Tag: media

Twitter suspends Instapundit

If you go to the @instapundit account, this is what you see:

Account suspended
This account has been suspended. Learn more about why Twitter suspends accounts, or return to your timeline.

This is getting crazy. Twitter is blocking access to my blog, banning Milo, suspending Instapundit… it appears the thought police at Twitter are openly declaring war on the social media Right.

UPDATE: This was Twitter’s excuse:

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds responds:

Sorry, blocking the interstate is dangerous, and trapping people in their cars is a threat. Driving on is self-preservation, especially when we’ve had mobs destroying property and injuring and killing people. But if Twitter doesn’t like me, I’m happy to stop providing them with free content.

Was just on Hugh Hewitt talking about this. Since Twitter won’t let me respond to — or even see — my critics, let me expand here.

I’ve always been a supporter of free speech and peaceful protest. I fully support people protesting police actions, and I’ve been writing in support of greater accountability for police for years.

But riots aren’t peaceful protest. And blocking interstates and trapping people in their cars is not peaceful protest — it’s threatening and dangerous, especially against the background of people rioting, cops being injured, civilian-on-civilian shootings, and so on. I wouldn’t actually aim for people blocking the road, but I wouldn’t stop because I’d fear for my safety, as I think any reasonable person would.

“Run them down” perhaps didn’t capture this fully, but it’s Twitter, where character limits stand in the way of nuance.

Meanwhile, regarding Twitter: I don’t even know that this is why I was suspended, as I’ve heard nothing from Twitter at all. They tell users and investors that they don’t censor, but they seem awfully quick to suspend people on one side of the debate and, as people over at Twitchy note, awfully tolerant of outright threats on the other.

Twitter can do without me, as I can certainly do without Twitter.

UPDATE: Apparently Twitter has reconsidered and unsuspended Glenn. For now.

Meanwhile, GabTechNews warns that YouTube has gone the Reddit route, almost precisely as spelled out by QuQu of GGRevolt.

Grave news: Youtube has gone the Reddit moderation path.
Volunteer-staffed mass flagging, comment removal, all that.
The internet is becoming a very coddled place.
They call it YouTube Heroes.



I think, at this point, we are going to have to assume that it is only a matter of time before Blogger is similarly converged and prepare accordingly. I’ve always had several backups running, of course, so I doubt much of an interruption will be necessary, but if Blogger goes the way of Goodreads, Wikipedia, Facebook, and now Twitter and YouTube, check in at either Gab or Castalia House to find the new location.

Milo crushes it in Houston

“This room is a vision of what America should look like in 20 years.”

What concerned members of the Alt-White branch of the Alt-Right really need to keep in mind is that attempting to criticize or control Milo is like trying to criticize or control a Category V Hurricane. It is not even wrong, or misguided, it is simply a category error. One cannot leash a force of nature.

Richard Spencer is correct to say that Milo is Alt-Lite, not Alt-Right. But that’s just fine. And keep in mind that the whole force of the mainstream media’s hatred only made him stronger, so what do you think adding your weight to the collective disapproval of him is going to accomplish. Milo listens to no one but his friends and allies. If you wish to have any influence on him at all, you had better learn to appreciate him and bring something to the table besides criticism and disapproval.

Entryism is always a legitimate concern. But the only way the Alt-Right will become irrelevant is if it succumbs to the tendency of its Alt-White spergs to purity-spiral into their own navels, in which case it will be entirely replaced by the Alt-Lite. However, I think this is unlikely because the Alt-West branch is considerably less prone to purity spirals and welcomes the training grounds offered by the Alt-Lite.

However, I am done trying to talk sense into Alt-Whites who are paranoid about those they deem “e-celebs” and determined to make neither friends nor allies of anyone who is not 100 percent white and does not buy 100 percent into whatever it is that they believe. They are irrelevant and we need not concern ourselves with them. To the extent they trouble to shoot at the Left instead of demonstrating their purity by aiming at us, they are useful, and that is sufficient reason to ignore their occasional attacks directed our way.

Increasingly desperate

Now the media is “quoting” Donald Trump saying things he did not say. CNN actually inserted the word “racial”. Because, you see, if they just insinuate that he is RACIST one more time, that will salvage Hillary Clinton’s flagging campaign.

As Scott Adams observed earlier today, “Everyone knows it’s over. But not everyone can say it yet.”

But it’s over. Trump will be the next President of the USA and it’s not even going to be close.

An interview with Decius Mus

American Greatness interviews the author of the Flight 93 article:

AG: Michael Walsh, the PJMedia columnist and author of The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, notes that the most vociferous in the conservative NeverTrump camp tend to be those under 50. Do you think there is a generation gap among conservatives and, if so, what accounts for it?

It does seem that, the younger a (nominal) conservative is, the more likely he is to be against Trump. I think this is owing to two things, at least. This will sound like an old man being cranky, so take it with due allowances.

The first is that the young are not educated. Not that I got the greatest education, but it was pretty good. Still the people who taught me were far more educated than I am now, and the oldest ones were the best educated of the bunch. And my sense is that their teachers—most of whom I never met, or were even dead before I was born—were better educated than even they were. So in terms of education and knowledge, we’re on a downward trend and have been for a while.

What that means is that young conservatives learn conservatism as a checklist. They don’t really read books, except recent “conservative” bestsellers. They read excerpts from the Federalist at a summer fellowship and think that’s an education. Not to knock summer fellowships, but they are supposed to be gateways, not complete educations. And they don’t really read anything harder or deeper than the Federalist (not to knock it, either, but the Founders read Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, Montesquieu and more).

So on the basis of a rather flimsy education, they think they know what conservatism is, but it’s just a catechism for them, a hymnal. And they compare Trump’s policy positions to their hymnal and they see discrepancies and they just default to “Heretic! Not conservative!”

Which points to the second, which is that older conservative intellectuals tend to have better educations and read more widely so they have a broader perspective. They also have the benefit of hard-won experience and an understanding that compromise, course changes, tactical adjustments and so on are sometimes necessary. They’re less “idealistic” in the sense of uncompromisingly foolish. And—speculating here—they have seen America at its best, or when it was much better, so they know we’ve fallen and they don’t want to see us fall further.

The kidlets, as I call them, were raised on a diet of racism-this and equality-that and that’s-not-who-we-are, so they can’t process anything that seems to contradict the narrative. To them “conservatism” is the 1980 campaign’s economic platform spot-welded to Millennial identity politics and sexual libertarianism. Freedom!

He’s absolutely correct. As John Red Eagle and I have demonstrated, conservatism is something very different than most self-described conservatives believe. Conservatives don’t have an ideology and they don’t even understand what it is they are supposedly trying to conserve. It’s little more than an attitude and a pose; they can’t even reasonably describe themselves as Constitutionalists because they oppose the very purpose of the U.S. Constitution, not that they are aware of that.

Anyhow, it’s a really good interview. Read the whole thing.

Chickenhawks can do flips

As evidenced by (((Ben Shapiro)))

Five weeks later….

Jack Greer explains:

Jack Greer ‏@15Midichlorians
according to @benshapiro #NeverTrump means “never Primary Trump” but Ben likes the stability and presidential-ness of General Trump


Ah, so “never” for varying values of the term. Well, rats only swarm a winning ship. This is just an early sign of the coming Trumpslide. Let’s all welcome (((Ben))) aboard the #TrumpTrain!

The pretty, monstrous face

It’s really rather remarkable how insistent the media is in trying to anoint Milo the face, the spokesman, and the apostle of the Alt-Right.

Members of the alt-right, unlike their old, frustrated European counterparts, are less focused on policy than on performance. Their MO usually involves pissing people off with hypermasculine taunts. They call establishment and even Tea Party Republicans “cuckservatives”—because they are cuckolded by the Left. They do most of their acting out online, often by organizing on 4chan or Reddit and then trolling targets on Twitter. The alt-right is a new enough phenomenon that in August, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan—running against an alt-right candidate in a primary—mistakenly called it “alt-conservatism” on a radio show. “It’s a nasty, virulent strain of something,” he said. “I don’t even know what it is, other than that it isn’t us. It isn’t what we believe in.”

As Donald J. Trump has become the candidate of the alt-right, Breitbart News has become the movement’s voice. The two merged semiofficially in August, when Breitbart’s chief executive officer, Steve Bannon, quit his job to run Trump’s campaign. And Yiannopoulos, whose byline on the site is simply “Milo,” is Breitbart’s most radioactive star.

“Milo is the person who propelled the alt-right movement into the mainstream,” says Heidi Beirich, who directs the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups and describes the term “alt-right” as “a conscious rebranding by white nationalists that doesn’t automatically repel the mainstream.” Beirich says she’s not even sure if Yiannopoulos believes in the alt-right’s tenets or just found a juvenile way to mix internet culture and extreme ideology to get attention.

Especially because he KEEPS TELLING THEM he is not.

Despite being the alt-right’s mouthpiece, Yiannopoulos won’t say for certain if he’s one of them…. He turns to Allum Bokhari, a 25-year-old half-Pakistani Oxford graduate, who used to work for a Liberal Democratic member of Parliament and now writes for Yiannopoulos at Breitbart, and asks, “Am I a member of the alt-right?”

“No,” says Bokhari, who wears a white dress shirt, gray blazer, and gray trousers to work at a desk next to a garment rack in Yiannopoulos’s living room. “Because they wouldn’t have you. You like Israel a lot more. Some on the alt-right would describe you as a degenerate.”

Of course, there is a reason they want to create a leader of the Alt-Right. As with #GamerGate, they need to identify a leader in order to destroy him. And it doesn’t help their cause that so many well-known members of the Alt-Right refuse to talk to them. I get numerous requests from reporters and I ignore all of them. I am not the only one. Cernovich has a similar policy. So does Stefan.

I’m also a member of #GamerGate, after all. I know the media’s routine and I won’t play along with it. I can’t speak for the Alt-White branch, I’m happy to leave that to TRS and Richard Spencer, among others, but as far as the Alt-West goes, there are no leaders, there will be no leaders, and neither me nor anyone else speaks officially for what is neither a group nor a movement, but a philosophical identity.

To ask “who is the leader of the Alt-West” is like asking “who is the leader of the left-handed people” or “who is the leader of those whose favorite color is blue”? There is no answer.

And as for the true face of the Alt-Right, we all know the correct answer is: “Pepe, and Kek is his Apotheosis.”

Can’t say I didn’t warn you

Do not – repeat – DO NOT – post pictures of your children on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or anywhere else on the Internet. They are not old enough to consent to it or understand the long-term consequences, and you are violating their privacy. It’s particularly egregious when you see parents posting pictures of their kids all over the place, but they refrain from posting pictures of themselves.

I expect there are going to be a lot of these cases in the future, and that the children are going to win because the parents quite clearly did not have their children’s interests at heart, but were merely indulging their own egos:

A 18-year-old woman from Carinthia is suing her parents for posting photos of her on Facebook without her consent. She claims that since 2009 they have made her life a misery by constantly posting photos of her, including embarrassing and intimate images from her childhood. Her lawyer Michael Rami says that to date, her parents have posted 500 images of her on the social media site without her consent, and he believes she has a good chance of winning in court.

You may now proceed with the expected snowflaking.

Everyone not us is the same

Nothing more clearly demonstrates the clueless myopia of the left-center mainstream than this piece from the American Interest:

The alt-right is more diffuse, and diverse in its tactics and objectives, than the PC left. It encompasses sophisticated neo-reactionary Silicon Valley engineers like Curtis Yarvin, 1990s-style white nationalists like Jared Taylor, and legions of race-baiting online trolls with Pepe the frog as their Twitter avatars. But they are united by their contempt for pluralistic liberal democracy, their view that Western Civilization is in a profound and perhaps irreversible state of decline due to the empowerment of women and minorities, and their open embrace of white identity politics, and even white separatism, as the only solution.

This is a precarious cultural moment. How can it be that it is impossible to really understand the 2016 U.S. presidential election without reference to anti-liberal ideologies developed in the dark corners of 4chan and the inner sanctums of once-marginal campus bureaucracies?

Many commentators have observed that the radicalisms of the right and left feed on one another, teaming up to suck the liberal center dry. On the one hand, excessive left-wing speech policing and cultural brinksmanship on issues of race and gender was bound to make Milo-style ideological transgression more appealing. On the other hand, the alt-right’s newfound cultural power seems to vindicate some of the assumptions of the PC left: that racism and misogyny are deeply embedded in America’s cultural fabric, just below the surface, ready to erupt unless controls on thought and language are continuously tightened.

But what if instead of thinking of the campus left and the alt-right as mortal enemies, each bringing out perpetually heavier firepower in a long-running war of attrition, we thought of them as allies in a battle for the fate of liberalism? Because despite what they might say about each other, the radicalisms of 2016 actually align with one another more than they align with the Anglo-American Enlightenment tradition that has always occupied the American political center.

The Alt-Right is no ally of the campus left and never will be. What’s really happening is that the campus left, long coddled by the left-liberal center, is starting to scare the mainstream thumbsuckers. And starting to scare them nearly as much as the Alt-Right does.

There is no space left for the Weimar Republicans and Social Democrats. Their age of playing touch football with each other are over. They’re going to need to learn how to put on pads if they’re going to play according to the new rules.

Pinterest is converged, anti-American

Pinterest deletes my Nationalism board devoted to being proud of being American & white. Calls it “hate speech”
– Wife with a Purpose

This is coming everywhere. This is why we need to develop alternatives now. If we don’t use the converged companies’ tools, they can’t use those tools to control what we are allowed to think, say, and write.

ABC reports “Hillary Clinton’s death”

Presumably they’re going to have a tough time explaining her reappearance yesterday. Second coming or body double? But the image below was briefly up on the ABC News website. Hoax, hacking, contingency preparation or Joe Biden’s wishful thinking? Who knows.

In any event, Democrats are already openly discussing her replacement, so I think it is reasonably safe to conclude that regardless of her personal state, her campaign for President is now pining for the fjords.

Troubling thought for the day: what if the reason she reappeared and was so mysteriously reinvigorated is that Satan didn’t want her in Hell either AND SENT HER BACK!