Tag: corpocracy

The Last Comics Publisher

It’s probably apparent to a fair number of you why Arkhaven matters, and why a non-comics leather book snob like myself nevertheless troubles to do what I can to keep independent comics infrastructure alive. The decline and ongoing collapse of DC and Marvel and IDW has been well-chronicled, after all. But what you may not know is that the same forces, indeed, in one case, the exact same corporate vehicle, is now targeting the two alternatives to the mainstream comics industry for destruction.

First, Japanese manga:

Blackstone launched a 275.8 billion yen ($1.74 billion) bid to take Japanese digital comic distributor Infocom, including a tender offer for a per-share price of 6,060 yen, Infocom said on Tuesday. The tender offer will amount to 141.4 billion yen, Infocom said. The company’s current parent Teijin said it will sell all of its 58% stake in Infocom for 134.4 billion yen in a share buyback after the buyout is completed. Infocom operates digital comic site Mecha Comic, which is among Japan’s largest, according to its website.

Second, Webtoons:

Webtoon Entertainment, which describes itself as the world’s largest web comic platform, has set its market value at $2.67bn (£2.11bn) ahead of its US listing. Its shares are due to start trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange on 27 June at $21 each, the top end of their marketed range. The Los Angeles-based company is owned by South Korean technology giant Naver, which has been boosted by the growing online popularity of Korean and Japanese comics. Webtoon says it has 170 million monthly active users in more than 150 countries around the world. The company is aiming to sell 15 million shares and raise $315m in the initial public offering (IPO).

The world’s largest fund manager BlackRock has expressed interest in buying up to $50m of shares.

BlackRock is Disney’s second-largest shareholder, controls several seats on its executive board, and owns about 78 million shares in the company, or the equivalent of $9.5 billion.

It’s really fascinating to see the massive amount of money suddenly being pumped into converging these culture war vehicles, especially in light of the obvious superiority of the best that Arktoons has to offer vs the best that Webtoons has on display. Below is a comparison between the #1 most popular Webtoon which is apparently about lesbian furries vs the recently updated Silenziosa:

So, in the coming months, you can expect to see a number of changes and improvements at Arkhaven, including subscriptions to specific comics, comments, and other features. The best way to support this right now is simply to subscribe for free to the Arkhaven Substack, where we’ve recently launched a daily serialization of Alt★Hero that begins with The Gods of Peaceful Sleep.

Now, of course, it’s easy to say “I’m not a comics guy, what do I care?” But do you really think the clowns running BlackRock and Blackstone care about comics, much less manga? It’s not about money either. They will never make their money back by driving these things into the ground. It’s about complete control of the cultural space, control that our community will never cede them.

We’ve also modified our approach to text serializations on Arktoons based on what we’ve learned from the substacks. Instead of running an episode once a week, we’re going to run them straight through, every day, with the exception of Quantum Mortis: A Mind Programmed, which will run on weekends. Since Chuck Dixon’s Snakehand ends today with Episode 56, Sidewinders will continue with the second novel in the series, La Gringa.

We’re looking for more volunteers to help chop up comics into Arktoons-presentable episodes, so if you’re willing and able, please get in touch. And authors who want to serialize their published novels are welcome to join the party too.

UPDATE: JDA’s more informed take on Fandom Pulse isn’t any more optimistic:

Manga fans have largely mocked American comic fans for years, calling American comics “dead” and laughing at the fans as Marvel and DC Comics circled the drain and slowly killed their content. Even superhero manga like My Hero Academia blew away the competition from Marvel and DC in American markets, which should have given the companies a signal something was drastically wrong…

Blackstone has already announced its plans to focus on female-centric content by focusing on genres with that target audience in mind. This means manga fans are likely to see a rampant feminization of their content out of the gate.

DISCUSS ON SG

AI Fraud and Fakery

It’s abundantly clear that “AI” is the current, and possibly last, bubble that the Clown World economy has inflated in order to let the vulture capitalists continue to feed upon the tattered remains of the US corpocracy:

Unless you are one of a tiny handful of businesses who know exactly what they’re going to use AI for, you do not need AI for anything – or rather, you do not need to do anything to reap the benefits. Artificial intelligence, as it exists and is useful now, is probably already baked into your businesses software supply chain. Your managed security provider is probably using some algorithms baked up in a lab software to detect anomalous traffic, and here’s a secret, they didn’t do much AI work either, they bought software from the tiny sector of the market that actually does need to do employ data scientists. I know you want to be the next Steve Jobs, and this requires you to get on stages and talk about your innovative prowess, but none of this will allow you to pull off a turtle neck, and even if it did, you would need to replace your sweaters with fullplate to survive my onslaught.

Consider the fact that most companies are unable to successfully develop and deploy the simplest of CRUD applications on time and under budget. This is a solved problem – with smart people who can collaborate and provide reasonable requirements, a competent team will knock this out of the park every single time, admittedly with some amount of frustration. The clients I work with now are all like this – even if they are totally non-technical, we have a mutual respect for the other party’s intelligence, and then we do this crazy thing where we solve problems together. I may not know anything about the nuance of building analytics systems for drug rehabilitation research, but through the power of talking to each other like adults, we somehow solve problems.

But most companies can’t do this, because they are operationally and culturally crippled. The median stay for an engineer will be something between one to two years, so the organization suffers from institutional retrograde amnesia. Every so often, some dickhead says something like “Maybe we should revoke the engineering team’s remote work privile – whoa, wait, why did all the best engineers leave?”. Whenever there is a ransomware attack, it is revealed with clockwork precision that no one has tested the backups for six months and half the legacy systems cannot be resuscitated – something that I have personally seen twice in four fucking years. Do you know how insane that is?

Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you’re out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your I.T department runs, which you have no experience hiring for, when the organization has never used a GPU for anything other than junior engineers playing video games with their camera off during standup, and even if you do that all right there is a chance that the problem is simply unsolvable due to the characteristics of your data and business? This isn’t a recipe for disaster, it’s a cookbook for someone looking to prepare a twelve course fucking catastrophe.

How about you remain competitive by fixing your shit? I’ve met a lead data scientist with access to hundreds of thousands of sensitive customer records who is allowed to keep their password in a text file on their desktop, and you’re worried that customers are best served by using AI to improve security through some mechanism that you haven’t even come up with yet?

A friend of mine was invited by a FAANG organization to visit the U.S a few years ago. Many of the talks were technical demos of impressive artificial intelligence products. Being a software engineer, he got to spend a little bit of time backstage with the developers, whereupon they revealed that most of the demos were faked. The products didn’t work. They just hadn’t solved some minor issues, such as actually predicting the thing that they’re supposed to predict. 

It’s really remarkable how much shameless fakery is taking place in the tech sector these days. It makes the dot com boom look relatively restrained by comparison. At this point, I’d almost be willing to believe that Suno is actually a collection of semi-talented musicians in India who rapidly record two-minute clips in response to the user’s prompts.

DISCUSS ON SG

The End of an Era

Restaurants closing in 2024:

  • Fuddruckers is expected to close ALL locations by the end of the year
  • Old Country Buffet is closing ALL remainder locations
  • IHOP is closing 100 locations
  • Buffalo Wild Wings is closing ALL Canada locations as well as 60 locations in the US
  • Applebee’s is closing 35 locations
  • Red Lobster is closing 50 locations as they enter bankruptcy
  • Denny’s is closing 20 locations by the end of the year
  • Marie Callender’s is shutting down ALL remainder locations
  • Pizza Hut is planning to close 500 locations
  • Outback Steakhouse is closing 41 of their 700 locations
  • Sai Baro is closing a total of 50 locations with majority being mall locations
  • Mard Pizza is closing a total of 27 locations
  • Ruby Tuesday is closing 16 more locations in 2024.
  • BDQ is closing 8 of their 59 locations.
  • Joe’s Crab Shack is closing 41 of their 60 locations
  • Bonefish Grill is closing 7 locations

This is what cultural and economic decline looks like. Apparently 60 years of relentless immigration are not, in fact, good for the economy or the traditional culture. I wonder, however, how much of these failures are related to economic contraction, reduced consumer spending, and excessive debt versus the lack of appeal held by these traditional restaurant franchises for the newcomers.

UPDATE: A reader writes to explain what he saw at Outback Steakhouse:

Your assessment of the restaurant closures is spot on. I worked at an Outback for 5 years in a nice Chicago Suburb. When I started, Outback was still in its prime but only a year in they began to shift their marketing campaign. Between couponing, offering deals like “all you can eat shrimp”, and bending over for any customer that had the slightest complaint by comping their meal, it slowly but consistently brought the level of the clientele down. This was especially frustrating for myself and the servers alike that were used to 20% tips being the norm (when good service was provided of course) – however with the cheaper and more diverse customers, the tips became less and less. I think what happened is that Outback as a corporation became short-sighted and wanted to attract new customers but in the end it only caused them to be hurt by having to shrink margins to just keep these new customers happy by giving away so many freebees. A few years after I left, to no surprise, the location that I worked at closed.

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Nothing They Can Do

It’s such a shame that no one can do anything about Sean Combs beating the hell out of a young woman, despite the fact that there is clear video evidence of the assault.

LA District Attorney George Gascón says he is not able to prosecute Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs over the 2016 assault on Cassie Ventura caught on video because it happened too long ago. The Los Angeles district attorney’s office has announced that they cannot prosecute Sean “Diddy” Combs over a video showing him assaulting Cassie Ventura at a California hotel.

“The conduct would have occurred beyond the timeline where a crime of assault can be prosecuted,” implicating the statute of limitations in an Instagram post on Friday. California’s statute of limitations is one year for simple assault and three years for felony assault.

The footage, initially obtained by CNN, depicts the rapper in March 2016 grabbing Ventura, his then-girlfriend, by the neck, throwing her to the floor, and kicking her multiple times.

And yet, for some reason, he’s not being deplatformed, demonetized, or subjected to media hit pieces, and none of the corporations with which he works are refusing to work with him. Immunity to criminal prosecution is just one of the benefits of taking the ticket… until the Black Rider decides you’re no longer of sufficient use to him, of course.

I suspect the release of the video is a warning that Mr. Combs’s time is running out.

And in case you ever asked that very stupid question: “why doesn’t someone call the police?” this should answer your question. Because neither the police nor the justice system are allowed to touch the ticket-takers without permission.

UPDATE: No worries, justice is served, and we are assured that Mr. Combs is better now. In fact, we are even told that after going to rehab, he “continues to seek both therapy and spiritual work.”

DISCUSS ON SG

Non-Competes are No More

The FTC eliminates a corporation’s ability to limit the employment prospects of its former employees:

Pursuant to sections 5 and 6(g) of the Federal Trade Commission Act (“FTC Act”), the Federal Trade Commission (“Commission”) is issuing the Non-Compete Clause Rule (“the final rule”). The final rule provides that it is an unfair method of competition—and therefore a violation of section 5—for persons to, among other things, enter into non-compete clauses (“non-competes”) with workers on or after the final rule’s effective date. With respect to existing non-competes—i.e., non-competes entered into before the effective date—the final rule adopts a different approach for senior executives than for other workers. For senior executives, existing non-competes can remain in force, while existing non-competes with other workers are not enforceable after the effective date.

This is definitely a positive development. The idea that a corporation should be able to coerce an employee into agreeing not to work for a competitor without compensation is one of the pernicious consequences of Clown World’s contract morality, in which everything is permissible so long as the victim can be coerced, forced, scammed, or otherwise convinced to agree to it.

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Disappointment, Guaranteed

The naive optimism of the clueless cultural observer would be hilarious if it weren’t so tediously and predictably inobservant:

After the disastrous launch of their Gemini AI, which insisted that George Washington was actually Black and couldn’t decide whether Musk’s tweets or Hitler was worse, Google’s response was timid and weak. This was just a bug! A problem with QA! It absolutely, positively wasn’t a reflection of corrupted culture at Google, which now appeared to put ideology over accuracy. Really, really!

Anyone watching that shit show would be right to wonder whether one of America’s great technology companies had fallen completely into the hands of the new theocracy. I certainly did.

But now comes evidence that Google perhaps isn’t totally lost, even if an internal war over its origin principles is very much raging. One pitting the mission of organizing the world’s information and making it useful against the newspeak Trust & Safety goal of controlling narratives and countering malinformation (i.e. inconvenient truths).

This played out in stereotype as 28 Googlers occupied the CEO of Google Cloud’s office for 10 hours this week, defaced property, and prevented other Googlers from doing their work. Because Google provides cloud services to Israel, said the occupiers. And thus The Current Thing demanded it be stopped by whatever means possible.

But then the most amazing thing happened. There was no drawn-out investigation. No saccharine statements about employee’s rights to occupy offices, preventing work from happening, or advance their political agenda at work. Nope. They were just fired. Immediately. All 28 of them.

The firings aren’t the result of Google suddenly realizing that it is a business that shouldn’t permit its employees to prioritize politics and ideology over doing their jobs. Nor do they represent a belated rejection of what the author calls “the new theocracy”. It’s simply what happens when those lower in the ranks of the corporate ahrimanocracy offend those who are higher in its ranks.

Remember, evil revels in its own hypocrisy. The more subjective the standard, the more complete its control.

DISCUSS ON SG

Ejected by the Beast

You can declare yourself to be a Yellow-Winged Dragonkin. You can threaten your fellow employees with violence and blackballing. You can be incapable of distinguishing between the mythical Hydra and the legendary Medusa. You can be confused about your sex. You can invert your sexual orientation. You can contribute absolutely nothing to the corporate bottom line. You can work for years on a project that will never, ever have any hope of eventually reaching the market and keep your job at Google.

But there is one line no Googler can cross and hope to remain employed.

On Wednesday, the Alphabet subsidiary rushed to fire 28 employees who were part of Tuesday sit-in protests against the company’s provision of artificial intelligence and cloud services to the State of Israel. The protests were organized by a group called No Tech for Apartheid, which had declared Tuesday a “day of action” at Google. At issue: Google’s Project Nimbus — a $1.2 billion cloud and AI contract with Israel — and the Israeli Defense Forces’ use of Google Photos in Gaza, “which has led to the arrest, imprisonment, and torture of thousands of Palestinians with little to no evidence,” the group said. “It’s clear that the Israeli military will use any technology available to them for genocidal means.”

It’s always useful to understand Clown World’s priorities. Convergence is just another word for clownocracy.

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Devil Mouse Continues Suicide

The Disney shareholders had a chance to at least try changing course, and they rejected it.

Disney (DIS) has successfully fended off activist investor Nelson Peltz in his quest to secure board seats at the company, officially ending a highly contested proxy battle that has plagued the entertainment giant and its CEO Bob Iger for months.

The company revealed the news during its annual meeting of shareholders on Wednesday, confirming the current Disney board will remain intact following a shareholder vote that gave Disney a win “by a substantial margin.” About 75% of retail shareholders voted in favor of Disney’s current board, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Disney’s stock traded lower immediately following the results, with shares down more than 1%.

The results of the vote lend additional credence to the notion that once a corporation is completely converged, there is no way out except bankruptcy. The Disney executives will continue doubling down until their fate is sealed, assuming that it isn’t already.

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Dancing with Demonetization

Stripe first suspends, then desuspends, Dr. Malone’s Substack. His lawyers issued a press release describing the situation:

Stripe, a global payment processing company, has retracted its request for comprehensive financial data from Dr. Robert Malone following legal intervention by the Dhillon Law Group.

The initial request, which deviated from Stripe’s standard operating procedures, would have compelled Dr. Malone to provide extensive financial information from his business banking activities, including transactions and account balances spanning the entire history of his business bank account.

Dr. Malone, a medical researcher with a significant subscriber base on Substack, was faced with an abrupt policy change that threatened his business’s revenue stream. The payment processor’s demand for detailed financial records was not in line with the regular scope of information typically required by financial institutions, raising concerns about privacy and operational overreach.

“Stripe previously notified us that the firm required that we share details and activity relating to my business bank account with Stripe, including my current account balance, transactions, and all historical transactions, or else Stripe would stop processing payments from our Substack subscribers,” Dr. Malone said. “We were provided approximately one week to comply with this requirement. This was not a general policy, and appears to have been selectively deployed by Stripe in response to a U.S. Government request. As Substack only allows the use of credit card processing via Stripe, we saw this as a direct threat to the revenue from the business we have built up over the last two years using the Substack social media authorship toolkit. We immediately contacted the Dhillon Law Group, which has been able to promptly and favorably resolve this so that our business was not impacted by this new Stripe policy.”

The Dhillon Law Group challenged Stripe’s requirement on behalf of Dr. Malone, emphasizing the need to protect sensitive financial data while still ensuring the client’s business remained unaffected.

“Financial service providers must tread carefully when requesting client data. It is critical to uphold the delicate balance between regulatory requirements and an individual’s right to financial privacy,” said Mark Meuser, an attorney with the Dhillon Law Group. “We are satisfied with Stripe’s decision to withdraw its request, allowing Dr. Malone to continue his valuable work without unnecessary intrusion into his business affairs.”

If conservatives had any political utility whatsoever, they would immediately pass a law denying the right of every federally-regulated corporation providing any payment or banking service to deny those services to any citizen for any reason. Loans, of course, would be excepted from these guaranteed services. It’s not as if there isn’t ample precedent for this, as Congress passes laws requiring access for everything from college to restaurants. The idea that corporations should be granted Constitutional rights so they can act as a form of shadow thought police is fundamentally flawed.

The fact that conservatives won’t defend the right of citizens and nationals to participate in the economy, and instead are signing off on anti-constitutional antisemitism laws, is all one needs to know in order to grasp the fundamental uselessness of conservatives and the Republican establishment alike. Which means both conservatism and the Republican Party are going to eventually go the way of the equally useless Conservative Party in Great Britain, which is presently on track to be comprehensively wiped out by the Labour Party.

It’s bad enough that an evil party is evil. But that is its purpose. There is absolutely no reason for a party that is supposed to be good, but instead reliably supports that which is evil, to even exist.

DISCUSS ON SG

Honeypot or Genuine Alt-Tech

I support Andrew Torba and what he’s trying to do with Gab Social and Gab AI, and I particularly support his latest move to reduce the amount of resources that freeloaders are permitted to burn, but I don’t have perfect knowledge of him or the situation. And I definitely have made mistakes about people who later turned out to be infiltrators, gatekeepers, or bad actors, so in the interest of contemplating the essential truth of the matter, I’m linking to two articles about Gab that are polar opposites, one dedicated to attacking Torba, the other by Torba himself explaining his recent actions.

First is the hit piece. While it is well-researched and most of the details appear to be accurate, there is nothing conclusive, it’s mostly guilt-by-association combined with an apparent lack of knowledge of how much it costs to run even what looks like a shoestring operation and make a living, especially when all the cheaper mainstream options cannot be used. And a similar approach could be just as easily used to “expose” me. His mother may be an astrology freak, but my father is a convicted felon. His brother may be gay, but mine died of a drug overdose. And the questionable nature of his past involvement with the Silicon Valley crowd can’t even begin to compare with my having been a Wax Trax! recording artist. Which is why I’m essentially dubious about the significance of the various red flags being waved:

Over the past decade, the United States, and to a great extent the entire world, have been in a growing state of censorship. Ideas that go against the accepted narrative are often removed from the internet and the creators of those ideas are persecuted as being “hateful” or purveyors of disinformation. Many major hubs of communication like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube have actively censored their platforms, particularly after the 2016 US Presidential Election primarily due to the rise of the Alt-Right movement. E-celebrities, content creators, and many of their followers found themselves banned from mainstream social media, which created a vacuum that was soon filled by vaporware sites and grifters whose profits lay in victimhood narratives and false hype, none of which are more notorious or egregious than Gab and its founder Andrew Torba.

Founded just months before the 2016 Presidential Election by self-described Silicon Valley conservative Andrew Torba, Gab touted itself as a censorship-free alternative to Twitter and was heavily promoted by the media before becoming associated with far-right extremism and hate after the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. As of 2022, Gab has adopted a militant Christian nationalist bent and boasts of having an excess of one million “cumulative registered accounts” as well as having a value of $10 million, despite indisputable evidence to the contrary.

Since Gab’s inception, Torba has shapeshifted and rebranded himself many times in order to attract any group that would promote Gab and give him money. Over the course of Gab’s history, Torba has pandered to nearly every fringe online community on the right-wing spectrum; ranging from 4chan lolicon connoisseurs and edgelords to the QAnon and MAGA cults and beyond. If one looks past Torba’s conservative christian veneer they will find an affinity grifter who says and does everything in his power to keep the façade of Gab being a viable alternative to Twitter going and keep the money flowing. Torba relied on making misleading claims about the user base and utility of Gab in order to rip off millions of dollars from investors, many of whom he swindled using his conservative christian affinity grift.

Gab’s notoriety is mainly due to Torba fostering a drama producing environment on the site by not moderating terms of service violations like doxxing and threats of violence. Why does Torba purposefully leave some of the more unhinged elements of Gab unmoderated? What has Torba done to improve Gab with the millions of dollars he raised? What happened to those millions? Why hasn’t the SEC done anything about it? Does Gab’s seeming immunity from legal consequences and purposeful lack of moderation point to it being a honeypot, especially considering Torba’s frequent willingness to report his own users to the Feds?

Andrew Torba And The Grift Of Gab, THE PROVIDENCE POST, 15 March 2023

Second is Torba’s post made in the aftermath of the anti-freeloading policy that I personally believe to not only be justified, but long overdue for a business that has reportedly been running in the red on the Silicon Valley investment model for a long time. I even expressed my opinion on the matter in a meme posted on Gab this morning, of which Torba himself approved.

Torba’s recent post, at least to me, reads like that of a moderately successful entrepreneur who is simply doing whatever he needs to do to in order to keep the lights on his current operation in a moribund industry, even as he attempts to shift resources toward a more promising one in a new and growing industry.

Thank you to everyone who upgraded to GabPRO today. We had our single biggest revenue day for PRO since January 2021. Gab Social is well on its way to becoming sustainable longterm.

The past year has been very tough. As many of you noted we have been operating at a loss for a long time and that needed to change quickly.

The compounding problems of both storage space filling up and capital draining month to month had to be solved or Gab was going to die. We couldn’t let that happen and so drastic measures had to be taken to solve two problems at once. We also needed to do something big that would get the attention of everyone here so that all of us could be focused on solving these issues together.

There’s no other conspiracy here. That’s the simple truth of the matter. The advertising market tanked last year with the economy/inflation and it impacted us hard. We made significant cost cutting measures over the past year but it still wasn’t enough. Running a website as big as Gab costs a lot of money and there’s no way around that.

The team has started working on the storage issue and this change buys us a lot more time to handle it. We have been reading many of your suggestions and taking them into account.

We see that many of you are concerned about your identity which I totally understand as someone who has been dragged through the mud personally for 8 years now by the media, members of Congress, foreign governments, the ADL, the SPLC, and many more people. I’ve been”canceled” 100 times over. I get it.

That being said there are plenty of ways you can support us anonymously. The easiest way to do that is by sending physical mail to our mailing address with a money order, etc. We have a mail in check option on the GabPRO checkout flow. Just be sure to include your reference number and Gab username. You can get a money order at any post office and plenty of other places. You can also work with other Gabbers you trust who can gift you a PRO account.

I’m confident that Gab will emerge from this stronger than ever with a more united community.

We can’t do this alone anymore. We need your help if we are going to make this work longterm and I know that together we can get the job done and keep the one single place on the internet that allows free speech to stay online permanently.

Those who haven’t been on the business end of a deplatforming, and haven’t been subjected to a full-bore media assault, have no idea how stressful it is or how it hardens those who have gone through those things without cracking. Assuming that Torba is not an actor or a honeypot, and the evidence presented is neither substantial nor convincing, I can assure you that Torba no longer cares one little bit about the opinions of those with the luxury to cling to their precious anonymity or those who think they know better than he does what it takes to keep Gab alive.

As every Castalia, Arkhaven, Infogalactic, and UATV subscriber knows, either you actively and materially support what you like or you don’t matter at all. Just as no army has any use for warriors who won’t fight, no business has any use for supporters who burn up its resources rather than contribute them. The reason Castalia House will be around when Tor Books goes out of business, and the reason UATV will be around when YouTube turns out the lights, is solely due to the strength and the commitment of this community. I do not say that lightly. It’s the literal truth.

If the Gab community is strong enough, and committed enough, and if Torba is genuinely the committed Christian Nationalist man he now presents himself as being, it will survive. If any of those three pieces are missing, it will not. In the meantime, and despite our well-known past differences, I wish him and his endeavors well.

DISCUSS ON SG