Tag: media

Bounding Into Comics reviews Alt★Hero #1:

The road to publication that Alt-Hero: Crackdown has traveled is well known by many who follow comics. Creator/writer Vox Day introduced us to the idea for his creation some time ago and it made an insane amount of money on the online fundraising platform, Freestartr. It was met with almost equal parts excitement and anger. Some saw it as a return to classic comics from someone other than the “Big 2,” some saw it as a natural response to the increasingly leftist slant most modern comics were developing and pushing, and some saw it as a mean-spirited jab at people with different views as them. I’m not here to talk about any of that though. This is a review and all that matters is whether the book was any good or not. So was it? Actually, yeah. It was pretty good.

The best satire is the kind that while reading it, you’re not too sure if it’s actually satire or not. Alt-Hero: Crackdown excels in this area on nearly every page. It’s nice to read a comic story directly for those of us who tire of the constant barrage of hard left-wing ideology and it’s even better that the focus is NOT on political agendas, but rather, telling a good story. Some of the bigger comic publishers should take a few notes.

Go there to see what kind of rating they gave the inaugural issue….

Amanda Robb of Rolling Stone and Al Letson of NPR’s Reveal are doing an “investigative report” on Alt★Hero. I have learned that they are now contacting the top backers who are listed on the Freestartr page. I am not talking to them – I previously spoke with Ms Robb concerning a story that was originally supposed to be about Castalia House before NPR got involved – and I would not recommend that anyone else talk to them or even respond to them when they inquire.

Based on their interview with Chuck Dixon, it’s apparent that both the article and the radio piece are going to be generic SJW hit pieces about bad people who think bad thoughts creating bad things that all politically righteous people are morally obliged to ritually condemn and disavow. Which is fine, that has been the standard mainstream narrative about me for the last five years, but I have learned from experience that it’s best not to give them anything they can fold, spindle, and mutilate into a kill quote.

In happier news, Alt★Hero #1 got an excellent review from an industry professional and it is going to be reviewed by a comic media site as well. And I can state with some confidence that the digital edition of Alt★Hero #2 will be out before the end of the month.

In case you might be interested, I am doing a Killstream with The Ralph Retort tonight. Tune in here.

After all, Jordan Peterson himself has assured us that one should never assume malevolence when stupidity can explain an action. I mean, only stupidity could explain why top FBI officials would discuss their secret investigations with CNN executives, right?

E-mails Show FBI Brass Discussed Dossier Briefing Details With CNN

New e-mails show former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe was surprisingly knowledgeable about CNN’s understanding of and deliberation about a dossier briefing given to Donald Trump days before CNN ever reported on the matter.

Newly revealed e-mails show that former Federal Bureau Investigation (FBI) deputy director Andrew McCabe was keenly aware of CNN’s internal understanding of a secret briefing about the infamous Steele dossier, days before CNN published any stories on the matter. The e-mails, which were obtained by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), also reveal that top officials used coded language to refer to the salacious and unverified allegations made by Steele.

Peterson’s “general rule of thumb” is a false dilemma. There is no contradiction between evil and stupidity. Evil comes in many forms, most of them stupid, some of them intelligent.

But a better rule of thumb is this: Anyone who claims stupidity is sufficient explanation for malevolence is in league with the malevolent.

If there is one thing I have learned from editing Moira Greyland’s book and observing how various scandals have played out over the last five years, it is that the truth is usually worse than the skeptics and conspiracy theorists ever imagine.

I’ll be appearing on the Alex Jones Show today at 2:15 Eastern to discuss the ramifications of the Stefan Halper revelations and possibly the #1 New Release in Comics & Graphic Novels, Alt★Hero #1, as well. Should be an interesting conversation.

The YouTube video of my appearance on the show is now up.

And Alex is absolutely right. The Left is panicking over Arkhaven’s flagship series. Consider this informative review from a longtime industry artist who, in addition to being a member of Furry fandom, has worked on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Heavy Metal.

Utter garbage. Been in the comic business 35+ years, and this is trash. But I’m sure your fellow Hitler Youth will eat it up like the gullible nobodies that they are. Absolute hilarity seeing all of these paid 4-5 star posts, pretty much the only ones you’ll get you shills.

Or, you know, maybe those who read it and gave it good reviews simply aren’t particularly interested in having sexual deviancy, SJW politics, globalism, and fat, ugly women with short pink hair being pushed on them every time they open a comic book. Perhaps they prefer a good story and intringuing characters to SJW preaching and cardboard cutouts.

Last year I made an exception to my “do not talk to the media” policy when a journalist who contributes to Rolling Stone and has a history of writing relatively fair and substantive stories contacted me about doing a story on Castalia House. We arranged to meet for lunch, and the interview was a reasonably free-ranging one that was not indicative of the usual “bad person du jour” hit piece. So, I felt that it went pretty well and that it would not be a repeat of the usual “isn’t it terrible that you are such an unrepentant badthinker” narrative.

Spacebunny, of course, knew better. I should have listened to her when she told me to just ignore this request like all the others.

Last week, the same journalist went to visit Chuck Dixon in the company of another journalist, who turned out to be Al Letson, the host of Reveal, a public radio program and podcast showcasing investigative stories. They were not particularly interested in talking to Chuck about Arkhaven, about his books, about the comics industry, about how he “broke the Bat”, or about the fact that he is an industry legend, the most prolific comics writer of all time, who has been openly blackballed by Marvel. Instead, they were primarily interested in playing the “you’re really a bad person, aren’t you” prosecutorial game in support of the usual disqualify-and-discredit narrative for a story that is intended to run jointly in Rolling Stone and National Public Radio.

Apparently the straight story on Castalia House didn’t sell, because I received a request for a second interview from them yesterday. I declined the request, and informed them that if they require further support for their tedious narrative, they are certainly welcome to report that I literally feed SJWs to my Vile Faceless Minions and drink SJW blood while sitting on a pile of silvered SJW skulls and watching old newsreels of Mussolini. Let’s face it, that’s more accurate than anything they are likely to “report” now.

So, I will be returning to my previous policy of simply not talking to anyone in the mainstream media. Forget the nonexistent upside, there simply isn’t any point in doing so. One can get the same narrative, more or less, from Wikipedia and RationalWiki, if one so desires. And there is no shortage of books, blog posts, and videos from which one can ascertain my views and quote-mine my words.

Now, here is what may be a useful observation in case you do happen to make the mistake of talking to the media. The journalistic responsibility of a reporter or interviewer is to give you the opportunity to speak for yourself, in your own words. Contrary to what many of them appear to believe, they are not prosecutors or debate antagonists, so the moment that they start “pushing back”, cross-examining, or attempting to argue with you in any way, end the pseudo-interview and send them packing.

If a reporter wishes to publicly debate me as an equal on a level playing field, that’s fine. If a journalist wants review copies of a Castalia House book or an Arkhaven comic book, I’ll be happy to send a digital edition. I can’t prevent them from playing the “bad person du jour” game, but I will not participate in it.

You know, Jordan Peterson must be a real threat to the mainstream, a true dark intellectual renegade, when The Weekly Standard rushes to his defense because someone suggested that he just might possibly be less than entirely philosemitic. After all, we know that the mainstream media always makes it an absolute top priority to see that false accusations are exposed whenever someone is inaccurately accused of being insufficiently enthusiastic about minorities who are no different than anyone else except for being smarter and harder working and more successful or are falsely accused of membership in the defunct German National Socialist Workers Party, right?

I know I have always appreciated the forthright way with which The Weekly Standard staunchly defended President Trump, and all his loyal supporters, and GamerGate, and the Sad Puppies, and indeed, myself, from all manner of false and scurrilious charges.

Unscrupulously, Feldman also hid from readers all the notable Jewish individuals from across the political spectrum who’ve written or spoken positively about Jordan Peterson and his work. To name a few: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Harvard’s Steven Pinker, psychiatrist Norman Doidge, professor Jonathan Haidt, author Howard Bloom, novelist Melanie Phillips, journalist Barbara Kay, professor Gad Saad, editor Jonathan Kay, comedian Dave Rubin, writer Cathy Young, biologist Bret Weinstein, author Ben Shapiro, comedian Bill Maher, New York Times columnists David Brooks and Bari Weiss.

It’s frankly astonishing that not one editor at the Forward had the professionalism to insist on gathering some testimony on behalf of the accused from any of these reputable people. Evidently, at the Forward, it’s perfectly acceptable journalism to ask a loaded question about a man and then stack the deck against him by quoting only his accusers. One of those anti-Peterson complainants—Heidi Beirich from the controversial Southern Poverty Law Center—even suggested (without any evidence) that Peterson could be seen as “a possible ally in Holocaust denial.”

In sum, what Feldman did was to 1) lie about a neo-Nazi’s opinion of Peterson; 2) use that lie to suggest he has a vast neo-Nazi following at the Daily Stormer; 3) conceal all the Jews who like him; and 4) seek out political partisans to smear him as a possible Holocaust denier.

It’s as unethical as it’s unconvincing. Even the most superficial reading of Peterson’s oeuvre suffices to show he’s an uncompromising enemy of anti-Semitism–and a real friend to the Jewish people. As he demonstrates in his detailed response to Feldman, he has spent the last 30 years “lecturing and teaching about the horrors of the Holocaust.”

It’s interesting, is it not, that it is so important for the media – supposedly Peterson’s enemy, who, we are told are just waiting to pounce on any mistake it can use to ruin him – to defend him from discrediting and disqualification? After this and The New York Times puff piece, how much more confirmation do you require to accept that he is Fake Opposition?

Jordan Peterson belatedly learns that even when you metaphorically castrate yourself by publicly sacrificing your intellectual integrity on their behalf, (((some people))) are going to accuse you of being a Nazi hater anti-Semite dog-whistler anyway:

Jordan Peterson is a public intellectual adored by neo-Nazis, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists. The neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer called Peterson, a Canadian psychology professor-turned-self-help-guru, “The Savior of Western Civilization.” Paul Joseph Watson, a prominent conspiracy theorist for Infowars, has tweeted, “Jordan Peterson for Canadian Prime Minister.”

Part of why people on the far right like Peterson is because he is not afraid to talk about the Jews, and he has a lot of people to talk to. Peterson is on a 50-city tour of North America and Europe to promote his best-selling new book, “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.” His YouTube channel has over a million subscribers. He has answered questions about global Jewish influence several times, in person and online. In an April blog post, he attributed that alleged influence to Jewish intelligence —an old anti-Semitic dog whistle.

Yet Peterson rarely speaks about anti-Semitism itself, even though he says he’s been obsessed with the Holocaust since he was a teenager and lectures on it frequently. Critics say this omission may encourage anti-Semitism among Peterson’s followers, who range from avowed neo-Nazis communities like the Daily Stormer to frustrated young men looking for a scapegoat….

Peterson’s willingness to answer questions about “Jewish success” and his interest in IQ literature is “suspicious” said Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of history at Emory University and author of “Denying the Holocaust,” who won a libel case in Britain against prominent Holocaust denier David Irving.

Lipstadt said that Peterson’s statements on Jewish intelligence reminded her of Kevin MacDonald, a professor of psychology who the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as “the neo-Nazi movement’s favorite academic.” MacDonald has written several books criticizing Jewish intellectual culture. (Peterson links to a critique of one of MacDonald’s books at the end of his blog post on Jewish intelligence.) Lipstadt said that MacDonald’s academic language obscures the anti-Semitism behind his opinions. She worries the same is true of Peterson.

I’ll admit it, I laughed. Given that Peterson is a coward at heart, I think we can safely expect him to throw himself down tearfully in the full pharasaical proskynesis in the near future, lest he fall further afoul of anyone who is not any smarter or nepotistic than anyone else and totally doesn’t have any statistically disproportional influence in the media or anywhere else at all.

In the meantime, Herr Peterson has gone full Nazi and is now calling a fine, upstanding Jewish journalist who has never done anything wrong except be a standard deviation more intelligent than the norm “contemptible” and a “pathetic weasel”. It’s truly horrifying to see such naked Jew-hatred on display. I am literally shaking. I do hope someone has duly alerted the ADL and the SPLC.

From the oh-so-ethical pen of @aefeldman : “Jordan Peterson is a public intellectual adored by neo-Nazis, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists.” You pathetic weasel. You had your damn article written before you even talked to me.
– Jordan B Peterson

What, he’d never met the anyone in the media before? They ALWAYS have their articles written before they talk to you. The narrative is set before they contact you and attempt to harvest their kill-quotes. That’s why I don’t bother speaking with the media about myself or my views anymore. They can quote-mine my books, my video transcripts, and my blog just like everyone else.

The most contemptible journalist I ever had the carelessness and naivete to talk with produces the most contemptible piece yet written about me @aefeldman
– Jordan B Peterson

So much hate. Why does Jordan Peterson hate Jews? Why does he dream about future Holocausts? Well, not to worry. He has only to clean his room, stand up straight, and take his pills, then everything will be fine. And while we’re speaking of the Approved Opposition, I note that if you go to Jordan Peterson’s Twitter page without being logged in, you will find other Twitter accounts helpfully suggested to you:

Dave RubinVerified account
@RubinReport

Ben ShapiroVerified account
@benshapiro

Bret WeinsteinVerified account
@BretWeinstein

Sam HarrisVerified account
@SamHarrisOrg

Christina SommersVerified account
@CHSommers

UPDATE: a rare Darkstream by day on the subject.

On the plus side, the disappearance of free mainstream journalism means we won’t have to put up with the pretense of objectivity anymore. Megan McArdle explains why the Washington Post cannot exist without Jeff Bezos keeping it afloat.

Critics of the “mainstream media” (or if you prefer, the “lamestream media”) are fond of saying that we’re going to be put out of business by competition from “new media” upstarts. Indeed, as a young blogger, I might even have made a few such pronouncements. And I and those critics were wrong. Traditional media can survive competition for readers just fine. It’s competition for advertisers that’s killing us.

For more than a century, magazines and newspapers were what’s known as a “two-sided market”: We sold subscriptions to you, our readers, and once you’d subscribed, we sold your eyeballs to our advertisers. That was necessary because, unbeknownst to you, your subscription dollars often didn’t even cover the cost of printing and delivering the physical pieces of paper. They rarely covered much, if any, of the cost of actually reporting and writing the stories printed on those pages. And you’d probably be astonished at how expensive it is to report a single, relatively simple story.

But that was okay, because we controlled a valuable pipeline to reader eyeballs — a pipeline advertisers wanted to fill with information about their products. You guys got your journalism on the cheap, and advertisers got the opportunity to tell you about the fantastic incentive package available to qualified buyers on the brand-new 1985 Chevy Impala.

Then the Internet came along, and suddenly, we didn’t own the only pipeline anymore. Anyone can throw up a Web page. And over the past 20 years, anyone did — far more than could support actual advertiser demand.

The companies that won this rugby scrum weren’t the venerable old names with long experience marrying ads to winsome content. They weren’t even the new media companies with their frantic brigades of young staffers generating hot takes. The companies that are winning — mostly Google and Facebook — get content for free from their users, or other people on the Internet. Including us.

Providing the rope with which someone else will hang you is obviously not a very good business model. And in the words of economist Herb Stein, “If something can’t go on forever, it will stop.” Either we will find someone else to pay for the news and opinion and cartoons you consume, or we will go out of business.

When content is king, tedious, inaccurate, and watered-down content isn’t going to survive long, no matter how necessary and important its creators believe it to be. And considering what the consequences of advertiser-supported mainstream media have been, the sooner it dies off, the better.

And yet, the Alt-Right remains inevitable. Now that it is of no further use to them, the media is finally killing off its cartoon parody of the Right. But the Right is not, and never was, based on races or states, but rather, on nations. The material distinction between nationalism and imperialism is the easiest way to distinguish between true Right and Fake Right. Meanwhile, the genuine nationalists are growing steadily in popularity and influence, and taking over entire nations:

Eight months after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia ended in the death of a counterprotester, the loose collection of disaffected young white men known as the alt-right is in disarray.

The problems have been mounting: lawsuits and arrests, fundraising difficulties, tepid recruitment, widespread infighting, fierce counterprotests and banishment on social media platforms. Taken together, they’ve exhausted even some of the staunchest members.

One of the movement’s biggest groups, the Traditionalist Worker Party, dissolved in March. Andrew Anglin, founder of the Daily Stormer, the largest alt-right website, has gone into hiding, chased by a harassment lawsuit. And Richard Spencer, the alt-right’s most public figure, cancelled a college speaking tour and was abandoned by his attorney last month.

“Things have become a lot harder, and we paid a price for what happened in Charlottesville. . . . The question is whether there is going to be a third act,” said Spencer, who coined the name of the movement, which rose to prominence during the 2016 presidential campaign, advocates a whites-only ethno-state, and has posted racist, anti-Semitic and misogynistic memes across the internet.

This is why it is vital for nationalists to adhere religiously to the philosophical truth rather than to various dogmas and ideologies. Any departure from the truth and the media will adroitly exploit that gap and use it to discredit and disqualify you. Speak the clear and unvarnished truth and they will fear to even mention your name because there is little they can do to effectively spin what you are saying into something that it observably is not. They really, really, really do not want to permit any discussion of which narrative is closer to the observable truth, because that calls their own veracity and legitimacy into question.

Reject the Fake Right. Reject the neoconservatives. Reject the cuckservatives. Reject the conservatives. They are all fakes. They are all frauds. None of them are able to speak the truth reliably, and that is why the media is always able to successfully exploit the vulnerabilities exposed by their dishonesty.

UPDATE: Yes, in the unlikely event you still take any of them seriously, reject the libertarians, the communists, and while we’re at it, the Whigs.