Free Speech Under Assault at Gab — Culture Wars (original) (raw)

On Monday, March 8, Ali Breland introduced himself to me via e-mail as a reporter for Mother Jones who was planning to do an article on Andrew Torba, the CEO of Gab, a media platform which over the past few months had become the refuge of those who had been banned from Twitter.

The most famous refugee from Twitter was Donald Trump, who got banned from the platform he made famous with his tweets on January 8, 2021 under the preposterous pretext that calling his supporters “patriots” and refusing to attend the inauguration of the people who had stolen the election from him violated Twitter’s “glorification of violence policy.”1 Concluding that President Trump was guilty of “incitement of violence,” Twitter closed ranks with other big tech Internet oligarchs and kicked the president of the United States off their platform as a way of showing him and anyone who voted for him who was running the country.

Within hours of getting banned on Twitter, Torba welcomed Donald Trump with open arms to Gab. “It’s happening,” Torba said. “This is Gab’s moment, one that we have been preparing for now for over four and a half years.”2 Capitalizing on the de-platforming which spread through the Internet in the run up to the theft of the election, Gab branded itself as the free speech alternative to cancel culture and was immediately branded in return as a “haven for right-wing terrorists.”3 Big Tech’s attempt to demonize Trump and his expulsion from Twitter became a windfall for Gab, whose traffic increased by 120 percent in the 24 hours following the Capitol riot.

One month later, on February 7, Torba admitted that Trump had not migrated to Gab. In fact, he never used the platform.4 In a statement he posted on Gab, Torba wrote: “@realdonaldtrump is and always has been a mirror archive of POTUS’ tweets and statements that we’ve run for years. We’ve always been transparent about this and would obviously let people know if the President starts using it.” Torba went on to blame “media outlets that falsely reported that Trump himself was posting to the account” as the source of the misinformation.5

At this point, Gab started having technical problems as increased traffic caused Gab to crash on a regular basis. Others felt that deficient security rather than increased traffic was behind the technical problems. As if to prove that group right, Gab suffered a massive hack on February 28, 2021, then another one in early March which provided the basis for the Mother Jones article.

Did Torba allow the attacks to happen? According to an article in Wired, Eugen Rochko, the developer of a source codebase known as Mastodon, which Gab used as a basis for its website from early 2019, believes that “poor security practices played a significant part in the breach.”6 By relying on Mastodon, “Gab’s programmers introduced two serious security vulnerabilities into its code,” according to Rochko, one of which was publicized by early February. Rochko says that Gab did little to address these “obvious” problems, adding: “I’m not aware of them ever adopting our bug fixes, including important security fixes.” In an article in The Guardian, Megan Squire, a professor of computer science at Elon University and a “longtime researcher on the far right’s use of internet technologies,” said that “Gab was negligent at best and malicious at worst” in its approach to security. “It is hard to envision a scenario where a company cared less about user data than this one.”7

Gab, according to Mother Jones is “a Twitter clone that boasts that it ‘champions free speech.’” Ever since Torba created Gab in 2015, “it has served as a haven for alt-righters, QAnon supporters, and other far-right groups banned from mainstream platforms.”8 In his brief message, Breland asked me about “leaked messages between Andrew Torba and Roosh V,” in which Torba claimed that “he was a fan of yours” and wondered if I “could comment on the veracity of this.”

Thus began a skirmish in the culture wars which gave not only a good indication of how warfare is fought in our day, and the location of one of its most important fronts, but most importantly its main weapon, which is the charge of anti-Semitism. It is impossible to understand the battle against free speech in our day without mentioning the Jews’ role in that battle. This became obvious once Breland’s article appeared in Mother Jones. The article’s tone of moral superiority was belied by the fact that Breland was the beneficiary of criminal activity. The article was based on an “immense cache of stolen Gab data,” which Breland received from “a hacker who goes by JaXpArO and provided to Distributed Denial of Secrets, a website that calls itself a ‘transparency collective.’”9 Given an announcement this dramatic, the reader was primed to expect the worst—anything from sexual scandal to criminal activity—but the only criminal activity was on the part of the Mother Jones designated hacker, and the only scandal, the fact that he used that material with impunity when people like Julian Assange are still in jail.

Instead of the smoking gun which the reader had been set up to expect, Breland lamely cited a routine e-mail exchange in which Torba welcomed Roosh Valizadeh to the Gab platform, as something intrinsically sinister and qualifying Breland as a candidate for a Pulitzer prize in investigative journalism, or as he put it in his breathless prose:

This immense cache of stolen Gab data includes a conversation in which Torba welcomed Daryush Valizadeh, a misogynist and anti-semitic right-wing internet figure, to the platform.Valizadeh, a pickup artist, video maker, and blogger known as Roosh V within the online “manosphere,” has bragged about committing acts of sexual assault and derided Jews. While he’s taken steps to distance himself from the alt-right, he has had ties to the movement and supported Richard Spencer, the white nationalist who gave it its name.None of that history stopped Torba from extending what Valizadeh called a “warm welcome” to Gab.10

Breland failed to specify the charge of sexual assault and ignored Roosh’s conversion and his repentance at the life he had lived as a pick-up artist. He also fails to mention the positive influence I had on leading Roosh out of a life of sexual decadence. Boiled down to its gist, the article was a strained attempt at guilt by association, the main guilt being imputed being anti-Semitism as defined by the ADL and the SPLC, which means anything Jews don’t like. Continuing down this line of “out of their own mouths” rhetoric, Breland reveals damning information like the following exchange: “Thank you for the warm welcome on Gab. I enjoy not having to self-censor like on Twitter,” Valizadeh wrote. “You’re welcome brother, pray for us. We need it,” Torba responded.

Now we get to the really damning part:

In a subsequent message to Valizadeh, Torba praised E. Michael Jones, a prominent anti-semitic writer and publisher whose work has been tracked by the Anti-Defamation League, and who Valizadeh has interviewed several times on his podcast.

“I am a huge fan of EMJ too, he has an account but hasn’t logged in for some time,” Torba wrote, seeking Valizadeh’s assistance in getting Jones to use his dormant Gab account more—especially to host his videos, which regularly appeared on the video streaming site, BitChute. “Would love to get all his videos on Gab TV, very important for the distribution and preservation of truth. If you can send him a note, I tried emailing the email we have on file but it bounced.”

Once the initial shock following such damning revelations has worn off, we begin to see the magnitude of this expose. Torba, it turns out, wants Jones to post his videos on Gab! Jones, you will be equally shocked to learn, has been condemned by both the ADL and the SPLC. Once again, our intrepid Mother Jones reporter couches his revelation of material that is ubiquitous on the Internet—thanks to Jewish control of discourse—in the hushed tones of someone who thinks the smoke is still pouring out of the muzzle of his imaginary smoking gun. The case against Jones becomes even more damning when Breland reveals that Jones had the temerity to criticize Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg for: “commandeering the resources of” South Bend, Indiana, while he was mayor “to promote the homosexual agenda,” and he argued, “you can’t allow homosexuals into office because they only represent their own narcissistic fantasies.”11

How am I ever going to live that down? How will I be able to face my wife after a damning revelation like that?!

Needless to say, I was flattered by the attention, but suspicious nonetheless that I had been drawn into this battle for something other than my writing skills. I have become the Internet’s designated anti-Semite, and as such I can be deployed as a weapon against anyone within two mouse clicks on the Internet. Making use of the Pharisaical concept that uncleanness is contracted by proximity, my name can be used to take out anyone cancel culture wants to destroy by contaminating him with my imaginary malady. This Jewish tactic is known as Taboo, which means that anything Jews don’t like can be transmitted from one person to another by proximity, even though the people have never met and their only connection is the mind of the Jew who is trying to destroy one or the other or both of them. Those who are familiar with Scripture know that the Jews have been using this ploy for thousands of years, ever since the Pharisees condemned Jesus for sitting down to eat with tax collectors and prostitutes. Because Jews have since become prominent in illicit finance and prostitution, their ire at Taboo now focuses on anti-Semitism, which the International Holocaust Remembrance Association has defined as “a certain perception,” which means that it is not a category of reality which can serve as the basis of laws but rather a category of the mind which can be deployed as a weapon against anyone the Jews don’t like.

Over the next few days, the electronic equivalent of barrels of ink got spilled in articles commenting on what happened. The conversation quickly fell into the heavily trodden paths which ensured that what really happened was going to be obscured by the categories of the mind which get imposed on discourse to render the real story invisible and any understanding of what is really going on impossible.

Sensing that I was being set up to be used as a club to beat Torba, I did not respond to Breland’s e-mail. However, Torba, who evidently got a similar request, did respond later the same morning, which is to say, one day before the article actually appeared in Mother Jones, and his forthright response effectively destroyed Breland’s attack: “I apologize for absolutely nothing because I did nothing wrong here,” Torba wrote in a public message on his Gab account. “I am indeed a big fan of both @rooshv and @EMichaelJones and have signed copies of their books.”

Once it became obvious that _Mother Jones_’s expose had flopped, the oligarchs who had ordered the hit piece turned to the hackers who made it possible in the first place and asked for their assistance once again. Only too happy to oblige, Captain Jack Sparrow and his minions crashed Gab and then tried to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from Torba with a boldness which flows from the secure sense of impunity which Antifa and other groups which do the bidding of the oligarchs have enjoyed for some time now. Once again, the morally superior Breland has no problem with extortion and other criminal activity as long as the extorters' hearts are in the right place, which is to say, fully loyal to oligarchic control. Instead of reproving the extorters, Breland rebukes Gab for “the site’s poor cybersecurity” and lauds “the same hacker responsible for the prior hack,” who “threatened to release more information unless they were paid.”

Torba ignored the threat, and Gab was back in operation one day after the hack, necessitating another attack, this time from an unlikely source. On Wednesday, March 10, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas announced via Twitter that Gab was anti-Semitic and had “no place in Texas” because it did not “represent Texas values.” The source of this attack on Gab was unlikely because just a week before Governor Abbot had attacked Big Tech for censoring the internet, hinting that censorship was not compatible with “Texas values.”12

Less than a week before Abbott denounced Gab, he had introduced a bill into the Texas legislature protecting social media companies in that state from being banned by Big Tech giants who are “controlling the flow of information and sometimes denying the flow of information” by “choosing which viewpoints are going to be allowed to be presented.” Texas, Abbott concluded at a press conference in Tyler, “is taking a stand against big tech political censorship. We’re not going to allow it in the Lone Star State.”13

Less than a week later, Governor Abbott announced that Gab was unwelcome in the state of Texas. He did this at the behest of Representative Craig Goldman, a member of the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Advisory Committee. In the picture which went out with the tweet Goldman can be seen sitting to the left of Governor Abbot in front of an Israeli flag.14 Torba responded quickly but in a way that would prove ultimately self-defeating. By attempting to refute a term, namely, anti-Semitism, which the IHRA has defined as “a certain perception,” Torba gave unwitting credence to a non-existent argument and entered into the discussion on the terms of his enemies. Instead of going on the offensive and asking something along the lines of “Why are the Jews trying to destroy Gab,” Torba wrote:

Gab is not an ‘anti-Semitic’ platform. We protect the political speech of all Americans, regardless of viewpoint, because in this age of cancel culture nobody else will. That means unpopular viewpoints may be found on the site.15

In response to Abbott’s attack, I posted the following text on Gab: “It took Abbott just five days to do a complete about face on free speech. His capitulation shows that the Jewish Question lies at the heart of the free speech issue. The main weapon in the arsenal of cancel culture is the bogus claim of anti-Semitism. The attack on Gab proves this.” Other commentators brought up Abbott’s hypocrisy in posing as a champion of free speech and then condemning Gab one week later, as well as Abbott’s links with notorious censors like the Chinese government,16 but no one seemed able to ask the most obvious questions: how do we explain this dramatic and puzzling volte face on the governor’s part? More puzzling still, how do we explain the strange alliance between a left-wing magazine like Mother Jones and the Republican governor of one of the most conservative states in the union? The missing link which answers both questions, of course, is “anti-Semitism.” The Jews were determined to destroy Gab, and after their proxy warriors in the fourth estate and the criminal corner of the dark net failed, they turned to the politicians they controlled, and Abbott was certainly one of them.

Abbott had a long history of supporting Jewish interests while in office. On May 2, 2017, Abbott signed “a robust anti-boycott Israel bill into law,” which “bans state entities from engaging in business with organizations and companies that support BDS.”17 In the Stalinist prose we have come to expect from the Jewish press, the article goes on to quote Governor Abbott as saying at the signing ceremony: “As Israel’s No. 1 trading partner in the United States, Texas is proud to reaffirm its support for the people of Israel and we will continue to build on our historic partnership... Anti-Israel policies are anti-Texas policies, and we will not tolerate such actions against an important ally.”18 For some independent commentary, the article then quoted Charles Kaufman, who chairs B’nai B’rith’s International Center for Human Rights and Public Policy, as saying:

Advocates of BDS would do well to learn from the robust business relationship Texas enjoys with the State of Israel. The path to peace is not through hatred, false narratives, boycotts or terrorism. States like Texas won’t fall for such nonsense. It is only fitting that this bill becomes law in the same week that the Texas-Israel Chamber of Commerce has arranged for Israeli experts to present a forum at Texas State University on how the state can leverage Israeli water technology to meet future water challenges in Texas.19

One Texas politician referred to the willingness of the Israelis to share their water technology as an attempt to take over Texas’s scarce resources.20

The article closed on an equally objective note by citing Sandy Hagee Parker, the daughter of the pope of Christian Zionism, John Hagee, who as head of Christians United for Israel announced that she was “very proud of my home state for standing up for the US-Israel relationship and effectively shutting down the BDS movement’s efforts to make Texas complicit in their antisemitism.”21

In 2019, Governor Abbott signed into law a holocaust remembrance bill which created an annual week of education regarding the Holocaust in public schools across Texas. The bill was created “to prevent future genocide and combat discrimination, bullying and harassment,” unless the target of this “discrimination, bullying, and harassment” was someone Jews disliked, like Andrew Torba and the people on Gab, in which case the governor himself would engage in the very behavior the bill ostensibly opposed.22 On January 25, 2020 Abbott stopped off in Israel to pray at the Wailing Wall and curry favor with the Jews before heading off to Davos, where he curried favor with richer Jews and other oligarchs.23

On March 11, one day after Abbott’s attack, Torba appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room to tell his side of the story.24 Bannon had a long and varied career before emerging in his current incarnation as a right-wing podcaster.

Bannon was born on November 27, 1953 in Norfolk, Virginia into a Catholic working-class, Irish/German family headed by an AT&T telephone lineman whose political sympathies lay with the Kennedy family and unionized labor. After graduating from Virginia Tech in 1971 with a degree in urban planning, Bannon joined the Navy, where he earned a reputation as a problem solver, as well as a master’s degree in national security studies from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. Georgetown has been a feeder school for oligarchic institutions like the U.S. State Department since the 1960s when it gained this status as part of the reward which the Jesuits received for contesting the Catholic Church’s teaching on birth control. The degree at Georgetown coupled with his CO’s recommendation as a problem solver got Bannon into the Harvard Business School, and the degree he earned there landed him a job at Goldman Sachs, which certified him as Kosher. The stint at Goldman Sachs earned him a job in 1987 as a Hollywood producer (18 films between 1991 and 2016). It also allowed him to negotiate the sale of Castle Rock Entertainment. As payment for brokering that deal, Bannon accepted a stake in five television shows, including Seinfeld, the quintessential Jewish sitcom, from which he continues to earn cash residuals.25 At this point a pattern began to emerge, and independent internet podcasters were the first to connect the dots:

This guy went to Harvard, this guy worked for Goldman Sachs. This guy then became special assistant to chief of naval operations in the Pentagon. He was studying at Georgetown university to get a degree in National Security Studies. He then went on to become a vice president at Goldman Sachs in 1987 in the midst of the hostile takeovers, leveraged buyouts, etc., and by that point the wool has to have come off the eyes. You can’t get that high and not have encountered Jewish power. This guy is a self-avowed passionate Zionist. You don’t get to that point by accident.26

Bannon was a protégé of the late homosexual conservative power broker Arthur J. Finkelstein, the man who put Bibi Netanyahu into office in Israel. As such Bannon represented the Likudnik wing of Jewish politics, something that would become apparent after Bannon’s client Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. According to the Jazz and James podcast we have already cited, Bannon’s involvement in video game culture, which began in 2005, would have an important impact on his development as an agent of Jewish interests because it was the first time that he came in contact with “young men who have practiced anonymous on line aggression.” Video game culture opened Bannon’s eyes to the populist influences which he saw face to face at a Trump rally in 2015. The “white faces” Bannon saw at that Trump rally in 2015 would have made an avowed Christian Zionist like Bannon uncomfortable, or it might have indicated a new field of endeavor.

Two years after his initial contact with gamer culture, Bannon became one of the co-founders of

Israel-born Breitbart news and procured substantial funds for the website from Robert Mercer. He then served as chief strategist for the first seven months of the Trump administration. He was also a top executive at Cambridge Analytica, and they are tied into Palantir, which is Peter Thiel’s company. Thiel was very familiar with the internal workings of Trump’s campaign analytics. The idea that you can get involved in an analytic company and not be involved with Israeli intelligence is like try to do it. Like try to find a government on the planet that isn’t [controlled by Israeli intelligence].27

The role Bannon played in co-opting America First in the interest of Donald Trump’s Jewish backers fit perfectly with the role he played as a founding member of Breitbart news. When Philip Elliott and Zeke J. Miller published an article in TIME magazine claiming that Breitbart “pushed racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic material,” Bannon conceded that the material which appeared on Breitbart contained views with “racial and anti-Semitic overtones,” but went on to claim that he “has zero tolerance for such views.”28 Which is one way of telling us that he elicited those views so that he could publish them on Breitbart as a way of identifying those who held them.

After Bannon attended a Trump for president rally in 2015, he understood the force of nationalism which was sweeping the globe and volunteered his services for the Trump campaign. Bannon resurrected the America First message, purged it of the warnings about Jewish influence which made it unacceptable to big Jewish donors like Sheldon Adelson, and then forged it into the ideological backbone of the campaign which put Trump in the White House in 2016. Bannon was the spiritus movens behind the overtly America First ad, replete with pictures of George Soros, which put Trump over the top during the last week of the campaign.

As his reward, Bannon was named policy chief at the White House, an office which gave him access to national security briefings. Bannon held that office for seven months, until August 18, 2017, when he was made the scape goat for Richard Spencer’s Unite the Right rally. After Trump was held responsible for the violence which occurred in Charlottesville after the police drove the white boys into the arms of Antifa, Bannon fell on his sword and returned to private life.

Bannon, who describes himself as “a proud Christian Zionist,”29did Torba no favors by beginning the interview with a question which indicated that he shared the same world view as the hackers, Mother Jones, and Governor Abbott: “Why,” Bannon asked, “would Governor Abbott lead off with sites like Gab are anti-Semitic and have no place in Texas?”

The question put Torba immediately on the defensive. Was Bannon unaware that in mentioning the term anti-Semitism, he placed the presumption of guilt on the person he was interviewing? Once the word is broached, there is no defense. Torba was placed in the impossible situation of proving a negative, in this instance that he was not an anti-Semite. Sensing that he was on the defensive, Torba then did his best to extricate himself from the hole Bannon had prepared for him:

Steve, your guess is as good as ours. The bizarre thing about this is that the Texas GOP has an account on Gab itself. So, it seems we’re seeing some sort of civil war or division in the GOP, where you have this grass roots America First side of the party and you have the GOP establishment on the other side. Governor Abbott announced just last week that he was going to take a stand against Big Tech censorship. Last December he signed a $17 billion dollar deal with Amazon and is courting the Big Tech giants who are de-platforming people and demonizing Trump supporters, Christians, etc. He’s talking out one side of his mouth on censorship and on the other hand he’s making multibillion dollar deals with tech companies like Amazon. Last night we had 800,000 people visit us from Texas, and I think he’s going to pay the price for it come primary season.

Was Bannon too stupid to know that his repeated reference to anti-Semitism was damaging Torba? Or was something more sinister at work? Either way he pursued a line of questioning that made Torba seem evasive and defensive. Ignoring the fact that Torba had already answered his first anti-Semitism question, Bannon played the Jewish card once again: “No one came to you and said, hey, we think you’re an anti-Semitic site?” putting Torba on the defensive once again. Torba responded by trying to get the discussion out of the anti-Semitism swamp:

Listen, Steve, Gab is not an anti-Semitic platform. I don’t even know what that means. We protect political speech of Americans and of people around the world regardless of viewpoint. Gab is a viewpoint neutral platform. As long as what you are saying is legal, it is allowed on the site. And apparently Governor Abbott doesn’t agree with that. There is this blatant hypocrisy coming from him within the span of a week. He said last week that he was going to go after big tech.

When one of Bannon’s female colleagues asked: “Who told him [Abbott] to do this?” no one had an answer. Torba should have said, “The Jews are trying to destroy Gab,” but instead replied, “Many of our customers are Jewish.”

At this point, Bannon once again brought up anti-Semitism, even though Torba had tried to dismiss it by claiming that he didn’t know what the term meant.

Bannon: “Have any of your Jewish users approached you to say, hey, we think this is turning into an anti-Semitic platform?”

Once again Torba was forced to play defense instead of going after the people who used criminal activity to take down his site.

Torba: “No, but they have been replying and supporting us. They have replied to Governor Abbott’s tweet saying, ‘I’m a Jew. Sometimes I see stuff on Gab that I don’t like, but I’m an adult. That’s just the way the world works.’ I’m not going to decide what is objectionable and what isn’t. I’m not going to play speech police the way big tech does. We have drawn a very clear line in the sand. We allow legal political speech on site. We do not allow criminal activity or illegal speech. And by the way I see that every day on Facebook and Twitter. I would argue that it’s much worse on a place like Twitter or on Facebook.”

At this point, Bannon’s other co-host asked, “Does the Ayatollah of Iran have a Gab account?”

Torba: “He does not.”

Man: “And the ayatollah does have a Twitter account?”

Torba: “Correct.”

Man: “And the ayatollah of Iran has used his Twitter account to spread anti-Semitic messages?”

By answering “Absolutely,” Torba allowed Bannon to lead the narrative down the well-worn path of Muslim bashing, as a way of telling his audience that Torba’s heart was in the right place, in spite of what Mother Jones and Governor Abbott had to say about him.

On March 12, Laura Loomer wrote a piece for RT defending Gab. Speaking as a “Jewish journalist” who was “banned by Big Tech in 2018,” Loomer said that she was “warmly welcomed into the Gab community where free speech is welcomed, unlike on Twitter and Facebook,” and wondered “how that makes it anti-Semitic.30 The endorsement came at a price. As in the Bannon interview, Torba was being offered forgiveness for the sin of anti-Semitism if he would do penance by engaging in Muslim bashing.

“I was permanently banned from Twitter on November 21, 2018,” Loomer continued, “for a tweet in which I called Congresswoman Ilhan Omar “anti-Jewish.” Ilhan Omar is such an anti-Semite that House Democrats were forced to pass a resolution on anti-Semitism. It was later revealed by the Wall Street Journal that I was banned from Twitter after the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) lobbied Twitter executives to ban me. In 2014, CAIR was classified as a terrorist organization in the United Arab Emirates and labeled as a Muslim Brotherhood entity by the United States. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.”31

So, now we know that the Muslims are behind Big Tech censorship on the internet and, therefore, behind the attack on Gab!

Bannon’s response to the claims about Iran’s Supreme Leader was “Jewish hatred.”

Man: Has Governor Abbott ever criticized Twitter for allowing that to happen?

Torba: “Not that I’ve seen. No one is discussing the child exploitation that is going on on Facebook and Twitter. Everyone is burying this under the rug. 85% of child exploitation reports, according to the FBI, come from Facebook. This disgusting criminal and immoral behavior is going on on their platforms. Are there people who pose objectionable stuff? Yes, it’s the internet. Is objectionable content illegal? No, I believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant for this kind of stuff.”

The best way to betray someone is to pretend to be his friend. The best way to betray nationalism is to create a faux nationalist movement which is beholden to Jewish money and as a result makes any criticism of Jews or the state of Israel off limits. This is what Bannon did when he created the philo-Semitic version of America First which got Trump elected president in 2016.

After leaving the Trump White House in August of 2017, Bannon announced that he was going to create “the infrastructure globally for the global populist movement,” and embarked on a European speaking tour which allowed him to build “a network of right-wing populist-nationalist parties aspiring to government.”32 Those parties included France’s National Front, Hungary’s Fidesz, The Italian League, the Five Star Movement, the Brothers of Italy, the Alternative for Germany, the Polish Law and Justice Party, the Swedish Democrats, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Freedom Party of Austria, the Swiss People’s Party, the British Independence Party, the Flemish Vlaams Belang, the Belgian People’s Party, the Swiss People’s Party, the pan-European identitarian movement, Republika Srpska’s Alliance of Independent Social Democrats.33 Notable by its presence on the same list was Israel’s Likud Party, whose inclusion gave away Bannon’s game.

Bannon’s campaign to bring European nationalist parties under the Likud umbrella “had only limited success.” It had no success with the Sweden Democrats or the Vlaams Belang, which called it “poorly organized,” or the Alternative for Germany. As a result, “Right-wing populist parties did not achieve a surge of support in the 2019 European Parliament elections.” The unanswered question is whether that failure came about because of Bannon’s efforts or in spite of them. The same question should be asked of Bannon’s overtures to the Catholic Church after his attempt to create a “gladiator school for culture warriors” collapsed when “the group’s rights to use the former monastery were revoked due to failure to pay rent and conduct maintenance work.”34

Married and divorced three times, Bannon fit in not only with the sexual morals of Donald Trump himself but with sexually degenerate colleagues like Roger Stone. Betrayal comes naturally to people like this. Add to this the fact that Bannon “strongly favors U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal,” his ties with the late Sheldon Adelson, his alarm “at a push for a renewed Middle East peace process,” and the fact that he called Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas a “terrorist,” and it becomes abundantly clear whose interests he serves.35 Bannon’s treatment of Torba is consistent with a life dedicated to serving Jewish interests. Jews need front men like Bannon and Abbott to distract the goyim from the influence Jews wield from behind the scenes.

This brings us back to the unanswered questions surrounding the hack. According to one Silicon Valley insider:

Gab is rumored to be a “fed trap,” an FBI confidential informer cum “patsy to set up and arrest for an easy FBI agent promotion” farm. Torba did a Gab stock issuance (not an IPO, a more limited SEC Regulation A sale to qualified investors) the other year, but seems to have “gone private” recently. If the SEC does nothing now that all the fake (bot) users are exposed by the security hack, where the real user count contradicts material claims made in Gab’s filing for public stock sale, this supports the fed-trap thesis in its strongest form: the US deep state supports Gab. A contact who has documented “loliporn” (from Lolita + pornography; Japanese anime-style underage subjects) in droves on Gab paid accounts writes that the Gab hackers are working with authorities in places like Germany to locate and prosecute naive Gab users who verified with real-world identification documents. The hackers claim over 1,000 German Gab users are under investigation and may face arrest and prison time. It doesn’t matter if Torba is sincere but incompetent, a Judas Goat feigning incompetence, or something in the middle. The bot-inflated user numbers (securities fraud if done by Torba), loliporn, mishandling of credit card and other personal identification data, and once-posted but then taken down “selfie-a-deux” pictures of Torba with Peter Thiel, also Torba with Alan Dershowitz, are enough for me to stay away. Gab support from gay-married Bitcoin-holding libertarian Jeff Giesea also requires some explanation. There has been too much smoke, and now a big fire.

Which brings up an even more interesting question. Am I a “patsy”? I clearly have a role to play. As the ADL’s designated anti-Semite, I can be deployed as the digital version of Typhoid Mary to infect unsuspecting undesirables with my malady through guilt by association. So in this regard, anyone who gets a following by proposing an alternative to the party line will gather people around him whose information is important to those who want to thwart the movement. Anyone in a situation like that who runs afoul of the law, even rarified laws like Security and Exchange Commission regulations, (SEC regulations), can fall victim to the FBI which invariably uses the threat of prosecution to turn one member of a group against another, as they just did in the preposterous Michigan governor kidnapping plot and the January 6 election protest which was turned into an “insurrection” by the same mass media who had vowed to remove Trump from office. At this point, it’s impossible to tell.

On March 21, Torba posted an America First manifesto on his Gab account announcing that the Republicans had failed the blue-collar constituency which had voted Trump into the White House in 2016. The new Gab America First movement headed by Torba was going to be “first and foremost” a “Christ-centered, Pro-Family movement. Period.”36 That means that Torba “will no longer tolerate the slow walk towards the madness of woke liberal ideology in the Republican Party.” Torba then enumerated the planks in his platform:

–10 year immigration moratorium – National voter ID/voting reform – Build the wall – Pull federal funding from sanctuary cities – Pull federal funding from Universities that teach anti-American critical race theory – Deport anyone here illegally – Ban dual citizens from Congress – 12 year term limit cap for Congress – Make usury illegal (predatory lending, insane interest rates, etc) – Trust bust Big Tech monopolies – End foreign wars, bring troops home – Incentivize small business creation – Incentivize the development of nuclear families – Incentivize women to stay at home and raise children. – Incentivize and encourage homeschooling – Paid Paternity and Maternity leave should be required by law for parents to incentivize higher birth rates and family bonding. – Ban abortion – KYC age verification for online porn – Tax companies who store cash offshore to avoid taxes (Apple, etc) – Eliminate the vast majority of foreign aid to invest in rebuilding America’s infrastructure – Create millions of jobs to rebuild America’s roads, bridges, airports, and more similar to the WPA – Protect and defend the 2nd amendment and 3D– printed firearms (1st amendment) – Protect and defend the 1st amendment right to free speech online

Needless to say, there are many good proposals in this ad hoc list. My heart skipped a beat when I heard that Torba was planning to ban dual citizens from Congress, even though he never mentioned the other country which shared and divided their allegiance. What is missing, however, is a coherent political program which is faithful to the America First name. So, to name just one instance, there is no mention of Israel in Torba’s political bucket list. At another point in his manifesto, Torba asks, “How is it that drag queens have taken over our public libraries?” Good question. It turns out that Drag Queen Story Time was created by a Jewish lesbian named Michell Tea (Tomasik) and RADAR Productions of San Francisco. RADAR, which is “instrumental in disseminating the program throughout the country,”37 is funded by the California Arts Council, The San Francisco Public Libraries, the Horizons Foundation, and a number of Jewish billionaires directly through family foundations like The Walter and Elise Haas Foundation and the Zellerbach Foundation.38 If you were surprised that Jewish billionaires funded Drag Queen Story Hour, you will also undoubtedly be shocked to learn that Brett Blomme, the president and CEO of the Cream City Foundation, which sponsors Drag Queen Story Hour events in Milwaukee, was arrested recently and charged with seven counts of possessing child pornography. Blomme is also a judge for Branch 5 of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court. It only gets worse: “the complaint alleges that the abusive acts depicted in the material occurred in a Cottage Grove home owned by Blomme and his husband, who “are the adoptive parents of two children.”39 Blomme was elected with the support of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who said that the charges against Blomme came as “a complete surprise.”40

Another follow up question might be “who gave us abortion?” Or who gave us pornography? Or who corrupted our culture? Or who got us involved in wars in the Middle East? But these questions, for some reason, never got asked.

The reason why became apparent one day later. At this point I need to say that Culture Wars had been trying to arrange an interview with Torba for weeks. On Wednesday, March 17, I sent Torba an early version of this article, requesting an interview during the coming week beginning March 22. On Monday, March 22, Torba reappeared on the War Room with Steve Bannon, who this time did not mention anti-Semitism. Instead, he allowed Torba to expound on his manifesto. The only thing new came at the end of the interview when Torba announced that he was planning to run for political office in the district in Pennsylvania which included his native Scranton and a large, disaffected blue collar constituency which took religion and family values seriously. Torba had announced, in other words, that he was following in the steps of Donald Trump by becoming another Bannon candidate, knowing full well (because I just told him) that Bannon’s job as political fixer is to make populists pleasing to the Jews Bannon has served for his entire adult life. Bannon’s job is to make the Jew invisible. By hitching his wagon to Bannon’s star, Torba has created for himself a political vehicle which is every bit as viable as the one which put Donald Trump in the White House. It is also every bit as ineffective because it refuses to address the main issue in political life at this moment in time, namely, Jewish influence and Jewish privilege.

So we wish Andrew Torba well in his new political career, and we thank him for the nice things he had to say about my books, but Torba’s response to Bannon’s tendentious questions on the first War Room interview bespoke a naivete which has proven fatal to too many candidates and organizations already. His second appearance on the same show bespoke an element of political calculation missing from the first interview. Bannon’s silence on the topic of anti-Semitism during the second interview, when Torba announced that he was planning to run for public office, spoke volumes. As things stand now, our only political option is choosing which group of Jews to rule us. The masses are waking up to that fact, not in spite of Big Tech censorship, but because of it. Andrew Torba has a role to play in that battle, but in order to play a winning role he needs to understand how contemporary cultural warfare is based on identity theft and how Jewish proxy warriors, like Steve Bannon, insinuate themselves into grass roots movements in order to co-opt them for the same Jewish masters who control the Democrats and the Republicans. Plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose, or as Sun Tzu said, “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

On April 10, 2021, Andrew Torba finally issued a statement identifying the group which orchestrated the attacks against him and Gab.

After five years of attacks from Jewish groups like the ADL, I’ve become used to the lies, hate, and persecution, but I have never once caved to their pressure and demands of censorship nor have I lashed out in hatred. … I am not Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey. Gab is not Facebook or Twitter. We are not going to bend over backwards to appease the interests of the ADL, the American Jewish Congress, or any other interest groups.

Congratulations, Andrew. No one can win a battle unless he identifies the enemy. This is a step in the right direction. Let's hope more will follow.

[…] This article was published in the May 2021 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To support the work we are doing at Culture Wars, become a subscriber!