Nothing is Real

From very large and significant matters to very small and trivial ones, the media is constantly massaging your perceptions of reality:

Vanity Fair France has apologised after it was found to have photoshopped an image of actor Guy Pearce, removing a pin of the Palestinian flag that he wore at the Cannes Film Festival. The ‘Time Machine’ and ‘Prometheus’ star posed for a photo shoot wearing a badge displaying the Palestinian flag on his jacket. The item was reportedly visible in the French magazine edition of Vanity Fair, but absent from images shared by the publication’s website and Instagram account.

Now, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter in the slightest if an actor wears a Palestine pin or not. But his doing so violates the Narrative, which is that all good and right-thinking people support Israel’s right to defend itself by bombing refugee camps full of women and children situated on foreign territory, and therefore his action has to be disappeared before it reaches the public eye.

Never forget that if the media is reporting it, it is almost certainly false or misleading in some way.

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You Get What You’ll Pay For

Now, I’ve never paid any attention to either the Kardashians or Kanye West, and wouldn’t grieve in the slightest if the entire Hellmouth vanished in a nuclear tidal wave triggered by a Russian super-torpedo. But that being said, people complaining about nepo babies being given opportunities that are denied to less-talented nonentities is an illogical appeal to a nonexistent meritocracy which never really existed and very much does not exist today.

The reason the third-generation Kardashian daughter was gifted the coveted role in The Lion King is entirely obvious:

Earlier this month, it was announced that North was cast in the live-to-film concert event which ran for two nights on May 24 and May 25. The Hollywood Bowl can notably hold up to 17,500 people and tickets for the concert began at $60.

She was given the role for one of three reasons, and it may very well be that all of them apply:

  • Her parents helped fund the event.
  • Her parents’ fame helped sell tickets for the event.
  • The event organizers are either seeking or repaying a favor done to the parents or one of the various organizations to which the parents are connected.

If you don’t like nepotism, stop supporting the parents. The individual who decries North West being handed a celebrity career on a silver platter but watches the Kardashians or listens to Kanye is literally responsible for the very thing she – and it’s usually going to be a she in this specific case – is decrying.

Furthermore, the idea that there is any meritocracy in the world of entertainment in general, or the Hellmouth in particular, is totally absurd. The Big Bear has to hold his comedy events in a barn or an aircraft hanger since he’s not allowed to perform in comedy clubs. I have to publish my own books since I’m not allowed to publish them through mainstream book publishers. We both have to stream on alternative channels and our access to marketing is limited since we’re banned from YouTube and X, among other places.

They metaphorically have to line us up 20 meters behind the starting blocks and weigh us down with weights just to be able to compete with us! How is that a “meritocracy” of any kind?

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The Gazacaust is Bad PR

Mitt Romney is bewildered. He can’t figure out why Israel is suddenly getting all this bad PR when all they’re doing is defending themselves from an attack that took place seven months ago.

Social media is partially responsible for the widespread international criticism of Israel’s conduct during its military campaign in Gaza, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has suggested. The top American diplomat made the comment during an exchange with Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) at the McCain Institute’s 2024 Sedona Forum in Sedona, Arizona on Friday.

Romney asked Blinken why “the PR [has] been so awful” for Israel amid the conflict in Gaza. “Why has [Palestinian armed group] Hamas disappeared in terms of public perception? An offer is on the table to have a ceasefire, and yet the world is screaming about Israel,” he said. “Typically, the Israelis are good at PR. What’s happened here?” Romney said.

The Secretary of State recalled that when he started working in Washington in the early 1990s “everyone did the same thing,” which was reading newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, and watching national news networks to get information about world events.

But now, in the 2020s, “we are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond” and social media “has dominated the narrative,” he said.

Now, I’m no marketing expert, but it strikes me that the combination of a) mass graves being found in Gaza, b) unprecedented crackdowns on college protesters, and c) passing anti-Constitutional laws to threaten anyone who objects to genocide is not particularly amenable to positive public relations.

When you’ve lost Scott Adams to the point that he is dropping more F-bombs than an Iranian drone strike, it can’t be long before you lose the rest of the Boomers.

UPDATE: The IDF expanded its defensive operations with airstrikes on the city of Rafah tonight.

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Ben Shapiro is “a Sneaky Rat”

It’s not exactly news that the Littlest Chickenhawk is absolutely terrified of anyone who isn’t a college student, and therefore, is capable of unmasking what a mediocre little midwit he is. Lauren Witzke broke the news of the Daily Wire’s secret gag order that Little Benny managed to have imposed on Candace Owens in order to avoid the public debate he claims to have wanted:

“But the debate was never going to happen. That is because the Daily Wire — in secret and unbeknownst to its readers — sought a gag order to be placed on Owens after she had called for a debate. They did this under the cover of secrecy, before a private arbitrator, at exactly the same time that they were claiming in public that they wanted this debate and were even negotiating the terms with her. To this date, the Daily Wire has not informed its readers, seeking to understand why the much-anticipated debate had not yet happened, that they had sought and obtained a gag order against Owens.

When seeking a gag order to be imposed on Owens, the Daily Wire accused her of violating the non-disparagement clause of her agreement with the company. To substantiate this accusation, the company specifically cited Owens’ initial tweet requesting a debate with Shapiro as proof of this disparagement, along with concerns she voiced that Shapiro appeared to be violating the confidentiality agreement between them by publicly maligning Owens’s views to explain her departure from the company. While the company claimed before the arbitrator that it did not object in principle to a “healthy debate,” it urged the imposition of gag order on Owens by claiming that the way she requested the debate constituted disparagement of Shapiro and the site.

To justify the gag order it wanted, the company also cited various criticisms of the Daily Wire and Shapiro on X that Owens had “liked.” This proceeding took place as part of an exchange of legal threats between the parties after the public agreement to debate about Israel was solidified. Those threats arose from the fact that various Daily Wire executives and hosts, in both public and private, were castigating Owens as an anti-Semite. On March 22, Daily Wire host Andrew Klaven published a one-hour video that hurled multiple accusations, including anti-Semitism, at Owens. The Daily Wire cited Owens’ response to that video — her defense of herself from those multiple accusations — as further proof that she needed to be gagged.”

“After the prior restraint hearing sought by the Daily Wire and Shapiro, the arbitrator sided with them and against Owens. The arbitrator agreed with the Daily Wire that Owens’ call to debate Shapiro, and her follow-up negotiations of the debate, constituted “disparagement” of the company and Shapiro. The company argued that any further attempt by Owens to debate, as well her suggesting that the debate would expose the Daily Wire’s real “priorities,” constituted criticisms of the site and of Shapiro, criticisms that the arbitrator concluded Owens was barred from expressing under her contract with the company.

The arbitrator thus imposed a gag order of prior restraint on Owens. Among other things, the order banned Owens from saying or doing anything in the future which could tarnish or harm the reputation of the Daily Wire and/or Ben Shapiro. Given that the Daily Wire had argued, and the arbitrator agreed, that Owens’ offers to debate Shapiro about Israel and anti-semitism were themselves “disparaging,” the Daily Wire has ensured that the debate with Owens that they publicly claimed to want could not, in fact, take place. Any such debate would be in conflict with the gag order they obtained on Owens from expressing any criticisms of the site or of Shapiro.”

The ironic thing is that Shapiro will never understand how much his cowardice and “cleverness” is the cause of all the hatred directed toward him. No one envies his manufactured “success”. He’s a miserable little midwit, eaten up by his certain knowledge that he’s an imposter. I know this, because I was there when he was a young man deciding between making his own way and taking the ticket. And against my advice, he chose the latter.

Now he has learned that there is no amount of money that can compensate a man for selling his soul.

More details from Glenn Greenwald. And the New York Post.

Daily Wire obtains gag order against Candace Owens despite Ben Shapiro wanting debate

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The Carlson-Dugin Interview

A selection from the complete transcript of the interview:

Tucker Carlson: So what you’re describing is clearly happening and it’s horrifying. But it’s not the definition of liberalism I have in mind when I describe myself, as what we say the United States is a classical liberal. So you think of liberalism as individual freedom and choice from slavery. Right? So the options as we conceive them, as I was growing up, were the individual who can follow his conscience, say what he thinks, defend himself against the state versus the statism, the totalitarianism embodied in the government that you fought against: the Soviet government. And I think most Americans think of it that way. What’s the difference?

Aleksandr Dugin: Very interesting question. I think that the problem is in two definitions of liberalism. There is old liberalism, classical liberalism. And new liberalism. So classical liberalism was in favor of democracy. Democracy understood as the power of majority of consensus, of individual freedom. That should be combined somehow with the freedom of other. And now we have totally the next station already. Next phase: new liberalism. Now it is not about the rule of majority, but it is about the rule of minorities. It is not about individual freedom, but it is about wokism. So you should be so individualistic that you should criticize not only the state, but individual, the old understanding of individual. So you need now – you are invited to liberate yourself from individuality to go further in that direction. I have spoken once with Fukuyama, Francis Fukuyama on TV. And he has said, before, democracy has meant the rule of majority. And now it is about the rule of minorities against majority, because majority could choose Hitler or Putin. So we need to be very careful with majority, and majority should be taken under control and minorities should rule over majority. It is not democracy, it is already totalitarianism. And now we are not about defense of the individual of freedom, but about prescription to be woke, to be modern, to be progressive. It is not your right to be or not to be progressive. It is your duty to be progressive, to follow this agenda. So you are free to be a left liberal. You are no more free enough to be a right liberal. You should be a left liberal. And that is a kind of duty. It is prescription. So liberalism fought during its history against any kind of prescription. And now it at its turn became totalitarian, prescriptive, not free as it was.

Tucker Carlson: And do you believe that was inevitable, that process? That was always going to happen?

Aleksandr Dugin: I perceive here a kind of logic. So a kind of logic that is not just a reversion or deviation. You start with one thing. You want to liberate individual. When you arrive at the point when it is possible, it is realized. So you need to go further. And you start to liberate ourselves from this time from old understanding of individual in favor of more progressive concepts. So you could not stop here. That is my vision. So if you say “Oh, I prefer old liberalism,” they would say, the progressives, they would say, it is not about old liberalism. It is about fascism. You are defender of traditionalism, conservatism, fascism. So stop here. Either be progressive liberal or you are done, or we will cancel you. That is what we observe, I would say.

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The Decline of the Literary West

Reader’s Digest is shutting down in the UK:

Reader’s Digest’s UK edition has closed down after 86 years due to ‘financial pressures, as the iconic magazine’s editor-in-chief shares a touching tribute. In an honest and heartfelt tribute, the iconic magazine’s editor-in-chief Eva Mackevic said ‘the company just couldn’t withstand the financial pressures of today’s unforgiving magazine publishing landscape’.

The closure comes 14 years after it fell into administration because of a £125m pension fund deficit.

Founded in the the US in 1922, Reader’s Digest – whose motto was ‘Articles of enduring interest’ – was first published in the UK in 1938. Back in 2000 Reader’s Digest UK was selling more than one million copies a month.

I loved Reader’s Digest. My grandparents were subscribers, and whenever I visited them I would read several of those thick little magazines a day. Laughter the Best Medicine was all right, but I preferred the more subtle humor to be found in Life in These United States. And the abridged novels it contained often provided exposure to interesting authors to be explored more fully in the the future.

But diversity doesn’t read. And increasingly, neither does the three-second attention span crowd. Books are in the process of returning to the elite status they once held prior to the release of the dime novel and the mass market paperback, which is not a bad thing for deluxe leather book binders, but isn’t a healthy sign for society.

With more than 3 million subscribers in the USA, the original magazine should be around for a while. But the failure of the once-powerful UK edition is a good reminder of the vagaries of time. Yesterday’s success not only doesn’t guarantee success today, it often plants the seeds for tomorrow’s failure.

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How the Media Sausage is Made

The media consists of a shrinking collection of genuine lowlives. Seriously, they collectively have the ethics of criminals and the morals of pimps, as a recent revelation in the Trump trial in New York City demonstrates:

The head of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, took the stand during the Trump hush money trial in New York and, according to the New York Post, admitted that he helped cover up a story on Woods back in 2007.

Woods apparently had been caught in an affair with his then-mistress Mindy Lawton, with photos being taken of the two in Woods’ Cadillac Escalade. Pecker admitted under cross-examination that he had bought the photos, then approached Tiger about making a deal to avoid publishing them.

Sure enough, soon afterwards, Woods appeared on the cover of Men’s Health, another magazine title under the American Media Inc. parent company umbrella. Woods also consented to a 12-page long story inside, a lengthy, in-depth article for the usually private Woods.

The Post spoke to a source described as part of his “inner circle,” who said that Woods was essentially forced into agreeing to the interview. “It was a total shakedown,” the source told The Post. “He was totally blackmailed, but what could he do? He had to play ball. He didn’t have any other choice.”

This isn’t at all unusual either. Every time they are working on a hit piece, they contact the target, explain a few of the accusations against you, then offer you “the chance to tell your side of the story”. But they don’t print anything you say that will offer a reasonable justification or a convincing defense, they just quote-mine the interview in order to support their narrative.

At best, they don’t run anything at all and you might as well have turned down the interview. At worst, you say something they can take out of context that looks even worse than anything they had already, something that will permit you to be deplatformed, debanked, de-employed, and further discredited.

Which underlines why you never, ever, talk to the media about yourself, your opinions, your accomplishments, or your friends and family. And just to address the spergs and pedants, I will add that if you’re not particularly controversial, sending out corporate press releases to industry-specific publications are probably fine.

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The Literal Thought Police

Clown World’s thought police are getting increasingly heavy-handed in England:

I’ve been visited 4 times in 3 days by Cheshire Police. Asking for a Voluntary interview about something I’ve tweeted. Including a couple of women police officers knocking at 9.30pm last night when my kids were in bed. I’ve given them my solicitors information and number. He then called to arrange an interview. No answer, so he left a voice message for the Sergeant who’d visited on the 1st occasion. The last two women didn’t know there had been 3 visits in 3 days, apparently! Either it’s a shambles or an attempt to intimidate me and my family. Welcome to North Korea.

Remember, hypocrisy is always a virtue in the inversion that is Clown World. The servants of Clown World genuinely believe they are upholding freedom as they oppress you, believe they are defending basic human rights as they threaten violent force to silence speech, and believe they are defending people while they murder innocent civilians.

And the more trivial the thought crime, the more popular the opinion expressed, the more overt the attempts to intimidate.

But don’t think that they’ll be mustered in your defense when you are openly slandered, libeled, defamed, and insulted, even when you have an iron-clad case against those who have clearly violated the law more egregiously than the thought criminals they are pursuing. Then, it’s suddenly “well, no actual harm done” and “freedom of speech” and “freedom of the press” and every other subjective excuse they think will somehow conceal the obvious fact of their shameless hypocrisy and double standard.

Which is why it is best, if you are at all active on social media or even a minor public figure, to stick relentlessly to telling the truth, using rhetoric that is soundly based in proper dialectic, and preferably, utilizes terms that are defined as positive by the Clown Worlders themselves. This doesn’t mean that they won’t try to prosecute you for directly quoting someone stating an uncomfortable truth, but it does significantly complicate their ability to do so successfully.

Rolling Stone journalist Amanda Robb once complained in an article that she interviewed me for three hours without me ever giving her anything “useful”. What she was looking for was a kill-quote and I knew it. Her problem was that I expressed my opinions very clearly, without hiding anything, but in an entirely non-pejorative manner, with no vulgarities, obscenities, or emotionally-charged terms that have been defined as offensive. Of course, her confession confirming her intentions is why I no longer give interviews to anyone with any associations with the mainstream media.

That’s why, 11 years later, they’re still using the same half-sentence quote taken completely out of context to try to discredit and deplatform me. They just don’t have anything else; they have to invent totally false positions I’ve never, ever, held or expressed just to take a shot even though there are 27,000 blog posts, 512 columns, and 15 books to comb through if they need material. Here is the entire quote, which you will note never appears in its entirety on Wikipedia or anywhere else beside this blog, because it shows that I was not only responding to an series of outrageous lies and accusations made, completely unprovoked, by Jemisin, but that my response to her absurd and dishonest “call for reconciliation” in Australia was not only reasonable, but prescient.

Jemisin has it wrong; it is not that I, and others, do not view her as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we simply do not view her as being fully civilized for the obvious historical reason that she is not.

She is lying about the laws in Texas and Florida too. The laws are not there to let whites ” just shoot people like me, without consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence”, those self-defense laws have been put in place to let whites defend their lives and their property from people, like her, who are half-savages engaged in attacking them.

Being an educated, but ignorant half-savage, with little more understanding of what it took to build a new literature by “a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-American guys” than an illiterate Igbotu tribesman has of how to build a jet engine, Jemisin clearly does not understand that her dishonest call for “reconciliation” and even more diversity within SF/F is tantamount to a call for its decline into irrelevance. Nor do the back-patting Samuel Johnsons wiping their eyes and congratulating her for her ever-so-touching speech understand that.

There can be no reconciliation between the observant and the delusional.

I have never retracted, apologized, or backed down from what I said, why it’s still all right there on the blog for everyone to see, and why they had to give her no less than three successive Best Novel Hugo Awards in order to elevate her imaginary standing in the science fiction world to distract attention from the observable truth about one of their leading poster diversities.

Eleven years later, events have proven my assessment was absolutely correct. Thanks to the convergence of the various industries involved, Jemisin got the “even more diversity within SF/F” for which she was calling and SF/F is now observably in marked decline in every single format, from comics to film. And it never ceases to be amusing how the midwits in the media showed themselves to be incapable of understanding the science in the genetic science reference, although word must have eventually gotten around because they all suddenly dropped that one about six years ago.

In any event, never give them the ammo with which to shoot you. Force them to manufacture it without ever stepping back one inch from that which is true and True. For we will continue to observe while they continue to delude themselves, and there will never be any reconciliation until the day Reality comes for them and shatters their delusions.

Oi! We ‘eard you been thinking some criminal thoughts!

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BRICS Justice

Brazil has fallen. They are freezing the assets and bank accounts of journalists and confiscating their bank accounts. Pay attention. Coming to a Western nation near you.

I doubt it because I don’t think this is the conventional Clown World deplatforming and demonetization of the sort we so often see in the USA, Europe, and the antipodean colonies. It may, to the contrary, be more akin to BRICS’s ongoing war against Clown World’s soft power, as this article suggests:

Schirlei Alves gave up local journalism after being sentenced to one year in prison by a judge in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. It happened in September 2023. Alves had published a news story about a businessman accused of rape and then cleared from it. Another judge filed civil and criminal lawsuits against her, and she decided that she could no longer do her job in her hometown.

In January 2024, it emerged that the same judge who sued Alves is also suing news organisations, artists and politicians for their use of a simple hashtag. Two months before, the Brazilian Supreme Court ruled that news organisations can be held legally responsible for any interviews in which sources attribute crimes to third parties…

During the trial, the prosecutor said that the Brazilian laws do not cover the unintentional rape of a person in a vulnerable position. As this was not included in the law, he argued, this constituted “an atypical case.”

As she summarised the trial to readers, Alves used the term “reckless rape” in the heading of her piece and suggested that the victim had been humiliated by the businessman’s defence lawyers during the hearings. After the piece was published, the hashtag #estruproculposo (reckless rape, in Portuguese) spread across social networks in a movement of solidarity.

In other words, the reporter falsely and knowingly chose to publicly defame a man cleared of a rape charge at trial, and her defamation was spread nationwide via social media. This doesn’t strike me as a pernicious attack on journalism, but rather, an admirable willingness to hold journalists accountable to the same standards that everyone else is held.

This isn’t an exaggeration. An exemption from the libel and defamation laws is exactly what the media clowns are demanding. Their words, not mine: “From a conceptual point of view, we are fighting to ensure that international standards of insult, slander and defamation are not applied to journalistic activities.

Since Clown World is literally built on a foundation of lies, since The Empire That Never Ended is also known by its foremost opponents as The Empire of Lies, it should come as no surprise that any attempt to hold liars accountable for the damage caused by their lies is portrayed in its deceitful media as an attack on the satanic freedoms for which it stands.

I’m still waiting for justice in one of the more recent cases of my own defamation and insult at the hands of certain journalists. But if justice won’t be done under a Clown World regime, we may hope for it after BRICS wins WWIII.

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Candace Owens Banished

It’s official. Even in the post-BLM era, Promethean > Black in the hierarchy of Clown World.

There will be no more Candace Owens at the Daily Wire amid claims the conservative commentator has promoted antisemitic rhetoric. The right-wing political website announced Friday it had severed ties with Owens, known for her support of Donald Trump and Kanye West, famous for their own controversial comments.

“Daily Wire and Candace Owens have ended their relationship,” co-founder Jeremy Boreing wrote on social media.

Boreing did not provide any further details on what led to the exit, but Owens — who joined the outlet in 2021 — confirmed “the rumors are true” in her own post on X.

“I am finally free,” she said.

In recent months, Owens incited a firestorm of backlash with her antisemitic commentary about the United States’ role in the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Owens also floated claims that a small group of Jewish people in Hollywood and Washington, D.C. were involved in something “sinister.”
Her remarks caused a public clash between the polarizing political pundit and Daily Wire brass, who have typically stood by her inflammatory views on the transgender community, COVID vaccines, immigration and Black Lives Matter.

Now, all of this is false and same-gender loving, of course. It’s all nonsense. There is nothing even remotely “right-wing” about Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, Jeremy Boreing, or the Daily Wire, it’s just a minor struggle for precedence among the grifters, gatekeepers and other grotesqueries of Clown World’s Fake Right.

But it is highly illustrative about that which is allowed, that which is partially allowed, and that which is absolutely not allowed and will not be permitted by the Fake Right. Which, in turn, allows the perspicacious observer to easily concern which opinion leaders are, and are not, genuine. Anyone who will not cross Clown World’s red lines is inorganic and is being paid to mislead you and redirect your thinking away from what have been deemed the Dangerous Thoughts.

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