Tag: media

Controlled opposition or media indiscipline?

Like others in and around the Alt-Right, I’ve been approached by numerous media organizations since the election. I was also invited to speak at the recent NPI conference. I declined the opportunity, not because I have any problem with Richard Spencer or anything the Alt-White is pursuing, but because going to conferences and talking to lots of people is really not my thing. I don’t even go to three-quarters of the professional conferences that I really should attend, and I’ve been speaking at game industry conferences since 1995.

But I have to admit, it was somewhat fortuitous that I didn’t go given the manufactured media coverage of a minor incident towards the end, when apparently some idiots in the crowd began throwing Roman salutes on camera, and Richard decided it would be a great idea to throw the media some red meat by shouting “Hail Victory and Hail Trump.” Mike Cernovich put out a widely watched Periscope calling this “utter stupidity” and “controlled opposition”, and thereby sparked a bit of outrage among Richard’s fans.

As a number of people have asked my opinion of this, here it is:

  • No, I don’t think Richard is a federal agent or an actual controlled opposition figure. I think Mike would have been more accurate to say “controllable opposition” or “dancing monkey”. But Mike made it very clear exactly what he meant in his Periscope. Don’t get pedantically hung up on a term. If nothing else, Richard’s hair is too fabulous for him to be a federal agent.
  • There was nothing actually wrong with what Richard said. But we’re dealing with rhetoric here, not dialectic.
  • It wasn’t a big deal. But it was a foolish thing to do. The media is absolutely slavering to be able to have REAL PROOF that the Alt-Right are no-good, very-evil Nazis so that they can use it as a weapon against President-elect Trump, giving them ANYTHING is tactically retarded.
  • It’s not about Richard. It’s about Donald Trump. If Richard is genuinely supportive of Trump, then pulling that sort of stunt was the very last thing he should have done. Making yourself the news story at the expense of the individual you are supposedly supporting and celebrating smacks of being self-serving. As Mike said, dress up like a Nazi, speak bad German and wear a swastika armband if you want, just leave Trump out of it.
  • Richard has failed to learn the lesson of #GamerGate and the principles of 4GW. He wants to be the media-anointed leader of the Alt-Right because he believes, wrongly, that this will help him achieve his objectives. It won’t. As Mike and I have both noted, the media elevates fringe figures to “leadership” specifically in order to attack the movement through them. That’s why they keep trying to call Milo, and Mike, and even occasionally me “an Alt-Right leader” even though we all specifically deny it. Milo and Mike have always denied being Alt-Right, and yet the media keeps trying to claim they are its leaders. Ask yourself, “why is the media doing that when they know it isn’t true?”
  • You don’t play the media, the media plays you. Yes, Trump can play them. Yes, Milo can play them. But I’m not either of those unique talents and neither are you. I learned my lesson the hard way, when a woman from Wired read SJWAL and spent three hours talking about #GamerGate with me just in order to get what she thought was a single kill-quote into her article that was nominally about the Hugo Awards. She was wrong, because she was an American who didn’t realize I was referring to a very real problem that is covered only in the European press, but I learned that they will go very far out of their way in order to get that single soundbite, that single optic, that they can then use as a caricature of you for the next decade in order to discredit and disqualify you. That is why I don’t do TV, I don’t go on radio shows or podcasts that are oppositional, and I require that all interviews with me are written.
  • The media is not the way to “get out your message”. That’s the bait they’ve used to lure in every sucker for 50 years. I can’t count the number of times a reporter has said he “just wants to give me the opportunity to tell my side of the story”. It’s a trap. The way to get out your message is to patiently build your own platform, because he whom the media builds up is he whom the media can take down at will.
  • I am not opposed to Richard or jealous of Richard, nor do I want the attention he is receiving. I rather like him, I simply don’t think he understands that the media intends for him to become a David Duke figure, a weapon available for deployment against any politician or program that he nominally supports.
  • The media always has a narrative it is attempting to sell. Don’t help them sell it!
If the Alt-Right is going to continue to be successful, those to whom the media pays attention are going to have to develop the same media discipline that #GamerGate and the Trump inner circle have exhibited. Don’t take the bait.

The wrath of the God-Emperor

The God-Emperor Ascendant informs the media of their proper place in the new hierarchy, which is considerably closer to the kennels than the Cherry Blossom Throne:

Donald Trump scolded media big shots during an off-the-record Trump Tower sitdown on Monday, sources told The Post.

“It was like a f–ing firing squad,” one source said of the encounter.

“Trump started with [CNN chief] Jeff Zucker and said ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed,’ ” the source said.

“The meeting was a total disaster. The TV execs and anchors went in there thinking they would be discussing the access they would get to the Trump administration, but instead they got a Trump-style dressing down,” the source added.

A second source confirmed the fireworks.

“The meeting took place in a big board room and there were about 30 or 40 people, including the big news anchors from all the networks,” the other source said.

“Trump kept saying, ‘We’re in a room of liars, the deceitful dishonest media who got it all wrong.’ He addressed everyone in the room calling the media dishonest, deceitful liars. He called out Jeff Zucker by name and said everyone at CNN was a liar, and CNN was [a] network of liars,” the source said.

Well, they can hardly deny it, can they? It’s about time someone in a position of power started calling them out on their deceitful propaganda. I understand his contempt for them; I learn new things about myself nearly every time I am mentioned in the media, particularly in articles written by people who have never spoken to me, never met me, and obviously, have never read any of my books.

They’re lucky it was Donald Trump and not Donald Trump Jr. or it would have been a literal firing squad.

The rubes are onto us!

The New York Times is trying to figure out how to avoid getting FoxNewsed by the Alt-Media:

The last year has turned the United States into a country of information addicts who compulsively check the television, the smartphone and the good old-fashioned newspaper with a burning question: What fresh twist could our national election drama and its executive producer, Donald J. Trump, possibly have in store for us now?

No doubt about it: Campaign 2016 has been a smash hit.

And to the news media have gone the spoils. With Mr. Trump providing must-see TV theatrics, cable news has drawn record audiences. Newspapers have reached online readership highs that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

On Wednesday comes the reckoning.

The election news bubble that’s about to pop has blocked from plain view the expanding financial sinkhole at the center of the paper-and-ink branch of the news industry, which has recently seen a print advertising plunge that was “much more precipitous, to be honest with you, than anybody expected a year or so ago,” as The Wall Street Journal editor in chief Gerard Baker told me on Friday.

Papers including The Journal, The New York Times, The Guardian, the Gannett publications and others have responded with plans to reorganize, shed staff, kill off whole sections, or all of the above.

Taken together, it means another rapid depletion in the nation’s ranks of traditionally trained journalists whose main mission is to root out corruption, hold the powerful accountable and sort fact from fiction for voters.

It couldn’t be happening at a worse moment in American public life. The internet-borne forces that are eating away at print advertising are enabling a host of faux-journalistic players to pollute the democracy with dangerously fake news items.

In the last couple of weeks, Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets have exposed millions of Americans to false stories asserting that: the Clinton campaign’s pollster, Joel Benenson, wrote a secret memo detailing plans to “salvage” Hillary Clinton’s candidacy by launching a radiological attack to halt voting (merrily shared on Twitter by Roger Stone, an informal adviser to the Trump campaign); the Clinton campaign senior strategist John Podesta practiced an occult ritual involving various bodily fluids; Mrs. Clinton is paying public pollsters to skew results (shared on Twitter by Donald Trump Jr.); there is a trail of supposedly suspicious deaths of myriad Clinton foes (which The Times’s Frank Bruni heard repeated in a hotel lobby in Ohio).

As Mike Cernovich, a Twitter star, alt-right news provocateur and promoter of Clinton health conspiracies, boasted in last week’s New Yorker, “Someone like me is perceived as the new Fourth Estate.” His content can live alongside that of The Times or The Boston Globe or The Washington Post on the Facebook newsfeed and be just as well read, if not more so. On Saturday he called on a President Trump to disband the White House press corps.

He may not have to. All you have to do is look at the effect of the Gannett cuts on its Washington staff, which Politico recently likened to a “blood bath.”

So, they’re going to win by cutting back on staff and lying about the competition. That sounds like a strategy for certain success!

The total ineptitude of the conservative movement can really only be understood by the ease with which the Alt-Right is competing with them despite a complete imbalance of resources, numbers, and awareness. But conservatives were always too interested in dialectic and making nice to ever have any hope of beating the mainstream media at its own game.

Can you imagine how the Alt-Right would have handled the Lewinsky scandal? Instead of huffing indignantly about “the dignity of the office” and attacking Republicans who also had affairs, there would have been a positive torrent of horrifically pornographic memes starring Bill Clinton. I’ll go so far as to suggest that if the Alt-Right had been around then, Bill Clinton would have been forced to resign.

Speaking of the Alt-Right and Mike Cernovich, EveryJoe has the most substantive review of Mike’s MAGA Mindset that I’ve seen yet:

Back in mid-October, the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency was considered outlandish by the mainstream media. Virtually every major polling organization had predicted that Hillary Clinton would emerge victorious in nothing short of a landslide of epic proportions, condemning Trump’s campaign to a fate as an embarrassing political footnote.

Also in mid-October, author Mike Cernovich and editor Vox Day published the audaciously-titled MAGA Mindset: Making YOU and America Great Again. A book that alternates between political prognostication and self-help reaffirmation, MAGA Mindset confidently describes the rumbling sociocultural landscape that helped form the framework for Trump’s eventual victory.

One does not need to read tea leaves to predict how such a bold move could have spelled disaster for Cernovich’s career; while he had already established himself as a powerful social media bellwether for the New Right movement, authoring a pro-Trump manifesto on the eve of his defeat would forever arm his mainstream media nemeses with concrete evidence of Cernovich’s analytical myopia.

It is this intrepidness on behalf of Cernovich and Day – the MAGA mindset, as it were – that imbues the book’s premise with an indelible potency.

In a self-effacing origin story of sorts, Cernovich calls himself a “dumb hick from flyover country” who “should not have amounted to much.” Now, though, he has become famous (or infamous, depending on whom you ask) as the founder of website Danger & Play and as an outspoken Twitter user who coined hashtags #HillarysHealth, #HidingHillary, et al. With 166,000 followers and counting, Cernovich estimates that his account receives over 100 million impressions monthly.

The juxtaposition of these two mentions of Cernovich illustrate the fundamental problem the mainstream media is facing. They have to cover him. He’s too big to ignore. But they can’t resist the urge to attack, marginalize, and belittle, thereby completely missing everything about why people are paying attention to him in the first place.

Consider how many stories they’ve done about Hillary Clinton’s unexpected defeat and why the pollsters got it wrong. And yet, even when they begrudingly mentioned an individual who was predicting the precise opposite of everything they expected at the time, they only portrayed him as “promoter of Clinton health conspiracies”, not someone who had been predicting a Trump victory since 2015.

That is why they are destined to be the irrelevant news, until they finally disappear altogether. They either don’t know, or simply don’t care, what people are actually interested in reading about. Worse, they act as if we can’t tell what they’re doing. Notice how Cernovich “boasts” when he is simply telling a reporter the facts, whereas when John Scalzi blatantly lied to a New York Times reporter about his site traffic, he was “affable” and “comfortable with the business of promotion” and “adept at generating buzz.”

Do they really think we don’t notice?

Viaje al pensamiento de Alt-right

It’s interesting to see that the Argentine media is considerably more professional than the US media. Instead of running to the likes of (((Ben Shapiro))) and other self-professed enemies of the Alt-Right to explain what it is and what it believes, Gabriela Esquivada took the unusual approach of simply asking Jared Taylor and me for her piece entitled “A Visit to the Thinking of the Alt-Right“:

Viaje al pensamiento de Alt-right: qué es y cómo funciona la nueva derecha de Estados Unidos. 

Estan cansados de la corrección política y el conservadurismo tradicional. Son nacionalistas, antiglobalización y defensores de una América blanca. Su influencia en la victoria de Donald Trump

En los Estados Unidos se ha presentado como un conjunto laxo de personas y organizaciones que van de la derecha a la ultraderecha, y que han ganado espacio en los medios que tratan de encontrar explicaciones a la elección de Donald Trump. Se llama Alternative Right, Alt-Right: derecha alternativa (DA).

“Es una ideología occidental que cree en la ciencia, la historia, la realidad y el derecho de una nación genética a existir y gobernarse en su propio interés”, definió Vox Day, seudónimo de uno de los bloggers más influyentes de este movimiento variopinto que se ha cocido en los Estados Unidos al fuego de la crisis económica y la decepción política de los últimos años.

El autor de Vox Popoli recomendó la lectura de los 16 puntos que él sintetizó como base de una filosofía de la DA, entre los que se destacan la superación del conservadurismo tradicional, la defensa de “los tres pilares de la civilización occidental” (el cristianismo, las naciones europeas y el legado grecorromano), el nacionalismo, la oposición a la globalización y el igualitarismo, la defensa de la política de la identidad y el proteccionismo, entre otros puntos….

El racismo y el sexismo son ideas y ninguna idea es mala, según Vox: “El hecho de que alguien pueda legítimamente tener una creencia no significa que alguien más no pueda creer que está equivocada o despreciarla. Dicho eso, algunas ideas encontradas pueden coexistir. Otras no”.

—Hay creencias que pueden conducir a acciones destructivas.

—¿Y qué? La ciencia lleva a acciones mucho más mortíferas que cualquier creencia —siguió Vox—. ¿Deberíamos matar a todos los científicos para asegurarnos que ninguno podrá construir armas peligrosas? La gente sólo puede ser responsabilizada por sus acciones, no se puede ejercer el poder de policía sobre las creencias sin recurrir a la tiranía total y el control del pensamiento.

“La DA está cansada de la corrección política”, marcó Sabo uno de los ejes de ese ideario. “Porque no es posible prever hasta dónde la llevará la izquierda”. Vox cree que la corrección política “es un cáncer y un intento de controlar el modo en que se le permite pensar y hablar a las personas”. Agregó, enfático: “Es una abominación neo-marxiana”.

It’s a very good article that, wonder of wonders, actually reports rather than editorializes. This should make it clear, as if there was still any doubt remaining, that the Alt-Right is a global phenomenon, of interest to nationalists and their opponents all over the world.

Milo on Sky

Spacebunny and I were just watching Milo doing the tomorrow’s press deal in the UK. He was great, as you’d expect, but one thing he did mention was that he would NOT be taking a position in the Trump administration, or at least, not a full-time position.

So, sad to say, I expect this officially rules him out as the God-Emperor Ascendant’s Press Secretary. It was, alas, nothing more than a dream, a bittersweet dream.

Change is coming

The God-Emperor Ascendant’s Fist prepares the legislative troops for the long march:

Vice President-elect Mike Pence told House Republicans in a closed-door meeting Thursday to be ready to move a lot of legislation next year.

“We’re going to move an agenda” focused on rebuilding the military and improving the economy, Pence told reporters after the meeting.

In his remarks to House Republicans, Pence talked about how he and the new administration wanted members to “buckle up,” and get ready for a speedy start on policy. He also solicited suggestions for candidates to fill administration posts.

“Donald Trump is a man of action and we’re counting on you,” Pence said, according to Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady. The Texas Republican said that Pence mentioned a tax overhaul and Obamacare, but didn’t get into specifics.

Pence, a former House member himself, returned to the U.S. Capitol Thursday to visit with House Republicans. He also met with top Democratic leaders in the House and Senate. Pence’s closed-door meeting with Speaker Paul Ryan and other House Republicans reflected his vital role helping President-elect Trump forge a relationship with Congress. His visit was squeezed in even as Pence is overseeing the building of a Trump administration, a transition effort seen as marked by infighting.

Pence didn’t mention Trump’s campaign promise to build a wall on the Mexican border, according to Representative Lou Barletta of Pennsylvania. But Pence said the transition is “going fantastic” and that Trump is methodically selecting his Cabinet positions, Barletta said.

Representative Chris Collins of New York, who was appointed by the transition team as its congressional liaison, said Pence also told lawmakers one of Trump’s top priorities was taking a deep dive through President Barack Obama’s executive orders. “We applaud that,” he said. “He will be reversing many of them.”

The Democrats are, without question, going to squeal like pigs being butchered and plead everything from “time-honored tradition” to racism, including appeals to the very customs they have blithely ignored in the very recent past. It is now readily apparent that this is not going to do them any good whatsoever, as the God-Emperor Ascendant has made it abundantly clear that he does not care in the slightest what the media or the SJW Left might have to say about him. Of course, I doubt he cares very much what we have to say either, except in that we are a more accurate guide to the current conceptual trends.

As I mentioned to Brian Greenberg on his show last night, Trump simply isn’t going to be impressed when they accuse his lieutenants and appointees of racism, hate crimes, crimethink, and small furry animal-molesting, because they have accused him of all the same things. My prediction: the conservative media will be licking his boots and hailing him as the next Reagan by October. The mainstream media will fall in line within a year after that, simply to avoid looking entirely out of touch.

Furthermore, everyone needs to relax about his appointees. This is not a traditional administration. It doesn’t necessarily matter what Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani or John Bolton think, because if they don’t do what Trump wants them to do, he’ll replace them without a moment’s hesitation and they all know it now. Look how swiftly Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, slapped down the idiot Republicans who wanted to bring back earmarks.

If Donald Trump was not the President-Elect, there is no way he would have done that, or succeeded so easily. I suspect that the neocons and everyone else who think they can use Trump the way they used the Bushes, the Clintons, and Obama, are about to discover that he is more capable of using them than they are of using him.

The Trump administration is looking more glorious by the day and the God-Emperor hasn’t even Ascended yet. Both Trump and Pence are showing themselves to be serious men of grim purpose and action, and while it is too soon to hail them on any accomplishments as yet, things are looking better than I had ever imagined.

UPDATE: The God-Emperor has chosen Jeff Sessions for Attorney-General. Great choice. Now set him loose to DRAIN THE SWAMP.

UPDATE: The Sessions (AG), Flynn (National Security Adviser) and Pompeo (CIA) announcements are to be formally announced later today. First Bannon, now this? The legions are practically shaking with anticipation.

It’s not your imagination

ESPN has been moving steadily leftward since it converged:

ESPN Public Editor Jim Brady on Election Eve surveyed complaints that the sports network had gone overboard with liberal pieties, frustrating long-time watchers by injecting politics onto the plahing field. He agreed with conservative complaints that ESPN had shifted leftward, though the company brass and at least one outspoken lefty personality didn’t see a problem: “One notion that virtually everyone I spoke to at ESPN dismisses is what some have perceived as unequal treatment of conservatives who make controversial statements vs. liberals who do the same.”

I used to LOVE ESPN and Sportscenter back in the glory days of Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick. I haven’t even considered turning it on or even visiting the ESPN website for years.

But remember, SJW convergence is nothing that merits fighting. It’s a sign that there is a sizable opportunity to exploit.

Happy Birthday, Mike

Want to get Mike Cernovich a birthday present and thank him for the yeoman’s work he put in to ensure the Ascension of the God-Emperor Trump to the Cherry Blossom Throne?

  1. Buy a copy of his bestselling MAGA MINDSET in hardcover or in paperback.
  2. Give it to a friend or family member or teacher or professor to read. Tell them: this is why Donald Trump won the election.
  3. Tweet their reaction to @cernovich on Twitter or Gab.
It’s a gift that keeps on giving. In the meantime, Mike is gearing up to be the target of another hit piece. This is to be celebrated; the media only writes hit pieces about people who alarm them in some way.

Steps ahead

It’s rather amusing to see how the God-Emperor Ascendant no sooner gets criticized for something nonsensical by the Left than his actions obviate the basis for their criticism:

Vice President-elect Mike Pence reportedly ordered the removal of all lobbyists from president-elect Donald Trump’s transition team, The Wall Street Journal wrote on Tuesday night.

The decision was one of Pence’s first since formally taking over the team’s lead role. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was abruptly dismissed from the post last week.

Critics have excoriated Trump for including lobbyists, Washington insiders, and Republican Party veterans among his team, suggesting it contradicts the anti-establishment message that defined his campaign.

“[Americans] do not want corporate executives to be the ones who are calling the shots in Washington,” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said earlier Tuesday. “What Donald Trump is doing is that he’s putting together a transition team that’s full of lobbyists — the kind of people he actually ran against,” she said.

Will Fauxcahauntas praise Trump for actually draining the swamp? Of course not! Because Warren isn’t anti-establishment, she was just grabbing what she mistakenly thought was a useful club with which to hit Trump.

But, as usual, the God-Emperor Ascendant is several steps ahead of his bumbling opposition. As entertaining as the Obama administration was, the Trump administration promises to be even more so, albeit in an entirely different way.

Then, for a night cap, Trump proceeded to upset the entire press corps by going out to dinner with his family without inviting them as is apparently traditional. And received a standing ovation when he walked into the steak house.

The mainstream media think Trump is a madman and in disarray because they’ve never seen this level of competence in action before. One thing that is amazing about the God-Emperor Ascendant is the speed with which he acts once he decides that someone is not up to fulfilling their responsibilities to his liking. Never forget, this is a man who changed campaign managers THREE TIMES in the course of a campaign, and won. He didn’t win DESPITE changing them, he won BECAUSE he changed them.

Rogers was told that all team members picked by Christie were being ousted, The Journal reported, citing a source familiar with the situation. 

Translation: settle down, everyone. Trump has no intention of letting the neocons or the GOPe interfere with his administration. That doesn’t mean there won’t be anyone from the status quo on his team; many individuals have legitimate and relevant experience that could be of genuine utility to him. But it’s pretty clear already that if they get out of line or attempt to exert any undue influence on him, they won’t be there long.

Trump likes to test people and give them enough rope to hang themselves. My guess, and it is nothing more than that, is that Chris Christie gave him certain assurances, then promptly went ahead and violated them as he tried to impose status quo shackles on the God-Emperor Ascendant, thereby prompting the house-cleaning. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn Donald Trump Jr. was somehow involved in that process. One senses an uncompromising and merciless hand in all of this.

How GG crowned the God-Emperor

And saved the free world:

By now, you’ve read countless presidential election post-mortems that have struggled to rationalize how Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton when it was “her turn” to be president. Many of them predictably avoid placing any blame on the candidate herself (first female president!) and instead blame James Comey, or Russia, or Jill Stein. In reality, the president-elect trumped Hillary because of Gamergate and the vast internet army that the movement created.

That’s right: Trump was literally memed into the White House. Trump and his supporters dominated social media from day one, pumping out weaponized memes at a rate that Hillary’s campaign never could have anticipated. When the email scandal broke, the internet detectives who were just rookies at the peak of Gamergate used their experience to sniff out each and every damaging WikiLeaks revelation. Hillary supporters blame a “silent majority” of backwoods hillbillies for Trump’s victory, but they could have realized the tide was turning if only they looked online….

Like clockwork, the prominent figures who backed Gamergate also began jumping onto the God-Emperor bandwagon.

Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart journalist whose very existence as an openly gay Trump supporter continues to cause cognitive dissonance in SJWs everywhere, was also the first person to break the news about the gaming journalist elites’ secret mailing list. While he was virtually unknown back in those days, Milo has now become one of the movement’s key figures. His rise to fame has been met with a predictable character assassination on the part of the mainstream media, but Milo doesn’t seem to mind, especially now that people are genuinely pushing for him to become the White House press secretary.

Gamergate may have also led to Trump picking Steve Bannon to serve as the White House chief strategist. Bannon is the executive chairman of Breitbart News, which was the only prominent media outlet to cover Gamergate as it unfolded. Sure enough, the media has been quick to scaremonger about the decision, depicting Bannon as an anti-Semitic white nationalist. The New York Times even called him a “voice of racism,” which should sound like a familiar aspersion.

There’s also Vox Day, the author and Rabid Puppies founder who penned the book SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police as a “guide to understanding, anticipating, and surviving SJW attacks.” He was among the first wave of a Gamergate supporters, hosting the GGinParis meetup in July 2015 along with Milo and Mike Cernovich, yet another Gamergate figure who emerged as one of the most famous pro-Trump memeologists.

Read the whole thing. Well done, #GamerGaters. Salud to the #GGinParis gang. It’s an honor to stand with you all. And remember, it never ends.