I had a wonderful conversation with a woman just 20. She was a bright creature, so sweet and intelligent, a life full ahead. Still. She was 20. All — ALL — of my cowboy boots are older than that. My sincere prayer is she will inherit a country, kind, loving and strong.
In the idealism of youth, she said people needed to put their differences aside and work things out.
Jaded me, I saw things differently.
Not long ago, I basically locked myself in an office for a couple years and created FooF Magazine. It was a national humor website featuring political satire, memes, editorials, funny photos, commentary, videos, entertainment, reviews — tons of cool stuff.
My tech guru and I went to Kickstarter.com. Having raised more than $4 BILLION with a “B,” it’s the Internet’s largest crowdfunder of film, video, art, performance art, dance, theater, writing — anything to do with an art project.
Well. A liberal art project.
If Kickstarter accepts your proposal, you have a few weeks to raise your goal, from a couple bucks to $20 million. (That kind of nosebleed money is usually reserved for designing and selling video games.)
We put together a pretty amazing proposal. Funny. Inspirational. Cutting edge. Creative. Timely. Informative. We wanted to raise a skimpy $150,000 to launch and keep FooFMagazine.com going.
Kickstarter rejected the project.
Why?
They said they “didn’t do magazines.”
I appealed. I pointed out Kickstarter devoted AN ENTIRE SECTION on their site called — what’s the word I’m looking for? — MAGAZINES.
Kickstarter harrumphed. They wrote back they only funded one-time magazines. Which was a big, fat, brazen lie. Kickstarter advertised having recently funded dozens of ongoing magazines that were quarterlies, monthlies and semi-monthlies.
This correspondence went back and forth. It ended with some faceless, nameless millennial cog in The Liberal Machine sniffing that they reserve the right to refuse a project Just Cuz, Neener Neener.
Translation from LeftSpeak?
You’re A Conservative. You don’t deserve a voice. Not on campus. Not in the media. Not in entertainment. Not in government. Not in social media.
All that work. For nothing. It crushed me. Some six months later, I was going over FooF and realized hey — this is a really cool project, one that could catch on. We launched the project on a shoestring. Within a couple of weeks, we were starting to pull in eyeballs and Google advertising dollars.
Millions, billions, techno-nerd trillions!
I was working 14-hour days. The ad money slowly grew. Then, one day, our ads just — disappeared off the pages. A Google email said we had violated some mystery article of their vague code of ethics. Google wouldn’t say what it was. We had no gay porn, no regular porn, no bad words, no nudity, nothing offensive, unless you consider making light of Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi offensive.
And that was our sin. We questioned socialism and corruption, the gods of the Left.
Had to close down FooFMagazine.com. Google just pulled the plug on our advertising, which we never recouped.
For the same reason why the IRS went after conservatives: the Left sports a predatory zeal for speech and thought control, all the while screaming they’re the ones being controlled.
Next project of mine to be submarined by the Left?
I started thejohnbostonchronicles.com, a pay-to-read subscription blog. Made a slight profit each week from readers. After a great launch, for about a year, I noticed web viewership was stagnant, at about 100-200 visits a day. I had a few thousand followers. Plus I did a ton of social media. We bought ads on Facebook. We weren’t getting any hits. One day in election-year 2008, I ran a satirical blog on “39 Reasons To Vote For Hillary.” My tech pal called and asked: “Did you SEE your number of hits today?”
About 75,000. A flat line skyrocketed — because Facebook thought I was endorsing Hillary Clinton, not making fun of her.
More and more, similar stories are surfacing about how these Silicon Valley giants are not just intolerant, but Orwellian in word and thought control, all the while managing huge swaths of public opinion. Conservatives are “accidentally” getting bumped off social media, or they mysteriously start “liking” their polar opposites. Or a thoughtful question is tagged as hate speech.
I can’t imagine being so profoundly creepy to do that to another person.
The sins of the Right?
We’re tepid. Post photos of us drunk or at lunch. We won’t struggle or complain. Facebook and other social media are our 21st-century versions of Rome’s bread and circuses.
My dear 20-year-old gal pal. Yes. She’s very disturbed at the dark priesthood, the death cult of the Left. An optimist, part of her holds that one magic day, liberalism will happily trade victory for — compromise?
I seriously doubt that.
Vive la guerre…
With more than 11,000 essays, John Boston is Earth’s and Santa Clarita’s most prolific humorist and satirist.