Andy the Gabby Cabby posted another video yesterday discussing mad right-winger Alex Belfield’s suspension from YouTube. The Cabby didn’t appear himself, but gave the video over to Belfield to say what had happened. According to Belfield, he’d been suspended for several reasons. One was the factcheckers complaining against his remarks about Covid. The second was because he’d been contacted by a journalist for the Times, who wanted to ask him about the smears against Keir Stalin that appeared on one his videos and accused him of making them. Belfield states that he doesn’t even appear in the video and that it’s just Boris Johnson speaking. He therefore called the hack a ‘farthead’, and so got himself banned on that account. And the remarks left by his commenters suggest that it was also because of his personal comments about Carol Vorderman. Not that he seems dismayed by the ban. He talks about having expected it 1 1/2 years ago, and is proud of all the support he’s had from his fans, who he regards as a real family., He’s going to set up his private VOR club, charging a pound a week, which’ll be set up in March.
I’m not surprised that Belfield got a strike against him because of his attitude to the Coronavirus. He’s one of a number of right-wingers, who don’t believe that the disease is all that bad and urge the lockdown to be lifted. He does, however, urge everyone to take the vaccine and has been very careful about what he says about it. But clearly, not careful enough. This comes after 157 medical professionals wrote to YouTube urging that it ban Joe Rogan because one of his guests was sceptical about the efficacy of the lockdown. This was followed by Neil Young taking his videos off the platform, or threatening to.
I can sort of sympathise with him to a certain extent with the Times journo after the way its sister paper smeared Mike as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. Nevertheless, even if Belfield didn’t speak on the video and it was all Johnson, the video repeated a terrible, dangerous smear that Belfield didn’t correct. A smear that has resulted in the Labour leader being mobbed, vilified and receiving death threats. And no, I don’t have much sympathy for him, not when he and the other Blairites were all too keen to smear decent , anti-racist women and men as anti-Semites. This was even when they’d opposed real Fascism and anti-Semitism all their lives, like Mark Wadsworth, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and so many others, and were themselves Jewish, like Walker and Greenstein. Because of those smears, these people have been viciously abused and received death threats. Jackie Walker talks about some of the horrendous messages she’s had in one of her videos. She’s been told she should be lynched – an especially horrible comment as her mother was a southern American Black civil rights activist – and she should be cut up, set on fire and her body dumped in bin bags. One entirely blameless Jewish lady in Devon had her car firebombed after the Campaign for Anti-Semitism declared that she was an anti-Semite. These smears are all because these people supported Jeremy Corbyn and/or opposed the Israeli state’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Or else like Mike they dared to correct the fake history pushed by the Labour apparat to show that those accused were innocent.
As for Belfield vanishing behind a paywall, this may well be the end of his popularity. He may retain his fandom, but I can’t see it growing again without the massive public exposure through YouTube. Even if it’s only a pound, people don’t like paywalls, as some of the newspapers have found with their online content. Besides this, there are still unanswered questions about his legal entanglements. Jim Round, one of the great commenters on this blog, has remarked
‘This was predicted by some as the July court case gets closer, he has still not admitted that he is the defendant, and refused to answer questions about donations.
It is not a “ban” as such, as he is still deleting a lot of his content, Playboard is your friend here.
With regards to free speech, as said before, Belfield is quite hypocritical here as if you disagree with him, you get cut off, abused and/or harrassed by him.
I know what you are getting at with over zealous T&C’s but human nature will always unfortunately bring out the bullies who think they can say what they like with no right to reply.’
I’ve seen some of that bullying attitude myself in a video Belfield put up several weeks ago., accusing a caller of wanting to let in 100 million immigrants. The caller, a polite young chap, had called in to challenge him on his opposition to asylum seekers. Belfield responded by saying that there were millions of starving people who’d like to come to Britain. There were 100 million such people in Nigeria, so should we let them all it? Should we round them up and take them here? The lad didn’t know how to respond, so eventually Belfield cut him off. He then sneered and joked with the next caller, who did agree with him, how the poor fellow wanted to allow in 100 million immigrants. But while the lad hadn’t handled the question well, he hadn’t said anything about letting in 100 million people. It was Belfield misrepresenting him, and by extension everyone else who doesn’t share his opposition to ‘dinghy divers’. And Belfield’s remarks about BBC personnel being ‘Guardian-reading, champagne-sipping, oyster-eating, uni-educated Naga Manchushi types’, or alternatively saying they’re lesbian, Celie Imrie-types with clipboards, really is just abuse.
But it does show the poisonous hatred of some parts of the right towards the left, articulated on behalf of working class Whites, who have been left behind by the middle classes and affirmative action.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 