the internet purge has begun in earnest — the last days of American Everyman

American Everyman is a political blog I came across by chance about five years ago, and one of only a handful of blogs I have subscribed to. However, last Friday I learned, again by chance, that it no longer exists – WordPress sent no notification to any of its subscribers and none either to its owner, Scott Creighton, who woke one day shocked to learn “willyloman.wordpress.com is no longer available”.

I caution readers that Scott’s language is less restrained than my own.

Afterwards he uploaded a youtube video to his current channel ‘Churchdog42’ (named after his dog by the way) that I have embedded above. In the notes beneath he writes:

I am speechless, heartbroken, enraged. I violated none of their terms of service. None. Never ONCE supported violence and in fact was dedicated to STOPPING violence. Wars, acts of hostility here at home during protests, economic violence. I am just… speechless

I never thought WP would do this. I am shocked beyond words.

You can contact me at RSCdesigns@tampabay.rr.com

I don’t feel I can do justice to Scott’s story and so have decided to embed a few of his many youtube uploads in sequence (interspersed throughout) so you can hear him tell it directly – at least for so long as this channel exists.

Instead, I’d like to discuss a crazy moment about twelve months ago when I added a comment to one of Scott’s many articles – he is hugely prolific – about the British general election in which Jeremy Corbyn was narrowly defeated.

To cut a long story short, I really shouldn’t have written what I did (I was rattled) and Scott justifiably lashed out at me for insulting him. For the next hour and more a sequence of heated comments flew back and forth between us. By the end we had politely agreed to differ and Scott very kindly wished me well. The whole incident convinced me not only of Scott’s tremendous commitment to searching for truth – he could have cut off the debate at any moment (this took place on his own blog after all) – of his integrity – he could have deleted everything (as WordPress just did) – but crucially, of his goodwill. You don’t have to agree on every count to respect someone’s point of view.

This is not an obituary of course, and Scott says he intends to find another platform to keep fighting on – I will update if he does. Nor is this purely a story about Scott and his American Everyman blog – his site is just one of a number of relatively small sites that WordPress has recently taken down, and doubtless this purge is set to continue. Perhaps after posting this article in Scott’s defence, my own site will be targeted next (who knows). All I can say is that if Scott was a small fish (enjoying around a thousand pageviews a day) then I am an ant.

In any case, the purge goes far beyond WordPress and – as Scott also explains in these videos – he is currently being “unpersoned” by Google too. As I wrote in an earlier post, in which I detailed how my own internet traffic has substantially fallen away, the so-called “internet kill switch” is better imagined as a knob that turns everything down incrementally. Scott is being turned off, as we all are.

He writes:

First Youtube, then PayPal, then WordPress, then TechCrunch and now Google. I am being erased in slow-motion. Little blogs like mine are just the beginning. Priming the pot, as it were. You can expect too see Drudge, Caitlin, AEfor9/11Truth, Before its News, WSWS and so many others follow in my footsteps into obscurity soon enough. Once folks are desensitized to this, the whole of the Western version of the internet will eventually be purged of all dissent. Will Coward Nation finally stand up? I once believed they would. Now… not so sure.

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Update:

Scott Creighton has now temporarily relocated. His new blog wittily titled Nomadic Everyman can be found here: http://nomadiceveryman.blogspot.com/