Vox Popoli

I don’t know about you, but I’m absolutely shocked that the New York Times didn’t see fit to mention any of my medievalesque fiction in its recent hit piece on Rachel Fulton Brown:

The idea of medieval studies as a haven for white nationalist ideas gained ground when Rachel Fulton Brown, an associate professor of medieval history at the University of Chicago, began feuding with Dorothy Kim, an assistant professor of medieval English literature at Brandeis, after Dr. Kim, writing on Facebook, highlighted an old blog post of Dr. Fulton Brown’s titled “Three Cheers for White Men,” calling it an example of “medievalists upholding white supremacy.”

Many scholars were outraged when Dr. Fulton Brown, in a riposte to Dr. Kim written a few weeks after Charlottesville, tagged the right-wing writer Milo Yiannopoulos, whose website then ran an article about the dispute. Last July Mr. Yiannopoulos followed up with a 16,000-word attack on the field, which assailed Dr. Kim and others as “an angry social justice mob.”

The article caused a furor, as scholars accused colleagues of providing screenshots of private Facebook conversations and surreptitious recordings of conference sessions to Mr. Yiannopoulos.

Since then, Dr. Fulton Brown has become more isolated, as some who initially supported her have distanced themselves after she began citing the far-right writer Vox Day and even, in a recent blog post, entertained the idea that the Christchurch shooting might have been a “false flag operation.” (Dr. Fulton Brown, in an interview, said the depiction of her as a white supremacist or a member of the alt-right is “a misnomer” that “depends on a fantasy about me.”)

But the climate of intense suspicion and division the feud helped foster, particularly on social media, remains.

I am, however, genuinely disappointed they didn’t mention my run-ins with English historical fantasist Mary Beard, much less run any of my well-known memes on the matter.

I did take the liberty of pointing out to Ms Schuessler that with regards to any guilt by association created by citing me, everyone from Nature to The New York Times is similarly guilty, as it is not uncommon for science journals and newspapers to cite my “Religion does not cause war” argument, although they usually attribute it incorrectly to my primary source, The Encyclopedia of Wars.

But the numbers and percentages reported are always the dead giveaway because they only appeared in The Irrational Atheist.

The obvious attack vector it presents is why it is important for every media and technological organization that is to the right of center to reject every business model that is dependent upon advertising.

Poynter is funded by Open Society Foundations, liberal billionaire George Soros’ massive foundations, as well as the Omidyar Network. The two combined for “$1.3 million in grant funding.” Funds were sent to Poynter specifically to establish the International Fact-Checking Network. The ‘UnNews’ list was started to help fact-checking organizations determine what was “unreliable.”

That anti-conservative mindset was apparent throughout the incoherent and inconsistent report. Conservative organizations were included throughout but liberal groups rarely were. The National Review and Heritage were removed from the list but Heritage’s Daily Signal was on it. That combined to create a shameless double-standard. It specifically targeted conservative media watchdog groups and didn’t include liberal ones.

The goal of the report is clear. Poynter is recommending that advertisers “who want to stop funding misinformation” should use its list. It stated that while marketers can create their own “blacklists,” those lists might be incomplete. Golding wrote that, “Advertisers don’t want to support publishers that might tar their brand with hate speech, falsehoods or some kinds of political messaging.”

Poynter has a longstanding history as an anchor in the journalism business. Its board of trustees includes  execs from The New York Times, ESPN, Harvard, Vox, CBS, ABC, and The Washington Post. Poynter is currently working with Facebook and Google for its fact-checking programs.

I have gotten offers to advertise this or that for years. I experimented once with an ad service, but quickly determined that the benefits were not worth the costs. This is why we are very unlikely to accept ads for Unauthorized at any point in the future; relying directly upon our viewers and supporters is much more reliable than trying to play the delicate game of hoping that the companies advertising won’t be converged or inclined to crumble under SJW pressure.

What I find mildly amusing about the whole thing is that the corporate left is so stupid and unable to foresee consequences that they don’t understand how their actions are multiplying the negative effects of advancing technology on the core advertising model that sustained media businesses for more than a century. If you consider that even Google, the dominant force in online advertising, is now seeing its market cap decline because it is methodically chasing away both its content creators and the rightward half of its user base, it should be obvious that all the lesser corporations dependent upon it are suffering even more.