On Feb. 14, I received this email from Medium.com:

Hello,

We are writing to notify you that your Medium.com account is in violation of our rules, and your profile and posts will no longer be publicly available on Medium.

Harassment

Medium exists to share and discuss ideas. We don’t tolerate harassment, which includes:

— Bullying, threatening, or shaming someone, or posting things likely to encourage others to do so

— Posting copies of private communications between private individuals without the explicit consent of all parties to the communication

–Doxing, which includes not only private or obscure personal information but also the aggregation of publicly available information to target, shame, blackmail, harass, intimidate, threaten, or endanger

— Using Medium features like responses, private notes, mentions, follows, story requests, or writer requests in a way intended to annoy or harass someone

— Posting intimate or explicit images taken or posted without the subject’s express consent

Related conduct

We do not allow posts or accounts that engage in on-platform, off-platform, or cross-platform campaigns of targeting, harassment, hate speech, violence, or disinformation. We may consider off-platform actions in assessing a Medium account, and restrict access or availability to that account.

Your work will remain accessible to you while signed in, and may be exported at any time by following the instructions here, but will appear as unavailable to others.

Your Medium membership, if you have one, will be cancelled and any remaining funds you may have prepaid will be returned to you.

Medium Trust & Safety

There was nothing in this email to describe how anything I had done had specifically violated these rules. So I sent them an email inquiring what content had caused this suspension, and what I might do to get my account reinstated. No answer. So I emailed again, and again. Nothing.

Yesterday, however, it was reported that Medium.com had also suspended the accounts of Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, and Laura Loomer — all figures identified as “alt-right” — and it may therefore be surmised that, like Twitter and Facebook, Medium.com has begun to effectively prohibit conservatives from using their platform.

Notice how labeling people "far right" is used to justify online purges, without bothering to ask, "In what way are these people farther 'right' than others?" https://t.co/vpiNcUA65B — The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) February 22, 2018

I first began writing at Medium.com in June 2016. Some friends of mine had occasionally used Medium.com for long-form writing, and I saw the advantages of the platform in technological terms. Several of my posts there reached a readership of more than 10,000, and I appreciated this, even though I derived no direct revenue from it.

Mike Cernovich has announced his intention to sue Medium.com for violating his “civil rights,” and I wish him success in that endeavor, although it has always been my personal policy never to sue anyone. Lawsuits are a headache that I strive to avoid, and while I have been forced to defend myself in court — and won — being a plaintiff just isn’t something that appeals to me. Reporting on bias in the media becomes problematic if you are suing the people you’re reporting about.

And that’s what this is — another media bias story. The days of the Internet as an unrestrained Wild West frontier for the dissemination of information are coming to an end, as we see emerging online the same liberal bias that has warped newspapers, magazines and TV news into an Orwellian exercise in propaganda and disinformation. Companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook are suppressing facts and commentary that contradict the Cult of Social Justice that prevails inside the “progressive” echo chamber of the university-educated elite.

Although this silencing of dissent has harmed me personally and professionally, I keep in mind that this is not about me. Nobody other than my family and friends really cares what happens to me and, while I consider regular readers here as my friends, what would happen if this blog got taken offline? For a few days or a few weeks, perhaps, there might be some attention paid to my suppression, but “out of sight, out of mind” as they say — almost no one now mentions how my @rsmccain account was banished from Twitter two years ago.

Those of us who are banished are like Bukharin or Trotsky during the era of Stalinism, airbrushed out of the old photos and excluded from the history books, becoming “unpersons,” as it were. We dwell in a sort of an online gulag, occasionally mentioned in samizdat publications which the hegemonic powers have been unable to suppress — yet.

When Medium.com announced its new rules Feb. 7, the claim was that this was to “strengthen our community,” while the evidence indicates this was merely a pretext for banishing dissent from the site. Medium.com is a Democrat Party propaganda operation, and therefore must purge anyone who disrupts this partisan and ideological conformity.

Do not be deceived about what is happening here. It is not a paranoid “conspiracy theory” to describe the self-evident facts, even if the ideological enforcers defend these purges by libelously accusing the suppressed of “harassment,” “abuse,” “hate,” etc. After their candidate was defeated in 2016, the Democrats decided that the reason for their loss was that their opponents had been too successful in online activism. Consequently, a crackdown on conservative voices was organized in Internet firms as a way to tilt the playing field online, much as CNN and other so-called “mainstream” news operations tilt the playing field.

What does history teach us about the consequences of this kind of suppression? I’m sure the geniuses running “Trust & Safety” operations at these companies haven’t studied those lessons very carefully.

“Truth is great and will prevail,” as Thomas Jefferson said, but the eventual triumph of the truth can be long delayed by oppressors, as was the case in the former Soviet Union, a regime of lies which took more than 70 years to collapse from its own inherent contradictions.

Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.







Heading to #CPAC2018. This trip supported with reader contributions via PayPal. https://t.co/s7l9w0Gb7U — The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) February 22, 2018

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