Author: VD

RaiderGate!

This report of the Raiders offensive line metaphorically kneeling while on the field sounds as if it must be satire. I mean, it can’t possibly be true, right?

A new report from The Armstrong and Getty Radio Show has sent shockwaves throughout the sports world after it was revealed that members of the NFL’s Oakland Raiders may have purposefully allowed their star quarterback to get sacked multiple times after he refused to kneel during the National Anthem.

If true, this would essentially mean that an NFL football game was illegally thrown over anger that one of the teams star white players did not believe that kneeling during the nations anthem was the correct way to protest supposed racial injustice in America.

In other words, an epic level scandal.

During the anthem, virtually the entire team was seen kneeling other than the teams coaches and star quarterback Derek Carr. Unfortunately, this may have not set well with the teams offensive line as they were apparently the players who spearheaded the entire idea to kneel as a team in the first.

“This is one hell of a scandal with the NFL, could ruin the whole league,” claimed the show before detailing the fact that Carr was sacked two times in a row on the teams second drive and that the teams usually dependable center snapped the ball at the wrong time in three different instances. Extremely capable receivers also made multiple “weird” drops of passes thrown by Carr that T.V. announcers even noted at the time.

On the one hand, you think, no way. What sort of professional being paid millions of dollars would even contemplate such a stupid action. And then, you consider that the combination of low IQs and an entitlement philosophy with low short time preferences does make it possible. Still unlikely, but possible.

From the radio show forums: “One of the guards reportedly said if he wants to stand alone he can play alone. One reporter asked a team official about it and was told he would never be allowed in the locker room or any access to the team if he reported on it.”

UPDATE: An NFL sponsor is the first to pull its ads:

It’s happening; the NFL has just lost their first sponsor over players and coaches’ move to take a knee during the playing of our national anthem before kick-off.

Tennessee businessman Allen Jones slammed the league as “unpatriotic” in a public statement and pulled all ads for his two businesses, Check Into Cash and Hardwick Clothes, from the NFL for the remainder of the season. Jones reportedly “instructed his media buyer to remove any commercials from airing during NFL games.”

“Our companies will not condone unpatriotic behavior!” said Jones in a statement.

The dark side of entrepreneurial genius

Many will rightly look at this as a wonderful example of the sort of energetic immigrant entrepreneurialism that they believe to be of great benefit to America. But, as it happens, there is a very real and substantive downside to it as well:

The Uberpreneur: How An Uber Driver Makes $252,000 A Year. Uber may not just be a disruptive platform for transportation, but one for small businesses.
 
“Absolutely,” Uber spokeswoman Kristin Carvell says. “One of the greatest things about the Uber platform is that it offers economic opportunity for a variety of drivers — full-time, part-time, veterans, teachers, artists, and students — in more than 260 cities around the world.  Supporting and fueling the local economy is important to Uber and our driver partners help us to achieve this goal.”

His passengers seem to agree. Gavin’s ratings are 4.85/5.00 on Uber Black, 4.87/5.00 on UberX and 4.95/5.00 on Lyft, which he also uses. Those ratings have held up over time; Gavin drove over 3,829 passengers in the past 18 months.

These passengers include “executives who people pay thousands of dollars to meet at networking events,” Gavin says. He’s met Vogue fashion editors and Silicon Valley’s top brass, including legendary investor Shervin Pishevar.

“I’ve had a lot of amazing drivers, but Gavin is one of the best,” Shervin told me. “I was in his car with my daughter when I saw his jewelry designs. I thought they were wonderful and gave him a lot of encouragement to pursue his dreams.”

It’s these tactics that translate to sales. In the past year, Gavin designed many jewelry pieces for passengers, averaging $18,000 in transactions per month. Adding the $3,000 monthly gross earnings from Uber, he made $252,000 last year. Gavin used the income to expand his business, buying three more cars and hiring six new drivers.

It’s an absolutely brilliant idea. This guy is advertising far more effectively than any social media or Madison Avenue campaign, taking advantage of the direct one-on-one time he has with his riders to let them know about his business, which quite clearly is a genuine interest to a sufficient percentage of them. This guy is a bona fide entrepreneurial genius.

However, it’s not all rosy good cheer and future GDP growth on the horizon.

But Gavin’s growing business doesn’t tell the full story. As he’s become more successful, he hasn’t forgotten about his fellow Filipino immigrants. “I reach back to my roots,” he said. “When hiring new drivers, I find underemployed Filipinos and give them the jobs first. Most don’t know much about smartphones — and that’s okay. I teach them about Uber and Lyft. I teach them how to use the internet so it can help their lives in other ways, too. I let them use the cars to run errands and pick up their children. It’s not about squeezing every dollar from them. It’s about empowering the community that you came from.”

So much for American meritocracy. Gavin is so grateful for the opportunity that America has given him that he’s actively helping his fellow Filipinos in preference to Americans, even when they are massively less-qualified.

This is precisely why the civic nationalist notion of only bringing in the best and most productive foreigners is as harmful to the nation, and arguably more insidiously so, than importing a parasitical class of welfare recipients.

Alt★Hero launch

Alt★Hero is go on Freestartr. We apologize in advance for any inadvertent mass triggerings that may result from the release of this video. You’ll want to check out the campaign every day, because we will be adding a new page, as well as additional character art, on a daily basis. The video can be watched here as well.

On the production side, those of you who are Voxiversity supporters may be pleased to note that this video was produced by the Voxiversity producer. Also, for both campaigns, be sure to provide us with your emails so we can get in contact with you and provide you with the relevant information and digital products.

UPDATE Four hours. Four freaking hours! That’s how long it took to fully fund Alt★Hero by 242 backers, which is now officially green-lighted. Someone told me that it would be fully funded on the first day and I did not believe them, although the five thousand angry tweets by Comics SJWs in response to one image of Rebel did make me wonder.

So, thank you all, and rest assured that together, we will Make Comics Great Again and have a great deal of fun in the process.

We’ll figure out how to accept one-offs and additional orders over the weekend. For foreign backers, don’t worry about the US forms. Just cram everything into the US form, including your country. Freestartr will fix that, but in the meantime that will work.

Rebel wasn’t really expecting to have to get ready quite so quickly….

Making America Employed Again

The God-Emperor strikes again:

The Department of Justice announced Thursday it has filed a lawsuit against a Colorado corporation for allegedly discriminating against U.S. workers.

The complaint alleges that in 2016, Crop Production discriminated against at least three United States citizens by refusing to employ them as seasonal technicians in El Campo, Texas, because Crop Production preferred to hire temporary foreign workers under the H-2A visa program.

“In the spirit of President Trump’s Executive Order on Buy American and Hire American, the Department of Justice will not tolerate employers who discriminate against U.S. workers because of a desire to hire temporary foreign visa holders,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement. “… Where there is a job available, U.S. workers should have a chance at it before we bring in workers from abroad.”

This is great. This is excellent. Now, BUILD THE WALL!

I think they’re done laughing

The SJW Trigger Sequence:

  1. LOL! LMAO! LMFAO! HAHAHAHAHA! So very ha!
  2. Me no care. Give zero fucks.
  3. ANGER! FURY! HATE HATE HATE! RAGE!

GAYLIEN‏ @GuyWithOpinion1
You know, I usually just laugh at you, but honestly fuck off and die. You don’t get to shit on Jack fucking Kirby’s grave, you Nazi fuck.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Sure I do. He was a midget, a bullshitter, and he couldn’t draw hands or ears. I see we’ve gone from Stage One to Stage Three.

Drew Habits‏ @DrewHabits
If Jack Kirby were alive today, he’d probably kick your ass with his 100-year-old muscles while you pooped your Dukes of Hazzard underoos

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Jack Kirby was a midget and a bullshitter. He wasn’t kicking anyone’s ass, except maybe a little girl’s.

Ten‏ @tenryuuwu
if kirby were alive today he’d steal your lunch money and give you a swirly

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
That’s antisemitic. Jews are not all thieves. And Kirby wasn’t big enough to pick me up, let alone give me a swirly.

Whatever happened to all the laughing? Well, they’re clearly not triggered or anything.

By the way, I performed a little science at the gym today, testing out hypotheses. It turns out I could curl the little midget four times cleanly, six if I cheated. Figure eight at peak.

UPDATE: Now MovieBob is weighing in.

Undoing the settlement, destroying the peace

ESR, an avowed Yankee, explains why it is a terrible idea to permit SJWs to demolish the symbols of Southern history and pride in the name of diversity and equality:

The statues now at issue were mostly erected between 1865 and 1914 by organizations like the Daughters of the Confederacy who were fully invested in the soft version of Lost Cause romanticism. In view of current revisionism, it should be remembered that, in the time before the early 1960s when one could express white-supremacist and segregationist beliefs in the South and expect a lot of applause, the statue builders generally didn’t play that song.

We know this because we can read the dedications they chiseled on their monuments. Whatever the statue-builders may have privately believed, the face – the myth – about that they presented was not one of white supremacy justified but of virtue and heroism in a lost cause.

My cultural and political ancestors, the Yankees who had won the war, got out of the statue-builders’ way because we understood that the statue-builders were, in fact, cooperating in the great settlement between South and North. Making heroes of the rebels was not a large price to pay if it meant that Southern pride became American pride.

In fact, the deception was quite mutual. Southerners, by and large, tried to pretend their revolt had not been a defense of the indefensible. Northerners by and large, decided that agreeing with that pretense (or at least not disputing it in public) was a polite fiction useful to everybody.

The statue-smashers either fail to understand that great settlement (likely), or intend to undo it (not likely), or are pursuing a broader aim which I’ll address near the end of this essay.

It is 2017 and the wounds of the Civil War have not entirely healed. “Damnyankee” is still a single word in much of the South. Failing to understand the great settlement creates the risk that those wounds could re-open into divisive regionalism and eventual conflict.

This is especially so since Southerners already feel like victims in the red/blue conflict that now divides coastal urban elites from Middle America. Many Blue tribesmen talk as though they think everybody living more than 60 miles inland and outside a university town is a closet neo-Confederate. This is fantasy, but there is a possible future in which Southern resentment becomes the dominant symbology of the Red tribe in a way it is not today.

Some people are going to want to interject at this point “What about the insult to black people? Aren’t those statues symbols of white supremacy that should be smashed on that account alone?”

Brother, if I believed that I would be swinging a hammer myself. But the mission of the statue builders was to redeem the honor of the South in part by editing white supremacism and slavery out of our cultural memory of the war. They largely deceived themselves with Lost Cause romanticism. Making those statues into symbols of black subjugation would have undercut their whole project.

I do not want to see the post-Civil-War settlement undone. Thus, I’m in favor of letting Southerners keep their statues and their myths. We should let Southern heroes remain American heroes because that is what worked to pull the country back together – and because after the war so many of them really did argue for reconciliation.

The USA isn’t going to collapse because the South rises again, rather, the South will rise again when the USA collapses under the weight of all of its competing identities.

The original Comics-SJW

I’ve been a little taken aback by the sheer vituperation of the SJWs triggered by the mere existence of the Alt⭐️Hero concept, at least at this very early stage. And, I confess, I have been more than a little surprised by their apparent confusion between the late Marvel/DC artist Jack Kirby and the superheroes that he drew.

Ayatollah Cumonme‏ @Phonycian
if jack kirby were alive today he’d kick you in the balls and spit on you

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
If Jack Kirby were alive today, he’d be asking to work for me. The SJWs at Marvel and DC today wouldn’t employ him.

rstevens  @rstevens
kirby would cook you and serve you to hogs, dude

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
You’re talking about the little Jewish guy with no biceps, right? Sure, he might draw that.

psychopompous‏ @prognostiq
you really have fucking clue huh. i mean, not surprising but… you’re not fit to shine his shoes, bud.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Shine his tiny little size five shoes? I shall endeavor to restrain my disappointment.

Jo O’Donnell ⚘‏ @bowtiednomad
son hed cause more damage to your body than your daily lunch of 5 5-layer burritos

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
A dead guy who went 5’4 and weighed about 125? You’ve read way too many comic books. You know they’re not real, right?

meth lab for cutie‏ @patrickmustdie
jack kirby would of wooped your ass and then tell the story for laughs at parties for years

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Kirby used to brag about fighting a guy who didn’t show up. I made the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps tap out in less than 7 seconds.

As strange as it is to be threatened with a very small corpse, I understand that comic book fans enjoy this sort of theoretical matchup. So, just to be clear, this is Jack Kirby in his physical prime, with his wife, Roz. This is another picture of Kirby. This is me, with Spacebunny. Another picture of me. Yes, both pictures were a long time ago, but nevertheless, I am confident that I have maintained myself in rather better condition than Mr. Kirby has.

Jack Kirby’s tough guy story: Once, while Jack was in the Timely office, a call came from someone in the lobby. When Kirby answered, the caller threatened Jack with bodily harm if he showed his face. Kirby told the caller he would be right down, but by the time Jack reached street level, there was no one to be found.

Vox Day’s tough guy story: In his second public ringfight, his opponent, a Tae Kwan Do practitioner, broke Vox’s nose in the initial exchange. Vox didn’t notice it until his sensei called time out to stop the bleeding. After the time out, Vox caught his opponent coming in with a sidekick that doubled him over, and proceeded to throw alternating hooks to both sides of the defenseless man’s head until the referee stopped the fight in the first round and declared Vox the winner. After the fight, Vox went to the hospital to get his nose straightened out. Mostly.

For what it’s worth. Anyhow, what explains this weird elevation of Jack Kirby to demigod status by the Comic SJWs? The answer, as it turns out, is that they believe him to have been their much-revered forefather who blazed the social justice trail they so bravely tread today.

X-Men creator Jack Kirby was the original comic book social justice warrior

Over the past week, comic book enthusiasts have been celebrating the late artist Jack Kirby’s birthday by remembering the impact he had on the industry. From his iconic stories and characters to his contentious relationship with Marvel, Kirby’s legacy is a rich and memorable one. A massive part of this legacy was that Kirby was always telling stories — through his heroes like the X-Men, the Thing, the Hulk — of being an outsider and becoming a hero despite living in a world that’s seemingly out to get you. And there are still people fighting battles today in the spirit of Kirby’s legacy.

The past few years in the comic book industry have been underscored by a struggle for more diversity. And while it can get ugly, sexist, and racist, there’s plenty of good to come out of this battle. Case in point: the hugely successful Ms. Marvel series featuring Kamala Khan, a Pakistani-American Muslim teenager. More characters like Kamala is what Kirby would have wanted.

In the spirit of remembering Kirby, writer Saladin Ahmed tweeted and pointed to a 1990 interview with the Comics Journal, where Kirby explained that he was compelled to create the superhero Black Panther because the default had always been white characters. And one day, he realized he was ignoring how important it was for him, and for the comic book industry, to reflect humanity.

So, yeah. This is going to be SO MUCH FUN. You know how SJWs love nothing better than to deconstruct our historical heroes and literally tear them down? Well, as I have pointed out, any use of a tactic legitimizes it….

And they’re totally NOT TRIGGERED! NOT EVEN A LITTLE!

Georgie‏ @SilverDoe_Iso
Thanks to the delightful replies to this idiot, I was made aware of Faiza Hussein, and just ordered myself a comic ?

Well, that certainly shows me! By the way, in the Marvel universe, Faiza Hussein is the current bearer of the sword Excalibur. That’s right. In Marvel’s world, King Arthur’s blade is wielded by a Muslim woman.

But it must be confessed that it is true that the artists of Alt⭐️Hero don’t draw women like Jack Kirby did. Then again, why they would want to do so remains a mystery to me. I leave it to the reader to guess which image below is Mr. Kirby’s work and which is not. And, in case you’re interested, I should probably mention that we anticipate launching the Freestartr campaign tomorrow.

Catalonian update

Spain is pulling out all the stops to shut down the Catalonian vote on independence. To save democracy, one presumes.

CATALONIA REFERENDUM LATEST: Madrid pulls out all the stops to block independence vote

SPAIN has launched an all-out assault on the Catalan government with Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, the prosecutor’s office and the judiciary all making moves to block a binding referendum on independence on October 1.

An unprecedented combination of legal action, police deployments and economic sanctions are disrupting the effort to hold the vote which has been declared illegal by Spain’s Constitutional Court.

Police have been sent to hunt down ballot papers and materials related to the referendum, while media organisations have been warned not to broadcast official Catalan campaign advertisements related to the vote. More than a hundred websites related to the referendum have already been shut down by the authorities.

Madrid has also essentially taken over the regional executive’s finances to ensure that “not a single euro” is spent on the ballot. Banks have been ordered not to allow money transfers from Catalan government accounts without Madrid’s consent.

Catalonia’s High Court is investigating the entire Catalan Cabinet led by regional President Carles Puigdemont — as well as five regional lawmakers — on charges of disobedience, prevarication, and misuse of public funds.

Sounds legit. Clearly Madrid has the moral high ground here. After all, the Constitutional Court has spoken!

 Remember when the USA went to war so that purple-fingered Iraqis could vote? Why, I’m starting to wonder if the neo-liberal world order is not actually founded on the principles of self-determination and democracy after all!

Mailvox: If this is failure

I suspect success might go to my head.

I actually put off reading the Throne of Bones series because I figured your fiction couldn’t possibly be any good. Why? Well, nobody can do everything well! You’re a clear political writer and superb thinker, you even had a band at one point. You’re an immensely creative organizer, you started your own publishing house… “What are the odds for this guy also being a good epic fantasy writer?” I asked myself. Also, the title, Throne of Bones kind of put me off. I thought you were referencing G.R.R. Martin. Well, I finally read it, and was delighted. Sea and Summa followed in due course. Your writing has the key characteristics that I value in excellent fantasy: resonance and novelty. There is a sense of familiar mythic themes, but rendered in a new and surprising way. Elves and orcs and dwarves and Romans! Oh my!

I noticed a mention that you will come out with a revised book (Sea?) soon. I’m wondering, why revise? Why not write another one? (Please?) Will the revision be an expansion where I can just start reading the new stuff, or will I need to read the whole thing again to find the additions? (Not that this would be a dreadful fate!)

Now that F&SF has become a loathsome wasteland of Social Justice and Abused Pronouns, we need more writing like this.

Actually, it’s not a revision, but an extended edition. By Amazon’s reckoning, A Sea of Skulls will go from 430 pages to 924 pages. I don’t quite see how that is even possible, since by my count, it will go from 165,000 words to 297,500. None of the existing story will be excised or even modified; I have no reason to change anything, and besides, I don’t have the time.

And don’t forget, The Last Witchking & Other Stories is now available in audiobook. I waited years to put any of this out in audio because I was waiting for the right narrator, and Jeremy Daw is just that.

An excerpt from “The Last Witchking”.

In the eyes of the villagers of Pretigny, Speer Gnasor was a boy not terribly unlike any other. He was taller than the other boys his age, but someone has to be the tallest in every village, and no one ever appeared to think it odd that at nearly thirteen years of age, the top of his father’s head barely cleared his shoulder. Speer was quick-witted but not remarkably so, although he was both envied and mocked by the other boys for his ability to read.

He participated in their games, albeit in a desultory manner. He was not unpopular, and if he had exerted himself even a little, he might well have made himself a leader of one of the little packs that divided the children of the town on lines roughly conforming with their fathers’ occupations.

Per Gnasor, his father, raised bees and made candles, and his mother raised the small flock of geese and chickens that provided him with his daily egg, and on feast days, the fowl for their little family. His two passions were fishing and books, and it was said that he had read every one of the twenty-eight books in the village at least twice.

The Gnasors themselves were said to possess seven books. By Pretigny standards, this amounted to a family library of almost mythic proportions. He dutifully attended the small church of the Immaculate twice each week, and if he ate the wafer and drank the wine given to him by the priest with little thought for what it represented, in this he was no different than any other boy in the village.

He was not an unhappy lad, and he was entirely content with his life as he found it. He did not, like some of his youthful acquaintances, chafe at the smallness of their familiar surroundings or dream of one day seeking his fortune in what, from the perspective of Pretigny, was considered to be the great city of Niederholen. Even the rumors of the riches of distant Stalchwil on the banks of the Ghlêne more than a ten-day journey away held little fascination for him. He learned to tend his father’s bees, to twist wicks and shape wax, and slowly, but surely, he even began to take notice of the butcher’s daughter. She was a tall, slender girl with a wide mouth and pale blue eyes who was nearly of a height and an age with him.

Left to his own devices, allowed to pursue his homely dreams, it was likely that Speer Gnasor would have married the butcher’s daughter, learned the butcher’s trade, and eventually become a fine, upstanding pillar of the local church and community.

But on his thirteenth birthday, everything he knew about himself and the world around him was forever transformed by a letter from his father.

After a dinner that featured rare treats such as Valoyan sausages and the sweet cheese called Niederholt, Per Gnasor sent him into the forest armed with nothing more than his warmest coat and a small shovel and told him to unearth his birthday present one hundred paces north of his favorite tree.
Both excited and confused, he lost little time in finding the peculiar oak with a thick lower branch that twisted over its leftmost neighbor, and paced off the distance. He had to dig a hole that was deeper than his knees before he struck something hard. With a little more work he saw it was a small wooden chest. His heart beating faster, he extricated it from the ground and opened it.

The first thing he saw was a letter written in an unfamiliar hand. Despite the shadows cast by the looming trees, there was just enough light breaking through the leaves to permit him to read it.

To my son and my heir,

You are not what you think you are. You are more, so much more. Kings and princes would tremble and scour the earth in search of you were they to hear even a rumor of your existence. It was to save you from their wrath that your mother sacrificed herself. It was to protect you from their vengeance that you were hidden away even from yourself. The man and woman you believe to be your parents are my true and loyal servants, and they have raised you at my command, even as they release you now to your destiny as they have been instructed.

You will be told many lies about your true kind, we whom the vulgar and the frightened wrongly named witchkings. But this is nothing more than fear. It is the shameless perversion of history by the vicious little minds of its victors.

As you will learn, we Wahrkönigen were simply dedicated to the truth and only the truth, regardless of its consequences and heedless of its costs. And what was this fearful truth, this dark god that struck such terror into the hearts of Men and Elves, Orcs, and Dwarves? Only this: There is no Good and there is no Evil. There is only what Is. Nothing more. Have the courage to grasp this fearful truth, and you shall be a worthy successor to the long line of kings before you.

I have prepared the means that you will require to learn both the Lesser and the Greater Arts. Master them well. An arduous task lies before you, but I know you will succeed, for you are my son and you will surpass me. And in the place that has been prepared for you, you will also find the answers to your inevitable questions, including your true lineage.

You are a phoenix raised by sparrows, my son. Now it is time for you to fly. When you have grown into your strength and become worthy of your heritage, you will set the world on fire.

These are the three charges that I lay upon you, my son. Instruct the Elves. Break them of their ancient pride and shatter the remnants of their kingdoms. Humble the Northmen. They must pay a tithe of blood for their treachery. Harry them throughout their islands and drive them into the sea. Preserve the Blood. You must not be the last of your line. Father many children, on many women, but instruct only the most worthy in the Wahrkunst. The Blood will tell.

You are young and you are alone in a harsh and unforgiving world, but never doubt that you were loved as few sons have ever been loved. For your mother and your father so loved you that they died for you, not once, but twice. We allowed ourselves to perish and we erased ourselves from the minds of mortals, so that you might live.

Your enemies, and they are many, will not find you until you are ready to be found. Be brave, my son, be strong, and never permit yourself fear. For you are a true Wahrkönig, and in your veins flows the pure blood of the greatest and most powerful sorcerers the world has ever known. Embrace your greatness, my son, embrace the Blood, embrace the challenges I have set before you, and one day, you will teach the world that you are harsher and more unforgiving than it could ever dare to be.

Avenge me, my son. Avenge your loving mother. Avenge your noble race,

Mauragh, son of Thauragh
King of Thauron, Nordandir, and the Wolf Isles

The trend is bigger than the man

As I’ve observed, pointed out, and argued repeatedly, the trends are much, much bigger than individual men or even individual movements:

He must have known what was coming. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, a pillar of the cowardly GOP Establishment, announced he would not be running for re-election on Tuesday [Republican Sen. Corker announces he won’t seek re-election, by Richard Lardner and Erik Schelzig, Associated Press, September 26, 2017]. Corker’s departure is widely being interpreted as a sign of the Establishment’s inability to control the GOP base, as the election of President Trump, the rise of nationalism and the emergence of alternative media outlets (such as Breitbart and VDARE.com) make it harder for cuckservatives to Republican primary voters in line [Sen. Bob Corker’s retirement is notable for when it’s happening, by Amber Phillips, Washington Post, September 26, 2017]

And now, we have the ultimate proof in Alabama. Judge Roy Moore, one of the most persistent targets of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is now the Republican nominee for the Senate. And he defeated incumbent Senator Luther Strange despite Strange being endorsed by President Donald J. Trump himself…. Even before Trump’s inauguration, when there were troubling signs the new President was surrounding himself with the Republican Establishment, it was clear that the President’s supporters would need to rise against Trump in his own name. The victory of Roy Moore is the best example so far of how this insurgency will play out.

And most importantly, it shows how the populist and nationalist movement is larger than Trump himself.

Trump’s advisors seem to know this. In the Fox News interview referenced above, Dr. Gorka claimed “no one voted for Trump, we voted for his agenda.” And during his speech in support of Moore, Bannon referenced Jeff Sessions, not Trump, as the “spiritual father of the populist and nationalist movement.”

But does Trump himself know this? Already, the Main Stream Media is trying to present this as a devastating defeat for the president personally. The New York Times kvetched about Moore’s social views and sneered that his victory “demonstrated in stark terms the limits of Mr. Trump’s clout” [Roy Moore Wins Senate G.O.P. Runoff in Alabama, by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, September 26, 2017]. Jason Le Miere at Newsweek suggested Trump had suffered his first major political defeat at the ballot box and hinted his political weakness could trigger his impeachment. [How Alabama Senate Election Results Could Trigger Trump’s Impeachment, September 26, 2017]

This wildly overstates the case. Trump had hedged his bets, suggesting at one point he made a “mistake” in endorsing Strange [Trump supports Strange, but says it may be “mistake,” Washington Post, September 25, 2017]. He also said he would “campaign like hell” for Moore if Moore won [Roy Moore: ‘I can’t wait’ for Trump to ‘campaign like hell’ for me, by Sean Langille, Washington Examiner, September 25, 2017].

It’s hardly a devastating defeat for President Trump when his supposed enemies are fanatically loyal to him and his “allies” can’t wait to stab him in the back.

People get caught up in the heat of the moment. It’s easy to forget that the battles of last week, last year, and last month were, at the time, seemingly every big as important as whatever the battle du jour happens to be.

You can only ride the trends, you can’t reasonable hope to control them. This is why it is foolish and futile to attempt to brand and spin and otherwise attempt to control a trend as narrative, because that is a category error. The main reason Alt⭐️Hero is going to be successful is not due to the quality of the storylines, the artwork, or the characters, but because it is in line with the winds of the zeitgeist at a time when Marvel and DC Comics are trying to fly directly against them.

If Trump is wise, he will not only recognize that he is not bigger than the movement, but that the movement is not bigger than the trend.