Facebook and Youtube No More…for Me.

I’ve had a Facebook account since 2009, and it was in the Youtube-verse that I first “discovered” Bill Whittle. In Facebook, I saw myself as someone who wanted his friends to see an alternative perspective to the mainstream media feed, and I would post alternative viewpoints from Youtube into my Facebook and Twitter accounts. I knew it wasn’t much, but I figured that even a lone middle finger usually pointed at the Left might just plug an important leak in someone’s dam. Facebook and Youtube, however, have stepped up their censorship in order to narrowly define the narrative in their favor. What’s a Dutch boy (well, mostly Polish….) to do?

Today I closed my accounts with both…and found myself immediately foundering. Where is the clearinghouse for all the conservative voices? Am I going to have to pay for an account for everyone I pay attention to? There are those multi-voiced conservative sights…heck, even Gavin McInnes and Milo hang out in their own backwater channel. The Daily Wire, BlazeTV…again, what’s a 60-year old who lives paycheck to paycheck to do?

I was counseled by a few to stay in the game. We had to keep trying to be heard in our little circles of erstwhile friends and neighbors. Most were concerned about the social connections (more like reconnections from days of yore) that would be difficult, at best, to maintain. The latter pained me most for, in truth, much of the conservative voice is preaching to the choir. The brightest and clearest of the conservative voices is barely heard over the din of howling wolves and bleating sheep anticipating the Great Slaughter. Our attempts at cultural inroads to the Left are torpid and contrived- tanks with one track blown off in a crossroads, the lovely Christie suspension an elegant filigree on the side, capable of stopping nothing hurled at it, but looking splendid in its death. Bill is right to argue for naturally-occuring conservative cultural milieu (is that also plural in French? Merde!) such as sci-fi, but even there Heinlein was an aberration.

The truth is that we should have developed our own cultural voice a long time ago. We should all be wearing swanky suits and looking like those steely-eyed missle men Bill (and every one of us, I’d bet) admires. We tried. When I was in the Tea Party, I belonged to a Tea Party Community Facebook-ish thing all our own. But it felt like we were just putting out opinions that everyone else already had. Nothing was revelatory. Nothing embolden or strengthened anyone any further, and the fire seemed to slowly die out there while we went looking for werewolves and brandishing our well-worn pitchforks. The truth was that we didn’t need an echo-chamber, we needed a well-defined “standard”, if you will, to rally around. We needed to hear the various facets of that same voice to help exercise (and perhaps exorcise) our own variations on a them. But, alas, at least among the hoi polloi, little is available. And this odd coupling of a Mark Levin and a Glenn Beck seems suspicious at least. I for one cannot determine if I want my money to support what looks less like an eagle and more like a Hydra! So, again… what’s a conservative old fart to do, other than to anger his God, waving his impotent little middle finger and crying out for Sancho Panza? For me, windmills are dangerous….