When a channel reaches 100,000 subscribers YouTube sends them a framed “Silver Play Button” plaque to celebrate their success, and if they reach a million subscribers, they get a gold plated one, but YouTube got upset that so many anti-social justice warrior, pro-free speech, conservative channels were reaching 100,000 subscribers, they started refusing to send out the plaques to certain channels once they reached the milestone because YouTube didn’t want to appear as if they were endorsing their views.854
Patreon
Patreon is a service that allows artists to fund their work by having fans sponsor them with varying amounts of monthly support. While the site was created in 2013, it really took off in April 2017 after the “Adpocalypse” when YouTube rolled out their new guidelines and screening mechanisms to demonetize videos they deem “non-advertiser friendly.”
Most YouTubers joined Patreon as a way to supplement the revenue they were losing from so many videos getting demonetized, and for most of them, especially small to moderate sized ones, Patreon is pretty much a standard part of being a YouTuber since earning money from ads has never been the same in the wake of the Adpocalypse.
But since many of them came to rely so heavily on Patreon for their revenue, this became a danger for conservatives who are now at risk of having their Patreon accounts shut down at any time for being “intolerant” of the liberal agenda by not supporting gay “marriage,” or pointing out facts about illegal immigration and crime.
The first person to be banned from Patreon that made headlines because it was seen as a political decision was Lauren Southern (banned in July 2017), a Canadian YouTuber who became known for her criticism of multiculturalism and the mass immigration of people from the Middle East into Europe. She once even documented her visit to a doctor where she said she wanted to identify as a man and was given a doctor’s note which she then took to Canada’s “DMV” and got a driver’s license legally declaring she was a “man” just to see how easy it was to get her gender legally changed.855
Lauren Southern’s ban caused quite a stir online and Patreon’s CEO Jack Conte appeared on Dave Rubin’s “Rubin Report” YouTube channel to respond to the criticism. He said that Lauren wasn’t banned because of what she had been saying about the “Islamization” of Europe, but that she had “put lives at risk” during a stunt she recorded involving refugee boats illegally bringing people across the Mediterranean Sea into Europe.
The CEO claimed they have a policy about what he called “manifest observable behavior,” and if a creator does certain things, like commits crimes, then they will be banned, but, “The decision to remove a creator page has absolutely nothing to do with politics and ideology.”856 He also claimed that Patreon’s policies about speech (not actions) only focused on what people said on their Patreon page, not on Twitter or anywhere else, and emphasized that Lauren Southern was banned for actions not words, but soon this would be proven to be another lie.857
December 2018, Sargon of Akkod (who had over 800,000 subscribers at the time) was banned for using a “racial slur” that someone at Patreon discovered he said in an interview months earlier. The context in which it was said was actually while he was denouncing the alt-right, saying they were acting like a bunch of “white niggers,” (trying to use their own insults against them) and so his entire Patreon account was disabled, causing him to lose thousands of dollars a month in income with no recourse.858
About a year after Lauren Southern was banned from Patreon, her friend and sometimes collaborator Brittany Pettibone was also banned for her support of Generation Identity, a right-wing identitarian movement in Europe working to preserve European culture from Islamization.859 The two girls have been smeared as “white supremacists” by the liberal media because they celebrate Western European culture and oppose mass migration of Muslim refugees into Europe. Soph’s Patreon was shut down one day after YouTube deleted her channel for the same enigmatic excuse of “hate speech” against homosexuals.860
Patreon now has a policy against even making “negative generalizations of people based on race [and] sexual orientation,” so if you point out well-documented facts about crime in black communities or the HIV rate among gay men, that would be a violation of their terms of service because it’s seen as casting them in a negative light.
Imagine a bank not letting someone cash a check that was written to them because the bank didn’t like what the person was going to do with the money, or didn’t like the kind of language the person uses when talking with their friends. That’s exactly what Patreon has done here, and it’s beyond Orwellian and is a dangerous precedent that’s likely only going to follow with much worse actions in the near future.
Meanwhile, far-left individuals and groups are allowed on Patreon, including “Revolutionary Left Radio,” a communist podcast which is run by an admitted “militant revolutionary Communist who wants to put every fascist in the world against the wall and violently expropriate the wealth and property of the owning class.”861 Before a Breitbart article was published highlighting violent Leftists using Patreon, the group’s banner on their Twitter account featured masked militants holding guns.862
Another Communist account called the “Guillotine Podcast” had over 350 patrons (sponsors) donating monthly. The Patreon page itself said they are working to “inspire insurrection” and notes that they want to fire “massive .44 rounds at the heads of politicians and capitalists.”863
Milo Yiannopoulos was banned by Patreon one day after he joined in December 2018. They released a statement saying, “Milo Yiannopoulos was removed from Patreon as we don’t allow association with or supporting hate groups on Patreon.”864 He joined Patreon just days after widely circulated reports said he was $2 million dollars in debt from legal fees, employee salaries he hadn’t been paying, and other expenses he racked up in his ascent to Internet infamy. So in a desperate attempt to try and raise money he joined Patreon, but was immediately denied access.
In some cases it’s not necessarily Patreon that wants to ban someone, but Visa or MasterCard, who demands Patreon shut down people’s accounts, or threatens to stop processing payments for Patreon all together which would completely put them out of business overnight.865
The Future of YouTube
For the first ten years of YouTube’s existence it was an even playing field where anyone could upload videos and if people watched them and shared them, their message could be seen by millions of people. The search results were fair, and if you were looking something up the videos you would find were relevant to what you had hoped to find. The only videos that would be deleted were things any reasonable person could agree on, like pornography, animal abuse, calls to violence, etc.
People found themselves having great careers when their passion unexpectedly opened the door to huge audiences who shared their views. But the corporate conglomerates didn’t realize how many people would use YouTube to counteract the mainstream media and nobody expected how popular conservative channels would become. So YouTube is scrambling to put the genie back in the bottle, and don’t really care how obvious their liberal bias is, or even how much money they lose doing it. Conservative content must be reigned in or stamped out at any cost.