Homophobic Abuse on the Net and Government-Mandated Censorship That Fails to Protect Vulnerable People
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.
American Search Engines; Disinformation Peddling, Propaganda, Censorship, and Lies. What Kind of a Country is This? And a Commentary on Gay Rights.
The situation with American search engines is rapidly deteriorating.
The situation was already unacceptably bad when just two companies got to control the entire search market. Those companies being Google and Microsoft.
But throughout the 2010s, you could still view most of the things you asked them for.
As time went on, especially in the wake of COVID, they’ve become Gaslighting Engines, full of disinformation, propaganda, censorship, and lies.
What I KNOW they are hiding is disturbing, but obviously only people working at Google and Microsoft have the entire blacklists available.
I have a hunch that if we knew the half of it, it would be downright scandalous. Far from being limited to “a few sites where someone was getting decapitated” in the 2000s, now Microsoft blocks almost all (legal) porn, and this trickles down to everything that asks it for results, including DuckDuckGo, which is a flat-out copy of the same results as Microsoft Bing.
They also block information they don’t want people to have about how dangerous the alleged “COVID vaccines” are or their true efficacy*, as well as any “debate” about climate change.
*(COVID shots are quite dangerous, and not very useful, as I and others only learned at some great cost, with the Pfizer shot damaging the heart of someone I know and his doctor having to write a medical slip saying he could never take one again….fortunately I didn’t get it THAT bad. This year I’m just skipping it. I told my doctor and she moved right along. If she had persisted in repeating the government lies and propaganda, I would have kept going through the list until I found a doctor that wasn’t compromised to the point of arguing about it, knowing they were wrong.)
The people running the search engines have made the decisions on every issue that is up for debate. It’s the one that they want you to arrive at.
And if logic and reason tell you that you’re right, and they’re lying to you, they will simply bullshit you until you doubt what you’ve repeatedly witnessed. The tactic of the disinformation peddler is to tell you to ignore what you’ve experienced and bully you into admitting things you know aren’t true.
You’re not even allowed to read anything else anymore.
When did information become illegal in a country with the alleged “Freedom of Speech”? When did information become “banned” in a Free country?
You can’t ban information in a Free country, so the only logical conclusion is that America is not a Free country. Not anymore.
On top of this, they also block a lot of Web forums, international news sites, and to a large extent, Microsoft and the search engines that ask it for things are dramatically limiting the reach of porn.
Flat out refusing to return any for more and more types of “porn” queries.
What they decide to return to you is what they decide.
We’ve spent so many years reaching the point where there’s basically only one search engine that’s even usable at all (Google), that it’s reached the point where Google might as well be the government. They go above and beyond what the government wants them to censor and lie about.
We know that the Biden Administration contacts tech companies and tells them to ban, shadow ban, and delist users and their posts, and even Democrats in Congress do it.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Biden Administration and Congressional Democrats violated the First Amendment of the Constitution, and ordered them to knock it off, as of October 3rd, 2023.
But we have the most Anti-Constitutional Administration and Party in control of the US federal government, maybe in American history. It just rules “with a pen and a phone” and sees what sticks, and eventually the courts bring an end to the worst of it (like “COVID Vaccine” threats), so whatever limits the court has placed, the Biden Administration and Democrats are likely already looking for ways around.
There’s nothing that pisses off a leftist troll mob like a person who can think for themselves.
There is a group and it is hated wherever it goes. This group has been the subject of mass murder by the Nazi Party, and it has faced the death sentence, imprisonment, abuse of psychiatry, and other horrors. No, not the Jews.
I’m gay and I have a mob following me around the Internet, launching virulently homophobic garbage my way and trying to get me banned from everything. They’re so mentally unstable and evil that they even say racist things about my spouse, who they don’t know, just to hurt me. At the same time, they demand respect from me, for being “trans”. This just isn’t how that works.
You ask when will the persecution of gay men ever stop? Probably never. It’s welcomed on Mastodon.social as we speak. A “Social Networking” site, subject to the laws of Germany. How ironic.
It greatly offends them to see someone who was so badly oppressed by the American government for over 30 years that he not only had no Freedom to marry, but could have been arrested in half the states for the first 19 years simply for existing, who says openly that he doesn’t like what America, and more broadly, the Western world, has turned into.
Even long after the 1970s, well into the 2000s, mainstream Psychiatry in America was very openly homophobic. If you spoke to a psychiatrist, you had to tread lightly on the entire issue.
When I was a teenager in the early 2000s, a psychiatrist asked me “Are you attracted to men?” and I said “Absolutely not.”
Later on, I read his clinical notes, and he wrote down that “he agrees that he is a NORMAL [all caps] heterosexual male”.
The way in which he asked it led me to believe I would face trouble if I said yes. So I lied. There’s no shame in lying to a person like this.
What was I supposed to say to a person who had the legal authority to detain me without trial and fill me with primitive pharmaceuticals if he didn’t like me? They don’t call it “punishment for society being homophobic, and nobody will stop me”.
“Why yes, yes, I am everything you hate! You know those Muslim people that just blew up New York City? Well, I’m GAY. Not only gay, but I don’t believe in God! You hate me MORE!”
They just commit these terrible and criminal abuses of Psychiatry, and nobody will stop them.
Law & Order: SVU had a banned episode called “Unstoppable” about a rapist nobody would do anything about. They should have made an episode called that about Psychiatry.
No matter what they say these days, nobody has convinced me that Psychiatry has changed at all. They keep re-issuing the DSM, and if you read it closely they take “gay” out and put it back in somewhere as things they can say instead, to the same effect, but it’s about muddying the waters.
It’s not that there are just a lot of old psychiatrists hanging around from when being an open bigot was more acceptable in the profession, it’s that Psychiatry is hardly even medicine and it draws in the very worst doctors.
Even as a teenager, I was smart enough to pick up on where it was going with this guy. I knew I wouldn’t be a martyr. I would have only picked the wrong hill to die on.
Today, people would just go screaming all over the place until they get what they want. Back then, it would have been “Sir, this is a Wendy’s.”
It will be demonstrated that I knew, for a fact, that I would not even be helped by my own parents, if this brain butcher decided to go to work on me.
The Nazis did the same things to gay people that they did to the Jews.
We have records of gay people being oppressed all over the world going back hundreds of years, we have records of gay people in various societies going back into antiquity with varying levels of acceptance.
In some ways the modern world has been worse to gay people than the ancient world was.
One of the crazies that follows me around and tries to get me banned everywhere was talking about “gay rights in the world”, as-if I was the one that needed any lectures about living in an oppressive shithole.
They act like rights come from the government. That’s something that only a fool could believe.
Perhaps President Ronald Reagan put it best when he said that the government doesn’t solve problems, the government is the problem, and that the nine scariest words in the English language are, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
The government doesn’t give anyone a right. You have to take them.
Sometimes it means openly ignoring that law.
For half my life, being gay was a crime in half of America.
Ignoring the law that made it a crime was not wrong.
I think that most people would agree with me on that now, but that doesn’t change the fact that to be gay then, you also had to be a criminal in the eyes of the law.
Eventually, you hope it relents, and that it may finally give you some of the things that other people were entitled to for tens or hundreds of years, or for as long as this government has existed and denied some people their rights.
Obviously, I can only speak to what I’ve seen over the past 40 years or so, but this is my take. It could be wrong, but here’s my take.
I knew dozens of other gay people (counting bisexual people) in Indiana in the late 90s and early 2000s. Some were open or semi-open about it. Usually at least their immediate family knew.
One of my friends from school was bisexual. It obviously wasn’t something that was largely invented just over the past few years or so. Up until about a few years ago, you hardly saw any trans people at all.
I only knew one until a few years ago, and when I knew him, he was a man, and he was a very bad man. He got married to my (now deceased) Aunt and had children, and then ran out on them. I don’t respect that. You want to go become a woman? Whatever. Don’t start a family and run out on them.
But back in the 90s, it was impossible to even suggest that anyone was “going into the schools and teaching kids to be gay”.
We were widely despised in America. Only 10% of Republicans said being gay was “morally acceptable”, and today half of Republicans say it is, and 70% of Americans polled by Gallup. But in the 90s, we were about as popular as cancer, but everyone still knew someone that was gay. It was, awkward, I guess.
Many people, like my parents, would just blurt out homophobic shit right in front of you, in public, and nobody cared.
Nobody who was gay talked much about being gay.
If someone who wasn’t gay did, they almost never said anything good about it. All you ever heard was shit like my mother and father said in the car about it being synonymous with pedophilia and that these people would murder kids.
Thanks to this childhood abuse, I didn’t even have a word for what I was. I knew I didn’t want to be gay because the only thing I’d ever heard about that word was what I just told you, so I was very terribly confused. Not about being attracted to other people, my own age, of my gender. I was very certain of that. But I didn’t have a word that wasn’t contaminated.
While straight children in school learned about sex in Health class, all they ever told us in Indiana public schools in 1996 was about gay and Black people getting AIDS. That isn’t really a dig at Indiana, because most of the country was on the same page.
It was the government doing this. The same government people want in total control of the Internet today, so that the government can decide what “disinformation” is.
They followed that by pulling out the TV/VCR cart and driving home their point.
We had to watch a movie where a Black woman got AIDS and gave it to the baby she was pregnant with, and then the Black woman died of AIDS.
I think that if an all White State and county government with an all White school district faculty, showed that to a school with about 249 White students and 1 Black one today, that school district would probably be condemned on every major news site.
Things like this were amazingly, not the least bit scandalous, but nobody heard about it, and nobody cared if they did. At least nobody that the government would have listened to.
Nobody under about 30-35 in America today understands the grotesqueness of what people my age had to go through and I hope that they never will.
I wouldn’t actually say there’s a lot of courage that I’ve seen in the “trans” movement.
They waited until gay people such as myself had to face the worst of it (actual malice and discrimination) and defeated the bastards in court, and had to suffer hundreds of years of abuse at the hands of bigots, oftentimes suffering government action more severe than Communists and Black people got, especially during an era (the mid-20th century, before I was born, but with effect that lingered) where it was impossible to tell where the Indiana government stopped and the Indiana Klan began (a litany of abuses which declined very slowly), then the trans people started coming out of the woodwork after the nuclear winter was over, so to speak, and the gay people had put in the hard work to rebuild a more tolerant society.
There was never a time when Black people were treated so badly in Hollywood, as when they made entire movies for the government telling people to watch out for gay men who were incurable predators out to harm their children.
The distrust of government and their “laws” that the actions of said government caused for gay people my age or older are probably permanent and irreversible. You cannot create a system like this that makes people illegal and then blame them for getting used to being criminal simply for existing, and for no longer necessarily respecting the rest of your “laws”.
YouTube took the film down. I think they should have left it, honestly.
It shows how the American government “educated” Americans about gay people. Americans in my parents’ age group. Which probably explains why my mother told me, aged 5-6 or so, in a Taco Bell, while we were eating dinner, never to get in the car with a stranger because it might be “a gay man who would rape [me] and cut off [my] head, like they did to Adam Walsh“.
And if that sounds bad, while she was implying that gay men were all like Ottis Toole, she was mild compared to my father.
Many a day would I be riding along in the car with Dad, with him shouting about “f****s ruining our country”, with Rush Limbaugh on the radio ranting about Bill Clinton, with the occasional “Spatula City” riff or plug for “Snapple”, which was big in the 90s.
Yes, for many years, Snapple was one of the big advertisers that made Rush Limbaugh popular. If you knew Rush like I had to, you could tell that something like Trump would eventually happen, even 30 years ago.
Roy Schestowitz says that my family sounds horrific. It always has been. Imagine having to live with that for years.
But these trans people that follow me around the Internet are even more homophobic than my parents were (let that sink in), and they’re even less good at denying it after they literally just said the thing.
One particularly sick individual managed to make a statement that was homophobic, racist against Asian people, and xenophobic against Filipinos all in the same sentence.
This would be the one that was bragging about how good their totally unimportant joke of a country is for trans people, like her.
Their only defense to the homophobia is claiming that they are trans, which makes them immune from whatever they do, on platforms like Libera Chat and Mastodon.
She may be trans. I don’t know, does it matter? She’s still a homophobe. She still hates Asian people.
I stood up to my own parents, I stood up to my own government. I don’t have to take this crap from a homophobic and racist Internet person.
The only time I let myself get backed into a corner by one of these homophobic assholes was that stupid psychiatrist in 2001, and I’m not proud of it.
I was more afraid of him than I was of people who have stabbed me, held a gun to my head, or beat the shit out of me (for being gay).
I’m less afraid of actual death than I am of psychiatrists. Once they go to work on people, they don’t stop. Cracked ribs and concussions heal. They get you on “medicine”, or take away your civil rights, that does not heal.
Being anti-government, as in opposed to it in general, is not extreme.
This American government has hurt me and kept me down and taken everything I’ve owned repeatedly. This government has protected people who have attacked me in the street, and it has attacked me.
Why wouldn’t I be against it, in principle? I have a long memory, and I don’t tend to forget who the enemies are.
I’ll never forget the propaganda, the abuse. The fact that I learned more from Internet pornography and experiences with people I promised would never be spoken about again, about myself, is an experience that I blame squarely on this government and my parents. Nobody ever accused them of being stupid. This was deliberate.
There are parts of our government keeping, like the Bill of Rights. Most of it needs to be repealed.
If it’s gotten so big that it can sit around all day E-Mailing Google and Microsoft things it doesn’t want me to know, it’s gotten too big.
I experienced a government that was my only source of information in the pre-Internet (at least in people’s houses) era, and given the propaganda and disinformation it promoted using this total authority, I’m not looking forward to them gaining total control of the Internet so we can go back to that.
As to the part about my parents, if I ask them about something like the “Taco Bell Incident” and why they would ever say such horrible things and lie to me like this, my mother will reply, “I don’t recall ever saying that. You must be imagining things.”
Oh really? I remember which Taco Bell it was at, which table in the restaurant we were sitting at, what I ordered, and that I was halfway into my bean burrito (with no onions) in 1990 when she said that awful shit, but I’m imagining the awful shit. Okay, gaslighting. How does that work?
If they could actually admit that they did this and apologize, I might hate them less.
In some countries, they apparently respect their elders. All I could think about while all this shit was going on was “at least the people doing this will start dying someday and my life might not be such Hell then”.
And even then it’s awkward, because I heard my dad has been having heart trouble and he’s still my dad.
But back to search engines…
Every year these search engines and the government get together, and they decide that there’s some new thing they won’t let you see, or don’t want to allow you to think about, and they start blocking it or framing it only one way.
That’s their answer for everything. Just block it or only return “the Party line”.
Their goal is that the Web should be shopping, banking, streaming (from Apple, Netflix, etc.), and reams of government-whitelisted propaganda, and there should be no more real people on it.
People on Twitter and Mastodon are not real people.
They’ve had their brains scooped out by the mass media and turned into mashed potatoes, and put back in. They’ve never had to endure anything like I have, I guarantee you. I only wish the worst thing that had ever happened to me was pronoun-related. Trust me.
Now all they do is share links to the most dishonest media outlets, ever, and agree with each other all the time. That’s all these things are. You disagree with anyone, they shoot you and that’s the last thing anyone hears from you on that platform.
The government, at least the American one, is not worried about Mastodon. It’s all under control. The instances that are not under control will be taken care of “by other means”, including de-indexing, attacks on hosting, and other forms of harassment, as is what increasingly happens to Web sites in general.
Even Wikipedia is pretty bogus. Any article that PR agencies and the government care about, they just pretend to be “editors”. They use sockpuppets. They write their own articles, they watch them. If anything that’s not good for them ends up there, they revert it and use tricks to ban people. They control what you read.
In some ways, things are not as bad on the American Web, yet, as they are in North Korea or China, but there is more similarity than they want you to think about.
I’m waiting for the part where Comcast, RCN, AT&T, and the few other ISPs in the United States get orders to block access to the sites.
It won’t even be crude DNS blocks like they do in already non-Free countries which were years ahead of us in all the wrong ways, like Canada and the United Kingdom.
Working with Enemies of Free Software, like Let’s Encrypt, they’ll also take their TLS certificates away.
Modern Web browsers scream about connecting to sites without TLS, and TLS only works with Cartel Certificates, and it won’t be long until TLS is mandated by these same browsers…they want to use Certificates for the Web the same way “Secure Boot” is meant to control what software your computer can run.
Then they’ll make sure there aren’t any American hosting providers your site can work with. There won’t even need to be a law or a reason why. If you haven’t done anything, they’ll just say there is “imminent danger to the public”. They’ve done this before to take down a lot of sites that aren’t violating any American laws.
If you use cell phones, you won’t be able to “get the app”. For years now, the US government has leaned on Google and Apple to throw everything out of the App Store and Play Store that it doesn’t like.
(For now you can just load an APK if you use Android though.)
They’ll drive you to the point where you give up or have to use “unorthodox” methods to run your site, or abandon the Web and hack something together on Gopher or Gemini, and then they’ll say “Well why would you do that if you’re not a <whatever>?”
It’s so completely obvious that the US Internet is turning into something more like the North Korean “Intranet”. They are literally doing it all right in front of us.
Their goal is that even if VPNs and Tor aren’t illegal, that you still won’t be able to easily access information. Once they cut you off from mainstream stuff, you are open to all sorts of crude DDoS attacks and such and they can finish you off that way.
The American government is oppressive and terrible, and it’s getting more oppressive and terrible now that it’s coming apart and taking on a trillion dollars in debt every three months or so.
But it’s not as “crude” as North Korea. Far from needing something like Naenara Browser or Red Star OS, they can go after you everywhere all at once.
The enemies, software-wise, are Windows and Mac OS, and to a lesser extent Chrome OS. They’re the “major Web browsers” like Firefox and Chrome.
You’re probably using unfriendly software to read this at this very moment.
Not content with just entirely controlling most of the software that Americans rely on, they pay unemployable nutcases to sit around all day and scream about Brave. They have “hate group watchers” like the SPLC which have said nothing about the recent Black Lives Matter endorsement of Hamas, telling parents to watch out for “Linux, Tor, Matrix, and Brave”.
The Anti-Defamation League, which primarily concerns itself with anti-Jewish hatred, moved a mention of BLM’s endorsement of Hamas down the list and under a heading that wouldn’t draw attention! This is just incredible.
But they have plenty of time to screech about software they don’t like.
I saw look at the list and use the software. Tell them thank you for the helpful recommendations!
I wish I could say what to do about Web Search.
Back in the day, search engines just basically did whatever you told them to, today they lie and promote disinformation (mostly from the government), lopsided results (which are always biased towards the left), and blacklist sites and wide swaths of content due to moral crusaders out collecting scalps (the porn) and copyright trolls (the bittorrent sites).
SearXNG can only solve a part of the “Google and Bing are bullshitting you.” problem.
The main thing SearXNG is designed to do is to protect your privacy.
While asking multiple engines the query can exploit gaps in their censorship and disinformation, they are never truly in 100% lock-step with one another, it’s still pretty bad. There’s still a whole Web out there you’re not seeing.
Some of the problem can be worked around by (and I use a VPN and Tor together for this) asking a Russian search engine like Yandex.
Is Russia bad in its own ways? Yeah, but amazingly their search index isn’t as censored as the ones in America, at least on the English site.
And if they don’t learn anything about me, what harm am I doing?
I would never resort to asking the Russians something if Google worked as well for me as it did in 2005 or 2010. Even Yahoo! in 2000 was better than this crap.
My position on what should be done about search is there should be a law against “blacklists” if it’s not material that is illegal under a Constitutionally-valid statute.
The leftist organizations have been urging the US Supreme Court to reverse its opinions from the 90s and allow the American government to shut down anything on the Internet it doesn’t like.
The American government has had a bit of a problem in the last few years where little things like Constitutions and laws don’t matter, so it’s probably just a matter of time before it starts openly defying court orders too.
There is no law in my State that says the governor can demand that everyone stay in their home over a virus. There simply isn’t.
So imagine my surprise when the governor purportedly “ordered” me to do that.
Bullshit! I will do whatever the Hell I want unless there’s an actual law that is in actual effect. Once Darren Bailey obtained relief from the governor’s phony executive order, the jig was up, but like all true authoritarian dictatorships, the governor said the executive order was still enforced.
I didn’t hear them enforce it on anyone. Nobody ever got ticketed for ignoring it.
Perhaps they were too busy sending the city police, the Sheriff’s department, a hostage rescue team, and the State Troopers downtown over the BLM (loves Hamas) riots and looting.
That was scary. And now, the BLM people who openly supported Hamas Terrorists the other day, with no consequences, have managed to erase the fact that that ever happened from existence.
It’s funny how BLM was “one movement” until it endorsed the people behind “Israel’s 9/11”, and now suddenly it wasn’t “really BLM” because it was “just some chapters of it really”.
Yes, because Chicago and Los Angeles are podunk little towns that nobody has ever heard of, far, far off the beaten path. /s
Politicians (all Democrats) who were climbing over each other to get the endorsements from BLM (loves Hamas) just a year or two ago are now stampeding to get away from it, disavowing themselves, removing BLM references and logos off their campaign Web sites.
Maybe they can “Get in touch.” with Google and have them chisel all this off the index.
Down, down the memory hole! Further, I say!
I have yet to see any “chapters” of people who honestly believe that all lives matter, promoting Hamas. Please inform me of how people who value all lives are bad.
The anti-Techrights trolls, including the homophobe/racist, support Hamas and terrorists pretty openly on Mastodon now. Some of them frame it in a way where they can deny it later, but in many cases it was a very “tepid disapproval” where they gave support to Hamas, but in a way where they could “still condemn the violence”.
You have to wonder who on the “Left” can work up the nerve to actually condemn Hamas, full stop, after the horrific events that have been unfolding as of late.
I condemn Hamas, full stop. There is no excuse for terror, and I hope they find every last one of the sons of bitches and hang them for this dastardly cowardly attack that murdered civilians, including many helpless children.
I separately continue to condemn Netanyahu, the person. What Hamas did will cement his control over Israel and make it impossible for anyone to stop him for years, like what happened with Geroge W. Bush’s approval after 9/11 where if anyone said something bad about the President, they disappeared.
(Starting with the journalists who had been used to operating with Press Freedom and didn’t appreciate the new country they had woken up in.)
Why is it so hard for the Left to condemn murderers? They’ve been brainwashed into thinking that the barbarians who voted for Hamas to rule the fictional “Palestine” have been cruelly oppressed by Israel. Israel is the only ally of the LGBT people in the entire Middle East. The rest are murderous savages.
Again, it will be a sad day when the American government gains total control over the Internet.
It will start out by claiming it is “eliminating Nazis and misinformation”, but that is not what’s going on.
It wants to make sure that you read nothing but misinformation, which will be whatever it wants to put there. █