"The Resistance" and Wil Wheaton Promoting Hate and Fascism?
Wil Wheaton and many members of "The Resistance" are advocating joining Counter Social, a website created by The Jester. The Jester is a known American patriot hacktivist who targets anti american actors such as Anonymous and Fundamentalist Muslims. His behavior is usually associated with the right and even Mastodon called Counter social Fascist and "pure raxism." If even the far left says the site is bad and disconnected form it why is Wil Wheaton promoting it?
Support the show (http://timcast.com/donate)
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It's the day that Wil Wheaton and many other people on the left are going to deactivate their Twitter accounts in the hopes that Alex Jones will be banned within 30 days.
If they don't reactivate their Twitter accounts within the 30 days after today, their accounts will become permanently deleted.
And Wil Wheaton is advocating for a couple different alternative social media sites, Mastodon and CounterSocial.
Now, both of those sites are very similar.
But what's particularly interesting here is that about eight months ago, Mastodon accused CounterSocial of being fascist and pure racism.
And there was a big controversy among the left who were advocating for these platforms, some people even calling CounterSocial backwater, racist, nationalist, fascist, etc., as I mentioned.
So why then would Wil Wheaton support this platform?
Well, as it turns out, Countersocial was founded by a hacktivist known as The Jester, who in the past has targeted anonymous WikiLeaks and things he deems to be anti-America.
The Jester is most notable for targeting jihadist and Islamist websites.
So, for me, I have to say it's really strange to see many people on the left supporting this.
I have to imagine Wil Wheaton knows the history of the jester and knows the accusations laid against it.
So if it's true that counter-social is pure racism, nationalist, and open to fascists, is Wil Wheaton actually advocating for a platform that is Pure racism.
But before we get started, please head over to patreon.com forward slash timcast to become a patron if you'd like to help support my work.
This is what I do for a living.
I make these videos, I travel around, I do interviews.
And if you like this content and want to see more, please consider supporting my work at patreon.com slash timcast today.
Well, it's probably no surprise to many people that I have been blocked by Wil Wheaton.
He didn't block me yesterday, but I tweeted that I found it ironic that Wil Wheaton is saying Twitter supports hate and bigotry and extremism, so he's going to leave, when in fact, some of that does stem from Wil Wheaton.
In fact, November 7th, 2017, this story from Pathios, Wil Wheaton lost his temper and apologized.
He said, The murder victims were in a church.
If prayers did anything, they'd still be alive, you worthless sack of shit.
And this is in response to Paul Ryan calling for prayers for people who were killed in Texas.
But he did apologize.
He said, And that was actually the second statement.
Dear people of faith, see this?
I spoke in anger and I apologize to you.
And that was actually the second statement.
The first one was, hey, real and actual people of faith, I hear you.
I apologize for insulting you in my rage at Paul Ryan's refusal to address gun violence.
Twitter is full of hate.
It's full of bigotry.
It's full of mean and nasty people.
But that's the Internet.
It's not specific to Twitter.
Everyone on the Internet engages in this behavior.
In fact, if Twitter really was going to get rid of hate, they would just have to close the platform down.
Because there are many people who think some things are hate and some things aren't.
I might tweet something out and someone will respond to me, that's really stupid, Tim, you're an idiot.
Yes, that's hateful, but hey, you have an opinion, I recognize that, and I'm strong enough to know that what you say doesn't matter too much to me and isn't going to change what I do in my life.
But I heard what you said.
If Twitter got rid of that kind of behavior, that would get rid of most of the behavior.
And then what do we have?
People saying, that was an interesting statement.
That's it.
Because even if you said, look, I'm going to be critical and say this is a bad idea, or this is not very smart, you're still being mean.
And many people will still be offended by that.
The point is, you can't really control if people are offended.
The internet is a place full of various speech, and some people are offended by some things, and others are not offended by some things.
Wil Wheaton tweeted that he was going to be over at CounterSocial and Macedon.
And to me, I was very intrigued by this, because Countersocial and Mastodon are very, very similar.
So I wondered why he would be on both platforms when these platforms actually have a feud with each other.
Now to better understand what this is, let's take a look at Countersocial.
CounterSocial is the first social network platform to take a zero-tolerance stance to hostile nations, bot accounts, and trolls who are weaponizing our social media platforms, and freedoms to engage in influence operations against us.
And we're here to counter it.
With advanced user protection features such as KosoGuard, identity alerts to minimize your attack surface, your online footprint instantly becomes safer.
They say, we operate a modified hardened node and infrastructure.
We are unafraid to engage in offensive countermeasures.
We actively block node and access to our community from IP space originating in Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, and Syria, along with over 100,000 VPN and proxy services.
Now, Mastodon is a very, very similar service.
It's all based on the same code.
And activist Kit O'Connell said, It seems like there's a growing amount of buzz in liberal
circles about counter-social.
How do we prevent people from joining that backwater server while encouraging them to
join Macedon, a great decentralized social network?
And I want to point out, these tweets are actually very old.
They're from December.
And it's possible that things have changed since then.
This post, from December 6th, from Mastodon Status, saying, We no longer federate with CounterSocial.
This means it is now impossible to see statuses, to follow, and to interact in any way with people on this instance.
CounterSocial blocks whole countries.
They consider it hostile, and we believe this is a huge error.
painted with hate, and we don't want to promote this behavior.
Counter-social is the only blocked instance on XYZ.
While we want to be as open as possible to all opinions, we don't want to be open to
fascists."
Really?
I'm really confused as to why Wil Wheaton was promoting counter-social, especially when
you consider who developed it.
The jester.
The extremely well-known pro-America hacktivist who targeted Islamists and jihadis.
This is a hacker who took down websites of the Taliban and other Islamist organizations.
Typically, you would find that associated with the right, but because the Jester is anti-Trump, many people on the left are now supporting the Jester and his endeavors, which, seriously, I find very strange when you look at the Jester's history.
The first thing I want to highlight is Jester's QR code attack, and this is from his Wikipedia page.
It says, On March 5, 2012, the Jester changed his Twitter account avatar from his signature Jester icon to a QR code without comment or explanation.
Scanning a QR code redirects a browser to a website.
Scanning the Jester's icon led to a URL where he had an image of the signature Jester icon and an embedded, hidden code that allegedly exploited a vulnerability that affects Safari, Chrome, and Android browsers.
Apparently, once connected to the Jester's server, the network diagnostic tool Netcat checked the connecting mobile device to see if it had Twitter software installed.
Twitter account information was then harvested and checked against a list that the Jester allegedly maintains of known Twitter accounts associated with the hacking groups Anonymous, LulzSec, or Antisec, with Wikileaks, Al-Qaeda, and Islamic Jihadi recruiting sites.
Twitter accounts that did not hit a match-to-list were ignored.
Possibly, when a Twitter account registered a hit on the list, the account permissions were transferred to the jester.
He elevated his permissions to allow him to exploit the entire mobile device.
It is possible that in this manner, the jester was able to obtain access to SMS text messages, voicemail, call logs, and email on the phone.
Let me break that down.
Jester changed his Twitter photo to a code that if you scanned, he would essentially or allegedly gain access to your entire device.
He stored that data.
I have to wonder how many innocent people not associated with Anonymous, LulzSec, Wikileaks, Al-Qaeda, or whatever group, gave up their information and access to their mobile device to this hacker.
If the story is true, and again, it does say allegedly, then the jester exploited innocent people in pursuit of his political gains.
Then we have to consider the history of the jester.
He took down jihadi and Islamist websites.
But what's particularly concerning there is that this is vigilante justice, and you can't just assume that the jester is acting in good faith.
If today, someone like Lauren Southern or Tommy Robinson, who are very critical of Islam, I'm pretty sure many conservatives, many people on the right, and many people who are critical of Islam, would be fine with it.
And that's actually how things happened back in the day, just about six years ago.
It was the conservatives saying, yeah, well, he's going after the terrorists.
But that's unaccountable.
You don't really know who he's targeting, and you can only really take his word for it.
I am not surprised to see people associated with the far left calling counter-social fascist and pure racism when you realize who's operating behind it.
But that Mastodon post about the racism of counter-social didn't even mention the jester's history.
So to see Will Wheaton promote counter-social and Mastodon when this feud is well known, it's very strange to me.
Because Mastodon works just as well.
You don't need to be on counter-social, which is sort of derivative of Mastodon.
Countersocial is a forked piece of code, meaning that it is essentially the same code, but changed.
They're not connected anymore.
Wil Wheaton doesn't need to promote this.
He could be on Mastodon.
He doesn't need to be on both.
Curious.
But, to be fair, let's take a look at what Countersocial says about the claims against it, that it's fascist, nationalist, and racist.
CounterSocial posted these frequently asked questions.
Why do they block entire countries?
They said, The nations blocked by our network are well known to be
origin points of an overwhelming majority of bots and trolls
that are used to engage in influence operations against not only the West but their own neighbors,
as well as attempts to disenfranchise and divide social media users worldwide.
Blocking these nations is the most effective way to keep our community safe and secure for our servers.
CounterSocial is constantly monitoring the internet ecosystem to mitigate threats to our community.
Banned nations may be added or removed at our discretion.
Currently, banned countries include Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, and Syria.
They ask, is it blocking entire nations' racism?
CounterSocial says, no.
The nations blocked contain individuals of all races.
Nations are not races.
I gotta stop right here and point out the argument that when Donald Trump issued his moratorium on travel from certain nations, the left said that is racist, and the right argued nations are not racist.
The left argued that targeting Muslims is racist.
The right argued North Korea and Venezuela aren't Muslim.
But the left still said this was a racist policy from Donald Trump.
If counter-social is blocking people for similar reasons because of the threats, and the left is saying it's racist, it is fair to say that the far left does view counter-social in a very similar way that they view Donald Trump's moratorium on travel.
So again, why would Wil Wheaton be promoting this?
Countersocial addresses one argument, surely that's nationalistic, and he says no.
Currently, at the time of writing, there are 195 nations on planet Earth.
We block seven of them.
Nationalistic is defined as having strong patriotic feelings, especially a belief in one's own country's superiority.
Again, we block seven of 195 countries, so ask yourself, which country of the remaining 188 countries free to access the site is Countersocial nationalistic about?
Well, let's go back to the Jester's history, the hacktivist who created the platform.
He claims to be acting out of American patriotism.
So which country is... So which country...
Is counter-social being nationalistic about?
Well, based on the jester's own history, America.
And that should be pretty obvious to anyone.
So then we can go back to that argument.
If counter-social is saying it's not racist or nationalistic, well, that could be applied to Donald Trump's argument about the travel ban.
This platform, counter-social, is a conservative right-wing site, though it is a never-Trumper-associated site.
So what about counter-social is so appealing to Wil Wheaton, a high-profile member of the resistance?
Maybe it has nothing to do with principles.
Maybe it's because they've agreed to be friends and because they both don't like Donald Trump.
But clearly, based on what Wil Wheaton tweets and what The Jester has done in the past, there is something not right here and it's goddamn confusing.
But let me know what you think in the comments below.
Why do you think Wil Wheaton's promoting it?
Do you think he's just ignorant?
He's just promoting a platform because he likes it?
Or do you think he really does know the history of it, the accusations laid against it, and is willing to promote it anyway?
Personally, I don't think Wil Wheaton's a fascist.
I do think he's fragile.
He blocked me for a very silly reason, and he blocks a lot of people.
But that's his right to do.
I don't think he's authoritarian.
I don't think he's overly nationalistic.
I think he's just within the trend of most people in the mainstream left, where they're on Twitter, they're being inundated by this content, and they just sort of regurgitate it.
But again, comment below.
Let me know what you think.
We'll keep the conversation going.
You can follow me on Twitter at TimCast.
Stay tuned.
New videos every day at 4 p.m.
And new videos on my second channel, youtube.com slash TimCastNews, starting at 6 p.m.
