The Censorship of Alternative Media Is Virtual Book Burning

(Psst: The FTC wants me to remind you that this website contains affiliate links. That means if you make a purchase from a link you click on, I might receive a small commission. This does not increase the price you'll pay for that item nor does it decrease the awesomeness of the item. ~ Daisy)

Author of Be Ready for Anything and Bloom Where You’re Planted online course

Recent discussions about an executive order that would “help protect” conservatives from bias on social media have brought a bone of contention to the forefront. Are alternative and conservative media actually being censored or are non-mainstream journalists and bloggers just whining?

As the owner of a website that is demonstrably facing censorship, I can tell you that from my point of view, we Americans are currently in the midst of a virtual “book burning” akin to the ones we look back on in shame.

The history of book burning

As early as 221 BC in China, the burning of books has always foreshadowed a crackdown on dissent and information. It’s probably no surprise that Adolph Hitler ordered the burning of “subversive” books in Nazi Germany, and the McCarthy era brought public burnings of any book that could be – if one’s imagination was stretched to the absolute limit – related to communism.  There are many cases of modern-day book-burning, and it generally links to opposing views, either religious, social, or political.

In the past, torching texts was a tactic used by conquerors to wipe the slate of history clean. In 213 B.C., China’s Emperor Shih Huang Ti thought that if he burned all the documents in his kingdom, history would begin with him. (He went as far as burying alive those scholars who continued to teach old ideas.)

Eight centuries later, legend says, Caliph Omar burned some 200,000 objectionable books belonging to the library of Alexandria, warming the city’s baths for six months.

When the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258, the waters of the Tigris were said to have run black with ink from all the destroyed books.

In 1492, after the Spanish conquered Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Western Europe, they allegedly emptied many of the city’s treasured libraries and set their contents all to flame.

Then there are those who have burned books to silence opposing views.

Catholics torched the writings of Protestant reformer Martin Luther.

The Nazis lit a towering bonfire of books by Jewish and leftist writers such as Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud and Upton Sinclair.

And many 1950s Americans, spurred by Senator Joseph McCarthy, hunted for procommunism books to burn. (source)

Nothing like a handy memory hole, right?

These days, as more and more people turn to the internet for essays and news, dissenting views are more often found online than in paperback. And there are people in power who want this to stop because particularly after the last election, they’ve seen the power the internet has to change the entire course of a country.

Big Tech and Big Media hold most of the microphones and they like it that way. They tend to be united politically and they’ve been busily working toward silencing opposing views on the internet, branding them as “dangerous” or “ignorant.” Members of the alternative media, writers of alternative health news, and opinion bloggers are being censored at a rapid clip.

How is silencing opposing views on the internet any different than burning a library filled with inconvenient information?

First, we need to define modern censorship.

Opposing views on the internet can be silenced in a number of ways. Keep in mind you don’t have to like the examples I provide here. If they came for these people or websites, they can come for your favorites next until all we have left is a government-controlled media. This has happened in China and Venezuela, just to name a couple of places.

.Some of the ways our virtual books are being burned are deplatforming (when people can no longer publicly express their opinions), being hidden by search engines (when readers can no longer find the information), and financial starvation (when site owners can no longer afford to keep running the website or pay writers and researchers.)

Some examples of deplatforming

The first way is called deplatforming. This means that all of the places where a person or entity was once able to be heard are taken away. Next, they attack the earning potential of websites. Soon, the sites under attack are only able to be located if you’ve bookmarked them. If they’re able to even stay in business. I wrote recently about the costs of running a website the size of mine, which is only a fraction of the cost of big sites like Infowars or Natural News

Let’s go into more detail about deplatforming. Again, it doesn’t matter if you think these sites are the best thing since sliced bread or if you think the people running them are lunatics. Free speech doesn’t just mean the speech with which you agree.

Take Mike Adams of Natural News for example. Love him or hate him, he has a massive following of people who have found his work valuable. He has been removed from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Because Adams has the financial means, he responded by starting his own version of YouTube for the banned and censored called Brighteon.

But even worse for Adams is the fact that he got delisted from Google. In this business, Google is just about everything. You can talk about Duck Duck Go and Bing all you want. Google is the leviathan of the industry and most readers use it. Being delisted means that even if someone searches for an article on your site with your site name, the article will not show up in the results.

This also happened to Alex Jones and his site Infowars. He was deplatformed by Facebook, Apple, YouTube, and Spotify, all at about the same time, which certainly suggests all the Big Tech companies are in cahoots. It wasn’t long after that Jones’s days at Twitter were also over.

This has happened to quite a few other alternative media sites, as I wrote last year.

Yesterday, the alternative media purge was boldly advanced in a coordinated effort to silence people who dissent from establishment views. It’s just one more step toward a monopoly on information by those who hate freedom. At this rate, they’ll soon have unquestioned access to the minds of more than 2 billion people. And this should terrify everyone who wants to be free to question the status quo and to seek a wide range of information.

Hundreds of alternative media site administrators logged onto Facebook to discover that their accounts had been removed. Soon after, many of these sites and their writers found that their Twitter accounts had also been suspended.

Popular pages like The AntiMedia (2.1 million fans), The Free Thought Project (3.1 million fans), Press for Truth (350K fans),  Police the Police (1.9 million fans), Cop Block (1.7 million fans), and Punk Rock Libertarians (125K fans) are just a few of the ones which were unpublished. (source)

Another prime example of deplatforming was Sayer Ji’s newsletter service suddenly closing down his account without notice or appeal. Ji’s website, GreenMedInfo, had hundreds of thousands of subscribers when MailChimp closed them down for “anti-vaccine content.”

GreenMedInfo has used Mailchimp as an email service provider for over 10 years, with an account in good standing and excellent compliance relative to the industry statistics. They’ve charged us, on average, $3,000 a month to send out our free newsletter to a global subscriber base of over 300,000, all who voluntarily opted into our list to receive our content. Since 2007, we’ve used their service for sending out hundreds of millions of free newsletter emails to over 200 countries around the world. We have never sent content to individuals without their consent, nor without them first asking us to do so. (source)

GreenMed Info was also banned from Pinterest.

Why don’t we have the right to get information from an expert researcher who disagrees with the status quo? Why don’t we have the right to opposing points of view on a wide variety of topics? Are we deemed too ignorant to figure out what’s fact and what’s fiction?

Do you know what they call a government that has a total lock on information the public is allowed to access?

China.

North Korea.

Pick your communist government of choice where alternative information is outlawed.

Google keeps “updating” alternative media out of business.

Google is a massive purveyor of traffic to any website. Whether you personally use Google as your search engine doesn’t matter. 117 billion Google searches are done every day. So when they type in a question looking for the answer to a question and alternative sources are five pages back, those people are unlikely to get that far and find our information.

You may or may not have heard about Google’s infamous algorithm changes. Every few months, the web search engine performs an update and sites either win or lose. Sometimes they lose big. The most recent update, nicknamed the Medic Update, is analyzed here.

In each of these examples, you have a passionate subgroup that is much more vocal online (read: linking more) than a silent majority that reflects mainstream viewpoints.

It seems that in the Medic Update Google decided they couldn’t risk passionate alternative viewpoints overwhelming the search results on sensitive YMYL topics.

The last major update was in July, which was then tweaked again in August. These updates targeted alternative health sites to “protect” people from “dangerous information.” Sites that question vaccines, pharmaceuticals as the first line for everything, or promote nutritional changes over medication got buried in the update.

Many of the alternative health sites that declined were leaders in their niche, like DrAxe, SelfHacked, Mercola, or WellnessMama. However, much of their authority came from other similar sites, and rarely did they manage to break into earning links from sites with extremely high TrustRank.

Sites that gained in the latest Google algorithm update, like Examine.com, UpToDate.com, HealthLine, MedLinePlus.gov, and Drugs.com all managed to earn a significant number of links from mainstream, high TrustRank websites. (source)

Examine.com begs to differ with the claim that they gained.

We’re finally posting this after a recent search-engine update, but past updates weren’t any gentler. Over the past 2.5 years, Google has decreased traffic to Examine.com by roughly 90%.

Examine.com's SEO traffic is way down.

Let’s be clear: Google owes us nothing. They are a private organization, they can do whatever they want.

And obviously I’m a little biased — I’ve been working on Examine.com for over eight years now.

But I would argue that we provide more reliable, nuanced, and honest information than anyone else out there. If Google’s goal is to organize information and help people find what they are looking for while protecting them from scammers, they should see in us an ally for many health topics.

The latest update was roughly a month ago, and it essentially wiped us out. (source)

The “Medic Update” seemed to focus in particular on websites that provided information about vaccine choice and alternative medicine.

I personally got hit in the tweak of this algorithm change, about a month after the original, although out of more than 2000 published articles less than 5% contains alternative medical content. (This article probably isn’t going to help my case.) The graph below is my traffic only from Google, which is a massive highway to get readers to my website. You can clearly see the plummet.

Ouch. This has definitely hurt. Not in just getting fewer people here, but in the pocket, too. Which leads me to the next way our virtual books are being burned.

Alternative sites are losing money hand over fist.

When Alex Jones got deplatformed, not only did he lose access to millions of followers, he lost a massive chunk of money too. First, his advertising network dropped him, then other advertisers headed for the hills, leaving him with an estimated $5 million a year in lost revenue.

And Jones is not alone. In the same article where I outlined the costs of running my website, I also explained in detail previously how websites like mine make money. When blogs and websites lose the ability to fund the expenses, at some point, they’re going to have no option but to fold.

There are multiple ways that alternative media outlets are losing money.

The Mind Unleashed, a fantastic website where I get a lot of my own news, was recently dropped without warning by their advertising network.

The AntiMedia and The Free Thought Project were both hit by the alternative media purge that I mentioned early, resulting in a loss of reach to millions of followers, which in return leads to a loss of revenue. And in this business, believe me, out of sight is out of mind. This has happened to me, too. Suddenly, with the last update, my pageviews plummeted from about 20,000 per day to 6,000 per day. When your income is dependent upon people getting to your website, that can dramatically decrease your income.

Other people have suddenly lost their merchant accounts that process credit card payments for their products, Alex Jones being one of them.

YouTube has demonetized thousands of videos and creators with alternative points of view. PayPal, GoFundMe, and Patreon have disabled the accounts of people considered to be “alt-right.”

Basically, Big Tech and Big Media can and will starve content creators out of business if they don’t like what the websites and videos have to say.

Don’t get me wrong. I find some of the points of view that have been censored to be repugnant. But free speech is free speech. If you truly believe in our First Amendment right to dissent, share our grievances, and have a free press, even abhorrent opinions are covered. While the extreme levels of this crackdown have hit more extreme websites first, never think that it won’t continue until only a homogenized and politically correct media is all we have left.

Fake News

The new catchphrase to brush of any web content you don’t like is “fake news.”

While some information out there is decidedly slanted (in this article I had videos from CNN before and after the clip was cut to portray a completely different story – of course, the videos were promptly removed from YouTube) other information that is called “fake news” is just stuff the reader, search engine, or social media outlet doesn’t like. This article from Salon delves into the phenomenon of calling any outlet with which you disagree “fake news.

Facebook has rolled out its own Ministry of Truth ala Orwell by having their “fact-checkers” go through posts and add an article from a site they like better to inform readers about the veracity of the article. Trouble is, the fact checks come from decidedly political outlets but are presented as the unbiased truth.

Of course, if your website is branded “fake news” then you are on the road to Silenceville in any of the multitudes of ways discussed above.

So how is this like book-burning?

Back to my main thesis now, this purge of alternative points of view is nothing less than virtual book burning. If content creators are discredited, financially starved, and hidden from view, we’ll soon only have one point of view available. It will be that of the people who hold all the microphones, the people who control all the platforms.

Sure, we will still have our loyal friends and readers, but we will lose the ability to reach other people. And even if those other people come looking for the information we provide, they won’t be able to find us. Libraries and libraries of alternative content will be online but the doors will be chained shut by search engines and social media outlets. Other pieces of information – information that is critical of the government or the politically correct cause of the day – will be completely destroyed, removed from the internet, removed from Amazon, and turned into virtual ash.

Maybe because the purveyor couldn’t afford to keep it online because he or she was stared out of business. Maybe because the decision-makers of what we’re allowed to see decided we weren’t allowed to see that.

Decisions are made based on the information available to people. When that information is limited, so too are our choices.

You may think it’s fine when it’s the work of people you consider “extreme” being burned.

A lot of people reading this (and more who would refuse to read it) probably think that I’m nuts, defending extremists and people who may not be very nice. But, if you look closely, you’ll see I’m not defending those people or their points of view. I’m defending the right to express what one believes, regardless of how heinous I may find their opinions.

We’ve all read this quote by Martin Niemöller, a prominent Lutheran pastor during the days of Nazi Germany.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

The thing that many people don’t realize is that Niemöller was originally pro-Third Reich and enthusiastically embraced the teachings of Adolph Hitler. But then in 1934, he met Hitler and discovered his own telephone had been tapped by the Gestapo. He suddenly saw that he had been complicit through his support in what had become a maniacal dictatorship and ethnic cleansing and from that day forth, vehemently opposed Hitler.

You see, everything changed when he got more information.

It changed when he learned the truth about what was espoused by the Riech Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, the only news available at that time in Nazi Germany. It changed when he learned things that the government kept hidden.

Those people cheering the fall of Alex Jones, Mike Adams, the “Alt-Right,” and any other politically incorrect information will be very surprised when they are targeted next. They’ll be shocked when their writings are destroyed and their websites are hidden.

That’s how the slippery slope of censorship works. It’s fine when it happens to the crazy people or those with whom you disagree.

But it’s going to be a shock when your own books are thrown on a bonfire because the needle of what the government or Big Tech deems acceptable has moved.

About Daisy

Daisy Luther is a coffee-swigging, gun-toting blogger who writes about current events, preparedness, frugality, voluntaryism, and the pursuit of liberty on her website, The Organic Prepper. She is widely republished across alternative media and she curates all the most important news links on her aggregate site, PreppersDailyNews.com. Daisy is the best-selling author of 4 books and runs a small digital publishing company.  She lives in the mountains of Virginia with her family. You can find her on FacebookPinterest, and Twitter.

Daisy Luther

Daisy Luther

Daisy Luther is a coffee-swigging, globe-trotting blogger. She is the founder and publisher of three websites.  1) The Organic Prepper, which is about current events, preparedness, self-reliance, and the pursuit of liberty on her website, 2)  The Frugalite, a website with thrifty tips and solutions to help people get a handle on their personal finances without feeling deprived, and 3) PreppersDailyNews.com, an aggregate site where you can find links to all the most important news for those who wish to be prepared. She is widely republished across alternative media and  Daisy is the best-selling author of 5 traditionally published books and runs a small digital publishing company with PDF guides, printables, and courses. You can find her on FacebookPinterest, Gab, MeWe, Parler, Instagram, and Twitter.

Leave a Reply

  • Daisy, this is one of your best ever, and most vital, articles. You’ve made the point dramatically that tyrants throughout history have always sought to whitewash over their evils. Some additional examples from American history might include Lincoln’s infamous arrests of newspaper editors and burning of their presses after criticizing his exorbitant tax extortion war against the southern states.

    Other examples might include Woodrow Wilson’s use of his Espionage Act to jail those who criticized his treachery that sucked America into WWI that the British had planned for at least twenty years. Their secret funding (of Teddy Roosevelt’s campaign to suck enough votes away from Taft) that got Wilson elected in 1912 made all the difference.

    When FDR couldn’t find any legal grounds that would hold up in court, he had Ezra Pound arrested (once the US Army took control of wartime Italy) and had Pound thrown into a mental hospital up through 1957. Criticism even over radio of FDR and the Federal Reserve was not to be tolerated by FDR.

    In our time, the America gangster government’s efforts to destroy Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Bradley/Chelsea Manning for exposing evil and illegal government conduct is more well known today. While none of them used the book format in this digital age, the struggle to censor and destroy by tyrants is, in principle, identical to every ancient precedent, as Daisy has listed, going back through thousands of years.

    It would be difficult not to recall the infamous remark made in a February 1981 staff meeting by the late CIA director William Casey who said before witnesses, “We’ll know that our disinformation campaign has been successful when everything the American public believes is a lie.” Then consider that some of the early funding for both Facebook and Google came from the CIA’s venture capital fund called In-Q-Tel — and then ask yourself if it’s just a mere coincidence that both Facebook and Google have such wacko political orientations, as do their various owned subsidiaries. I think it was no coincidence that Edward Snowden recently described Facebook as a mass surveillance system — rebranded as “social media.”

    Welcome to the age where at least some of TPTB want you disarmed, defunded, and devoiced, at least if you’re a Bill of Rights supporter … by methods far beyond what George Orwell could have ever imagined.

    –Lewis

    • I can’t imagine a more effective intelligence gathering operation than getting people to voluntarily list their views, opinions, stances, positions and approvals than Facebook.

    • This statistic is based on IP addresses, so I guess they’re counting different log-ins as different people?

      • Daisy, that’s the oldest trick in the cloud. It’s called the Drudge Stratagem! You set your website to update every 30 seconds and then claim each reset as a unique page hit. I call it dishonest and fraudulent…he calls it innovative and profitable.

        It’s the reason I removed Drudge as my home page a long time ago.

        The WWW truly IS the wild, wild west…and boot hill is filling up fast.

        Thank YOU for running a clean and honest site.

  • Interesting article. There are things I don’t want to look at or have children gaining access to… But sites that truly are by request or sought out are ok. If I disagree with a site I can opt out if I choose to. That’s censorship enough. I can censor what I choose to read. What If I choose to read up on an opposing viewpoint. If government censors have effectively taken down that sight then their censorship is interesting with my right to see what’s out there in differing opinions. I don’t want to be silenced either. I have a personal opinion about most subjects. I’d like to remain free to express myself.
    I get delayed site pic sent by friends and family. They are not extremists unless loving a free America is now dangerous. They aren’t promoting anarchy or violence or even open. They may dislike a polititician or send a bible verse. I guess that is the new cendorable outlook. Ok. I’ll still speak my peace somewhere. Or I may retell a life experience to help someone be better able to meet their need.

  • Daisy, I remember the McCarthy era, I was a young child when it began and ended. Today we are seeing the same fear raising its ugly head via the Main Stream Media and Big Tech; I do not honestly expect Congress to enact any major changes to the law that has exempted any of the Big Tech Company’s. Does it need to happen, most deffinetly it does, but Congress mainly the Democrats in the House prefer for them to be able to continue to censor Conservatives, the so-called alt-right and leave them alone. Unless and until the Republican Party regains the House and maintains the Senate and likewise can increase the number of true Conservative Senators sufficient to over ride a fillabluster it will not happen. What we need to work toward is just those goals that and the retention of President Trump in the White House.

    • “Until the Republican Party”. Really?? So, you still believe that a Democrat Politician and a Republican Politician are different?
      They play both sides against the middle. I am so sad that people still buy the false premise that Republicans and Democrats are two separate parties. They are one in the same and work hand in hand to achieve their POLITICAL goal.

      Stop supporting ANY POLITICAL PARTY!! They do not care about you at all!! Neither. How much proof do you require before you open your eyes??

  • One historical figure has, I believe, been mistreated in this discussion. The late US Senator Joseph McCarthy was demonized in his day by the Deep State of that era. See this 672-page book by M. Stanton Evans short-titled “Blacklisted by History…” as listed on Amazon:

    https://www.amazon.com/Blacklisted-History-Senator-McCarthy-Americas-ebook/dp/B000W94GOU

    See not only the full description and a few of the 5-star reader reviews (which constitute 75% of the total 363 reviews), but then compare the lone establishment review (that tries to diminish the work) with the long list of highly favorable editorial reviews by such names as Jack Cashill, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, etc.

    Today’s lamestream media that trashes Trump at every opportunity has not invented anything new. Their media ancestors ran a similar attack operation that continues even today on Senator McCarthy — despite the proof in recent years of the Soviet penetration of the FDR government and beyond that McCarthy was trying to expose.

    What McCarthy did not have access to was Antony C Sutton’s research in his book “Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution” that revealed the funders of Lenin’s famous train ride from Switzerland to Moscow in order to steal the 1917 Russian Revolution from Kerensky. Those funders were the German General Staff, Great Britain, and America’s Wall Street. Once Lenin was in power, a steady stream of American oligarchs poured into Moscow under cover as “Red Cross” representatives so they could exact various industry trade monopolies from Lenin’s thugs — which explains why FDR when first taking the president’s office in 1933 was so quick to grant diplomatic recognition to Soviet Russia.

    You will not ever find that history in today’s government propaganda public school’s fairy tale version for the clueless kiddies. Instead what you’re seeing are the early stages of a digital version (instead of using fire trucks) of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 book “Fahrenheit 451“ with Deep State cooperating “private” corporations doing the censorship dirty work as an end-run around the First Amendment freedom of speech that the government is constitutionally prohibited from committing.

    —Lewis

  • Unfortunately, as long as private companies of all types and sizes are not required to obey the Bill of Rights, then there’s nothing to be done except to launch and support strong alternatives while boycotting the rest. To do otherwise — I.e. require private companies to accept content they don’t believe in — is to ask for all kinds of weird stuff should roles reverse.

    • All internet service companies should all be required to accept all customers regardless of political belief or 1st Amendment activities. For the same reason your electricity can’t be shut off for advocating a political belief, so should your internet service provider be barred from censoring thought.

    • Bill or Rights…how is Google not following bill of rights? They are private company…what amendment are they not following?

  • “Let’s be clear: Google owes us nothing. They are a private organization, they can do whatever they want.”

    Yep! And you still have a host for your site, and the news-gathering places I frequent still link to you.

    Any comparison between today’s internet environment and actual “book burning” is a gross exaggeration.

    • It’s not an exaggeration. Organic Prepper is one troll storm of complaints away from being kicked off their services. Internet access is as important as electricity in America 2019 and for that reason no internet service provider should be allowed to discriminate – that is, book burn – on the basis of 1st Amendment conduct.

  • “117 billion people do use Google”

    Daisy, are you sure that number is right?
    There aren’t that many people in the world! I think we are at 8 billion. Do you mean there are 117 billon searches done? That is more believable.
    That 117 billion just jumped out at me!

    Otherwise this is a great article.

  • Hmmm… about Natural news; I was banned from posting there from Disqus. I’ve made ban lists on the right and left for being pro-choice and pro-Trump depending on the level of partsanship. Essentially being a centrist who can make OK arguments in a civil (if sometimes acerbic tone when rudely challenged) does not go down well with partisans. I’m probably not the only centrist who’s been burned.

    Mike Adams himself is still enjoyable to watch on some subjects but on some things he’s become really radicalized. Like his odd idea about the Earth being terraformed for aliens. Like, as if an alien power nudging an asteroid couldn’t conquer the planet in a hurry, no firefights or subversion needed.

    In my limited experience, partisan sites that complain about censorship may well themselves be serious offenders of banhammer abuse, with mods and other insiders unable to stand any challenge to their echo chamber. It would hardly be surprising if some of the people who directly contributed to Natural News’ deplatforming, were once supporters.

    • Disqus does not ban anyone. They never have. You were banned by the Natural News Admin for saying something of an unflattering nature to them. It happened to me as well. Moeover, Natural News is one of a suite of sites owned by Mike Adams. I think you’ll find you’ve been banned from ALL of them.

      Disqus is nothing more than a plug-in for a web site. It’s functionality has never included anything remotely like the ability to influence traffic. As a web designer and former Administrator myself, I can assure you this is the case.

      Your point about the closet Nazis whining about the big platforms demonetizing and de-platforming them, while they simultaneously disenfranchise their own commenters is well taken! It is rank hypocrisy at its very worst.

      I’m proud to say Daisy is cut from much finer cloth than that!

      ” It would hardly be surprising if some of the people who directly contributed to Natural News’ deplatforming, were once supporters.”

      Now that you mention it…that would make PERFECT sense! I’m not personally that vindictive, but I know the world is full of just that sort. You can’t just go through life crapping on the people you depend upon and expect there NOT to be consequences.

  • They came for socialists, J3ws, Trade Unionists … the thing is those groups would be for censorship. Before getting on me about those who maybe J3wish they do tend towards socialism, safe spaces and censorship in my perception but are not monolithic in that regard.

    While a dark digital curtain is falling, it’s not complete, there are holes, perhaps not enough holes to run a business. I am reminded in the Soviet Socialist Republics, “the China’s” it is illegal to listen to outlander newscasts on shortwave.

    The take away is the dark digital curtain is falling, it can’t be stopped. The central government has no incentive to stop it as it aids in their building out of their command and control infrastructures. Trump is a blimp on the trend line.

  • A virtual Fahrenheit 451. This is a powerful article; a ‘heads up’ to reality. And it is painful to know.

  • Interesting you should post this today – I’m getting a “forbidden” error trying to access stan deyo .com today.

  • Private platforms have the right to do what they want. If you choose to use them it is no longer them that’s the issue.
    If you know (insert name)_____IE: CNN, Google, FB etc. etc are doing this to you then why do you insist on using them? It is very possible to happily survive without them.

  • this online censorship is the safe way of killing off your competition much like the clintons kill off anyone who is going to testify against them. thing is, they won’t be happy until they hunt down and really kill the person so this is a prelude-war to the real war coming. as usual though the sicko-elite will lose in the end and it will be such a great loss that it will never be repeated for all of eternity – that’s how bad they will lose while they delude themselves into actually thinking they have a chance, when in fact their behavior is just storing up wrath for their “day” of wrath and oh what a judgment will be there’s. they should really run to Jesus quick because they’ll have eternity to think about the error of their ways in a not so nice place called the lake-of-fire, which is designed to keep them in a pure state for eternity because if you reject the blood of Jesus as payment for your evil then you only have the fire left to pay – but we’re all gonna pay for disobeying our Creator – some to eternal life because of Jesus and some to eternal death because they rejected Jesus. What’s it gonna be is the question for all during their mortal lives.

  • 102 years ago books (textbooks, hymnals, music, etc) were burned all over America. People were lynched, beaten, tarred and feathered, locked up in Alcatraz, Leavenworth and countless other prisons for 5, 10, 20 years, just for speaking their opinion.
    The “Nazis” burned Jewish pornography and pseudo-sexual “science” books that had long corrupted German culture.
    Americans burned German textbooks and hymnals. Burned down their schools and churches.
    A pile of German books burns outside the Baraboo, WI high school. Lit by the National Guard.
    http://i.imgur.com/yD2C94G.jpg

  • Daisy, wonderful article! I’ve seen important information disappear from the Web before, e.g., information about 10 years ago on how to avoid being killed by a cytokine storm, which can happen in severe viral illnesses, so when I find critical information like that, I make a copy. I think it is likely to be very soon that we will all be operating on a local level with what resources we have, and the Net will be a tool of surveillance and oppression by an elite desperately trying to maintain control. It has been a wonderful resource for the rest of us and a great education on how the political elite rule, but at the same time, it has been a Trojan horse, especially for those of us who lack hacking skills.
    At this stage, one can learn a lot from what kinds of things they choose to censor. For example, several years ago I translated an article from Japanese into English by a researcher who presented evidence that the emergency back-up generators at Fukushima shut down before the tsunami arrived. That simply disappeared as far as I could tell. I typed in very specific information, but got zero hits. The Citizens Nuclear Information Center says the article is still up–they think. In other words, someone with a lot of power was either going to be embarrassed at responsibility for a bad mistake (unconfirmed reports from workers that the diesel fuel tanks were empty) or there was a conspiracy to cause these melt-downs, which is what Dmitry Orlov among others thinks happened.
    BTW, that is Sayer Ji (not Sawyer), and his site is here: https://www.greenmedinfo.com/ His work is valuable for archiving and organizing research on all sorts of topics related to alternative medicine, such as effects of herbal treatments and of course the “V” word for which he is being harassed.
    It’s not just the Web, either. In town meetings to determine the siting of telecommunications facilities, participants are not allowed to discuss health. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 forbids environmental considerations in siting of this equipment, and that is interpreted as meaning “health.”

  • Thank you for detailing censorship and the cost to operate your web site. I had no clue of the costs. Being in my 70’s, I’m keeping a 1944 set of Britannica Encyclopedias so I can know the real truth, not a revision of the truth.

    Thank you for your site, good information!

    The email address, “themadclicker”, I use to take lots of photos, far more than the editor wanted me to bring back!

  • Face Book disappeared 12 years, 6 pages, all contacts, content and art without warning, because one of my pages was antivax. So, I’ve just gone to email.

  • A 355-page paperback that I have is very relevant here. It is titled “A Universal History of The Destruction of Books … from ancient Sumer to modern Iraq” by Fernando Baez, the director of Venezuela’s national library when this book was first copyrighted in 2004. It was first translated from Spanish into English in 2008.

    When I ran a search on that topic I found a few other titles that addressed the same subject, such as:

    Burning the Books
    A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge,
    by Richard Ovenden,
    Hardcover, 256 Pages, Published 2020 by Belknap Press

    Books on Fire
    The Destruction of Libraries throughout History,
    by Lucien X. Polastron, Jon E. Graham, Lucien X.
    Hardcover, 384 Pages, Published 2007 by Inner Traditions

    Libricide
    The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century,
    by Rebecca Knuth, John English,
    Hardcover, 296 Pages, Published 2003 by Praeger

    Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary,
    by Gillian Partington, Dr. Adam Smyth,
    Digital, 216 Pages, Published 2014 by Palgrave Macmillan

    –Lewis

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