Who’d Write-In The Name “Kamala Harris”

Ironic that the political party hysterically warning the end of democracy put forward a Presidential candidate who never received a vote from its members.

Being that I’m an independent, and view both political parties as completely corrupt, I won’t vote for either candidate. It won’t make a difference. Massachusetts will vote Democrat. That too, the gerrymandering from both parties, is part of the duopoly’s SOP.

“If voting meant anything they wouldn’t let us do it.”

For the past year, I’ve been meaning to write about political repression. Where to start? Anything I say will sound trivial. As the complaints of a cynic who doesn’t believe in anything. Of course, I do believe in quite a few things, but they aren’t what’s important to most people — like if Trump wins or not.

I believe in free speech. The freedom to produce political satire.

Admittedly, that’s self-serving.

I don’t believe in conspiracies. But I do believe people can get the same idea, at the same time, and what they do, might look conspiratorial.

One of those ideas is Trump should be muted. An idea that is driving most corporations.

I began to notice that when I began producing satirical YouTube shorts. Here’s one about Biden and the “objects” (balloons).

I learned how to work the YouTube algorithm so I could reach 2,000 viewers. I couldn't get past it. My videos weren’t going viral. The reason was simple — viewers didn’t like my videos enough to share them. Nothing to do with YT. All me. If anything, I was thankful YT made it possible for me to get a couple of thousand viewers to try.

In April I started making more political garbage videos about Trump and Biden.

I created pointed political satire videos like this and decided to “promote” them through advertising; that is, YouTube has a way to “promote” one’s video if you pay for some advertising. So I paid — or tried to pay — $10 per video.

YouTube would not accept my money, claiming I had broke their “electioneering rules” and pretty much blacklisted most of my videos from their advertising system! Why? Because they deemed me, I guess, another Russian troll.

I sent them emails, I had some conversations with Googlers, that I was doing satire! SATIRE. I should have free speech. None seemed to personally disagree with me but the system was programmed the way it was programmed.

What am I going to do. Sue YouTube for not taking my money (they’re probably doing me a favor).

Anyway, YouTube is programmed to essentially remove all advertising for videos that mention Trump or Biden. Unless…

They’re videos paid for by the two main political parties. They can do it because YouTube has a complex vetting process, for electioneering, where lawyers send in the right forms. I too filled out those forms, but I must have missed something because my “promotions” were always rejected — even on videos having nothing to do with Trump or Biden.

Then there was the problem of voices. I used synthetic voices from ElevenLabs. I created one for Trump and one for Biden. They were deleted. Think about that. If there’s any voice you should be able to satirize it’s a Presidential candidate!

I complained to ElevenLabs about my freedom to do satire.

Nothing.

I sent a letter to the FTC about it.

No reply.

Think about it, you can create almost any “voice” on these systems but those of Trump or Biden (or Harris now I assume).

It isn’t Congress who is passing laws against creating these voices. It is political pressure by the government acting on the behalf of private political parties. Did I mention deep corruption?

Let’s recap where we’re at. The political parties:

1. Don’t allow their members to vote for a party candidate.
2. Gerrymander.
3. Have bullied the social networks so that only their content can be promoted.
4. Have scared the AI companies into removing anything having to do with Presidential candidates.
5. Have hidden most Presidential election posts on their platforms.

Again, I am NOT COMPLAINING! Really, it is what it is. I’m small beans. I’m not even a whole bean. Who cares if I can’t pay $10 for more viewers of a Trump or Biden video? It was just an experiment.

An experiment that taught me again how democracy and free speech isn’t what it used to be, if it ever was.