Leftists across the internet cheered Saturday as tech platform Cloudflare announced it would no longer allow online forum Kiwi Farms to use its service.
Kiwi Farms had been described as a “hate site,” allegedly for harassing transgender people, doxxing political opposition on the left, and saying “mean” and “bigoted” things about certain sexual and racial minorities, including sending death threats.
Visitors to the forum were greeted by a Cloudflare “block” page alongside a link to the company’s press release explaining the decision.
“This is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare’s role as an internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with,” the company said. “However, the rhetoric on the Kiwi Farms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwi Farms or any other customer before.”
That “immediate threat to human life” referred to posts on the site about transgender Twitch streamer Keffals, a man who thinks he’s a woman.
Keffals claimed that Kiwi Farms was mounting a harassment campaign involving abuse and death threats against him, and that he feared for his life.
Now, to be fair to Cloudflare, the content on Kiwi Farms was pretty vile. Racial and sexist epithets flowed freely, and the site had an unhealthy obsession with several strange individuals.
The site—originally founded as the CWCki Forums—documented and harassed one man, Christian Weston Chandler. The forum persuaded the autistic Chandler to do horrific acts both to himself and others.
The forum eventually expanded and focused on others, changing its name to Kiwi Farms in the process, but the initial cataloging of Chandler’s life by the forum makes him one of the most documented men on the Internet.
There exists an ongoing 66-part documentary series detailing Chandler’s life on YouTube, created mostly with information gleaned from Kiwi Farms.
Simply put, Kiwi Farms was not a good place. But what Kiwi Farms did isn’t unique.
The forum is far from the only wretched hive of scum and villainy online. Multitudes of leftists routinely send death threats to conservatives, gleefully revel in right-wingers’ deaths, and organize mass campaigns to harass those who don’t toe the leftist line.
In an ironic twist, it appears Keffals himself may have engaged in some of the behavior for which he accused Kiwi Farms.
In a thread on Twitter, user Fredrick Brennan revealed a series of messages appearing to show Keffals admitting he told someone to kill himself.
Or take the ongoing harassment of Supreme Court justices outside their homes. Their home addresses can still be found on popular social media site Reddit, paired with numerous threats of violence.
As the New York Post reported back in June, a man who flew from California with the intention to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh found the latter’s address online.
Is doxxing people bad? Only when it’s against people like Keffals. If it’s “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, she deserves it for being against biologically male transgender people invading women’s spaces.
While Kiwi Farms is roundly castigated and scrubbed from all corners of the internet for its despicable content, Keffals and the protesters outside the justices’ homes are feted for doing the exact same thing.
Leftists have achieved such dominance in the West that they’ve realized the rules just don’t apply to them anymore. Harassment, death threats, doxxing, and violence are only a problem when the right does it.
After the Judicial Crisis Network tweeted an article profiling the protesters who spend their evenings harassing the justices outside their homes, one of those same protesters called on Twitter users to report the Judicial Crisis Network for harassment.
Apparently, you can harass the justices, but God forbid you get called out for it.
That means the left is nearly impossible to take down if there isn’t a seismic shift in how rules are enforced. It isn’t enough to simply call out hypocrisy anymore; action must be taken.
Although conservatives might grumble about how leftists consider the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot to be the worst event in history while conveniently ignoring months of violent rioting by Black Lives Matter and Antifa in 2020, what does that grumbling change?
Has anyone connected with that rioting been punished? Not really, but you can bet we’ll hear endless chiding by our leftist betters about how political violence is unacceptable—unless, of course, it’s in support of a cause they like, and suddenly it’s OK again.
Conservatives will never save America if the rules are unequally enforced. We must not only call out leftist hypocrisy wherever it appears, but ensure punishments are meted out equally when those rules are broken.
Social media companies like Reddit don’t get to enforce rules unequally on their platforms and still claim neutrality, and neither should leftists expect to break the law with impunity. When conservatives have power, it’s not enough to grumble about how the left breaks the rules without consequences; they need to ensure the left suffers for doing so.
None of this is to say that the right should become the very thing it seeks to destroy. There is a real risk in overcorrecting. But the Kiwi Farms hypocrisy makes it clear that the left knows it plays by a different set of rules than the rest of us.
Kiwi Farms is terrible, but the left is terrible, too.
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