With millions of Americans switching to alternative news sources because most don’t trust mainstream media, the globalist elites are resorting to desperate measures.

Today, as in all times of crisis, to be a Patriot, to take a stand for Truth, is dangerous business. To host a news website or blog that challenges the ruling powers, entrenched corruption, and the forces of darkness is a perilous thing. We are beginning to see just how perilous. We are not yet suffering the types of outright censorship and iron-fisted persecution of politically incorrect thought that already befall our brethren in banana republics or in communist tyrannies such as China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea, or in Muslim dictatorships such as Iran, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia. Nor are we yet experiencing the levels of intimidation, prosecution, fines, and imprisonment being meted out in the European Union and Canada for daring to speak truth to power. But anyone who doubts that similar oppression is in the works for America is deaf and blind to the onrushing statist steamroller that is smashing the First Amendment — and all other treasured rights as well.

During the eight-year reign of President Barack Obama, the advocates of Orwellian controls for the ostensible purpose of combating “hate speech” and “thought crimes” made frightful progress. Federal and state government officials, together with their cronies in the major media and tech giants such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Microsoft, have ganged up to crush the upstart alternative media that are challenging (and have already surpassed, by some important metrics) the MSM (mainstream media) Fake News monopoly that has protected and projected the globalist agenda for decades. Breitbart News, the Drudge Report, InfoWars, Natural News, and dozens of other Internet-based news providers have already been targeted and are feeling the impact of the corporate-government jack-booted heel on their jugulars.

Will things change for the better in this regard now under the new Trump administration? There was good reason to hope so, but we have no guarantee. On February 17, 2017, President Trump tweeted: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” The list he mentioned was abbreviated, of course, and could have included many additional genuine enemies of freedom among the so-called elite media. The outrage that followed from the Fake News organizations the president lambasted was as hypocritical and hollow as it was predictable. En masse, they attempted to misrepresent Trump’s attack, which was directed at them specifically, as an attack on the First Amendment and journalism in general.

But however much the Fake News hypocrites tried to camouflage themselves and misrepresent President Trump’s accusation, many, if not most, Americans recognized the truth in it. We had just witnessed, during the recent election cycle, a year-long spectacle of some of the most egregious media mendacity, bias, and prop­aganda in our nation’s history. In addition to day-after-day fawning pro-Clinton “news” coverage glaringly juxtaposed to malicious anti-Trump coverage, we saw over and over again blatant examples of outright violence against Trump and his supporters being censored or even justified by the “objective” elite media. Even before being subjected to that deceitful onslaught, the American public had already passed verdict on the MSM and found it disreputable. A Rasmussen poll in 2013 found that only six percent of Americans considered the major media to be “very trustworthy.” Surveys by Pew, Gallup, and other polling groups have likewise documented the ill repute in which the media are popularly held.

Add to that the fact that millions of Americans have abandoned the establishment corporate media and now get their news elsewhere. Many have fled to Fox News, which at least puts up a semi-credible façade of being politically/socially/morally conservative, even while, in the main, presenting the globalist line from a “Republican” perspective. Similarly, most of the talk-radio universe is dominated by “conservative” hosts who, for the most part, toe the establishment GOP party line. But the past decade has seen the burgeoning of a host of independent Internet-based news sources that defy the liberal-left elites and their globalist agenda (as well as defying any neat categorization): the Drudge Report, Alex Jones/InfoWars, Breitbart, the Daily Caller, WorldNetDaily, Zero Hedge, LewRockwell.com, Antiwar.com, Vdare.com — and many, many more.

As we have reported online and in these pages many times previously, the globalists have been pushing for many years to transfer control over the Internet to the United Nations, which would mean total evisceration of freedom of communication and expression over the Net. After all, that dictators club is filled with regimes that already are infamous for rigidly prohibiting access to “unapproved” sites and for punishing netizens who dare to express views that conflict with official dogmas of the state. However, the most immediate threat comes not from this type of direct interference of government agencies (whether global, national, or local) but from left-wing so-called watchdog groups, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Media Matters, working in collusion with the MSM monopolists, international corporations, Deep State intel operatives, and statist politicians. Their multi-pronged attack on the vibrant, independent American media is currently focused on cutting off advertising revenue and denying access on various platforms and search engines.

On October 6, 2015, Matt Drudge made a surprise visit to InfoWars.com for an in-studio televised interview with Alex Jones to warn of the coming oppressive censorship. “I had a Supreme Court justice tell me to my face it’s over for me,” the legendary recluse and owner of the very influential Drudge Report revealed. “He said, ‘Matt, it’s over for you; they’ve got the votes now to enforce copyright law, you’re outa there. They’re going to make it so that you can’t even use headlines.’” “To have a Supreme Court justice say that to my face,” warned Drudge, “means time is limited.”

“You had Justice Stephen Breyer saying we had to look at a global law, you remember, just recently, so they’re getting ready for these decisions to come,” he continued. “You thought ObamaCare was shocking; you thought some of these other decisions were shocking. Wait until these copyright laws work their way up, and the Supreme Court decides you can’t have a website with news headlines linking across the board.” The effect will be, he noted, to push everyone into cyber “ghettos” of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, where no diversity of thought is tolerated.

If Matt Drudge, an Internet visionary and considered by many to be the T-Rex of independent media aggregators, is that alarmed, everyone else also had better be concerned. Although no longer the one-man operation it was when starting out as a simple e-mail news-and-rumor letter 20-some years ago, his still-small organization boasts a very large footprint. In 2015, Politico reported that during the previous year, “DrudgeReport.com was the No. 1 site of referral traffic to the Daily Mail, CNN, Fox News, Roll Call, Breitbart, the New York Times, National Journal, USA Today, Associated Press, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and POLITICO.” His website has had as many as a billion page views in a single day and claims millions of devoted followers. The New York Times reported in 2007 that presidential candidates, including Hillary Clinton, were cooperating with Drudge and “working harder than ever to get favorable coverage for their candidates — or unfavorable coverage of competitors — onto the Drudge Report’s home page, knowing that television producers, radio talk-show hosts, and newspaper reporters view it as a bulletin board for the latest news and gossip.”

Yet Matt Drudge sees that his days are numbered if the Big Brother plans of the Big Government advocates are not stopped. One of the threats mentioned by Matt Drudge and Alex Jones in their InfoWars exchange concerned the dangerous copyright elements in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) treaties negotiated by the Obama administration. Although President Trump has apparently scuttled those agreements (at least temporarily), that danger is far from over.

Ad Spending Targeted

“Advertisers are telling right-wing website Breitbart News to ditch the hate speech and are withdrawing their campaigns until it cleans up its content,” reported the left-wing International Business Times (IBT) on November 23, 2016. “AppNexus, a company whose software helps deliver ads online, has told the conservative news and opinion site that it breaches its policies around hate speech.”

“This blacklist was solely about hate speech violation,” IBT quoted AppNexus spokesman Joshua Zeitz as saying. “We did a human audit of Breitbart and determined there were enough articles and headlines that cross that line, using either coded or overt language.”

IBT noted that “Breitbart has risen to prominence as President-elect Donald Trump appointed its former executive chairman Steve Bannon as his chief strategist after Bannon headed up his election campaign.” The organization takes its name from its founder, the late Andrew Breitbart, who got his start in the business working for Matt Drudge. According to IBT, AppNexus spokesman Zeitz said the company would ban Breitbart’s content as “quickly as a site that has pornography and violence.” The website is not being censored because it spreads misinformation or for its conservative editorial position, he insisted, but because of violations of “hate speech.” Of course, “hate speech” is pliably defined and seems rarely to be applied to the detriment of those who are “progressively” inclined.

AppNexus reportedly handles about $2.5 billion in ad spending, and Breitbart is not the only conservative site being affected. Nor is AppNexus the only advertising company performing this ideological squeeze play. Omnicom and AdRoll are two additional huge advertisement buying networks that have joined the thought police. “The move comes,” notes the IBT article, “after other online platforms such as Google and Facebook have made efforts to stop fake news being served, or spread by their users.” Yes, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Google (which owns YouTube), and other enforcement-arm members of the emerging Orwellian Ministry of Truth are on a jihad against “hate” — unless, that is, it is real hate being spewed by politically acceptable/politically protected haters, such as real Islamic jihadists, LGBTQ militants, or enviro extremists.

In Germany, for instance, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, in 2015, adopted the “code of conduct” implemented by Angela Merkel’s regime to squash the widespread opposition to her disastrous refugee program. It includes a pledge to delete “hate speech” from their websites within 24 hours.

“Posts critical of Chancellor Merkel’s migrant policies, for example, can be categorized as ‘Islamophobia,’” notes the Gatestone Institute, a human-rights group, “and are often found to violate ‘Community Standards,’ while incitement to actual violence and the murder of Jews and Israelis by Palestinian Arabs is generally considered as conforming to Facebook’s ‘Community Standards.’”

According to the Gatestone report, “Facebook’s bias is so strong that it recently restored Palestinian Arab terrorist group Fatah’s Facebook page, which incites hatred and violence against Jews — despite having shut it down only three days earlier. In 2016 alone, this page had a minimum of 130 posts glorifying terror and murder of Jews.”

Angela Merkel, who grew up during the Cold War and became a Communist Party functionary, under the watchful eye of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, appears to be reverting to form. Although she has been rebranded as a “conservative,” she clearly favors the statist methods of her old communist regime.

Like Breitbart, Alex Jones’ InfoWars has exploded into a huge global presence on the Internet. Over the past two decades, he has built a multi-million-dollar, multi-media empire — including multiple websites, a nationally broadcast radio show, documentary video production, original reporting and commentary, and traveling “crisis news” crews — that is presenting a major challenge to the giant MSM corporate media. According to Alexa, the website traffic-rating company, Infowars.com in January 2017 received 400,419 daily unique visitors, 1,284,643 daily page views, 7,562,818 monthly unique visitors, and 40,562,397 monthly page views.

However, like Breitbart and Drudge, Jones has seen his advertising revenues slammed by the PC thought police. A tireless supporter of Donald Trump, and one of the earliest to rally to Trump’s anti-globalist banner, Alex Jones undoubtedly played a crucial role in rallying swing voters to Trump’s cause across the country. On his February 21 show, Jones reported on the new attack aimed at strangling his advertising revenue stream. And he let it be known there was no doubt in his mind that this assault is directly the result of his support for Trump.

“The election of Donald J. Trump as 45th President of the United States was a crushing blow to the globalist empire,” he said, “and there’s no question that the elite have pinned Infowars to be one of the primary driving factors behind the biggest upset to the New World Order in decades.”

“Today, Infowars has been banned from one of the largest advertising platforms in the world for its support of Donald J. Trump in an unprecedented attack on the liberty movement and free speech,” Jones continued. “This is a platform that Infowars has used to promote its own products to millions across the Web and as one of its primary sources of self-funding. In total, Infowars is expected to lose a large percentage of its total income that could be used to hire more reporters, build better studios, get better equipment, and keep on fighting.”

Jones reproduced a letter he had received from AdRoll informing him that “Infowars has been flagged by the AdRoll Policy team and, as a result, [advertising] campaigns suspended.” “All content on your website should be relevant, accurate, informative, and up to date. Any claims should be easily verifiable,” the AdRoll letter continued, before making the following incredible statement: “Furthermore, all political content should focus on the merits of the candidate, and political messaging should not target special interests or groups, or imply affiliations.”

That’s right, according to the AdRoll Policy team, “all political content” must meet their PC criteria. “This is in line with the policies of both AdRoll and our partner ad networks policies,” the letter claims, before stating, “Since your account was flagged, we are no longer able to run campaigns for your site and have now gone ahead and suspended the campaigns.” AdRoll is a partner of Google and Facebook, both of which were heavily involved in promoting Hillary Clinton — with financial support, tech expertise, and boosting pro-Hillary stories (while burying negative ones).

In a passionate rant filmed while driving his car, Alex Jones explains that the AdRoll ban is costing him $5 million in lost revenues, which is a sizable chunk of his $50 million annual intake and a big part of the budget he has planned for a Washington, D.C., office and other news centers in the United States and overseas. But it isn’t the financial loss that makes him furious, he says; it’s the arrogance of the globalists in thinking they can just roll over us. But they will fail in that, he vows, defiantly shouting that he and the InfoWars team, along with the growing army of infowarriors around the globe, which now numbers in the millions, will continue to go on the offense, making up the AdRoll loss from other sources — while also launching a RICO lawsuit against AdRoll and its “partners” for racketeering to deprive him of his First Amendment-protected rights. Anyone who thinks he isn’t totally committed to following through on this pledge, or that he isn’t fully capable of doing so, doesn’t really know Alex Jones. He may not be your cup of tea and his style may not suit your tastes, but like Donald Trump, he has proven over and over again that he is an indefatigable force, and one to be reckoned with.

Since AdRoll, Omnicom, or AppNexus claim to be on a campaign to expunge “fake news” and “hate speech,” would it not be consistent for them also to drop advertising for CNN, MSNBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and other denizens of the Big Media Left for failing to “focus on the merits of the candidate” in their vicious attacks on Trump and other conservatives? Don’t hold your breath; we find no evidence of similar actions by these self-anointed advertising ethicists adversely affecting any of the left-of-center MSM crowd.

This hypocritical virtue signaling is not surprising, since the current campaign to defund, marginalize, and destroy the independent challengers to the establishment media is being choreographed by the champions of “tolerance” hypocrisy, Morris Dees’ Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), David Brock’s Media Matters for America (MMfA), John Podesta’s Center for American Progress (CAP), and Norman Lear’s People for the American Way (PFAW), all of which have been lavishly funded by George Soros, his partners at Democracy Alliance, and the usual big tax-exempt foundations. Following the model honed by Brock in his successful attacks on the advertisers of Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura Schlesinger, Fox News, and others, they are working closely with the MSM character assassins to demonize everyone they perceive as a key threat on the Right. Then they use the “news” stories and “investigative exposés” crafted by their cabal to convince advertisers to drop advertising on the websites, networks, and programs they’ve targeted. They also use pressure from Facebook, Google, AdRoll, Omnicom, and AppNexus to destroy the target’s advertising base. In addition, they mobilize armies of trolls to swarm the comment sections of advertisers’ webpages with talking points from the MMfA/SPLC/PfAW/CAP smear repertoire.

There are additional tactics that get even dirtier, such as hacking and crashing a website, or using blackmail and intimidation. Mike Adams, known as “the Health Ranger,” is the founder of the hugely popular Natural News website (seven million unique visitors per month). On February 22, he announced that he had been blacklisted by Google’s search engines and that Google had removed 140,000 pages of Natural News (www.naturalnews.com) content from their indexes.

Why? Appearing on the Dave Hodges radio program The Common Sense Show, Adams explained that he had been approached by people who tried to extort him into supporting their attacks on Alex Jones, whom he considers a friend and ally. “We will pay you $50,000 to provide us with damaging information against Alex Jones,” he was told. “If you do not help us, we will destroy you.” Adams revealed this extortion attempt on the Hod­ges show on February 19, just 48 hours before the AdRoll attack on Alex Jones. He thinks it’s a little too coincidental that the extortion bribe/threat to him, the attacks on Jones/Drudge/Breitbart and others, and the Google ban on him all happened in the time frame that they did, and in the larger context of an ongoing very large and very concentrated hostile campaign to destroy independent media. “Google sent no warning whatsoever to our ‘webmaster tools’ email address on file with them,” Adams says. “The shut off of Natural News was clearly driven by a human decision, not an algorithm.”

Less than two months before the advertising attack on Jones and the Google ban on Mike Adams, Matt Drudge Tweeted that he was under attack from a massive DDoS (distributed denial of service) hacking effort to crash his site. Drudge Tweeted:

Is the US government attacking DRUDGE REPORT?

Biggest DDoS since site’s inception. VERY suspicious routing [and timing].

— MATT DRUDGE (@DRUDGE) December 30, 2016

Since the Drudge Report is one of the oldest surviving pioneer websites on the Internet, saying this is the biggest DDoS in the site’s history means the attacks are very serious. A second Tweet suggested that the attacks might possibly be the work of Deep State actors at the NSA, headquartered in Fort Meade, Maryland:

Attacking coming from ‘thousands’ of sources. Of course none of them traceable to Fort Meade …

— MATT DRUDGE (@DRUDGE) December 30, 2016

Wild conspiracy theory? Paranoia? Hardly. This is war, and the globalists plan to take down all opposition, all resistance, all competition — one way or another. If you’re not already in the fight, it’s time to get in before it’s all over. Will you help roll back the onslaught of evil, or stand by and allow it to triumph? Here are some simple ways that you can help:

• Set TheNewAmerican.com as your browser home page; every click and page view helps us build our impact and advertising revenue stream;

• If you’re on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media, use them to post our articles — daily;

• Become an anti-troll; post polite, informative comments with links to our articles in forums and comment sections, especially in answer to the “trolls” (paid and otherwise) who are constantly attacking truth, morality, and liberty, while promoting the statist agenda;

• Contact advertisers of websites under attack by the Left to let them know you appreciate their support and urge them not to capitulate to the organized bullies; inform advertisers on MSM and leftist sites that you do not approve of their support for those sites/organizations;

• Buy products and services from online providers that support liberty;

• Support/encourage liberty-minded websites and organizations that are under attack; and

• Dump Google as your default search engine and use one that doesn’t promote the anti-freedom agenda and doesn’t track you, such as DuckDuckGo, StartPage, Blekko, Ixquick, or GoodGopher.

Versions of this article and the related stories below appear in the May 8, 2017 print edition of The New American.