Yesterday I got an email from "Google Publisher Policy" telling me that my page christopherchantrill.com had been in violation of its "Google Publisher Policies." As follows:
- New violations were detected. As a result, ad serving has been restricted or disabled on pages where these violations of the AdSense Program Policies were found.
Who, me? I thought? Let's look at Google's "Google Publisher Policy." For instance: "We do not allow content that:
- incites hatred against, promotes discrimination of, or disparages an individual or group on the basis of their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization.
Examples: Promoting hate groups or hate group paraphernalia, encouraging others to believe that a person or group is inhuman, inferior, or worthy of being hated
I think that what Google didn't like was my blog post "My '1584 Project'" from a couple of days ago. In that post I made the argument that, if Nikole Hannah-Jones was going to push her "1619 Project" that dramatized the arrival of the first slaves in North America as the true founding of the US -- Talk about inciting hatred! -- then I had the right to come up with a counter-narrative.
If NHJ was going to represent 1619 as the true founding, how about 1584, which was the date that the Roanoke Colony was founded. And what was the Roanoke Colony all about? It was all about cleansing England of its "waste population," according to scholar Nancy Isenberg in White Trash. So you tell me which is the true founding of America? Sending the waste population of Europe to the Americas or sending slaves to North America? Both pretty shameful if you ask me.
But here is what I think triggered Google's hate speech AI thingy. I included a paragraph from Isenberg's book that listed all the pejoratives used over the years to describe White Trash:
Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tuckies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White [N-word]. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people.
[My bold]. In the original I did not use "N-word." I used the original unredacted text -- once used by white supremacists and now by black rap artists -- in the interest of scholarly accuracy. But, of course, Google's Department of Ideological Conformity would have found [N-word] and flagged it as an example of "incites hatred..." and so forth.
Truth is, of course, that the noble task of purging our society of hatred and all the rest is not quite as simple as flagging banned words, Google. And I suggest to you, Google, that you are starting down a rabbit hole that will end in nothing but hate and violence, and you will find yourself, Google, in the middle of the cross-fire.
Indeed, as we hurtle into what seems like a revolutionary and inquisitorial maelstrom, with defenders of the establishment like Google trying to push back on the barbarian hordes, the only question to me is the size of the butcher's bill.
But, of course, the midwits operating the Google Publisher Policies have No Idea about this. Defending the ruling class and its orthodoxy and its perquisites is just what a good Googler does, instinctively, because that is what he or she has been carefully taught, from year to year, in his or her dear little ear.
The only good thing about this, I reckon, is that the folks at Google and elsewhere in tech are flying blind. Or, to change the metaphor, they are like a colonialist army marching up some mountain valley in Afghanistan, utterly blind to the unseen bandits watching from the heights.
The Google guys really do not know what they are getting into. And neither, I suspect, does anyone else.
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