Since October, my Medium earnings have dropped by two-thirds. I haven't changed quantity, quality, or even the general subject of writing, but you know what happened in October. Since then, I've gone from earning about $1,400 a month to $400. I went from adding 2,000 'followers' a month to as low as 6. These days, I'm lucky if 300 people read an article (there, indi.ca is like 1,000/2,000). As Marshal McLuhan said, the Medium is the message, and I'm getting the message loud and clear. STFU about Palestine.

The Medium

This is censorship by algorithm, by corporation, by White Empire itself. Normally the word 'censorship' is reserved for government actions but, like everything else, the White Empire (re: America) has privatized propaganda. Those outlets have, in turned outsourced the job to algorithms and HR departments. If you're on a platform you won't get distributed and if it's a publication you just won't get hired. That's how modern censorship works. It's been privatized, and the government is owned by 'the private sector' (ie, the rich) anyways. This is the state of modern propaganda.

For examples of egregious censorship and lies, just witness the tortured language in any American newspaper. They use the passive voice to hide their part in an active genocide. Hence you get The Intercept reporting that “The New York Times instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.” You see Arab journalists suspended from the BBC, or journalists in general suspended from the LA Times for protesting the murder of other journalists. Or you don't see Palestinian content on Facebook platforms because Meta systematically censors it. And then you see the US government trying to just ban TikTok completely. This is what the media would call censorship and propaganda if they were remotely objective. But they're not. They're just objects owned by the rich corporations that also own the government.

'Propaganda' and 'censorship' are terms that Empire uses against its enemies but this is, in fact, propaganda. People within the White Empire and especially America are the most propagandized people on Earth. British tabloids and the NYTimes spread lies about beheaded babies and mass rape and are backed by the US President and given Pulitzer Prizes for their war crimes. It's all one system. What I call the military-industrial multiplex, because media is a vital part of it. Truth is the first casualty of war, and they really focus on killing that fucker. Propaganda has always been a vital part of war, and—like most other functions—the White Empire has privatized propaganda. In typical propagandized terms, this is called the 'free press'. It is, in fact, bought and paid for, and used for specific purposes. Medium is just a subset of this phenomenon, and barely worth commenting on specifically.

Medium is just another part of this system, and a pliant one. Medium is a money losing company, the plaything of oligarchs. The lifeblood of Empire is money, and anytime it's the poor against the rich, powerless against the powerful, toy soldiers like Medium all get in line. It will be recorded ignominiously in history, but this isn't news. Big company craven and corrupt, who knew.

The Message

I had a good run on Medium, but it was honestly getting suspicious. I write about how much America sucks, and then pay 10% withholding tax to America. I've been promoted, 'curated', and have met directly with people at Medium. One month I had the highest traffic article on there. For a while, they somehow wanted me to do this. And I made, for me, a good deal of money. Usually by biting the hand that feeds me. They seem to like that. A lot of my writing was lyrical BDSM for white people.

My previous greatest hits were (the sadly dated) America Passports Are Worthless Now ($7,200), I Lived Through Collapse, America Is Already There ($4,200), and White People, You Need To Wash Your Butts ($3,100). There is a certain genre of criticism that actually supports their propaganda line, which is that they're more free than everybody else (just look at the criticism!). This is contained within a higher line of propaganda, which is that what matters above all is belief. Zizek is a piece of shit and I only quote him via the inestimable Mark Fisher, saying, “Cynical distance is just one way… to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.”

Ironic distance is not what I'm selling, but it's what Medium and much of my audience was buying. They could listen to an angry brown man and be absolved of their sins, to disagree with everything going on while still going along with it. It is this cynical distance that was shattered on October 7th. Because Hamas et al didn't just talk about liberation. They did it.

The Al Aqsa Flood

The Al Aqsa Flood of October 7th broke a lot of things. A lot of illusions were broken that day. The illusion of 'Israeli' military power, the illusion of Western democracy, the illusion of liberal values. Western universities were revealed as hedge funds, Western media were revealed as privatized propaganda, and Western online platforms were revealed as content plantations. Warren Buffett said ‘when the tide goes out, you see who's swimming naked.’ Well, when the flood comes in, you see who fucking sucks. Almost all western media, including Medium.

I totally understand why I'm getting censored for writing stuff like Why I Support Hamas, The Coming Destruction Of ‘Israel’, How Hamas Is Not A Terrorist Organization, and The Heroes Of Hamas. Hamas is public enemy #1, condemned everywhere from the nightly news to Saturday Night Live. I just think this is stupid. I take every condemnation from Empire as a reading recommendation and I've actually read about Hamas and read the statements from across the Resistance. And they're not bad at all, in fact, they're the good guys. They're the ones fighting against genocide. Isn't it obvious?

I'm referencing books and actual research here, whereas the propagandists just repeat the word 'Hamas' and expect people to be suitably terrified. Mooslem sounding. They don't quote from Hamas, they don't educate their viewers/readers one iota. They just repeat a lie often enough that it becomes the truth, and often enough it works. They literally just repeat the name 'Hamas' over and over and expect people to be scared because it sounds Arabic and Muslim. And in ordinary times, that's enough. But times are not ordinary anymore.

The Difference

The difference between what I do and what organizations like Hamas do is that they actually do something. I am—and I have no illusions about this—just a manic street preacher, holding a sign saying 'THE END IS NIGH' and holding out his hat for coins. This is actually how I explain my job to people, I tell them that I'm a beggar blogger. The Internet is my street and I just wander around there, muttering. Medium threw some coins in my hat for a while and then they kick it away, so be it. That's life on the street. But people like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Yemeni, and the Revolutionary Guards of Iran are street fighters. And they are inestimably more useful than me.

The point is not whether or not these groups are violent. Violence is a tactic, not a strategy. 'Non-violence' is a virtue preached to the powerless, while the powerful beat them. Gandhi's and MLK's idea of non-violent action has devoured by Empire and spit out as a political sedative. As Kwame Ture said, “In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.” As Brother Ture also said, “Peace is the white man's word. Peace. Liberation is our word. But you'll want peace in the end.” As Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah says, “I want to fight this enemy any way I can, until I achieve victory.” Or as Malcolm X said, “by any means necessary.”

The point is that the Axis of Resistance is doing something about the very problem I've been talking about. I talk about White Empire literally killing the entire planet and these people are doing something. More power to them. The people in the military-industrial multiplex watch countless films about Rebel Alliance, then turn on the TV and cheer for the Empire. It's quite a magical trick. The audience gets to rebel vicariously on one screen, while actual rebels are crushed viciously on another. But now they're losing control of the programming. The screen of screens is shattering. What the Axis of Resistance is doing, through action, is disrupting the narrative. They say the victors write the history, but you could equally say that those who write the history are winning. And the Resistance is writing history. In indelible blood rather than delible ink.

The Pathetic

Empire, instead of changing material reality (maybe don't commit genocide, the region will still sell you oil anyways) is trying to change immaterial media. Instead of trying to change the charnel, they're trying to change the channel. Like Elvis, they're just shooting the TV rather than doing something about their increasingly addled decline. Hence you get the massive, lockstep campaign around stupid but often repeated talking points. 'Beheaded Babies' (not true) and now 'Antisemitism on Campuses' (do I need to tell you?). It's all a ruse. A pathetic ruse, while people can see real children being buried alive and people being mass executed in hospitals. The information, an Al Aqsa Flood of information, there's just too much of it because it's actually happening. The truth seeps through.

Media like Medium censoring me by 80% doesn't matter, cause there's 8000% more atrocities out there, and people are talking about it. You can't demonize, demonetize, and disappear everybody, in the process you lose the power that you're using. Like America is sanctioning themselves into an economic core, they're censoring themselves into an ideological corner too. They can't claim Human Rights™ and Free Speech© anymore. All that's left is brute force, which really ruins the look.

Western social media simply cannot hold back society anymore, their mass media cannot hold back the masses, and their institutions cannot institutionalize brains. These people are obviously not arbiters of truth, they're now forever tainted by the Genocide of Gaza. The entire Western media will be remembered like Radio Rwanda during that genocide. As part of it. As the martyr Aaron Bushnell said, when he immolated himself in Washington DC, “This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” And then he cut through decades of bullshit with a burning conscience. In the light of so much human sacrifice, the flailings of Empire seem ever more absurd, and its failings fatal. They're drowning in the Al Aqsa Flood. As Allah has said (about the much more serious Day of Judgement, which applies to you too):

In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

Woe to every fault-finding back-biter, who amasses wealth, counting it over, thinking that his wealth will make him live forever. By no means! He shall surely be cast into the crushing torment. Would that you understood what that crushing torment is like. It is a Fire kindled by God. Reaching right into the hearts of men, it closes in on them from every side in towering columns.

This must be what it feels like being an imperial propaganda manager, or its privatized pawns in the 'free' press now. They're pushing all the usual buttons, but just foghorn sounds and farts come out, and they can't go out to dinner without being accosted by angry peasants. They don't look powerful, they look pathetic. And that, in itself, is a loss of power.

The Al Aqsa Flood

The attack on October 7th, what the Resistance calls the Al Aqsa Flood, broke the illusion of 'Israeli' military deterrence, broke the illusion of America's distance, and is breaking the illusions around almost every imperial institution, great, small, and medium.

The Empire has tried to bury this revelation with massive wartime censorship, but they just revealed themselves in what they removed, and ended up flooded anyways. It's simply too much. The Al Aqsa Flood was big and the intifada has only gone global. It's got their kids, on elite university campuses. It's messing up their dinners at home now. It's too much. There is no 'medium' solution to this. This is heavy stuff.

The horror now touches every delusion of western civilization, past, present, and future. As Gandhi said about the concept of western civilization, ‘it would have been a good idea.’ Instead all we got was superior violence, and now they can't even get the violence right. All they can do is kick the hat away from beggar bloggers, while real street fighters openly defy them. So truly I do not give a fuck and am not important at all. All praise to the Resistance. A drop of their blood is worth an ocean of ink. A moment of them doing something is worth an eternity of thinking about it. We all have to sacrifice to overthrow this Empire, and demonetization is nothing.