Blacklisting, enforced poverty

Blacklisting is illegal in Oregon under ORS 659.805 though as with many aspects of this particular crime, the type of blacklisting that Chris and I have experienced is different than normal blacklisting. As with so many things around this, it’s so big and calculated, and gone on for so many years, it’s hard to know where to begin.

In my case, I can describe how and why I know employment-based blacklisting was going on, but proving it according to a court standard would likely require discovery and/or honest witness testimony under oath. One of the tricks with me has been keeping me in a position where almost all my employment has been in low-level at will jobs where you can easily be shut out gradually or fired without cause. When that was not the case (and sometimes when it was), other machinations came into play, including medical machinations – via biomedical CGI I was made sick, deliberately. I lost or was shut out of some of my better jobs this way. Generally speaking, there seems to have been a deliberate ceiling built over me so that I could never progress past the bottom rungs of any given position or profession. The same seems to have been true of Chris.

Even to this day there are telltale clues, for example on social media. It is not normal, for example, for someone who has been on Twitter since at 2007, had the same account since 2015, tweeted more than 32,000 tweets – to have only 35 followers. And of those followers maybe half seem to be using their real names. 

Similarly, I have a YouTube channel that has been active since 2017, currently with 4,701 videos on it, and less than 600 subscribers. Almost all of those subscribers seem to be fake names, accounts that are there to monitor and disrupt. I rarely get comments on videos, and when I do, they usually seem to be to disparage, misdirect, or disrupt.

Being blacklisted (or greylisted, or shadow banned) on social media accounts like Twitter and YouTube is a problem because it makes it difficult to impossible to level up to a power user status (blue-check verified accounts, special YouTube creator accounts) and it makes it difficult to promote your business or brand – something that is extremely important for an artist. It also reenforces the false idea that we are marginal people who have never accomplished much in life.  Of course, it’s gone even further than that – In 2020 I had two original music related YouTube channels simply vanish into thin air with no explanation or remedy.

An even bigger problem has to do with accessing important components of civil society. In addition to police, FBI, etc refusing to take crime reports from me, even when the crimes and threats are serious (murder, human trafficking, medical malfeasance, massive fraud, terrorism, threats to democracy) – perhaps even more frightening is the apparent blocking of access to legal representation, the court system, and the press. This won’t stop me from trying to access these systems, but that blacklisting would and could go this far really says a lot to the extent and danger of this crime. The penumbra around this also goes a long way towards explaining the motive behind so doggedly pinning the “delusional” label onto me.

By 2002 I had the sense that I was professionally being blacklisted because I’d seen how people who were my peers in web design and development in the late 1990s had progressed professionally while I was unable to do so. This blacklisting is insidious and damaging not just financially, but also psychologically as people all around Chris and I knew full well that we were being controlled in this way, but were always coming up with alternate explanations for it, and often those explanations were about blaming the victim, something that Chris accepted and internalized. Other times, the explanations were constructed in such away as to draw false equivalencies “I experience this too” – driving home this message that “you are nothing special.” With Chris there were often other put downs added in such as “we just don’t like his music” and “Chris’ bands weren’t ‘cool'”

In reality, it was easier for me to see the extent of the blacklisting with Chris because I knew he was special.

There seems to have been another thing running parallel with the blacklisting and that is intellectual property theft. In other words, our intellectual output was (and is) being consumed, but only covertly and in a way that not only avoids paying us fair compensation, but has made us unable to profit in any meaningful way from our own creative output. If our intellectual property is, as I suspect, being “harvested” and distributed on some other platform without our consent, that not only removes our control on what we want to release, and how and when and under what terms we want to release it, it also prevents us from earning money on our own work and intellectual output. It’s actually horrifying in and of itself, from the standpoint of an artist/creator not to mention a person who values her agency and personal boundaries.

I believe that the very people who derided Chris as being “uncool” or unlikable were in fact the same people profiting from Chris’ intellectual output. Also, I don’t think it was just intellectual output that they were profiting from, but all manner of exploitation including sex trafficking, set ups, fraud, and financed manufactured stories that were then used as an excuse by federal agencies to covertly enact harm, and ultimately to murder him. 

Clearly, the FBI is not going to investigate this. I believe the reason is because they are so deeply involved. Possibly some of this could come out in a discovery process prior to a civil trial.

That said, within this decades-long blacklisting, fraud, and theft there are a few threads that I can follow reasonably well. The first has to do with the imitation and blacklisting of Chris music specifically within relation to Sub Pop in the 1990s, and the second has to do with the sabotage of Chris and my band Boo Frog which may also have been linked to Sub Pop. It’s quite possible that in both these instances Sub Pop was acting in tandem with, or as an agent of, the federal government.

 

web page updated 21 August 2022