Welcome to the Digital Reign of Terror
At the end of last week, both Facebook and Twitter banned a sitting US president for allegedly using their respective platforms to “incite violence.” Although this may come as a surprise to some, it shouldn’t. Radical leftists are sore winners. When they gain power, they’re not gracious, welcoming victors. They’re vengeful hunters fixated on retribution. Rhetorical showboating isn’t just a campaign tactic; they mean it. They double down. From the beginning, the left’s promises to bring “unity” were a form of Orwellian double-speak meaning the exact opposite. Their version of “unity” is an ideologically homogenous populace achieved by stomping on the necks of the “deplorable” opposition.
Compliance or death: That’s the authoritarian leftist concept of “unity.”
Make no mistake, it’s not just run-of-the-mill ’90s “Democrats” that are in control of the US government now. Even the seemingly milquetoast leaders are simply puppets for a radical version of authoritarian leftism. It’s a bitter, unhinged, and sanctimonious ideology that many of you assumed would stay confined to liberal arts campuses and zany academic articles about “decolonizing computational sciences.”
But it didn’t stay there. It’s metastasized to the point that the United States House of Representatives has banned the “gendered” terms: mother, daughter, father, and son. Our incoming president will re-introduce critical race theory indoctrination into government-funded institutions. And our apparent education secretary will likely attempt to implement a similar program across the nation’s public schools — just like he helped do in Connecticut.
Now that the authoritarian left is in power, the purging can begin. Thanks to their postmodern roots, the radical left has always had a unique talent for hyperbolizing the language of their opponents. When they want to silence you, they simply construe whatever you’ve said in the worst possible way, conflate your language with violence, and then use that to justify any sort of despotic behavior they desire.
When Trump posts a video urging people to go home peacefully, Facebook and Twitter remove it and ban him from their platforms for “inciting violence.” They rationalize the bans by noting that he failed to parrot the accepted narrative that allegations of election fraud should be dismissed out of hand as ludicrous and conspiratorial. One might expect an honest democratic system to welcome doubt and transparently work to assuage any fears of malfeasance, not suppress discussion and malign skeptics. If doubting the integrity of the election was unreasonable at first, it certainly became much more reasonable after big tech and the corporate media establishment admonished all of us to shut up about it and stop asking questions. Or else.
Regardless, self-described thought leaders and other woke zombies here in Silicon Valley and around the country got the message:
Unleash the censors.
It’s now a free-for-all for the Corporate Thought Police, and in the past few days we’ve witnessed the beginning of their Digital Reign of Terror. Below are a few of the major online community choke points around which your corporate woke zealots will now wrap their hands and squeeze with glee.
1. Revoking Personal Access
First, they will ban you from mainstream communities like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Over the past few days, we’ve seen heretics of the woke religion lose hundreds and even thousands of followers on Twitter. In addition to Trump, Twitter has suspended both large and small accounts accused of wrong-think, including Sidney Powell, General Flynn, the Free Julian Assange account, Anna Khachiyan* and her Red Scare Podcast, Tom Fitton from Judicial Watch, Lin Wood, and even Techno_Fog. Most of them have been suspended permanently.
Facebook didn’t stop at banning Trump, either. They added both conservatives, like Elijah Schaffer, and non-leftist liberal groups, like the #WalkAway movement, to their blacklist. YouTube has deleted the channel for Steve Bannon’s The War Room podcast and thrown Millennial Millie in YouTube jail for posting a video about Trump’s Twitter ban.
You may simply shrug, telling yourself that it doesn’t matter too much because you’re not quite as radical as some of the aforementioned afflicted; that if you just keep your head down and don’t say anything too conspicuous, you’ll be left alone. But you’re wrong. Your day will come, too.
Once you’ve been banned from a major platform, the next obvious remedy is to switch to a smaller platform more committed to free expression: Gab, MeWe, or Parler, for example. Which brings us to the next choke point.
2. Revoking Access to Alternatives
Almost half of all Internet traffic comes through mobile devices. More importantly, over 80% of all social media usage occurs on mobile. Once independent apps become viable options, the next step authoritarian thought police use is to ban those independent apps from mobile devices altogether. Gab, for example, has been banned from the Apple store and from the Google store for years. The justification is that Gab doesn’t sufficiently “moderate” its community. In other words, Apple and Google won’t let a Gab app on your phone unless the company implements its own Ministry of Truth to keep counter-narrative ideas suppressed. Gotta keep those SJWs employed.
After Twitter suspended the TeamTrump account on Friday, provoking many Trump supporters to rush to Parler as an alternative, Google immediately removed Parler’s app from its store, and Apple followed suit shortly thereafter. Within 24 hours, big tech had conspired to revoke access to Parler as an alternative to Twitter for millions of users.
Of course, even without access to an app, consumers might still use sites like Parler by going over the web directly. Which brings us to the next choke point.
3. Revoking Access to Technology for Building Alternatives
Websites don’t operate in a vacuum. They rely on other technology, and gated access to that technology can be used to bully independent companies into submission, or to punish them if they don’t comply with the imperious demands of rabid leftist zealots.
So you can access Parler over the web. Unless you can’t. Websites like Parler rely on hosting services. Hosting services own and operate a large number of computer servers connected to the Internet, and they rent out these servers to companies like Parler. This arrangement allows companies to quickly and easily scale their business by increasing the number of servers and necessary bandwidth as needed.
Independent companies could, of course, build their own server farms and lay their own fiber optic cables between those servers and telecommunications hubs, but most independent websites can’t do that because it’s prohibitively expensive to do at a small scale, especially when growth needs can be sporadic and often unpredictable. So instead, they hire a hosting service, which exploits economies of scale to provide dynamic server and bandwidth capacity to thousands of clients at an affordable cost.
Whomever controls mainstream hosting service providers has the power to crush independent websites by simply booting them off the service, so it would be tragic if hosting providers themselves were part of the authoritarian leftist Borg. While there are technically many hosting service providers, the three best-known providers that are capable of supporting the demanding needs of a social media site like Parler or similar alternatives to Twitter and Facebook are Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft Azure, and, of course, the ubiquitous Google.
Tragically, Parler is using AWS. Or at least it was. On Saturday, Amazon announced it was suspending Parler effective Sunday evening. This means that, by the time you read this, Parler will be dead. At least until they rebuild without AWS, if they can.
“We’re working and scrambling to do this,” lamented Parler’s Chief Policy Officer, Amy Peikoff, “but it’s not something you can do really quickly, so there’s a good chance that we will be down for a while.”
It’s not just hosting service providers that can disrupt independent companies like Parler. Modern websites rely heavily on intricately connected third-party services, and when a large player like Amazon or Apple places a company on its blacklist, many smaller organizations fall in line out of fear of being labeled guilty by association. The CEO of Parler, John Matze, explained to Fox’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday:
“It’s devastating is what it is. It’s an assault on everybody. They all worked together to make sure at the same time we would lose access to not only our apps, but they are actually shutting all our servers off…and it’s not just these three companies. Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us, too, on the same day.”
When Bartiromo asked if this could put Parler out of business, Matze gloomily explained, “It would put anybody out of business. They could destroy anybody.”
If, by some heroic effort — not to mention a monumental infusion of cash from upon high — Parler manages to build its own replacement for AWS and other canceled services, it’s still not out of the woods. You’d think it would be, of course. You’d think if a company owns its own hardware connected to the Internet that it would finally be out from under the jackboots of leftist busybodies like Jack Dorsey and Jeff Bezos. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
Which brings us to yet another choke point. Can you feel the squeeze?
4. Revoking Access to Internet Infrastructure
That choke point is the phonebook of the Internet, or the Domain Name System (DNS). To navigate to a website like Parler, for example, consumers might visit a search engine and click on the links provided. But savvy users know and expect propagandized engines like Google to make finding blacklisted sites like Parler close to (if not actually) impossible, so instead they’ll go directly to the URL box at the top of their favorite browser and type in “parler.com.” Assuming that the browser itself hasn’t been assimilated into the leftist censorship collective, they’ll expect the browser to promptly take them to Parler’s servers, thus bypassing intellectual gatekeepers like Apple, Google, and Amazon.
But it might not.
You see, your browser doesn’t actually know what “parler.com” means. “Parler.com” is not an address — it’s just a nickname of sorts. When you tell it to visit “parler.com,” your computer first visits a DNS server, which looks up the name “parler.com” and responds with an IP address such as “65.8.168.27.” That number represents an actual address. It’s directions to a computer somewhere on the Internet that is owned or controlled by Parler. That address — and that address alone — tells your computer how to get to Parler. Without it, the text “parler.com” is meaningless.
Without an honest DNS server pointing your computer to Parler, you’re not likely to ever find your way there. There are many DNS servers in the world, both paid and free. You likely use whichever DNS server that your Internet Service Provider tells your computer to use. Do you trust that Comcast will always tell your computer to use a DNS server that grants you access to Parler.com? How about AT&T?
You can change DNS servers manually. Some of the most popular free DNS servers are OpenDNS, Cloudflare, and that creepy old stalker, Google. But the DNS system is an effective choke point that authoritarians are already quite adept at manipulating. Although anyone can operate a DNS server, censors like the Chinese government have decades of practice at effectively using methods such as DNS poisoning to control access to unsanctioned websites. Faced with a coordinated effort by major tech companies to censor you at the DNS level, you’re likely to lose. Even juggernauts like Facebook and Google end up on the losing side when China actively uses these tactics against them.
An Endless Battle
We could get deeper and more technical in our discussion of how authoritarian leftists can and will censor dissenting voices, especially now that the United States government is their official ally. Before long, we’d find ourselves talking about the need to build a parallel Internet entirely, and then a banking system, and then the need to protect both against military action by irate governments with itchy censorship fingers.
Theoretically, the discussion about technical attacks and countermeasures is endless, but with each level of increasing sophistication outwitting the censors becomes increasingly unlikely. There are no silver bullets here, save one: to fight.
The way to end the Digital Reign of Terror is to fight the culture war. If you work for a tech company hellbent on censoring free speech in the name of corporate virtue signaling and vapid, feel-good platitudes about “unity,” quit. Take your talents to an upstart rival, or start your own company if you’ve got the gumption. Stop working for the Empire. A disgruntled stormtrooper is still an agent of the Imperial forces, no matter how much he grumbles under his breath about it while he’s firing his blaster.
If you don’t work for big tech, you can still fight by standing up against the movement to normalize authoritarian leftist culture. It’s not normal. It’s not honest. It’s not American. Use your voice. Take the reputation hit. Speak out. You can’t run from it. You can’t hide.
Understand: Leftist censorship is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity. Or remorse. Or fear. And it absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you are dead.
*Correction: Anna’s podcast account, The Red Scare, was banned from Twitter but it turns out that Anna subsequently abandoned her personal Twitter account voluntarily.
