Policing Outside their Jurisdiction: Patreon, Josh Slocum, and Disaffected
thought police convict you and cancel your income
My friend Josh, pictured above, has a podcast.
Josh is not a terrorist, not a demagogue trying to rally troops to nefarious ends, not a would-be cult leader calling for slavish devotion to his own views.
He’s a gay American man, funny and interesting, witty as hell and remarkably kind.
Josh is the kind of friend who understands intuitively that if I call him without texting first, something is wrong. He sees my name pop up on his phone with no text first and knows immediately that I would only do that if I really need him to answer.
He’s the kind of friend who gets that without my having to spell it out, so he answers, and then stays on the phone while I, an insecure wintertime driver on the verge of total panic, try in heavy snow to accomplish my first trip up the narrow hill leading to my rural New England home, sliding and fishtailing in a front-wheel-drive car.
He’s also the kind of friend who then schedules driving lessons so that next time I’ll know what I’m doing.
Bear that in mind: this is a story about a good man, in the United States of America, opening his mouth and saying what he thinks, and enough people agreeing with him, and wanting to hear his views, that they sent him money to help him make the show.
This is a story about, simply, a group of (mostly) Americans voluntarily associating over shared views, and a payment processing company facilitating the exchange of money in this voluntary, freedom-based exchange.
This is a story about the kind of freedom we used to take for granted.
Josh’s Show
His podcast, Disaffected, is a show that “looks at politics, culture, and relationships through a psychological lens.” It’s funny, thought-provoking, and quite entertaining. He does a weekly episode in an old-fashioned talk-show style, with audio only episodes supplementing. You can, and should, subscribe on Apple podcasts or Spotify. (Here’s the YouTube link, but please bookmark Odysee or Rumble too, for we all know what the next dropping shoe will be.)
The thesis of the show is that the disordered patterns of the Cluster B personality disorders—Borderline, Histrionic, Narcissistic, and Antisocial—are the patterns running the far left, and much of the mainstream left, too.
I believe that his thesis is correct. When I found his show, I had been tweeting for a couple of years about the ways in which my childhood experience of abuse provided me with an understanding of what was going on in my college classrooms, though I didn’t have the mental infrastructure to describe it that way.
I often found it frustrating that I kept revisiting my childhood as I discussed the tactics and techniques being used to turn my classmates into Woke warriors. I looked for other analogies and frameworks, but absolutely none fit as well as the abuse history I understood all too well. For a long time, I thought this reflected a lack of insight on my part.
Josh’s show gave me the mental framework to explain why so much of what happens on the left reminds me of being raised by personality disordered abusers. It’s the very same psychology, the same tactics, applied at scale.
Cluster B Folks Run Everything Now
Cluster B dynamics are everywhere. This is the root of our cultural embrace of the black-and-white thinking of Borderlines, the way you can go from hero to villian in a single misstep. It is the narcissistic source of the left’s warm, reassuring confidence that we, uniquely, have the right and true approach to humane thinking, human rights, government, religion, sex, parenthood, etc., and that other people/cultures/subcultures would be infinitely enriched by learning from us. It informs the histrionic propaganda that insists we believe that every non-white person shivers in terror each time they leave their home, lest a cop murder them.
This is why our media asserts obvious nonsense, like that laws attempting to protect children from being fast-tracked into medical transition are “anti-trans,” or that a conservative black man is the “black face of white supremacy.”
It’s why we are all expected to believe, or at least to act as if we believe, flatly ridiculous things.
It’s no longer an acceptable cultural narrative that anyone, in good faith, simply disagrees about the fairness of males playing on women’s sports teams, or about the wisdom of children undergoing medical transition.
Do you doubt that Elliot Page is and always was male? You must want all trans people dead, or at the very least, as President Biden asserted recently, be racist, anti-semitic, and homophobic, in need of love as an antidote to your “hate.”
This embrace of histrionic insanity is why they assert dangerously crazy things, like that 12 year olds can consent to transition, and parents who object are guilty of abuse. Our child protection agencies fail miserably at protecting kids from real abuse, so naturally they overload the system with this bullshit. And notice that this segment is labeled “Anti-LGBTQ violence” (click to play the video).
Gosh. I wonder what else these monsters think 12-year-olds can consent to?
Did you know that your sane, reasonable view that 12-year-olds can’t consent to jack shit makes you guilty of “anti-LGBTQ violence?”
It’s why “OK Groomer” is regarded as a call to violence, widely reported as such, but an actual call—by the individual who most mainstream media are quoting as an “expert” in order to bash Elon Musk, no less—to “accost Supreme Court justices” in public is whitewashed.
When “we” do it, it’s violent. When they do it, it’s reasonable and deserved.
This is the domestic abuse paradigm, put in charge of a country and culture.
Josh’s show is the single best resource I know of for understanding how and why these dynamics work and spread.
Patreon As Thought Police
Patreon is a platform designed to allow content creators to earn an income, and in many cases, a living. It allows creators to offer perks for pledges at different levels. Here’s an example from Gwendylyn Brown, one of the children from “Sister Wives,” who opened a Patreon to make content giving her own perspective on the show that chronicles her father’s polygamous marriages.
Patreon allows content creators to interact with their audience in fun ways, and provides a steady income stream.
Josh was using Patreon to fund his show. A Woke mob is responsible for his full-time job ending. As of January 1, 2023, the show will be his only income.
He had a few other income streams — Substack, SubscribeStar, and Paypal — but Patreon was 90% of it. Patreon was the first and remains the biggest way that content creators fund their work.
On Wednesday, December 14, a week and a half before Christmas, Josh woke up to an email from Patreon. He’s been suspended under their rule that your behavior and expressed views off their platform is subject to their moral judgment. Fail their Woke standards, and you are convicted of wrongthink, with your income canceled.
Patreon decided that one of his episodes, which was not posted on their website, violated their standards.
Just like that, 90% of an American’s income is gone, thanks to the Big Tech thought police.
The Point
Josh has a unique show, with insight that very few people can match, delivered with humor and eloquence.
Yes, I love my friend, and I am worried about him. Courageous truth-tellers should be lauded, not punished, and it makes me sick that the consequences of his being a courageous truth-teller might turn out to be dire.
And yes, I hope—very much—that any of you who are inclined to oppose Woke madness with your Christmastime donations will consider subscribing to his Substack. This issue was the first and is a great elucidation of his perspective.
But that’s not my main reason for writing this.
I am writing this because of a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago.
I have been in therapy for a long time, and I’ve worked very, very hard to try to correct the distortions my childhood left me with—to try to understand what words like good, bad, normal, love, and hate mean in the context of a family.
The person I was chatting with was telling me a story about her father getting drunk and using a belt to punish her for mouthing off to him. She was sixteen years old and had just gotten out of the shower. He ripped the towel off and hit her with the belt five times, while yelling at her.
My gut-level response, my initial thought, was dismissive and even a little confused. So many years later, this was still on her mind? Why?
I can forgive myself for this on one level. Being yelled at and hit five times with a belt, even in the humiliating situation of being forcibly made naked, is fairly minor in my paradigm of abuse.
On another level, I was horrified and may never forgive myself.
So much work, so much effort, and my meter for “normal” is still insanely fucked up.
I don’t want this to happen to Americans. I don’t want our culture to be one where we can hear, “An American expressed their honestly held views somewhere else, and Big Tech decided to punish them for wrongthink not even on their platform by canceling their income” and shrug dismissively.
The brainwashed Woke morons from my college classes, the ones that many of you enjoyed reading me tweet about during my Twitter days, are now deciding, in the United States of America, who’s allowed to earn money.
Too many brave men and women have died defending freedom for us to shrug at this, or accept it as a “new normal.”
Meet their Woke moral standards, inculcated on the college campuses (the ones we all used to be assured was where this insanity would remain), or starve.
The right to something as simple as a bank account or using payment processors (which is all Patreon really is, remember) is already hinging on Woke approval.
Ask Colin Wright, who lost his PayPal account for his radical, hateful, genocidal-of-trans-people belief that humans are a sexually dimorphic species, composed of men and women. (Though in a Kafkaesque twist, they’ll only confirm this if he gets a lawyer and they get a subpoena, and for special fun, they kept his money for 180 days after they banned him.)
What happened to Josh could happen to any of us, and if the Woke moralists get their way, it will.
This is wrong, and we should be regarding it as a serious, dire emergency.
Because it is.
Links: Josh’s Substack, YouTube channel, Odysee channel, Rumble channel, Apple podcasts, and Spotify.
Housekeeping: comments are turned on for paid subscribers. Email hollymathnerd at gmail dot com if you would like a paid subscription but cannot afford it.
I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb in guessing that none of the woke crowd has ever read "The Art of War."
Never corner your adversary. They're cornering a lot of good people, but even good people have their limits. It is inevitable that if adults do not soon get this under control, one of these good people will go kinetic.
Bitcoin helps with this. I will talk to my connections on how to get him set up with Podcasting 2.0 features (like receiving BTC directly through boosts/donations) as an additional revenue stream.