The Hill’s firing of Gray was in retaliation for an interaction between her and Yarden Gonen, whose sister was allegedly taken hostage during the al-Aqsa Flood. Throughout the interview, Gray calmly and cordially disagreed with Gonen, who was espousing Islamophobic and anti-Arab bigotry, as well as repeating the debunked narratives about Hamas and October 7.
Gonen went so far as to argue that Arabs and Palestinians residing in the U.S. “pose a threat” and Gray assertively pushed back. Gray followed up by stating: “I hope that Netanyahu agrees, and Israel agrees to the ceasefire deal that could bring all the hostages home, including your sister, home. I am sure the viewers watching are praying for her safety.”
In a pompous manner, Gonen inappropriately responded, “I really hope that you specifically will believe women when they say they got hurt,” as a jab at Gray. (The Hill/Rising, June 5). The asinine statement from Gomen visibly annoyed Gray, who was accused by her employer of “rolling her eyes.” Gray kept her cool and responded by simply saying: “Okay, thanks for joining. Stick around.”
Katie Halper got fired from there about a year and a half ago for the same reason, at which point Briahna considered quitting in solidarity. This is What Got Katie Halper Censored & Canceled By The Hill: Israel Is An Apartheid State.
Last month Max Alvarez fired Chris Hedges from the Real News Network over his interview with Dennis Kucinich. The interview with Congressional candidate Dennis Kucinich that was removed from The Real News site and led to the termination of my show.
All these folks work off my & others’ Patreon & Substack donations now. And how long before those corporations drop them?
Edit to add: Greenwald interviews BJG over her firing.
And how long before those corporations drop them?
Do you mean Patreon and Substack? That’s almost definitely not happening. These platforms exist because they, to a good extent, allow for freedom of expression. Technologically they’re nothing to write home about (and Patreon video player is actual dogshit) and could easily be replicated and replaced. So it would be huge for them to lose chunks of creators’ revenues if those were to leave over political differences.
That’s almost definitely not happening.
I wouldn’t be so sure. I don’t know about Substack but afaik Patreon has deplatformed people for political reasons before, including anti-imperialists.
So it would be huge for them to lose chunks of creators’ revenues if those were to leave over political differences.
This is a very naive argument, in a way akin to the liberal notion that the market regulates itself because if corporations behave contrary to what people want they will lose money.
The idea that corporations will allow free speech because it’s in their financial interest to do so just doesn’t conform with what we observe happening in reality. Oftentimes political pressure placed on platforms by governments, media and powerful lobbying groups is stronger than the economic incentives to resist that pressure.
The idea that corporations will allow free speech because it’s in their financial interest to do so just doesn’t conform with what we observe happening in reality.
There is a fundamental difference between a business selling a product and one that simply takes a part of profits from others’ activity. Creators don’t have to take money through Patreon, they can choose any other platform, and for the subscribers it doesn’t make a real difference. Quite the opposite, if a different service was to take a lower fee (and put more money in the pocket of creators), or be more explicitly in line with their content, then people would be even more eager to support them there instead.
Maybe. Though you could make the same argument for big platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Technically they operate with the same model of taking a profit from others’ activity. But because they are so big and that is where most people are, it’s hard to make a switch.
At the end of the day you still run into the problem of monopolies. Not just of the platforms themselves but more importantly of the financial institutions that they rely on. Who processes the transactions? As long as the payments still go through the US dominated financial system any platform will be vulnerable to political pressure to have their access to said financial systems cut off if they do not comply.
The only real way to escape is to build structures outside of the West’s financial transaction architecture, for platforms to adopt payment systems that go through the kinds of alternatives that Russia and China are trying to build at the moment.
YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Technically they operate with the same model of taking a profit from others’ activity.
People use them regardless, for many different types of content, they’re primary platforms. Patreon is a secondary one, pretty much nobody would just go to Patreon and pay for a random subscription to discover someone’s content. But with the primary ones if a certain person was banned from there, subscribers would still keep using them for all the other ones.
Anyway, I’m not really disagreeing, and it’s speculation either way. For all we know, States might straight up illegalize commie content online, moving all of it, including payments, underground.
Yes, I mean Patreon and Substack. I won’t be surprised if payment processors stop processing certain channels some day, because they’ve done it before. PayPal, GoFundMe, And Patreon Banned A Bunch Of People Associated With The Alt-Right. Here’s Why.
I agree with you on Patreon not being worth much of anything beyond the actual user content. But Patreon is not ideologically guided; it’s just a lib tech company looking for a way to skim a little money. Whatever notions of Freeze Peach they claim to care about will wither the moment the ADL threatens to call them anti-semetic or funding khkhkhamas. The Patreon C-suite knows that banning a few publicly smeared lefties will cost them less than ending up on an ADL boycott list or getting tiktok’d.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Seems like this woman’s career has just been getting continuously fucked over ever since she decided to work for Bernie Sanders.
She’s not even particularly impressive or interesting as a supposed “left-ish” media figure. She’s an ivy league lawyer, has plenty of bad lib takes, and adjunct to the controlled opposition like sanders and aoc. You’d think the dems would maybe see her as useful, but the left edge of the US overton window is a chainsaw.
She’s not especially impressive, I just can’t help but pity her being continually hung out to dry in increasingly degrading ways by the systems she keeps trying to work within. A person in her position could live an easy and comfortable life like any other DC suit passively toeing the liberal line. She burns all her bridges with the DNC to be Sanders’ press secretary after they’ve already fucked over Sanders once before, and Sanders turns around and disowns her when she doesn’t endorse Biden. She can’t get work in DC, so she uses some of her only remaining relationships to try to make a living as a podcaster by attaching herself to a Chapo host at the height of their success. The Chapo host gets outed as an alleged sex pest and ghosts her, with the scandal sinking the podcast. She gets a job as a talking head on a DC tabloid rag’s pivot-to-video internet talkshow where they make her interview a settler colonist promoting an ongoing genocide. Gray stays professional throughout the interview, and they fire her anyway, not for anything she said, but because they didn’t like her alleged facial expression after the settler accused her of being a rape apologist.
Obviously she’s a privileged imperial reformist whose politics are nothing special, there’s just something surreal about how disproportionately her career seems to keep getting worse every time she fails to seig heil with enough enthusiasm. If anything, she’s a living morality play for every DSA-adjascent professional “progressive” reformist: you can do everything “the right way” and this is still the best you can expect.
I agree with you on her being shafted. And yeah, it’s sad since she’s not a terrible person or a grifter.
I just feel like there are a lot of lessons, particularly those of the black civil rights movement, that she doesn’t want to learn from. I guess she thinks she’s too smart or professional for radicalism or a material analysis of the fake-left “progressive” movement she want to rise within.
Virgil had no credibility or political purchase, so it was pretty odd to me that they started that podcast. Seems like everyone else had enough sense to ignore him. Tried listening to a little and it was just a whoosh of co2. I half expect she’ll join TYT at some point.
In her interview with that zionist, she had a lot of opportunity to absolutely shred that bullshit; Finklestein would have and they’ve spent enough time together that she should know better. Although I’ve seen her scowl at Finklestein enough times, too.
There are plenty of people with lame politics so I have trouble deciding why I expect more. Maybe I keep wanting to see a new generation of black panthers, instead of someone who doesn’t want to cross the invisible line. Going against the imperial narrative in US media is hazardous to your career, for sure. There’s room for her if she wants to move left, but the forces of capital won’t let her use their media monopoly to undermine their interests.
In her interview with that zionist, she had a lot of opportunity to absolutely shred that bullshit
Sure she could’ve, but I’m sure the logic going on in her head was: “If I lose my cool and come off too aggressive, they’ll just fire me and replace me with someone more explicitly Zionist. If I stay calm and professional I can ask questions that prompt the settler to expose her own bigotry to the audience without looking like I’m trying to do a debate instead of an interview. I’ll get to keep using this platform to reach people and ask questions that others wouldn’t.” The joke is that it didn’t matter at all because in the end they just fired her anyway because they didn’t like a black woman’s face while she was being slandered by a bigot.
Maybe I keep wanting to see a new generation of black panthers, instead of someone who doesn’t want to cross the invisible line. Going against the imperial narrative in US media is hazardous to your career, for sure. There’s room for her if she wants to move left, but the forces of capital won’t let her use their media monopoly to undermine their interests.
There’s ideological room for her on “the left” (the limits there being her own class interest and political education), but lets not pretend there’s room for her to have a career “on the left”. The Panthers didn’t organize a 501c4 to pad their resumes. People like BJG desperately want to believe they can turn meaningfully positive political action into a job that pays the bills, and it always ends up like this. To ideologically move beyond the limits of professional reformism, she’d need to accept that it’s almost never going to come with a financially successful career. You can make a living, and you can be a revolutionary, but you can’t make a living being a revolutionary in a capitalist framework. The contradictions will always make you choose one over the other, and a person’s material conditions will usually end up being the deciding factor.
Yarden Gonan’s sibling should die every day for eternity. Boo-fucking-hoo your rave next to a concentration camp wasn’t fun.
She’s an intellectual giant, I agree with her takes more than any other DC pundit. Her interviews with Norman Finkelstein are brilliant. Getting fired from the hill only reinforces how terrified the establishment are of her persuasiveness. I’m gonna sub twice as hard to bad faith now. And of course Useful Idiots with Katie Halper.
