by Sharon Rondeau
(Jan. 24, 2025) — Shortly before Christmas, Roger Ogden, owner of the YouTube channel “Patriot Fire,” was notified of its reinstatement after the platform silenced it more than five years before.
“The focus is pro-Amercan politics [sic],” the channel’s description reads. “This channel was taken down by YouTube in 2019 and was restored in mid-December of 2024, over five years later. I will be updating it with new videos in the coming weeks, mainly about the Border, at first.”
As of this writing, launched in 2009 and focusing on events occurring in and around San Diego, Patriot Fire boasts more than 12,000 subscribers and 377 videos. Restoring it, however, has been a slow process, Ogden said.
“When YouTube restored my channel, it was lifeless. It didn’t have a pulse,” he told us in a January 5 email.
He began by uploading new videos to his “The Real Border Fence” playlist, he said, which now has 26 videos from May 2023 and dating backwards. The video presents various scenes showing an encampment of illegals, including young children, and a line of people advancing toward a hillside while Border Patrol agents looked on. It has 835 views as this story goes to press.
In an amplification of the video’s content Sunday, Ogden wrote:
The aid station that enables these illegal border crossers is managed by Pedro Rios, who works for the American Friends Society NGO. Rios propagandizes it as a “humanitarian crisis”, but if they were not providing the aid, the people would not starve, they could go back to Mexico where they came from, and stop coming. This camp is winding down as Trump is about to take office, but over the last couple of years, many thousands of illegals crossed in this way, aided by ultra-progressive activists.
These are people trying to cut in line to request asylum. They cross the first fence, the primary fence, and then camp out between the two fences to force the Border Patrol to process them for asylum. Most of them are unqualified for asylum, coming to the US for better jobs and social benefits than they have in their home country. Some say they are fleeing crime. However, none of these reasons are qualifications for being granted asylum. They have to pay the Cartel to cross, probably, $8-10K per person.
There is not much going on there at the moment, but if you want to find this site, it is near the water treatment plant just west of San Ysidro.
These are the coordinates: 32°32’24.3″N 117°04’05.2″W
You can just cut and paste the coordinates into your navigator to find the place.
The channel encountered a “strike” early in the restoration process, Ogden told us, but as of this writing has not received another. Three strikes would take the channel offline again, he noted.
Patriot Fire’s companion blog, PatriotFire.net, contains hundreds of entries on immigration and cultural issues particularly relating to the state of California, as well as posts exploring the question of “Who is a natural-born citizen?”
We asked Ogden for a rough timeline of events relating to the removal of his channel, and he said:
My last video was posted on October 27, 2019. My channel was deleted a few days after that, in early November. I was posting about the “Trump Wall” and the state of the border fence before the Trump construction started. I requested my channel be monetized. They said they would review my channel and let me know in a few days. In a few days, my channel suddenly disappeared without notice or explanation. I contacted them and asked if I could appeal. The person I contacted, just said “no.” I was already unhappy with YouTube, so I just let it go.
The local Antifa cell had been flagging my videos for some time, trying to have my channel taken down. So, there were a lot of complaints about my channel. I posted a video of the Antifa organizer tearing up a pro-Trump sign in front of the Conference Center where Trump held a Rally in May 2016. At that time I did not know who he was or that he was organizing an Antifa cell in San Diego…
I received a notice that I could request my channel be restored in the spring of 2024. I did not think it would be possible, so I didn’t send a request until October, actually a few days after their deadline. In mid-December, they notified me that my channel had been restored.
I didn’t save a copy of my appeal. It was only a couple of sentences. I expressed contrition and that I would be willing to have many of my videos removed to have the rest restored. I also stated that I would stay within their guidelines in the future.
They offered to potentially restore channels to me and others, long before it was clear that Trump would win the election. I am not sure when they initially made the offer. I learned about the offer when I tried to log into my old channel to see if anything had changed and a notice popped up. But they did not restore my channel until after the election. So, Trump winning the election could very well have impacted the final result. My channel was restored 6 weeks after he won.
I don’t know if all this info about Antifa is helpful for your purposes, but just thought I would include it as background. I reused videos from the Internet to create both of the videos linked above under Fair Use Law.
At Trump’s inauguration on Monday, Google CEO Pichai Sundararajan was in attendance, standing just behind Trump and Vice President-Elect J.D. Vance as they were sworn in. Google is YouTube’s parent company and has been roundly criticized over the years for reportedly censoring and altering search results.
Google in turn is owned by Alphabet, which as of 2022 was ranked higher in value than Amazon.
Prior to the inauguration, tech and business CEOs Mark Zuckerberg (Meta, Facebook), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates met with Trump and appeared to have left with a favorable impression.
Following the January 6, 2021 disturbance at the U.S. Capitol, Facebook and Twitter, renamed “X” after Elon Musk purchased it in 2022, deplatformed Trump’s official accounts. YouTube soon followed suit.
In March 2023, YouTube restored Trump’s ability to upload videos as he campaigned for a third time for the presidency. Trump announced his candidacy in November 2022, several days after the midterm elections.
Since at least 2015, psychologist, author, columnist and behavioral researcher Dr. Robert Epstein has accused Google of manipulating search results to favor certain political outcomes as well as of “suppressing content.”
In 2018, Sundararajan denied to the House Judiciary Committee that through its algorithms and search results Google demonstrated “political bias” toward “conservative points of view.”
However, in early 2020, YouTube formally announced it would not permit videos containing “birtherism” and actively removed videos purporting to show the results of the November 3 election were illegitimate.
In June 2023, YouTube reversed course and said it would “stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections” after admitting to “tens of thousands of video removals.”
YouTube has reportedly also censored comments responsive to video content. Another observation is that “swear words” in subtitles have been replaced by brackets at YouTube’s direction; yet another is that videos are “demonetized” and age restrictions placed on them.
In July 2020, a video of a press conference given by America’s Frontline Doctors critical of the U.S.’s response to the coronavirus outbreak was removed. That same month, Sundararajan testified to the House Judiciary Committee, with then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL1) interrogating, that in creating “lists” of websites Google executives perceived to be “interfering in elections,” a “manual component” could be present, which appeared to contradict his 2018 testimony to Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA19).
Patriot Fire is also on Facebook and Bitchute.
Editor’s Note, 8:33 a.m. EST, 01/25/2025: The initial version of this article erroneously reported Ogden’s May 2023 video contained footage of then-independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at a border fence. As that was not the case, that reference as well as a summary of the responsibilities of the Department of Health & Human Services, for which President Trump nominated Kennedy, have been removed.