Tag: media

Sales of books, candles, rise

It would certainly be amusing if Scott Van Pelt was numbered amidst the many coming ESPN layoffs:

ESPN will lay off more than 100 staffers after the Thanksgiving holidays, multiple sources tell Sports Illustrated. The layoffs, which were described by a person briefed on the plans, will hit positions across ESPN including front-facing talent on the television side, producers, executives, and digital and technology staffers. The SportsCenter franchise is expected to be hit hard—including on-air people—given the frequency of the show has lessened considerably on main network ESPN.

The network declined comment to SI on Thursday afternoon…. ESPN continues to be impacted by the changing habits of consumers including cord-cutting and cord-nevers (those who have never purchased a cable subscription) as well as the rising costs of sports rights. The network has dropped in households from 100.13 million in 2011 to an estimated 87.5 million households today.

Notice that all these SJW-infested companies are in double-digit decline. I was told this evening that Marvel is going to try to turn things around, but the problem is, they are either going to have to clean house almost completely or their new editor-in-chief is going to find himself at war with nearly 100 percent of his current writers and artists. And I find it impossible to believe that Disney, of all companies, is going to engage in full-scale deconvergence operations.

Regardless, I will bet that within 24 months, either Marvel or DC will be asking me to work with them in some capacity. Because we even do SJW better than they do, as you will see later this week.

In the meantime, ESPN has new policies designed to try to prevent their more outspoken SJWs from attacking their viewers: “Communication with producers and editors must take place prior to commentary on any political or social issues to manage volume and ensure a fair and effective presentation.”

It’s far too late for that. They’re not fooling anyone.

The Great Reckoning

I rather like that name for the ever-expanding Hollywood Values revelations. Hollywood and the media are in serious trouble and they know it.

‘Fear is everywhere’: a quiet paranoia haunts post-Weinstein Hollywood
The industry is on edge as allegations of sexual misconduct reach dizzying heights. The question on everyone’s mind is: ‘Who will be next?’

Week five of the great reckoning and Hollywood is frightened and lost, drifting deeper into uncharted waters with no script, no direction and no sense how it will end.

Scandal was always part of the entertainment industry, a ritualised process of rumours, denials and hush money, publicists and fixers, banishment and redemption. But the vortex of sexual abuse allegations which started with Harvey Weinstein spins ever faster, whirling beyond control of the studios.

Who is next, asks the reporter in the Guardian? Apparently two Guardian editors.

The Guardian’s digital editor Ian Prior has been absent from work after female staff members reported harassment allegations to management, BuzzFeed News has learned. Guardian sources say Prior — the UK news organisation’s digital editor and former head of sport — is away from work while management investigate the allegations, made in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein revelations that have created shockwaves across Hollywood, the media industry and politics…. The latest allegations against Guardian editors come after BuzzFeed News revealed earlier this year a complaint had been filed against former deputy Guardian US editor Matt Sullivan.

Meanwhile, ESPN’s great experiment in attempting to SJW-converge American sports is collapsing.

ESPN will lay off more than 100 staffers after the Thanksgiving holidays, multiple sources tell Sports Illustrated. The layoffs, which were described by a person briefed on the plans, will hit positions across ESPN including front-facing talent on the television side, producers, executives, and digital and technology staffers. The SportsCenter franchise is expected to be hit hard—including on-air people—given the frequency of the show has lessened considerably on main network ESPN.

The network declined comment to SI on Thursday afternoon.

Though hiring has continued and the network remains one of the great destinations for jobs in sports media, ESPN has experienced significant layoffs over the last two years. In Oct. 2015 the company laid off roughly 300 employees, about 4-5{666e5e86189a1fe5e2247551e7a4443f43206d2d8b82140cfc9efd38c8e16ed5} of its workforce—a particularly brutal act of gutting given the long tenures of many of those who were cut.

These are glorious days indeed. Drive on through the false narratives, punch through the flimsy armor of distractions and dissimulations, and find the truth! Hunt the witches without mercy. Encourage those who have been victimized to Be Brave and Be the First! The God-Emperor wills it!

UPDATE: DC is going down hard. It’s not even a little bit surprising that some of the most SJW-converged shows on television were being run by a (((gamma))) given to sexual harassment:

Andrew Kreisberg, co-creator and executive producer of the CW/Warner Bros TV DC series The Flash, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow and Arrow, has been suspended from his duties by the studio today over allegations of sexual harassment. Tonight, WBTV also say they are launching an investigation into the accusations.

“We have recently been made aware of allegations of misconduct against Andrew Kreisberg,” Warner Bros. TV Group said in a statement Friday night. “We have suspended Mr. Kreisberg and are conducting an internal investigation. We take all allegations of misconduct extremely seriously, and are committed to creating a safe working environment for our employees and everyone involved in our productions.

Kreisberg has been one of the top lieutenants of Greg Berlanti, the boss of the CW/DC universe. He has been a key auspice on all DC series, with primary focus on serving as showrunner of The Flash.

“We were recently made aware of some deeply troubling allegations regarding one of our showrunners,” Berlanti Prods.’ principals Greg Berlanti and Sarah Schechter said in a statement. “We have been encouraging and fully cooperating with the investigation into this by Warner Bros.

“There is nothing more important to us than the safety and well-being of our cast, crew, writers, producers and any staff,” they added. “We do not tolerate harassment and are committed to doing everything we can to make an environment that’s safe to work in and safe to speak up about if it isn’t.”

According to people familiar with the situation, several staffers on The Flash have complained about Kreisberg’s behavior.

15 women and 4 men registering complaints. Shut them all down.

The fiend Roy Moore

Well, if dating a girl who is of the age of consent and not taking advantage of her over several months of dating doesn’t disqualify a man for the Senate, I don’t know what does!

Debbie Wesson Gibson says that she was 17 in the spring of 1981 when Moore spoke to her Etowah High School civics class about serving as the assistant district attorney. She says that when he asked her out, she asked her mother what she would say if she wanted to date a 34-year-old man. Gibson says her mother asked her who the man was, and when Gibson said “Roy Moore,” her mother said, “I’d say you were the luckiest girl in the world.”

Among locals in Gadsden, a town of about 47,000 back then, Moore “had this godlike, almost deity status — he was a hometown boy made good,” Gibson says, “West Point and so forth.”

Gibson says that they dated for two to three months, and that he took her to his house, read her poetry and played his guitar. She says he kissed her once in his bedroom and once by the pool at a local country club.

“Looking back, I’m glad nothing bad happened,” says Gibson, who now lives in Florida. “As a mother of daughters, I realize that our age difference at that time made our dating inappropriate.”

Now, I wasn’t there, but I will say that an older man who dates a younger woman for two to three months with her mother’s approval and doesn’t have sex with her is not the sort of man who behaves in the manner that his accuser is claiming. Especially in light of the timing, this is almost certainly politically motivated slander and Fake News.

Quite on the other end of the credibility scale, Steve Sailer just busted (((Jon Leibowitz))) for attempting to sweep (((Louis CK’s serial sexual harassment under the rug, while (((Matthew Weiner))) is the latest Hollywood Values paragon to be accused of sexual harassment.

Why is one accusation credible while the other isn’t? Compare how Moore’s behavior towards other was described compared with Weiner’s.

At times he seemed a classic bully: obsequious toward those above him, condescending and harsh toward those he perceived as having less power to help or harm him. After one confrontation, costume designer Juliet Polcsa began carrying a minicassette recorder to tape her interactions with Weiner.

And then there is this.

Matt originally hired Kater as his personal assistant. She was soon promoted to be his writer’s assistant, and by the end of that same season, Matt offered her the opportunity to co-write the season finale — a particularly important show for him as Weiner also directs the final episode of each season. Then, without requiring Kater to generate any other spec material on her own (usually required for a writer’s advancement), Matt promoted her to be a full-time staff writer for this past season. 

That’s a totally normal timeframe for advancement, right? Weiner wasn’t treating Kater any differently than any other PA/writer’s assistant/co-writer/staff writer, right? She was just so super-talented that she never worked in the industry again, right?

More harassment at NPR

The head of National Public Radio tried to bury the harassment charges against his top editor.

The left-wing Washington Post reports that NPR “leaders were aware of at least four complaints against” Michael Oreskes, NPR’s top editor, prior to his resignation last week after two allegations went public. With charges of a cover-up floating about, NPR chief Jarl Mohn has taken a four-week leave for what he says are medical reasons.
The brewing NPR scandal comes down to the left-wing news outlet’s decision to keep Oreskes on, even though top management knew of four harassment allegations against him, according to the Post.

To make matters worse, the Post reports that in just the last ten days, five more NPR staffers claim to have been harassed by Oreskes.

Going forward, the problems for Mohn and the taxpayer-subsidized NPR are quite obvious. By not acting appropriately and/or effectively enough to end Oreskes’s alleged behavior — meaning serious disciplinary action or termination — the alleged victims piled up. The possible liability issues ramifications here are the stuff of trial lawyers’ dreams…and taxpayer nightmares, for we subsidize this apparent den of executive harassers and enablers.

The details of the seven(!) NPR allegations are not yet known. We do, however, know something about Oreskes’s alleged M.O. via reporting last week from the Post. This includes unwanted kisses, proposals for a “room service lunch, a creepy personal ad, and using the promise of employment to keep the women on the hook.

For the overall national, establishment media, this is also bad news. In just a month, no fewer than eight members of the elite media have been hit with allegations that range from harassment to misconduct to assault. In many of those cases, we have been told that “everyone knew,” but no one did anything.

On top of NPR and the New York Times, other news outlets embroiled in this growing scandal include NBC News, MSNBC, ABC News, Rolling Stone, the New Republic, and Mother Jones. The prominent names include Matt Taibbi, Mark Halperin, David Corn, and Leon Wieseltier.

While this very same establishment media excoriate Fox News over that network’s alleged harassment problems, they were all covering up much, much worse behavior allegedly committed by their very own over the course of decades.

I believe a brilliant, bestselling political philosopher has written, bestsellingly, about the tendency of a certain class of individuals to cast aspersions on others that would, by rights, more accurately describe their own behavior.

Hollywood values in the media

Breitbart reports on a 6th reported sexual assailant in the mainstream media:

Mother Jones’ David Corn Is Sixth Member of Elite Media Accused of Misconduct Towards Female Staffers

Just coming to light are two emails written by former staffers for the hard-left Mother Jones magazine, who allege that Washington bureau chief David Corn inappropriately touched female employees and made jokes about rape and “women’s sexuality and anatomy.” In just a month, Corn is the sixth member of the media elite under investigation for alleged misconduct.

The left-wing Politico just obtained the emails, written in 2014 and 2015, and in a statement, Mother Jones’ CEO Monika Bauerlein and editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery said, “[N]ow that they’ve come to us, we are going to take them seriously and investigate.”

David Corn. That sounds pretty generic. But, we shall check nevertheless. Infogalactus investigatus!

Let’s see. Brown University. Winner of George Polk Award for Journalism, 2012. Chief of Washington bureau for Mother Jones. Washington editor for The Nation. Oh, well, there it is. Again.

“Corn was raised in a Jewish family in White Plains, New York.”

And now Wall Street too!

At this point, it’s getting just a little bit difficult to feign surprise anymore. Or pretend that the Judeo-Christians in Hollywood and the media, and on Wall Street, do not have a serious sexual assault problem. Again, read Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth for details. I wonder how long it will be before Ben Shapiro’s name comes up; he white-knighted for Michelle Fields to the point of protesting too much.

But as the #DailyMemeWars noted, all of this is just prelude until the Hollywood Values scandal goes critical when Lucas and Spielberg go down. Remember, Marion was supposed to be ELEVEN.

“RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK”
Story Conference Transcript
January 23, 1978 thru January 27, 1978
George Lucas (G), Steven Spielberg (S), Larry Kasdan (L)

G — We have to get them cemented into a very strong relationship. A bond.

L — I like it if they already had a relationship at one point. Because then you don’t have to build it.

G — I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.

L — And he was forty-two.

G — He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a real strange relationship.

S — She had better be older than twenty-two.

G — He’s thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve.

G — It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.

S — And promiscuous. She came onto him.

G — Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it’s an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she’s sixteen or seventeen it’s not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he…

S — She has pictures of him.

G — There would be a picture on the mantle of her, her father, and him. She was madly in love with him at the time and he left her because obviously it wouldn’t work out. Now she’s twenty-five and she’s been living in Nepal since she was eighteen. It’s not only that they like each other, it’s a very bizarre thing, it puts a whole new perspective on this whole thing. It gives you lots of stuff to play off of between them. Maybe she still likes him. It’s something he’d rather forget about and not have come up again. This gives her a lot of ammunition to fight with.

S — In a way, she could say, “You’ve made me this hard.”

G — This is a resource that you can either mine or not. It’s not as blatant as we’re talking about. You don’t think about it that much. You don’t immediately realize how old she was at the time. It would be subtle. She could talk about it. “I was jail bait the last time we were together.” She can flaunt it at him, but at the same time she never says, “I was fifteen years old.” Even if we don’t mention it, when we go to cast the part we’re going to end up with a woman who’s about twenty-three and a hero who’s about thirty-five.

Abortion and the Alt-Right

Ed Driscoll lies about the Alt-Right on Instapundit:

If this sounds like something the alt-right might tweet, as Elliot Kaufman wrote at NRO in August, “contrary to NARAL’s protestations, the leaders of the alt-right are actually pro-choice. They don’t oppose abortion because it’s good for racial minorities; they support abortion because it kills them. They hate black people and think America would be better if fewer of them were born. Though this is terrifying to contemplate, it should not be unfamiliar. In fact, the alt-right tends to praise abortion for the same reasons that Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, praised birth control: They help to rid the country of ‘undesirables.’”

As one Instapundit commenter asked Driscoll, which “leaders of the alt-right”. I don’t believe there are “leaders” in the first place, because a political philosophy is not a political party – who is the leader of liberalism or conservatism or progressivism? – but abortion is absolutely not something that the Alt-Right broadly supports.

It is absolutely true that Americans would be better off if fewer blacks were born, just as it would be better if blacks had never been enslaved or forcibly brought to the USA. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who recognizes historical wrongs or unfortunate consequences hates black people. The fact that Tibet would be better off without the Chinese, Minneapolis would be better off without Somalis, Germany would be better off without Syrians does not require hatred of the Chinese, Somalis, and Syrians to recognize it.

This really isn’t that hard. ALL political entities eventually fail. All multi-ethnic states eventually become ethnically homogeneous states, even if that ethnicity is a new one created by the genetic amalgation of the old ones. That is going to happen in the United States, and there are no shortage of signs that peaceful amalgamation through mass cross-breeding is not going to be the method utilized.

Read the link. The commenters there did an ace job of calling out Driscoll for his dishonesty and blowing out his argument. It’s just another example of how the media finds the Fake Right to be useful in attempting to discredit the genuine Alternative Right.

Alt★Hero press release

This was sent out to over 200 journalists. I very much doubt any of them will actually do anything with it, but it might inspire an angry tweet or two like the last one did.

Alt★Hero Celebrates Record Crowdfunding

After reaching its initial funding goal in only four hours, a new right-wing comics series, Alt★Hero, concluded its historic crowdfunding campaign by reaching the $245,000 mark. 2,190 backers signed on to help the alternative superhero series wage cultural war on the social justice-converged comic duopoly of Marvel and DC Comics.

Alt★Hero is being written by prolific Marvel and DC Comics veteran writer Chuck Dixon and six-time Hugo Award Finalist Vox Day. It will be published by Castalia House, Finland’s leading independent publisher.

The series is the creation of game designer Day, who is best known for being a member of GamerGate and publishing the political philosophy bestsellers SJWs Always Lie and SJWs Always Double Down. Alt★Hero features unconventional villains such as Captain Europa of the Global Justice Initiative and controversial heroes such as Michael Martel, a vigilante who drops off criminal undocumented immigrants at the local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, and Rebel, an Southern girl whose superhero outfit incorporates the Confederate battle flag.

The breakout star of the campaign, however, has been Dynamique, a chain-smoking French model whose indifference to current events is only surpassed by her pragmatism.

“This is only the beginning,” said Alt★Hero creator Vox Day, who is writing six volumes of the series as well as co-designing the role-playing game. “Fans and retailers alike despise how Marvel and DC are trashing characters they have cherished for generations. That is why it’s not going to be too long before you’re going to start seeing Alt★Hero games, and eventually, movies.”

“I have an entire year’s worth of continuity funded to build a cast of characters in a brand new universe. Very inspiring, Very exciting,” said industry legend Chuck Dixon, the longtime Batman writer and co-creator of Bane, who is writing the first six volumes of the Alt★Hero series Avalon as well as a standalone novel entitled Avalon: Vendetta. “The city of Avalon is already a very real place in my mind. I think readers are going to enjoy visiting.”

“Astonishing demand,” added journalist Mike Cernovich on Twitter in response to the news that Alt★Hero had shattered the previous record for a new comic being crowdfunded.

In reaching 978 percent of its original $25,000 goal, the Alt★Hero crowdfunding campaign was the most successful in history for a new comics launch, and is the 22nd most-funded of the 10,553 historic comics-related crowdfunding campaigns.

Thanks again to all of you who made this possible. It really is just the beginning of a cultural revolution.

UPDATE: Who said there was no media coverage? The Springfield Daily has the honor of being the first mainstream media organization to cover Alt★Hero.

Never cross the God-Emperor

From Peter King’s increasingly NFL-free MMQB column:

2015: Megyn Kelly, proving to be a tough and formidable moderator in a Republican Primary debate, asks the question of all presidential-debate questions to Donald Trump, about why he has called women he didn’t like “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, disgusting animals.”

2016: In an interview with Kelly on FOX five months before the election, Trump tells Kelly in another headline-maker that if he does not win in November, “I will consider it to be a total and complete waste of time, energy and money.”

2017: Kelly hosts a segment on the “Today” show about how to dress your dog for Halloween.

Keep that in mind when Robert Mueller announces his long-anticipated indictments today.

UPDATE: The Russian investigation appears to be the nothingest of nothingburgers.

The former chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has been told to surrender to authorities on charges including tax fraud, according to people familiar with the matter.


UPDATE: Or perhaps not. But it’s looking more Deep Swampy than anything:

Paul Manafort and Rick Gates were told to surrender to face charges including conspiracy against the United States and conspiracy to launder money. Other charges are being an unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts.

Mailvox: why start now?

RD wonders if I’ve seen the Dennis Prager video on the Alt-Right:

Prager University mentions you in a video about the Alt-right, basically labeling you in a very negative way. Have you seen it?

I would have been shocked if Dennis Prager had anything positive to say about me. He’s a mediocre thinker and a mediocre writer whose columns on WND were lightweight, little trafficked, and almost entirely forgettable. Despite my own columns appearing on the same opinion page, I seldom bothered reading his, and a perusal of this blog will demonstrate that I’ve never considered him to be any sort of peer. I’ve barely spared even a single thought for him in 10 years.

I think Prager is wildly and utterly wrong in every way…Prager’s opinion may lie in the fact that he’s fundamentally a radio performer, not a writer. I suspect that he likes to talk at people somewhat more than he likes to engage with them.
– 2007

This is as deeply and profoundly silly as anything that the rape fetishists on the feminist Left have invented. It confuses metaphor with reality.
– 2007

I have no doubt that you’ll all run right back into the warm embrace of Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager and Jonah Goldberg and Sean Hannity and Bill Bennett and all the other Radio Republicans… I mean, you’ve got to know their opinions, they’ve collectively got such a smashingly excellent record over these past few years.
– 2007

“I believe that this man [George Delano Bush] is changing history for the better, that he is the dam holding back the waters of chaos, that he saved this country at a time when Democrats would have failed it, and that he is both kind and strong, real and decent, powerful and humble…. Unless he is a faker — and I believe that I can sense a faker a mile away — it was clear that the president was moved…. I realize that I open myself to ridicule by saying that everything I had suspected about the man was reinforced in a little over a minute….”
– quoting Dennis Prager in “Republican Whore Doggies” in 2004

The most straightforward way to refute anything said by Dennis Prager is to point out that Dennis Prager said it. Therefore, it is almost certainly wrong. So, I have no idea what he said and I could not care less about whatever it was.

The conservative blacklist in comics

Megan Fox proves that Marvel, DC, and other comics publishers are blacklisting non-SJW artists and writers in her article at PJ Media entitled Prominent Conservative Artists Blacklisted Because of Involvement with Alt*Hero Comics Series:

Conservatives are mocked in comics circles for claiming there is a blacklist in the industry, but the evidence points to work being withheld from writers and artists deemed too right-wing. Lim feels he is now on that list of unemployable deplorables. “I understand the decision, but it IS a blacklist. And these are things other writers and artists should know before taking on work,” he said. Lim feels that an artist’s job is to do the work he is hired for. “Recently I did two covers for a Bernie supporter for his book. Considering how political SJW Marvel is, practically every drawing I did for the company merchandise is a depiction of a narrative I disagree with. But I don’t live in an echo chamber and I carve out a living by taking on work I am asked to do and I fulfill it to the best of my ability. Some people cannot separate the work from the worker. The artist acts as a de facto ‘endorser’ of the work,” Lim explained.

Asked if Lim had ever been attacked by conservatives for drawing Bernie-themed covers, he laughed. “In seven years not once has a conservative contacted me to shame me for my work or blacklist me for the clients that I had.” Lim’s major work includes Star Wars Adventures, Back to the Future, Street Fighter X G.I. Joe, TMNT and much more. He worked for seven years as a merchandising artist with properties that included Marvel, Lucasfilm, Valve, and Nickelodeon.

PJ Media reached out to Vox Day for his opinion of Lim’s blacklisting from Mount Olympus. “The fact that a comics publisher, of any political stripe, would refuse to utilize the work of an accomplished illustrator like Timothy Lim simply because he worked with someone else they don’t like is absurd, but more importantly, it is proof that they are less interested in producing quality content than they are in pursuing approval from social justice warriors.”

Day released Lim’s cover work for Alt★Hero to PJ Media saying, “We love Mr. Lim’s work. He absolutely nailed the essence of Dynamique’s character with the way he shows her sitting there so calmly despite all the devastation behind her.”

And so much for the false Narrative that Avalon writer Chuck Dixon wouldn’t speak out about the ludicrous behavior of the SJWs in comics or his involvement with the Alt★Hero campaign:

Chuck Dixon, the Batman writer most known for co-creating the popular villain Bane and the man Bleeding Cool called “the most prolific comic book writer of all time,” has also been attacked for signing on with Alt★Hero. PJ Media spoke to Dixon about it. “A couple fellow travelers called me out on Facebook when the news came out that I’d be contributing to the Alt★Hero project. They had the echo chamber on their pages with all the usual assumptions and name calling,” he said. A quick search on Twitter showed multiple sources calling Dixon a “Nazi.”

“I’ve experienced a steep drop in assignments since 2000. Primarily from the two largest comics publishers [Marvel and DC Comics]. The reason for this can only be my politics and a change in editorship at those companies,” he said…. Dixon has heard disturbing things from his former employers. “The editor-in-chief at one company proudly tells people that I will never work there again as long as he’s in charge,” he said. “A friend of people high up in both companies suggested that I apologize for my political beliefs in order to get assignments again. That’s never going to happen,” he promised. 

Definitely read the whole thing.

UPDATE: on a not-unrelated note, the reason Freestartr was temporarily down was that it was the target of a DDOS attack, presumably from SJWs attempting to interfere with the Alt★Hero campaign. If they’re this desperate to shut it down, perhaps it is worth supporting even if you’re not into comics.