By Bill jimandbillpodcast and itsanotherday

The internet was — and still is — the Wild, Wild West.
It tested us. It pushed us. It embarrassed us. It exposed us. And most importantly, it gave free voice to all — the loud, the quiet, the polite, the profane, the heretic, the patriot, the crank, and everyone in between. For the first time in human history, power didn’t get to decide who got heard. That was the real revolution. And they hated it.
They — the monsters that control us — never accepted the loss of the gatekeeper role. Mainstream media? They’ve already killed it. Legacy television and newspapers are now nostalgia acts, propped up by corporate PR budgets and government contracts. The last real bastion of free speech — long-form podcasts, independent creators, raw conversations on platforms that still allow dissent — was the final frontier they couldn’t fully tame.
Until now.
Enter the shiny new tools: “brand safety,” “suitability,” “AI-driven content analysis,” “GARM standards,” “Barometer,” “IAB Taxonomy.” They sound boring. They’re supposed to. That’s how you slip chains around people’s necks — by making the chains look like paperwork.
But let’s call it what it is.
These are not neutral scoring systems. They are ideological tripwires dressed up as advertising hygiene.
The parameters? By whose standards?
Politics and “hate speech” — the two categories most weaponized — are defined, interpreted, and enforced by the same corporate and institutional class that spent the last decade trying to push counter-cultural agendas past the point of exaggeration. In the name of advertising.
Many brands were strong-armed into nontraditional narratives, DEI checklists, sanitized messaging, and virtue-signaling campaigns — not because customers demanded it, but because the risk scores said “unsafe” if they didn’t comply. The scales were used to reward compliance and punish deviation. And now those same scales are being quietly repurposed to throttle anything that doesn’t fit the sanitized corporate-approved lane.
Do I sleep with one eye open, or do I lay me down to sleep, I pray AI my soul to keep?
That’s not paranoia. That’s pattern recognition.
This isn’t government censorship with jackboots. It’s slower, cleaner, more effective: economic strangulation.
Flag a podcast episode “high-risk” on politics, debated social issues, or “misinformation.” Watch advertisers pull out automatically. Watch revenue dry up. Watch the host soften the edges, skip the third rail topics, or simply disappear. No ban. No announcement. Just death by a thousand risk scores.
The Wild West is being fenced in — and they’re handing us the rope.