Mailvox: well, no

I was somewhat amused to receive a request to promote someone’s IndieGoGo campaign this morning. I didn’t take any offense at the request, and I’m sure it’s a perfectly good campaign and all, but I have to imagine that he hasn’t been aware of what’s been going on around here lately. Please consider this my standard reply to anyone who would like me to promote a campaign on IndieGoGo.

Dear X,

I’m sorry, but I will not promote anything on IndieGoGo. Nor would I recommend that anyone use them. They retroactively cancelled our successful campaign there and refused to give us the money that we raised from our backers, then made false and contradictory accusations in order to try to retroactively justify that refusal. So, I hope you’ll understand that we will not promote the platform of someone who has deplatformed us.

Best regards,

Vox

And for those of you who missed AH:Q 2.0, just be patient. We’ll introduce 2.1 later this month. Everything is in order. Trust the plan.

Free speech fail

What we have here is a complete failure to anticipate:

When Gab.com goes back online this weekend there will inevitably be a flood of psyop accounts created to drive division and break our guidelines. We will need your help more than ever to spot them and take action.

It only took Andrew Torba 14 months to come around to the very position for which he attempted to publicly mock me and for which he completely sold out Spacebunny, to whom he had appealed in the first place in order to obtain my help. Why do you think I subsequently concluded he was not ready for prime time and refused to have anything to do with him or his site? I’m not pretending that I don’t despise the guy, of course I do, but when have my analyses of people or situations ever been based on my feelings about them?

There are few things I find more stupidly tedious than clueless people babbling about “not punching right” or “we’re all on the same side”. No. We’re not. There are more than two sides. That’s binary thinking. And believing and supporting everyone who says they are opposed to the most extreme Left or are capable of mouthing the right words at the right time in a public situation is exactly how the Right wound up following opinion leaders such as William F. Buckley, Bill Kristol, Glenn Beck, and Ben Shapiro, and enriching shameless grifters like Jordan Peterson and Candace Owens. It’s how the Right always end up with sell-outs, surrender monkeys, cucks, cons, and outright liberals running the Conservative Establishment.

Character matters. Integrity matters. A willingness to speak the truth matters. Consistency matters. Loyalty matters. A devotion to a consciously anti-Christian tactic as a principle, especially a false devotion to a fake principle one is not even willing to stand by under pressure, is simply no basis for trusting someone, following someone, or even deeming someone to be on our side.

In other platform-related news, if you subscribe to the Darkstream, I would encourage you to follow my new account on Stream.me for a livestreaming alternative to YouTube. There are some minor issues to resolve; my new router appears to be causing occasional interruptions in the simulstreams and I can’t see the Stream.me comments yet, but we’ll work them out.

RIP Dr. Z

While I enjoyed Peter King, Dr. Z was always my favorite of Sports Illustrated’s Big Three football writers. His acerbic, opinionated style might not well have gone down with television viewers – he was fired by ESPN – but he was the inspiration for all the detailed analysis now provided by the likes of Football Outsiders and ProFootball Focus.

His articles are a wealth of football history, dating back to the all-time great Notre Dame teams of 1946 and 1947 and the unheralded stars of the AAFC. He truly lived a life in football, and he was one of the sport’s greatest historians. His insight was deep, as indicated by this offhand observation in an article on the New York Giants defeat of the Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl XXV:

“I want size on my entire defense,” says Parcells, “not only on my front seven, but in my secondary. [Five of his nine defensive backs weigh 200 pounds or more, and no defender weighs less than 190.] The defensive backs have to be physical on the receivers, jam them. Sure, they’ll get their share of catches, but they’re going to pay for them.”

That was the heart of the defensive scheme New York threw at Buffalo. Parcells was in charge of the overall concept, but the implementation was left to Bill Belichick, the brilliant, 38-year-old defensive coordinator who has head coach written all over him.

We can hardly hold it against him that he did not predict Belichick would subsequently become the greatest NFL coach of all time, as he clearly perceived Belichick’s unusual potential. His attention to detail bordered on the obsessive; he made a habit of timing the performance of the national athems. My favorite feature was his post-season ratings of the NFL announcing teams, where he spoke for the viewers with the assurance of a subject-matter expert.

The worst is the search for the eternal “story line,” a favorite device of production people but something I’ve always felt is a deadly trap. “Here’s the story line,” we hear at the top of the show, or “among the many story lines,” etc. No, the story line is what develops from the game itself, and as an old handicapper, I can tell you that most of the time it differs from preconceived notions. So why bother with it at all? Why get locked into such a static device, instead of merely letting the game take its course?

He was an old school man in a new school world, but he never compromised or concealed his opinions. He was also a wine aficionado and wasn’t afraid to demonstrate that he loved his wife as much as the sport to which he dedicated his life. He was, in short, a genuine man, and the world is fortunate that he left us such a treasure trove of his work.

Perhaps the best compliment one can pay him is to observe that if an alien were to come across the ruins of the planet Earth centuries in the future, the archive of Dr. Z’s writings would not merely suffice to allow that alien to understand the game of football, it would make that alien a fan of the defunct sport.

The Killstream gets KIAd

Further evidence of the complete inutility of virtue-signaling. It will not save you once you have been targeted for deplatforming.

Killstream is known for both its controversial guests and similarly toxic chat. Users have been known to take advantage of YouTube’s Super Chat system to buy and pin toxic messages in the live chat, further defaming the stream’s reputation.

This prompted show host Ethan Ralph to fight back by holding a charity stream to benefit St. Jude’s, a research hospital for children with catastrophic diseases. However, YouTube’s new policy on harmful Super Chats has caused a major rift between Ralph and the platform, as well as the Wall Street Journal – which he is now accusing of taking money away from sick children.

Ralph claims that an upcoming article from the Wall Street Journal pressured YouTube into taking action against his stream, causing the company to cancel over $26,000 in donations, which St. Jude’s is now reportedly refunding.

An email taken from a journalist at the WSJ claims that the Ralph Retort livestream is featured in an upcoming piece, which will detail how the alt-right is using YouTube’s Super Chat function to spread to ‘problematic’ ideology.

Of course what the Wall Street Journal did was wrong. Of course it was ridiculous that St. Jude’s refused the donation. Of course it is wrong for YouTube to deplatform Ethan.

What about any of this is even remotely a surprise? Stop virtue-signaling. Stop trying to appease those who hate you. Start utilizing independent platforms and concentrate on supporting those who are doing the same.

From Infogalactic to Castalia House, we are actively working on this. That’s why Castalia House Direct exists, that’s why we are considering the best way to offer an alternative to Kindle Unlimited, and that’s why Voxiversity and the Darkstream are on BitChute instead of relying solely on the vagaries of YouTube’s Trust and Safety Council or whatever they call their thought police. We’re also working on other projects about which we have not yet said anything.

But we can’t make anyone stop using Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and YouTube. All we can do is offer an alternative.

“That is our job”

A gaffe is when someone mistakenly says something they believe to be true. The media really is the enemy of the people and has been for a long time. A reminder from February 2017:

The hosts of MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ commented on President Trump’s efforts to “undermine the media.” Co-host Mika Brzezinski commented Wednesday morning that she is upset to see President Trump has moved in on the media’s turf when it comes to the area of mind control.

“He is trying to undermine the media and trying to make up his own facts,” she said about Trump. “And it could be that while unemployment and the economy worsens, he could have undermined the messaging so much that he can actually control exactly what people think.”

“And that, that is our job,” she noted, referring to the media.

The entire purpose of the media is to control what people think. That’s why they are so enraged by the God-Emperor correctly describing them as Fake News. Everything they say is a lie. Everything they say is meant to establish a false narrative. Everything they report is intended to spin things in a manner to influence people’s behavior.

Look at the NPR hit piece on Chuck Dixon and me. Even though Amanda Robb obtained nothing effective that she could use against me in the three hours she spent interrogating me, she and her co-conspirator still successfully planted the false narrative of dark money in the minds of people like Jason Yungbluth and IndieGoGo.

Al Letson: So Vox Day claims to have gotten money to produce these comic books through a crowdfunding website. I’m on that site and it says he started off trying to raise $25000, but he raised close to $236000. That just amazes me.

Amanda Robb: It’s actually pretty unbelievable.

Al Letson: Where is that money coming from?

Amanda Robb: Well that’s the $236000 question. It’s very hard to tell. Most of it’s from a anonymous donors and a lot of it comes in very large increments, some up to $5000 each which is weird because the average donation to a crowdfunding project is about $66.

Al Letson: But we don’t know if he actually raised that money. It looks like it, but we don’t know that for a fact.

Amanda Robb: I think that’s a really good point because Alt-Hero was raising money on a crowdfunding site called, and apparently Vox Day helped create it. It’s a private site. It’s totally black box. There’s no way to find out who made most of the donations, where the money came from, where it went, if it actually existed. I did find out that the company that processed the credit card payments decided to stop working with FreeStarter a few months back, and I tried to get in touch with the company to find out why and they wouldn’t talk to me. Then Alt-Hero had already way surpassed its fundraising goal and is publishing now a series of comic books.

First, I didn’t help create Freestartr. Fake news. Second, notice what Robb conveniently failed to report. She claims that the average crowdfunding backing – not a donation, also fake news – is  $66. But while she mentions a) the total, and b) the largest backing amount of the Alt-Hero campaign, she completely fails to note that since there were 2,190 backers, the average backing for Alt-Hero was only $107. That’s certainly higher than the average but it is not even remotely remarkable; the leading boardgame now being crowdfunded on Kickstarter has an average backing of $101 and a retro sports watch that is trending with 20 days left has an average backing of $248.

Again, fake news, false narrative. Mika Brzezinski inadvertently admitted the truth about the media. They actually are trying to control exactly what people think and they are ferociously opposed to anyone who stands in their way and prevents them from doing that.

The amusing thing is how she belatedly tried to backtrack and control what people think about what she actually said about controlling what people think.

Mika Brzezinski@morningmika
Today I said it’s the media’s job to keep President Trump from making up his own facts, NOT that it’s our job to control what people think.

Mika Brzezinski@morningmika
 Of course, that is obvious from the transcript but some people want to make up their own facts. SAD!

Again, fake news. She quite literally said it was the media’s job to “actually control exactly what people think.” There is no possible grammatical construction or interpretation that allows any objective reading of her statement to conclude that she actually said it was the media’s job to prevent President Trump from making up his own facts.

But instead of claiming that she misspoke, which at least would have been a credible lie, she chose to try to create an observably false narrative about her own words. Meta fake news!

Darkstream: Blue Wave or Pollster Fiction?

From the transcript of the Darkstream, which I’m glad to report is no longer being linked to strange, creepy kid videos on YouTube.

A lot of people who support Trump, a lot of people who are going to vote Republican, are not going to tell people that. You know, people are beginning to become more comfortable and confident about supporting the God-Emperor because he’s been so successful – he has been perfect,  he hasn’t built the wall, yet he hasn’t drained the swamp yet – but the economy is doing extremely well, he is at least saying a lot of the right things in public. When when people are talking about how, “oh well he hasn’t done the necessary, hasn’t done this or that,” can you imagine George Bush or George W. Bush actually threatening to open fire on immigrants? I mean, he has pushed the Overton Window so far to the right in with just his rhetoric that a lot of us don’t even realize this.

If you look at how much he has pushed back against the Obama and liberal Republican alliance it’s really incredible. In that interview that I did with Bleeding Cool that was retroactively vanished, one of the things the interviewer noted in an aside that he thought was interesting was that I was no longer saying that Donald Trump is the greatest US president since Calvin Coolidge, that I was saying that he is the greatest president since Andrew Jackson. And he is already though there’s a lot that still needs to be done. There’s no question there is a lot that needs to be done, but this is a president who has declared himself to be a nationalist, this is a president who has openly declared and correctly declared that the media is the enemy of the people, this is a president who has stated his intention of ending birthright citizenship, these are all major major accomplishments in the Presidential sense. He is using what Teddy Roosevelt called the bully pulpit with a great degree of effectiveness.

You need to keep in mind he doesn’t have a cooperative House or Senate. Despite the fact that they are Republican that does not mean that they are on board with the Trump nationalist agenda and so you know, it’s really remarkable.

Someone says “a Native American that believes Andrew Jackson was a great president?” He was a great president. He wasn’t good for the Cherokees, but you know what, the Cherokees weren’t his people. I don’t think that that was the right thing to do. I certainly don’t think that it was a good thing to do, but when you put against that the fact that he eliminated the first Central Bank of the United States, there is no comparison. What he did for his people was phenomenal. You need to look at and judge leaders by the correct criteria, okay? What Winston Churchill did for the people of Germany was very, very bad, no question, but we don’t judge Winston Churchill by what he did for the people of Germany, we judge him by what he did for the people of the United Kingdom of which he was the prime minister at the time. Andrew Jackson should not be judged by what he did to the Cherokee or the other American Indian tribes, he should be judged by what he did for his people,  and I think that I think that Donald Trump is going to be lauded and revered for what he’s accomplished already, much less what we hope he will accomplish in the future.

Go the hell home already

The ranking commander in Afghanistan has publicly conceded that the Afghan war cannot be won.

The Afghanistan war cannot be won militarily and peace will only be achieved through a political resolution with the Taliban, the newly-appointed American general in charge of US and NATO operations has conceded.

In his first interview since taking command of NATO’s Resolute Support mission in September, Gen. Austin Scott Miller provided NBC News with a surprisingly candid assessment of the seemingly never-ending conflict, which began with the US invasion of Afghanistan in October, 2001.

“This is not going to be won militarily. This is going to a political solution,” Miller said. He mused that the Taliban is also tired of fighting and may be interested in starting to “work through the political piece” of the 17-year-old war.

But it’s not clear if the Taliban is open to negotiations. Last month, a top Taliban commander told RT, in a rare interview, that the group’s leaders had no desire to negotiate with the Americans.

Congratulations, it only took 17 years for the U.S. military to discover why Afghanistan is called “the graveyard of empires”. That’s some fine military intelligence at work there. Go the hell home. The invasion was bad enough, but the decision to try and occupy Afghanistan was reprehensibly stupid. No more wars without formal Congressional declaration.

Not a single seat

A bold prediction by Fleporblog flies directly in the face of the Blue Wave-predicting pollsters:

Florida is looking better and better by the day for Republicans! Nearly 3.75 million people have voted early. The margin for the Republicans continues to increase each day (currently +63,537). Democrats had a lead of 96,450 at the end of Early Voting in 2016. The difference at this point is +159,987 for Republicans. We have an excellent chance of flipping FL-D7 and a good chance of flipping FL-D13.

We will not lose a single Republican House Seat.

Nevada has been a night and day difference when comparing 2018 to 2016. The RNC went all in with door-to-door knocking starting 6 months ago. It is really paying off BIGLY! We will hold the Senate Seat (Heller) and the Governor’s Seat. We have a fantastic chance of flipping NV-D3 and a good chance of flipping NV-D4.

We will not lose a single Republican House Seat.

If this guy gets it right with a call that virtually no one else is making, he’ll definitely be one site to watch in the 2020 Presidential election.

You can’t stop The Legend

You can’t even hope to contain him:

Prolific comic book creator Chuck Dixon and the creator of Bane will see his novel series based on Levon Cade adapted to television by Sylvester Stallone’s Balboa Productions. The Levon Cade series follows Levon Cade, a former Marine, who became a construction worker. Cade eventually becomes a mercenary and metes out vigilante justice. The first book Levon’s Trade sees Cade hunt for a missing college student and uncover a vast criminal conspiracy.

This will not be the only news on the TV/movie front this month. Stay tuned….

The end of the neo-liberal world order

For all its global reach, the neo-liberal world order will likely prove to have been exceptionally short-lived in the historical sense:

Though the press is obsessed with President Trump defining a change we are seeing, that is a classic case of mal-educated Amerocentrism. The shift started before him. He is just a symptom, not a cause. It isn’t even an American phenomenon. If anything we are lagging the global trend.

What period started to come to an end at the start of this century? The end of the post-Cold War as a period by itself? I don’t quite buy it. There is a lot of talk of an end to the post-WWII, “Liberal World Order” (LWO). I think that might be right.

The LWO began at the end of WWII. The period after the fall of the Soviet Union that people call as the Post-Cold War Era wasn’t really an era. It was either the final or the penultimate chapter of the long running LWO that the Cold War was just a longer chapter of. Even while the Soviet Union was on its death bed we saw the next chapter, AKA Bush41’s “New World Order” (NWO).

One could argue the NWO was the penultimate chapter, and 2001-2008 the final chapter of the LWO.

Hard to say right now, but if forced, I’d put my chips on that argument.

The NWO lasted less than a decade, if that. It was a period of unchallenged American dominance, but that rode on the back of the “The Liberal World Order” built in the post-WWII period.

What I would call the final chapter, somewhere from the attacks of September 2001 and the newly elected President Obama’s apology tour and welcoming of a rising China, I’m not sure – but it marked a shift to something new. The pivot is not yet complete – it is a slow turn that took awhile to get here.

The last two chapters of the LWO saw the falling apart of those structures – the EU, ascendency of Western culture, extra-national international legal bodies, American dominance of the high seas – that defined the success of the old age. The vacuum left behind by them, and the fragility of remaining ones like NATO, is feeding change.

This new era is a movement of returns, reckoning, and realization. Strangely, end of the LWO can probably can be traced back to the Muslim world. They were an the early adopter or canary in the coal mine of the structural culmination of the LWO. There you find the first place where the assumptions of the ruling Western elite began to fail.

Just look at the pictures of Cairo and Kabul in the 1960s and 1970s. Western dress, cultural norms, secularism, and political systems (socialist, capitalist, or a mixture of both) dominated. At the end of the 1970s the wave crested first there when you saw decades of progress for women in the public space begin to retreat from Islamabad to Alexandria.

Those were indications that the West had lost its confidence and its appeal. Once that support goes soft, everything it underpins weakens. Much of the weakening started with the anti-Western efforts in our own universities and popular culture. Jesse Jackson’s “Hey, hey, ho, ho; Western Civ has got to go” was just one of a long series of notes to the outside world that things were well along the way to being not quite right.

If you value Western values of tolerance and progress, how do you expect them to grow and expand abroad when you cannot support them at home? In their absence, something will fill the void.

I don’t believe there is any difference between the LWO and the NWO. Both were aspects of the neo-liberal world order championed by the same people. Globalism was always the objective of certain elements behind the neo-liberal world order, and the ongoing rise of nationalism represents the inevitable reaction to globalism that is described in the old Chinese aphorism.

 The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.

But remember, what fuels the drive for global institutions is the result of widespread failures at the national levels. As we have seen in the USA, when centralization fails, the response is not to abandon it, but to try to salvage it through expanding its reach. As fast as the neo-liberal world order has failed, any globalist order would fail even faster due to the greater stresses upon even more fragile bonds.