The Cville Cyberpurge

Europe famously has hate speech laws, which run the gamut from banning Nazi propaganda to criticizing mass immigration.

Russia’s version of it is Article 282, which has been used on everyone from genuine Neo-Nazis and radical Islamists to the nationalist pundit Konstantin Krylov for stating that it’s “time to do away with this strange economic model [of federal subsidies to the Caucasus]”.

And yet if the United States has an exceptional degree of respect for absolute freedom of speech, encodified in the First Amendment, this is mitigated by its organic “Society 282,” as the Russian nationalist Egor Prosvirnin has poetically called it.

In the days the Unite the Rite march in Charlottesville, in which one antifa counter-protester was killed by a Neo-Nazi going postal with his car (the MSM version of events; reality might be rather different), Society 282 has gone on a veritable purge of Alt Right and Dissident Right content on cyberspace.

Too many people to name have been banned from Twitter.

Pax Dickinson is the most prominent one to come to mind. He was an easy target, since he has already been removed from the platform several times, though Twitter usually waits for new accounts to (re)gain popularity before kicking them back into purgatory. The trigger for the latest banning might have been his detailed, first-hand coverage of the Charlottesville rally, which features evidence that the Virginia State Policy pursued a strategy of corraling Alt Right protesters into antifa in a deliberate attempt to provoke violence.

The Alt Right blogger Christopher Cantwall has been banned from Facebook, Paypal, Mailchimp, and… OkCupid, just for good measure.

PayPal has banned American Renaissance, which had nothing to do with Unite the Right.

It is two particular cases, however, that are perhaps the most illustrative – and foreboding, at least for those who still value “freeze peach” (to use the derogatory antifa term).

VDARE

First off, Paypal has banned VDARE from using its services. Now VDARE is far more “dissident Right” than it is Alt Right. Two of the biggest names there are John Derbyshire and Steve Sailer.

John Derbyshire is an elderly English essayist, very milquetoast in manners, who campaigns againt mass immigration and enforced diversity in his columns; but heavens forbid those proles take their concerns to the streets (“what an unsavory bunch!“).

And Steve Sailer… well, does he even need an intro, here of all places? His ideology is “citizenism,” which is essentially civic nationalism informed by HBD realism.

And, as many of you know, both are core contributors to this very webzine, The Unz Review.

This is rather portentuous, since the Unz Review/VDARE cluster is, between Sailer, James Thompson, a bevy of other dissident right figures, and the ghost of Razib Khan, a central hub of HBD realistic commentary on the web. On the great map of the Dark Enlightement and the Alt Right, it is also surely the closest to political “normalcy” on the Great Chain of Respectability.

Any serious moves on the part of Society 282 and tech giants against this cluster will surely herald the onset of full-fledged Lysenkoism in the US.

The Daily Stormer

I suspect The Daily Stormer is to the Alt Right/Dissident Right what normie journalists are to Steve Sailer: A good percentage of them read it, but far fewer want to admit it.

Insane, over the top Nazi shtick; it’s not much of an exaggeration to say Andrew Anglin is more hardcore than Hitler. It’s repulsive, to be sure, but also morbidly enchanting. Because Anglin is one heck of a funny writer – you have to be somewhat inured to having your moral sensibilities offended to really appreciate it, but many of his people are /pol/ veterans, after all. It’s not hard to see why, at close to 3 million monthly visits, it has far eclipsed the weather-related forum to become by far the most popular website on the Neo-Nazi Right.

Curiously, unlike the older wehraboo generation of Nazis, Anglin is strongly pro-Russian and pro-Putin – and it’s not even on account of ignorance about what Putin actually represents:

Here’s the thing. Vladimir Putin isn’t even really a fascist. He’s a conservative populist leader who’s doing his best to improve Russia’s situation by whatever means are necessary. He promotes traditional values because that’s what will hold the nation together.

He’s not even an ethnic nationalist, in the full sense of the term; Russia isn’t a nation, it’s a medieval-type multi-ethnic empire, including Moslems, Jews and other non-Whites. And Putin has no intention of changing that fact.

But he’s running a multi-ethnic state the way it needs to be run: by violently suppressing all rebellion, encouraging national pride, keeping the different ethnic groups mostly separated geographically (outside of Moscow) and closely monitoring all dissident groups.

Though his second in command and technical manager, Andrew Auernheimer (the hacker troll known as “weev”) is… another matter.

Though this certainly hasn’t stopped the presstitutes from trying to put their own spin on things:

… [Andrew Auernheimer] currently lives in Ukraine and has called on its pro-western, anti-Putin president, Petro Poroshenko, to step down.

Anyhow, the stormers have had such a barrage of punishment unleashed upon them by the powers that be that they have been effectively “unpersoned” from the Internet in the past few days.

(1) DNS service provider GoDaddy gave The Daily Stormer a one day warning to take their business elsewhere.

(2) They took it to Google of all places, which promptly suspended service within a couple of hours.

(3) They then tried dailystormer.wang, but the “sneaky, bucktoothed Chinese” made sure that didn’t last long.

(4) The content delivery network Cloudflare ceased providing service, making the site vulnerable to DDoS attacks that promptly shut it down.

It is noteworthy that Cloudflare has long boasted of its absolute commitment to content neutrality, even being criticized for providing support to Islamic terrorist groups.

But a group of Neo-Nazis who don’t appear to have killed anybody to date – apart, perhaps, from Russians in Ukraine, if weev’s boasts are to be believed, but Hillary McCain and the Blue Checkmarks don’t consider them to be humans anyway – are 1,488 negative social justice karma points too much for them.

So much so that they are willing to invalidate their one truly unique selling point for the sake of virtue signalling.

(5) When Cloudflare service ended, The Daily Stormer’s hosting provider was revealed to have been Digital Ocean, which promptly ditched them as well.

(6) Finally, they went to the based Putlerreich… which promptly fobbed them off as well.

The T-Journal has the story.

The Stormers registered dailystormer.ru with Ru-Center on August 15. A day later, the Russian web censor Roskomnadzor sent them a letter requested them to stop delegating the domain in the .ru zone.

However, this had no legal force, since it was not backed up by a court judgment; it not realistic to procure it on such short notice. Therefore, it was something that the Russian registrar had done on its own initiative.

Not that it curried Russia favor with any of the Blue Checkmarks.

While the initial reports of The Daily Stormer joining back up with Putler got tens of thousands of RT’s, the response to the follow-up that it was kicked out within a day was… *crickets*.

The Ascent of Society 282

There are three big forces that are driving the end of the end of the classical liberal idea of freedom of speech as a foundational principle in the United States.

Generational change

Millennials are far less supportive of free speech (expressed as “support for censoring offensive statements about minorities” – as hazy and Orwellian a definition as you can get, considering that one can choose to be offended by anything) than any other generation. Maybe “Generation Z(yklon)” will reverse this trend 2-3 decades down the line, as Audacious Epigone hopes, but don’t count your chickens before the eggs are hatched.

E-mobs

The braying Twitter mob can roar its condemnation of some individual on a scale never before seen in history. Historically, a poet or philosopher ostracized from his home city could wanter off to seek his fortune in a faraway land. Only a limited number of people could ever participate in a witch-hunt due to restrictions of physical space and information flow. The Internet and social media allows the instant participation of millions in Two Minute mobs, creating unimaginable and unprecedented pressure on tech companies, employers, student conduct boards, etc. to purge them.

Tech oligopolies

The products of tech companies are more and more intertwined with our everyday lives.

The most germane aspect of this influence for dissidents are media platforms: The complex of DNS registrars, web hosts, and CDN providers that you need to run a website; the social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) behemoths that account for an ever greater percentage of news delivery; the online payments systems that finance them.

But it doesn’t stop there. As Egor Kholmogorov succinctly remarked, “In this new world, if your politics aren’t approved of by the owners of Uber, or Airbnb, or food delivery services – you will have to walk by foot and remain hungry and stay at home.” Airbnb has been permanently deactivating the accounts of people it suspected of planning to march on the Alt Right side in Charlottesville. Uber has kicked off people who participated as well.

This trend is only going to intensify. Cars are going to get automated. Google Glass or something similar is a matter of time as well. Combining them with reputational apps will allow the global village to identify its pariahs on sight.

As the Marxists said, you can’t have an ideological superstructure without the economic base; by cutting off the latter, you can strangle the former.

Global Impact

For all the SJW retrogression, America is still the one place in the world that is most firmly committed to the ideal of free speech.

Considering the global economic scope of America’s tech giants, and the hegemony of its culture, the creeping introduction of the “hate speech” exception towards the First Amendment will have global reverberations.

Proponents of liberty will no longer even be able to say, “But what about America?”

And there will be a rapid universalization of authoritarian Social Justice as a global values system.

Solutions

These fall into three bins, though each has their own very big problems.

(There used to be a fourth one, namely, Moldbug/Curtis Yarvin’s ideas about neocameralism and Silicon Valley techno-monarchy. Congrats, you sort of got that. How’s it working out?).

Exile to Lagos

This is the oldest solution – just flee from the mob to somewhere a bit saner.

This is already happening. In the past, many people moved to the United States, for its more congenial intellectual (and legal!) atmosphere. Mark Steyn and The Derb immediately come to mind.

More recently, crimethinkers have started an exodus into Eastern Europe. Budapest already hosts a small Alt Right hub, Matt Forney having decamped there. AltRight.com’s Vincent Law is based in Saint-Petersburg.

Problem: The aborigines don’t necessary care all that much for your ideology or welfare, especially if you get in the way of favorable horse-trades.

Somewhat hilariously, Orban’s Hungary is the only European country that Richard Spencer has been deported from to date.

And as the recent experience of The Daily Stormer has shown, Russia isn’t any nicer to foreign nationalists than to its own, if and when the heat gets turned on.

As a matter of fact, some of the kremlins might have just decided to dump Trump overboard because they got very very sad hearing about the big bad Orange Nazi from CNN – a testament, if there ever was one, to the sheer power and influence of the American deep state and its propaganda organs.

The big, sad secret of ROG is that it’s about as real as Trump’s collusion with Russia. I.e., it doesn’t exist.

There is no escape from ZOG.

Alternative ecosystems

As the tech giants have grown more domineering, they have spawned a set of alternatives.

For instance, Gab.ai for Twitter (my profile there: https://gab.ai/akarlin, for whenever I finally get shoahed from Twitter), and Hatreon (https://hatreon.us/akarlin/), an alternative to Patreon that also hosts a variety of personalities considered to be too unreputable for the handshakeworthy version.

This, too, has many problems.

First, the Internet’s infrastructure is highly complex and interconnected, and even these sites still need higher-level resources to run properly. A concerted effort from establishment players can squeeze out the upstarts. Even as I write this, Hatreon is down, because Digital Ocean pulled its web hosting support in the wake of the scandal around The Daily Stormer thanks to the public connection made by a Blue Checkmark journalist.

Second, the lure of money can be even more powerful than the threat of retribution. Twitter, too, had a reputation for free speech absolutism back during the Wikileaks-Cablegate era. That ended as soon as it started rivaling Facebook and attracting celebrities and other handshakeworthy people to its platform. The CEO of Gab.ai, Andrew Torba, has been blacklisted from the Silicon Valley social scene, including the Y Combinator start-up incubator, for Tweeting a “build the wall” meme, which apparently made some Y Combinator members feel “unsafe.” There are powerful material and reputational incentives for such people to get back in line.

Into the Deep Web

If we are fated to drift into a hardcore cyberpunk dystopia controlled by faceless tech oligopolies, then we might as well start living up to the genre’s aesthetics.

For instance, The Daily Stormer already has a deep web presence at http://dstormer6em3i4km.onion/ (can be accessed using the TOR Browser). The deep web hosts all kinds of underground markets for shady and illegal products, such as drugs, stolen information, casinos, weapons, CP, even hitman services (though it’s likely most of those are feds).

In the dankest timeline, where Zuckerberg lords over a mulatto underclass clicking sponsored content all day, soylent is the only legal food, and your basic income determined by social justice quotient of your social media posts and shares, it is feasible that all the cool blogs and websites and videos retreat into samizdat in the deep web, leaving Picus News – the collective CNN/FOX/Buzzfeed – on the surface.

There already exists a readymade solution for financing difficulties once Paypal and the half a dozen other players cut you off: Cryptocurrencies.

A more exotic variant that I have suggested in the past is to create a social media/communications platofrm on blockchain-based principles. This might be the only viable longterm solution as the Bilderbergers and Picus TV continue to extend their tentacles.