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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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: