In an abrupt reversal amid an ongoing online firestorm, YouTube announced Wednesday
that it would block conservative commentator Steven Crowder from making
any money on videos he uploaded to the site, following a torrent of
outrage from left-wing groups about insulting remarks he made about a
gay political personality working at Vox.

YouTube,
a Google subsidiary, claimed Crowder had engaged in a “continued
egregious actions that have harmed the broader community,” but
acknowledged that Crowder’s videos “did not violate our Community Guidelines.”
The company stopped short of banning Crowder and deleting his videos
entirely, as many progressive groups and journalists demanded.

Crowder’s
demonetization, in turn, prompted conservatives to renew charges of
large-scale censorship and hypocrisy against the big tech giant. Several
right-leaning content creators, as well as nonpartisan journalists
documenting hate speech, charged that YouTube was engaged in an broad
“purge” Wednesday against their channels, which were not directly
related to the Crowder dispute.

“Vox is still going to be
pissed; they’re not going to be happy with this,” Crowder said in a
video posted to his Twitter account after learning about YouTube’s
action, calling the situation a brewing “Adpocalypse.” Crowder has more
than 3.7 million subscribers on YouTube.

“It’s not a win,” he
continued, “because their goal is to completely get rid of people. We’re
at a point in time right now where people can still have a voice, but a
lot of people are going to lose their ability to lose revenue.”

“Their goal is to completely get rid of people.”— Steven Crowder

In
a livestream Wednesday afternoon, Crowder highlighted a series of
unpunished hateful comments made by liberal commentators — including
Stephen Colbert’s reference to President Trump as “Putin’s c–kholster,”
and Samantha Bee’s mockery of Ivanka Trump as a “feckless c–t.”

The
episode began May 30 with a viral Twitter post by left-wing Vox
personality Carlos Maza, which contained video montage of derogatory
comments Crowder had made about Maza in the past two years. In the
various clips, Crowder variously refers to Maza as an “angry little
queer,” a “gay Mexican,” and “Mr. Lispy queer from Vox.”

Maza, an
openly gay partisan activist, has himself previously used aggressive
language on social media. “Milkshake them all,” he wrote May 21,
referring to right-wing activists. “Humiliate them at every turn. Make
them dread public organizing.”

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As Los Angeles officials were wasting taxpayer dollars to virtue-signal about Alabama’s abortion ban, the homeless crisis in the city increased by 16% while the overall county saw an increase of 12%.

According to the Los Angeles Times,
the number of people now living on the streets, in vehicles, or in
shelters steadily increased throughout the past year, following a small
decrease in the previous year.

“The annual point-in-time count,
delivered to the Board of Supervisors, put the number of homeless people
just shy of 59,000 countywide,” reports the outlet. “Within the city of
Los Angeles, the number soared to more than 36,000, a 16% increase.”

“And as in past years, most — about 75% — were living outside, fueling speculation of a growing public health crisis of rats and trash near homeless encampments downtown,” the report continued.

Officials
largely blame the problem on the lack of affordable housing while
vowing to pledge more taxpayer dollars into supposedly “fixing” the
problem. So far, government programs have done little to help. For
instance, the city’s Measure H sales tax
from 2017 barely scratched the surface of the problem by helping to get
roughly 20,000 people off the streets only to be outpaced by the number
of people that were becoming homeless.

“If we don’t change the
fundamentals of housing affordability, this is going to be a very long
road,” Peter Lynn, executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless
Services Authority, told the Times. “If we don’t get ahead of
affordability, we’re going to be very hard pressed to get ahead of
homelessness.”

“Overall, the service portion of the effort on mental health,
substance use, the issue of housing, rent subsidies, those are important
and we should stay the course,” County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas
told the Times. “Where we have to work much harder is in the area of
affordable housing.”

Ridley-Thomas admitted that the numbers are
deeply discouraging following the small downturn in homelessness that
the previous year showed.

“At this point of unprecedented wealth
in the county of Los Angeles, we are equally confronted with
unprecedented poverty manifesting itself in the form of homelessness,”
County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas told the Times. “Last year’s count,
we felt we were trimming in a way that would suggest we were getting
our arms around this. And yet this year we are pretty well stunned by
this data.”

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In August 2018, President Donald Trump revoked former CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance.

.@POTUS revokes security clearance for former CIA director John Brennan https://t.co/QZrKVuD4LY pic.twitter.com/847QEo2pW5

— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 15, 2018

On Tuesday Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) said that the Deep State
ignored President Trump’s order last summer to revoke former CIA Chief
John Brennan’s security clearance.

According to a report out by the New York Times, John Brennan, a rabid Trump hater, still has his security clearance because the White House never followed through with the complex bureaucratic work it would have taken to strip the clearance.

Attempts to revoked Brennan’s security clearance were “hampered by
aides who slow-rolled the President and by Justice Department officials
who fought Trump, warning he was jeopardizing national security,”
reported the Times.

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Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have reportedly amassed a
“lobbying army” as they prepare to deal with an increasing amount of
antitrust investigations and calls to break up the Silicon Valley
Masters of the Universe.

Although America’s largest tech companies have historically stayed
away from lobbying Congress, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have transformed into some of the largest influencers in Washington, D.C.

The four technology giants have spent a combined $55 million on
lobbying in 2018, doubling their previous record $27.4 million spent in
2016, and some of the tech companies are spending at an even higher rate
this year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The tech companies’ rapid hiring of lobbyists arises as the House
Judiciary Committee announced that it will start a “top-to-bottom”
investigation of America’s largest tech giants, the Donald Trump
Department of Justice (DOJ) said it will investigate Google for potential antitrust violations, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has reportedly started asking Amazon’s rivals about the e-commerce giant’s business practices.

Big Tech’s rapidly growing influence puts
these companies at relative parity with traditional lobbying
powerhouses such as the defense, automobile, and banking industries.

The four tech companies have reportedly amassed 238 lobbyists for the
first quarter of 2019, both in-house and contracted lobbyists; roughly
75 percent of the lobbyists come from government offices or political
campaigns.

Big Tech’s lobbying influence extends to calls with members of
Congress, advertising, funding of think-tanks, and efforts to influence
President Donald Trump, who has occasionally criticized Big Tech’s
censorship of conservatives and even Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ ownership of
the establishment Washington Post.

Breitbart News has reported that
Google has donated to conservative think-tanks and publications such as
the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Competitive Enterprise
Institute (CEI), the National Review, the Cato Institute, the American Conservative Union (ACU). Many of these institutions, such as the National Review and
CEI have been critical of calls to rein-in Big Tech’s dominant status
and censorship of conservative and alternative viewpoints.

Sheila Krumholz, the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, told the New York Times that these companies have ramped up their lobbying efforts.

Krumholz said, “They are no longer upstarts dipping a toe in lobbying. They have both feet in.”

Big Tech also has rapidly picked up former high-level congressional staffers to increase their influence on Capitol Hill.

Facebook hired Catlin O’Neill, who worked as Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s
(D-CA) chief of staff, and who now works as the company’s American
director of public policy for the social media giant. Pelosi reportedly
received nearly $43,000 in total donations during the 2018 midterm cycle
from employees and political action committees (PACs) of the Big Tech
companies, each of which ranks among her top sources of campaign cash.
Pelosi has typically served as a champion of Big Tech companies.

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