THE WEEKEND ESSAY: Why Gab is a victim of the “liberal” Establishment’s obsession with suppression

by John Ward

Hot on the heels of the censorious UK Anti-Stalking Bill, the swift but completely unjustified strangulation of a controversial social medium this week acts as a stark warning to us all. Pluralism and the right to a mind of your own is under direct attack from the pinched goblins of orthodoxy. The Slog deconstructs the disgraceful sabotage of gab.ai

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Some of you may not know what Gab is. Ignoring IABATO* and simply stating the facts, Gab is Twitter for those people who don’t like censorship. It thus attracts some nutjobs and deeply unpleasant, abusive people. But you can easily block them. The bottom line here is that Gab is (or rather, was) one of the few places on the Planet where you can say what you think without being banned from the site.

The intentions of the Establishment to smother Gab for good are reflected in this capture I just made from Wikipedia, adding my own highlighting:

Gabwiki

Wikipedia (perhaps the most singularly manipulated and perverted online information source of all time) reveals itself here as a tool – albeit maybe unwilling – of that security services to image management consultancy axis of darkness designed to be an invisible persuader of the innocents. Note how Gab has been demoted to the past, and the likes of Breitbart join that rapidly expanding club designated by the Holier than Thou as far right conspiracy delusion.

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I began using Gab about five weeks ago. I haven’t done much on it. But with judicious following across a broad spectrum and blocking of the unhinged, my feeling thus far is that Gab users are both more open-minded and far more polite than Tweeters.

For the last week or more, Gab has been cooperating fully with the US FBI and DoJ in handing over evidence about the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter suspect. He was a Gab user. You all know my feelings about anti-Semites: I hope they put the bloke – Robert Bowers – away for life and invest money figuring out how and why he arrived at the desire to massacre Jews.

This was the New York Times take in the Bowers/GAB connection (my emphasis):

‘But he did not turn to Facebook or Twitter. Instead, the man accused of killing 11 people went to Gab, a two-year-old social network that bills itself as a “free speech” alternative to those platforms, and that has become a haven for white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other extremists.”

The stats do not support that typically knee-jerk, patronising ‘liberal’ assertion, but then the NYT has become a parody of itself in recent years. Nine years ago it completely demolished my former site Not Born Yesterdayand called me “the Far Right neo-Nazi John M. Ward”, which was neither me, nor was it correct: the furthest Right I have ever been in voting terms is Tory (once) in 1979. The only Party I have ever joined was the SDP. The Times did this with the connivance of “Lord” Mandelson…and fine defender of Free Speech – so long as it doesn’t name him as a fraudster and thief.

Within days, several major platform hosts pulled their support for Gab. This was the classic rationale used by one of the world’s least attractive online service providers:

“When a site is allowing the perpetuation of hate, violence or discriminatory intolerance, we take immediate and decisive action,” PayPal spokesman Justin Higgs said in a statement.

Mr Higgs’ self-congratulatory onanism marks what ought to be a turning point in one of the most important battles every Free Citizen across the globe faces: the rearguard fight to stop unthinking zealots from allowing us to say what we like.

The rest of this post is devoted to showing up and shaming the sleazy fascism, commercial motivation and putrid hypocrisy of the vacuous ideologue goblins and virtue-signalling globalists prodding all of us towards the concentration camp.

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The self-styled “liberal” fallacy

When I began my Politics part of my degree at Liverpool University in 1966, I already held dear the adage passed down via Voltaire, Helvetius and the English biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall. It defined superbly what the basis of free speech within the Rule of Law was about:

“I disapprove utterly of your views, but I will defend to the death your right to express them”

If you don’t hold with that, then you are not a democrat (small d). No doubt you vote Democrat or Labour and think of yourself as a Liberal. But I bring bad tidings: you are closer to the beliefs of the Nazis than to Voltaire.

Saying we “generally” approve of free speech is like observing that one is slightly pregnant or mostly dead. Free speech is indivisible. Hating somebody or something is regrettable, but in a law-abiding liberal democracy hating someone or something cannot be a crime. 

It’s one of the dilemmas of free speech. But those who restrict free speech make two fundamental page one errors in their rationale for so doing:

  1. They confuse certainty with fashion, mores and evolving values.
  2. They assume (like all superior élitists) that certain ideas are dangerous because they can persuade stupid people that The Dark Way should prevail.

Those who routinely peddle the idea of online abuse, banning certain campus speakers, hate crime as a concept, Antifa as the means to a just end and attacks on online free speech as ‘justified’ would have been merrily chucking books into the flames in Berlin during 1936. They are, to be harsh but accurate, Nazi grubs convinced that one day they will morph into a harmless butterfly in some future Paradise.

Gab did not produce Robert Bowers

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Gab has roughly 465,000 users. Other shooters in recent years (most of them being narcissist wannabe Stars) have tended to leave “last testaments” on Twitter and Facebook. Gab has had the rug pulled because 0.00022% of its universe opened fire on a synagogue.

Murder or attempted murder is a crime. If 1 member of a social media audience of 465,000 commits murder, that is no rationale at all for censoring the platform. The idea that Gab promotes and sanctions murder caused by hatred is beyond risible. But like “Nigel Farage caused Jo Cox’s murder” it is wonderfully convenient.

But thousands of Islamist sites online promote the idea of annihilating the Jews and other infidels 24/7. Their platforms are bankrolled by Saudi Arabia among many others. They stay in existence for three reasons: first, they have a right to their opinion; second, nobody dare offend the Saudis: and finally, they gain the tacit support of Useful Idiots who call this barbaric, squabbling catechism ‘the Religion of Peace’.

Robert Bowers will (if found guilty) I am sure turn out to be the usual embittered loner described by his neighbours as “quiet and polite” but brought up to believe that every disturbed bonehead should have the right to bear arms. Gab has been going for a few years, no more: but US killing sprees have been with us for sixty years. Guns kill, Gab doesn’t: if you’re looking for blame-castles to storm, oppose the National Rifle Association, control the lobbying of legislators, and look at the violence inherent in US movies.

But if you’re a free speech democrat, don’t ban any of those things. Let The People make their own minds up.

The LibLeft and violent hate-crime

We need to home in more clinically here on the rank double standards of those who profess to believe in a liberal and more fair society, but act in a manner that suggests they don’t believe a word of their own tosh.

The main thing the US Democrats and their followers have done since the People elected Donald Trump is hate him. At least three luvvie celebrities have suggested openly that he should be assassinated. Almost every MSM station and title has propagated the general idea of Trump as a racist, rapist Russophile in hock to the Kremlin and doing Putin’s bidding. Not only is most of this palpably off with the fairies on an outer ring of Saturn,  the  non-stop ‘Impeach Trump he is not my President’ nursery antics have shot the Democratic Party squarely in the foot. It now reveals itself to be woefully ill-prepared to challenge the man in the White House in 2020. The imminent mid terms may yet hold more shocks for the Blue folks.

Americans I met in Paris last year insisted to me that Antifa was right to confront and provoke the KKK. Silly inadequates running around in white hoods I regard as beneath contempt, but they have killed precisely 37 US citizens since 1935. The KKK had followed every last regulation required to hold its demonstration, whereas Antifa just turned up and started throwing stuff. “NONONONONO!” one woman yelled at me across the supper table, “You don’t understand….the KKK should never have been given permission!”

don’t understand? God help us all. Antifa promotes violence, perpetrates it, shouts down speakers, throws its devotees’ excrement at opponents, and flatly refuses to eschew violence in the furtherance of political ends. The Democratic Party refuses to condemn it.

So too does Jeremy Corbyn and the main vehicle for driving his image as the Messiah born to rule the United Kingdom, Momentum. Almost exactly two years ago, Trots within Momentum crammed a committee meeting and got the non-violence clause in its constitution dumped. For this and a dozen other reasons, Labour does not affiliate with Momentum. But the Party’s leader does – along with shadow Chancellor McDonnell, the ever-gobby and only metaphorically lightweight Diane Abbott, and Gay Pimpernel Owen Jones.

Take a few minutes to study the behavioural history of Saint Jeremy of Islington.

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Throughout his career, Jeremy Corbyn has vigorously championed and supported the political violence employed by Che Guevara, the ANC, the IRA, the PLO….and now, Antifa.

In 1985, Corbyn was appointed national secretary of the newly launched Anti-Fascist Action, even though – both then and now – there is no Fascist Party in the UK. AFA was launched in London in 1985 at a large public meeting representing “a wide range of anti-fascist and anti-racist organisations and individuals, including Red Action and the Direct Action Movement”. None of these were affiliated to the Labour Party. The AFA logo is a clue to as to why that was:

Antifascistactionlogo

Bloke about to throw Molotov cocktail at a dissident. Hmm: very pacifist and free speech.

The AFA’s history is one worthy of the Dave Lenispart spoof columns in the once influential satirical magazine Private Eye:

‘It was partly a reaction to the perceived inadequacies of the original Anti-Nazi League (ANL), which had recently wound up its operations. AFA members accused ANL of failing to directly confront fascists, of allying with moderates who were complicit in racism, and of being a vanguardist front for the Socialist Workers Party(SWP). This original AFA unravelled due to internal tensions between militant anti-fascists and more moderate anti-racists. By 1988, fractured by in-house sectarianism, AFA had all but collapsed, but In 1989, it was resurrected as a militant, physical force anti-fascist group. Although many Trotskyist groups, independent socialists, anarchists and members of the Labour Party were active in AFA in the 1980s, after its relaunch in 1989 the main members were always from Red Action, a group founded by disillusioned militant anti-fascist ex-SWP members who had criticised perceived populist or popular front politics of the ANL.’

It’s hard not to go a bit Life of Brian about all this, and ask “Yeh, but are we the People’s Front for the Liberation of Judea?”, only to have a fanatic scream at us, “Nah we fuckin’ aren’t, we are the Judean People’s Liberation Front, an’ we fuckin’ spit on the People’s Front for the Liberation of Judea”.

Unity comes uneasily to the anal ideologues. And so too does tolerance.

Let me if I may close on the one word which activist and State Establishment vandals simply cannot and will not accept under any circumstances: pluralism.

It is the one thing detested with equal venom by groups and organisations as varied as Wall Street, The European Commission, MI5, Corbynista Labour, the CIA, Jihadists, post-Thatcher Tories, Blairite Remainers, the ECB, the Democratic Party, Green activists, the BMA, the Pentagon, feminists, the State Department, multiculturalists, NATO and the oil business.

For all of these people, the alternative opinion is the enemy. Their perpetual claim is that they are saving things – whales, democracy, peace, the Planet, the working class, law and order, prosperity, equality, freedom and souls. And as they go about God’s work, the only outcome they will accept is the unconditional surrender and abject humiliation of any and all who represent dissidence.

To cross the river to Paradise, you see, one must first of all sink all the other boats.

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