How Alternative Media Became the New Punk Rock

It was the spring of 1977 when John Lydon – better known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols – released the most notorious song in the history of Punk Rock.

God Save the Queen, named after the British National Anthem, took England by storm for criticizing Queen Elizabeth II as the nation celebrated the 25th anniversary of her ascension to the throne.

“God save the queen – the fascist regime”

The song’s lyrics earned it a complete and total ban from BBC airwaves, which during the 1970’s would have normally been a kiss of death for anyone hoping to ascend their song to the charts. However, Lydon’s powerful anti-establishment message turned that ban into a glowing endorsement – a concept that the elites in Britain did not understand.

As some British tabloids would suggest, Johnny Rotten was a national traitor. BBC labeled the song “of gross bad taste,” and some major retailers refused to carry the album. The song did rise to #2 in the charts, but it was carried underneath Rod Stewart’s I Don’t Want to Talk About It. Suppression of the song went into full swing when official pop charts even refused to print its name.

There came a time when members of the British Parliament were contemplating a ban. A Virgin Group spokesman replied by saying “it is remarkable that MPs should have nothing better to do than get agitated about records which were never intended for their Ming vase sensibilities.”

But the intention of censorship is never to shield oneself from unwanted experiences – the true reason is to deny the rest of us who may want to enjoy such content from the ability to hear alternative points of view. The people are the future – and the future wants to be free.

“We're the future, your future – God save the queen”

You might have thought that the lesson was learned, but you would be wrong. Forty years later, the powerful have forgotten the lesson of the Sex Pistols – that when you try to stop people from seeing something, they are going to pay more attention than you could have ever imagined. It’s called the Streisand Effect.

Though it’s now 2018 and the Punk movement has long hit its prime, the establishment has set its sights on a new enemy. However, this time instead of trying to shut down musicians, they’ve descended to a new level of authoritarianism and have begun to ban, censor, and attack journalists.

In the same way the Sex Pistols broke the mold by simply expressing their true feelings about the Queen, the alternative media is doing the same by telling the truth and expressing how they truly see the world around them. This is a direct threat to the mainstream media who up until recently have had near complete control over the narratives in which we are expected to view politics, science, government, media, and virtually every aspect of life.

When looking back at our time, future historians will see 2018 as the year of mass censorship, much like what happened to the Sex Pistols in 1977 only on a much grander scale. So far, Apple, Facebook, Spotify, YouTube, Twitter, Disqus, LinkedIn, MailChimp, and several other major platforms who work closely with government have banned or censored a plethora of journalists, including Alex Jones of Infowars, who has a history of revealing important secrets about government corruption including NSA spying, the Bilderberg group, and cover-ups in the Biotech and Pharmaceutical industries.

This kind of journalism is indispensable and deserves a voice in the open forum of ideas, but now that these major companies have been granted de facto monopolies on public discourse through massive government subsidies and contracts they have become, in effect, arms of the state with the power to censor who they wish without recourse.

In 2018, social media is more like the public square than it is a leisure activity. People spend their time there and they talk about important issues. If we want to have a functioning democracy, we can’t allow these corporations to censor whoever they like. Right now, it’s happening to conservatives disproportionately, but some censorship leads to more censorship and eventually all opinions could be banned which don’t align with Zuckerberg and the power elite in which he spends his time.

Alternatives do exist such as Minds.com and BitChute, but although they are growing rapidly, they are still not at the level to compete with the big social media giants like Facebook and Twitter.

Of course, the mainstream media are big supporters of this censorship while they simultaneously attack President Trump for his rhetoric. However, the President has come out on the side of freedom as he addressed the topic on Twitter on August 18th.

“Censorship is a very dangerous thing & absolutely impossible to police. If you are weeding out Fake News, there is nothing so Fake as CNN & MSNBC, & yet I do not ask that their sick behavior be removed. I get used to it and watch with a grain of salt, or don’t watch at all. Too many voices are being destroyed, some good & some bad, and that cannot be allowed to happen. Who is making the choices, because I can already tell you that too many mistakes are being made. Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!” -- President Trump, Twitter, August 18th

The mainstream media has been calling Trump “Hitler” for the past three years, but where Hitler would have been squarely on the side of censorship, Trump is calling for open debate in a free market of ideas, and that is a great thing.

All of this, unsurprisingly, is leading to an exodus of major social media platforms and has boosted the viewership of Alex Jones significantly. As we all should have learned from the Sex Pistols, censorship doesn’t solve problems, it amplifies the voices of the oppressed. The only plausible long-term solution is to allow everyone a voice – especially those you disagree with.