This weekend we celebrated Gab’s ninth birthday. The days leading up to that milestone felt like any other week at the office: another payment processor kicked us off their platform and behind closed doors Washington and London used Gab as a pawn in a trade scuffle. For this company the alarm bells never seem to stop, but those fire alarms keep us convicted and focused. They remind us that we are a real threat to the powers that be and that we are directly over target.
Our birthday lands every year on August 15. Centuries earlier that same date signaled the departure of the First Crusade in 1096, and I’ve come to see the parallel as more than symbolic. When I opened my laptop in that small-town coffee shop back in 2016, I was under no illusion we were starting a social platform; we were launching a campaign to rescue one of the cornerstones of Western civilization, open and unfettered speech, from a coalition determined to extinguish it.
The attacks rolled in on every imaginable front. Congressman and staffers on the January 6 Committee issued subpoenas. Banking authorities revived a souped-up Operation Chokepoint 2.0 in 2021; almost overnight half a dozen financial institutions closed our accounts and froze our reserves without citing a single regulatory violation. Foreign governments, including Germany and Australia, sent escalating demands that we remove lawful but “undesirable” content. Legacy media outlets ran coordinated smear pieces, while the SPLC and ADL published dossiers portraying us as a menace to society itself. Payment processors, app stores, hosting providers, and email services all banned us. All because a handful of billionaires in Silicon Valley preferred censorship to competition.
Yet every siege left us more battle-tested, and more stubborn. By refusing to yield, Gab helped push free speech back onto the main stage of American politics. The cultural wildfire that kindled here for nine years did not stay contained; it lapped at the walls of Twitter until Elon Musk bought the platform and dismantled many of its most heavy-handed speech codes. Ideas once confined to Gab are now shouted from university podiums, celebrity social media accounts, and prime-time cable panels. We celebrate that expansion, but victories of this kind are partial and precarious.
The war has simply shifted terrain. State capitols from Tallahassee to Sacramento have begun passing “antisemitic hate speech” legislation whose practical effect is to criminalize protected speech that is critical of Israel and Jews as a collective. I remember watching Governor DeSantis fly to Israel to sign one such bill. What is the Governor of a US State doing in a foreign country signing legislation that silences his citizens? He, like all the rest of them, is owned lock stock and barrel by foreign interests.
What gets obscured by the pomp of this nonsense is that the Jewish tradition itself identifies large portions of New Testament language as “antisemitic,” yet the First Amendment leaves believers free to preach it anyway. Once governments start deciding which passages of Scripture can be uttered in public, the door has opened wide for broader blasphemy laws. The Gospel is not hate; truth is not violence. We intend to keep saying so, consequences be damned.
My name, Andrew, carries an ancient weight: the Greek carries the meaning “strong, manly, brave, and warrior-like.” Scripture remembers the Apostle Andrew as the first disciple whom Jesus called, literally the first human being invited to leave everything and follow the Truth. I choose to take that legacy seriously. Defending the right to proclaim the words of Christ is not political advocacy on my part; it’s a spiritual and genealogical obligation. If the censors prevail, it won’t be because we lacked conviction; it will be because ordinary people forgot they were stewards, not subjects, of their own tongues.
Looking past American borders, the picture grows darker still. The U.K.’s Online Safety Act, the EU’s Digital Services package, and assorted “hate speech” treaties emerging from the UN form an interlocking net whose clear target is the last ungoverned forum of human thought. The next frontier beyond even these censorship regimes is artificial intelligence. Already we can see that whoever programs tomorrow’s language models will determine which facts, jokes, histories, and prayers can even be articulated on the public internet.
That fight, too, is underway. Gab AI, and our own language model called Arya, stands as one of the very few AI systems coded to value truth above PR optics. Every line we write is informed by the conviction that Sam Altman and his peers must not inherit the keys to the human mind. Centralized intelligence with centralized morality would be indistinguishable from a theocratic dictatorship, only the priests would be wearing hoodies and speaking at Davos. We’re building something entirely different: an AI that treats human cognition and truth as sacred, whether or not the output flatters every protected class Silicon Valley holds dear.
We set out in 2016 with an unfashionable belief that words belong to the people who speak them. Today the battle lines have multiplied, the enemies have grown richer, and yet the mission is clearer than ever. So we sharpen our keyboards and pray in the same breath, ready for the next nine-year campaign on the digital frontier. The crusade continues, not for conquest, but for conscience. And we’re honored to have everyone standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the ranks.
For nine years running, we’ve never accepted a dime from special interests, VCs, or three-letter agencies. The only reason our servers still hum is the steady drumbeat of your twenty-dollar donations, your GabPRO upgrades, and your Gab AI Plus subscriptions. Each choice literally buys the next gigabyte of bandwidth and the next hour of legal defense.
If you believe the fight for free speech is just getting started, lock arms with us: grab GabPRO for sharper tools, drop a donation for our legal arsenal, or grab Gab AI Plus so the next generation of AI is built by patriots, not foreign programmers who despise them. Every little bit keeps the fortress standing long enough for the truth to finish its slow march through the institutions.
Thank you for continuing to stand with us in this battle, we wouldn’t be here without you.
Onward to victory.
Andrew Torba
CEO, Gab AI Inc
Christ is King
