Tag: media

He did not enjoy the smell of heresy

The God-Emperor Ascendant puts the fear of himself into the House Republicans:

The Trump effect has landed forcefully on Capitol Hill.

Less than two hours after President-elect Donald Trump criticized House Republicans — in a tweet, of course — for trying to gut an ethics investigative unit on the first day of business in the new Congress, those plans lay in shambles in the Republican conference’s meeting room…. By aiming his social-media fire hose on fellow Republicans — even as he assembles a Cabinet filled with billionaires and insiders — Trump made clear that he intends to continue giving voice to the anti-establishment outsiders who propelled him through the Republican primaries against much more seasoned politicians and to an electoral-college win against Democrat Hillary Clinton.

That may give Trump leverage over those members of the Republican conference who have claimed the “outsider” mantle for the past six years, a period when the most conservative Republicans have gained stature back home by flouting leadership, whether it was John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) as speaker or Ryan for the past 15 months.

These Republicans regularly turned their backs on party leadership and claimed ideological purity in their carefully crafted districts that were bastions of like-minded conservatives. They operated on the assumption that the only likely political penalty was a primary challenge from the right.

Now, their party’s leader wields a Twitter account with 18.5 million followers. As he prepares to enter the Oval Office in little more than two weeks, Trump is far more popular in their districts than they are. He employs as his chief strategist the former leader of Breitbart News, a conservative media outlet that has included among its top targets the skewering of Republicans not deemed suitably conservative.

As a result, the first day of the 115th Congress served as a sort of beta test of how some Republicans will react when Trump sics his media power on them. If the most conservative flank tries to buck Trump on a pricey infrastructure deal, how will they handle the heat from Trump’s Twitter feed? If moderate Republicans try to block his moves on health care, will they withstand the heat if Trump goes to Breitbart to attack them by name?

On Tuesday the answer came fast: Run for cover.

It is good to see Donald Trump putting the bully back in the bully pulpit. Someone needs to keep the corrupt bastards in line.

Want to get re-elected, Congressman? Then you’d damn well better play ball.

Con star or fighter?

Todd Kincannon explains the difference on Gab:

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
If you are ever wondering whether somebody is a real fighter or just a Conservative Media Star™ (or wannabe), ask me. Ann Coulter, fighter. A.J. Delgado, fighter. John Derbyshire, fighter. Everybody at Taki’s Magazine and @VDare, fighters. 99% of National Review, Conservative Media Stars™.

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
I’ve always thought military analogies in politics are lame, but here we go: I fought in the trenches to get Trump elected. The Trump people know who I am and what I did. All of them think Bill Mitchell is a useless clown who did nothing but run his mouth to people who were already voting Trump.

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
Tweeting “Rah Rah Sis Boom Bah” stuff all day does not tangibly help the cause. That’s all Bill Mitchell has ever done, and all he appears capable of doing, either due to a lack of brains, a lack of balls, or both. My money’s on both.

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
People who only preach to the converted are not useful allies in fighting the Left, especially when their entire goal is to become a Conservative Media Star™. That’s Bill Mitchell. People like that are useless and always have been. And there are a helluva lot of them.

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
Bill Mitchell, Erick Erickson, Jonah Goldberg, Kurt Schlichter, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Glenn Beck, and many, many more, far too many to name. All each cares about is being a Conservative Media Star™. Not one of them actually cares if we accomplish anything in fighting the Left.

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
Seriously, the number one word associated with Bill Mitchell in real Trump operative circles is “clown.” The number two word associated with Bill Mitchell by actual Trump operatives is “who?”

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
There is a third category of people who are fighters but not for the things we believe in. Bill Kristol is an example. He’s a true fighter, but he fights for the globalists. I respect Bill Kristol, though I strongly disagree with him. I do not respect the Conservative Media Star™ crowd.

I’m not part of the Trump People, nor am I an actual Trump operative, but I have to confess, when this Bill Mitchell stuff blew up on social media as the post-election drama du jour, my reaction was most definitely “who?”

Followed by: “I don’t care.” I still have no idea who he is. NB: This is not an invitation to inform me. I rest content in my ignorance of the matter.

The banished slave-girl

After which the God-Emperor Ascendant sent her to NBC, shorn, dishonored, unwanted, and unloved. From the Carlos Slim blog:

Megyn Kelly, who arrived at Fox News 12 years ago as a television news neophyte but rose to become one of its two biggest stars, has decided to leave the network to take on a broad new role at NBC News for an undisclosed amount, people briefed on the negotiations said on Tuesday.

The NBC News chairman, Andrew Lack, wooed Ms. Kelly away from Fox News by offering her a triple role in which she will host her own daytime news and discussion program, anchor an in-depth Sunday night news show and take regular part in the network’s special political programming and other big-event coverage.

The move will herald a seismic shift in the cable news landscape, where Ms. Kelly had become the second-most watched host — after Bill O’Reilly of Fox News — and often helped define the national political debate, especially over the last year as Donald J. Trump regularly attacked her, at times in viciously personal terms.

On the radio

Today at 9 AM Eastern I’ll be appearing on Jesse Lee Peterson’s show. For details concerning where you can hear it, check @jlptalk on Twitter.

And for those who might be tempted to sperg about my “don’t talk to the media” policy, note that he’s a WND man. I am always pleased to speak with friends, allies, and colleagues, in public or in private.

UPDATE: the link to the recording.

Fake news at the Washington Post

I’m sure we all look forward to Facebook banning links to the Washington Post due to the fact that it is a confirmed provider of fake news:

The Washington Post has retracted its story about Russian hackers penetrating the nation’s electricity grid with a virus found in a Burlington, Vt., electric company laptop.

“Authorities say there is no indication of that so far [that Russians had penetrated the US electric grid],” according to an editor’s note attached to a corrected version of the story on the paper’s Web site. “The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid,” the editor’s note read.

News of the supposed hack had set off a firestorm of recriminations, with Vermont leaders calling Russian President Vladimir Putin “a thug” earlier Saturday, after one of the state’s electric utilities found a virus on a laptop computer. A utility spokesman has also told the Burlington Free Press the laptop was not hooked into the grid.

The amusing thing about the whole SJW “fake news” strategy is that even liberal observers predicted that it was going to be turned around and used against the mainstream media. This simply goes to show, once more, that a calm and strategic approach combined with ruthless tactical meme magic is an extremely effective approach to defeating the SJWs despite their possession of the cultural high ground.

On a related note, James Delingpole pens a savage declaration of war on the Liberal/Globalist/SJW/Media/Establishment Left at Breitbart London:

We will take the fight to the enemy, not cower in No Man’s Land

One of the best things about 2016 for me was the way it gave the lie to the weaselish and wet aphorism – so often repeated by so many of our impeccably reasonable, sensible and balanced TV and newspaper pundits  – that elections are “won in the centre ground.”

This was the Belial philosophy that gave us, in the U.S., that hideous continuum from the Bushes and the Clintons to Obama; and in Britain, the grotesque and malign Third Way squishery that took us from Tony Blair through to his (self-admitted heir) David Cameron and beyond. (It’s also the mindset which invented the disgraceful, sell-out concept of “soft Brexit”.)

No wonder so many of us had become so fed up with politics: no matter which party you voted for, whether the notionally left-wing one or the notionally right-wing one you still seemed to end up up with the same old vested interests, the same old liberal Establishment elite.

Of course we should always despise the liberal-left because their philosophy is morally bankrupt, dangerous and wrong. But I sometimes think that the people we should despise most of all are the squishes who pretend to be on our side of the argument but forever betray our cause. Sometimes they do this by throwing the more outspoken among us to the wolves in order to signal how tolerant and virtuous they are; sometimes they do this by endorsing some fatuous liberal position in order to show their willingness to compromise.

I call the latter approach the “dogshit yogurt fallacy.”

If conservatives like fruit or honey in their yogurt and liberals prefer to eat it with dogshit, it is NOT a sensible accommodation – much as our centrist conservative columnists might wish it so – to say: “All right. How about we eat our yogurt with a little bit of both?” We need to understand, very clearly, that there are such things as right and wrong; and that, furthermore, it is always worth fighting to the bitter end for the right thing rather than accepting second best because a bunch of lawyers and politicians and hairdressers from Brazil and squishy newspaper columnists and other members of the liberal elite have told us that second best is the best we can hope for.

On Brexit, for example, I’m with Her Majesty the Queen: “‘I don’t see why we can’t just get out? What’s the problem?’


We will never apologise, never explain, never surrender

See those scalped corpses, littering the plains? These are the guys – and it is, invariably, men – who thought that if only they showed contrition for their confected crimes the enemy would leave them alone. Sir Tim Hunt apologised, the guy from Saatchi apologised, the guy on the Rosetta space programme who wore the “sexist” shirt apologised. A fat lot of good it did them. The vengeful liberal-left doesn’t just want humiliation – it wants total annihilation.

Giving even an inch of ground to an enemy so implacable and vile is not only futile – but it also badly lets the side down by granting them a power that they do not deserve. The most recent sorry example of this was Steve Martin who actually deleted a tweet praising his late friend Carrie Fisher as a “beautiful creature” because a bunch of feminazis on Twitter complained that this was sexist objectification.

Look, I know it’s a scary thing when the SJW witch-hunt mob turns on you. But read Vox Day’s SJW Attack Survival Guide, follow the example of Nigel Farage and fight these people to the very last bullet (keeping the final round for yourself). Do not surrender!

We may or may not be outnumbered. The recent European referenda and the US presidential election suggest that we are not. We may not have the high ground. But we are never outgunned, intellectually or literally. Do not surrender, do not apologize, and do not hesitate to go on the attack, either directly or circumspectly, every single time you encounter an SJW anywhere.

On cherishing extremists

People have asked me, repeatedly, if I am not violating my stated tactic of “protect and cherish your extremists” when I criticize those on the right for doing what I consider to be objectively stupid things. The answer is both simple and obvious: no.

You protect an extremist by refusing to criticize him when he does something extreme to the enemy in the interest of the cause. You protect an extremist by refusing to criticize the excessive tactics he utilizes in taking the battle to the other side. You do not protect an idiot by refusing to criticize him when he a) acts like a moderate and attacks someone on your side, b) does something idiotic and irrelevant, c) serves the interests of the other side by dancing for the media.

The latter really isn’t that hard to understand. Look at how the media actually went so far as to pay for the KKK’s wood and fuel just so they could create evidence to support their “stupid white people is raciss” narrative.

TIJAT producers went so far as to orchestrate more than one cross-burning ceremony in Pulaski, though it is presented in the documentary as if the KKK is actually hosting the event. “We’ve been allowed special access to film this secret induction,” reads a title card that precedes one of the cross-burning scenes.

“It was the producers who told me they wanted a cross-lighting,” recounted Nichols. “In fact they made two cross-lightings cause they wanted to reshoot some scenes. They bought everything—the wood, the burlap to wrap around the wood, the diesel and kerosene for my cross lighting. They even brought all the food for everyone.”

If you’re dressed in a monkey suit and dancing for the media, you’re not “playing 4d chess”, you’re not “mocking the media”, you’re not an extremist who merits defending, you’re just a dancing monkey being used by ruthless hypocrites on the other side.

“They kept asking me, wanting me, to use the word ‘nigger,’” said Nichols, who alleged he was paid $600 per day by producers to participate. “I was sitting down being filmed and interviewed with the lights and the backdrop set up, and I said something and used the word ‘blacks.’ Then the producer interrupted me and said ‘No, no, no. We want him to use the word “nigger!”’’’

There is always demand for idiots who will play media patsy. And while there are people who can go boldly into the lion’s den and make the lions do tricks, if your name is not “Donald Trump” or “Milo Yiannopoulos”, you are not one of them. Trust me on this. I am smarter than you, I am better-educated than you, and as a three-time nationally syndicated columnist, I have far more media experience than you. And yet, even I can’t do it reliably. That’s why I limit my contact with the media to written questions, and that’s why they don’t run my answers when they interview me. I don’t serve their narrative.

Turn your guns on allies and sympathizers instead of the enemy, and you lose all right to any cover or assistance or regard. I don’t have much tolerance for idiots and I don’t have any for those who attack my friends and allies. If you’re going to attack Mike and Milo and Stefan and Roosh, you won’t do it here and you will go immediately on my “ignore that idiot” list.

It’s Milo’s world

We’re all just living in it. This is hugely amusing, because I was informed that some SF-SJWs were doing their usual narrative-spinning about how Milo’s $250k book contract really wasn’t that big, and tended to indicate that he wasn’t really all that famous or important.

Then I noticed that SJWAL sales were spiking and I wondered why. This is why.

Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Threshold Editions (March 14, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1501173081
ISBN-13: 978-1501173080


Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#1 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Censorship
#1 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Political
#1 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Commentary & Opinion

So, congratulations, Milo, for hitting #1 on Amazon. And, well, thanks! Apparently it’s not at all a bad thing to have the best-selling author in the world write the Foreword to your own little book.

Love the title. It quite suits him. He is dangerous, Ice…man.

Moths drawn to the media flame

There has been a fair amount of drama of late surrounding the Deploraball, Mike, Milo, Baked Alaska, and perhaps a few others for all I know. I am not involved with it, I am not attending it, I know nothing about it, nor have I spoken to anyone about any of it. I haven’t even been on Twitter.

However, I suspect I may understand the core issues underlying whatever the various details might be. Basically, there are people who understand the difference between social media and mainstream media and there are people who don’t. There is also a fairly significant difference between those who seek to get any attention they can and those who are under incessant scrutiny by enemies looking to discredit and disqualify. Having been one of the latter for the last 15 years, I understand what many of those who have never been subjected to a media blitz simply can’t grasp until they experience it for themselves.

The fact is that if you run around using vulgar language, throwing Roman salutes, wearing bedsheets, denying the Holocaust, publicly soiling yourself, denigrating Christianity, declaring your intention of attacking an elected official, expressing your attraction to a minor, putting naked pictures of yourself online, or threatening to commit violence on another individual, you are not ready for prime time. It doesn’t matter who you are, or what else you might have to say, you have rendered yourself completely vulnerable to a public neutering courtesy of the media. Just ask Anthony Weiner… and he’s on their side.

Moreover, those who are dealing with a hostile mainstream media on a regular basis simply don’t have either the time or the inclination to defend your stupid, attention-seeking antics. If you don’t have enough respect for yourself or your public image to put on your big boy pants and play by the observable rules, there is no reason for anyone else with anything at stake to maintain a connection to you. You’re not worth it.

If you want to publicly neuter yourself, go ahead. If you want to defecate all over yourself in the name of principle, courage, the Third Reich, or sheer bloodymindedness, that is absolutely your prerogative. Do as you see fit. But you should not expect anyone else to stand passively by you and allow you to splatter your self-destructive shit all over them.

This isn’t about SJW attacks, where one minor violation of the Narrative results in a media-driven SJW witch hunt. This is about attention-seeking provocateurs failing to grasp the difference between social media memes and real-world public relations, and in doing so, creating both distractions and potential headaches for others.

Look at how the New York Times came to me, then vanished into thin air when I answered their questions and pointed them to the 16 Points of the Alt-Right. They don’t want the public to see an intelligent and sophisticated political philosophy of nationalism that has ever-increasing global appeal, they want toothless hillbillies, psychotic racists, and retarded neo-Nazis to dance for them and bolster their false Narrative of “Hey Look, KKK Nazi Squirrel!”

Anyone who is determined to play dancing monkey for the mainstream media and provide support for the media’s false Narrative is of less than zero utility to the Alt-Right, to the Alt-Lite, and to the Trump administration, no matter who they are, no matter what they have done. So get serious and stop dancing.

It’s fair to criticize Mike, or Milo, or me for things we have done, for words we have written, and for public positions we have taken. It is fair to criticize those who are self-serving cowards and refuse to stand up for putative allies who are attacked unjustly. But it is simply stupid to expect us, or anyone else, to devote any time and effort to defending the willful stupidity of others. And to say that any of us are afraid of being attacked is even more ridiculous when a simple Google search will reveal hundreds of vituperative and defamatory attacks on any of us.

FFS, why play into the media’s default script for those they would dearly love to destroy?

UPDATE: Mike Cernovich has posted his side of the story.

Thomas Sowell lays down his pen

The conservative economist retires his column at 86:

Back in 1962, President John F. Kennedy, a man narrowly elected just two years earlier, came on television to tell the nation that he was taking us to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, because the Soviets had secretly built bases for nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from America.

Most of us did not question what he did. He was president of the United States, and he knew things the rest of us couldn’t know – and that was good enough for us. Fortunately, the Soviets backed down. But could any president today do anything like that and have the American people behind him?

Years of lying presidents – Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican Richard Nixon, especially – destroyed not only their own credibility, but the credibility which the office itself once conferred. The loss of that credibility was a loss to the country, not just to the people holding that office in later years.

With all the advances of blacks over the years, nothing so brought home to me the social degeneration in black ghettos like a visit to a Harlem high school some years ago.

When I looked out the window at the park across the street, I mentioned that, as a child, I used to walk my dog in that park. Looks of horror came over the students’ faces, at the thought of a kid going into the hell hole that park had become in their time.

When I have mentioned sleeping out on a fire escape in Harlem during hot summer nights, before most people could afford air-conditioning, young people have looked at me like I was a man from Mars. But blacks and whites alike had been sleeping out on fire escapes in New York since the 19th century. They did not have to contend with gunshots flying around during the night.

We cannot return to the past, even if we wanted to, but let us hope that we can learn something from the past to make for a better present and future.

Goodbye and good luck to all.

Dr. Sowell is a good man and he wrote many a fine opinion column. I enjoyed several of his books and considered him to be among the more thoughtful conservative columnists. His ideas were always worthy of consideration.

25 years of syndicated columns is an amazing achievement and testimony to the man’s intellectual stamina; I didn’t last half that long myself. Congratulations to Dr. Sowell, and I hope he enjoys more than a few years of relaxed retirement.

The hate-filled echo chamber

It’s fascinating, is it not, how the media and the SJWs – but I repeat myself – try to simultaneously dismiss the Alt-Tech alternatives as hate-filled echo chambers of racism and conspiracy theories while simultaneously celebrating the banishment of everyone who doesn’t submit to the Narrative enforced by the SJW thought police on Big Social Media. Of course, if they could successfully connect consequences to actions, they wouldn’t be SJWs.

A Guardian rabbit cautiously ventures, undercover, into the terrible dark abyss of GAB:

In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential victory, it was said that Twitter had helped swing the election for the property developer, reality TV star and insatiable tweeter. But some of his more high-profile supporters on the so-called “alt-right” who have had their Twitter accounts suspended are abandoning the platform in favour of a new social network called Gab.

The self-styled cult iconoclast Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart has apparently joined the likes of Trump attack-dog Ann Coulter and the excitable Alex Jones of Infowars in signing up with Gab. There is even a parody RealPresidentTrump account that for a short while presented itself – all too convincingly – as the real thing.

And recently the white nationalist leader Richard B Spencer went so far as to claim that Twitter had sent “execution squads across the alt-right” to purge users with far-right views. He predicted that Gab would be “the place where we go next”.

The brainchild of its 25-year-old Christian conservative founder, Andrew Torba, Gab promises to guarantee free speech, no matter how offensive. It is currently in the early “beta” stage of development and there is an extensive waiting list to join. When I applied, wanting to take a look at the site, I was told there were more than 400,000 applicants in front of me, and was advised that it could take a week before I was allowed on.

Instead I used the login of a colleague in America and spent 48 hours in a strange world of Trump worship, white nationalism, racism, conspiracy theory, gun idolatry and crass humour, all of it delivered with the righteous conviction of total certainty. The effect is a little like viewing the world through a circus mirror while being constantly told that this is what reality looks like….

Twitter and Facebook are commercial enterprises that advertise themselves as neutral places of communication, which inevitably brings complications. Some of the fake news that Facebook promoted during the election is thought to have helped the Trump campaign. And Twitter, which has been used to circulate Holocaust denial and other scandalous nonsense, is slowly coming round to a more interventionist monitoring of content.

They’re like bossy little children who can’t bear to be left alone.

“We don’t want you here! Go away! You are banished from our tree house!”

“Um, okay. Later.” (goes and builds own tree house)

“Hey, hey, hey, can we come in? Why won’t you let us in?” (secretly climbs tree)  “Hey, hey, you’re not doing it right! This tree house sucks! Why can’t we play here? I know, let’s vote on some new rules about what everyone can do!”

Never think, for one single moment, that SJWs won’t invade Gab, Infogalactic, and every other successful Alt-Tech site and attempt to take them over. It won’t work, of course, but don’t think they will simply leave them alone.

They also appear to have conveniently forgotten, already, that it is the circus mirror people who are in possession of the reliable predictive model. As Aristotle wrote, some people simply cannot be educated by mere information.