On Wednesday, right-leaning political personality and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html">&#8220;Intellectual Dark Web&#8221;</a> icon Dave Rubin announced the launch of a previously teased venture whose goal is to combat the status quo of rampant Big Tech censorship, de-platforming, and de-monetization practices: <a href="https://locals.com">Locals.com</a>.
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If you’re a creator and you want to own your own community, set your own rules, post video and audio to a curated feed, chat with supporters, sell tickets to events, build your own network with other creators and much more, join us on <a href="https://t.co/WLIO0Cxwe0">https://t.co/WLIO0Cxwe0</a>
The future is now. <a href="https://t.co/JfSRcGbMDq">pic.twitter.com/JfSRcGbMDq</a>
&mdash; Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) <a href="https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1202288504006307841?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 4, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
With the tag line of &#8220;Own your community, Own your future,&#8221; Locals pitches itself to content creators as a one-stop &#8220;home for all your content&#8221; through which creators can &#8220;[p]ost videos, photos, podcasts, messages, and polls,&#8221; as well as &#8220;[s]ell tickets to events, and offer exclusive content to your supporters.&#8221; The site advertises that it can strengthen content creators&#8217; relationship with their fans by removing the Big Tech middlemen and serve as a networking/community hub by allowing content creators to easily and freely associate with others. Perhaps most importantly, Locals tells creators to &#8220;[s]et your own rules&#8221; for interaction, in marked distinction with the &#8220;inconsistent and unfair moderation&#8221; of Big Tech.
Rubin, who is currently the only person publicly identified with launching the Locals project, spoke exclusively with The Daily Wire for a wide-ranging interview about the origins and importance of Locals.
&#8220;Everyone knows there is a massive problem with Big Tech,&#8221; Rubin began. &#8220;We have all outsourced all of our ability to communicate with each other to these Big Tech behemoths — no one really owns their content or knows what their terms of service are.&#8221;
Creators have very little access to their own audiences, Rubin continued, because Big Tech companies are clearly manipulating their algorithms and engaging in clandestine shadow-banning-type behavior. With the status quo, content creators have no way of ensuring that they can actually reach all of their followers and subscribers.
&#8220;For someone like me, from a libertarian/classical liberal way of thinking,&#8221; Rubin went on, &#8220;it’s time to reverse this. It’s time for creators, who are the real drivers of social media — the people who are generating clicks and creating podcasts — to be in control. It&#8217;s time for a new model.&#8221;
Locals, Rubin explained, &#8220;is a community-based app and desktop website where you can post audio, post video, communicate with your fans, and so forth. It’s subscription-only, so that takes care of all the bots and trolls and anonymous haters. One of the reasons that everyone hates everything online is that you have smart people arguing with these pink fox anime avatars on Twitter.&#8221;
Rubin&#8217;s signature &#8220;Rubin Report&#8221; program is the very first Local, he said, and he promised that more big-name creators will be rolled out soon. It will be up to each content creator to decide how much to charge for access to his/her Local, beginning with as little as three dollars per month. Each Local not only sets his/her own rules, but also owns his/her users&#8217; data — &#8220;so that, even if you leave Locals,&#8221; Rubin noted, &#8220;you can still communicate directly&#8221; with your fans.
Suffice it to say this is a very different model than the one currently deployed by Big Tech giants like YouTube.
&#8220;There are so many people out there around the world who have all this great stuff to say, but these platforms are controlled by external platforms who manipulate,&#8221; Rubin said, coming to a crescendo. &#8220;I want to give every creator the chance to be truly independent. I created a tech company, not a platform.&#8221;
Combatting Big Tech censorship is an increasingly popular political agenda for the American Right. Freshman Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has made taking on Big Tech a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-josh-hawleys-bill-taking-big-tech-josh-hammer">focal point of his first year</a> in office. Earlier this week, furthermore, numerous leading conservative thinkers co-signed an <a href="https://americanmind.org/essays/for-real-american-greatness-a-tech-new-deal/">essay</a> for the Claremont Institute&#8217;s American Mind online journal that called for a &#8220;Tech New Deal&#8221; intended to ultimately &#8220;ensure[] America can extend its greatness well into the digital age.&#8221;

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Dave Rubin Launches ‘Locals,’ A New Venture To Combat Big Tech Censorship

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Yesterday, hapless bloviator <a href="http://www.evefairbanks.com">Eve Fairbanks</a> wasted 3,000 words in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/29/conservatives-say-weve-abandoned-reason-civility-old-south-said-that-too/?arc404=true">The Washington Post</a> on a risible comparison of open discourse, free speech, intellectual tolerance, civility, and reason to the ignominious defenders of chattel slavery in the antebellum South. Because if you are the <a href="http://www.evefairbanks.com/who-is-eve">unhealthily Civil War-obsessed</a> Eve Fairbanks, nothing apparently says &#8220;civility&#8221; and &#8220;tolerance&#8221; like seceding from the Union in evil defense of human enslavement and firing upon Fort Sumter to instigate a bloody conflict that would ultimately take the toll of 600,000-plus lives.
Really — <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/29/conservatives-say-weve-abandoned-reason-civility-old-south-said-that-too/?arc404=true">read the whole screed</a>.
Fairbanks&#8217; <a href="http://www.evefairbanks.com/who-is-eve">&#8220;about me&#8221; section</a> of her freelance journalist website informs the curious reader: &#8220;I grew up in Virginia a little girl mad about the American Civil War. On weekends I begged my father to take me to all the battlefields: Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, Antietam. I was transfixed by the moral question the war addressed and the incredible change its end effected: a change we&#8217;re still trying to make real.&#8221; As someone <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/13394/five-lessons-abraham-lincoln-would-have-todays-josh-hammer">proudly born on Abraham Lincoln&#8217;s birthday</a> and who <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/42341/hammer-it-past-time-trump-openly-defy-court-order-josh-hammer">views Lincoln as the greatest statesman</a> in the history of the American republic, I would succinctly say to Fairbanks: Seek help. This is not healthy. Only through such a narrow, blinders-restricting historical lens could someone possibly deduce that culturally defensive pleas for openness, tolerance, civility, and reason are eerily evocative of antebellum defenders of the &#8220;<a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/peculiar-institution">peculiar institution</a>.&#8221; Fairbanks seems woefully clueless to the reality that many of the greatest thinkers in recorded human history have called for openness, tolerance, civility, and reason for literally thousands of years.
Is Fairbanks so obtuse as to write out of history Aristotle&#8217;s emphasis — later emphasized, in part, by the likes of Maimonides and Aquinas alike — on reason as a quintessential feature of human nature and the necessary stepping stone toward the end goal of true human flourishing? Is Fairbanks so dense as to discard the classically liberal wisdom embodied by early 20th-century Voltaire biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall: &#8220;I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it?&#8221;
At its core, Fairbanks&#8217; juvenile logic is as follows: (A) antebellum slaveholders and slavery defenders stealthily couched their arguments through the lens of tolerance and civility; therefore, (B) contemporary &#8220;Intellectual Dark Web&#8221; types who complain about the intellectually stifling nature of contemporary politically correct leftism run amok, including Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro, utilize &#8220;antebellum reasoning&#8221; as a mischievous way to make disreputable opinions seem perfectly reputable. Put another way, as Ben aptly formulated it on <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/51218/ep-851-when-everyone-hitler">today&#8217;s podcast</a>: (A) Hitler owned and loved his dog; therefore, (B) all loving dog owners are Hitler. It ought not to take much more intellectual horsepower than merely being a sentient human to intuit the axiomatic asininity therein.
David Duke praised Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) earlier this year — would Fairbanks contend that every Omar supporter is a white nationalist? During the nadir of the Second World War, the United States made a purely tactical decision to ally with Stalin&#8217;s Soviet Union — would Fairbanks submit that every American governmental official, at the time, was a closet communist? Is everyone who enjoys eating at Chick-fil-A necessarily credited with personal support for the conjugal, one-man/one-woman definition of marriage?
The reality is that the discursive and rhetorical notions Fairbanks so sanctimoniously mocks — open discourse, free speech, intellectual tolerance, civility, and reason — are all inherently noble. But noble notions and pursuits, of course, are necessarily subject to intellectual capture, devious bastardization, and sly regurgitation by the forces of evil. Many of history&#8217;s greatest monsters have built support and sought justification for their evil deeds by means of appealing to virtue, reason, and the like. It takes a profound commitment to moral relativism to fail to discern any relevant historical distinctions between, say, Aristotle&#8217;s appeals to reason on the one hand, and Hitler&#8217;s genocide based on something closely approximating racist Aryan &#8220;reason,&#8221; on the other hand. And it takes a similarly robust commitment to moral relativism to fail to discern any relevant historical distinction between John C. Calhoun&#8217;s asserted belief in slavery as a &#8220;positive good,&#8221; on the one hand, and Ben Shapiro&#8217;s insistence on using biologically correct pronouns, on the other hand.
Open discourse and civil respect for opposing viewpoints is a cornerstone of the liberal, post-Enlightenment Western geopolitical order. Indeed, such open discourse and civil respect for harshly opposing viewpoints is what famously animated <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Lincoln-Douglas-debates">both Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas</a> in their 1858 debate series. The debates themselves were fine and dandy; indeed, they were wondrous spectacles for a public ensorcelled by the statesmen&#8217;s dueling positions on Dred Scott, slavery in the western U.S. territories, and the question of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/13394/five-lessons-abraham-lincoln-would-have-todays-josh-hammer">judicial supremacy</a>. Instead, where public discourse and sentiment went awry was when violence broke out and the secessionist insurrectionists ultimately fired upon Fort Sumter. Eve Fairbanks, who presumably would have objected to the very spectacle of Lincoln and Douglas debating each other, would do well to learn such a rudimentary lesson.

Illustration Of Lincoln And Douglas Debate, c. 1858.

HAMMER: Washington Post Contributor Compares Pleas For Tolerance And Civility To Antebellum Slavery. She’s Comically Misguided.

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Dave Rubin Launches ‘Locals,’ A New Venture To Combat Big Tech Censorship

HAMMER: Washington Post Contributor Compares Pleas For Tolerance And Civility To Antebellum Slavery. She’s Comically Misguided.