In December 2018, Liberty Nation reported about a shocking banning of YouTuber Carl Benjamin, known as Sargon of Akkad, from Patreon for dubious reasons. Now, Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin are following in the footsteps of Sam Harris and are announcing that they are both leaving the platform on January 15, 2019.
Peterson, Rubin, and other members of the so-called Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) are presenting disturbing circumstantial evidence that major institutions are colluding to purge conservatives from all public arenas. Rubin paraphrased IDW-member Eric Weinstein, saying that the question ultimately boils down to whether Republicans should be banned from using roads and other public infrastructure.
...they want Chinese communism-style social media control.
The background is that in August 2018, Patreon out of the blue banned prominent critic of Islam Robert Spencer from their platform. Shockingly, they revealed that it was their payment provider, Mastercard, that demanded Spencer be removed. At the time, Liberty Nation speculated that the payment processor may have been pressured by foreign nations in the Middle East, and that such global pressure from totalitarian regimes is a good argument for an Internet Bill of Rights.
Part of the story is that independent journalist Lauren Southern had earlier been banned from Patreon due to political activism that allegedly put people’s lives in danger. The company’s CEO, Jack Conte, appeared on the Rubin Report to explain that content producers would not be removed for political opinions, but rather for “manifest observable behavior.”
That is why the banning of liberal Carl Benjamin from the platform came as a disturbing surprise. Either Conte was lying, or he was losing control of his company from external influence. There is now some evidence that it is the latter. In a conversation with prominent YouTuber Matt Christiansen and Patreon’s head of Trust & Safety, Jacqueline Hart, new information was revealed that pressure is being exerted on the company.
Jacqueline Hart
“Payment processing depends on our ability to use the global payment network, and they have rules for what they will process,” Hart said. Christensen was taken aback by this and asked, “Are you telling me that this was Patreon’s decision then, or someone pressured you into this?“ to which she replied: “No - this was entirely Patreon’s decision.“
One way to resolve this apparent paradox is to note that Hart was hired in October 2018, shortly after the scandalous banning of Spencer and shortly before the equally outrageous purge of Carl Benjamin. Hart has a background from the payment industry and has worked closely with PayPal, who deplatformed the Patreon competitor SubscribeStar only a day after Benjamin announced that he would move there after the purge.
An interpretation that is consistent with the facts is that Patreon was pushed by social justice activists in the banking and payment industry to start a concerted effort to remove the ability of conservative content creators to have their work funded. In this narrative, Hart is the watchdog that is placed at Patreon by these external actors to control them.
Change the Terms
This sounds conspiratorial, except that there is open evidence of such collusion. Peterson referred to the site ChangeTheTerms, which has as a stated goal of removing “promoters of hate speech” from all tech platforms. This is a collaboration effort between several far-left social justice activist groups, such as the Soros-funded Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC has, of course, branded Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali “promoters of hate speech.”
They define hate in the following ominous way:
“Hateful activities are those that incite or engage in violence, intimidation, harassment, threats, or defamation targeting an individual or group based on their actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability.”
According to this definition violent attacks by Antifa, or Maxine Waters’ incitement to harass Republicans wherever you see them are not defined as “hateful activities,” but to criticize Islam or want to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border would be. According to this definition, using the term “illegal immigrant” or saying that a man can’t be a woman is hate speech. It would mean banning the conservative half of the U.S. population from the internet.
In short, they want Chinese communism-style social media control.
Separation of Church and State
It is prudent to remind the reader that after the Protestant revolution, Europe went through a century of religious warfare with oppressive censorship and social control. The truce that emerged from that conflict was a mutual understanding that certain basic freedoms and institutions needed to be neutral. It led to the separation of church and state and the canonization of free speech.
Now, a few centuries later, a new religious progressive creed wants to return to those dark days of censorship and persecution. They want to undo the very foundation upon which the West is built. Banking, payment systems, and communication are public infrastructures that we trust and rely on to be politically and ideologically neutral. It’s part of the legacy of separation of church and state.
There is now a real push for those pillars of our individual freedoms to be demolished by ideologically possessed totalitarians in our midst. All lovers of liberty, whether on the left or the right, should be alarmed by this trend. Liberty Nation will follow this development closely and report on Peterson and Rubin’s Patreon alternative as soon as it is launched. Stay tuned.
