PJM.

Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube deleted livestream videos of the event posted by Breitbart News after they went viral, claiming the videos contained “lies” and disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic.

Gulag and Fakebook removed it, but guess what?  TCJ readers saw every bit of it if you wanted to.  And more of the conference.

That’s because [1] people have finally learned their lesson and are saving the raw video to other, less communist sources than YouTube and Twitter and Fakebook, and [2] TCJ has great readers who love to spread the truth.

I depend upon you.

So here’s the deal, Late Boy Scout.  The bloodthirsty, Soros-funded, liberty-hating Bolsheviks who work for Google-YouTube won’t explain it to you or anyone else because it would betray the fact that the decisions are capricious and designed with one thing in mind.

The destruction of liberty and freedom.  They won’t stop until you and everyone who owns a firearm are in a reeducation camp.

It’s really a shame that the rest of us are late to the game when it comes to having a viable competitor to YouTube.  I guess it has to do with naivety or laziness.

World Net Daily:

So let’s set aside the notion of firearms as amelioration of tyranny for a moment, which is the real reason for the existence of the second amendment.  Let’s focus on hunting.

Of primary importance to the ethical hunter is a quick and as-painless-as-possible dispatching of the animal.  A wounded animal is in pain.  Of course it’s true that hunters can find their products elsewhere, but Google can only do what it can do, so we can’t expect them to do everything.

Let’s also stipulate that good optics makes for a more successful hunt and more likely dispatching of the animal rather than simply wounding the animal.  What this means is that Google management wants and likes to see wounded animals from hunts.

What a bunch of retards.

Those who follow firearms, shooting, and tactical channels on YouTube know about the travails of Hickok45 on YouTube.  Venerable and old school, Hickok45 tests and comments on firearms manufacturers send him.  Sometimes he shoots his own firearms, but always, he shoots, comments and often provides history and mechanical commentary on the machines he is using.  Sometimes it is with admiration, sometimes slight disdain, but always honest and interesting.

Hickok45 met with disapproval from some redditors when he supported the NRA in light of the compromises the NRA recommended (e.g., bump stocks, enhanced background checks), but being a former LEO and old school like he is, I wouldn’t have expected anything else from him.  Just as interesting to me is Jeff Quinn of Gunblast, especially when shooting and commenting on revolvers, but always interesting.

Hickok45 met with several bans on YouTube for promoting products, but he never really did that and always appealed the decision, mostly meeting with reinstatement by those who run YouTube.  But all of these folks may need to find new homes.

Full30: I received an email from my Google/YouTube rep at 9:30pm tonight. He requested an emergency meeting tomorrow to discuss YouTube’s new policies regarding firearms content.

This is really bad. Please read this carefully and a couple of times, and let it sink in. 1/3rd of my videos or more will need to be removed. If you don’t have them removed in 30 days, your channel will be deleted for policy violations.

I wish this were a joke. It’s not. I feel horrible for reloading channels or NFA channels. Showing how to make ammo or even showing the installation of a silencer is prohibited. Hell, showing the use of a magazine larger than 30 rounds is prohibited! Belt feds are a no go.

I’ll try to find out as much as I can from my rep tomorrow. I mean, are legal machine guns and silencers being demonstrated really going to get us account strikes now?

Please read this guys… I’m in shock, but then I knew this day wold come. It looks like it’s here in 30 days. I’m at a total loss for words. ~Tim

Redditors are up in arms, because the Google guidance says the following.

“YouTube prohibits certain kinds of content featuring firearms. Specifically, we don’t allow content that:

Intends to sell firearms or certain firearms accessories through direct sales (e.g., private sales by individuals) or links to sites that sell these items.

These accessories include but may not be limited to accessories that enable a firearm to simulate automatic fire or convert a firearm to automatic fire (e.g., bump stocks, gatling triggers, drop-in auto sears, conversion kits), and high capacity magazines (i.e., magazines or belts carrying more than 30 rounds).

Provides instructions on manufacturing a firearm, ammunition, high capacity magazine, homemade silencers/suppressors, or certain firearms accessories such as those listed above. This also includes instructions on how to convert a firearm to automatic or simulated automatic firing capabilities.Shows users how to install the above-mentioned accessories or modifications.”

“Manufacturing a firearm.”  Reddit understands that this means if you teach someone to field strip an AR-15 or replace a bolt carrier group and check head space (Brownells), you fall into this category.  If you comment positively about a particular firearm, part, accessory, or manufacturer, you fall into these categories.

Their temporary answer is to start downloading targeted videos.  But make no mistake about it, they’re pissed off.  There is also no mistaking the fact that at the moment, there is no replacement for the information and firearms channels on YouTube.

This could possibly effect other related videos such as tactical instruction where firearms are discussed, such as with Kyle Lamb, Travis Haley, Chris Costa, and John Lovell.

I’ve long thought that an alternative needed to be developed to YouTube other than Live Leak, but to date there is nothing.  Suffice it to say that the progressives at Google are winning this battle.  What happens in the longer term war will be up to someone other than Google.

You might have noticed that I rarely embed or even link YouTube videos any more.  I’ve made my choice – has the rest of America?

Not that my readers need any introduction to the SPLC, but I wanted to go around the traffic circle one more time and remind you of something I noted a few weeks back.

David Codrea had a post where he linked the new Google guidelines for identifying “offensive” search results.  Right there on page 44, we read this.

Reputation research is important for identifying websites which promote hate and violence. The Pew Research Center, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Southern Poverty Law Center are some reputable sources that can be used for reputation research.

“Reputable.”  I needn’t waste my time debunking this crap.  My readers know better.  Hey, what do you think Mike Vanderboegh would say about this if he was still alive?  I’m smiling just thinking about it.

The Trace:

Just 22 percent of current gun owners who acquired a firearm within the past two years did so without a background check, according to a new national survey by public health researchers at Harvard and Northeastern universities shared in advance with The Trace and The Guardian.

For years, politicians and researchers have estimated that as many as 40 percent of gun sales are conducted without a background check — a statistic based on an extrapolation from a 1994 survey. The new survey, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that the current proportion of gun sales conducted without a background check is about half of the oft-cited figure.

It’s amazing, yes, that the Annals of Internal Medicine can waste time on things like this when there are heart attacks, strokes, internal bleeding problems with anti-coagulants, cancer, and so on.  Good Lord.  There are real medical problems to be solved.  You’d think that aspiring doctors would be at least moderately interesting in practicing medicine rather than being political shills.

Okay, we’ve discussed The Trace before.  They are professional purveyors of fake news, and Google loves them and puts them near the top of their Google news search.  I’m sure you’re as surprised about that as I am.

Note to The Trace.  Your data is worthless.  Those who have purchased a gun without going through a background check – which is perfectly legal in most states – will not tell you they have done so.  I know.  I’m a gun owner, and I know they we think.

The second problem is that criminals have never gone through a background check to purchase weapons, and they never will.  The Trace misses two huge categories of people who constitute a large enough fraction of gun purchases that it casts doubt on the study.  The Trace doesn’t even know how to estimate the size of those two categories because gun owners will never … never … be honest with pollsters.

By the way, not that there would be anything wrong with purchasing guns from an FFL and going through the necessary Form 4473.  So I don’t think it would prove anything one way or the other even if accidentally The Trace is correct.

And I said I was a gun owner above.  I lied.  I lost all of my guns in a boating accident to the bottom of lake Keowee.  I cried a river of tears over that incident.

How Guns Are Getting Bigger – And Possibly More Deadly.

Not only are guns getting bigger, they’re getting into the hands of more criminals, according to a recent investigation by The Trace, with deadly effect.

While all bullets could kill if they hit vital organs, arteries, or the head, experts told The Trace that the bigger the bullet, the more likely any wound will be fatal. Bullets are measured in calibers, or the diameter of their width, in fractions of an inch or millimeter.

In the past 20 years, higher demand from law-abiding citizens and criminals, both claiming concern about self-protection, has led gun manufacturers to make more of these deadlier guns. Legal and illegal citizen buyers alike are scooping up higher-caliber pistols like those originally designed for police from the civilian market and illegal gun runners. As a result, guns with higher caliber bullets are showing up at more crime scenes, leading experts to expect the lethality rate of gun violence to rise, too.

“Demand is shifting because supply is shifting,” SUNY-Albany sociologist David Hureau told The Trace. “Bigger, badder guns are just more available on the secondary market.”

This is a stark change from just 50 years ago, when the criminal’s gun of choice–dubbed the “Saturday Night Special”–was smaller and cheaper. Since then, gun companies have marketed bigger, higher-caliber weapons like 9mm, .40, and .45 caliber pistols as adequate for keeping average citizens concerned about self-defense—”citizen protectors,” as one sociologist called them—safe.

I sent this to myself today with that subject line (“The dumbest gun headline of the day).  I see that Bob Owens has already posted on this, and I basically concur with his sentiments.  The article is nonsense, and the writers obviously don’t know anything about their subject.

The .45 ACP has been around and in use by both military and civilians for more than a century, and the large revolver cartridges have been around for an even longer time than that.  In fact, the .38 Special is approximately the same diameter as the 9mm, or in other words, the “Saturday Night Special” to which the author refers is about the same as the 9mm that she calls a “bigger, higher caliber” round.

Actually, I see the opposite happening because I actually know something about guns.  I use .45 ACP and always will, but the most popular cartridge in America is the 9mm and I see people leaving the larger calibers for the smaller ones (e.g., 9mm, .380 ACP, etc.).

But I’ll observe something about this article that Bob missed.  It was “written” by someone named Carla Javier with Fusion.  Within an hour, another writer with Fusion wrote an article that could be mistaken for the one you just read, by someone named Alex Yablon, entitled America’s Obsession With Powerful Handguns Is Giving Criminals Deadlier Tools.

Some editor at Fusion, if they have such a thing there, made the decision to publish virtually the same article under different bylines within one hour of each other.  In and of itself that is only moderately interesting and goes to show their utter disdain for Americans whom they think they can beat into submission with words.  But here’s the really interesting thing.

Guess how I found these two articles?  That’s right, by a Google News search on the word “guns.”  Think about that for a moment.  These articles are quite literally fake news.  There is nothing in them but propaganda, and any pseudo-educated gun owner can debunk the data in there, and if a Google employee cared to convert inches to millimeters, s/he could easily have called bullshit on the two articles.

But no, these are seen by Google news feed as newsworthy.  Here’s the kicker.  The Captain’s Journal, which provides vastly superior analysis to anything Fusion could ever hope to put out, cannot get on the Google News feed.  Bob Owens is on the Google News feed (for which I don’t begrudge him), and Bob didn’t say anything different than I did.  But I connected the dots to propagandizing by Fusion.

You didn’t read that anywhere else but TCJ.  But remember boys and girls, Google thinks I’m not news worthy.  Perhaps Google is trafficking in fake news, yes?

This subreddit thread, while being a complicated read, full of surprises and ins and outs, with caveat, qualifier and stipulations, demonstrates that Google appears to be actively removing “spirit cooking” conversation and censoring search results.  As I said, the issue is complicated and you can study this discussion thread yourself, and to be fair, the allegation is also directed at Reddit, not just Google.

Now, I’ve always had a good working relationship with Google, and I truly hope that continues.  I have always gotten good service from you, and I have made good use of your search engine.  But I see that Google has taken steps to censor news and views based on political proclivities.

Google plans to prohibit fake-news websites from using its ad-selling software, a move that could crimp revenue at those sites.

Google said Monday that it is updating its policies to ban Google ads being placed “on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose” of the website. The policy would include sites that distribute false news, a Google spokeswoman said.

[ … ]

Google has long prohibited AdSense from being used on sites that promote hate speech or include pornography and violent content. Its policies previously didn’t include language about sites that spread false content. A spokeswoman said the change to the policy was imminent, and that it follows existing Google policies that ban advertisements that misrepresent what they are marketing.

Oh dear.  This is a bad move for Google.  Listen to me, on the outside chance that there are any Google executives or high level managers who are reading this, this is a very, very bad move on your part.  This isn’t something you want to happen.  Don’t test these waters.  This is your Bermuda triangle.

As I was reading from one commenter at one subreddit, “We are now the new underground.”  You see, the cool kids already think you guys are a bunch of gray hairs, and telling them you’re going to get into bed with the establishment will be the last straw.  You will look back and regret getting into bed with the establishment by censoring sites.

This is how it’s going to work.  You won’t really get to make this decision – the consumers will.  They will tell you by their patronage whether they approve of your behavior.  I hadn’t said anything about it, but using your tool Google Analytics, I have been fairly closely watching sources of my traffic over the last year or two.

I am beginning to get a non-trivial amount of traffic from Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo.  I haven’t changed.  My coverage and commentary hasn’t changed.  Google hasn’t changed much over the last year.  What has changed is that people are beginning to use other search engines, and Facebook stock is dropping like a rock.

You would do well to consider these things.  You don’t want the “cool kids” to think of you as another arm of the fedgov.  The cool kids run things around here.