Wednesday night, explaining the new ads at Instapundit, Professor Glenn Reynolds revealed the censorship he has experienced:
Sorry, the problem is that InstaPundit has been demonetized by Google, for unspecified “dangerous” content. Between the overall trend of ad revenue decline — which hits everyone — and the trend of cutting advertising to right-leaning sites, and now this, ad revenue is down about 90% from its high, I’d estimate, and it may get worse. (The Amazon revenue, which we’ve been phasing out anyway, is similar). At some point I’ll probably have to go to some sort of subscription model — maybe one that lets you buy out of the ads — or a purely donation-supported model.
In the meantime, if you’d like to support the blog you can donate via Stripe or subscribe to my Substack. It’s all much appreciated.
Wow. The weird thing is that back in the day — the first decade of the 21st century, when blogging was invented — the people running Silicon Valley were, if not conservative, certainly libertarian in their general attitude. Companies like Google, Amazon and PayPal were run by people with the plainly capitalist goal of getting rich, and so were inclined to support advocacy of free enterprise, deregulation, lower taxes, etc.
“Demonetizing” is censorship, period, and it didn’t start happening — the orchestrated attempt to shut down independent online publishing — until Obama’s second term. There was a left-wing blogosphere (the “moonbats,” as we called them) and a right-wing blogosphere (the “wingnuts,” as the Left called us), and the existence of two oppositional blogospheres was a fact of life everyone in the game understood.
What happened? It was several factors. Obama’s popularity made leftist politics the “cool kids” thing, and the callow youth had an intolerant attitude toward opposition. Almost as soon as Obama was elected, they began denouncing all criticism as “racist,” and embraced a no-holds-barred approach toward perceived enemies. Well do I remember my experience in 2011 being swarmed by an angry “Occupy” mob that was trying to storm a conference in D.C. where one of the Koch brothers was in attendance. Because the Kochs had supported the Tea Party movement (and free-market advocacy generally), this made them EVIL in the eyes of that brain-dead zombie horde of “Occupy” protesters.
That general idea — exercising the “heckler’s veto” on anyone who disagrees with them — has been used by the Left to organize advertising boycotts of talk radio, Fox News, etc., and so when social media platforms started shutting down conservatives (I was banned from Twitter in 2016), it was merely an extension of the same mob mentality that mobilized the “Occupy” zombies. By the time Twitter (and Facebook and YouTube) began their wholesale “deplatforming” of conservatives during the Trump years, the independent blogosphere was already largely a thing of the past. People decided that venting their spleens on Twitter was sufficient, and so there was no need for the hassles of maintaining a regular blog.
But you could not effectively monetize Twitter. You were giving Twitter your content, and Twitter was monetizing that traffic for themselves. I was happy to use Twitter as a means of promoting the blog, but I was never under any illusion about the transactional nature of Twitter’s business model. When Instapundit and Ace of Spades subsequently stopped using Twitter, it was not so much as a protest against the banning of myself and others as it was an acknowledgement that Twitter was (and is) a parasitical growth that exploits its users.
The vague accusation that Instapundit promotes “dangerous” ideas — well, dangerous to whom? Google doesn’t want to answer that. In fact, when you get banned from their Adsense platform (as I was in 2013), you’ll find it impossible to get any answers at all from them.
Everything we learned from the release of “The Twitter Files,” and everything Republican-led congressional committees have exposed about the relationship between government agencies and Big Tech, tells us that this censorship is not random or coincidental. It is targeted and orchestrated, and the fact that they’ve now targeted Professor Reynolds (known as “the Blogfather,” because he inspired and encouraged so many others bloggers) tells you that no one is safe from this repressive regime.
