Zerohedge has hasbara

Apparently Robert Trip has been hired to run around to different right-wing sites and proclaim that Alex Jones and Mike Cernovich were “hog-tailed” by Megyn Kelly. From Zerohedge:

Robert Trip Jun 19, 2017 12:39 PM
The poor bastard didn’t stand a fucking chance going head to head with the Power Chick.

I’ve replayed the interview and I’ve never seen anyone get hog-tailed like that.

Robert Trip Jun 19, 2017 12:17 PM
Alex.

Take it like a man and stop whining.

You were had in spades, big time.

Raked over the coals.

Wow! What a total beat down!

However, he is NOT RobertT here. Robert is honestly dubious.

RobertT June 19, 2017 11:39 AM
Only idiots mess with the media. Cernovich, jones don’t seem to understand, when it comes to the media, sheer numbers outweigh everything else. Most people don’t even know what all the uproar was about, they just know what the MSM said. And even if they don’t trust the MSM, that is still all they know. My advice, just try to stay completely off their radar. Eventually they lose interest. If your reputation is still intact, count yourself lucky.

RobertT June 19, 2017 11:48 AM
People who are pretending Cernovich & Jones ‘won’ are mistaken. That’s not to say it’s not helpful to the movement for people to fall on their swords now and then. But in the final analysis, that’s what they did.

RobertT June 19, 2017 11:57 AM
The only things saving Trump is his twitter feed. And Rush. And the fact that he is constantly on the attack. The MSM is constantly responding. Believe me, they may hate his guts, but they enjoy the game. Cernovich and Jones tried to do it the old way, tried to win on the facts. In Trump’s world, what’s a fact? How could they miss that?

Keep this in mind whenever you’re running into commenters on a site who can’t be reasoned with, but stick firmly to their narrative. If they’re not an SJW, they’re probably paid hasbara.

Mailvox: doomsayers

PA observes a familiar response:

The other day some doomsayer in the comments was huffing about how Infogalactic is “only” 1% different from Wikipedia and the features aren’t happening fast enough and blahblahblah. His line struck me as very familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

This morning I remembered:

“Now when Sanballat heard that we were building the wall, he was angry and greatly enraged, and he jeered at the Jews. And he said in the presence of his brothers and of the army of Samaria, ‘What are these feeble Jews doing? Will they restore it for themselves? Will they sacrifice? Will they finish up in a day? Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of rubbish, and burned ones at that?’ Tobiah the Ammonite was beside him, and he said, ‘Yes, what they are building — if a fox goes up on it he will break down their stone wall!’ ”
– Nehemiah 4:1-3

Yup, that was it. Keep building that wall, brother. It looks awfully good to me.

They doubt. They jeer. They try to demoralize. Meanwhile, we simply continue building the planetary knowledge core.

The price of media exposure

Alex Jones is discovering that no matter how big your microphone is, the collective microphone of the mainstream media that can be arrayed against you is even bigger:

Megyn Kelly presented a highly critical 19-minute piece on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on her NBC newsmagazine “Sunday Night” after a week of harsh criticism over the decision to present his views on network TV.

Jones is notorious for saying the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was staged to promote tougher gun control laws. Twenty-six people, including 20 children, died, making it the second-deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history at the time.

NBC News brought on its elder statesman Tom Brokaw to join Kelly at the end of the program to say the parents of the Newtown victims “should not have to hear the cruel claim that it’s a lie.” Brokaw’s appearance was clearly an attempt to assuage the Sandy Hook families who were outraged and even threatened legal action against NBC News.

Jones, a radio host who operates the right-wing website Infowars, repeated his theory in the interview. Kelly said he never disavowed his previous statements in their conversations and noted there was no evidence to back his claims.

Kelly interviewed Newtown parent Neil Heslin, who described the devastating loss of his son. “I think he’s blessed to have his children to spend the day with, to speak to,” Heslin said. “I don’t have that.”

Kelly did have several heated exchanges with Jones, who was sweating profusely during their sit-down. She opened by pressing him on why he called the victims of the terrorist bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, “liberal trendies” when many were pre-teen girls.

Jones tried to rationalize his statements in the interview but for the most part seemed frustrated by Kelly’s queries.

In a live-streamed video aired on his YouTube channel, Jones reacted angrily to the final taped “Sunday Night” piece as it aired. He lambasted Kelly and the mainstream media.

“This is a giant, evil misrepresentation,” he said. “They continue to misrepresent what I’ve said and what I’ve done.”

Still, he declared victory — popping a bottle of champagne and angrily vowing to keep up the fight against “globalism” and the lies covered up by the mainstream media.

On social media, reaction was mostly predictable.

Media colleagues and critics generally gave Kelly high marks for the toughness of the piece, which disputed nearly every theory Jones has promoted through Infowars.

Far-right commentators repeatedly called the interview a “hit piece.”

The rigor of the piece will likely take some of the sting out of critiques of Kelly, some of which suggested that her transition from Fox News to NBC News was off to a rocky start.

Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote on Twitter: “Bottom line on NBC’s Alex Jones piece: Strong editing gave it an edge & made him look like a kook. Still a win for him; boosts his profile.”

Jones, likely sensing that NBC was going to toughen up the segment, had already sought to undermine Kelly by leaking taped phone conversations in which she assured him it was not going to be “a hit piece.”

Now, it manifestly was a hit piece. The “far-right commentators” were correct. The Post columnist openly admits as much when she refers to “strong editing” giving the piece “an edge” and making Jones “look like a kook”. That is always the media’s objective when profiling or quoting a Narrative denier. Notice how the LA Times piece takes its own shots: “was sweating profusely”, “tried to rationalize”, “seemed frustrated”, “reacted angrily”, and so forth.

This is why the average individual should NEVER speak to the media. Jones did everything people customarily recommend – he recorded the interview, he recorded the requests for the interview, he released some of the recordings, and he showed Megyn Kelly to be a liar – and yet that didn’t prevent NBC from doing the usual hit piece or the rest of the media piling on and declaring it to be a triumphant expose of a kook.

Notice, too, the way in which the rest of the media is praising Kelly for disputing Jones’s statements. But did she request a debate or an interview with him? And what sort of honest debate format has ever permitted one disputant to edit the statements made by both sides?

Now, the additional exposure may be worth it to Jones. It’s too soon to say. Sometimes these calculated risks do work out, as Cernovich’s appearance on 60 Minutes observably did. But the average individual must understand that it is a risk, and that even those with sizable platforms such as Alex Jones and Mike Cernovich are playing underdog. And really, what is the benefit of proving, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that Megyn Kelly is a liar? Is there anyone in America who didn’t already know that?

Repeat or reprisal?

More vehicle vs pedestrian drama in London:

A van has reportedly left ploughed into a group of pedestrians outside a mosque in north London, leaving ‘a number of’ casualties. Police were called just after midnight to reports of a vehicle in collision with pedestrians at the renowned Finsbury Park Mosque, in Seven Sisters Road.

Looks like reprisal. “Images on Twitter appeared to show a clean-shaven white man with black hair being detained by police officers behind a van.”

The media will be so happy. Only 16 years after 9/11, they finally have their long-awaited backlash.

UPDATE: One person has been killed and ten more injured after a white van driver screaming ‘I’m going to kill all Muslims’ ploughed into worshippers near a renowned north London mosque, in the latest terror attack to rock Britain. A 48-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after the van mounted the pavement and veered into a congregation outside the Muslim Welfare House, near Finsbury Park Mosque, shortly after they finished Ramadan evening prayers.


I hope people will remember that Islamophobia is against violence. Islamophobia is a phobia of peace. This man was obviously no true Islamophobe.

Don’t look back in anger.

UPDATE: alternatively, could the whole thing be Fake News? /pol/ is on it and is beginning to smell a rat.

Foxholes: a poll

✌Red Pill Texas ?‏ @RedPillTexas

Leadership matters. If you were under fire in the foxhole. Would you want @RichardBSpencer, @Cernovich, or Vox by your side?


vote here

I can see the case to be made for any of us. Richard, to his credit, is more than willing to put himself out front and take the shots on behalf of others. Whatever you might think of him or his ideas, I don’t think he’s given enough respect for his courage.

Mike is tough, aggressive and proactive. Physically, he’s the biggest and strongest of the three of us. He’s also rather more clever and observant than most people realize.

I tend to be lazy, remote, and tend to be considerably more interested in the abstract than the moment. On the other hand, I’m the only one of the three who is frequently compared to, if not described as, a serial killer.

So, I suppose it really depends what you’re looking for.

Mailvox: awareness in Germany

A reader writes of his recent observations:

I live in the most left (and green) town I know and can conceive of in Germany. In this town there’s a district that’s known nationwide for how “green” it is. Everyone votes green or far left. That’s where I and my family have been living since the nineties.

My parents were practically communists just 5 years ago and when you talk to them about taxes or guns you might still get the impression that they are. For about 2 years they’ve been hitting a very different note when it comes to foreigners, though. Cologne might have had a big part in waking them up.

After that, my sister had a job application rejected because she isn’t like the rest of the staff, Turkish. They all got upset about that for half a week and I had to listen to my sister beginning her sentences with “I mean… You know I’m not a racist, but…” for that time.

Now a very close family friend (even more crazy, total hippie, believes in auras etc) has legal trouble with her Lebanese ex-boyfriend and they all talked about it at the dinner table when she was visiting for a night. All three of them are horrified the judge might rule against her because he’s a foreigner.

He kicked her out of her own house.

She went to the police, they asked him about it, he told them it’s his house, they left without asking for proof.

Among my friends, I’d wager 90% now spew out sentences that would have triggered themselves into fits of “RACIS RACIS RAAAAAACIS!” just 5 years ago and the other 10% are crazy SJW’s who no longer talk to me because of my Twitter account.

That’s a quotient, in a city of SJW’s to begin with, that I am very hopeful about.

The Alt-Right is inevitable because it is the only political philosophy based in reality. This is simply one more example of the process in action.

Happy Father’s Day

Congratulations, gentlemen. You have accomplished the first part of your primary duty as a man.

Now for the hard part. Raising your sons and daughters to be ready for the challenges ahead.

John Adams once said, “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

That was then. This is the Current Year. Raise your sons to study politics and war. Raise your daughters to be the wives and mothers of warriors.

The myth of classical knowledge diffusion

Both atheists and Muslims have been attempting to pass off medieval propaganda about the Islamic world preserving the Graeco-Roman classical canon that subsequently launched the Renaissance as historical fact, but the historical record demonstrates precisely the opposite.

The oft-repeated assertion that Islam “preserved” classical knowledge and then graciously passed it on to Europe is baseless. Ancient Greek texts and Greek culture were never “lost” to be somehow “recovered” and “transmitted” by Islamic scholars, as so many academic historians and journalists continue to write: these texts were always there, preserved and studied by the monks and lay scholars of the Greek Roman Empire and passed on to Europe and to the Islamic empire at various times.

As Michael Harris points out in his History of Libraries in the Western World:

The great writings of the classical era, particularly those of Greece … were always available to the Byzantines and to those Western peoples in cultural and diplomatic contact with the Eastern Empire.… Of the Greek classics known today, at least seventy-five percent are known through Byzantine copies.

The historian John Julius Norwich has also reminded us that “much of what we know about antiquity—especially Hellenic and Roman literature and Roman law—would have been lost forever if it weren’t for the scholars and scribes of Constantinople.”

The Muslim intellectuals who served as propagandists for Caliph Al-Mamun (the same caliph who started the famous Islamic Inquisition to cope with the rationalism that had begun to infiltrate Islam upon its contact with Greek knowledge), such as al-Gahiz (d. 868), repeatedly asserted that Christianity had stopped the Rum (Romans—that is, the inhabitants of the Greek Roman Empire) from taking advantage of classical knowledge.

This propaganda is still repeated today by those Western historians who not only are biased against Christianity but also are often occupationally invested in the field of Islamic studies and Islamic cultural influence. Lamenting the end of the study of ancient philosophy and science upon the presumed closing of the Athenian Neoplatonic Academy by Emperor Justinian I in 529 is part of this narrative. Yet this propaganda does not correspond to the facts, as Speros Vryonis and others have shown, and as evidenced by the preservation and use of ancient Greek knowledge by the Christians of the empire of the Greeks….

Christian Europe, including the Christian kingdoms in Spain, could not benefit more from its commerce with the superior civilization of the Christian Greek Roman Empire because, as Henri Pirenne pointed out long ago, Islamic warriors’ attacks had turned the then-Christian Mediterranean sea into a battlefield, and eventually into an Islamic lake, and had consequently short-circuited the direct cultural exchange between Europe and the empire of the Greeks. Therefore the Islamic empire was arguably the cause of the relative slowing down of European development in the early or “dark” Middle Ages. The scholarly attacks against the Pirenne thesis have failed to invalidate its importance to illuminate what happened: of course cultural and especially commercial exchange between West and East continued to occur, and now largely via the Islamic empire, but this happened not because of the civilizational properties of medieval Islam but because medieval Islam had interrupted the direct communication in the first place.

Therefore the torrent of Islamocentric academic publications; television documentaries from PBS, the History Channel, and the BBC; declarations by UNESCO; and the National Geographic traveling exhibits extolling the “transmission of Greek science and technology” by Islam to the backward West overlooks that, whatever the actual degree of this transmission, the transmission not only of Greek science and technology but also of Greek sculpture, painting, drama, narrative, and lyric, which could not and did not take place via Islam because of religious barriers, would equally have taken place without Islam, if Islam had not interrupted with its military conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries the direct communication between the Christian West and the Christian East.

In fact, when Greek scholars began to arrive in Italy escaping from the final destruction of the Christian Greek Roman Empire by Islam in the fifteenth century (a destruction facilitated by the Christian West’s weakening of the empire during the infamous Fourth Crusade that sacked Constantinople in 1204), they brought Greek drama, narrative, lyric poetry, philosophy (significantly Plato), and art to the West. They decisively contributed to (and perhaps even started, as many scholars have argued) what would be the Italian Renaissance. This massive cultural transmission showed the sort of impact the Christian Greeks could have had on western Europe centuries earlier, perhaps as early as the seventh century, without the Islamic interruption.

Thus the Pirenne thesis continues to be valid to demystify the role of Islam in European history: medieval Islam had interposed itself between Christian Europe and the Christian Greek Roman Empire. Cultural communication continued, of course, but diminished and in a different form. Therefore, precisely because of the problem that the Islamic empire had created, this communication between Christian Europe and the Christian Greeks now had to take place often through the mediation of the Islamic empire itself, which had benefited and continued to benefit from its direct contact with the superior culture of the Greek empire. When this Greek material arrived via Islam, it did so diminished, distorted, and mediated by a faith that was fundamentally inimical to the spirit of Greek civilization.
– The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain, by Darío Fernández-Morera

This shouldn’t be hard for inhabitants of the West to understand. Has the Muslim occupation of Dearborn, Malmo, and, the French banlieus led to any sort of intellectual renaissance in those places? If not, then why would one expect the historical occupation of Spain, North Africa, or the Holy Lands to be any different.