Conservative Web Host: We Will Never Ban Customers for Legal Speech
Christopher Bedford is on the front lines when it comes to fighting Big Tech and left-wing organizations’ online efforts to censure and even erase conservative voices.
As co-founder of the web hosting company RightForge, Bedford is helping clients survive attacks from the left, including assisting the crowdsourcing platform GiveSendGo after GoFundMe revealed its leftist leanings and refused to give millions raised there to support the Freedom Convoy 2022 of truckers in Canada that are protesting the government’s vaccine mandates. Hackers tried to take down GiveSendGo, and even the Canadian government threatened the platform. Bedford said that the Christian founders of GiveSendGo are now forging ahead on their own and have raised almost $10 million for the truckers. But he told Breitbart News that conservatives, in general, are being forced to create a parallel universe to counter the left’s efforts to silence them, including online. This month I joined RightForge. While I’ve devoted my life to journalism (& will continue to), everything is at stake; if the internet is not free, honest journalism itself is threatened, along with honest political debate, education, science, & the rest.https://t.co/EGBhY193fs — Christopher Bedford (@CBedfordDC) October 13, 2021 “I think the Internet ought to be free,” said Bedford, who also is a senior editor at the Federalist. “The Internet ought to be a highway essentially, that folks can use. We’re not trying to go out there and build a conservative Internet ... we’re trying to build a Bill of Rights.” Bedford said the Internet had become the opposite of free, including servers like Amazon Web Services shutting down the conservative platform Parler. “So we’ve seen warning shots,” Bedford said. “Previously, we’ve seen companies taken down, we’ve seen Google demonetizing different folks for pushing the wrong agendas and ones that they didn’t agree with.” “We’ve seen people shadow banned,” Bedford said. “We’ve seen people kicked off of Twitter, we saw the President United States kicked off Twitter,” Bedford said, calling the censorship of conservatives “an attack on the American dream.” “The whole idea of the American Dream is if you don’t like something, or you think you can do something better, then go try and do it.” And Bedford said on the record that RightForge would not de-platform anyone who is expressing legal free speech. “In order for a customer to be removed from our platform, we would have to have the Department of Justice come to us with proof of illegal activity,” Bedford said. But the left’s online power is the real threat, Bedford said. “Social media is like the shiny beacon that gets a lot of attention because it’s so public and so many people experience it,” Bedford said. “But the real, deep, dangerous threat to American freedoms you can find in the servers like Amazon Web Services. You can find it in the banking sector.” “Those companies that won’t do business with gun manufacturers,” Bedford said. “You can find it in places like MailChimp and GoFundMe and other places that say, ‘We’re not going to help you.” So is this the start of a parallel economy? “Unfortunately, we’re at a place where conservatives and free thinkers — not even conservatives — are being kicked out of access to our economy,” Bedford said. “And so they have to form their own.” “Fortunately for us we know how to do that,” Bedford said. “We have the technology — banking and internet servers and things like that — while extremely complicated and capital intensive, are not copyrighted technologies.” Follow Penny Starr on Twitter.
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