President Trump has, for months, been the target of Stephen Colbert’s pointed jokes and mockery. But many on social media believe the “Late Show” host went too far Monday night in making an oral-sex joke regarding Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. #FireColbert was trending on Twitter Wednesday morning. There’s a new Twitter account called @firecolbert. Its first tweet: “It’s time to #FireColbert! It’s time he be removed from CBS. Let your voice be heard! #Boycott all of Stephen Colbert’s advertisers.” There’s also a new website, firecolbert.com.
Tag: media
Like monkeys studying the space shuttle
I will say this for New York Magazine. They certainly expended no shortage of man-hours and digital ink on a long and detailed piece about the Alt-Right by Simon Van Zuylen-Wood, Noreen Malone, Max Read, Andrew Sullivan, Park Macdougald, Jason Willick, Mark Jacobson, Maureen O’Connor, Gabriel Sherman, Ben Crair, Nick Richardson, and Mark O’connell with Claire Landsbaum, Jordan Larson, Amelia Schonbek, Matt Stieb, Nick Tabor, James D. Walsh:
To understand this new right, it helps to see it not as a fringe movement, but a powerful counterculture.
When did the right wing get so bizarre? Consider: For a brief and confusing moment earlier this year, milk somehow became a charged symbol of both white supremacy and support for Donald Trump. The details are postmodern, absurdist, and ominous — not unlike the forces that brought them about. In January, the actor Shia LaBeouf mounted an art installation designed to protest the president. The next month, neo-Nazis who organized on the message board 4chan crashed the show, where they started chugging from milk jugs — because northern Europeans digest milk well, or because milk is … white. In other words, an innocent dairy beverage as old as time had been conscripted as a Donald Trump surrogate on the internet. It was yet another message-board in-joke — freighted with political meaning — suddenly in the news.
But weirdness, perhaps, is what happens when a movement grows very quickly and without any strong ideological direction — from a disciplined party, from traditional institutions like churches and chambers of Congress, from anything more organized than the insurrectionist internet.
Here in America, in trying to describe our brand of the reactionary wave currently tsunami-ing the entire developed world, we’ve leaned on the term alt-right, which had been coined by white supremacists. Richard Spencer, the most press-hungry of that group, takes credit for it. For much of last year, the term was often used as shorthand for “racists, but … young?” Which is helpful, as far as it goes, but the full reality is much more complicated. The alt-right — or the new right, if you prefer to sound more like Tom Wolfe than Kurt Cobain, or the radical right, to properly acknowledge its break from mainstream conservatism — is a coalition comprised of movements like neo-reaction, certain strands of libertarianism, tech triumphalism, and even the extreme-populist wing of the Republican Party. All share with Spencer’s white-ethno-nativism the ideals of isolationism, protectionism, and nationalism: a closed nation-state. Along the way, the coalition swept up “men’s rights” advocates and anti-Semites and cruel angry teenagers and conspiracy theorists and a few fiendishly clever far-right websites and harassing hashtags and even a U.S. congressman or two. Not to mention the White House.
But to approach the big messy tent of the new retrograde right — the international brigade of nativist-nationalists, tech-savvy anti-globalists, the porn-loving gender traditionalists — as primarily a political movement is to wildly underestimate its scope. Reactionary energy helped deliver all three branches of government to a Republican Party in the grips of an alt-right-curious anti-PC bomb-thrower the faithful called their “god-emperor” (or at least helped him along with last year’s affirmative action for white people, a.k.a. the Electoral College). But at no point during the campaign, even, could you have mistaken the unruly energy on the right for anything so organized as a party or as purposeful as a protest movement. It was — and is — a counterculture. One formed in the spirit of opposition to everything the existing Establishment stood for: globalist, technocratic liberal elitism. The amazing thing is, in November, for the first time in American electoral history, the counterculture won everything.
It’s the usual discredit-diminish-and-disqualify hit piece, of course. And while people have noticed some curious omissions – Guess whose name does not appear in a huge 20-part article on the Alt Right? Hint: he’s the author of 16 Points of the Alt Right. – the much more serious flaw is the near-complete unwillingness of the 20 or so authors to actually quote anyone who is Alt-Right, or even in the Alt-Right’s orbit, about what it is and what it stands for.
Instead, they all ran out to get quotes from academics and others openly hostile to the Alt-Right, in order to better pontificate to their readers about what it is they think we believe and why we pose such a dire threat to the established political order. It’s rather like the sort of college course that is designed to provide the course taker with the sense that he knows the subject matter without actually teaching him anything about it. The one thing the small army of co-authors did get right, however, is to observe the fact that the Alt-Right is both a broad-based cultural phenomenon and a nationalist political philosophy, not a “branded movement” or a specific ideology.
It’s a pity that no one thought to send any of these indefatigable ideological spelunkers the version of the 16 Points best suited to their ability to understand the Alt-Right. And considering on their bizarre musings about the term cuckservative, you’d think it would have occurred to one of them to at least check Amazon. But the most egregious failure is without question their inexplicable inability to grasp the source of the God-Emperor meme.
Speaking of the 16 Points of the Alt-Right, I should mention that I finally got the Ukrainian translation posted earlier today, as well as the Esperanto and Irish translations. You can find them on the right sidebar as UK, EO, and GA.
Steve Sailer finally gets his due
For once, the mainstream media pays attention to an actual thought leader who is legitimately influential across the Alt-Right:
Sailer’s brief career at National Review ended in 1997, when William F. Buckley, Jr. eased out the magazine’s then-editor, the immigration hawk John O’Sullivan, in favor of Rich Lowry — part of a larger shift in the conservative world away from paleoconservatives and immigration skeptics near the turn of the millennium. Since then, he has largely been confined to smaller and less mainstream conservative outlets. But after Trump won last November by getting blue-collar, Midwestern whites to vote like a minority bloc, as Sailer had so memorably recommended in 2000, a number of Sailer’s establishment critics, such as Michael Barone, were forced to acknowledge that Sailer had been vindicated.
On foreign policy, too, Sailer has been a pervasive if subtle presence on the right. During the mid-2000s, he popularized the phrase “Invade the World, Invite the World” to parody the apparent bipartisan foreign policy consensus of the last two decades around large-scale military intervention abroad and large-scale immigration at home. It took some time, but by the summer of 2016, the mood of the country had caught up with Sailer. Breitbart began using “Invade the World, Invite the World” to describe the ideology of John McCain and Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump’s stated hostility to elites’ perceived “globalist” overreach proved to be a major asset in his campaign.
As Michael Brendan Dougherty of The Week has observed, Sailer has exerted “a kind of subliminal influence across much of the right … even in the places where his controversial writing on race was decidedly unwelcome.” Sometimes that influence has not even been subliminal — David Brooks has cited Sailer in The New York Times on the correlation between white fertility rates and voting patterns, Times columnist Ross Douthat has referenced Sailer’s analogy between Breitbart-style conservatism and punk rock, and the economist Tyler Cowen has described him as “the most significant neo-reaction thinker today.” Meanwhile, Sailer’s ideas and catchphrases — including “the coalition of the fringes,” to describe the Obama coalition, and “elect a new people,” a paraphrase of Bertolt Brecht describing an alleged liberal plot to re-engineer the country’s demographics — have spread across the right-wing Internet like wildfire.
It’s a hit piece, to be sure. But it is a hit piece with a respectful tone, and one that even admits “he’s not entirely wrong”.
Announcing Infogalactic Tech
Following fast on the heels of Infogalactic News, the Techstars and Infogalactic News team are pleased to announce the launch of Infogalactic Tech, for all your daily tech-related headlines. This will likely include game-related news as well, at least until we put together an Infogalactic Game team. Technology is increasingly converged, which is why we are going to need to develop and support new Alt-Tech news sites.
If you have a site that you believe merits being permanently linked at the bottom, please email technews-at-infogalactic-dot-com or make a suggestion in the comments. We will also be adding link suggestion boxes to both News and Tech at some point in the near future. As always, if you wish to support these ongoing developments in Alt-Tech and Alt-Media, please join the Burn Unit. As people continue to join, we’re going to be able to keep doing more.
On a not-entirely-related note, I’ve begun blogging about some of the design and development challenges we’re facing with GameBrain and our other games, and how we’re deciding to address them. This really isn’t extra work; it’s more akin to thinking out loud about stuff we’re already doing. The DevGame post today poses the 3-strike challenge, which concerns how to end a multiplayer game that is based on a 3-strike system.
Failure at Fox News
As a general rule, when your management decisions are being met by the news that your competitors “smell blood in the water” and “are moving to take advantage”, you should probably rethink your overall strategy:
The profitable, influential, seemingly impregnable Fox News is suddenly vulnerable.
In a massive disruption for right-wing media, Fox talent is on the market, the purge of the old-boy clique may continue, and there’s huge internal paranoia about further lawsuits and revelations.
On top of that, there are episodic pushes from the next generation of Murdoch leadership for changes in culture and personality.
So at a time when all of cable is vulnerable as viewer habits change, Fox is caught between the America-first instincts of its base viewers, and the globalist impulses for Rupert Murdoch’s sons.
A woman to run Fox News? The Hollywood Reporter reports that James and Lachlan Murdoch have quietly put out feelers for a new head of Fox News to replace Bill Shine, the Roger Ailes consigliere.
“[T]he preference … is that the new leader be female.”
And competitors are moving to take advantage.
Perhaps they could hire Marissa Mayer. I understand she is available these days.
Coulter cancels speech
Ann Coulter, quite understandably, has decided to cancel her scheduled Berkeley appearance:
Conservative commentator Ann Coulter has canceled her speech planned for this week at the University of California’s Berkeley campus after a dispute with university officials, who feared violent protests, over whether a safe venue could be found. “There will be no speech,” she wrote in an email to Reuters on Wednesday, saying two conservative groups sponsoring her speech were no longer supporting her. “I looked over my shoulder and my allies had joined the other team,” she wrote.
Never count on conservatives. They’ll usually find a way to cuck out somehow. I tend to doubt that Milo, with his backing from the Alt-Lite and Alt-Right, will see the need to do the same.
A belated discovery
The media belatedly discovers that Turkey’s AKP is not a pro-Western party that will serve as a model for Islamic democracy:
the Western party line remained unchanged over many years:
“Turkey is now a vibrant, competitive democracy….” —New York Times, June 8, 2010
“A vibrant democracy…an example of reform in the region….” —Foreign Policy, May 26, 2011
“Regionally, a vibrant, democratic Turkey no longer under the military’s thumb, can offer the Arab world a true model…. The Turkish model could also provide a model of how Islamic factions can coexist alongside liberal and secular groups, despite their clashing worldviews….”—Haaretz, August 15, 201
“A vibrant democracy…led by Islam’s equivalent to the Christian Democrats….” —Financial Times, September 15, 2011
“A template that effectively integrates Islam, democracy and vibrant economics….” — New York Times, February 5, 2011
“Turkey is poised to become one of the most successful countries of the 21st century, a model of Muslim democracy and a powerful force for regional peace… —Boston Globe, June 14, 2011
“One of the most remarkable success stories of the past decade…a vibrant democracy and dynamic economy under the Muslim equivalent of Christian Democrats”…—Financial Times, April 19, 20121The Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP and widely (if meaninglessly) described as a “moderately Islamist” party, came to power in 2002, at which point the rubicund encomiums from the press and foreign spokesmen began. I began visiting Istanbul in 2003, moved there a year or so later, stayed until 2013, and left after the so-called Gezi protests, when, only then, the cheery music in the media fairly abruptly stopped.
The West’s collective assessment of Turkey throughout that time, displayed in official diplomatic statements, the mainstream press, and just as often in the specialized media, was notably weird and notably wrong. It was either the cause or the consequence of an exceptionally poor understanding of Turkey by Western publics and their policymakers. It resulted in the crafting of policies toward Turkey that were neither in Turkey’s interests nor the West’s, and helped, at least to some extent, to usher in the disaster before us today.
Living in a state of constant denial while clinging to the current Narrative is seldom an effective strategy. I can’t help but notice that absolutely no one is talking about Turkey joining the EU anymore.
The Media Bubble is real
However, the author’s attempts to blame geography and economics notwithstanding, the reality of the geographic concentration of the media in the big Left-dominated cities in no way excuses their dishonesty, partisanship, and attempts to enforce their ever-mutating narratives.
To some conservatives, Trump’s surprise win on November 8 simply bore out what they had suspected, that the Democrat-infested press was knowingly in the tank for Clinton all along. The media, in this view, was guilty not just of confirmation bias but of complicity. But the knowing-bias charge never added up: No news organization ignored the Clinton emails story, and everybody feasted on the damaging John Podesta email cache that WikiLeaks served up buffet-style. Practically speaking, you’re not pushing Clinton to victory if you’re pantsing her and her party to voters almost daily.
The answer to the press’ myopia lies elsewhere, and nobody has produced a better argument for how the national media missed the Trump story than FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, who pointed out that the ideological clustering in top newsrooms led to groupthink. “As of 2013, only 7 percent of [journalists] identified as Republicans,” Silver wrote in March, chiding the press for its political homogeneity. Just after the election, presidential strategist Steve Bannon savaged the press on the same point but with a heartier vocabulary. “The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country,” Bannon said. “It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no fucking idea what’s going on.”
But journalistic groupthink is a symptom, not a cause. And when it comes to the cause, there’s another, blunter way to think about the question than screaming “bias” and “conspiracy,” or counting D’s and R’s. That’s to ask a simple question about the map. Where do journalists work, and how much has that changed in recent years? To determine this, my colleague Tucker Doherty excavated labor statistics and cross-referenced them against voting patterns and Census data to figure out just what the American media landscape looks like, and how much it has changed.
The results read like a revelation. The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-Clinton county—odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties. And you’ve got company: If you’re a typical reader of Politico, chances are you’re a citizen of bubbleville, too.
It’s not an Either/Or situation. The media concentration on the coastal urban centers is real. As is the fact that the Democrat-infested press was knowingly and proudly in the tank for Clinton all along. This is just another attempt to deceive the public and reshape the narrative through half-truths.
The article is an exhibition of the very thing it seeks to disprove.
Sean Hannity is next
Debbie Schussel is accusing Sean Hannity of sexual misconduct:
Fox News host Bill O’Reilly was recently fired from Fox News after mounting accusations of sexual harassment and backlash from network sponsors. This follows the resignation of former CEO of Fox News Roger Ailes in July 2016 after allegations from Gretchen Carlson, Andrea Tantros, and Megyn Kelly of sexual harassment. Tantros also filed suit against Bill O’Reilly and politician Scott Brown. The latest conservative commentator to be accused of sexual misconduct is host Sean Hannity who was accused on the Pat Cambell Show by lawyer, political commentator, and frequent Fox News guest Debbie Schlussel. Debbie claimed on the show that Sean Hannity asked Schlussel to come back to his hotel twice after a book-signing event. Does this constitute sexual misconduct?
Why do these guys even talk to women in a professional capacity? This is further proof that the talking heads simply aren’t all that smart. If a woman shows even the slightest sign of being a fame whore, you’d have to be mad to think that she has any interest in you for yourself.
Anyhow, now that the new standard is “allegations have been made”, Hannity will obviously be expected to resign, since Mrs. Junior Murdoch doesn’t approve of those goings-on at her father-in-law’s company.
It’s rather amusing to see conservatives being ejected by the very “conservative” women they championed. At this rate, the Alt-Right is going to win by default.
Never too big
Bill O’Reilly is just the latest to learn that no matter how big you are, SJWs in the media and the corpocracy can take you down if you give them half a chance.
The Murdochs have decided Bill O’Reilly’s 21-year run at Fox News will come to an end. According to sources briefed on the discussions, network executives are preparing to announce O’Reilly’s departure before he returns from an Italian vacation on April 24…. The Murdochs’ decision to dump O’Reilly shocked many Fox News staffers I’ve spoken to in recent days. Late last week, the feeling inside the company was that Rupert Murdoch would prevail over his son James, who lobbied to jettison the embattled host. It’s still unclear exactly how the tide turned. According to one source, Lachlan Murdoch’s wife helped convince her husband that O’Reilly needed to go, which moved Lachlan into James’s corner.
I’m not a fan of O’Reilly. My book Media Whores was killed by the publisher and I was paid not to write it after Fox News learned that O’Reilly was one of the subjects to whom a chapter was devoted. But the point is that no one is bigger on cable news than he is, and yet a few allegations were enough to bring him down despite his continuing popularity.
This is why you MUST build your own platform. It’s a non-negotiable.