Tag: media

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to a head late last year when an article that Young wrote for the charity Teach First on intelligence and genetics was withdrawn from the organisation’s website on the grounds that it was “against what we believe is true and against our values and vision”.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.

While I’m a little disappointed to hear Ethan isn’t planning to collaborate with anyone in a future Freestartr, it was certainly cool to hear him give a shout out to Arkhaven. Especially the way he laughed about it afterwards.

Does the storm cometh at last?

This is precisely why the media anoints opposition leaders. To pronounce the undesirable ideas dead as soon as an individual’s popularity inevitably fades.

Does Richard Spencer’s Disastrous College Tour Mean The ‘Alt-Right’ Is Fizzling Out?

Less than a year ago, Richard Spencer led hundreds of angry white nationalists through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. This week, he spoke in a barn to only a few dozen people. And that was only after he tried to give away tickets outside a local Macy’s.

Spencer’s planned college speaking tour, which he hyped as a force multiplier for his message among the young men who are most receptive to it, has disappointed him. Its failure is a sign that Spencer might have hit a roadblock in his quest for more mainstream acceptance.

It’s rather amusing to witness such wishful thinking, considering that the Alt-Right in its true nationalist, post-conservative form has not even peaked in terms of its global popularity. Spencer was never of the Right from the start. The fact that he has been largely abandoned by the Right doesn’t mean that the post-conservative Right is fizzling out, it means that the Fake Right has been figured out.

As I have said many times, the labels are irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if we are called Alt Right, alternative Right, New Right, post-conservative Right, Real Right, Neo-Nationalists, or whatever else can be concocted by someone’s imagination. Just like it doesn’t matter if the other side is known as liberals, progressives, socialists, leftists, Trotskyites, neocons, globalists, futurians, or whatever else they are calling themselves today. It is the ideas that matter, not the labels, not the symbols, and not the people.

Does it matter whether one refers to the law of excluded middle, the principle of excluded middle, the law of the excluded third, the principium tertii exclusi, the tertium non datur, or X!=Not X? Not at all. Does it matter if one learned it from Aristotle, Bertrand Russell, or Winnie the Pooh? Again, no.

Who is the leader of capitalism? Who is the leader of progressivism? Who is the leader of stoicism, or socialism, or rational empiricism? To even ask the question is to commit a category error. And remember, even something as simple as the party colors of red for Democrats and blue for Republicans were switched on us by the media in the 2000s.

The only thing that matters is the heart of the philosophy, which is post-conservative, pro-West Christian nationalism. It is not new and it will remain relevant, no matter what it is called and no matter who supports it.

CPAC is now the Holocaust, if longtime “conservative” columnist Mona Charen is to be believed:

A conservative columnist was escorted out of the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday after slamming President Trump and conservatives for behaving like “hypocrites” when it comes to women’s issues…. Declining to mention Trump by name, Charen said conservatives are guilty of “look[ing] the other way” when it comes to the president and other Republican men who have faced allegations of sexual misconduct.

“This was a party that was ready to … endorse Roy Moore for Senate in the state of Alabama even though he was a credibly accused child molester,” Charen said. “You cannot claim that you stand for women, and put up with that,” she told the crowd, as several members of the audience shouted, “Not true!”

Charen’s comments were met with heavy boos inside the conference hall, and she was later spotted leaving the conference with a three-person security detail. Earlier on in the panel, she issued a strong rebuke of Marion Le Pen, the niece of former French right-wing presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, whose own appearance at CPAC drew scrutiny from some conservatives who have accused her of enabling far-right groups with racist views.

“There was quite an interesting person who was on this stage the other day. Her name is Marion Le Pen,” Charen told the crowd, suggesting Le Pen was only invited because of her surname.

“And the Le Pen name is a disgrace,” she added. “Her grandfather is racist and a Nazi. She claims that she stands for him. And the fact that CPAC invited her is a disgrace,” Charen said.

No, the fact that the likes of Charen were ever taken at face value as conservatives, as Republicans, or as Americans is ludicrous. One of the things that will be hardest for many longtime conservatives to accept as identity politics increasingly rise to the fore is the realization that about one-third of their long-time “opinion leaders” are not, and were never, on their side. Just as those “opinion leaders” have done, conservatives are going to have to make a choice between being pro-American and pro-Christian, and being globalist and philosemitic. The “creedal nation of immigrants with Judeo-Christian values upheld by the Zeroth Amendment” dodge is now finally understood to be the anti-American propaganda that it was from the start.

If you look at my columns dating back to 2001, one glaring omission that you may notice now is how, with the exception of Jonah Goldberg, there is no praise for, or quoting of, an entire subset of leading conservative columnists. Nor did I ever call myself a conservative or a Republican. It was always obvious to me, even at the time, that Ms Charen’s interest group that somehow happened to be remarkably overrepresented in the “conservative media” reliably put self-interest above ideology and operated in a shamelessly nepotistic fashion.

Remember, I was there when the Littlest Chickenhawk was a supposed child prodigy playing violin and regurgitating mainstream Republican talking points. I saw how he was nationally syndicated by Creator’s Syndicate despite not being one of the 20 most-read columnists on WND, and how those columns were picked up by big city newspaper editors around the country while mine, 4x more popular and syndicated by the much more respected Universal Press Syndicate, were not. I even commented, 13 years ago, that it was very strange how more than one-fifth of the nominally “conservative media” happened to be members of the group that was the second-most inclined to the Democratic Party and only represented 0.68 percent of the Republican voters in 2000. Once more, pattern recognition proves more reliable than experts and credentials.

As Bill Kristol, Ben Shapiro, Mona Charen, and various others have now made abundantly clear, they were intended to be a leash on conservative nationalism all along. And now that conservatives across the West are waking up to the Big Con and are wisely choosing their nations over anti-Western globalist interests, they are going to have to deal with the fact that they are going to be attacked as Hitlers and Nazis and Holocausts just like Brexit, AfD, La Lega, Viktor Orban, Donald Trump, Marion Le Pen, and every other individual who stands up to defend America, Christianity, and the West.

Because the “conservative Republican” Mona Charens of the world are against all three.

That was interesting. I started a Periscope talking about my own experience as a “crisis actor”, which is simply another way of saying “roleplayer in a training exercise”, and most of the people trying to watch it were blocked. I could see the number of people joining and then dropping out going up and down by scores before I shut it down.

It’s remarkable how desperate they are to stop “crisis actor” from becoming the “fake news” of 2018. Apparently these people are unfamiliar with the term “Streisand Effect”.

Nor is Periscope the only Big Social platform to do so:

On Wednesday, one week after the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., Facebook and YouTube vowed to crack down on the trolls. Thousands of posts and videos had popped up on the sites, falsely claiming that survivors of the shooting were paid actors or part of various conspiracy theories. Facebook called the posts “abhorrent.” YouTube, which is owned by Google, said it needed to do better. Both promised to remove the content.

The companies have since aggressively pulled down many posts and videos and reduced the visibility of others. Yet on Friday, spot searches of the sites revealed that the noxious content was far from eradicated.

UPDATE: Definitely some sort of flag on the term. I did a second Periscope using the name “The Streisand Effect” and had no issues. This is actually an opportunity to redpill some people by showing them the strings; encourage them to put the term “crisis actor” in a YouTube, Facebook, or Periscope title and see what happens. It will definitely convince them that Big Social is suspiciously desperate to conceal specific forms of badthink.

What President Trump should do is call out “crisis actors undermining public confidence in the media,” both on Twitter and in a White House address. The response would make last year’s Fake News meltdown look downright sane and reserved in comparison.

First Things gets the Alt-Right wrong by concentrating solely on the anti-Christian, media-dancing minority:

Almost everything written about the “alternative right” in mainstream outlets is wrong in one respect. The alt-right is not stupid. It is deep. Its ideas are not ridiculous. They are serious. To appreciate this fact, one needs to inquire beyond its presence on social media, where its obnoxious use of insult, obscenity, and racism has earned it a reputation for moral idiocy. The reputation is deserved, but do not be deceived. Behind its online tantrums and personal attacks are arguments of genuine power and expanding appeal. As political scientist George Hawley conceded in a recent study, “Everything we have seen over the past year suggests that the alt-right will be around for the foreseeable future.”

To what is the movement committed? The alt-right purports to defend the identity and interests of white people, who it believes are the compliant victims of a century-long swindle by liberal morality. Its goals are not conventionally conservative. It does not so much question as mock standard conservative positions on free trade, abortion, and foreign policy, regarding them as principles that currently abet white dispossession. Its own principles are not so abstract, and do not pretend to neutrality. Its creed, in the words of Richard Spencer, is “Race is real. Race matters. Race is the foundation of identity.” The media take such statements as proof of the alt-right’s commitment to white supremacy. But this is misleading. For the alt-right represents something more nefarious, and frankly more interesting, than white identity politics.

The alt-right is anti-Christian. Not by implication or insinuation, but by confession. Its leading thinkers flaunt their rejection of Christianity and their desire to convert believers away from it. Greg Johnson, an influential theorist with a doctorate in philosophy from Catholic University of America, argues that “Christianity is one of the main causes of white decline” and a “necessary condition of white racial suicide.” Johnson edits a website that publishes footnoted essays on topics that range from H. P. Lovecraft to Martin Heidegger, where a common feature is its subject’s criticisms of Christian doctrine. “Like acid, Christianity burns through ties of kinship and blood,” writes Gregory Hood, one of the website’s most talented essayists. It is “the essential religious step in paving the way for decadent modernity and its toxic creeds.”

Alt-right thinkers are overwhelmingly atheists, but their worldview is not rooted in the secular Enlightenment, nor is it irreligious. Far from it. Read deeply in their sources—and make no mistake, the alt-right has an intellectual tradition—and you will discover a movement that takes Christian thought and culture seriously. It is a conflicted tribute paid to their chief adversary. Against Christianity it makes two related charges. Beginning with the claim that Europe effectively created Christianity—not the other way around—it argues that Christian teachings have become socially and morally poisonous to the West. A major work of alt-right history opens with a widely echoed claim: “The introduction of Christianity has to count as the single greatest ideological catastrophe to ever strike Europe.”

This is little more than Churchian virtue-signaling. The author should be embarrassed by making a mistake very similar to the one that he criticizes the mainstream media for making. Nor is his attempt to marginalize the Alt-Right as an intrinsically anti-Christian philosophy even remotely coherent, as one cannot both a) characterize its Spencerian aspects as defining its limits while simultaneously b) claiming that it is 100 years old and traces its intellectual roots back to Oswald Spengler.

What most people don’t realize is that the mainstream media still regularly contacts me for “the Alt-Right perspective” on current events. However, I no longer talk to them because they never, ever, quoted me in the pieces on the Alt-Right they subsequently ran, even when I provided The New York Times, or The Atlantic, or CBS with direct, substantive, and unevasive answers to their questions. The reason they never ran any quotes, of course, is that my words did not fit their preconceived narrative, while the media-dancing performance art of Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin did, just as Greg Johnson’s anti-Christianity and homosexuality fits the narrative that Matthew Rose and First Things are pushing in order to discredit and demonize the Alt-Right in the eyes of its readership.

But their efforts will fail and they will only discredit themselves, because they are observably not rooted in the easily verifiable truth. The Alt-Right doesn’t just stand for the European races, but for the West. And Christianity is as integral and irreplaceable an element of Western civilization as the European races; it is one of the three pillars of the West. The Alt-Right supports genuine Bible-based traditional Christianity, not the evil globalist Churchianity that presently wears so many nominally Christian organizations like a demon-possessed skinsuit.

To be clear, I’m not blaming Greg, Richard, or Andrew for the fact that both the mainstream media and the Christian media happen to find their particular perspectives to be useful. I am simply pointing out that, once again, the media simply cannot be trusted to report on philosophical matters such as these in an accurate, honest, or intelligent manner.

The Alt-Right is not an anti-Christian philosophy. It is pro-Christian and anti-Churchian. And as Instapundit noted, “with most churches being temples of social justice”, the open enmity between the globalist Judeo Christ-worshiping Churchians and both the Christian and non-Christian factions of the Alt-Right is hardly a surprise.