On the recent and coordinated banning of Alex Jones’ media outlet Infowars.com by Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Apple

by Seer Ablicadew

They come for one, they come for all, we see it on our phones.
The media elite is coming after Mr. Jones.
They come for one, they come for all, we see it with our eyes.
They make their backroom deals with dictators and their lies.
The apple bitten in the garden by the goo-twit-face
is smitten with its evil power, going after grace.
They come for one, they come for all, the thought-police of text.
One wonders who they’re coming for, and who will be the next.
They come for one, they come for all, if you are reading this,
beware you may be next in line, if they find you amiss.

Seer Ablicadew is a poet of prophesy.


30 Responses

    • Joe Tessitore

      I wonder about your response – “eh”?

      Goo-tube threw me on my first reading.
      Once I figured it out, I went back to thinking it was very well done.

      • C.B. Anderson


        With all due respect, this is old news.

      • Joe Tessitore

        Thanks for getting back to me – I really didn’t know what you meant.

    • Alexander Morris

      I agree, the rhymes are weak. Also, Alex Jones is a nutjob, and has admitted under testimony that he’s just playing a character on his show. That his beliefs are not genuine. Et cetera.

      “They’re turning the friggin’ frogs gay!”

      Censorship of political views is abhorrent, but only wackos believe the stuff Jones says anyway. He’s just playing his audience for money and attention.

      • Amy Foreman


        Surely this poem was not a defense of Alex Jones’ faithfulness to fact or his genuine beliefs. It was a warning, a caution: If Alex Jones is censored today, who will it be tomorrow? B.D. Wise said it well: “[B]eware you may be next in line, if they find you amiss.”

        The SCP attempts to deconstruct communism, the kind of communism behind the “Great Firewall” in China, which heavily filters nearly every topic available to the millions of Chinese internet users, and either blocks or alters sites according to the ideology of the Communist Party.

        Ironically, a year or so ago, Google was battling the Great Firewall, trying to facilitate the free flow of information and ideas within China. Google lost that battle. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/media-censorship-china

        And now, it seems, Google has abandoned its original mission, which was “”[t]o organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Now, in order to be accurate, the mission should read, “To organize some of the world’s information and make portions of it accessible and useful.”

        They’ve done it to the wacko “nutjob.” You and I are next.

      • Alexander Morris

        Good point, Amy. Nothing should be censored. Sad to hear about Google too.

      • J. Simon Harris

        The difference between this and China’s firewall (which, yes, is absolutely abhorrent) is that these are private companies, whereas the censorship in China comes from the government. Private companies are under no obligation to protect the views of anyone (in fact, freedom of speech arguably makes it necessary for them to be able to block whomever they want on their own websites). If the government starts banning media content, then we are in serious trouble. But if a private company bans something, we are free to boycott the company (and there are plenty of venues through which to get Alex Jones’ content, if you really want to give that guy your money). Imagine if SCP were not allowed to filter its content (although admittedly SCP is a curated site, whereas Google etc., are more general purpose).

  1. David Watt

    Bruce, this is a well written response to the important issue of censorship.

  2. Michael Dashiell

    I heard that entities like Facebook are working on mind control.

  3. James A. Tweedie

    Bruce, your poems tend to be spontaneous, unpolished, timely, heartfelt, to-the-point, edifying and entertaining. Whether or not I agree with your point of view or whether or not any given poem demonstrates a mastery over classical poetic shape and form is (for me at least) besides the point. You are one of a kind. You are a breath of fresh air. You are true to yourself. You are provocative and sometimes you are a few inches off the wall. Keep it up, man! Keep it up!

    • J. Simon Harris

      I always enjoy Mr. Wise’s poems as well, regardless of whether I completely agree with them. This poem is no exception. Censorship is not a good thing in general, whether or not you agree with the voice being censored. Just wanted to point that out, although I stand by my earlier comment as well.

      • Joan Fullmore

        I agree with your first comment totally! Every rule has at least one exception, including Censorship.

  4. David Paul Behrens

    In the early sixties, Lenny Bruce was arrested numerous times, for talking! His legal problems and harassment by authorities drove him to an early grave. He was eventually posthumously exonerated by the Supreme Court, reaffirming the right to free speech, as specified by the First Amendment.
    The only exception is discourse which can be provably linked to the causation of physical harm or death, such as yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, resulting in a stampede. Otherwise, all censorship is wrong and presumably illegal, thanks to Lenny Bruce.

    Lenny Bruce died for our sins!

  5. DPB

    Lenny Bruce

    Lenny Bruce is dead but his ghost lives on and on
    He was an outlaw, that’s for sure
    More of an outlaw than you ever were
    Lenny Bruce is gone but his spirit’s livin’ on and on

    Maybe he had some problems, maybe some things that he couldn’t work out
    talkin’ about
    Never robbed any churches nor cut off any babies’ heads
    He’s on some other shore, he didn’t want to live anymore

    Lenny Bruce is dead but he didn’t commit any crime
    I rode with him in a taxi once
    Only for a mile and a half, seemed like it took a couple of months

    They said that he was sick ’cause he didn’t play by the rules
    He fought a war on a battlefield where every victory hurts

    Bob Dylan

    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thanks for demonstrating that Bob Dylan was the most godawful, crummy, poor excuse for a poet that the twentieth century ever produced

      • DPB

        ‘Lenny Bruce’ is not a poem. It is song lyrics. It can be found on the record album ‘Shot of Love,’ the last album in his trilogy of albums dedicated to Jesus Christ, following ‘Slow Train Coming’ and ‘Saved.’ I doubt that Dylan would consider it to be a good poem or that he is anything but a songwriter. Check out his speech to the Nobel Committee. The only reason I posted it was because of the subject matter. Take care, Mr. Salemi.

      • DPB

        Bob Dylan is still around and is currently, and continuously since 1987, on tour. He has also released four albums of new original songs in the twenty-first century, plus five records of old standards and one Christmas album. Seventy-seven years old and he is still going strong.

  6. Joan Fullmore

    Sorry, I cannot work up any passion for protecting the right of each citizen to lie to the public. I am not that open-minded, I guess. Personally I am glad to see that Mr. Jones is one less person getting airtime for Ignorance.

    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Yeah, and I suppose that what constitutes “lies” and “ignorance” is to decided by you and your like-minded friends. What arrogance.

      • Joan

        You assume a lot. You must be the one who has like minded friend to conspire with. I must be worst than arrogant for I have nor want any friends other than my Self, so my opinions are strictly my own. I just had to comment for all great poetry I’m aware of is not inspired by conspiracy theorists whose fantasies harm other human beings.

  7. David Paul Behrens

    Just thought I would share the lyrics of the last song on ‘Shot of Love’.

    Every Grain of Sand

    When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed
    There’s a dyin’ voice within me, reaching out somewhere
    Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair

    Don’t have the inclination to look back on any mistake
    In the fury of the moment, I can see the Master’s hand
    In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand

    Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear
    To ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay

    I gaze into the doorway of temptation’s angry flame
    And every time I pass that way I always hear my name
    Then onward in my journey, I come to understand
    That every hair is numbered, like every grain of sand

    I have gone from rags to riches, in the sorrow of the night
    In the violence of a summer’s dream, in the chill of a wintry light
    In the bitter dance of loneliness, fading into space
    In the broken mirror of innocence, on each forgotten face

    I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
    Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me
    I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
    Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand

    Bob Dylan

    Sometimes his lyrics can be somewhat poetic.

  8. Seer Ablicadew

    The poem “They Come For One, They Come For All” is a tennos—ten lines of iambic heptametre, here, and most often, in five rhymed couplets. Unrhymed, it is balland verse. I am using the tennos, as Mr. Whidden is using the traditional sonnet, to, through verse, comment succinctly on the World. I like it as a vehicle for thought for several reasons:

    1. Like Mr. Watt, I am interested increating poetic forms; the tennos is hardly the first of these concoctions; but as such the tennos is a form that I developed, so it works personally for me;

    2. Using the tennos is my way of dealing with the World, in that it is short, to the point, and this is most important to me, it is limited. I can deal with a topic, say what I have to say, and then go on. It cuts it off, so I no longer need to think about the topic anymore. For I have found there are so many topics in the universe, not only is one lifetime not enough to cover even but a mere pittance of them, but I personally need to move on.

    3. Though I have written docupoetry, among other kinds of poetry, for years, the tennos is a perfect vehicle for that.

    4. The tennos is also a building block for larger works, like the 12-lined dodeca, or poems of twenty, forty, or eighty lines, all of which I have written.

    Now, as to the poem “They Come For One, They Come For All”. First off, it is merely a tennos. I got to say what I wanted to say about Big Tech shutting down Alex Jones and InfoWars, something I had never heard about before the last major election in the United States, and I need say no more about it. It had bubbled up in the news recently, so I did some cursory research on it, and wrote the poem.

    As I have always been a proponent of free speech and a free press, which epicist John Milton suggested in “Areopagitica”, it was an easy topic; for, around the Globe there is a constant attack on free speech, whether it be through religious institutions, economic corporations, or national governments. Though my handling of it may be cursory, it is a very serious situation, as Ms. Foreman has briefly, but articulately, explained in one instance, the intercourse between Google and China, and Mr. Watt has succinctly branded as “a response to the important issue of censorship”.

    Mr. Tweedie has pointed out that poems, like “They Come For One, They Come For All”, are “spontaneous, unpolished, timely, heartfelt, to-the-point, edifying, and entertaining.” That is certainly an ideal I am striving for. But as the writers here know, it isn’t easy; and qualified success is occasional and brief. “They Come For One, They Come For All” was spontaneous, as polished as I wanted to make it, timely, heartfelt, and to-the-point. But it was not edifying, in the way that most of my poetry strives to be, nor was it delightfully entertaining. It was rather more a pale shadow of the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, or more recently Orwellian dystopia.

    But Mr. Tweedie brings up an even more serious topic when he states “whether or not any given poem [of mine] demonstrates a mastery over classical poetic shape and form…” which he goes on to say “is…beside the point.” On one level I believe he is right, but on another I disagree. First off I absolutely agree with him, my poetry generally fails to achieve the “classical” fluidity of Greek poetry. Here I would place everybody who has ever written in English.

    But the English language tradition is larger in prose and poetry than that of the Greek and the Latin combined, even if we don’t have the equal of a Homer or a Vergil, a Plato and Aristotle or a Newton and Leibniz, even if we don’t have a Euclid or Archimedes, a Gospel writer or an Apostle Paul, a Lucretius or an Aquinas. If we have no greats, we have a greater pool. The elasticity of English remains electrifying, if diffuse, profuse, if at times less than satisfying. In poetry, we have the rich alliterative verse of Anglo-Saxon epic, the ballad tradition, fresh Renaissance Middle English, Elizabethan allegory, the poetic drama, literary epic, mock-heroic verse, etc.; in prose, we have the essay, empirical philosophy, satire, fiction, political, economic, biological, chemical, mathematical, and historical treatises. And the list goes on.

    So to answer Mr. Tweedie’s comment. I am striving for a “classical poetic shape and form”. So, if I don’t have mastery of the Greek poetic meters—nobody else does either, at least that I know of, or has ever in the entire tradition of English language literature. So, we all approach it in different ways. Shakespeare, for example, went to Greek and Roman classical sources and topics; that I have done, as have others here as well. Milton attempted an even greater extent by pulling together the ancient classics and the Hebraic tradition. I have gone to that too, as have others here as well.

    So, to halt this microessay: “They Come For One, They Come For All” combines the simplicity of the ballad with Latin rhetorical device in making a comment on the moment. In that sense it is classical. Jones’ name is made generic, as Orwell does, for example, in “Animal Farm”—Mr. Jones. “The apple bitten in the garden” comes from the Mosaic Torah and from California Big Tech. I had “goo-twit-face” before Mr. Mantyk replaced twit with tube; because Twitter hasn’t yet purged Alex Jones (though its employees are exploring the possibility). If they do purge, it will go back to twit. The phrase “thought-police” is straight out of Orwell. And the word “beware” also translated from the Mosaic Torah.

  9. Seer Ablicudew

    Because, like so many other writers, I am under pressure to produce—in my case one poem per day—usually a tennos of ten lines (around 100 words), it is sometimes difficult to get to comments on my poetry. I must admit that my amount hardly seems anything compared to what some prosists and poets produce in a day, as, for example, in these numbers, approximate and unverified: Hemingway and Graham Greene 500 words/day, Maugham 1000 words/day, London 1500 words/day, Twain 1400-1800 words/day, Tom Wolfe 2000 words/day, Angelou 2500 words/day, Trollope, Doyle and Mailer 3000 words/day.

    I will try to answer the promising poet Mr. Harris’ question: “Mr. Wise has such a whimsical technique, yet treats such weighty topics; it is oddly fitting, isn’t it?”

    Well, yes, and no. Yes, because the tennos nips in the bud any lengthy analysis, and therefore, there is a rather matter-of-fact attitude about the most recalcitrant of topics; but no, as the tennos yields differing tones. Take, “They Come For One, They Come For All”, for example, where an ominous tone with the repetition of “come” in its various forms appears. Contrast that with a tennos previously published last year elsewhere on the Internet with a more whimsical quality:

    The Year of the Rooster
    by Li “Web Crease” Du

    As 2017 will be the year the rooster crows,
    outside a mall in Taiyuan in Shanxi there arose
    a white and bloated rooster statue with gold, swirled hair,
    rectangle eye brows, wings with fingers, in an angry stare.
    Its beak is golden, wattle scarlet, and its feet gold too;
    the gestures of its wingers are, like Donald Trump’s, on cue.
    The rooster statue’s “yuge”; about some 31 feet tall,
    and shoppers take their selfies with it as they pass the mall.
    In January, Trump becomes the US President,
    and China orients itself to New Year’s fiery gent.

    Although my whimsicality’s my own, in reality, the writer to whom I am most indebted for my whimsicality is e. e. cummings, who handled topics from love to nuclear holocaust with caustic, deadly earnestness and as well as joviality and jast.

    In reference to Mr. Harris’ observation about private company Google’s ban of Alex Jones; it was the private boys clubs and restaurants that were taken to task for banning individuals and whole groups, etc.

    In reference to

    “And past the crocs, the Capitol’s bathed in an eerie hue…”

    I disagree with Mr. Harris; the line is metrical. And, “an” is more important than its size might indicate. An “an” there is just what I want for the fluidity of the line. Here I am closer to Mr. Stone in that the “trouble” is with the word “bathed”. [As an aside, I enjoy how many others enjoy micromanaging the tennos—that is its folk quality.]

    I would more likely be tempted to use:

    “And past the crocs, the Capitol’s suffused in eerie hues.

    were I to change another thing. I rarely yield to criticism of elisions, as they are an important part of my particular poetic stockpile.

    I do want to thank “Br’er Harris” for his comments; because his comments are well-thought-out and often right-on-target.

    Rather the critique should be—Cain’t ya spell yer own name, dummy? It’s Ablicudew, idiot!


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