Tag: media

The Blaze is going down

According to a diabolically fashionable source:

My spies tell me that The Blaze is desperately seeking a cash injection to stay afloat, and that if it doesn’t get investment in the next couple of weeks it’s all over. The company was looking at a DIP loan last week, which is only ever used in cases of significant financial distress, when other options are exhausted. I can’t imagine who’d buy the company now, especially since all the big editorial talents are gone. Last significant person to jump ship was Jason Howerton, whom I rate highly and who was, I am told, almost single-handedly responsible for the success of the written content on the site. What is left, at this point, to acquire?

Well, there is always Matt Walsh, the Bravest of the Brave, who isn’t afraid to run away after calling out the entirety of Donald Trump’s supporters.

To be honest, I have no idea who else is there, because I have literally never been on that site or watched that channel, or, to be honest, ever been entirely clear what it actually is. The only thing I really knew about it was that Glenn Beck is involved and he is a fraud.

In November 2014, for instance, TheBlaze.com was attracting 29 million unique visitors per month, according to figures from the Web traffic measure service Quantcast. But by November 2015, monthly traffic for the TheBlaze.com had dropped to 16.4 million unique visitors, and traffic for the associated website GlennBeck.com had plunged from 4.4 million to 1.4 million uniques.

It’s worse now, having fallen to 8.3 million uniques in August 2016. That’s a 70 percent drop in less than two years. No wonder Beck is in trouble.

A conservative critique of the Alt-Right

In which (((Jeff Goldstein))), aka Protein Wisdom, considers the Alt-Right via the 16-points I laid out and concludes that Democrats are the Real Racists the Alt-Right are the Real Leftists in The Federalist.

The Alt-Right Is The Mirror Image Of The New Left

Our system was designed for assimilation and naturalization. The complete corruption of that system and the usurpation of its intent by those who redefine it in the terms of transnational progressivism are largely responsible for the resurgence of the white nationalism at the heart of the alt-right’s identitarian “philosophy.”

Concerns over a loss of sovereignty or the overdetermined influence granted preferred minority groups are legitimate, despite the putative conservatives who pretend they are not, or parrot an establishment apologia that waxes poetic about “inclusivity” and “economic growth” while Americans are increasingly self-segregating and an entire generation of young people will struggle to find a way into the workforce. I can read crime statistics, and have watched states turn blue as the result not of good Democratic Party governance but entitlement promises and the logistical changes that inevitably follow. Libertarian economist Milton Friedman knew well that you can’t have an open borders-type immigration system tied to a welfare state. That’s precisely what we now have.

Still, there are fixes to our national maladies that reside in the constitutional system of government we each inherited as our birthright as American citizens. American exceptionalism, which neither Barack Obama nor Donald Trump understand or can articulate, was born of our founding. This exceptionalism is found not in its genetic makeup (after all, we fought other white Europeans for our independence) but in a collage of Enlightenment ideas our Founders pulled together to create what became our national portrait.

To reclaim our birthright, we need only reclaim the Constitution. We need to re-embrace American exceptionalism and reject the kind of toxic identitarianism the Left uses to divide us, manage us, and place us into needy voter blocs they then collect to win elections, and through which an institutionalized progressive cancer spreads to eat away its bones.

Identity Politics On the Right

But we need recognize this cancer is not necessarily isolated within a given political party. It is opportunistic: in the ’60s, it infiltrated the “bourgeois” Democratic Party the cultural Marxists despised to become the New Left that today controls many of our institutions. As it did so, this long march created a counter-trend we now see bubbling up through cracks in our national foundation.

This counter-trend, make no mistake, is every bit as identitarian as anything Edward Said ever wrote, and just as toxic. Said enormously influenced Western academics. His Orientalism laid out the case for identity politics, declaring who controls particular group narratives and how, and who and what comes to count as “authentic” and thus permitted to represent a given identity group and its (collectivist) narrative. Identity politics necessarily brackets and minimizes individualism. As with much the Left does, it remains policed by a kind of mob shaming and an enforced intellectual correctness that is linguistically incoherent.

Unfortunately, this same set of core beliefs is now ascendant on a vocal part of the self-described “Right.” In his “What the Alt Right is,” Vox Day, one of the leaders of the alt-right “movement,” details what he calls “a core Alt Right philosophy upon which others can build,” then provides a list of 16 items one can imagine he sees himself virtually nailing to the doors of Benetton stores like a modern-day Martin Luther.

Read the whole thing. It is more than a little illuminating with regards to how the conservatives think, although there is nothing that is likely to surprise any regular reader of this blog. I will respond to it in detail later this week, but feel free to share your own thoughts in the meantime.

Look, Ma, I made the cover!

The first two are pretty good too, as are the REGRESSIVE LEFT series, which features The Magazine For People Terrified of Being Racist Islamophobes. You can find them in Satiria’s account. The funniest thing is that I have absolutely no doubt that SJWS are going to be frantically searching for the full text of my article, “Why Women Should Not Be Allowed to Think”.

It’s a good article, though, and frankly, I think I really presented a conclusive case.

Their indifference is palpable

This interview with NK Jemisin in The Atlantic is interesting, as it indicates a change in strategy on the part of the Puppykickers:

Just a year ago, the idea of a novel as deliberately outside the science-fiction norm as The Fifth Season winning the Hugo Award seemed unlikely. In 2013, a small group of science-fiction writers and commentators launched the “Sad Puppies” and “Rabid Puppies” campaigns to exploit the Hugo nomination system and place dozens of books and stories of their own choosing up for awards. Those campaigns arose as a reaction to perceived “politicization” of the genre—often code for it becoming more diverse and exploring more themes of social justice, race, and gender—and became a space for some science-fiction and fantasy communities to rail against “heavy handed message fic.” Led by people like the “alt-right” commentator Vox Day, the movements reached fever pitch in the 2015 Hugo Award cycle, and Jemisin herself was often caught up in the intense arguments about the future of the genre.

I spoke to Jemisin about her works, politics, the sad puppies controversy, and about race and gender representation in science-fiction and fantasy the day before The Fifth Season won the Hugo Award. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Newkirk: For you, are those people something that bothers you as you build a profile? Are people louder now that The Fifth Season is getting so much love?

Jemisin: They may be, but I’m not hearing them as much. I seem to have passed some kind of threshold, and maybe it’s something as simple as I now have so many positive messages coming at me that the negatives are sort of drowned out. As a side note, the so-called boogeyman of science-fiction, the white supremacist asshat who started the Rabid Puppies, Vox Day, apparently posted something about me a few days ago and I just didn’t care. There was a whole to-do between me and him a few years back where he ended up getting booted out of SWFA [Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America] because of some stuff he said about me, and I just didn’t care. It was a watershed moment at that point but now it’s just sort of, “Oh, it’s him again. He must be needing to get some new readers or trying to raise his profile again. Or something.” I didn’t look at it. No one bothered to read it and dissect it and send me anything about it. No one cared.

She just didn’t care. She just didn’t care. No one cared.

And then, the next day, they completely revamped the rules of the Hugo Award.

SJWAL. What’s particularly amusing about this is that last year, the Puppykickers went running to the media, pointing-and-shrieking like banshees. That strategy completely failed, so now they’re going with the “oh, we don’t care” line, while simultaneously trying to claim that I am seeking to raise my profile. We’ll see how long that lasts.

Let’s face it, I’m not the one talking to The Atlantic about me. Nor do I have any need to do so. As Mike Cernovich says, we are the Alt Media now.

Notice how the interviewer doesn’t ask her about calling Robert Heinlein and most of SF fandom “racist as *fuck*”. The truth is that having Jemisin replace Scalzi as the public face of Pink SF is about the best possible thing for Blue SF.

The Alt-Right is not Freddy Krueger

We don’t go away when you close your eyes and turn your back in a nightmare. But that won’t stop (((Jonah Goldberg))) from trying to ignore the Alt-Right:

My first column of the week was on how conservatives should not contaminate themselves by making room for the alt-right. I discussed the subject at great length with Hugh Hewitt on the air the other day, and I think the conversation is worth listening to. I won’t recycle all of that here, but I do want to clarify something. I do not think that “Trump supporter” and “alt-right” are synonymous terms. In fact, I’ve been very clear that they are not. Contrary to what Trump supporters claim, however, the alt-right is not some made up “bogeyman.” It is a thing. It may be vastly more insignificant than its proponents — and Hillary Clinton — claim, but that should make it easier to draw bright lines around it, particularly when they insist they want nothing to do with us and what we believe.

I see no reason to give an inch to the alt-righters’ effort to create an alt-white consciousness based upon the pigments of their imagination. By their own words, the alt-righters want to destroy and replace classical liberalism and modern conservatism and replace it with some tribal “identitarian” understanding of whiteness as a unifying concept. In this it shares the same modes of thought as the radical racialist Left. Hence, its real goal is to not just turn the alt-right into the Right, pure and simple, but to transform the consciousness of all white Americans — and white people everywhere — into racial jingoists.

That’s not who white Americans are, thank God, and I see no reason to give an inch to the alt-righters’ effort to create an alt-white consciousness based upon the pigments of their imagination. I think the wisest course would be to ignore it utterly, but thanks to the demons the Trump campaign has aroused — and even hired — that hasn’t been possible. I think it will be again, soon enough.

 It’s fascinating to see (((Jonah))) declare “that’s not who white Americans are” instead of “that’s not who we are.” It’s almost as fascinating to see him utilizing Obama’s rhetoric and following Hillary Clinton’s lead in order to claim that the Alt-Right are the real Leftists.

That should prove about as effective as previous cuckservative lines such as “Democrats are the real racists” and “Donald Trump is no true conservative”. Ricky Vaughan nailed it:

Ricky Vaughn ‏@Ricky_Vaughn99
Unoriginal Cuckservative: “the alt-right hurt my feelings”


6 months later


Unoriginal cuckservative: “the alt-right are the REAL SJWs”

However, (((Jonah))) mischaracterizes our position, to the extent that the Alt-Right can even be said to have a single position in this regard. It is not our goal to transform the consciousness of all white Americans into racial jingoists. It is merely our expectation that as an inevitable result of the policies advanced by the Left and supported by the cuckservative Right, “white American” will become the dominant political identity in America.

We are not transformatives, we are, rather, observational realists. We don’t need to destroy classical liberalism and modern conservatism, we have only to distinguish ourselves from them as they complete the process of self-destruction that was always intrinsic to their self-contradictory logics.

And the inherent falsehood in (((Jonah)’s position is revealed in the phrase “the pigments of their imagination”. Who is relying upon Leftist modes of thought now? Skin color exists. DNA exists. Race exists. Nations exist. But the various concepts upon which (((Jonah)))’s conservativism relies, equality, the melting pot, Judeo-Christian values, and a nation of immigrants, do not.

Since (((Jonah))) sees no reason to give an inch to science, history, and reality, it should not be surprising that both his movement and his personal brand are in descent, if not freefall. He asserts it will soon be possible to ignore the Alt-Right.

I don’t think so. In fact, I think that in 10 years time, Vox Popoli will have more readers than National Review.

The new William F. Buckley

It’s a bit ironic. Universal Press Syndicate signed me to a syndication contract with the idea that I would gradually come to replace their big syndicate star, William F. Buckley, because they considered me to be the most intellectually formidable of the “young” columnists then on the political scene. Needless to say, that didn’t happen, as they were totally unable to place my column anywhere except, briefly, with the Dallas Morning News.

As it turns out, it’s Jonah Goldberg who has turned out to be the true heir to William F. Buckley, as he is attempting to repeat his predecessor’s example in reading the 160,000-strong John Birch Society out of the conservative movement in a column entitled “Time to John Birch the Alt-Right“.

There is a diversity of views among the self-described alt-right. But the one unifying sentiment is racism — or what they like to call “racialism” or “race realism.” In the words of one alt-right leader, Jared Taylor, “the races are not equal and equivalent.” On Monday, Taylor asserted on NPR’s “Diane Rehm Show” that racialism — not religion, economics, etc. — is the one issue that unites alt-righters.

If you read the writings of leading alt-righters, it is impossible to come to any other conclusion. Some are avowed white supremacists. Some eschew talk of supremacy and instead focus on the need for racial separation to protect “white identity.” But one can’t talk about the alt-right knowledgeably without recognizing their racism.

And yet that is exactly what some conservatives seem intent on doing. For example, my friend Hugh Hewitt, the influential talk-radio host, has been arguing that there is a “narrow” alt-right made up of a “execrable anti-Semitic, white supremacist fringe” but also a “broad alt-right” made up of frustrated tea partiers and others who are simply hostile to the GOP establishment and any form of immigration reform that falls short of mass deportation.

This isn’t just wrong, it’s madness. The alt-righters are a politically insignificant band. Why claim that a group dedicated to overthrowing conservatism for a white-nationalist fantasy is in fact a member of the conservative coalition? Why muddy a distinction the alt-righters are eager to keep clear?

In the 1960s, the fledgling conservative movement was faced with a similar dilemma. The John Birch Society was a paranoid outfit dedicated to the theory that the U.S. government was controlled by communists. It said even Dwight Eisenhower was a Red (to which the conservative political theorist Russell Kirk replied, “Ike’s not a Communist, he’s a golfer”).

William F. Buckley recognized that the Birchers were being used by the liberal media to “anathematize the entire American right wing.” At first, his magazine, National Review (where I often hang my hat), tried to argue that the problem was just a narrow “lunatic fringe” of Birchers, and not the rank and file. But very quickly, the editors recognized that the broader movement needed to be denounced and defenestrated.

Jonah even went on his friend Hugh Hewitt’s show and tried to get him to sign on to a campaign against the Alt-Right, to which Hugh, through either common sense, or, more likely, cowardice and fear of losing part of his audience, was obviously reluctant to endorse:

HH: We have been having a Twitter back and forth, and I actually don’t think we disagree. We just disagree maybe on a statement of the facts. Would you define the alt right?

JG: I know what you’re about to do. And then you’re going to say well, there’s this other version of the alt right. I am willing to defer to the definition of the alt right that the people who created and lead the alt right movement use, which is an, the one thing that unites them, Jared Taylor was on Diane Rehm the other day. Jared Taylor is a leading racist…

HH: Good. Please.

JG: …a member of the white alt right. And he says that there are a lot of different views among the alt right. Some are Christian, some are Odinists. Some are this, some are that. But the one thing they all agree on is what they call racial realism, or racialism, which is just a social science sounding term for racism. They believe that, if you read Richard Host, if you read Richard Spencer at the NPI, who leads an alt right think tank, if you actually read the people who created the term, who have been pushing this stuff, the one thing they all agree on is that we need to organize this society on the assumption that white people are genetically superior, or that white culture is inherently superior, and that we should have either state-imposed or culturally-imposed segregation between the races, no race mixing with the lower brown people. And I take them at their word, that that’s the stuff that they believe. And I think rather than poisoning or blurring that distinction, we should take them at their word and say we want nothing to do with any of that. And I know that you want nothing to do with any of that. I don’t dispute that for a moment. Where I disagree with you is this idea that we should sort of talk about this broader alt right that is just for the wall, or likes Donald Trump. No. What we should say is this is not your group to them, too. These are not disaffected tea partiers. These are people who we have a fundamental, first principle disagreement with. And any movement that has them in it, doesn’t have me in it, and vice versa.

HH: I agree 100% with that. Now does the term alt right get used exclusively in that fashion?

JG: No, which is one of the things that we should be doing, is we should be helping sharpen the distinction, not blur the distinction. I agree with you. There are a lot of people who don’t know what the alt right is. I live in these swamps. I’ve been having these fights for 20 years. I didn’t hear the term alt right until Donald Trump came up. But I know a lot of the people behind the alt right, because I’ve been getting it, they’ve been attacking me and then saying nasty anti-Semitic stuff to me since I started working at National Review. I mean, people are like, the guys at VDARE and these other places, they’ve all coalesced around this idea of the alt right, and it is not a coalitional idea where they want to be part of the conservative movement. It’s that they want to replace the conservative movement.

HH: And they have to be driven out of the Republican Party.

JG: Yes.

HH: I’m speaking as a partisan now. As William F. Buckley led the effort to drive the Birchers out of the party, so must genuine conservatives drive out what you and I agree is the core alt right.

JG: Right.

HH: In the process of doing that, I do not want people who are not familiar with how you and I believe it to be understood by the people who invented the term to think that they are being exiled. That is my fear, because I believe a lot of people, and I’ve seen it everywhere I go, say they are alt right, and they don’t know that Jonah Goldberg would then classify them as supremacist.

JG: Well, I wouldn’t necessarily classify them as supremacists, either. I would classify them as wrong.

HH: Yes.

JG: They’re using the term wrong. And in politics, you know, specifically, you know, I wrote a whole book which you were very kind to about the importance of labels and why they matter, and the importance of ideology and why it matters, and that we shouldn’t fall into this thing that labels don’t matter. Labels matter a great deal. The labels you choose for yourself matter a great deal. And sometimes, people choose their labels incorrectly. And so rather than say, rather than work from the assumption that someone says they’re an alt-righter, and say well, you know, I don’t know that that means you’re a racist, I would say well, what did you, you know, educate them. And people need to be educated about this.

It’s rather like watching monkeys puzzle over a computer and start licking the keyboard and putting the mouse in their mouths in order to figure out how to make it work. It is two long time ideologists trying, and failing, to make sense of identity politics. And speaking of identity, how many of the growing number of people who describe themselves as Alt-Right, who watch Stefan’s videos or read Richard Spencer’s articles or listen to The Right Stuff or Red Ice podcats or look over my 16 Points with approval, do you believe to be so concerned that Jonah Goldberg – Jonah F. Goldberg! – would classify them as supremacists that they will flee from the brand with all due alacrity?

This is AAA Grade cuckservative projection: the belief that the key to all persuasion is to convince the other person that failing to do as you want will lead to someone calling you racist.

Point 12: The Alt-Right doesn’t care what you think of it.

Jonah isn’t as stupid as he sometimes appears to be. He understands, as he makes clear in the Hewitt interview, that he cannot expect to be as successful in banishing the Alt-Right from the public discourse or the Republican Party as Buckley was in purging the Birchers from the conservative movement. He knows we have no interest in being a part of it; any lingering doubts about the rhetorical effectiveness of “cuckservative” should be put to rest by that glorious moment when Hewitt recoils in horror from the mere mention of it and prissily hisses “Oh, I hate that!”

The cuckservatives fear and hate the Alt-Right for one simple reason. We are not their friends. We are not their allies. We are their replacements. They like to call us Nazis, well, to extend the Nazi analogy a bit further, conservatives are the Hindenburg party, in both senses of the term.

And as Mr. X pointed out on Twitter: “Everyone shouting “Birchers” like getting rid of them was great should remember that they were mostly right about communists in government.”

What is the Alt Right?

Stefan Molyneaux and I consider the question.

Just as Mike Cernovich is killing it on Twitter, Stefan is the king of the YouTube/podcast interview. He mentioned that our last conversation had 250,000 downloads. The Alt-Right may be the mainstream story du jour, but the real story is the way the Alt-Media is beginning to flex its muscle. I turned down five media requests in the last three days, but I’m always happy to make time for Stefan.

The Grey Lady shivers in her bloomers

The New York Times addresses the Alt-Right:

As Hillary Clinton assailed Donald J. Trump on Thursday for fanning the flames of racism embraced by the “alt-right,” the community of activists that tends to lurk anonymously in the internet’s dark corners could hardly contain its glee.

Mrs. Clinton’s speech was intended to link Mr. Trump to a fringe ideology of conspiracies and hate, but for the leaders of the alt-right, the attention from the Democratic presidential nominee was a moment in the political spotlight that offered a new level of credibility. It also provided a valuable opportunity for fund-raising and recruiting….

Although the alt-right tried to put its best foot forward, there was plenty of venom directed at Mrs. Clinton, and the conspiracy theories ran wild. A popular attack was the continuing effort to raise questions about her health.

 Matt Forney @basedmattforney
She’s winding down now. If she stays on stage any longer she might die. #AltRightMeans #AltRight #HillarysAltRightSpeech

By addressing the alt-right in such a prominent setting, Mrs. Clinton ran the risk of helping its cause. But Richard Cohen, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, dismissed the idea that Mrs. Clinton was doing the public a disservice by drawing attention to the alt-right.

“I think every public official ought to denounce racism, and that is what Secretary Clinton did,” Mr. Cohen said, noting that the alt-right ideology opposes the notion that all people are equal.

I think it’s interesting that the mainstream media is playing it pretty tame thus far. To be honest, the cucks and cons have been attacking the Alt-Right with considerably more vitriol than the mainstream media has to date.

My thought is that the conservatives are much more frightened of the Alt-Right than the Left is right now, because they know they are vulnerable to being replaced by it as the primary opposition to the Left. To the Left, on the other hand, the Alt-Right is actually seen as a preferable opponent, because it’s not even necessary to caricature us, we really believe many of the things they only claim the conservatives believe.

The Left is mistaken, of course, because their perspective is based on the current status quo, whereas the Alt-Right’s perspective is based on where the current trends are leading, and the likely reaction of the populace to those trends.