In the past few weeks, I’ve been extremely honored, blessed, and humbled, to have been invited to a number of events involving fellow writers, thinkers, dissidents, weirdos, and Freight Nerds, many of whom I have met via my writings, or online; and when I say online, I mean mostly on Twitter/X.
To a person, everyone I met who is connected to me via my online persona have asked the same question - why is it you keep being kicked off Twitter? What did you do?
Some of my closer associates know the story, roughly, but I keep being asked why, and I don’t have a solid answer, only theories. Part of the reason for that is the opaque system by which Twitter deals with those whom they throw off the platform, and the even more opaque and utterly impenetrable appeal system they ‘offer’ to those whom have found themselves in Bird Gulag.
In an effort to answer that question for people, and point them somewhere to read it so as I don’t have to recount the story again in person, AND, as a ‘Hail Mary’ pass in the hopes that some human at Twitter might read this and adjucate my appeals, properly, and give me back one or all of my accounts, here is the whole stupid saga.
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In 2016, my wife and I came back from working and traveling overseas, and settled in the place where she grew up, which required that I get a Green Card so as to live and work in the United States. 2016 was also the year that most social media completely melted down with the candidacy and ultimate victory of Donald Trump as President of The United States. Given my unorthodox political views, poasting on Facebook became an untenable position under a zeitgeist of increasing polarization and the mimetic contagion which drove it, and at some point in early 2017 I permanently deleted my Facebook account. Up to that point it was the only social media I had ever used, and, to be honest, I still didn’t understand the implications of what social media was, or what it all meant, in toto.
I’m an intellectually curious person, and something of a politics and ideas junkie. It was somewhat difficult listening to podcasts and various other media discussing various issues and the news of the day, while these outlets were also constantly referencing what people were saying about it online, specifically what was being said on Twitter.
Who are all of these Twitter accounts? Why is everyone always talking about the talking going on within Twitter? Frogs? Frogs are dangerous? WTF?
After about an 18 month break from interacting with the world via social media, I decided to start experimenting with Twitter, in much the same way a young man experiments with LSD; for my money, the first attempt at Twitter did not take into account Timothy Leary’s dictums about Set and Setting, and it wasn’t a productive trip.
I ended up starting and closing two accounts, as it took me a little while to wrap my head around the banter. Rhetorical jousting on Twitter is a world of nuance and peculiarity, full of semantics and memes and language that takes time for the uninitiated to understand. Some of the best friends I have made from Twitter were pretty vicious to my first accounts; mostly because I had no idea what I had gotten into, nor did I ‘get it’. Thankfully most of them have no connection between the me now and the me then who initially stuck my head above the trench.
At some point in 2018 I settled on my third account, (at)token_blue or Token Blue Collar Friend. The handle reflected something of my own personal life; in my travels around the world, I was often rolling with people from the ‘E-Mail’ job or professional caste, and this weird social dynamic carried on into my marriage. It appeared to me at this stage of my experimentation with Twitter that the user base was overrepresented by non-working class people; the handle seemed apropos.
Throughout 2018 and 2019 I picked up a few friends within Twitter who are still with me to this day - BoiltOwl, Dios, Bog Beef and Maarek from The Good Ol Boyz podcast, Gwynneplaine, Oliver Bateman, and any number of other Anons and Semi Anons. 2018 was also the first time I had a major connection happen via Twitter - Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie saw my discussions on the trucking industry, especially the new ELD mandate, and asked me to contribute a letter to a committee he was a member of. You can read that letter here.
As 2020 moved into Wuhan Plague Insanity, and our online lives supplanted the real lives already at risk from the technological impositions of The Machine, these relationships solidified, and were re-enforced as the online world became the only place where we could voice our resistance to this new biopolitical regime.
Somewhere along the way in 2020 my friend Oliver Bateman had written an article about how government regulation of the supplements that body builders and health enthusiasts used was going to cause more problems than they solved. I made a reply in his Twitter thread advertising this piece - “You should see what the government has done to the trucking industry.” and Oliver immediately invited me on to the podcast he co-hosted at the time with Aimee Terese, called “What’s Left?” Aimee’s involvement in my little story here will become apparent very soon.
In November 2020, I accepted Oliver’s invitation, and appeared on the show to discuss the trucking business and the problems of its operational side being overregulated by the government. According to Oliver, it was a pretty successful episode, even though his co-host Aimee was not present; within a couple of weeks, it had been downloaded or listened to over 25,000 times. To give you a comparison to my own show, only one episode of Voice Of GO(r)D has been listened to in excess of 4 digits, nevermind 5.
Back to Aimee.
Ms Terese has a bit of a history on Twitter - she is quite popular, and is a major critic, like many others, of the retarded political regime we live under, and the powerful groups of people who run it. So much so that Aimee raised the ire of online vigilante groups whom are useful idiots for the Democratic Party; they have their own Discord servers and other platforms where they share intelligence and screenshots, and basically chase people around the internet, attempting to have them thrown off various popular social media sites, including Twitter.
Within a few weeks of my interview with Oliver, I was suspended from Twitter. It was a pretty clear cut case of drive-by offense archaeology - the offending tweet was a reply which comprised of two words “cunt/cunty”. Completely pulled out of context, not aimed at anyone, it was a humorous attempt to make fun of myself, as if those were my pronouns. The poster to whom I was replying got the joke, and ‘liked’ the reply. No matter - according to Twitter, this two word reply amounted to hate speech.
At first I thought that the subject matter of my discussions with Oliver had elicited anger on the part of powerful forces within trucking; anyone who follows this Substack knows that I am not a fan of the American Trucking Association or the carriers whom they represent. Do they employ vigilantes to chase people around the internet? Seems unlikely.
On a phone call with Oliver in an attempt to figure out what was going on, he had informed me about his (now former) podcast partner and her issues with these vigilantes; Aimee Terese has now been kicked off and returned to Twitter so many times that its hard to figure out if the whole thing isn’t some weird PsyOp.
I was left with these two possibilities - either someone in the world of trucking didn’t like me, or the vigilantes who have spent years chasing Aimee across the internet put me in their sights, and I was now guilty by association.
Twitter has an appeal system, which is mostly automated, and if it is monitored by humans at all, it is monitored by the usual suspects one might find in Silicon Valley - progressive leftists with an axe to grind against anyone who doesn’t conform to the orthodoxy of the day.
This presented another problem for me, as I was very vocal in my opposition to the strictures of the Wuhan Plague Overreaction. In late 2020 and early 2021, the fear around Covid had reached a fever pitch, and many people were being attacked or outright cancelled from social media for expressing any criticism to this new regime.
I must have appealed my suspension 17 times; I even sent a letter, good ol’ Snail Mail, to Twitter HQ in San Francisco. In the letter I documented my positions, explained the offending tweet as a joke at my own expense, and also described the issues involved in being associated with Aimee Terese, as well as possibly having developed enemies in the trucking industry. No matter; eventually, after all of these attempts at getting my account back, Twitter stopped replying to my appeals. Wether or not this was algorithmic, or a human looked at my account and said “Fuck this plague-rat right wing fascist”, I was getting nowhere.
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Like so many others who have faced this problem of being thrown off Twitter, which has become the de-facto town square, a commons where ideas and discussions take place, I made the choice to come back under another name. It is possible to do, if you take the right technical precautions - a new SIM card for your phone, using a VPN and a different browser on your laptop, etc.
A few months after exhausting my patience with Twitter’s unresponsive appeal system, I restarted as (at)GhostOfGord, and immediately got about the business of ‘finding my frens’.
It is now late 2021, and a solid year and a half into the Wuhan Plague Overreaction; the cancellations were legion, and pressure to suppress speech from our state corporatist overlords was intense. If you haven’t read The Twitter Files from Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger + Co, then I heartily suggest that you do - they provide great context for what happened to me and thousands of others in the same situation.
Things back home in my native Canada at this time were getting wild. The government of the venal and vindictive Justin Trudeau had imposed medical apartheid on those areas of life that are Federally regulated, including transportation. No Vaxx card, no getting on an aircraft, train, bus, or ferry; the provincial premiers were doing much the same, and in the case of Francois Legault of Quebec, he literally barred the unvaccinated from going anywhere except the grocery store or pharmacy, and even then, those locations were required to send a minder around the store, such that our new Star of David wearers could only purchase the most essential of items.
(While we are here - never, ever, ever, EVER forget that they did this. The offending politicians AND THEIR SUPPORTERS must be shunned from polite society forever for what they did to Canada, no exceptions; unless they apologize, admit fault, and atone for their sins, and good luck with that.)
In January of 2022, Trudeau announced yet another vindictive policy - all truckers crossing the border into the United States, which in Canada is to say most truckers, would have to take the new mRNA experimental gene therapy into their lives, or they would be forced into a 14 day quarantine after every trip back into Canada, which would render them essentially out of a job.
Enter the Freedom Convoy.
Everyone who follows me knows what happened next - in expressing solidarity with my fellow countrymen and fellow truckers, I returned to Canada and hung out in Ottawa for the first weekend of the protest. On Twitter, I posted live videos, some of whom went viral, which showed the expressions of love and solidarity on the part of everyone who was there.
These videos, matched with my various podcast appearances and blogging activity discussing the trucking business, as well as my Twitter poasting critical of Trudeau and his policies, attracted the attention of some big names in the media.
I was invited to write for Newsweek magazine (thanks Batya!), and my first piece for them likewise went viral, and attracted further interest from other corners of the media.
Then, this happened -
Within 36 hours of this 5 minute appearance on February 11 2022, where Laura Ingraham did most of the talking, the same people who had me removed from Twitter the first time traced my Newsweek article to me and to my old account (not hard to do, I suppose) and I was suspended again for Ban Evasion.
One of my oldest friends in the world, who I hadn’t heard from in awhile (which I assume was from Wuhan Plague Regime induced psychosis) texted me on Sunday, February 13, my 43rd birthday, and told me to never talk to her again.
No questions, no discussion, just get out. Kinda like how Twitter got rid of me, too.
The following day Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergency Measures Act, and just like I was zapped from Twitter at the push of a button, so to did the bank accounts of hundreds of people across Canada, and their mortgages, insurance, business accounts, and economic lives, get blasted into digital and real life oblivion.
4 men arrested in Alberta that same time in connection with these protests remain in custody to this day, with neither trial nor bail afforded them; they have committed no crime, other than like myself and so many others, having raised their voices and said ‘Enough is Enough.’
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Despite all of this, I was still being invited to write at various outlets, and during Freedom Convoy, I appeared on many podcasts to discuss the implications of what was going on. It felt like I could get by without a Twitter account.
Some months later, I thought, what the hell, let’s try and get back on to BirdApp under yet another name, do the tech, take the risk. If nothing else, my projects of trying to better the trucking industry and promote my writings to that end needed a way to get to those whom were well placed to assist in that project - academics, media people, other commentators, politicians. All of those people are mostly to be found on Twitter; the place has more gravity than a black hole, and there is no escaping it.
I did all the tech stuff (again) and came back under the name (at)driverautonomy, which follows the name of this Substack, as well as one of the areas I focus on, which is the narrative around autonomous vehicle technology, and what effects myself and fellow truckers will be facing once this tech is implemented.
In the meantime, I also started this Substack, and a Podcast, and Twitter was the only marketing vehicle I had. As I churned out the content, my modest following grew, and (at)driverautonomy got very close to the same number of followers I had on (at)GhostOfGord before that account was nuked, which was a little over 3000 people. I took pains to check every new follower, to make sure that my numbers weren’t inflated by the various robot accounts which plague Twitter, nor the various humans who act like robots in their slavish devotion to the Current Thing. Anyone who even remotely smelled like the kind of Leftoid loser who had given me a hard time on my previous accounts was instantly blocked. My 3000 followers were legit.
And then, this summer, WHAM, I was booted again. The excuse this time was a reply to a tweet which was a quote from a great film directed by Quentin Tarantino. The quote was carefully ________ blanked enough to avoid offense, and the wording around it sufficiently vague that no one could possibly find fault.
Perhaps it was merely a coincidence that this ban came within days of me releasing this podcast with Margaret Mackay, an advocate for The Coutts 4. Trudeau and his government are probably not interested in the airing of Canada’s dirtiest laundry.
Again, the appeal was denied.
Again, I made the tech adjustments, and came back under yet another account, this time modeled as if to be an official account of an artist or famous person, but instead it was merely the official account of my podcast.
That lasted about 55 hours, and this time the wording from Twitter was a bit off, like it had been written by a person, and not a script bot. I was accused of multiple offenses and repeatedly breaking Twitter rules. For an account that was only 55 hours old, and hadn’t so much as used a four letter word nor posted a meme.
”repeatedly breaking Twitter rules”
There it was. Someone at Twitter had connected this account to old ones, and instead of calling it Ban Evasion, they messed up, and accused a 55 hour old account of the supposed crimes of those much older.
Someone at Twitter was out to get me.
Is it a spook from the Canadian Government? The Twitter Files showed how far up Twitters ass are America’s various 3 lettered ‘security’ agencies, directing the company to censor people on behalf of the state, in clear violation of the First Amendment. It’s not hard to imagine agents of Trudeau are in there doing the same, maybe even under cover as employees; especially that I’m really cooking with the Coutts 4 story, where it has been published in Newsweek, twice.
Or maybe it is that Musk really isn’t all that serious about his claims to supporting and promoting free speech. Maybe his thinning of Twitter’s herd didn’t go far enough, and there are still a number of obese purple hairs suffering gender confusion employed by him and taking out their dementia on accounts that they don’t like.
Or maybe he fired too many people? Wouldn’t it be nice to have some humans handy, maybe with a customer service line, so users could at least get a fair shot of defending themselves, especially those of us who are clearly being attacked for political reasons?
I keep hearing about Big Name accounts being let back on the site after having been suspended for whatever reason, and I have to wonder if there’s some secret back door, some tiny little committee that adjucates cases that only the well connected are allowed to send them. You would think, having written for Newsweek and Compact and UnHerd and The American Conservative and counting amongst my friends those in the highest reaches of the media half of The Cathedral, that I could somehow call in a favor, or have someone do it for me.
You would be wrong.
Maybe someone else will send this to Twitter for me, a Hail Mary pass necessitated by some upcoming writing projects that will require a certain type of online marketing that I would prefer to execute myself. I’d be in your debt if you could, even though it appears a long shot.
The accounts in question
https://twitter.com/token_blue
https://twitter.com/ghostofgord
https://twitter.com/driverautonomy
https://twitter.com/voice_of_gord
Thanks in advance
gordilocks@protonmail.com
Interesting story. I’ve never delved into the twitterverse. I’m thinking it will be a black hole for me and I’ll lose myself. Otherwise I’d give you a hand. Really thankful for all of the visibility you provide on the death of Canada. Thanks for sharing the Fox piece, hadn’t seen it before. Keep up the great work and raising awareness of the Coutts boys.