Tag: media

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.

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.