|
Censored Republic by Rob And,
I, for one, am tired of taking orders from cokeheads and felons! Elect
another one and I'll tell you what. I'll be ready for war!
~ FreeRepublic founder and owner Jim Robinson, on 8/20/99 A
few weeks ago, I joined the so-called FreeRepublic
forum, primarily to post new columns by Root Strikers that I thought the
FReepers would enjoy. I
knew that a number of people had been banned from the forum for posting
columns that didn’t toe the party line, so I deliberately didn’t
post any columns or messages that might get me banned.
Over the next ten days or so, I posted about three columns.
Based on FReepers’ responses, they were very well received.
Little did I know that trouble was brewing. My
days of laissez faire posting on FreeRepublic would soon come to
an abrupt end, as this
thread foretold. In
case that page has been deleted by the time you read this, one FReeper
asks another, “I wonder what happened to ogre68 [my handle]? As there
is no current FReeper by that name.”
The other FReeper replies, “Alas, another goes down the memory
hole.” Yes, down the
memory hole, which, as this
site describes, was “a document disposal system described in
George Orwell's famous novel, Nineteen
Eighty-Four. The candidates for this system were generally
documents whose continued existence would very likely undermine the
legitimacy of the State. For the sake of preserving that all-important
legitimacy, the inevitable fate of these documents was incineration.
They were erased from living memory through a highly bureaucratized
system of book burning.” No
incinerators or bureaucracy is needed today, just one person with a
delete key. The
next time I tried to post a column, I got a screen that said, “Your
posting privilege has been revoked [with no warning].
Reason: You see on the front page of strike-the-root where it has
links to "The Progressive", "Mother Jones",
"Common Dreams", "The Memory Hole", "Subversive
Liberty", and "Working for Change"?
That is a clue--find a leftist site to peddle the site to.”
So my posting privilege was revoked not because of the content of
the columns I posted or because of a comment I made but because of six
links (out of 117) at the bottom of the main page, which of
course was never posted on FreeRepublic.
This
highlights a fundamental difference between free thinkers such as myself
and most conservatives: We support free speech, free debate and free
inquiry in the pursuit of the truth, while most conservatives do not.
I don’t link to The
Progressive, Mother Jones,
Common Dreams or Working
for Change because I agree with most of what’s on their sites
(which is leftist nonsense) but because they often have worthwhile
things to say, especially in the areas of war and civil liberties.
I don’t worry that my readers will be swayed by their socialist
arguments. I trust my
readers to be able to find the truth in the market of ideas.
If you cater to readers who are fed a steady dose of the party
line, then I can see how they might not be able to handle different
ideas. They might see an original STR column posted on FreeRepublic,
click on the link to STR’s main page, scroll all the way down to the
bottom right corner, click on The Progressive, and then read a column
like this
one, which might lead them to fly their American flag only 364 days
per year instead of 365. I
realize that most of the content on those sites is socialist hogwash,
and I de-emphasize them by placing them in the bottom right corner.
But they don’t threaten my intellectual masculinity.
I’m not sure why the censor objected to The
Memory Hole, unless it reminded him too much of what he was doing.
I’m sure he objected to Subversive
Liberty because of the first word in the title (I doubt he even
looked at the site); anything with “subversive” in the title must be
a threat to the holy Constitution.
Pulling the four leftist sites above out of 117 links was
disingenuous, because if one did a casual perusal of STR, it would be
obvious that STR is dedicated to liberty. What
I think the censor objected to most, though he didn’t say it, was the
heading that the leftist sites fell under: “Anti-War Sites.”
As Mr. Robinson wrote soon after September 11: Lots
of grumbling lately about deleted posts. Well, my friends, the simple
truth is the game has changed. We are now at war. We have been attacked
by a vicious cold-blooded force of international terrorists who want to
destroy our nation, our freedom and our way of life. There is no doubt
about this. Knowing this, I am alarmed to read some of the stuff that
has been posted to FR in the last few days. This is not the time to
raise doubts about our leaders. This is not the time to raise conspiracy
theories. This is not the time to second guess our intelligence
agencies. This is war. This is survival of our way of life. We must
unite behind our Commander-in-chief and do all we possibly can to
support him and our war efforts. We do not have a choice in this matter.
Well,
Mr. Robinson, you were right: They elected another cokehead and felon1,
and now you’re ready for war. Of
course, FreeRepublic is your site, and you are free to censor it however
you wish. But if you do,
please remove these sentences from your site: “…Free
Republic is not edited or censored….” and
“But, most importantly, visitors are encouraged to comment
on the news of the day here, and especially to contribute whatever
information they may have to help others better understand a particular
story.” They
make you look like a liar. Also
realize that actions have consequences.
As Justin Raimondo recently wrote: “FreeRepublic.com
is the original conservative news and discussion site, and it is still
the biggest. But much of the elan is gone, and I fear that dear old FR
shows definite signs of senility. Gone are the free-wheeling ways of the
90s, when Jim Robinson's virtual community of conservatives was,
paradoxically, an oasis of freethinking revolutionary thought on the
internet--and downright fun. Also addictive. But the post-9/11 FR is
quite a different place. The free discussion of ideas that operated as a
general rule . . . has been replaced by a regime of ‘administrative
monitors’ who censor individual comments and often pull entire
threads.” And
as Robert Momenteller wrote in this
column: “So,
it shouldn't have been any surprise to me to find dozens of e-mails this
week expressing outrage over Robinson's deleting of Todd
Fahey's news article. Apparently, Robinson's moronic hall monitors
have deleted this article numerous times over the last week by dozens of
posters. While such censorship can be expected from our mainstream
press, it's a sad day when an alternative (supposedly conservative)
website that calls itself FreeRepublic and boasts about an open
discussion forum hops on the socialist express.
While opinion articles have been nuked for months that don't fall
into the Bush dynasty guidelines, this is the first time that we are
aware of that such degeneracy now extends to news stories. We
have been told by most FR posters that the reason the article got pulled
is because
the author's name is Todd Fahey. So, all those FReepers who do not
read EZ were denied a news scoop for a week because Robinson
doesn't like Fahey? Oh my! Things are even worse than one could have
ever imagined. Now with authors being added to the blackball hit list,
friends of Pravda will surely find their way to donate to JR's
coffer.” Well,
now the degeneracy extends to columns published on websites that have
links to unapproved sites. There
is a stereotype of conservatives that they are narrow-minded or
closed-minded, and I think it’s largely deserved.
Their true colors really came through after 9/11 (e.g., Ari
Fliescher telling reporters that people “need to watch what they say,
watch what they do,” and groups like the
American Council of Trustees and Alumni and Americans
for Victory Over Terrorism trying to stifle dissent).
For conservatives, war changes the terms of the debate, so that
any dissent threatens our very survival and therefore borders on
treason. FreeRepublic
was once a freewheeling forum, but Mr. Robinson has apparently decided
to use it to promote the so-called War on Terrorism, which is his
prerogative. But if people
want the party line, all they need to do is turn on the lobotomy box or
open the daily rag. Most
Internet users go online to be exposed to new ideas, to see things from
a different perspective, and to connect and communicate with other
people. Because of FreeRepublic’s censorship, it is no longer
possible to do those things at that site. As
FreeRepublic censors and deletes, it reminds me of a
dying star. FReepers
and lurkers get fed up with being censored and being exposed to nothing
but the party line, and peel off to form new stars.
Websites such as Strike The Root and anti-state.com that offer
open, freewheeling forums
are booming,
whereas the traffic on FreeRepublic seems to be stagnant.
New forums such as LibertyForum
and collaborative blogs such as the ones at No
Treason and Breaking All
The Rules are popping up all over the place, taking eyeballs away
from FreeRepublic. It is no
longer 1996, Mr. Robinson, and FreeRepublic is no longer the only game
in town. If you want FreeRepublic to become something other than a
glorified Ann Coulter fan club, you had better wake up to that fact. Mr.
Robinson, you were once a dissident, but now you operate the memory hole
for the regime. You once
spoke of going to war if another cokehead felon was elected President,
and now you unleash the dogs of war for such a man.
It’s ironic that your website is called FreeRepublic, because
as SARTRE wrote in this
column, “Attitudes like [those of] Mr. Robinson pave the way to a
republic no longer free . . . . The choice is simple, be a
bunkmate of Thoreau or become a jailer, alongside Robinson.” Which
will you be, a dissident or a jailer? 1 I’m not sure if the drunk driving charge would have been a felony, but I believe that possessing or using cocaine is a felony, and the sale of the Harken stock was never fully investigated.
discuss this column in the forum
|
