Over the last few days I’ve been struggling with how to respond to the fact that Twitter verified my account and then changed their terms of service to justify unverifying me along with a number of others following subsequent outrage from the press. It does feel like a slap in the face for a giant megacorp to quash the user agreement I enrolled with them under simply to appease a mob stoked by activist journalists.
The initial verification was heartening to me because I am a public figure, I have been impersonated and I’ve faced enormous hardship in order to get my opinions into the public square. The fact is that I had followed the terms of service: never engaging in harassment campaigns or using ethnic slurs. I simply stated my opinions, which are fairly moderate in comparison to others on both the right and left. This goes in the face of the narrative that my detractors were peddling about me: that I’m filled with hate, that I’m a Neo-Nazi or white supremacist, that I planned violence against anyone or that I’m personally responsible for the death of Heather Heyer.
But facts don’t matter so much as emotions. And its clear many people hate me. I’m sent death threats and entreaties to kill myself through social media on a daily basis. Many target their hatred against me for being a white man, assuming that if I don’t crawl into a fetal position to apologize for my race that I should have no voice.
The truth of all these things is highly dubious. Like over 50% of white Americans I felt mistreated in today’s society. I wanted to hold a rally to encourage white folks to have a voice and be proud of their heritage. I got a permit to hold a rally in my hometown of Charlottesville and worked tirelessly with police for two months to facilitate an environment where right-wing and centrist demonstrators could rally in peace at Lee Park while the inevitable Left-wing protestors could also protest in peace, but segregated safely behind a line of police or barricades.
The city government of Charlottesville had other plans and aborted the safety measures on the day of the rally. This led to a highly chaotic environment where people were getting into fights and panicked individuals who’d parked in the area did not know how to leave the area. This is what I believe happened with James Fields: he got lost in a strange city while trying to drive away from an event which had unexpectedly ended before it began, got trapped behind some other cars while armed left-wing demonstrators were blocking the road and panicked when someone hit his car with a weapon.
Of course the city didn’t apologize for creating these chaotic conditions. They blamed everything on me while an obliging media was only too happy to ignore the real story about police standing down and allowing chaos to spiral into violence and death.
This leads me back to my problem with Big Tech. They’re placed in between law enforcement who know that I did nothing wrong but don’t want to incur public wrath by saying so and the media who frame it as if I’m a genocidal terrorist. So they take things into their own hands to censor, smear and otherwise punish me for things I did not do.
My website, JasonKessler.net (which used to be the #1 Google search result for my name) was removed from the web by Weebly, a San Francisco based tech firm. The domain name which I’d purchased was seized. This was effectively the greatest censorship I faced because I couldn’t get my side of the story out to a wide audience right as all these media hit pieces were coming out about me. On top of that I had trouble raising money to mount a legal defense against the false accusations because Paypal shut down both of my accounts. Any platform which I used to raise money was bombarded by an outraged mob which didn’t want me to be able to defend myself and wanted me dead. My phone number and social media accounts were publicly listed and I received thousands of death threats and insults. For this reason I also had to leave my home of 15 years because of reporters and hostile people stalking my premises night and day.
YouTube demonetized most of my videos, my car insurance was temporarily cancelled and my credit score mysteriously fell 39 points to 666 overnight. I shut down my Instagram because it was flooded with hundreds of messages from people insulting everything from my looks to my race, calling me a murderer and wishing for me to die or be violently raped in increasingly disturbing and bizarre scenarios. On top of that OkCupid banned me for life and my employer was no longer able to send me out to work.
The final nail in the coffin was the revocation of my Twitter verification. There’s absolutely nothing to be accomplished by continuing to supply these platforms which hate my guts with fresh content. Going forward I’m going to be looking at supplying my content to alt-tech, anti-censorship platforms like Gab, VK and PewTube. Even if it means a reduction in my total viewership it will give me the peace of mind that I’m not contributing to the business models of platforms authoritarian Left-wing corporations subject to dictates of the mob.
To the extent that I still use platforms like Twitter it will only be to link to my content on other sites like JasonKessler.us or Gab. Be sure to follow me @TheMadDimension on Gab.