As of a few years ago, Glenn Greenwald was probably the most famous journalist in the world. And actually, given the striking decline in that mainstream profession, he might still be so today, since few other obvious names come to mind.

Meanwhile, I’d never heard of Dan Bongino until I read something about him in the New York Times earlier this year. Apparently, he’s a former Secret Service agent and right-wing pro-Trump pundit, with a strong following on the Internet.

But both these individuals were prominently mentioned in a March Times article on the rise of Rumble, a rapidly-growing video platform competing with Youtube.

Capitalizing on its relative lack of censorship, Rumble has become popular among the sorts of content-creators whose views have earned them strikes or shadow-bans on Youtube, or fear that would happen in the future. Such a group obviously leans heavily to the pro-Trump right, but not exclusively so. Indeed, the Times highlighted Greenwald’s official partnership with Rumble, a partnership that recently led him to announce plans for a one-hour nightly news program.

Meanwhile, according to the Times, Bongino had gained national stature as the host who had replaced Rush Limbaugh in some radio markets. After suffering from Youtube restrictions during the fall of 2020, he had shifted to Rumble, even taking an equity stake in that company. As of March, he’d accumulated more than 2 million subscribers on that platform and was streaming his live daily show, apparently becoming Rumble’s top broadcast star.

According to a follow-up Times article from last week, other developments may soon further bolster Rumble’s position. Earlier this year, Donald Trump had launched his own social network, Truth Social, but it has encountered a long series of severe business problems, and therefore has a clouded future. Although the Times obviously hates Trump with a vengeance and wishes him ill, the objective facts they cite do seem considerable, including the angry departure of various executives and ongoing federal investigations that putt his planned financing at risk.

So if these problems persist and Trump can’t obtain his funding, a possible solution might be to merge his company with Rumble, which already shares many of the same ideological supporters. Indeed, the Times story even claims that half the people currently working at Trump’s Internet company are actually Rumble employees, who handle his back office operation. Although the traffic to Trump’s network dwarfs that of its other alternative social network competitors such as Gab or Parler, those monthly numbers are less than one-tenth Rumble’s total, and apparently have been stagnating during most of this past year. Meanwhile, Rumble has been rapidly growing, more than doubling its monthly visits since March. So a merger with Rumble would certainly create the leading alternative media challenger to the established Tech giants.

Yet despite Rumble’s recent growth, its viewership is still merely a tiny sliver of that possessed by its giant video rival. According to SimilarWeb, Rumble had around 100 million visits in August, while Youtube had 33 billion, a figure more than 300 times larger. Given such a vastly larger potential audience, its easy to understand why Youtube remains the home of Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone and why Tulsi Gabbard selected it as the primary location of the new video channel that she recently established.

However, content-creators remain fearful of dreaded Youtube Strikes, and are sometimes cautious about what they will display on that platform. For example, Gabbard recently had a long and important interview with Prof. Jeffrey Sachs on the serious risks of World War III, yet she only chose to release it on her Rumble channel, perhaps fearing a dreaded Youtube strike. The video attracted well over 100,000 views there, but if not shadow-banned might surely have attained an enormously larger audience on Youtube.

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My own experience with Rumble has certainly been very favorable. Earlier this year, I did several lengthy podcast interviews presenting my case that the global Covid epidemic was the result of an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), and I’ve regularly promoted and highlighted these in my subsequent articles and columns. But although they were released on a variety of different video platforms, only their performance on Rumble has made waves. For example, my hour-long Geopolitics & Empire video has attracted nearly 600,000 views on Rumble, but only 9,000 on Youtube, presumably due to shadow-banning. A couple of my other podcasts have done even better on Rumble, with my two hour Red Ice TV interview reaching 650,000 views and the much shorter “Smoking Gun” presentation with Kevin Barrett breaking 850,000 views.

Although these latter numbers might seem impressive on Youtube, given Rumble’s much smaller potential audience, I consider them truly astonishing in that venue. For example, Dan Bongino’s top-rated Rumble channel contains hundreds of his videos, but only a half-dozen of these have broken 600,000 views, and the same is true for Glenn Greenwald’s channel, while only two of Rand Paul’s videos have reached that mark. After Alex Jones was driven from Youtube, he also moved to Rumble, but only one of his many hundreds of videos has even broken 100,000 views, and except for RT‘s ongoing livestream, only a handful of its huge number of Rumble videos have reached the 100,000 view mark.

Obviously, this comparison is hardly a fair one since my viewership represents the sustained, accumulated interest on a single issue, while a pundit like Bongino mines the news headlines for a different topical story every day or two. But on the other hand, his video channel obviously benefits from his nationwide radio broadcast audience, while Glenn Greenwald’s regular appearances on the Tucker Carlson show provides a similar boost.

By contrast, for over two years I have stood almost alone on the Internet in pointing to the obvious evidence that more than a million Americans probably died from the blowback of a biowarfare attack by elements of their own government, a prospect so unspeakably horrifying that virtually no one else has been willing to acknowledge it as a mere possibility, let alone seriously discuss the evidence. But although it’s been nearly impossible to find others even willing to mention my hypothesis, my podcast video interviews have now attracted nearly 2.2 million views, so at least a few people somewhere do seem to be watching them.

Solid estimates are difficult to make, but based upon the viewership of the videos on those highest-profile Rumble channels mentioned above, I’d guess that my interviews have become more popular than 99.9% of the other videos on Rumble, with the true figure quite possibly being as high as 99.99% or even 99.999%. There are obvious benefits in saying important things that others won’t touch, even if those presentations can only be done on a video platform possessing merely a sliver of Youtube’s global reach.

I’d like to think that at some point, the crucial facts that I’ve been presenting will finally break though into a broader audience and at least force the journalists of the alternative media to take notice and discuss them even if they remain forbidden within mainstream circles.

I keep in mind the example of Prof. John Mearsheimer’s prescient hour-long lecture on the dangers of a Ukraine war. His video languished for six or seven years on Youtube before it suddenly exploded into worldwide attention in February, with its 28 million views having now probably set an all-time record for any academic presentation on the Internet. As an obvious consequence of that popular breakthrough, the ultra-establishmentarian Foreign Affairs recently solicited a lengthy article from him, as did the front page of the Wall Street Journal‘s weekly Review section. So despite suffering from a near-total media blackout for well over two years, I’d still like to remain hopeful.

Later this month marks the tenth anniversary of my major article “The Myth of American Meritocracy.” By providing very strong evidence of the existence of Asian Quotas in the Ivy League, my analysis played an important role in launching the Harvard admissions lawsuit now before the Supreme Court. If as many believe, the justices will soon strike down the constitutionality of Affirmative Action after more than four decades, I’ll be very pleased with the result. But ten years is a long time to wait, and I do hope my Covid/Biowarfare analysis gains greater traction much more quickly than that.

EPub Format⬇ • Mobi/Kindle⬇

Meanwhile, I continue my efforts. My Covid/Biowarfare EBook has been downloaded over 13,000 times and my individual articles have accumulated more than 900,000 pageviews on the Internet. And if anyone would like to see the three videos that have now broken two million total views on Rumble, they’re easily at your fingertips.

• Covid/Biowarfare Series
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 2020-December 2021 • 60,000 Words

Kevin Barrett, FFWN • February 16, 2022 • 15m

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Geopolitics & Empire • February 1, 2022 • 75m • SoundCloud Audio

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Red Ice TV • February 3, 2022 • 130m

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