The supposedly offensive promo has a limited amount of footage that could possibly be objectionable. Was it the scenes of two men being arrested? A photo of a massive 420 rally in Central Square in 2009? A man speaking into a megaphone? A photo of a band playing or people playing a card game in Railroad Square? A large group of people standing around the “Welcome to New Hampshire” sign at the Vermont border? The 4:20 pumpkin?
Two days prior to this strike, another decade-old :15 promo was allegedly found objectionable, this one featuring then-libertarian Penn Jillette saying he should move to Keene to join the Free Staters. I appealed the finding, and YouTube reversed it, once again allowing the video to be played. So, when the subsequent takedown happened this weekend, I also appealed it, asking in my appeal where the supposed “harmful or dangerous” content was. They upheld their decision to block the short promo video and give the account a “strike”. Of course, they declined to state exactly what it was in those scant fifteen seconds that was so offensive.
Odysee.com Logo
The strike would have been a warning, but the account had recently received a warning in late February when YouTube removed a video promoting the new White Rose Society for violating their “medical misinformation” policy. So, that’s two videos taken down within a few weeks, hence the strike and now the account is not allowed to have uploads or live streams, among other things, for a week.
Luckily, we’ve been cultivating our exit plan from YouTube for years.
Now, YouTube has increased its rate of finding things it doesn’t like about our videos. It may not be long before our entire channel is taken down. If you haven’t looked seriously at LBRY yet, now is the time to do it. In 2020, they launched Odysee, a video platform built on LBRY. I’ve created a handy url to take you right to the Free Keene channel on Odysee: video.freekeene.com. Unlike YouTube, LBRY/Odysee has no strikes and videos cannot be taken down. It’s true content freedom, and blockchain-powered. You can get the LBRY app or just follow our channel on Odysee.
From now on, this :30 migrate-to-LBRY promo will play at the end of every upload I am able to make to YouTube before they shut us down completely:
The heroic “Sticker Pimps” arrested by Manchester police are not facing death, but they have been kidnapped by Manchester’s “finest” gang and are being prosecuted for “criminal mischief” for the dastardly “crime” of placing counter-propaganda White Rose Society stickers on so-called “public property”. Here’s what you need to know about them:
Frank ‘Footloose’ Staples – The founder of Absolute Defiance, Footloose has been leading the protests outside NH gang leader Chris Sununu’s home. He was recently arrested in front of Sununu’s home for speaking to a cop.
Jason Gerhard – Jason is currently a candidate for Selectman in Northfield, NH in an election happening TODAY. He’s qualified a warrant article for the town meeting this weekend which – if passed – instructs the Selectmen to ask some very interesting questions of the IRS. We discussed it with him in detail on Free Talk Live this last Saturday. Jason also spent nearly 13 years in federal prison for supporting tax freedom advocates Ed and Elaine Brown and was released in early 2020.
The situation is very reminiscent of what happened in 2011 when eight activists – mostly from Keene – were arrested and charged with “criminal mischief” among other catch-alls, for chalking pro-freedom messages outside Manchester’s police gang headquarters. They were the “Chalking Eight”.
The White Rose has been a very active group on Telegram, with photos posted daily from people placing their eye-opening, thought-provoking, and sometimes amusing stickers on various things all around the world. According to one of the channel’s admins, thus far with perhaps thousands of activists stickering around the world, the first to be arrested were New Hampshire’s “Sticker Pimps” in the supposed live-free-or-die state.
Now, YouTube has struck again and banned a video some amazing editor made about the return of the White Rose Society. I was honored to discover someone from the new White Rose Society had taken some audio from my radio show, “Free Talk Live“, where we were discussing the new White Rose and their amazing counter-propaganda activism. I uploaded it to the FreeKeene YouTube and it was nearly immediately removed for violating their “medical misinformation policy”, which says, “YouTube doesn’t allow content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of local health authorities’ or World Health Organization (WHO) guidance on social distancing and self isolation that may lead people to act against that guidance.”
If you’d like to join the White Rose, you’ll need the Telegram app. Then click this link: t.me/jointhewhiterose Check the pinned post for instructions and the latest sticker pack.
The Shire Free Church recently received notice from a debt collector claiming we owed the “City of Keene” $60 for an unpaid parking ticket. I knew this could not be the case since I challenge every ticket on behalf of the Church and demand a trial and every time – these days – they drop the charge rather than go to court over a $10 ticket.
It’s a validation of the activist approach of challenging all tickets. Be such a burden to the system that they have to drop your charges. If only more people would do this, then more charges would be dropped! If you’re in New Hampshire and you receive a ticket for anything at all, try demanding your trial and see what happens!
Libertarian NH Boogaloo Boys Demonstrate Outside NH State House
American mainstream news media has been reporting this weekend on the massive buildups of armed government goons at state houses across the United States. Expecting massive armed demonstrations of Boogaloo supporters, some of the state gangs locked down their capitol areas completely while others, like New Hampshire, took it easy and only had state troopers parked around and walking the state house property in pairs. By comparison, the New York Times said Massachusetts’ capitol had hundreds of officers wearing helmets and carrying batons.
However, around the country, barely anyone showed up. Some liberty activists said they wouldn’t attend because they believed the events were federal honeypots designed to gather information about freedom-lovers. Others foolishly believed that exercising their right to bear arms would mean their rights would be more likely taken from them. Luckily, in New Hampshire, five Boogaloo Boys showed up with rifles front slung. They were well-spoken and self-described as Libertarian, with one even talking about the Non Aggression Principle to the large number of reporters that were present.
One Boogalooer even educated the media people on gun safety and basics, with the photographers crazily shooting pictures when the Boogaloo Boy showed a magazine loaded with bullets. The news media was informed on the history of the Boogaloo – the name is based on the Eighties breakdancing movie “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo”, with the members describing their group as a real-life meme. They also explained the origin of their Hawaiian shirt dress code, which came about after social media sites started to crack down on any groups referencing Boogaloo. The social media crackdown on the term forced them to use code words that were similar, like “Big Igloo” or “Big Luau”, which naturally led to the shirts.
With Forums, Chat, and Social Media, Shire Society Shields Users from Big Tech
More than a decade ago, Facebook was still growing into the social media behemoth they are today. If you were around back then, you remember when it was actually useful for reaching friends across the world and keeping-in-touch.
There was a time, for instance, when you could create an event on Facebook and click an “invite all” box to invite all your friends to the event. Super handy! Every friend received an invite in their inbox and could make the choice to attend or not. The previous activist method of organizing – forums – did not have this calendar event feature, and understandably the activists migrated to Facebook as it seemed more useful for making things happen.
That was the first clue that things were not going in a good direction. At the time, you could still download a third-party browser plugin that brought the invite-all option back, but eventually Facebook changed their code so the plugin no longer worked. That was the end of easily being able to organize events on Facebook.
You’re leaving now, right?
Later, Facebook made it so you had to pay them if you wanted all your followers to see your posts. In more recent years we’ve seen anti-state events being taken down entirely and in recent days blanket bans applied to people with certain political views.
With record numbers of people leaving megacorporate state-worshiping sites like Facebook and Twitter for less-big-but-still-centralized communications platforms like Signal and Telegram, it’s finally cool to get off “Big Tech”.
Naturally, your friendly freedom-loving activists here at Free Keene have been encouraging this for more than a decade. It started when we launched the Shire Forum over a decade back. Originally the Free Keene Forum, it transitioned to become the Shire Society Forums after the Shire Society was formed in 2010. As one of the forum’s founders, I never cared for Facebook’s groups and wanted to keep forums alive as they were independents, self-hosted and open source.
Eventually the Shire Society Forums expanded to include other things like cryptocurrency discussion and non-Shire NH activism and media threads, so it was renamed simply “Shire Forum“. For the last few years it’s been running some super-modern forum software called Discourse. If you are a liberty-minded person considering a move to New Hampshire or already living here and you haven’t been on forums in many years – or ever – give the Shire Forum a try.
Join at Matrix.LRN.FM
Keene-area liberty activists have also been on the Telegram platform for chatting for most of the last decade. It’s long been the top-of-class of all centralized chat platforms on the planet. Slick, easy-to-use and great for group chats. However, while the source code for their clients is open-source, it’s not decentralized and so several years back we evaluated the Matrix – a decentralized, federated chat server system – and put its main client, then called “Riot” through the paces. It was good, but not great, and not easy-to-use like Telegram was. After about a year of trying it out, most of us gave up.
However, in 2020 we launched our own Matrix server after the centrally-hosted Discord corporation unceremoniously booted the LRN.FM chat server from its centrally managed platform. We knew it was coming and I’d heard that Matrix had a new client out called “Element” and that it was way better than its original “Riot”, so we launched our own Matrix server at Matrix.LRN.FM. It has been great, and the increase in freedom is palpable. No corporate masters are holding an axe over our heads.
Matrix is open source, self-hosted, and federated, which means that all of the Matrix servers on the planet are by default connected together, so users from one Matrix server can reach the rest of the planet’s Matrix users on other servers. Unless, a server admin disfederates, or blocks another server for whatever reason. Matrix is way more decentralized than Big Tech monsters like Discord. Technically, Matrix is polycentric – with many centers. If you don’t like one Matrix server, you can join another, or start your own. Element is indeed way better than Riot. If you want to try freer chat, join the LRN.FM Matrix server where you can join existing rooms or create and moderate your own, private or public. All freedom lovers are welcome, not just NH people.
Join the “FTL Social” Mastodon
The decentralizing liberty activist communications story doesn’t end there, however. Just this week we also launched our own federated, self-hosted social media platform called “FTL Social“. It’s running the open source Mastodon software which is also federated and polycentric, like Matrix. It’s open to voluntarists, liberty-loving anarchists, and libertarians from around the world who are looking for a place where their posts won’t be subject to the whims of statist Big Tech admins and their snitch users. Please join at social.freetalklive.com and check it out. It’s a killer replacement for Twitter and works great.
Don’t forget one of the most important decentralized change we’ve seen in our lifetimes – cryptocurrency! If you want to contribute to these projects I’ve listed here, please use the cryptocurrency addresses you can see in the right column here at Free Keene. Longtime readers here already know that crypto is the killer decentralized solution for money and can’t be shut down by greedy, evil politicians.
Last, but not least is LBRY. It’s the decentralized blockchain-based media protocol that has been hosting Free Keene’s videos since 2018. They recently launched a cool new video site called Odysee that has seen a big jump in activity in the last week. LBRY is based in Manchester and run by liberty activists.
I hope this article gave you some ideas about better options to protect your communications from the tech giants who hate freedom. See you in the decentralized, open source, polycentric fediverse!
