TBT: [Censored.TV] Lineup Announced

Other than Roosh V, probably the greatest influence on my deeper red-pilling was Gavin McInnes.  McInnes’s commentary is funny, lively, and fresh.  I have consumed hundreds of hours of his popular podcast, Get Off My Lawn, so I’ve heard a lot of his thoughts on a broad range of topics.  Even when I disagree with his assessment of some event, his perspective is unique and interesting.

Milo is also a part of McInnes’s world, and his sharp, erudite, biting commentary—and excellent journalism—routinely inspire posts on this site, such as Monday’s piece “What is Civilization?

Back in Summer 2019, McInnes—who, like Laura Loomer, has been banned from multiple platforms—launched Censored.TV, which at the time was FreeSpeech.TV (thus the brackets in this post’s title, and in the original post below; the service changed its name after another company threatened a trademark suit against McInnes).  The service, which is just $10 a month or $100 for a year, features about a dozen different personalities and shows, ranging from “Gary’s Mailbag”—a homeless man who wanders around outside the studio and reads letters—to Milo’s raucous “Friday Night’s All Right.”

The main message of the original post was to encourage readers to support content they like (myself included!), especially conservatives.  Platforms like SubscribeStar help give conservatives and dissidents a voice, but those platforms are oases of freedom in a desert of techno-tyranny.

With that, here is 2019’s “FreeSpeech.TV Lineup Announced“:

Thanks to my brother for this nocturnal news update:  Gavin McInnes’s new subscription-based service, [Censored.TV], is ready to launch.  Listeners to the excellent, hilarious Get Off My Lawn podcast know that Gavin has been planning this platform for some time now, so it’s exciting to see the lineup.  The most exciting part of that schedule:  the twice-monthly sit-downs with Milo Yiannopoulos to talk about the news.  Talk about throwing gasoline onto a raging fire of awesomeness.

The service is $10 a month, or $100 a year, which is on par with Steven Crowder’s Mug Club or Ben Shapiro’s subscription.  I just don’t think it comes with a Leftist Tears Hot-or-Cold Tumbler, much less a far superior hand-etched mug.  But with McInnes’s crazy, controversial, humorous observations about life and culture, I can live without a drinking vessel tossed in (although it would be hysterical to drink coffee from a mug made to look like McInnes’s bearded mug).

Because of constant censorship from techno-elites and their ever-shifting “terms of services,” conservative and Dissident Right voices have fewer and fewer options to raise funds.  Some sites, like immigration patriot website VDare.com, can’t even use PayPal anymore.  As such, more and more content creators are turning to alternative or free-speech-friendly services, or undertaking the cost of creating their own infrastructure, so they can continue to get their work to fans.

I am definitely a small fry in this game of commentary, but that’s why I’ve setup a page with SubscribeStar.  My goal isn’t too live off of subscriptions, but just to supplement my income slightly to make blogging more on a daily basis more feasible (and to reinvest some of the funds into maintaining and improving the experience).

For guys like Gavin McInnes, who has been hounded from even supposed safe havens like his old employer, CRTV (now BlazeTV), reliable income streams aren’t a passing lark—they’re absolutely crucial.

In a better timeline, McInnes would be hosting Red Eye.  But he’s a fighter, and I have no doubt his new service will continue to deliver the laughs.

Free speech isn’t free.  Support creators like McInness, Crowder, Shapiro, and Milo to the best of your ability to keep their content alive.

If you’d like to support MY content, consider signing up for a subscription to my SubscribeStar page.  New, exclusive content every Saturday, starting at just $1 a month.

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What is Civilization?

This morning while getting ready for work I listened to a fascinating discussion between Milo Yiannopoulos and “groypers” Steven Franssen and Vincent James.  I don’t know much about Franssen and James, other than that they are fairly prominent figures on the Dissident Right, but the discussion (which is available at Censored.TV to subscribers—I highly recommend forking over the $10 a month for a subscription) covered a broad range of topics, from 9/11 to the future of America and traditionalism.

Out of that far-ranging discussion came a brief debate between Milo and his guests near the end of the exchange.  The gist of it boiled down to the question “what is civilization?”  Milo’s contention—an interesting one—is that by abandoning our cities, we are, essentially, abandoning our greatest cultural products:  our art, our architecture, our institutions.  These cultural artifacts took the blood, sweat, toil, and ingenuity of the American people to build, so we’re capitulating to the Leftist mobs when we flee our cities instead of fighting for them.

In true Milo fashion, it’s a compellingly contrarian argument:  why surrender what we fought so hard to build?  I am a big advocate of normal, decent folks abandoning the cities in search of a better life in the country (to the point I think we should consider subsidizing families in rural areas), but makes a strong case.  If we want to preserve our heritage, we shouldn’t hand it over to looters.

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Loomer for Congress

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.  The record of women’s suffrage has been dubious, but our nation has enjoyed its share of qualified and exceptional female politicians, such as South Carolina’s own Nikki Haley.

One woman to add to that group is Laura LoomerLoomer, 27, is running for Congress in President Trump’s home district in south Florida.  Today is the Republican primary, and The Portly Politico sincerely hopes Ms. Loomer wins.  If she does, she’ll go on to compete against Democrat Lois Frankel, who has represented Florida US House District 21 since 2013.

Loomer is the most-censored woman in America—probably the most censored person, period.  Her crime:  bucking the establishment orthodoxy.  Loomer gained notoriety a few years ago when she crashed a production of Julius Caesar that placed President Trump in the title role (remember, the Roman Senators stabbed Caesar), allowing for some macabre wish fulfillment among the well-heeled progressives in attendance.  She also handcuffed herself to Twitter headquarters to protest their double standards—banning the Right for the mildest of rhetoric, but upholding Leftist calls for violence against conservatives.

Loomer is so banned—she can’t use PayPal, Twitter, Facebook, Uber, etc.—that Comcast-Xfinity blocked her congressional campaign from sending texts and making calls to potential supporters!

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Lazy Sunday LXXIX: Forgotten Posts, Volume III

Lazy Sunday is rolling on with some more “Forgotten Posts” (check out Volume I and Volume II).  Again, the criteria for selection is pretty loose—I scroll through my archives and find posts I don’t link to very often, or which I’ve largely forgotten that I wrote.  Even that’s not a hard-and-fast rule.

This week’s selections come from June 2019.  The summer is always a slow month for new; ergo, it’s a slow month for blogging.  But with a self-imposed daily post requirement, I’ve gotta come up with something.  Here’s a taste of those somethings:

There’s another Lazy Sunday in the books.  Speaking of books, I’ll be cracking them pretty hard this week, as school resumes this Thursday.  It’s going to be an interesting year.  Wish me luck.

In the meantime, enjoy your Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Resist the Black Pill

Lately, it’s been easy to give in to despair.  Trump is way down in the polls, we’ve suffered reversals on DACA (and Trump’s own reversals on rescinding foreign student visas for colleges going online-only in the fall and on suspending foreign worker visas through the end of the year), BLM is murdering people for saying “All Lives Matter,” and so on.

Despair is a sin.  Like most situations in life, doing the opposite of what you feel is virtuous.  Wallowing in self-pity (or shouting angrily during one of Tucker Carlson‘s litanies of unpunished progressive malfeasance) is the emotionally satisfying approach, but it’s not very productive.

I’m noticing that a number of folks on our side of this great culture war are taking the “black pill.”  Z Man railed against Trump in this week’s podcast, and in a post earlier this week (which I referenced yesterday).  Milo had all-but written Trump off until the Roger Stone commutation.

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Cancelling Jesus

Yesterday, I wrote about the destruction of statues of American leaders—the destruction of American history.  My position is that tearing down virtually any statue—Confederate, Union, Theodore Roosevelt, etc.—is the untenable erasure of our nation’s history.  Further, the historic illiteracy of the woke SJWs has seen the defenestration of statues of abolitionists—an absurdity for groups that claim to be fighting against the legacy of slavery.

In that context, I made a big deal about the toppling of a statue of Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln has assumed something of a demigod status in American history, one that glosses over some of the thorny issues of how to respond to the secession of the Southern States (a real question at the time was, having opted into the Constitution, could States later opt out; for a good biographical read on that issue, check out “A Voice of Reason” by John Marquardt at the Abbeville Institute).  Lincoln was certainly a man with many noble qualities, and a keen constitutional mind.  The toppling of his statues is the height of insanity—or nearly so.

In my haste, I neglected the even more egregious calls to destroy statues and stained glass windows depicting The most important Figure in world historyJesus Christ.

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Trump Takes Action on Big Tech

President Trump finally did it—after years of calls from blackballed conservatives, GEOTUS signed an executive order yesterday removing liability protections for social media companies that censor users based on their political views.

Here is a lengthy excerpt from Fox News‘s reporting:

The president’s order, which also cuts federal funding for social media platforms that censor users’ political views, came just two days after Twitter took the unprecedented step of slapping a “misleading” warning label on two of Trump’s tweets concerning the fraud risks of nationwide mail-in balloting. The move immediately backfired: Experts disputed that Trump’s tweet was actually misleading, in part because mail-in balloting has been linked to ongoing fraud; Twitter’s fact-check itself contained false statements; and Twitter failed to apply the standard of review to other users.

At Thursday’s signing ceremony, Trump called the fact-check “egregious,” and held up a photo of Twitter executive Yoel Roth, who heads up the site’s fact-checking and rules-making operation. Fox News reported on Wednesday that Roth has mocked Trump supporters, called Trump’s team “ACTUAL NAZIS,” slammed “scary trannies” in New York City, and called GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a “bag of farts.” (In a statement, Twitter did not dispute Fox News’ reporting, but called it “unfortunate.”)

“My executive order calls for new regulations under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to make it so that social media companies that engage in censoring any political conduct will not be able to keep their liability shield,” the president said.

Essentially, social media platforms have always had a choice:  either act as a publisher, in which case you’re liable for what users post, but you can remove and censor content as you see fit; or act as a neutral platform, in which case you’re protected from liability for what users post.  Twitter, Facebook, et. al., are trying to have the best of both worlds—ban political posts and users with which they disagree under the companies’ “Terms of Services,” while disclaiming responsibility for everything else.

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Big Deal

A big story in media this week is Joe Rogan, host of the popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, has signed an exclusive deal with Spotify that could be worth over $100 million.

Joe Rogan’s podcast has been around since 2009, and features long (two hours or more) interviews with personalities from every background and occupation.  The long-ranging, free-flowing conversations (really, they’re more conversations than traditional interviews) make for great listening, and I suspect part of the key to Rogan’s success is that he offers something for everyone.  For example, I ignore most of Rogan’s content, but I’ll never miss an interview he does with any of the various figures on the Right, from Ben Shapiro to Gavin McInnes (persona non grata from Rogan’s show these days, unfortunately).

McInnes describes Rogan as a man with a “blue-collar brain,” but who is generally open to learning.  That is, he’s rather meat-headed and unsophisticated in his analysis, but he’s willing to discuss anything with anyone (Flat Earthers, for example, are regulars on his show).  His only real sticking point, until the SJWs targeted him, was marijuana.  He lost it on Steven Crowder for merely suggesting that copious consumption of marijuana isn’t completely benign.  Yikes!

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Lazy Sunday LVI: Movies

If you want to find these flicks on RedBox, use my referral link; you get some bonus points, and so do I!  Link is here:  https://www.redbox.com/refersignup?referrer=50892857667272)

As I wrote in the lengthy preamble to yesterday’s SubscribeStar Saturday post, in The Age of The Virus, we’re all being asked to make a sacrifice befitting our decadent age:  stay home and watch movies.  With that in mind, I thought this Sunday’s Lazy Sunday should look back at some of my movie reviews, which are fairly thin on the ground.

I’m not a professional movie critic—I like what I like—so take these reviews with a grain of salt.  My dad has a system for finding movies he enjoys:  if the average rating is around three stars (out of five), it’s going to be good.  After all, what critics look for in films is often quite different than what the average movie-goer looks for, which explains why you’ve often never heard of the annual Oscar Winner for Best Picture.

With that, here are my posts (at least, the ones that I could find) about movies:

  • TBT: Transformers 2: Conservatives in Disguise?” – I wrote this review way back in the TPP 1.0 era, when the blog first began on Blogger/Blogspot.  The Transformers series now is a sell-out to Chinese audiences, but the plot of this second Transformers film highlighted the inefficiency of government bureaucracy, filled as it is with bean-counting busybodies who miss the big picture.  My preamble in the TBT version from last March draws a parallel to the EPA official in Ghostbusters (probably my favorite movie of all time, by the way), whose smarmy, toadying officiousness results in an apocalyptic outbreak of spooky apparitions in Manhattan.
  • Slammed Holy Saturday: Captain Marvel” – It’s apostasy in conservative circles to say so now, but I actually enjoyed Captain Marvel when I saw it last year (also, with The Virus shutting everything down, I pretty much forgot that today is Palm Sunday—that’s the real apostasy).  Of course, what I didn’t like was the pandering “you go GRRRRRRLLLLLL!”-ism of the film, which went so far as to make the alleged titular hero into an unlikable feminist.  Even the other characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe don’t like her!  But it was still a fun distraction, which is really what these superhero flicks are supposed to be.  It’s a shame they stained it with a bunch of SJW clap-trap.
  • They Live: Analysis and Review” – I love John Carpenter.  I love the range of his films, and I love that he writes synthy, electric guitar-driven soundtracks.  This flick in particular has become a bit of a meme for the Dissident Right, as the main character finds a pair of sunglasses that expose that huge chunks of the population are actually aliens, and that humans are in cahoots with these would-be invaders.  It’s a sharp critique of mindless consumerism, globalism, and the elites who push both.  WATCH IT!
  • Milo on Generation Joker” – If I love John Carpenter, I adore Milo Yiannopoulos, the cheeky, flamboyant British Greek with a penchant for mischief.  Little wonder, then, that Milo loved The Joker.  For a super villain movie, it paints a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of its subject, with parallels to the frustration of young men in our society today.  It’s another must-see; the They Live of the 2020s.
  • SubscribeStar Saturday: Hammer Films” – Yesterday’s SubscribeStar Saturday post, in which I offer up brief summaries and review of five films from Hammer Films, the famous British film company known for reviving classic horror characters from nineteenth-century literature.  Hammer movies are iconic for their gratuitous subject matter and bright, vivid colors (a bit idiosyncratic for horror flicks, but it works).  These movies won’t scare you, probably, but they are great fun.

That’s it for this Lazy Sunday!  Do your civic duty and cuddle up with a bucket of popcorn and these movies (I’m sure you can stream most of them on RedBox).

Enjoy!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

The Revival of Traditionalism?

Milo Yiannopoulos posted a screen shot yesterday of an essay from The Atlantic reading “How the Coronavirus Will Send Us Back to the 1950s” (the piece, by Helen Lewis, is now called “The Coronavirus Is a Disaster for Feminism“—a silver lining to this pandemic, I suppose).  His caption reads, “HOLY SH[*]T YES PLEASE[.]”

The Lewis piece is the usual feminist hand-wringing about the disparate impact of the coronavirus on women.  Feminists always find a way to make global catastrophes about them, and not about everyone who is truly suffering.  The attitude seems to be, “yes, yes, people will die, but why do I have to make any sacrifices or trade-offs for the people I ostensibly love?”

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