The Purges Are Ongoing

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

It was a rainy Sunday afternoon, peaceful and otherwise uneventful. Out of nowhere, the following people appeared on “Spaces,” an audible show on the app X (formerly Twitter). They are all speaking live with each other: Alex Jones, Elon Musk, Andrew Tate, Vivek Ramaswamy, Gen. Michael Flynn, with Robert Kennedy, Jr. and David Stockman listening in. Other people popped in and out.

In real time, I saw 120K people listening, and millions total over two hours plus the archive.

We keep hearing about the death of mainstream media and I’m starting to believe it. These people have all been targeted as enemies of the state and yet here they were, all having a civil conversation we could hear in all its raw authenticity.

It was also a marvelous conversation. Mostly it revolved around how to defeat the globalist hegemon through free speech. Most of the people in this public room have been shut down, smeared, or otherwise silenced by the system. They are important people with huge followings and major impact but somebody somewhere decided that they cannot play a part in the formation of public life.

And yet here they were speaking to hundreds of thousands of people in real time, apparently unannounced. They just showed up.

Herein is the value of Elon’s platform that he purchased, not to make money but to give life to the idea of an open forum in times when the elites want anything but that. It was beautiful.

I found Alex Jones particularly intriguing. I’ve never been a fan but that might be for cultural and aesthetic reasons more than anything else. In many ways, he has indeed been a prophet of our times. He has been forecasting the arrival of dark times for at least a decade.

About five years ago when he was first shut down and censored, the comedian and podcaster Dave Rubin told me that we all know where this is headed. First they go after Alex Jones, who seems indefensible, but that is only to warm us all up to tolerating censorship. Next they go after others who we deem inadmissible to the public conversation. Eventually they come for us, and there is no one there to defend us.

So he predicted and so it was.

The purge of public life has been systematic and relentless for years now.

There is always some excuse, some alleged infringement on the civic code of belief and conduct.

The campaign begins and they are eventually burned at the stake like the witches at Salem. The puritanical impulse to drive the heretics from our lives to clean up the landscape still survives and thrives after all these years, despite every slogan about tolerance and diversity.

Also over the weekend, I dealt with an unpleasant canceling myself.

Brownstone Institute has a monthly supper club with speakers from many disciplines and points of view.

For next month, we had invited Tiffany Justice, one of the founders of Moms for Liberty.

Moms for Liberty founder Tiffany Justice speaks at the Republican Party of Florida Freedom Summit, in Kissimmee, Fla., on Nov. 4, 2023. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)

This is an organization born of lockdowns that opposes school closures and favors parental rights. For some reason, the organization came to be targeted as bad... or something.

We use the service called Eventbrite to take our tickets. Over the weekend, the company sent me the following note:

“We have determined that your event is not permitted on the Eventbrite marketplace as it violates our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service, with which all users agree to comply. Specifically, we do not allow content or events that—through on- or off-platform activity—discriminate against, harass, disparage, threaten, incite violence against, or otherwise target individuals or groups based on their actual or perceived race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, immigration status, gender identity, sexual orientation, veteran status, age, or disability. As a result, your event has been unpublished. Please be aware that severe or repeated violations of our guidelines may result in the suspension or termination of your Eventbrite account. We have refunded all attendees who purchased tickets to your event, if necessary.”

Wow! Just like that, the service that claims to be for everyone has decided that our group cannot hear what Tiffany Justice has to say. It’s all crazy because ours is a very diverse supper club. I’ve never once polled people on their politics. So far as I know, it’s not even a topic of conversation. We are mostly interested in issues of science, civic life, community health, and so on. I invited Tiffany just to get her perspective. People are free to agree or disagree. That’s how the freedom of association works.

But to Eventbrite, they seem to think we are all automatons who accept whatever we are told. We were about to listen to forbidden thoughts and so their platform had to intervene to protect us, as if we were children. It’s all so insulting and ridiculous. It’s also not good for their business, one might suppose.

In any case, we scrambled overnight and implemented our own native system of taking tickets, so that we never have to rely on such third-party services again for this particular service. The meeting will go ahead, of course, without or without Eventbrite, so one wonders what the point of this particular purge really was.

We have ample proof that most of these platforms are no longer independent actors. They are funded and controlled by third parties that respond to government priorities. I don’t have proof regarding Eventbrite but we’ve seen the same behavior from a dozen or more industry dominant platforms, so we can safely assume the same here.

Fortunately, there is still something of a competitive marketplace out there, so we can exercise choice. But there’s no question that this too is on the chopping block. A point about industrial concentration is that it reduces the number of competitive options out there, allowing government a greater degree of control over commerce and therefore over individuals. It so happens that industry underwent an enormous consolidation over the last five years, to the point that the major government-connected firms control most of the market. This is true not just in digital commerce but also in groceries, home goods, and pharmaceuticals.

Make no mistake: the goal is to continue the purge. It’s been ongoing since at least 2016. That was the point of the lockdowns, masks, and forced vaccination: to drive out of professional and media life those who dissent. It has only intensified since then. You are either with team Ruling Class or against it. Those on the team prove it through constant incantations of woke philosophy, while those against it are systematically smeared, canceled, and silenced.

What can we do but resist? A major way is to use those platforms that tolerate dissent and eschew those that enforce the orthodoxy. This is the right of our times, and it is fundamentally about the right to disagree with the regime.