Gab: Home of the Renegade Mind
Derided as a cesspool of hate and petri dish for extremism, Gab has played a uniquely vital role in keeping the embers of Free Speech alive on the internet. Now, those embers may be ready to reignite.
Amid all the wailing and gnashing of teeth precipitated by the repeal of federal mask mandates, Florida’s anti-groomer bill, and more recently, the revelation that the Supreme Court is set to overturn Roe v Wade, I must admit that the fallout from Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter rather passed me by. It’s not that I’m dispassionate about the news; one need only consider the reactions of George Soros and Hillary Clinton to see the criminal-political class are scared goddamned shitless. Neither is it, for all his promising rhetoric, that I am yet to be convinced of the authenticity, much less the resolve, of Musk’s alleged red-pilling.
Instead, the reason I refuse to fellate some transhumanist billionaire in thanks for my capacity to express myself, is simply because, for all the so-called “conservatives” currently rallying around Musk - those who have made careers decrying cancel culture and cashing in those sweet, sweet outrage bucks - only a comparative handful ever had the balls to support the one platform upholding Free Speech as its most foundational principle.
I believe my arrival to Gab a fairly typical one, at least among those who’d hopped aboard prior to the Great Twitter Purge of 2021. Initially, the site appeared on my radar vis-à-vis a number of independent content creators, folk such as Mark Dice and Tarl Warwick. What prompted me to dip a proverbial toe in the water, however, was the telltale vitriol of the MSM’s smear campaign. With headlines plucked straight from the ADL handbook and conclusions eerily reminiscent of Brian Stelter’s pre-teen diary, these undisguised stink-pieces described a platform dominated by frothing-at-the-mouth neo-Nazis and race-obsessed “followers of QAnon”; by flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, and a litany of other ideological pariahs – a site, depending on tone and tenor of their propaganda, which was either a disastrously disorganized dumpster fire or a well-oiled, finely-tuned hate machine.
Naturally, I was intrigued. You see, what the professional shit-stirrers at Vox and the Washington Post appear incapable of grasping, is that unlike their own emotionally fragile, intellectually passive readership, there remains a significant and indeed, ever-expanding segment of society entirely unmoved by their slanderous hyperventilating. If anything, we take it as a full-throated endorsement. No doubt, Musk’s takeover will prompt a few more casual Gabbers to make the transition back to Twitter. Well, so be it. There is, quite clearly, sound enough logic in taking the message to those who most need to hear it, and yet, the majority of us sticking with Gab will do so, not because we remain banished from its puritanical progenitors, but because we recognize the mainstream, purely by virtue of being the mainstream, is structurally and intrinsically unsalvageable.
The evidence for this seems overwhelming. One need only consult Jeffery Epstein’s flight logs in order to see that the people who spent the last two years locking us in our homes, closing our businesses, forcing masks on our children, indoctrinating them, cheering on rioters, rigging an election, pushing a dangerous vaccine, laundering the profits, before starting a war to hide those profits are, perhaps not so surprisingly, total pieces of shit. Remarkably, that’s not even the most galling part. What’s most galling is that they did this all out in the open, with a shit-eating grin on their face, the media, Hollywood, and Big Tech complicit in crime after crime, cover-up after cover-up.
Needless to say, it is Musk’s claim, or at least his insinuation, is that it is just such issues he intends to address. And who knows, maybe he will. I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of his motives, aside from an instinctual distrust of crazy-rich dudes who want to put a computer chip in all our brains. Nevertheless, even if Twitter’s newest owner truly does seek to avoid the mistakes of his predecessors, I’m not quite sure why we’re giving him the chance.
After all, Silicon Valley has taken a big hit here. Behind the wall of apoplectic blue check marks - blue check marks whose breathless hysteria the MSM repackages as popular zeitgeist - Twitter is, if not exactly dying, then far from the monolith it was. Yes, Gettr and TruthSocial both launched to varying degrees of indifference, but what remains clear nonetheless , is that there is the potential, or the very at least, the belief in the potential, for the market to support a multitude of platforms. Sites like Minds, MeWe, and Gab have already proven as much. For years, conservatives had spoken of the need to break up the Big Tech monopolies, of breaking the left-wing stranglehold on the public discourse. They even got a few libertarians round to the idea, but now the opportunity to limit the influence Twitter has arisen organically, it seems as though too many exiles would prefer to fire up their old accounts, update their bio to #UltraMAGA, and go hunting leftist scalps as though the internet were just some impossibly vast, colossally pointless game of capture the flag.
In the end, I think it is the futility of such “activism” that most Gabbers appreciate. You see, partially through design and partially through the shrieking unpleasantness of its detractors, the platform comes with a kind of innate quality control system, a filtering mechanism which ensures, for all their ideological differences, that users share a conceptual reality few others do. Understand, I’m not trying to blow smoke up anyone’s ass here. There are as many reasons to wind up on our side of narrative matrix as the number of people who do. But no matter how you explain it – whether through insight, intelligence, eccentricity, or just plain old contrarianism – Gab’s self-selecting user base does not just see the necessity of our own breakaway society, but also possesses a worldview and value system which might actually sustain it.
Allow me to share an anecdote. Finishing up the final edits on my manuscript and following the conventional wisdom on how one might find a publisher, I first went in search of an agent to represent it. This is a challenge, even at the best times (the odds you’ll get so much as glance stretches well into what’s-the-fucking-point territory), and that’s for applicants willing to carpet bomb every email address they can get ahold of. I was more selective. Ignoring agencies which emitted a palpable whiff of progressivism (which, whenever you really looked, constituted pretty much all of them), I submitted to and was ultimately accepted by, an agency whose work I admired. This is unquestionably a writer’s single biggest step toward getting their work onto bookshelves, anxiety once more outpacing elation when, just a couple weeks later, I received an email from the aforementioned agent announcing that a major publishing house was interested in reading my manuscript.
Now, I am not going to sit here and rage at how thoroughly corporate leftism has permeated the book industry, mostly because an exercise of such scope and bitchiness would require the entire weekend and more than one bottle of merlot. Perhaps I’ll get round to it someday. Suffice to say, however, that each time I received news of some receptive editor, the subsequent search results would turn up Twitter profiles that bordered on parody, from pronouns in the bio to retweets of Ibram X. Kendi. It is a cast iron certainty that the next editor – if ever there is a next editor – will have already hashtagged their support for Ukraine.
Of course, it goes without saying that this is a fairly specific example of an even more specific problem, but nonetheless, I’m sure the reader grasps the broader phenomenon I am trying to illustrate. Throughout the last two years and within the centremost pillars of our society - first with Covid theatre and later on the issue of vaccines - we began to witness the first visual symptoms of a rot which has been injected deep into the marrow of our institutions. As if overnight, many politically-disengaged people awoke to the reality that many of their compatriots and most certainly their government, were explicitly and vehemently hostile to their way of life. January 6th was merely the pinnacle of this. What this seismic non-event precipitated, I think every reasonable person now concludes, was the crudest, most obscene display of power any of us have seen within our lifetimes, the ensuing Twitter purges leaving no doubt what side Big Tech deemed their bread buttered.
In the days following this digital pogrom, Gab as well as other “alternative” platforms experienced an unprecedented explosion of growth. The talk then was of secession, open and unambiguous. This was a nebulous idea, born in the fevered aftermath of a stolen election, but as testament to both the vision and the application of Gabbers, this idea soon took shape as a coherent, actionable ambition: The Parallel Economy.
Although still in its infancy, and despite immense resistance from the corporate-government hegemon, Gab’s CEO, Andrew Torba has laid down a blueprint for what might someday represent a civilizational life raft. In just a couple years, he and his family have managed to place his site well outside the reach of Silicon Valley censors, migrating their entire operation to their own in-house servers. Since then, they’ve set up Gab Marketplace where entrepreneurial users can establish a presence, while GabAds has allowed customers to discover and support businesses that share their values. Most recently, they’ve set up GabPay, a direct competitor to cabal-commandeered PayPal.
This is self-evidently an impressive feat, one which may well prove invaluable for those who’ve found ourselves branded as dissidents, and yet, with the internet being the internet, and in particular, with right-wingers being right-wingers, it seems this post will inevitably invite accusations of shilling.
This is a charge I readily embrace.
Rest assured, dear reader, that I am in no way affiliated with Gab, except as a fan and firm believer in what they do. I’m certainly not getting paid for writing this article. Rather, what I hope to have articulated, as the extent of Biden’s engineered economic collapse becomes apparent, is my belief that in order to weather the degradations of the coming storm, then establishing a robust network of like-minded, similarly-principled people isn’t just vital, it’s imminently vital.
I guess what my feelings toward Musk really boil down to, when you tune out all the culture war bullshit, is that fundamentally, I’m sick of these billionaire messiahs. It is time, far beyond time, that we stop living in their world. This starts by reclaiming authority over our children’s education. It starts with art and entertainment made for and by moral people. It starts with forming our own places of commerce, our own infrastructure, our own economies based on common values rather than on ever-accumulating debt. The task, on the face of it, may appear insurmountable, and yet it is one western civilization has always risen to, and one on which its greatness has always rested – a task which begins by reasserting, as endowed by none but our creator, the unwavering, unapologetic, and absolutely undiluted right to Free Speech.
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