The People’s Cube: Blocked By the Department of Defense – By Oleg Atbashian (frontpagemag.com) / Jan 22 2018
Our reader, who is a U.S. Army officer, has sent us the screenshot below showing that The People’s Cube has been blocked by the DoD Enterprise-Level Protection System due to “hate and racism” – a blatantly false label applied by someone on the government payroll, whose salary comes out of our taxes.
When I lived in the Soviet Union, my speech was expected to be blocked as politically unreliable and not aligned with the government’s collectivist, socialist agenda. Such was the default setting and there was nothing I could do about it. At the time I assumed that if I were to move to the United States, I’d be free to speak without censorship. Imagine my surprise when I found that many in this country, including on the government level, were motivated by the same collectivist, socialist agenda I had escaped from.
Dismayed at the sight of this happening in a free country, I began to satirize the left’s absurd and crooked schemes again, this time in English, and launched the People’s Cube. This site has become an outlet not just for me, but for thousands of like-minded Americans and contributors from around the world, who opposed socialism and collectivism in general.
Shortly after the Cube was launched, the “open-minded” proponents of socialism began to use misrepresentations and lies in order to block our content. Starting with the Google purge in 2006, we’ve been blacklisted, shadow-banned, suspended, down-ranked, and otherwise hindered by the prog-warriors inside what has since become collectively known as Googlefacebooktwitter.
We’ve been purged from Wikipedia. We’ve had our products removed from online stores in Zazzle, SpreadShirt, and CafePress. We’ve been slandered by Snopes. PolitiFact put us on their list of fake news sites. We’ve been denied ad revenue due to organized complaints to ad providers from invisible leftist operatives. And, finally, my wife’s contributions to the People’s Cube have led to a forced resignation from her job.
If it weren’t for all this blackballing, our traffic and popularity could have generated enough income for us to focus solely on running and improving the site, instead of doing unrelated work to make ends meet.
Technically, since all those malefactors were private companies, they were within their right to censor any content, even though one could question the legality of their monopolistic use of public space to impose ideological filters and thus skew the national discourse leftward. And yet, the classic definition of censorship has always been about the government silencing a citizen’s free expression.
So when the Department of Defense, a powerful government organization, blocks our content under a false and partisan pretense, it means that we have arrived. It is irrelevant whether the Pentagon employees should be able to access a satirical website or not; the charge couldn’t be clearer: “hate and racism.”
Another Soviet immigrant to the U.S., Ayn Rand, defined racism as being the basest form of collectivism. And collectivism happens to be precisely what we oppose philosophically, preferring to see every person as an individual. But this is probably what looks like “racism” to the collectivists, who prefer to see people as a faceless mass divided into identity groups, where all members are expected to conform to assigned roles, feelings, and thoughts based on their color, gender, ethnicity, etc.
Such a view of humanity comes with collective guilt, collective hate, and collective punishment. This view is a precursor to real racism and other malignant “isms” that infect our world today. It’s what we satirize. It’s also very likely that whoever has branded us with “hate and racism” inside the DoD shares such views, which makes this episode look like a deleted scene from 1984.
If the Pentagon had slandered the People’s Cube with such language under president Hillary, this would have indicated a very scary Orwellian scenario. Luckily, that is not the case and this blocking only reveals the presence of Obama’s holdovers inside the DoD, who are still trying to impose their rules and dictate their terms. It is our hope that the new management will downsize the “parental controls squad” and will no longer treat the military as if they were children in need of adult supervision to protect them from the facts of life.
My Soviet experience had trained me not to expect favors from the powers that be. Like anyone who appreciates freedom, all I want from the government is that it leaves me alone. But that is too much to ask from the deep-state elites whose very reason for existence (they may prefer raison d’être) is never to leave people alone; they will destroy anyone who threatens their power by any means available to them, including filtering internet content on the basis of slanderous and improvable accusations.
Getting rid of that political filter would reduce their arsenal by at least one powerful weapon.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/269086/peoples-cube-blocked-department-defense-oleg-atbashian
