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| ARTWORK: The Interpreter |
Now as some of you may be aware, this blog -Reaganite Independent- has been around since 2008. Originally launched as Reaganite Republican, the site was rebranded after the catastrophic election of Donald Trump,
who obviously I can't stomach...
Previously cautioned by a couple Gothamites who have known Trump for 30+ years -successful professional types who described him to me as 'utterly unprincipled', yet 'clueless' and 'hated'- I was (well) advised to never trust, support, or place faith in the man. I took their informed words to heart.
Furthermore, as a child of the Cold War, my own personal hot-button political issue has long been national security. And when it comes to security, that means 'peace-through-strength', as for me Reagan's towering success in bloodlessly snuffing the Soviet Union taught us all we need to know about dealing with the manipulative, habitually-dishonest, zero-sum Russians.
But various anti-Kremlin rants on this site seemed to have caught someone's attention, as from 2010 traffic stats showed the same Russian IP monitoring my website, nearly every weekday morning (at the same time). StatCounter displays a map of where the IP is located, and lo-and-behold, this one was right inside the Kremlin (at least that's what the map showed) in a so-called 'Moscow Mathematics Institute'.
This continued right-up-until the election of Trump.
Apparently at that point I was considered a threat to the glorious motherland and placed on some shit-list, because since that time someone has attempted to go after my blog revenue by filing complaints to Adsense in a systematic manner.
In the first eight years I've operated this site, there had been but one complaint about 'inappropriate' content to Google Adsense. The claim was dubious, but since you can't really interact with Google in any kind of reasonable time frame, it's best to just take down the post and
retire the issue.
Alas, all the more recent (disingenuous) protests to AdSense regarding
'adult content' here involved merely some picture of a girl in a bikini or such, posted years ago- and nothing overly revealing, mind you. (used to post
Miss Universe contestants or whatever back when I was trying to build traffic
-in collaboration with/linking a circle of conservative bloggers-
but eventually decided it was tacky and stopped doing them years ago).
'adult content' here involved merely some picture of a girl in a bikini or such, posted years ago- and nothing overly revealing, mind you. (used to post
Miss Universe contestants or whatever back when I was trying to build traffic
-in collaboration with/linking a circle of conservative bloggers-
but eventually decided it was tacky and stopped doing them years ago).
What is obvious is that somebody has scoured through my site looking for anything they could find to cause me trouble with Google AdSense, which everybody knows is the dominant player in per-click advertising. And then they pretend to be 'offended' by it. Does anybody really believe I'm suddenly offending people with near-stagnant posts that went up in 2009? The one they complained about last week was only a 2011 cartoon of Rahm Emmanuel's butt in the congressional gymn locker room- that's it.
But to top all that, something even stranger happened... someone found a way to use MY adcodes on a 'family sex' (+ bondage) porno site. Adsense quickly shut those ad channels down and sent me e-mails about 'my' violation of TOS. I promptly responded to disclaim any involvement, but never received any sort of response, and there it remains in my complaint file.
Sooo ask yourself WHY anybody would attempt to monetize a website that's so obviously in blatant violation of Adsense TOS with MY adcodes? If they're doing porn sites they should know Google Adsense is not going to last two days on there. And if they DID get clicks before the TOS hammer comes down, the money would go to MY account? What possible motivation could there be but to frame me + get my entire Adsense account shut-down?
Prior to the election of Trump, this blog actually brought in a few bucks. But sorry to disappoint you Ivan, I don't need the money -am active in US/world politics for other reasons- and it's not going to stop anything.
You could call it petty -or comprehensive, depending on your view- but IMHO the Russo-Trumpian plan for online domination of US political opinion was so complete, no target was too small or irrelevant. And they want you to feel like you're being watched.
Doubt all that? Consider the way that Newsmax (who today are out-of-the-closet Trump shills) started aggressively recruiting (via direct emails) + paying the small-medium blogs to display their little headline widget, starting right after Obama was reelected. All they asked was that it was high in your right column. I saw it appear on blogs I know never get any traffic.
And I signed up with them too -since 5 different Newsmax employees bombarded me with at least 15 emails (even after I installed the widget)- yet once the presidential campaign wound-down, they suddenly cut the revenue to almost nothing- so I took it out.
To me, it all seemed odd, plastic, artificial that they happily overpaid for these placements (vs Adsense, i.e.), were extremely aggressive on getting everyone to take part, so their narratives enjoyed daily exposure on almost every single blog... then the program disappears into thin air once no long useful to Trump/Russia.
Things that make you go 'hmmm'-