Is Norton Safeweb (Symantec) Making Mischief, in Order to Drive Traffic Away from Pro-White Sites?

By Nicholas Stix

For several days now, whenever I’ve googled to see what people have been saying about my work, instead of the usual, white Norton Safeweb check marks within bright green circles, next to my blog entries, I have gotten the dreaded white question mark encased within a gray circle, and the following explanation:

Site Untested

Norton Safe Web has not analyzed this page and it does not have sufficient information about this site. Symantec recommends that you do not visit this page.
You can use the Full Report option to get more information about this Web page. You can also use this link to provide your feedback on this Web site and to read user reviews from other Norton customers.

The assertion, “Norton Safe Web has not analyzed this page and it does not have sufficient information about this site” is a bald-faced lie. I have been a customer of Symantec’s subsidiary, Norton Safeweb, for a couple of years now, and it had always previously given this blog a white check within a bright green circle. That means that either it was lying then about having analyzed the page, or it’s lying now. But the one thing we can be sure of is that it is lying.

Google has sought at least since early 2005 to censor the writings of people whose politics its honchos hate, has sought to discourage people from reading their Web sites and blogs by dropping them from its news listings, with “content warnings” (e.g., Robert Lindsay) and has even shut down and disappeared entire blogs (e.g., Mangan’s, The Irish Savant, Stoptheinvasionoforegon and South Africa Sucks). It eventually restored Mangan’s and Irish Savant, after other bloggers protested; Stoptheinvasionoforegon and South Africa Suck were less fortunate.

Note that while there are many companies who provide censorship for a fee (“filters”), companies like Google make billions, based on misrepresenting themselves as honest brokers.

Which brings us back to Norton Safeweb.

Norton Safeweb purports to be providing a service, whereby it protects users from Web sites that spread malware. Period. That is its raison d’etre, and it earned billions in annual revenue, based on such representations. It does not sell itself as a political censor, but unfortunately, it appears to have surreptitiously bundled these two very different roles, without warning its present and potential customers.

Now, I’m small potatoes. Most members of the public have never heard of me, and while my readership would miss me, were I to disappear, in the grand scheme of cyberspace, my disappearance would not leave much of a trail. (I wish things were otherwise, but it is what it is.)

Not so, with American Renaissance. Hundreds of thousands of people rely on its articles, daily news round-up, books and conferences. It is an indispensable Web site whose loss would leave a huge trail. That is another way of saying that silencing AmRen would be a huge victory for the forces of anti-Americanism, anti-white racism, and tyranny.

In October, shortly after AmRen began promoting its 2011 conference, “In Defense of the West,” I began getting warnings from Norton, whenever I visited AmRen’s site, or even googled it.

AmRen was getting the “death penalty”: A white X in a red circle, which looks like a Phillips screw head.

This was disturbing. I had just begun promoting the conference. If someone got hit with malware while accessing the site, it could be a disastrous hit to AmRen’s fortunes, and lead people to avoid the site and the conference in droves. As I wrote in February, at the time of the last scheduled conference, domestic terrorists had succeeded in shutting it down at four different hotels by threatening to murder hotel personnel. (The federal government, still obsessing over imaginary “rightwing” terrorists, ignored the very real leftwing variety.)

In order to avoid causing damage to AmRen, I shut down my ads for the conference, and waited to hear that the matter had been rectified.

On the morning of November 12, AmRen’s editor-publisher Jared Taylor assured me that the site was clean. I was gearing up to leave for Trinidad again, and didn’t have the time or energy to put up a big ad for the conference, and as I had to rely on cybercafé PCs, couldn’t monitor the situation from Trinidad.

But this I know: I would trust Jared Taylor with my life. The man is not of this century. When he gives me his word that his site is clean, that means his site is clean.

When we returned from Trinidad on December 13, the Norton “death penalty” had been replaced with “life without parole”: A white exclamation point within a pretty, orange circle. At the Norton page in question, the reader sees the red “Phillips screw head,” and is notified that AmRen contains “Drive-By Downloads” in the form of an “HTTP Fake AV Redirect Request” at the AmRen store involving some sort of “Equus photos.”

But I could find nothing of the sort at the site.

I suspect that someone at Symantec/Norton doesn’t like American Renaissance, and is seeking to accomplish even more than the terrorists did, while using non-violent methods.

If my suspicion is correct, Symantec is leaving itself wide open for a multimillion-dollar lawsuit. I look forward to its executives’ response, and hope that they will prove me wrong.

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