As many of you know, I've been a champion of the free exchange of ideas for quite some time now. My mission has been modest in scope, I don't care to save the Nazis or give a platform to perverts, segregationists, or trolls. While free speech certainly entails these things, they are not my passion and not my life's work.

I have interest in one simple thing: men's interests and their ability to communicate them with each other. I had no idea when I came on board the red pill train that this would be such a cultural battle, but the writing on the wall was quite visible as soon as I opened my eyes.

There has been a constant war against the free exchange of ideas. I am not a feminist, nor do I follow intersectionality theory, but there is some truth to the old saying, the enemy-of-my-enemy is my friend.

Men are not limited to any political party or race, but they find their interests parallel to certain politics and races in our current cancel and censorship culture. The tactics used and perfected against men over the past few decades are now hard at work against whites and conservative voices. You don't have to be white or conservative to be a man, but you absolutely need to recognize the tactics being used right now don't really care if you're white or conservative if your interests are even remotely tangentially aligned.

And don't forget the cries of the racist and political movements. It's not whites, it's white men. It's not conservatives, it's the ol' boys club.

The Red Pill as a discussion forum has always varied greatly by race, creed, and political affiliation. We have large contingencies from dozens of countries, many of whom have no relation to USA politics.

But today US politics and racism are being deployed in a global battle for our culture and internet, with organizational forces that greatly resemble the very oppression they pretend they are fighting. They know they're not really resisting oppression when they yell "words are violence" as they assault you to prevent your ideas from spreading. The occupation knows what they are here to do, and they just hope that the smoke screen they keep kicking up will prevent you from seeing the truth.

The truth is, the race, gender, and economic wars we are in are skirmishes in a greater war. Black people don't really need to hate white people, women don't have to hate men, nobody has to do any of this stuff. But for the power grab to succeed, they need us to continue fighting with each other so we never target the people pulling the strings.

The power grab taking place is one that's happened many times before, in many different ways, as countries in history have devolved into totalitarian states. What's unique today is the battle is taking place in the world's biggest forum, and the first of its kind: the internet.

Battle for the Internet

The internet is a clever tool. In the early days there was a saying "the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." (John Gilmore) This still holds true today. It is almost impossible to completely extinguish an idea on the internet. The internet is a hell of a thing.

The battle for the internet itself I think has mostly been ceded by the opposition. But it was a fruitful fight for them, with many casualties. Copyright law was weaponized as a censorship-cudgel that paved the way for future censorship. It was based on the plausibility that surely a crime as bad as infringement must justify a network of tools to remove items from the internet.

The internet nerds out numbered and out smarted those who tried to disappear things from the internet. The Streisand effect was coined, as many elites slowly learned that the more they tried to manipulate the internet, the worse it would get for them.

Organizations that tried to "game" the system as they used to with traditional media learned quickly that 4chan could out-game them in every way possible. Moot became Time Magazine's most influential person in 2008 thanks to his "not his army." Mountain Dew's new flavor, decided by the internet, ended up being a toss up between "Hitler did nothing wrong," "Gushing Granny," and "Fapple."

By 2010, it would almost seem as though the nerds had taught the world a lesson. Do not anger the internet, we are bigger, more organized, and smarter than you.

And that message was absolutely received.

What followed was a counter attack that is still in progress today that is overwhelming and wide-reaching, and may look like the final blow that ruins the free exchange of ideas forever.

Male Speech, Conservative Speech, White Speech… Hate Speech

The first and most obvious attack was an ideological attack. The internet cells of people who disagreed and launched the measures of the 2000s and 2010s tended to group themselves along particular ideological lines.

To prevent their power, they must be disbanded and made unable to communicate with each other.

Hordes gaming internet polls and amplifying Streisand events cannot take place in any meaningful way if large groups of people (men) are unable to coordinate and communicate.

It was already culturally popular to hate on men, thanks to decades of groundwork placed by Marxists and feminists in schools and public forums. So it makes sense that /r/TheRedPill was one of the early pioneers hit by the hate speech brigade.

Reddit was hellbent on removing unsightly elements from their website, and had gone through a number of test runs, removing borderline material involving children, which was a defensible position to take, but later moving into simply censoring ideas that were counter to the new narrative.

And that narrative was that criticism of groups was the same as hatred.

It was an easy line to blur. Men had no public allies. Anybody willing to be honest about the world around them was now labeled a “misogynist.” When they got cancelled from their friends, jobs, and lives, they had nobody to turn to, as other men saw the warning and quickly aligned themselves with the right side of history.

The phrase /r/TheRedPill was blacklisted on Reddit as a whole. Mentioning it would see your comment silently erased, as an attempt to prevent new users from stumbling upon the ideas we espoused and ultimately to prevent us from changing minds. Later, Reddit fully quarantined the sub, to make sure it was invisible to search engines and make it difficult for even members of the sub to access it.

Of course, criticism is not the same as hatred. But that didn’t matter. It never needed to make sense. It never had to stand up to scrutiny. The point was to repeat the word “hate” enough times that the group inherited the attribute of “Hate Group” by association, regardless of the truth.

And it worked well.

Once society fully swallowed the idea that masculinity was a synonym for hatred, it was a small skip over to conservatives and eventually whites.

I needn’t give a full history of the attacks on conservative values (though maybe I will in a long-form book at some point) but the blueprint was the same. Conservative values became hate, and eventually espousing the ideas was hate speech.

Pro-life? You hated women.

Pro-family? You hate gays.

Don’t want girls and boys competing in the same sports? You hate trans.

Don’t want illegal aliens to vote? You’re racist.

Don’t want open borders? You’re a racist.

It wasn’t hard to rebrand conservative values as hatred, the path was already paved and only required small tweaks from the anti-male movement that came before it.

The next step was to rebrand racial identity as hatred. And it really didn’t take nearly as much work as I expected. BLM reared its ugly head after an isolated shooting, and it became publicly acceptable to call for the killing of whites on the basis that the only racial identity enjoyed by whites is one of supremacy and hatred.

There’s method to this madness. As evidenced by Reddit’s actions, and mirrored later by Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and every other social media site, the idea was simple: as long as perfectly acceptable positions can be framed as hatred, there is ample justification for the removal of these elements from the platforms and away from public view.

And it worked well.

Build your own Platform.

The argument bandied around after each wave of censorship is probably familiar to you. “Build your own platform.” It’s not censorship, it’s not an attack on free speech, it’s just capitalism. You can always just build your own!

This was an effective argument because it embraced the position of the right, who generally are strongly in favor of capitalism. If Twitter won’t let you do it, then just make your own. Why is that so hard to do?

There are a few hitches to this, however. And we will see that a number of companies worked in tandem, with antitrust and anticompetitive behaviors.

Gab is probably our poster boy for exactly why you can’t build your own platform; at least, not a twitter-sized platform.

Gab was a twitter clone whose main claim to fame was that they embraced free speech. If it’s legal, we will host it. (*except porn)

As a coordinated attack, they were shut down by every avenue that would lead to a capitalist being able to start their own platform.

• First, their hosting was denied and seized. They were forced to find new hosting.
• Then their domain was denied and seized. They were forced to find a new domain registrar, twice.
• The domain registry fought them on their TLD, they eventually gave up on gab.io and settled on gab.com.
• They were kicked off Google’s Play Store due to “hate speech” even though you could just as easily find hate speech online through their own Chrome Browser.
• They were kicked from Apple’s App Store, which makes it impossible to load on an iphone because you cannot easily sideload apps onto an iPhone that are not on the app store.
• Paypal & Stripe banned them, so they could not take payments via paypal or Stripe.
• Visa blacklisted the owner and his family, so they cannot do business with any credit card merchant on the planet, period.

This is an abridged history, but you get the point. Building your own platform, as it turns out, is pretty well impossible unless you toe the line. Though at this point, there’s a pretty good chance competing with the big guys will find yourself with similar issues, hate speech or not.

Start your own Credit Card.

So where does that leave a new platform? Well, after having to implement your own tech infrastructure and having no way of deploying it to user devices, you still have no way to get paid, and therefore cannot afford to run the platform.

So what’s next? Start your own credit card.

I say this in jest because I recognize exactly how much work that would take, and there is still one major problem with it. Since these companies all operate with impunity and in anti-competitive ways, I fully expect this scenario:

In order for your credit card to work, people need to accept it. To do this, you need to create the tech infrastructure, get yourself licensed as a Money Transmitter in every state (which is a multimillion dollar+ venture), and then get yourself partnership agreements with the various merchant services companies that exist. There are a lot of them.

Once you do this, VISA will inevitably threaten the merchant service companies that if they do business with your new card, they will pull out. This, of course, would be suicide for any merchant service and so you would lose.

Crypto is an option that many saw as an answer to these problems. I don’t think it’s got widespread enough adoption to be viable, given the critical mass you need to reach with “normies” to be successful.

So how fucked are we?

This entire essay seems a lot like doom and gloom. And in a way, it’s hard to spin it as anything but. The truth is, we’re in the shit right now, and there will be plenty more casualties before it’s over.

We are witnessing global power plays in real time, the outcomes of which will have long-lasting effects on all of our lives. What can we do?

I don’t have an easy answer for this, but I do have some ideas.

Critical mass social media sites seem to be running the show right now. Many people have enjoyed a growth in following that was virtually impossible in the days of conventional media. Getting thousands of people to watch a movie or a show was an expensive ordeal. Advertising dollars, gimmicks, actors, etc.

Today, a guy with some good ideas and some ingenuity can amass millions of followers. Each thing he writes gets exposed to hundreds of thousands.

This is giving away a level of exposure for private citizens that the media companies absolutely abhor. They let this happen on their watch, and they’re hell-bent on fixing it.

However, I think the social media companies are overplaying their hands. Reddit is currently on a crusade to remove all wrong-think, and in doing so they have angered even the communities they “allowed” to stay. As of this writing, there is a mass exodus leaving reddit and never turning back.

And I’m working on one of them.

TRP.red and Forums.red are the life rafts I constructed to give my small corner of the internet a place to communicate when all else fails. Forums.red (as of this writing) is about to launch into beta in the next few days, and we will see just how much we need Reddit.

I think the answer to this problem is not to gather your followers on a mainstream platform, the answer is the internet in the late 90s: Decentralized, specialized, and numerous.

We may be currently unable to harness the power of big payment to create larger than life platforms that slingshot us into the sun, but one thing we can do with our current infrastructure is create millions of specialized forums and websites, each with dedicated topics and communities, sharing information between us in a Hydraesque-manner.

Centralization is the wrong answer.

Separate, specialize, and overcome.

Use accounts on major media sites to push people to your specialized sites. But do not live there. Do not depend on it.

Make sure your followers have an independent way to communicate with you (and you them).

They cannot attack all of us, and they really can’t if each of our properties is inexpensive to run and operate, and requires little in the way of donations or funding.

I recognize the irony in saying this as I developed TRP.red tribes as a means for centralization. I offer the TRP.red Tribes (and soon to be forums.red) as a meeting place, safe for male communication and thoughts, as a means of decentralization from the mainstream companies. But the dangers are still apparent if you gather on my site instead of others, so I will be soon implementing some big changes that will help with the decentralization of the internet:

Tribe Portability. I will be adding an opt-in only feature for users to be able to share select data with the tribes they follow so tribe leaders can keep in communication with their followers even in the unlikely event trp.red closes.

Direct Communication. I will be adding the ability for Tribe Owners to communicate directly with followers, without the need for followers to come back and constantly check the website.

Forums.red. As I mentioned here, forums.red’s beta is about to launch in the next few days, and we’re very excited to see how you like it. More updates to follow.

Stay Safe

-rps

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