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.