Dec. 14, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
13:32
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| So I wanted to give everyone an update on what's happening with Patreon and Subscribestar, because naturally, now they are coming for Subscribestar. | |
| So today Nick Monroe posted this excellent Twitter thread about the Patreon Exodus. | |
| I'm just going to go through it and talk about a few of the points in here and what we can do about, well, anything, really. | |
| I'm going to skip past the stuff that I've covered in the previous videos with, you know, why I was deplatformed and people defending me and things like this. | |
| But I really do appreciate that there are people defending me. | |
| This would be much more difficult if it wasn't for the support that I'm getting from so many different people. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| So naturally, a lot of people have been leaving Patreon, and I've said it before, but I'll say it again. | |
| I'm really, really sorry to all of the content creators that this affects. | |
| I didn't think that Patreon would go and say that their terms of service simply don't matter. | |
| That they would just judge me on my brand, which has always been politically incorrect, and then decide that now, instead of some point in the last four years, that they'd decide to get rid of me. | |
| And there were so many different people affected by this, over a vast swathe of the political spectrum. | |
| It's not just people who supported me that were bothered, it's people who are generally interested in taking part in the political dialogue, who seem to be revolted by Patreon's behaviour here, and are taking sensible action, which we would usually describe as a market response. | |
| And this is a real shame, because these are all people that I know and like and have a great deal of respect for. | |
| So again, I'm really sorry. | |
| Gab.com opened a Patreon account, which lasted for one hour, and then they were to banned. | |
| What's Gab done wrong? | |
| What could Gab have possibly done? | |
| Oh, it's the wrong brand. | |
| They are a pro-free speech, anti-censorship, anti-political correctness brand. | |
| Well, I can see why they wouldn't be allowed. | |
| As we've already covered, there are far-left extremists using Patreon, but nobody cares about any of that. | |
| So we'll just carry on because apparently that doesn't matter. | |
| Minecraft creator and somewhat of a personal hero of my notch has decided that he's not going to do business with Patreon. | |
| And given that he's a billionaire and probably supports quite a few content creators that are worth your time, that probably means something to Patreon, one would think. | |
| Of course, no word on any of this yet, but good for Notch for standing by his principles. | |
| I don't know why, but Mike Sinovich seems to have got the wrong end of the stick regarding Jordan Peterson's defense of me from being banned from Patreon. | |
| For some reason he said he won't stand firm with me, so I just want to update Mike on this, because obviously he hasn't been made aware. | |
| That's not accurate, actually. | |
| He says, Sargon of Accad and censorship. | |
| I've been engaged in a series of intense conversations with many of the people in the so-called intellectual dark web over the last two weeks because of the banning by Patreon of Carl Benjamin colloquially known as Sargon of Accad. | |
| I'm an admirer of Sargon and he was a great friend of mine when I was in deep trouble two years ago. | |
| I think there is no excuse for deplatforming him, particularly when his fundamental crime was defending himself against neo-Nazis. | |
| I've been talking continually with the majority of the members of the so-called intellectual dark web and we are determining what steps to take. | |
| We thought about moving to alternative crowdfunding platforms such as Subscribestar, but it isn't obvious that will constitute a long-term solution. | |
| Dave Rubin and I and others have been discussing the establishment of a Patreon-like enterprise that will not be susceptible to arbitrary censorship and we are making progress but these things cannot be rushed without the possibility of excess error. | |
| But I am seriously displeased about the removal of Sargon and many other people and will definitely do something about it. | |
| And I have to say I really appreciate the kind words from Jordan Peterson and the fact that he's prepared to do something about this. | |
| Because I never thought that I would be the martyr, to be honest. | |
| I always thought that I'd be the guy who managed to fly under the radar because I'm not really that controversial. | |
| I'm just against political correctness, you know. | |
| I just like using naughty words for the shock effect. | |
| I don't go around actually attacking black people or women or whatever it is, but I do like using extreme language for the entertainment value. | |
| So I thought that would be understood. | |
| But the thing is, we've come to a point where context simply does not matter. | |
| Any use of a certain word or a certain collection of words, and you will be targeted in the same way that I was. | |
| And naturally, because a lot of people are leaving Patreon but still want to use a service similar to it, Subscribestar now has to come under attack. | |
| As if Subscribestar have done anything wrong here. | |
| Dr. Tiny Tim Squirrel, PhD from Edinburgh University, has tweeted, I regret to inform you all that Sargon Senovich, Ian Miles Chung et al. have found a dodgy new Patreon alternative called Subscribestar, which appears to have started up earlier this year and is actively courting deplatform content creators. | |
| Well, what makes it dodgy? | |
| Is it because the guy who created it is a Russian? | |
| Are we Russophobic now, are we? | |
| Is it not that there could be a legitimate businessman from Russia who wants to just do a good job and make a good product? | |
| No, I'm sure they're all bigots. | |
| Subscribestar are now the enemy platform, and so they're dodgy and dark and evil and hosting the alt-right. | |
| And this is where we go with this, but the thing is, neither myself, Cernovich, nor Ian Miles Chung are alt-right. | |
| I'm a liberal, Cernovich is a conservative, and Ian Miles Chung is probably also a conservative, and he's not even white. | |
| So why on earth are you calling us alt-right, Tiny Tim Squirrel? | |
| Now, I know why, and you know why, and it's not because you don't know what the alt-right is, it's because you want to use the term alt-right as a catch-all slur to try and scare various payment processors into pulling out a Subscribestar. | |
| Because why not? | |
| He says, here's what I can find about them. | |
| Picturing themselves as free of corporate bullshit or political biases. | |
| Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr all started in February, but only really picked up on the 9th of December after the most recent wave of deplatforming. | |
| So they were a corporation that was a company that were already in existence, but they were idling along because there wasn't a hole in the market, and suddenly there's a hole in the market, and they start doing really, really well. | |
| Weird. | |
| Poor quality English and Russian options on the site. | |
| Okay. | |
| They currently appear to only have 65 available stars to subscribe to. | |
| Stars are a mix of adult content creators, randoms, and alt-right alt-light types, including Thunderfoot, Sargon, Kandankula, Dave Cullen, Tim Paul, Ian Miles Chung, and Cernovich. | |
| None of those people are alt-right or alt-light. | |
| I mean, maybe Cernovich, you could say, is alt-light, but the rest are either liberals or conservatives. | |
| They use PayPal, Amazon Web Services Stripe GoDaddy. | |
| He tags Sleeping Giants, which is an account that is dedicated to harassing corporations to deplatform and defund their political opponents. | |
| Look them up if you don't believe me. | |
| That is the entire reason for their existence. | |
| God only knows who funds them. | |
| But Sleeping Giants et al. will probably want to start lobbying that set, given Subscribestar's seeming commitment to platforming the alt-right. | |
| This is not a free market. | |
| This is a cartel. | |
| Tiny Tim, what you have said here is not true. | |
| You have lied. | |
| And you have lied for political gain. | |
| This is pretty damn underhanded. | |
| And I think it's pretty bloody awful that you would, as far as we can tell, try and sabotage an entrepreneur's attempt at generating wealth. | |
| Subscribestar have done nothing wrong. | |
| I've done nothing wrong. | |
| None of these other people have actually done anything wrong. | |
| What the hell is your problem, man? | |
| Why are you trying to turn the left-wing censorship machine on Subscribestar? | |
| What difference does it make to you if I use that platform or anyone else uses that platform? | |
| Tim decided to look into Subscribestar, which is good for us, I suppose, so it gives us some more background information. | |
| They're owned and run by Starkling LLC, Redstead in Wyoming, but belongs to Russian national Mikhail, I can't pronounce that, who lives in Russia. | |
| Okay. | |
| Russians are allowed to do business in the United States. | |
| The CEO is a guy called Sergey. | |
| He emailed me. | |
| Okay, I have to now work with a Russian company. | |
| So what? | |
| I've found Mikhail, not linking him here, but it's pretty definitive proof of the same guy. | |
| It's just his Twitter page. | |
| Mikhail is a designer whose personal website is redworker.com, which redirects to redstormlab.com. | |
| He displays his work pretty prominently on his site except Subscribestar, which he seems to be keeping low-key. | |
| With a name like Red Worker, I was really not looking forward to looking this up, but this is his About Me section. | |
| Passionate and successful and making things look perform better, I'm striving to become part of a multidisciplinary team of creative professionals where I envisage myself as a digital designer, web and print. | |
| I look forward to reshaping the future of a project or company the way they've never imagined. | |
| Right, so he's a creative Silicon Valley type, but just from Russia. | |
| This is what we're talking about here. | |
| Doesn't really matter though, because Tiny Tim Squirrel copies in Jared Holt, Will Summer, and Brandy Zadronzi, other right-wing extremism watchers, you mean people from the far left, who might be interested in this guy and his company, who's raising detra it appears to be giving a platform to deplatformed Patreon creators. | |
| So what? | |
| Just because Patreon are not prepared to uphold their own terms of service and are purging people because of a prejudice against their brand, doesn't mean that these people should never have crowdfunding. | |
| That's not your decision to make. | |
| And it's not any of these people's decision to make. | |
| This is utterly unacceptable. | |
| And I don't know what you think you're doing. | |
| Sernovich, Peterson, Dankila all are linking to their own and each other's Subscribestar accounts. | |
| Classic example of the alternative influence network in action. | |
| Well, you mean people who are being persecuted by the progressives. | |
| Because that's really what we've all got in common above everything else. | |
| Is that you guys won't leave us alone. | |
| That's the problem. | |
| But hey, don't let me get in your way. | |
| You're on a big censorship spree. | |
| Hopefully your chaps can get something done, I guess. | |
| Turns out that Tim Squirrel and Becca Lewis from the Data and Society, the people who created the Alternative Influence Network, are connected, as Nick found out. | |
| Further analysis, Timmy shows up in the picture around the launch of Becca's report. | |
| He's a researcher. | |
| He likes to go over the cover. | |
| Likely harder now that I'm pointing him out to everyone. | |
| I'll tell you what, it's probably going to be even more difficult now, isn't it? | |
| And as Nick points out, basically you're seeing a cross-section of far-left researchers slash media here in early stages of setting up a narrative to create a smear campaign to hurt Subscribestar. | |
| And apparently, PayPal have already asked Subscribestar not to use their service. | |
| Now, I don't think that's necessarily banned, but there has been a request to not use PayPal at the moment, which is rather annoying. | |
| They do have two other payment options, so Subscribestar is still a go so far at the moment, at time of recording. | |
| But oh my god, this has to stop. | |
| This is not a free market. | |
| This is a monopoly, a cartel monopoly over internet transactions at this point. | |
| I mean, Patreon, maker support, and now they're coming for Subscribestar. | |
| This is not acceptable. | |
| They are just trying to scourge everyone who opposes them from the internet at will, and for some reason, PayPal are going along with it. | |
| I mean, it could be the fact that they're based in California as well in San Jose, outside of Silicon Valley, but hardly a million miles away. | |
| But seriously, this is of dire concern, and I wanted to bring this all to your attention. | |
| They are now going to go after an independent company who have done nothing wrong as far as anyone knows so far, and they're going to try and get them shut down because they offer a service without being ideologically biased. | |
| That's it. | |
| They offer a service to conservatives, liberals, non-progressives of any stripe. | |
| Thankfully, there's an alternative tech network that's forming with BitChute, Gab Minds, all of the sort of dissident platforms that are honestly doing a great job in my opinion. | |
| I can't wait till the day that BitChute replaces YouTube because BitShoot's fine. | |
| It's a great platform. | |
| And Gab's a great Twitter replacement as well. | |
| I would honestly recommend those guys get in contact with the intellectual dark web. | |
| Jordan Peterson, all those sort of people, follow Gab and BitChute and Minds, Bill Ottman, and get together and figure something out. | |
| Because I've got no doubt you guys have got the resources behind you. | |
| And I've got no doubt that Alt Tech have the skills behind them. | |
| And I'm prepared to chip in in any way that I can to do anything that I can to help to essentially build a new internet that they can't attack. | |
| At least not easily. | |
| And I tell you what, folks, in the future history of the internet, when this is all said and done, this is going to be something that they talk about. | |
| This is going to be something they teach in history classes about the early years of the internet. | |
| I mean, we're only like 20 years into the mass use of the internet at this point. | |
| Like, this is still really early days from historical period. | |
| So, like, I don't know how to tell you this, but I think this really matters. | |
| I think this really matters. | |
| I think breaking the Silicon Valley stranglehold on the internet is probably goal number one for any kind of activists who want to try and put out ideas without being censored by the power structure. | |
| So, again, sorry that I'm recording this in such an informal way, but on the plus side, at least everyone has got woke to the fact that they are now just openly saying, we don't care. | |
| We're going to get rid of you no matter what the cost. | |
| No matter what the cost to our reputation, to our platforms, it doesn't matter. |
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