realize is that the market analogy goes much further than they consider. MGTOW are the customers that say no when the price is higher than the value. They are stuck in a pay whatever the price is, no price is too high model.
They (the PUAs) are stuck…
Thanks for the explanation, Brent!
I suspect Roosh is not exactly an admirable guy, but that is precisely why I defend him – as I do Alex Jones. I am not actually defending either guy. I am defending the principle that corporate-government cartels stifling “disagreeable” speech is or ought to be alarming to people who value a free society.
I was curious spent some time reading articles on his website and the comments on them a year or two ago. That’s the best way to understand. Something I do with numerous subjects that cross my radar. I’ll find out what the person says rather than believe what someone says he says.
After that though I have no real opinion of Roosh one way or another. I see Roosh more of a person who decides he wants X and then does whatever it takes to get X without asking is X worth what it takes to get it? Which is the essence of PUA. Adapt to the circumstances, man up. I think he and his readers have some valuable insights but the main thrust of it is something I learned on my own from women themselves.
I got to a point to where I learned I have to do certain things to be attractive to most modern women and I didn’t want to do them because they made me feel bad about myself. Roosh took the other fork and did them. Then made a business of teaching them to other men. Which is why feminists and the mainstream hate him.
I used to work with a player. We go out to a pickup bar and I’d say 80% of the women he’d take home saw right through his bulls***. But they still went home with him. And quite a few would call him on weekday afternoon looking for a quickie.