Thanks to Paul Lathrop of the Polite Society Podcast, I have a YouTube of my GRPC presentation. I posted the text of it earlier but this lets you hear it warts and all.
I am not a public speaker. I do much better one on one. However, at the risk of tooting my own horn, I think I did OK.
Another Gun Rights Policy Conference is done and in the books. This year’s conference attendance set a record with over 1,100 attendees. Over 100,000 watched it live on Facebook where it was livestreamed. GRPC set another record with 91 speakers. I was one of the 91 and spoke on the panel that covered using new media to advance gun rights.
Below is my presentation as delivered. In a few days, there will be video up on YouTube of this and the rest of the presentations.
Good Afternoon!
I’m John Richardson of the blog No Lawyers – Only Guns and Money. I’m also a co-host of the Polite Society Podcast.
I had a rude awakening a month and a half ago. I woke to find that Google’s Blogger had taken my blog down and was threatening to delete it. I could not even access it to backup my nine and a half years of work. My blood ran cold at the thought of losing all that work.
I was erroneously accused of violating the terms of service for selling or facilitating the sale of a regulated item. I was put in the same category as drug dealers and other purveyors of prohibited or regulated items.
I immediately appealed and I got tremendous support from the gun rights community. Dave Workman wrote an article for Liberty Park Press. Tom Knighton covered it on Bearingarms.com. People aimed tweets at Google and Blogger. There were posts about it on Facebook. Two days later, I got a email from Blogger saying, in essence, “Ooops. We made a mistake. You didn’t violate anything. So sorry.”
I tell you this story not to gain your sympathy. I tell it to show how we are at the mercy of big tech oligopolies. There have been plenty of stories about gun rights supporters being suspended or banned from Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. You know, like SAF. We have seen the demonetization of firearms-oriented YouTube videos. Thanks to leaks, we know that through the use of algorithms and key word lists there is a conscious effort to suppress our voices in advocacy of the Second Amendment, self-defense, and gun rights.
I got complacent and we as a community have gotten complacent. The social media giants made it so easy to be involved in social media that we forgot something. That something was that if you don’t control the means of getting the message out, it can be turned off at a whim and you are suppressed.
I decided never again. I bought my own domain name and thanks to my friend Bill Chachkes of Firearms Chat Podcast, I was hooked up with a 2A friendly host – Patriot Hosting.
We need to do three things if we want to continue getting the message out. First, we need to control our hosting and not be dependent upon companies that will sell us out in a heartbeat. Second, we need to explore going back to older technology that is beyond the control of the tech oligarchs. By this I mean firearms forums and perhaps even old fashioned bulletin board systems. I should clarify that I’m not advocating going back to 2400 baud modems to dial long distance to a favorite gun board. Finally, seek out and use newer alternatives like MeWe, Full 30, and Declan McCullagh’s “Talki. Ng”.
The late Professor Brian Patrick who spoke at GRPC a number of times called how we communicate the anti-media. He spoke and wrote about this extensively. Professor Patrick credited horizontal interpretive communities and how they communicated for the passage of shall issue carry laws in Florida and elsewhere. In non-social science speak, this means gun rights supporters and potential allies talked to one another, planned their strategies, and organized through the use of newsletters, forums and bulletin board systems outside the notice of the mass media. The key phrase here is that they talked to one another. Moreover, they talked to one another as equals. It was not top-down like our opponents.
You may never want to be a blogger, a podcaster, a YouTuber, or any other type of content creator. Nonetheless, you can help out those of us who are by providing us with leads, tips, and other information. Some of my best blog posts have come due to this. We are all in this together, we are a community, and we all can help one another protect, preserve, and enhance our Second Amendment rights.
If you tried to reach this blog starting on early Wednesday morning you would have gotten an error message. Something along the lines that this blog was locked and not available for future use or some such verbiage. I was alerted to this by SAF’s Dave Workman who asked me around 7am what was going on.
Checking my email I saw this from 3am:
Hello, Your blog at http://onlygunsandmoney.blogspot.com/ has been reviewed and confirmed as in violation of our Terms of Service for: REGULATED. In accordance to these terms, we’ve removed the blog and the URL is no longer accessible. For more information, please review the following resources: Terms of Service: https://www.blogger.com/go/terms Blogger Content Policy: https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy -The Blogger Team
Checking the terms of service for “regulated” I find that it is defined as this:
Do not use Blogger to promote or sell regulated goods and services, such as alcohol, gambling, pharmaceuticals and unapproved supplements, tobacco, fireworks, weapons, or health/medical devices.
I immediately appealed the locking of the blog as I knew I never sold any firearms. All I could think was that it was the www.Luckygunner.com banner ad. They were gracious enough to check and let me know that I was the only Blogger based blog that had this happen to them.
The worst part about all of this was that I could not even access my own content from over nine years. I will never, ever be slack about backups again.
This morning I got this message from the Blogger team:
Hello, We have received your appeal regarding your blog http://onlygunsandmoney.blogspot.com/. Upon further review we have determined that your blog was mistakenly marked as a TOS violator by our automated system and, as such, we have reinstated your blog. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused in the meantime and thank you for your patience as we completed our review process. Thank you for understanding. Sincerely, The Blogger Team
In other words, I was out of jail.
I credit this to the publicity that the blocking of my blog has gotten on Facebook, Twitter, and in the online press. I especially want to thank Dave Workman for his article here and Tom Knighton of Bearingarms.com for his article on it.
I also want to thank Erin Palette of Operation Blazing Swords/Pink Pistols who put me in touch with attorneys in California and offered to help subsidize the legal bills if need be. I have had offers to help host the blog from a number of sources including Miggy at Gun Free Zone, Brandon Combs of the Firearms Policy Coalition, Bill Chachkes and his friend Kyle plus others. Then there are all the tech gurus out there like Sebastian, Tiffany Johnson, David Yamane, Harold Ancell, Baron B., Jacqui Janes, and many more. If I omitted your name, I do apologize. Please just know I appreciate all the support I’ve received as it really shows that we in the gun culture are a community.
In the past two days I have registered the domain www.onlygunsandmoney.com and have registered an account with WordPress. I have looked at dozens of WordPress themes. I will be revamping the look and feel of my blog and it will be migrated to WordPress. Where I actually host it is up in the air for the moment. There is nothing like a near tragedy to spur one into action!
So in closing, to everyone who asked what was going on, to everyone who reposted my Facebook or Twitter messages, to everyone who gave helpful advice, and especially to everyone who just cared, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I appreciate more than you can imagine.
I’ll let Willie have the last word here.
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