Like the rest of Silicon Valley, Patreon has decided it wants to be more than just a neutral platform, and now routinely cuts off income from content creators for political reasons. Chief among them is “hate speech”, which Patreon says it does not tolerate on its platform. It has used “hate speech” as a justification to ban a number of figures on the far-right, including Jason Kessler, Robert Spencer, Lauren Southern, Brittany Pettibone, TheQuartering, and many others. Patreon’s purge quickly escalated beyond the alt-right to target independent conservative journalists.
Patreon cited Brittany Pettibone’s support for the European identitarian organization Generation Identity, a group Patreon claims is a “violent organization.” (The organization explicitly disavows political violence.) Other content creators banned by Patreon include prominent Islam scholar and critic Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, Faith J Goldy, It’s Going Down (IGD), and conservative housewife Ayla Stewart.
Patreon also banned the independent journalist Lauren Southern in 2017 over her work exposing globalist NGOs assisting the illegal trafficking of persons into Europe via the Mediterranean. Patreon said her work could “cause loss of life” by stopping the work of NGO “rescue vessels” — but migrant deaths in the Mediterranean actually fell by 40 percent as attempted crossings declined in the wake of her reporting. Also, if interfering with the illegal activities of NGO vessels in the Mediterranean is unacceptable to Patreon, they should make it clear that the governments of Italy and Malta, which now bar NGO ships from their shores, aren’t welcome on the platform either.
And a new, invite-only crowdfunding site called “Hatreon” that launched in June has garnered attention from Richard Spencer, the white nationalist credited with coining the term “alt-right.” Hatreon told BuzzFeed News that it currently hosts 50 campaigns supported by about 130 donors who send roughly $3,000 per month in total. The company said these numbers represent a soft launch and that its site will be available to the public soon. Cody Wilson, a cofounder, said he and others started the site after Patreon kicked right-wing content creator TV KWA off its platform at the end of May. (source)
Double Standard
In the bans documented above, Patreon used tenuous, insufficiently supported accusations of “violence” to suspend services to right-wingers. But with the exception of one token ban against It’s Going Down, a far-left site that encourages and celebrates political violence, the platform does not appear to apply its rules to the left with the same level of strictness.
British left-winger Mike Stuchbery currently collects donations from Patreon. Yet he has repeatedly encouraged and supported violence on his Twitter account, most recently defending an incident in which a teenage Trump supporter was attacked and robbed in a Whataburger restaurant for wearing a MAGA hat. Although he later backtracked on those statements, Stuchbery has also said that Trump supporters are the modern-day equivalent of Nazi brownshirts and that Nazis should be punched.
Patreon insists that Generation Identity, which publicly disavows violence, is violent, and went so far as to ban Brittanny Pettibone simply for expressing support for the group. But Stuchbery, who uses Twitter to openly defend violence, is allowed to continue using Patreon.
It’s not hard to find more examples like Stuchbery. Heidi Culliman is a far-left author who has over 200 supporters on Patreon. She has also called her member of congress a Nazi,has called the President and the current U.S. administration Nazis, and, you guessed it, has called for punching Nazis. When people say the President is a Nazi, and that Nazis should be punched, that isn’t just a problem for Patreon — it’s a problem for the Secret Service.
Maybe Stuchbery, Culliman, and other violence-supporters who collect Patreon donations might clarify that they only want actual white supremacists like Richard Spencer to be punched, and not the President (they haven’t yet, by the way). But you don’t get a pass to punch someone like Spencer just because they’re morally wrong. Punching actual white supremacists, unless they punch you first, is still unprovoked violence, and advocating for it is still against the law, as well as Patreon’s policies (if they were enforced consistently.)
Patreon’s bias can also be seen in its approach to Antifa, a far-left organization that, much like Stuchbery and Culliman, supports the use of violence against people they determine to be “fascists.” As you might expect, those are frequently just ordinary Trump supporters and conservatives. Antifa’s rampages at pro-Trump events, where random acts of violence are accompanied by widespread looting and damage to private property, have in the past caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. Last year, an Antifa member pled guilty to plotting an acid attack on Trump supporters during the Presidential inauguration.
The U.S. government isn’t keen on these self-appointed fascist-fighters, and has categorized Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. Yet it’s a domestic terrorist organization that is still allowed on Patreon. A cursory search of Patreon reveals at least six [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] pages, some of them boasting dozens of regular contributors, which are affiliated with Antifa, express their support for Antifa, or display the movement’s symbol, the red-and-white anarcho-communist flag.
One of these pages, LibCom.org, defended violent attacks on German police with glass bottles and rocks during the 2017 G20 protests in Hamburg as “large-scale resistance” and “basic self-defense” via a blog named “Victory of the People.” True to the Antifa designation as domestic terrorists, LibCom also published a story celebrating the sabotage of U.S. army materials. Patreon, which takes a cut from the site’s donations, is directly profiting from this material.
Patreon also directly profited from the following image, which Antifa California distributed through the platform as a reward to supporters:
The image of a bike lock is a reference to Eric Clanton, the left-wing professor and Antifa member accused of assaulting a Trump supporter with a bike lock in April 2017. Clanton was arrested on assault charges, and faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted.
Patreon, in other words, allows Antifa to glorify a real act of violence for which someone was arrested and charge. Meanwhile, Lauren Southern was banned because of a tenuous and ultimately debunked theory that her actions might cause harm.
Patreon’s double standards go beyond its inability to clamp down on left-wing support for violence. In February, Patreon banned the account of Jeremy Hambly, a critic of the incursion of progressivism into the community associated with the popular card game Magic the Gathering (yes, the culture wars now extend to card games — read more about it here). Patreon said they banned Hambly for “doxing,” or the release of a person’s private information online, a charge Hambly denies.
Whether the charge is true or false — and the Southern incident suggests Patreon is disingenuous in its allegations of rule-breaking against the right — the Hambly ban again reveals Patreon’s inconsistency. The platform has for years refused to take action against Randi Harper, a serial bully who poses as an “anti-abuse” activist, but who herself has a long, well-documented track record of abusing others. This extends to doxing, which Harper has unapologetically used as an intimidation tactic. She once revealed the CEO of a debt collection agency’s home phone number, and threatened to release those of his family if the debt collectors did not stop trying to contact her (doing their job, in other words.) Despite this well-publicized behavior, Patreon has taken no action against Harper to this day.
Competitors?
Patreon isn’t the only way to raise money on the web. There are other fundraising platforms, including Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, and GoFundMe, which allow users to raise money for their projects. GoFundMe, in particular, has emerged as a popular method for activists, who use it to raise money for causes and campaigns.
But if you’re looking for a neutral platform that doesn’t come with the risk of a politically-motivated ban, these services are no better than Patreon. All have publicly committed to interfering in their users’ activities if they offend the company’s progressive values.
Earlier this year, Kickstarter banned the project of a Swedish academic who was raising funds for a book examining the statistical correlation between immigration and rape in Sweden. The academic, Ann Heberlein, said she started the project because the Swedish government no longer keeps adequate records of the ethnic and cultural backgrounds of offenders in the country.
IndieGoGo, another crowdfunding site, explicitly bans any campaign that “promotes hate” or “promotes hate symbols and/or hate terms on their website, as defined by the Anti-defamation league.” (The Anti-defamation league, which has previously blamed Trump supporters for rising anti-semitism, includes the internet meme Pepe the Frog on their list of “hate symbols.”) IndieGoGo also has a blanket ban on crowdfunding for “weapons, ammunition, and related accessories.”
GoFundMe also takes sides politically. It deleted the fundraising campaign of a Christian-owned bakery from Oregon, which was at the time facing a $135,000 fine for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. GoFundMe has also deleted conservative Jamie Glazov’s fundraiser for an anti-Sharia law tour, a campaign to expose Hillary Clinton’s anti-Israel sentiments during the 2016 election, and a fundraiser by an organizer of the “Draw Muhammed” contest which aimed to cover security costs for his family.
PayPal and Stripe: Impassible Gatekeepers
It’s not difficult to build a website. If all existing online fundraising services have been co-opted by censor-happy progressives, why not build competing services that don’t ban users for political reasons? When you don’t like what’s on offer, build your own. That’s the free-market conservative argument.
But it’s not as simple as that. In order to build a fundraising platform, you need a payments processor. And the market for payments processors is dominated by just two companies: PayPal and Stripe. And they’re just as intolerant as the fundraising platforms.
When Lauren Southern was banned from Patreon, she did what free-market conservatives recommended, and set up her own fundraising platform, powered by Stripe. Then, directly after Southern hit the headlines again over her lifetime ban from the U.K. for distributing leaflets satirizing Islam, Stripe abruptly withdrew their service.
Stripe informed Southern that she was banned for violating their rules on “Prohibited Businesses and Activities”, although they did not highlight precisely how she violated it. The list includes a prohibition on activity that “encourages, promotes or celebrates unlawful violence toward any group based on race, religion, disability, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, or any other immutable characteristic.”
Stripe has also withdrawn services from FreeStartr, an alternative to Patreon and GoFundMe set up by free speech maximalist Chuck Johnson. Johnson says the platform has also been banned by PayPal. Already notorious for freezing WikiLeaks’ account in 2011, PayPal also withdrew services from nationalist YouTuber Faith Goldy.
Because of the lack of a payment processor, all of FreeStartr’s funds are now at risk, including a legal defense fund for jailed British Islam critic Tommy Robinson, a support fund for South African farmers at risk of racial violence, and income streams for various mainstream conservatives like organizer Ali Alexander and YouTuber Ashton Whitty.
Johnson says Stripe accused him of “obfuscating funds”, although the company did not respond to a request to comment asking them to elaborate on the allegation.
Johnson also says Stripe changed their story. He says he was initially contacted by senior Stripe employee Edwin Wee, a former Democrat operative who previously worked for Joe Sestak and Mike Bloomberg, who informed him that the presence of a legal defense fund for white supremacist Richard Spencer meant that Stripe could no longer do business with him. Because of one objectionable fund, the entire platform had to go.
“Everyone will think like, ‘oh it’s Richard Spencer, he can go f*** himself’ — but they shut down my entire business over his account,” said Johnson, who claims his goal is to build an open, neutral platform, and not to personally endorse the people who use it.
“My position on this is simple, it’s the same position the ACLU had in Skokie.” said Johnson in comments to Breitbart News. “Everyone has certain rights… If they need a legal defense, and people donate to it, and all the money’s legal, then I don’t see an issue with it. People have a right to donate to controversial causes.”
Source: Breitbart
Big tech companies have seized control of digital platforms, and have declared their self righteous status as the gatekeepers of who gets to address the public. Conservative voices have overwhelmingly been silenced and held to a standard that leftist voices are not.
Chronological History of Events Related to Patreon
Patreon Loses Lawsuit With Owen Benjamin Fans, Likely To Pay Millions In Arbitration and Legal Fees
Patreon and Mastercard Ban Robert Spencer (Jihad Watch) without Explanation
Faith Goldy Banned From Patreon
