By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I’m pretty sure this place use to be a democracy. Not America. Contrary to what Broadway may have told you, even our saintly Founding Fathers were little more than racist neocons in pantaloons. I’m talking about the fucking internet. The Anarchist’s American Dream. A brave new world wrestled from the savages of the military industrial complex who birthed it and wilded into a stateless candy land of endless possibilities by fuzzy little daydream believers like Steve Wozniak and Richard Stallman. The place that gave us Linux and Anonymous and Napster. That land of a million possibilities where no kink was left without a chatroom and a 12 year old hacker in Ethiopia could take down the American Federal Government just for the lulz. That glorious pirate utopia of  temporary autonomous zones foretold by Hakim Bey, where only censorship was taboo and any lunatic with a Commodore could say whatever the fuck they wanted about the latest twat in the White House and the only recourse was to bitch and troll. Even a confirmed Luddite like myself couldn’t help but to look upon this satanic majesty and swell with pride at the seemingly inevitable supremacy of raw chaos.

Those memories are still so fresh in my mind but they seem quite quaint now. Much like the Wild West, those bad old all-or-nothing days seem to have given way to the scourge of untrammeled crony capitalism. Social media sites which once braved the criticism of the normies and Karens of the straight world have become colossal bureaucratic monstrosities, operating in tandem with America’s deep state to censor our blessed digital commons in the name of national security and combatting whatever the powers at be deem to be fake news. Facebook has taken the lead in this Orwellian jihad, unleashing a beige wave of crypto-fascist algorithms to flush out what they call “Coordinated inauthentic behavior” or CIB. In this latest purge, they have proudly published monthly reports announcing the extrajudicial destruction of some 46 pages, 91 accounts, and 2 groups, all of which we are promised with scant evidence are operations of Kremlin sponsored skullduggery. A crime that could be better summed up as being an upstart news source with views that don’t support the western values of blind globalism and “humanitarian” regime change.

And so it goes, as Nick Lowe once sang, where it’s goin’ no one knows. But I have a bad feeling that the big Stalinesque show trials of Slavic friendly news sites like Southfront and Newsfront are just the tip of a very censorious iceberg. Since the mainstream media let their lust for ratings get an embarrassing imbecile like Trump elected, they’ve doubled down on the Russiagate fairy tale they tell themselves in the mirror to get to sleep every night and rained down a four year shitstorm on the hardworking muckrakers of the Fifth Estate like myself. You can’t seem to so much as fart in the wrong direction on platforms like Facebook without getting a thirty day ban for one lame excuse or another. These seemingly insignificant acts of knee-jerk censorship can be devastating to little blogs like mine that have grown to depend on social media and the implied democracy it was once built on. The most tragic thing for a politically incorrect commie like me is to see my own comrades become savage little Eichmann’s of the status quo and relish in this toxic culture of censorship in the name of social justice and supposedly anti-fascist deplatforming.

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