A Podcast On A Previous Domain
In about 2015/2016, my wife and I conceived of an idea to have an online podcast show. We decided to call it Nearly Sacred. As I mentioned on another post on this site, that website was attacked and then the domain was stolen. Keep in mind, this happened before Trump and de-platforming had become a common occurrence.
The podcast discussed sacred matters such as things hidden and plain sight as well as the daily news and speculated on whether something may or may not be a conspiracy theory. Answer: A group of people did conspire to take down the podcast and to steal the domain. As the company who wound up with the domain’s founder says–he was just a greedy guy who liked money. So, evidently, somehow, someway, our podcast must have been threatening someone’s idea of money–or else they were trying to keep us from monetizing our content.
Later, Our Store Also Faced This
Later on our brick and mortar store also faced the same process. Local police and law enforcement along with government were useless. Actual threats were made. What is your recourse when the legal avenues that are supposed to work for enforcement are lackadaisical? Same thing with government institutions.
Society Sometimes Goes Crazy For Awhile
History is replete with examples of society periodically losing its mind. So, the natural thing to do is to get another website and start over. The problem is, though, if something is rotten at the level of the Domain, you cannot start over since censorship inevitably comes through another means. The web is supposed to enable everyone to speak, but what about when it does not, where do you go?
Well, You Can Go Decentralized, Sorta
So this site along with many of my other sites is decentralized. It is easy to push and pull the code and the only expense I have for it is strictly the domain name itself. If the domain name goes down for some reason, I just link it on up to some other form of domain name. The problem with this is that many places that help serve decentralized sites may not be so decentralized. Github, for instance, is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft is not known for its support of freedom. The bigger issue even before all that is you need a connection and some place that provides internet service.
The Web Was Supposed to be About Freedom of Information
The web was supposed to be about freedom of information and FREEDOM from tyranny. The same thing was true with the Declaration of Independence. Other documents that have something like that in mind might be the Covenant in the Bible. This new world we are inhabiting is allowing the technology to “wag the dog”. There are places like IPFS out there, but “normal” people cannot use those places. There are cryptocurrencies out there, but “normal” people struggle to understand the vocabulary.
I Finally Built A New Domain
After all of the above trouble, I was able to eventually build a new website domain. The trouble with getting there though, was immense. First I tried Heroku, and it promised a free domain but it proved very difficult to point any other domain at it without paying additional fees. Then, it seemed it would work if I had the latest “Flat DNS Alias” record, but then it did not after changing name registrars. In essence, there was a lot of “being run around” for something very straight forward. Keep in mind, my degree is in IT and if I am having trouble, you better bet your ass someone else who does not have a degree in IT would have serious difficulty.
Ultimately…
Ultimately I went with a hosted platform that I installed things to, but even there there were several glitches. I really just wanted to host my stuff on my own webserver at home, but the ISP I use made that impossible by their agreements and crippling the router used.
We Have A Serious Free Speech Problem…
I have always been told that we are free to disagree with people, but the weight of the arguments should help us decide the truth. What we are not supposed to do is “silence people” even those with whom we disagree. If we are going to start doing that, then where do we stop silencing people? What a boring world that would be–where everyone agrees with you or is abducted from their home in the middle of the night because they do not. That is not a way to build consensus. It is not even American. Maybe Soviet. Not American. The people who do this are traitors and should be treated as so and deported from the United States to some other regime that their actions might gain them favor. If we do not do this, how is anybody ever supposed to build anything to have a life? If I can come in and knock down everything you do and then “shut you up” by censoring all of your means of communication and then further not having any law enforcement do anything about any of it, then what good are rights? Answer: They are useless. I do not care what rights you fought for. If this fundamental right is gone, none of the rest matter.
Learning IT
My suggestion is to learn a basic form of guerrilla IT. What would you do if you were in a Third World Shit Hole where some dictator is coming in targeting the local population? How would your infrastructure work then? You can use the established channels, but have these other means of broadcast in mind. You never know when your life could suddenly be ruined because you have run afoul of the thought-police. Of course, they also never known when their time is up…