Back in the Gamergate era, online dissidents had an embarrassment of riches when it came to news and entertainment sources. It’s hard to imagine now, but prior to 2019 or so, you could catch the likes of Mister Metokur, Nick Fuentes, and Infowars on YouTube.
But then Orange Man won the election. Our overlords swore a mighty oath to make sure no unapproved candidate was ever cast as their public mouthpiece again. So they had their technopriests in Silicon Valley banish all heretics from their platforms and raise potent wards to keep them out.
Since then, YouTube looks like daytime network TV.
The exiled streamers refused to give up. They hopped from platform to platform, many of which had connections to shady foreign money. After a while, some Death Cult acolyte paid in exposure would write a hit piece salted with no-context gotcha quotes, and the streamers would suffer a fresh round of bans. DLive, a streaming site backed by a Chinese tech mogul, became notorious for inviting counterculture talent, then banning them at the first sign of trouble. They alienated Jim almost instantly, treated Fuentes like a redheaded stepchild despite his show hitting number one, and even kicked off Ethan Ralph.
Folks looking for views that dissent from the Woke Cult narrative have had it rough these past years. If you wanted to hear any message besides constant browbeating to support Current Thing, you had to maintain an ever-changing set of bookmarks for ever-sketchier sites.
That is, until October of last year, when Nick Fuentes launched Cozy TV. I expressed my high hopes for this new streaming platform back when it launched, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Cozy’s lineup started out with just Nick and a couple of his OG (Original Groyper) streaming buddies. Within months, it’s attracted name talent like Alex Jones and Gab founder Andrew Torba. Cozy TV hit the ground running and has only gained momentum.
I admit that from the outset, I was skeptical of Nick’s plan to open Cozy TV up to large numbers of other streamers. My first impression of Cozy was that it seemed like a pretty slick upgrade of Nick’s personal site. My expectation was that it would make a nice new home for his show. The site’s viewership would consist of America First fans with little oxygen left for anyone else.
Now, the numbers are in. Here is Cozy TV’s six-month performance compared to DLive:
You read that graph right. Cozy TV has beaten the odds and surpassed DLive within five months of launch. I’ve seldom been happier to be wrong.
The band of Zoomers with their homemade platform have unseated the blockchain-based racket funded by a Chinese billionaire.
If Fuentes had achieved this success in a vacuum, I’d call it a fluke. But Cozy TV isn’t the only development we’ve seen emerge to offer normal people alternatives to Cult-captured institutions. Brandon Sanderson’s record-smashing crowdfunder has proven the neopatronage model for artists. In December, Andrew Torba announced Gab Pay, which he intends as not just a PayPal alternative, but the cornerstone of a parallel economy.
Once is a fluke. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is proof. Sane people who refuse to consume woke agitprop, live in pods, and eat bugs are emigrating from old systems weaponized against them to build new institutions that serve them. And the cultists are seething over their inability to stop the exodus of those they live only to torment.
Get ready to join the new Christian civilization, now in its online seed form; later … who knows?
But becoming a citizen of digital Christendom first means unplugging yourself from the debauched and dying Clown World.
Indeed, “interesting times”.
I’m having trouble digging up your generational parable with Grant, Silas, the gradual deterioration of the house &c. Could I get a link?
https://brianniemeier.com/2020/12/trains-and-traditions/
Teddy Spaghetti appears to be warming up to Nick, so I hope that Unauthorized and Cozy can peacefully coexist.
The two sites are different animals, so there’s room for both. If you’d asked me a month ago I’d have said different since I thought Cozy TV would be to Nick what Unauthorized is to VD. Instead, Cozy is shaping up to be the streaming alternative everybody hoped Stream.me would’ve been. And unlike the other two, Cozy TV is wholly owned by its front man.
Brian, you fool! You can’t post your picture on the Internet without cartoonists and YouTubers doing embarrassing things to it!
The most amusing thing to me is the wignats protesting Marjorie Taylor Greene in the “cultists” link. “She’s not a fighter! She didn’t even deny the Holocaust!”
Greene is a politician. Her bread and butter entails making the rounds giving canned speeches filled with platitudes aimed at her core constituents. That’s to be expected. What’s unexpected was her refusal to knuckle under when the lemon-sucking schoolmarms in the GOP demanded she grovel. That is what dissident politics going mainstream looks like. It’s also more proof that the wignats still haven’t learned the difference between the internet and real life.