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When is Factchecking Actually Censorship?

Dinesh D’Souza, one of the most valuable, credible voices on the American Right, has taken on Facebook’s “factcheckers.” In a recent article for Epoch Times, D’Souza provides several examples of how Facebook has “flagged, demonetized for periods of time, and reduced the distribution” of his posts. But why?

In answering this, D’Souza goes beyond explaining what we already know – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, with impunity, censor anyone they wish, right up to and including a former U.S. President. But D’Souza goes on to explain the symbiotic relationship between the “Factcheckers” and the online communications monopolies.

By way of example, D’Souza details how two of the factchecking organizations relied on by Facebook have distorted the facts surrounding VP Kamala Harris’s slave owning ancestors. This well documented fact of the VP’s lineage, achieved via the marriage of the slave owner’s white grandson to a free woman of color. That couple gave birth to Christiana Brown, a great grandmother of the VP.

Politifact, as D’Souza puts it, “seems to confirm my account completely but then mysteriously concludes, ‘In the end we don’t have enough documentation.’ Evidently a genealogical chart and Kamala Harris’s own father’s testimony does not seem to be enough.”

Snopes was worse. Despite clear evidence, they declared the claim “unproven,” then go on to write “Even if it is the case that the Harris family, by way of Christiana Brown, are descendants of Hamilton Brown, those who seek to attack or undermine Harris for the wrongdoing of a man who died almost 200 years ago should first gain a better understanding of the complicated, traumatic histories of black families in the United States.”

As D’Souza says, understating the point, “this is tendentious editorializing.” Indeed it is. These are partisan organizations, masquerading as “fact checkers.” As D’Souza alleges, they are providing cover for Facebook to flag or remove content they find politically disagreeable. They are allowing partisan organizations to selectively target inconvenient truths as “misinformation,” while exercising excessive leniency towards anything – truth or lie – that supports their ideology.

D’Souza is not only a valuable and credible spokesperson for the right, he is eloquent. How he summarizes this sad situation bears repeating verbatim:

“How tragic it is that platforms that once symbolized freedom and open inquiry have now become frightening cauldrons of restriction, repression, and censorship. The very people who said they would save us from Orwell’s Big Brother have become Big Brother.”

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The Migration to Rumble Accelerates

Founded in 2013, for several years Rumble.com quietly developed its online video-sharing platform as a viable but virtually unknown alternative to YouTube. All of that changed in September 2020 when conservative radio host Dan Bongino became part-owner of Rumble, and offered the deplatformed, demonetized, deboosted, depersoned multitudes a new home.

The user experience on Rumble compares favorably to BitChute, a more recently established YouTube alternative, probably because the people operating Rumble have had nearly seven years to get the bugs out. Rapid, ok, meteoric growth has not slowed Rumble down, and its Alexa ranking in the U.S. is already an impressive 757. On their website Rumble claims 50 million unique visits per month, with no end in sight.

Needless to say, and consistent with our mission, we’re scanning Rumble to find out who in our Winston84 directory have already made the migration. Here is a list of some who are now to be found on Rumble:

Dan Bongino, of course, along with Dinesh D’Souza, The Hodge Twins, Diamond & Silk, Wayne Dupree, and Charlie Kirk. Also now on Rumble we’ve already found The Epoch Times and One America News, along with some indispensable purveyors of alternative perspectives who are not just suppressed, but banned from YouTube, Red Pill 78 and X22 Report.

Rather smug reporting on Rumble’s sudden rise can be found in the predictable places – Newsweek, the Washington Post, the New York Times. Let them bray. Behind the bravado is fear. Their audiences are shrinking, and even their collusion with the tech monopolies will not stop the erosion of their audiences.

The events of 2020, for any who hadn’t already realized it, have proven that the establishment sources of “news” are controlled and cannot be trusted. Absolutely nothing they write or broadcast can be believed until their proclamations are either verified or contradicted by evidence available on alternative media.

Thank you, Rumble.

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