As you know, I urged my fans and friends who are supporting this blog and my fiction work on a subscription basis to switch their pledges from Patreon to Freestartr because Patreon was removing right wing political commentators over their content.
This weekend, Freestartr was shut down by Stripe, the collections company used to process credit card transactions– a company set up as a paypal alternative because the latter was already known for trying to deplatform right wing personalities through demonetizing. From their website:
FreeStartr currently has lost the ability to collect funds for our creators. CEO Charles C. Johnson’s comments can be found here.
We are busy developing another payment gateway solution, but it will take some time to bring this online. (Watch this space).
Freestartr has effectively been destroyed as a company because they cannot get funds processed because Big Tech monopolies have decided to punish them over not policing their content creators’ politics.
Read that again. Because they have free speech, their company is being destroyed. There is no free speech in America. This is exactly, in a nutshell, why libertarianism doesn’t work and there needs to be regulation. Discrimination on a scale like this hasn’t happened since the Jim Crow era. People’s livelihoods are now being taken away in the name of left wing politics by financial institutions. At what point are we going to seriously fight this?
As financial institutions, this is the most dangerous moment in American history. These companies are not technically banks, and therefore financial discrimination regulations are not forced to apply to them. But they are banks. This is the way finances are conducted in 2018.
Everything is made harder for people on the right at every step. Big Tech is trying their hardest to squash us in order to unduly use their influence on the 2018 midterm elections. This is why Twitter is banning speech on a political level as well. This requires oversight from the highest levels, because as citizens of the United States, regardless of our politics or political affiliation, we should be able to speak without fear of being completely shut down in ever aspect of our lives.
The left is trying to give us no quarter in which to function whatsoever at this point. What are you going to do? Are you still going to say “well I”ll just be apolitical”? Stop buying things from people who hate you. Stop supporting those companies as much as you can. They will not hesitate to make your life a living hell on the flip side to try to “punish” you for simply believing something different than them.
As far as my subscription service, I’m going to wait for a little and see what Freestartr comes up with before making a move. I still have the option of going back to sites like Patreon, though I don’t want to support them if I can help it. Hopefully it doesn’t take too long to get this sorted out because we have to keep rolling.
If you want to support in the meantime, buy The Stars Entwined. My books are still vastly my primary income for my journalism work here, and it’s got a lot of great reviews by readers. Check it out here.
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