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This site is owned by people who appreciate the Rights enshrined in the US Constitution. We believe artificial constraints placed upon the legal expression of the thoughts and beliefs of individuals – whether coming from the government, social media companies, or others – should not be sanctioned with our silence.

All Obstacle Blaster videos have been removed from YouTube, and we have canceled plans to expand our presence on that platform. We have chosen instead to partner with the video-sharing platform, Rumble. In the coming months, that’s where the video version of our podcast can be found.

While none of Obstacle Blaster’s written or video content has as yet been the subject of YouTube censorship, we are aware that when YouTube adopted changes to its Terms of Use policies, it became virtually impossible for content creators to have any certainty as to what would constitute violative content. Moreover, the censorship team at YouTube has been enforcing those changes in a very arbitrary way. Since 2019, YouTube has deleted many thousands of channels that their censorship team deemed to contain videos with hateful content or material they insist was not factually accurate and the practice continues to this day. 

Mind you, when the YouTube censors do this, they do not identify precisely what content is hateful or wrong and they do not inform the offending content creator what the specific violation was. They also decline to explain how they arrive at the conclusion that the content tagged as “hateful” or “false” was genuinely hateful or false.

It is commonly understood that every viewpoint has its detractors. No matter the opinion being publicly expressed, someone could be offended. Anytime one person presents a thoughtful articulation of their personal opinion vis-à-vis a facet of politics, religion, or popular culture, there will always be someone, somewhere who is offended or who wants to brand that opinion as an expression of hatred. Yet, the content censorship team at YouTube does not enforce their rule against hateful or offensive content with any predictable uniformity. One person expresses their strongly held belief that offends many people and that expression is NOT hateful. Yet, when another person expresses their strongly held belief that offends many people, somehow that expression IS hateful(?!).

How does the management of YouTube believe their content censorship team members are uniquely qualified, then, to know the difference? And why did YouTube ever decide to be so concerned about the feelings of some, not all, of their users? If you pose any of these questions to YouTube or the platform’s owners at Google, you won’t get an answer.

The owners of Obstacle Blaster believe that no YouTube employee possesses the power of knowing any content creator’s motivation for posting their content. Even if they did, that motive should only be the business of the content creator so long as the content produced is legal [not defamatory, pornographic, threatening, endorsing or promoting illegal conduct, especially that which is harmful to children, or calling for violence of any kind].

To be clear, this is not a statement in agreement or disagreement with any content posted to or deleted from YouTube. This is a statement in strong opposition to YouTube’s practices as described above. We believe everyone should be concerned about the ways in which giant, wealthy, largely unaccountable corporations sometimes engage in abusive practices. Many small business owners have lost their livelihoods at the hands of YouTube for no other reason than YouTube deciding that certain opinions or pieces information should not be heard. In the unfair, arbitrary, and punitive way that YouTube now enforces its Terms of Use, no “harmless” content creator has any assurance their content won’t, at some point, also be subject to the unwelcome scrutiny of that platform’s censors. 

To those who will view any element of the above statement as controversial or divisive: 

1.  You are part of a tiny minority of people who hold that view. If you wish to know why that is the case, you might consider becoming better informed as to the sort of tyranny and Big Brother overreach that inspired the Founders to include the 1st Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution.
2. Part of the reason things have gotten so bad in recent times is that not enough people who value free speech have spoken up in its defense.
3. In a free society, we should not merely tolerate a variety of viewpoints. We should welcome them. 

Because YouTube does not tolerate, let alone welcome, a variety of viewpoints – and indeed that platform actively censors viewpoints that do not conform to the various narratives they choose to promote – we choose not to support or promote them with our business.

If more businesses made public statements as to their position on contemporary issues that directly or indirectly affect all of us, consumers would have a better idea as to the causes those businesses support. In making their buying decisions, consumers could then consider whether they, too, wish to support the same causes through their purchases. There’s plenty of proof this works.

Disney has increasingly been using the platform of their animated movies to make statements about the causes they support. As those statements have gotten more and more explicit, consumers have responded. Anheuser-Busch [its website says it is a “Beer Company with a Purpose”] has also recently been a leader in this regard. All it took was one ad!

No doubt the executive management team of the Target Corporation saw the overwhelming public reaction to the Anheuser-Busch decision to transition the Bud Lite brand, and decided they would not be outdone. Consumers responded accordingly. The same happened with Ford, the outdoor apparel giant, North Face, and many other corporate leaders. 

Nike’s loss of an estimated $3.75 billion in market cap after the company signed an endorsement deal with Colin Kaepernick* has been a drop in the bucket. Overall, in recent times, as major companies have taken increasingly decisive, clear-cut stances on controversial issues, those companies have experienced a loss of approximately a trillion dollars.   

Obviously, the above are examples of what not to do (or what to stop doing) when you realize what you’re doing is angering your shareholders whose dividend income drops when profits plunge. Still, such companies have made their statements clear. What they’ve done is what social media companies like YouTube should have been doing.

There are public libraries where children have been invited to “story time” events at which men who are dressed up as women read stories to little, impressionable kids. At these events, men wearing heavy makeup and adorned in sexually provocative outfits, read sexually explicit “stories” to the children who attend. If a large social media company supports things of this nature, it should make public statements that articulate that support. That is free speech!

Instead, however, companies like YouTube and Facebook have chosen to down-throttle, ban content, and delete the posts and accounts of people who express their strongly held belief that children should not be exposed to explicitly sexualized themes. We believe this is wrong. Companies should distinguish themselves by clearly stating to the public what they do support (like the above-mentioned companies have done) rather than using their resources to suppress and even erase public expression of ideas that may not coincide with the views of their ownership or management. 

*  During his brief career in the NFL, the San Francisco 49ers paid Colin Kaepernick millions of dollars to throw passes no one could catch. As a consequence, he made a bigger name for himself by taking a knee during the national anthem and wearing socks depicting police officers as pigs in blankets than by helping the 49ers win games. After he was cut by the 49ers and no other team hired him, Kaepernick suggested this was because of his race and not because of his inability to consistently throw complete passes to open receivers. Unsurprisingly, after cutting Kaepernick the 49ers started winning games again much to the chagrin of Seattle Seahawks fans.

At Obstacle Blaster, we believe Free Speech must be defended or, eventually, it will be lost. While this site is not a place for political commentary, we want everyone to know that we oppose censorship of legal speech.

The Founders of the world’s longest-lasting republic, the good ‘ol US of A, did not give us a constitution containing a provision that secures the Right of an individual to never be offended by speech they deem to be false, offensive, or hateful. The reason no such provision was added should be obvious. They were adults. Moreover, they had just fought and won a revolution against a king who asserted that he alone had the right to never be offended by expressions of speech that he deemed to be false, offensive, or hateful toward the Crown. The American Founders envisioned a society where freedom of speech would be guaranteed, which also guaranteed that some individuals could occasionally become offended or feel as though they are hated by others.     

If the majority of Justices of the Supreme Court over the years have consistently agreed with the Founders on any one precept, it is that legal speech must be protected. Yes, even at the “cost” of hurting feelings, angering, or offending people.

It is our opinion that the people who run YouTube and other platforms that similarly censor content are cowards. If they truly believe users should not have the right to say things that are offensive to some people, or provably incorrect or disputed by experts in science, history, etc., then they should use some of their resources to openly argue in favor of beginning the process of removing the 1st Amendment from the Constitution. But they won’t do that. They know how the public would respond. Instead, they will continue to try to shut people up and we believe that is wrong.

We trust that this position, and the growing amount of quality content we are continually uploading to this newly remodeled Obstacle Blaster site, will be met with the approval of visitors who choose to support Obstacle Blaster by joining as a member and sharing the site with others.

As always, if you agree with this statement or disagree, your civil comments are welcome.

Thank you!