Tag: media

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.

More jobs for the working class supporters, fewer jobs for the chattering class enemy:

The Tampa Bay Times announced that it would cut about 50 jobs after new tariffs imposed by the Trump administration dramatically increased the cost of newsprint. A spokeswoman for the Times confirmed the layoffs to the Tampa Bay Business Journal, saying they are directly in response to the tariffs imposed on newsprint imported from Canada. The Times spokeswoman declined to say how many of the layoffs would be within the paper’s newsroom, but said that the “cuts are taking place throughout the organization.”

That’s how you do it. The God-Emperor would do well to aggressively seek more of these heads my people win, tails yours lose actions.

It’s obviously over for the Left’s Blank Slate theory of Man. The media is already starting to lay the foundation for denying that anyone on the Left could possibly have believed in such obviously unscientific nonsense, let alone considered it to be infallible scientific fact:

The appointment – followed, eight days later, by the resignation – of Toby Young to the board of the government’s new Office for Students in January was only the latest in a series of controversial interventions in education for the self-styled Toadmeister (Young’s Twitter handle). Having established his media profile on a platform of comments guaranteed to rile the “politically correct” (sexism, homophobia, that sort of thing), he began to reinvent himself as an educationalist through his initiatives on free schools – and he has been raising hackles in that sphere too. Things came to a head late last year when an article that Young wrote for the charity Teach First on intelligence and genetics was withdrawn from the organisation’s website on the grounds that it was “against what we believe is true and against our values and vision”. Young’s article summarised – rather accurately – the current view on how genes affect children’s IQ and academic attainment, and concluded that there is really not much that schools can do at present to alter these seemingly innate differences.

That affair is now coloured by the disclosure that Young had advocated “progressive eugenics” as a way to boost intelligence in a 2015 article in the Australian magazine Quadrant. The flames were fanned by Private Eye’s account of how Young attended what was widely labelled a “secret eugenics conference” at University College London that featured speakers with extremist views.

All this is viewed with dismay by scientists who are researching the role of genes in intelligence and considering the implications for education. They are already labouring under a cloud of suspicion, if not outright contempt, from some educationalists, and interventions by grandstanders such as Young will do nothing to soften the tenor of the debate. Such polarisation and conflict should trouble us all, though. Because, like it or not, genetics is going to enter the educational arena, and we need to have a sober, informed discussion about it.

Researchers are now becoming confident enough to claim that the information available from sequencing a person’s genome – the instructions encoded in our DNA that influence our physical and behavioural traits – can be used to make predictions about their potential to achieve academic success. “The speed of this research has surprised me,” says the psychologist Kathryn Asbury of the University of York, “and I think that it is probable that pretty soon someone – probably a commercial company – will start to try to sell it in some way.” Asbury believes “it is vital that we have regulations in place for the use of genetic information in education and that we prepare legal, social and ethical cases for how it could and should be used.”

This is an interesting behavioral pattern of the Left that is a useful way of tracking what they currently believe, which is the memory-holing of their previous dogma. Most Leftists still strongly believe in Blank Slate theory, but it is apparent that their intellectual school of fish is about to make one of its sudden right turns.

It’s always enlightening to see how the media reacts like vampires exposed to sunlight whenever they find themselves on the other side of the investigation:

CBS has been using NDAs to try and suppress potential sources for an upcoming exposé about Charlie Rose’s sexual misconduct. And top network execs who worked on Rose’s shows are panicking that they’ll be accused of turning a blind eye to his sexual misconduct.

We’re told that CBS News president David Rhodes, “CBS This Morning” executive producer Ryan Kadro, “60 Minutes” executive producer Jeff Fager and former “CBS This Morning” executive producer Chris Licht are all terrified about a looming Washington Post investigation that’s now been in the works for months.

“There are a lot of executives looking around corners, hoping they’re not named in the story,” an industry insider told us. “[CBS is] trying to suppress [the story] by using the NDAs.” Meanwhile, said the source, “Jeff, Ryan and David are all waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

Kadro oversaw Rose — who was fired in November 2017 after the Washington Post reported that eight women alleged he had sexually harassed them — while Fager was Rose’s boss at “60 Minutes” and Licht hired Rose to co-anchor “CBS This Morning.”

Hey, CBS, remember, it’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the cover-up! And as usual, those who profess to be professionals somehow manage to abandon all semblance of professionalism and their much-ballyhooed training the moment it is their own ox being gored.

It’s almost as if being trained to be impartial doesn’t actually work… which when you think about it tends to make sense. There is no reason to believe that journalists retain any more of their J-school classes than any other college graduate with a liberal arts degree.

SJWs in the media are now trying to claim “globalist” is an anti-semitic term:

The term “globalist” has been used at the White House at least three times this week in reference to an outgoing Jewish Trump administration official, raising some eyebrows because the word is increasingly used in xenophobic and anti-Semitic contexts.

The word came up on Wednesday when a reporter asked White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders whether a similar candidate will take the place of Gary Cohn, the outgoing director of President Donald Trump’s National Economic Council.

“He was a noted free trader, a globalist. Will the president seek another globalist, another free trader?” Fox News reporter John Roberts asked.

This followed Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, using the word “globalist,” in quotation marks, to describe Cohn in a statement that was tweeted by his department on Tuesday….

For the anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi members of the so-called “alt-right” white supremacist movement, “globalist” is a euphemism for “Jew.” It refers to the longstanding conspiracy theory about an international Jewish cabal working to undermine the traditional white family and Western culture by pushing for immigration and diversity.

A glossary of extremist language published by The New York Times places “globalism” among terms like “alt-right,” “antifa” and “cuck.”

First, that is an interesting implication that the mainstream media is now aware that the real battle is between nationalism and globalism, and shows that it fears an increasingly nationalistic public’s reaction to those who openly advocate the latter. Second, it’s an astonishingly foolish way for any philosemite to try to defend globalism, as the following logical syllogism should suffice to demonstrate.

• Major Premise: Globalists advocate evil.
• Minor Premise: Globalist means Jew
• Conclusion: Jews advocate evil.

This leads directly to the following syllogism.

• Major Premise: All good men must oppose evil.
• Minor Premise: Jews advocate evil
• Conclusion: All good men must oppose Jews.
• Restated: Anti-semitism is a moral obligation for all good men.

Now, unless you agree with the conclusions, you will have to identify which categorical proposition is false. Unless you are pro-globalism, the first minor premise has to be the false one.

This is astonishingly inept rhetoric, even for the Huffington Post. It never ceases to amaze me how the Left simply refuses to accept that words actually mean things and good people actually oppose certain forms of evil. While it may have worked for blacks (racism) and gays (homophobia), no one is going to drop their opposition to globalism, or stop identifying globalists as globalists, for fear of being called anti-semitic.

In any event, I look forward to the Post’s future articles on how “pedophile” and “satanist” and “Hitler” are also anti-semitic terms.

Sam Harris learns what happens when the media’s Narrative moves on and you are no longer one of its favorites:

In April of 2017, I published a podcast with Charles Murray, coauthor of the controversial (and endlessly misrepresented) book The Bell Curve. These are the most provocative claims in the book:

• Human “general intelligence” is a scientifically valid concept.
• IQ tests do a pretty good job of measuring it.
• A person’s IQ is highly predictive of his/her success in life.
• Mean IQ differs across populations (blacks < whites < Asians).
• It isn’t known to what degree differences in IQ are genetically determined, but it seems safe to say that genes play a role (and also safe to say that environment does too).

At the time Murray wrote The Bell Curve, these claims were not scientifically controversial—though taken together, they proved devastating to his reputation among nonscientists. That remains the case today. When I spoke with Murray last year, he had just been de-platformed at Middlebury College, a quarter century after his book was first published, and his host had been physically assaulted while leaving the hall. So I decided to invite him on my podcast to discuss the episode, along with the mischaracterizations of his research that gave rise to it.

Needless to say, I knew that having a friendly conversation with Murray might draw some fire my way. But that was, in part, the point. Given the viciousness with which he continues to be scapegoated—and, indeed, my own careful avoidance of him up to that moment—I felt a moral imperative to provide him some cover.

In the aftermath of our conversation, many people have sought to paint me as a racist—but few have tried quite so hard as Ezra Klein, Editor-at-Large of Vox. In response to my podcast, Klein published a disingenuous hit piece that pretended to represent the scientific consensus on human intelligence while vilifying me as, at best, Murray’s dupe. More likely, readers unfamiliar with my work came away believing that I’m a racist pseudoscientist in my own right.

After Klein published that article, and amplified its effects on social media, I reached out to him in the hope of appealing to his editorial conscience. I found none. The ethic that governs Klein’s brand of journalism appears to be: Accuse a person with a large platform of something terrible, and then monetize the resulting controversy. If he complains, invite him to respond in your magazine so that he will drive his audience your way and you can further profit from his doomed effort to undo the damage you’ve done to his reputation.

It’s mildly amusing that Harris is only discovering now that the media in general, and Ezra Klein in particular, is disingenuous and utilizes character assassination as its stock tool-in-trade. Imagine what it is like for those who can be disemployed as well as discredited, Sam!

Well, you do not cease to amaze… “Junk science” is in the title of the article, and I “fell for it” (subtitle), because I didn’t do my homework (the thrust of the entire piece). Whereas in reality, you have been shown ample evidence that the science is mainstream, that I represented it accurately, and that your authors were cherry-picking it for ideological reasons.

Unfortunately for Sam, he has discovered how little interest those on the Left have in either the truth or in science, whether they are editors, reporters, or readers. The Narrative has moved on and Sam has been left behind, much to his surprise.

Judging from the response to this post on social media, my decision to publish these emails appears to have backfired. I was relying on readers to follow the plot and notice Ezra’s evasiveness and gaslighting (e.g. his denial of misrepresentations and slurs that are in the very article he published). Many people seem to have judged from his politeness that Ezra was the one behaving honestly and ethically. This is frustrating, to say the least.

Many readers seem mystified by the anger I expressed in this email exchange. Why care so much about “criticism” or even “insults”? But this has nothing to do with criticism and insults. What has been accomplished in Murray’s case, and is being attempted in mine, is nothing less than the total destruction of a person’s reputation for the crime of honestly discussing scientific data. Klein published fringe, ideologically-driven, and cherry-picked science as though it were the consensus of experts in the field and declined to publish a far more mainstream opinion in my and Murray’s defense—all to the purpose of tarring us as racists and enablers of racists. This comes at immense personal and social cost. It is also dishonest.

It sounds like Sam very much needs to read SJWs Always Lie.