The downside of reading the Gulag Archipelago is that you become dismissive of the power of the FBI. I mean compared to the KGB and its precursor the NKVD our secret police are pretty lame. Of course, everything is relative. Compared to the unimaginable freedom that we used to enjoy here, the present police state is very repressive and upsetting. A generation ago we would have laughed at the idea of the government spying on all of the phone conversations of the American people. And the idea that political opponents would now be the targets for re-education camps would have been the subject of science fiction dystopias that sane people would have found too far-fetched to be interesting.
But getting back to the USSR, the Soviets didn’t do anything half way. They were so zealous and thorough that they would arrest random people just because their quotas hadn’t yet been met. I was reading a story about a landlady who went to the police station to ask about what to do with a nursing infant whose mother was one of her tenants. The mother had been arrested by the NKVD and now the child needed milk. She wanted to know where she should bring the child. They brought the landlady to a waiting room and after a delay of a few hours they decided to arrest her just because she was already there and the quota needed filling. She disappeared into the gulag and was never seen again. Now there’s an action that would bring tears of joy to Jim Comey’s eyes.
I guess my point is that as maddening as it is to see the freest country ever imagined devolving into a police state the reality is that we have a lot of latitude to communicate our ideas and information with each other. After all I can call Joe Biden, Dementia Joe and Kamala Harris, Willie Brown’s Ho. And so far, I haven’t been dragged away to Siberia (or even Minnesota) or been shut down by the thought police. Sure, they’ve shut us out of Twitter and Facebook but honestly those things were overrun with Leftists anyway and from what people on them have told me they weren’t fun anymore anyway. Larry Correia is one of my favorite fantasy authors partly because he is not a Leftist. On his blog, Monster Hunter Nation, he wrote a recent post that chronicled his decision to abandon Facebook. Apparently, they didn’t shut down his very popular page but instead blocked him from writing to it.
I have a Gab page, but honestly, I’ve never really gotten any traffic from it. The short-short form of writing doesn’t really seem to suit me. Maybe it’s a skill I need to learn. But I like writing on my blog and if I can get some visibility from folks like Whatfinger, Disturbed Deputy and MaddMedic then I’m happy to communicate that way. Lately I’ve been getting some organic search traffic but it’s still quite limited and is restricted to very specific posts that have little to do with the majority of my content.
What I’m getting at is that although I’d love to suddenly go viral and have millions of readers, I’m not sure that was ever a realistic thing. Are there really that many people interested in the things I am? Maybe I’ll never know. But if the people who like my stuff tells some of their friends that’s probably the best way for my site to grow and right now, I don’t think the FBI or even Google is interested in my nefarious writings. If I do get hurled off my platform, I guess I’ll change my tune but I think what I’d do is what Gab did. I’d make my site completely bullet proof. I believe I’ve found a hosting plan that avoids all the vulnerable infrastructure and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.
Circling back to the beginning. We have lost a lot of freedom but compared to real totalitarian hell like the Soviet Union or that madman in North Korea we have enough wiggle room to say what we want, to whom we want. And right now, that’s good enough.
So spread the good word, send all your conservative friends to Orion’s Cold Fire and spit in the eye of Google and the FBI. Free America still exists here and I’m not feeling pessimistic today.
