The Boulder, Colorado-based leftist multimedia organization, Free Speech Television, dealt a blow to its web hosting subscribers last week by charging them for free speech. In a letter addressed to the reported 20,000 radical activists who host their websites through http://www.freespeech.org/ for free on the Internet, the non-profit organization tells their subscribers to pay up or get out. Brian Drolet, director of Internet projects at Free Speech Television, gave webmasters until October 7, 2001 to transfer their web pages from the free service to the paid service. Drolet told the activists the bad news that Free Speech TelevisionÕs Ò[w]eb hosting has been growing in such a rapid pace that it was taxing our manpower and our financial and technical resources.Ó Webmasters will have to pay Free Speech Television $8 - $33 (US) a month to maintain their activist websites. DroletÕs letter said the change to a pay service was a "difficult decision," particularly since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon last Tuesday. By October, Freespeech.org will delete any of the old ÒfreeÓ websites who have not coughed up the cash for the new pay-for-view service. This must be the end for ÒfreeÓ speech on the Internet as we know it! Goodbye Òfreespeech.orgÓ ø Hello Òfeespeech.comÓ

There are no illusions that the "free speech" on this site should resemble point-counterpoint debates of issues. I have no idea what it was like before the radical left rich kids from Saudi decided to ram a plane full of American innocents into crowded skyscrapers, but these days Freespeech.org is mostly a laundry list of anti-American hate. Now that "free" speech costs eight to thirty-three bucks a month, I doubt that visitors to the site will see quite as much variety they previously enjoyed.

I find freespeech.org an amusing example of reality versus fantasy. Leftist "intellectuals" and activists as a group try to come across as well read, unwavering in their humanistic morality with an impeccable sense of history. That is their fantasy at least. Such is the case with reading through the activist links that visitors to freespeech.org could browse on Wednesday.

Some of the really goofy examples on freespeech.org (replete with creative spelling and grammar) are:

After setting a scene where helpless civilians at a state-run Belgrade TV station for MilosevicÕs militant socialist propaganda in April 1999 is bombed in a United Nations peacekeeping action, one radical webmaster asks: ÒReporters, technicians, secretaries are crushed and dismembered by the percussion [sic]. Who did this[?] Who can slaughter innocents in the name of just war? Who can kill children in the name of freedom?Ó

One radical leftist informs the world that IraqÕs current woes caused by Desert Storm and the US economic embargo that followed rather than the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait through the story of an Iraqi water treatment plant worker: ÒTen years later the water system is barely functioning. Half a million children are dead because of an embargo on essentials of life. Who could have done this? What are they thinking? How can they kill with such clear conscience?Ó

Another freespech.org webmaster attempts to legitimize that claim with a few words from the anti-America crowdÕs Ògo to guyÓ, Noam Chomsky: ÒUS, Iraq and Human Rights: Noam Chomsky examines US human rights record in light of the bombing and sactions[sic] against Iraq.Ó

A particularly graphic anti-Semitic webmaster claims that Israeli police in the West Bank deny Arabs/Muslims admittance to health care on a regular basis: ÒThe woman screames [sic], pleads to be allowed to get to the hospital. Then she deliveres[sic] the baby in the backseat of the car. The soldiers ordered her out, the umbilical cord still strung to the infant. The mother collapsed on the ground. The soldiers laugh. July 2001 another baby born at an Israeli checkpoint dies before reaching the hospital.Ó

Freespeech.org offers the streaming video of the eco-terrorist documentary: ÒDefending the Forests: The Stuggle[sic] of the Campesino Environmentalists of Guerrero: The story of the Organization of the Campesino Environmentalists and their success in halting Boise Cascade's exploitation of their forests.Ó The anti-capitalist/eco-terrorist combo video: ÒOur Land, Our Future (Documentary): Indigenous protests against an environmentally destructive canal to cut through NicaraguaÓ followed by ÒSecrets of the Choco (Documentary): Large scale development plans threaten The Choco, in Comombia[sic], one of the worlds largets[sic] unspoiled rainforest.

The Freespeech.org editorial directors offered a rambling tirade about how the United States government (and in essence, blaming the American people since the US is a representative republican government by the people for the people) is to blame for the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC because of the US ÒcreatedÓ the ÒFrankenstein monstersÓ who flew four commercial jet planes full of civilians to their deaths. Freespeech.org is very clear about blaming the victim for this crime against humanity: ÒReasonable men, these orchestrators the future world. They've come into the street now, sanctimonious, posing as saviors amidst the fresh carnage they disown. They call on us to join another Holy War against their own creations. The people in the villages and towns, in New York and Washington and Baghdad and Kabul and Grozny will pay, with liberty and life. Neither monsters nor their masters: these people do not speak for us. Demand Peace Not Another One of Their Wars.Ó

The bottom of the page offers a great deal on the featured selection at the Freespeech.org bookstore: All Things Censored - The Prison Commentaries. Convicted cop killer and divisive radical Mumia Abu-JamalÕs book written from prison, lovingly transferred into a CD audiobook, about the pervasive racism in America that landed him on death row. The CD is only fifteen bucks plus shipping and looks great next to the Rage Against the Machine CDs that all good leftist faux intellectuals from Columbia University to UC Berkeley should have!

The reality is that whole idea of Òfree websitesÓ on the Internet was exposed as a scam over the past year since the dot-com crash. Free website pioneers GeoCities and AngelFire were some of the most popular hosting agencies from the dot-com explosion. Any Internet user could build a website, accept email, post pictures or even run a small business on GeoCities' or AngelFire's severs and hard drives for free (meaning you did not pay for your web hosting, but GeoCities and AngelFire plastered a half-dozen annoying pop-up banners on your "free" web page). When GeoCities and AngelFire began posting ridiculous numbers of satisfied customers and buying huge amounts of networking hardware to support those customers, many Internet service providers around the world tried to replicate that success by offering competitive services. Of course, if something is "free" all you can really do is offer what some high-tech businesses called "more different" services. If GeoCities offered 50MB of free server space, your free service would offer 30MB "more" space. If AngelFire makes web pages easier to post with Microsoft FrontPage extensions, you could offer the same thing along with the option of using "different" HTML editor's extensions like Macromedia's Dreamweaver.

When the dot-com rocket was at its zenith, Yahoo and Lycos bought GeoCities and AngelFire in the hopes of creating "customer loyalty" amongst the already huge Internet user bases both free web services had. Unfortunately, the smaller players in the field started to figure out that "free" was a fantasy. Banner ads on web sites were not generating the money banner ad salesmen had promised. Since most independent ISPs were only marginally profitable, the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to upgrade servers and networking hardware to handle the increased traffic to "free" web sites was a killer. The Linux crowd likes to crow about LinuxÕs stability and low cost compared to Microsoft or Sun MicrosystemsÕ servers, but they proved ineffective in offering a completely "free" solution.

This year ISPs from China to Canada offering "free" web hosting suddenly started to charge a monthly fee for what was once free only a year ago and the free webmasters instantly vanished. GeoCities has the Silicon Valley powerhouse Yahoo behind it, but they told their subscribers that they would begin cutting off customers who exceeded bandwidth limits unless they started paying about nine bucks a month. Yahoo is looking for revenue and hopes that the loyalty of the GeoCities customers will translate into profits. Look for GeoCities pages to start disappearing faster than the complementary coffee and donuts at a press conference.

Reality has officially hit freespeech.org. Invariably, the leftist intellectuals and activists will cry and moan about how "even freedom has a cost in our greedy capitalist system," and they will blame everyone but themselves for making the stupid business decision of overspending. Sure, freespeech.org is non-profit, but that does not mean they have a blank check to buy servers. The closest the organizers of freespeech.org will come to admitting that bad business decision is telling their subscribers: "the number of sites we host has grown to the point that the technical and financial burdens are too great for us to continue." Actually, I am shocked they have finances at all. Their "store" offers radical leftist books and videos, my favorite of which was the ten-minute video "Together We Can Defeat Capitalism." It was one artist's attempt to "survive in a world that revolves around finance capital, where media power is concentrated in the hands of the few, and where famine and hunger AIDS rages in Africa while we devour shares in the next dot-com IPO." The video to show me how to defeat capitalism costs $13 with shipping. Last night I got out the video camera and made a video of me sitting at my kitchen table counting thirteen one-dollar bills for ten minutes. Every time I got to the number thirteen, I looked into the camera and manically shouted: "Suckers!"

Let's see if freespeech.org posts that little bit of free expression on their doomed website <>

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