Tag: media

Pointless pressure

There has been considerable sturm und drang about the Electoral College, mostly because the media is grasping at any straw that won’t leave them cast out of influence for the next eight years:

In two days, members of the Electoral College will cast their historic votes for the next president of the United States. In the meantime, they are under siege. The nation’s 538 presidential electors have been thrust into the political foreground like never before in American history. In the aftermath of a uniquely polarizing presidential contest, the once-anonymous electors are squarely in the spotlight, targeted by death threats, harassing phone calls and reams of hate mail. One Texas Republican elector said he’s been bombarded with more than 200,000 emails.

“I never can imagine harassing people like this. It’s just f—– up,” said Jim Rhoades, a Republican elector from Michigan who runs a home inspection service. “I’ve lost a bunch of business.”

In recent decades, the Electoral College had become such a reliable rubber stamp of Election Day results that it was viewed as an afterthought.

But with many Democrats desperate to block the all-but-certain ascension of Donald Trump to the White House, this long-neglected body has been gripped by turmoil, and its members have been subjected to pleas to upend centuries of tradition by casting their votes for someone other than the president-elect.

There have been ad campaigns targeting electors and op-eds assailing their role. One Democratic member of Congress has called to delay the vote for president while an investigation of Russian involvement in the election is underway. Two others have pleaded with electors to consider Russia’s role when deciding how to vote. Progressive groups are preparing protests across the country at sites where electors will meet to cast their ballots. Personal contact information for many electors has been posted publicly — and it’s been used to bury them with massive email campaigns.

None of it signifies anything. I’ll be very surprised if more than two electors actually prove faithless, and it’s as likely to be a Clinton elector as a Trump one. Trump’s popularity has risen considerably since his election, his post-election moves have been distinctly presidential to the point of overshadowing the actual president, and the electors will have noticed that just like everyone else.

Dealing with defamation

Melania Trump files suit in Maryland:

The original complaint filed in Maryland Circuit Court focused on an Aug. 19 Daily Mail article entitled, “Naked photoshoots, and troubling questions about visas that won’t go away: The VERY racy past of Donald Trump’s Slovenian wife.”

“The statements of fact in the Daily Mail Article are false. Plaintiff did legitimate and legal modeling work for legitimate business entities and did not work for any ‘gentleman’s club’ or ‘escort’ agencies. Plaintiff was not a sex worker, escort or prostitute in any way, shape or form, nor did she ever have a composite or presentation card for the sex business,” the lawsuit said.

“Plaintiff did not come to the United States until 1996. Thus, Plaintiff did not, and could not have participated in a photo shoot in the United States or met her current husband in the United States prior to that time,” the lawsuit also said.

So, she’s considerably more of a public figure than I am, the accusation is less harmful, and she doesn’t even have multiple examples of documentary evidence of malice on the part of the accused demonstrated over an extended period of time.

And yet, the Daily Mail is likely going to try to settle.

Meanwhile, keep in mind the owner of Amazing Stories attitude toward lawsuits before you defend his right to engage to defend defamatory practices:

I don’t want to become an industry that threatens to sue everyone improperly using the name, but I also have a duty to my licensing partners to preserve and protect it. Right now I am spending what little free cash I have on IP attorneys. The research they are doing will determine who we go after and how; we’re still trying to decide whether to get settlements from “little guys” first, or go after a big kahuna first. The latter is potentially more attractive for a variety of reasons – publicity, the potential winnings (some have already been informed of their infringement and have chosen to ignore that notice, which means they could be up for treble damages) and the possibility of making things better for many others who find themselves in similar circumstances; going after little guys first is usually done to help build a case against the larger guys, but it usually involves a lot of what some might call “intimidation” and I’m not that comfortable with that. But in the end the attorneys are going to tell me what our best course will be and we’ll pursue it.

Steve Davidson was obviously quite comfortable with engaging in lawfare when he thought it suited him. And he already knows he has a little problem on his hands here.

anyone having access to good information to defamation and anti-nazi laws in EU countries, please get in touch with me

It’s rather depressing to learn that a guy whose wife was diagnosed with cancer in April prefers to spend his time and financial resources on defamation rather than on her, but, as the Austrians say, all value is subjective. What is wrong with these people?

Anyhow, it would certainly be amusing to end up in possession of the Amazing Stories trademark as a result of all this. We’ve already been reviewing an example of case law with $235k in damages for defamation alone in New Hampshire, an award that was appealed and upheld. Considering that I am an editor and publisher of leading Jewish and Israeli authors, including two books coming out in the next four months, it should be readily apparent that Mr. Davidson’s publication of Ms Meadow’s defamatory claim was both wanton and malicious.

Interestingly enough, one of those authors is even considered a world expert on fascism, having written one of the foremost academic treatments of it.

Right now, the bulk of Experimenter’s budget is being spent on intellectual property attorneys. 

No worries, we can fix that.

The fox guarding the chicken coop

Facebook is arguably the very worst organization to lead the charge against “fake news” than any organization not called “The Onion”, as Techdirt concluded long before Mark Zuckerberg’s latest George Soros-funded crusade:

Facebook is generally seen as a key multiplier in this false force of non-news, which is probably what led the social media giant to declare war on fake news sites a year or so back. So how’d that go? Well, the results as analyzed over at Buzzfeed seems to suggest that Facebook has either lost this war it declared or is losing it badly enough that it might as well give it up.

To gauge Facebook’s progress in its fight, BuzzFeed News examined data across thousands of posts published to the fake news sites’ Facebook pages, and found decidedly mixed results. While average engagements (likes + shares + comments) per post fell from 972.7 in January 2015 to 434.78 in December 2015, they jumped to 827.8 in January 2016 and a whopping 1,304.7 in February. 


Some of the posts on the fake news sites’ pages went extremely viral many months after Facebook announced its crackdown. In August, for instance, an Empire News story reporting that Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sustained serious injuries in prison received more than 240,000 likes, 43,000 shares, and 28,000 comments on its Facebook page. The incident was pure fiction, but still spread like wildfire on the platform. An even less believable September post about a fatal gang war sparked by the “Blood” moon was shared over 22,000 times from the Facebook page of Huzlers, another fake news site.

So, how did this war go so wrong for Facebook? Well, to start, it relied heavily on user-submitted notifications that a link or site was a fake news site. Sounds great, as aggregating feedback has worked quite well in other arenas. For this, however, it was doomed from the start. The purpose of fake news sites is, after all, to fool people, and fooled people are obviously not reporting the links as fake. Even when a reader manages to determine eventually that a link was a fake news post at a later time, perhaps after sharing it and having comments proving it false, how many of those people then take steps to report the link? Not enough, clearly, as the fake news scourge marches on.


Another layer of the problem appears to be the faith and trust the general public puts into some famous people they are following, who have also been fooled with startling regularity. Take D.L. Hughley, for example. The comedian, whose page is liked by more than 1.7 million people, showed up twice in the Huzlers logs. One fictitious Huzlers story he posted, about Magic Johnson donating blood, garnered more than 10,000 shares from his page. Hughley, who did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ request for comment, also shared four National Report links in 2015. 

Radio stations also frequently post fake news. The Florida-based 93XFM was one of a number of radio stations BuzzFeed News discovered sharing Huzlers posts in 2015. Asked about one April post linking to a Huzlers story about a woman smoking PCP and chewing off her boyfriend’s penis, a 93XFM DJ named Sadie explained that fact-checking Facebook posts isn’t exactly a high priority.

So, it’s not the dark and ever-dangerous Alt-Right that is to blame for fake news, but celebrities and Facebook itself. Moreover, Facebook isn’t even reliable when it comes to reporting its own internal metrics to advertisers, as it has been caught exaggerating its own traffic numbers for the FOURTH time. Or, as Facebook would prefer you see it, accidentally making mistakes that just coincidentally happened to favor its own financial interests again for the fourth straight time.

Facebook Inc. built a colossal business based on measuring something older advertising methods cannot: the granular details about people. Two months ago, the company copped to a flaw in that measurement. Then Facebook did it again. And again.

On Friday, Facebook revealed faulty metrics with Instant Articles, its mobile publishing system, the fourth disclosure of a measurement error since September. The admission sharpened calls for more independent organizations to monitor the performance of digital advertising. And some large firms that buy a lot of ads said they will more closely scrutinize their spending on the social networking giant and could shift marketing dollars elsewhere….

In September, Facebook shared its first measurement error: inflated viewership numbers for its video ads, a relatively new product. Two months later, the company disclosed additional metric errors along with new tools for third-party measurement companies, including ComScore and Nielsen, to track its system more closely.

Problems persisted. Earlier this month, a report in Marketing Land, an industry publication, spotted a discrepancy between Facebook’s internal metrics on how articles where shared and public measurements. Facebook confirmed the error. “That shouldn’t happen,” said Brian Wieser, senior analyst, Pivotal Research Group. “If anyone was concerned that Facebook’s self-audit was not sufficient enough, they just proved it.”

I don’t know why anyone is surprised that Facebook is trafficking heavily in false information on every side. Look at who runs it. Once a con artist, always a con artist. That’s been Zuckerberg’s motif from the start.

The death knell of the dinosaur media

The New York Times has entered its terminal decline:

When we moved into our new building in 2007, we saw it as a modern headquarters for a modern New York Times. We still feel that way.

But as Mark mentioned in the State of The Times last month, after a good deal of consideration, we have determined that the way that we use our headquarters building needs to evolve to better match the changes you and your colleagues have been driving across every part of the company.

The current way we have configured our office makes us slower and less collaborative. It is also, frankly, too expensive to occupy this many floors when we don’t truly need them.

We’ve made the decision to consolidate our footprint across the building to create a more dynamic, modern and open workplace, one that is better suited to the moment. We’re planning significant investments in a redesign of our existing space in order to facilitate more cross-departmental collaboration.

We expect a substantial financial benefit as well. All told, we will vacate at least eight floors, allowing us to generate significant rental income.

We have engaged Gensler, an architecture and interior design firm, to help us redesign our workplace and beginning early next year, work will begin on select floors below 14. By the end of next year, we expect to have consolidated our occupancy to that side of the building. We will keep the cafeteria and the conference rooms on 15.

We have already seen that changing office layouts can lead to good results. Some of the most creative wings of the company — the Beta team, the Graphics Department and some of our technology teams have changed their floor plans to help improve the way they work.

The coming redesign will introduce more team rooms and common spaces. And, we will do away with big corner offices, like the ones you see on the 16th and 17th floors, including, yes, the publisher and CEO’s offices. We don’t need to preserve those vestiges from a different era, so we won’t.

What a pity they employed Paul Krugman back in 2007, rather than a more astute economist who saw the 2008 financial crisis coming, who could have warned them that buying real estate was not a good idea at the time.

Anyhow, it will take a while before the NYT goes away entirely, as there is a lot of ruin in a major media institution, but it won’t be too terribly long before its debts exceed its assets.

Firing the far left

The Trump administration-to-be sends a clear signal to the media that if they refuse to cover the President-elect and his team in a reasonably respectful manner, they will be cast into outer darkness:

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inner circle will be cutting off access to David Bradley’s The Atlantic magazine after a disgusting tweet by one of its new hires, Julia Ioffe, a highly-placed source has confirmed to GotNews.

Ioffe was fired from Politico ahead of schedule after posting the following obscene tweet, which has since been deleted but was archived here:

“This was not a first-time thing,” the Trump source told GotNews, pointing to “conspiracy theories” written by Atlantic senior editor David Frum about Trump world’s ties to Russia. “It’s a far left-wing magazine that’s about as relevant as the New Republic. We’re getting pretty tired of them calling us anti-Semites while they write hit pieces against our Jewish staffers.”

The corrupt minds of the SJW Left always project their own filth upon others. This is the 3rd Law of SJW. It would also appear that the neocon journey from the Left into “conservatism” and back again is now complete.

Vox Day of the Washington Post

It could happen, right? They really do want alternative, intelligent, Trump-supporting columnists with considerable mainstream media experience, right?

Wanted: Columnists to say nice things about Donald Trump. Must be able to make cogent arguments in favor of the president-elect’s policies, appointees and statements. Experience preferred but not required.

It’s not an actual want ad, but it might as well be one. As they discovered during the long campaign season, the nation’s newspapers and major digital news sites — the dreaded mainstream media — are facing a shortage of people able, or more likely willing, to write opinion columns supportive of the president-elect.

Major newspapers, from The Washington Post to the New York Times, have struggled to find and publish pro-Trump columns for months. So have regional ones, such as the Des Moines Register and the Arizona Republic, which has a long history of supporting Republican candidates.

The newspapers have plenty of conservative writers, but that’s where the problem begins. Trump, who has defied traditional left-right categories, has offered something for both liberals and conservatives to dislike. The latter never believed that Trump was a true conservative; the former were revolted by his rhetoric from the start.

Hence, he has had few friends on the nation’s op-ed pages.

A case in point: The New York Times’ regular center-right columnists, Ross Douthat and David Brooks, never got behind Trump. And despite recruiting prominent conservative figures such as Glenn Beck and Erick Erickson to write guest columns, the result was largely the same. Erickson called Trump “indefensible.” The best Beck could do was to say, “Mr. Trump is not Hitler.”

It was much the same with The Post’s regular lineup of conservative voices — George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Kathleen Parker, Jennifer Rubin and Michael Gerson; none offered much support for Trump. Regular Post contributors such as Marc A. Thiessen and Ed Rogers tended to knock Hillary Clinton more than they praised Trump.

“We struggled to find voices that could advocate for Donald Trump’s ideas,” said James Bennet, the Times’ editorial-page editor. “It was really unusual. It didn’t help that the conservative intelligentsia lined up against him.” But Bennet says Trump’s campaign contributed to the imbalance: “He didn’t have the people around him who were prepared to put together his arguments” for publication.

Lynn Hicks, the Des Moines Register’s opinion editor, found a parallel at his newspaper, the lar­gest in the swing state that wound up going for Trump. “Given that almost all of our Republican leadership in Iowa supported Trump, I kept waiting for [supportive op-ed] pieces to arrive,” Hicks said. “I’m still waiting.”

The Arizona Republic’s syndicated and staff opinion writers were all “stridently anti-Trump,” said Phil Boas, director of the paper’s editorial department. “In a normal presidential election, we would have seen a strong mix of pro-con views for Republican and Democrat candidates,” he said, “but the Republican civil war turned a lot of traditional voices on the right into opponents of the GOP nominee. . . . A number of pro-Trump readers accused us of betraying our state and its conservative ideals.”

Dear Mr. Farhi,

I am a Trump-supporting columnist. I correctly predicted both his nomination and his eventual victory. I have a daily blog that gets traffic of nearly 4 million monthly pageviews. I have been been a regular columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Atlanta Journal/Constitution, and have been nationally syndicated twice, by Chronicle Features and by Universal Press Syndicate. I have published over 500 weekly columns, and according to Amazon, I am one of the bestselling authors of political philosophy alive.

I shall eagerly await what can only be the inevitable offer of a regular column in the Washington Post.

With regards,
Vox Day

I also sent an email to the relevant editor. I figure this will happen right around the time Mike Cernovich launches his show on NBC, Milo is elected Queen of England, and George R. R. Martin finishes A Song of Ice and Fire.

Gab goes big

Fantastic to see Gab making the Drudge Report… even if the Yahoo article linked consisted of little more than the usual anti-Alt-Right nonsense.

Squeezed out of Twitter and other social media websites cracking down on hate speech, far-right activists are finding a home on a new platform that promises never to censor content.

Launched in August, Gab has become known as a safe haven for the “alt-right” movement dominated by the white supremacists who are helping fuel America’s deepening polarization.

The social network currently has 100,000 members and another 200,000 on its waiting list, according to the company.

“All are welcome to speak freely,” spokesman Utsav Sanduja says.

Gab is unable to accommodate all those who want to join, he adds, because it is still in its test phase.

The social network’s rise comes amid Twitter’s suspension of political activists for purportedly promoting racist and harassing comments.

One of the new “Gabbers,” Richard Spencer, heads the white supremacist National Policy Institute, whose account Twitter has suspended.

Spencer, whose “Hail Trump” comments were seen as evocative of the Nazi era, joined the Twitter exile along with Milo Yiannopoulos, accused of fomenting a social media campaign against the African-American actress Leslie Jones.

Sadly for the SJW Narrative, Richard Spencer’s account on Twitter was restored to normal status yesterday, because it was finally determined that he didn’t do anything to violate their increasingly Byzantine rules.

Make a note, Facebook. Yahoo is Fake News.

Note that I’m not active on Twitter any more by choice. I’m neither suspended nor banned, I’ve simply decided to stop utilizing a social media site that blocks access to this blog. If you want to follow me on social media, you’ll have to join the Alt-Tech revolution and get on Gab.

Cutting too close to home?

As a number of sites are reporting, both the Carlos Slim blog and the Washington Post are scrubbing their sites clean of reports of large-scale arrests in Norway related to a pedophile ring. Here is the evidence of the latter.

Archive of the Google search showing the Post article.

Archive of what the Post presently displays.

Archive of the actual Associated Press article recently scrubbed by both sites.

Norwegian police arrest 20 men in pedophile network probe
By Associated Press November 20 at 11:21 AM

HELSINKI — Norwegian police say they investigating a pedophile network suspected to involve at least 51 people, which includes the abuse of infants and at least one case of a suspect acknowledging abusing his own children.

Deputy Police Chief Gunnar Floystad says that in Norway’s largest abuse case to date they have arrested 20 men so far, with three convictions, in western Norway. The 31 other suspects are from other regions in Norway.

Floystad told reporters Sunday that many of the suspects are highly educated, and include lawyers and politicians. He said he could not reveal more details pending the conclusion of the investigation, known as “Dark Room,” which began in 2015.

Prosecutors said the perpetrators met in the dark web, using encryption and anonymity to hide their tracks.

It should be fascinating to see the Fake News attempting to claim that archive sites are the real fake news.

And now we’ve seen a false flag at Comet Ping Pong starring a crisis actor that has vanished from the news combined with the sudden elimination of pedophile-related arrests from the twin engines of the Washington-New York fake news bubble. Are you still confident that there is nothing at all to Pizzagate?

As for me, I’m just wondering what the over/under is on the number of pictures of Comet Ping Pong and people connected with it now in the possession of the Dark Room investigators.

All the news that’s fit to fake

I was interviewed for this piece on the Alt-Right that appeared in the New York Times, but none of the answers I provided to the reporter, who is referenced in the byline, were quoted in the article. Read it and you’ll probably be able to figure out why his questions and my answers were omitted easily enough.

As usual, I’m only posting my answers here, as I did not request permission to quote the reporter’s questions.

  • The Alt-Right is the rational response to the failure of American conservatism to conserve anything and the inability of libertarianism to promote liberty, as well as the descent of American liberalism into multiculturalism, social justice, and diversity. What I like about the Alt-Right is that it offers Western civilization a chance of survival that it will otherwise lack.
  • The Alt-Right is important because it is the only current political philosophy that is in harmony with science, history, and reality as we currently observe it.
  • It is neither intrinsically racist nor intrinsically white. It’s certainly not white supremacist; the desire of the white Alt-Right to preserve their European nations is no more “supremacist” than the desire of Israelis to preserve their Jewish nation or the desire of the Japanese to preserve their Japanese nation. Regardless of what you think of nationalism, nationalism is neither racism nor white supremacy. The fact that there are Alt-Right supporters who speak 18 different languages, from Afrikaans to Hebrew, should suffice to demonstrate the absurdity of the Alt-Right being nothing more than racist white supremacists.
  • There are observably two different branches of the Alt-Right, plus a pool of Alt-Right-leaning conservatives. I describe these as the Alt-White, the Alt-West, and the Alt-Light. They all share the same goal of preserving Western Civilization and the European nations, but whereas the Alt-West tends to place more emphasis on Christianity and the Graeco-Roman legacy, the Alt-White tends to focus more on the European nations. The Alt-Light are those who are still in the process of making the transition from conservatism, libertarianism, and even liberalism to open support of the Alt-Right, as defined by the 16 Points. 
  • I am of the Alt-West branch. I am neither a leader nor a figurehead of the Alt-Right, I’m merely an armchair commentator who happens to have made the philosophical transition from libertarianism to the Alt-Right.
  • Since I am an American Indian, this is obviously a false narrative. Nor do we merely present ourselves as more intellectual; one of the reasons our critics are so desperate to keep us out of the public discourse is because our ideas are more firmly grounded in science, logic, and history than theirs, and our intellectuals are observably more intelligent than theirs. To attempt to boil down the entire Alt-Right philosophy to nothing more than rebranded racism is ludicrously stupid. This should be obvious, since rebranded racism cannot explain why so many conservatives are gravitating towards the Alt-Right.
  • The Ku Klux Klan is an irrelevant and outdated American organization based on race. The Alt-Right is an increasingly popular, increasingly relevant global phenomenon based on nationalism.
  • Because the Alt-Right were among Donald Trump’s earliest and most enthusiastic supporters. Donald Trump was the only candidate, in either major party, whose policies were even relevant to the serious challenges now facing America and other Western nations. The fact that many Alt-Right individuals not only expected Donald Trump to win, but publicly predicted it very early on, is one of many indicators that the Alt-Right political philosophy is the only intellectually viable one in American politics today.
It is informative that even the New York Times feels it is necessary to resort to quoting non-entities, extremists, and people who explicitly disavow the Alt-Right label rather than those who openly embrace it in order to make what passes for their case. They do so because they have no effective response to us. They have no ability, no capacity, to even begin to engage in discourse with the greater part of the Alt-Right, because their perspective has been rendered outdated and irrelevant by events.

The New York Times: All the news that’s fit to fake!

Even the subtitle contains an outright lie: “A movement of many factions is trying to change its image now that its profile has risen, but its message — one of racial separation and supremacy — is unchanged.”

Racial separation is not supremacy. Are we Indians Red Supremacists because we insist on keeping our reservations? The constant conflation of separaration with supremacy by the Fake News is completely and shamelessly deceitful. That’s why they can’t quote me. To do so will explode their false narrative and demonstrate its intrinsic dishonesty.

Complete failure

Even the mainstream media is finally giving up on Saint Obama:

There’s no other way to describe it. Every December, Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post picks the biggest political loser of the past year. In 2013, Cillizza’s selection was Barack Obama. He cited the botched rollout of Healthcare.gov, the NSA domestic-surveillance scandal, the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups, and the continuing questions about the administration’s actions before, during, and after the attack on Americans in Benghazi.

In 2014, Cillizza’s selection was Obama, again. The midterm elections went abysmally for Democrats, the threat of ISIS became much clearer, Russia moved into Ukraine, and former CIA director and secretary of defense Leon Panetta painted an unflattering portrait of the president’s leadership in his memoirs.

In 2015, Cillizza picked two co-“winners,” Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. The reasons were obvious. By December 2015, it was clear Bush’s odds of winning the nomination were small and shrinking quickly. Clinton, meanwhile, looked likely to emerge bloodied from the Democratic primaries after a tougher-than-expected fight with Bernie Sanders.

This year, Cillizza assessed the surprising post-election political landscape and selected “The Democrats”:

The Democrats may be effectively locked out of power in all three branches of government for years. At the state level, after last month’s elections, they’ll control only 16 governorships and 13 legislatures. This year, punctuated by Hillary Clinton’s loss, exposed the remarkably shallow depth of the Democratic bench. The size of the Republican primary field — for which the GOP was relentlessly mocked — was also a sign of the party’s health up and down the ballot. Democrats simply didn’t have the political talent to put forward 17 candidates (or even seven). That’s partly because there’s been limited opportunity to move up in the leadership ranks. Pelosi (Calif.) and Reps. Steny H. Hoyer (Md.) and James E. Clyburn (S.C) have had a death grip on the party’s top congressional slots for a very long time. It’s also partly because the Democratic farm system is hurting. 

Lined up one after another, Cillizza’s picks create a broader narrative: President Obama’s second term has been a terrible failure for the country.

It’s actually hard to say which has been worse, Obama’s domestic policy or his foreign policy.