Tag: media

Why I no longer link to Steve Sailer

Or quote him, or quote the Saker, or link to any other writer on the Unz Review. I received this notice from Blogger yesterday:


We have received a DMCA complaint for your blog, Vox Popoli. An e-mail with the details of the complaint was sent to you on Sep 30, 2016, and we reset the post status to “Draft”; you can edit it here. You may republish the post with the offending content and/or link(s) removed. If you believe you have the rights to post this content, you can file a counter-claim with us. For more on our DMCA policy, please click here. Thank you for your prompt attention.

The complaint was related to a post entitled Cold War II, in which I extensively quoted The Saker and provided a link to The Saker’s article on the Unz Review from which I quoted. There are three problems here.

  1. It is obnoxious to file a DMCA complaint instead of directly contacting the writer with a request to take down or modify his post. My words get quoted, repeated, copied, and even plagiarized every day, and I have never filed a DMCA complaint about anyone. This is only the second DMCA complaint I have received; the first was from SFWA when they wanted to hide their embarrassing report about me from the public.
  2. I have an email from the Saker giving me permission to utilize all of his work; we’re even planning to release a collection of his excellent work on the Russian invasion of Syria in an ebook one day.
  3. The Saker told me that the rights to his work have been released to the public under one form of GPL or another; I’ll have to look it up to determine precisely which license it is.

So, until I a) hear from someone at the Unz Review, b) the DMCA complaint is either withdrawn at their own request or Blogger is informed that it is illegitimate and was filed by someone without the rights to do so, and c) I am assured that no DMCA complaints will be made against VP or AG in the future by anyone in their organization, I will neither cite nor link to anything on the Unz Review.

Caveat: if I go to the trouble of successfully counter-claiming and proving that I have the rights to quote the Saker as I see fit, I will continue to read and quote and link to him.

Lest anyone doubt that I am serious about this, I should mention that there was a strategy-related service that used to send me emails, unrequested, every day. One day, after I posted a quote from one of their emails and linked to their site as I had previously done from time to time, they sent me an email demanding that I stop posting quotes from their emails. So, I promptly unsubscribed, and after a few months went by and they realized they had lost an amount of regular traffic, they asked me to resubscribe and start linking to their posts again. I declined to do so, having found superior alternatives in the meantime, and spamfiled them. That was years ago. I haven’t visited their site or read a single email from them since. I don’t even know if they’re still around.

If any site doesn’t want a writer with monthly traffic of ~3 million pageviews providing them with links and traffic, that’s fine. I am too busy to waste time working with fools, the obnoxious, or the obtuse, and I have a surfeit of prospective sources from which to draw. I already feel that I don’t read half the material or address one-quarter the subjects I should. Regardless, as you can see, I have removed Steve Sailer from the list of Day Trips on the sidebar so as not to risk any future violations.

And just to be clear, I’m not blaming Ron Unz, Steve Sailer, or The Saker for this. I tend to doubt any of them even knew about it.

UPDATE: This appears to be an SJW attack on the Unz Review. He said the following in the comments:

Someone mentioned this situation to me. As might be guessed, this was the first I’d heard of it, and I assume it’s some sort of hoax intended as petty harassment by some random activist on the Internet. Anyway, I’m not too familiar with either these DMCA complaints or how Blogger works, but if you’ll drop me a note explaining whom I should email to explain that it’s fraudulent, I’ll be glad to do so.

Regards,
Ron Unz, Publisher

I have, of course, restored the link to Steve Sailer at the Unz Review and I will be contacting Blogger accordingly.

UPDATE: I have filed a counter-complaint with Blogger, citing Mr. Unz’s statement as proof that the complainant did not have the right to the content. That should suffice to resolve the issue.

The petty evil of William F. Buckley

Anonymous Conservative exposes the thought policeman of the conservative establishment to have been a malignant narcissist:

Jonah Goldberg recently said it was time to John Birch the Alt-right. Good luck with that, numbnuts, as an economic apocalypse approaches and the nation finds itself overrun with your Establishment-approved, religion-of-peace amigos. You’ll be lucky to one day escape the mob that is coming yourself. I look on this piece as my get out of jail free card, should I ever have the misfortune to be captured in Jonah’s vicinity.

So I am free to discuss things like this openly now. If the Cuckservative Establishment wants to attack the Alt-right, lets take a look at their saintly standard bearer through the lens of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Our source material will be the piece written by his son in the New York Times. At the time I read it, I was repulsed by what appears to be a case of pretty severe Malignant Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Here I will explain why, after quotes from the article.

First is the picture of him. Notice how despite his youth, you can still see the glassy, disconnected eyes. And the sneer of contempt, almost to the point of a growl with an upcurled lip, which is manifest on the left side of his face, and masked on the right side. That facial asymmetry always seems to hold when I see something aberrant. Faces are handed, and the left side almost never hides the demons within as well as the right.

Now the article.

Pup’s self-medicating was, I’d venture, a chemical extension of the control he asserted over every other aspect of his life. The term “control freak” is pejorative. Put it this way: Few great men — and I use the term precisely, for Pup was a great man — do not assert total control over their domains…


He was invariably the sunniest and most pleasant creature in the room. The moods of those in attendance upon him — Mum’s, mainly — did not always match his.


A TV remote control in the hands of an autocrat of the entertainment room becomes a “Star Trek” phaser set on stun. He and Mum might be watching “Murder on the Orient Express” with a half-dozen guests when, just as a key plot point was being introduced, suddenly the screen would fill with a documentary on Che Guevara or the Tuareg nomads of the Sahara…


There, the three of us would eat one of Julian the cook’s delicious meals on trays and watch a movie. I say “a movie,” but “movies” would be more accurate, since several minutes in, without bothering to say, “Let’s watch something else,” he’d simply change the channel. One day, when I was out of town and called to check in, Danny reported, with a somewhat-strained chuckle, “We watched parts of five movies last night…”


Once or twice during the convalescence, I became so splutteringly frustrated after the fourth or fifth channel change that I silently stormed out of the room.

I know what Buckley was doing because I have seen this mind in action. That storming out was what Buckley wanted. Think about it. He was watching those shows. Was he not drawn into them? Was his interest alone not piqued to see the climactic resolution unfold? Was his boredom climaxing at the exact moment everyone else’s interest was maximally invested?

The satisfaction he felt when everyone else was enraged at that critical moment was more pleasurable to him than seeing the plot twists revealed…. Buckley was not a great man. He was, like all narcissists, an insecure, mentally damaged coward, elevated to his position by an establishment that saw him as a useful idiot who would happily suppress the most fierce advocates for freedom, from John Birch to Ayn Rand.

I never, ever liked Buckley’s writing. There was always something that was distinctly off about it to me. There was never any depth or substance to it; there is more meat to a single chapter of Sam Huntington than there is in Buckley’s entire oeuvre. His columns never seemed to hit the target, and his novels were meandering and pointless. Yes, he was intelligent and influential, but always in the most shallow and superficial manner. It is not even remotely surprising to me that the establishment he constructed and policed has not long survived his death. In a different situation, he would have been a dictator, and probably have met with much the same fate as a Mussolini.

Read the whole thing. The incident with the boat at Christmas makes it very clear that there was definitely something seriously psychologically wrong with the man. He was basically the real-life version of Ricky Bobby’s father in Talladega Nights, if the father had punched out the waitress and burned down the Applebee’s instead of just mouthing off to her and being thrown out.

AC explains the driving motivation of the intelligent malignant narcissist:  This is the cerebral narcissist’s dream – tangible proof which they can handle in their brain, that everyone else is an idiot, and they are the smart one. It relieves the great insecurity which drives them unrelentingly to try and one-up everyone else.

This is why I don’t worry about to those who can admit that they have failed, admit that they are wrong, and don’t feel the need to inappropriately flaunt their intelligence at all times, but keep a very wary eye on those who are never wrong, always win, and claim even the most abject defeat to be a victory in disguise. They’re not all malignant narcissists, they may only be garden-variety Gamma secret kings, but in no circumstances can any of them be trusted in any way.

Notice how often Christopher Buckley tried to reason with his father, to absolutely no avail. That’s an unwinnable scenario with malignant narcissists, it is the Kobayashi Maru. Don’t argue with them, don’t try to correct them, don’t try to fix things for them, don’t enable them in any way, just keep your distance, keep them out of your life, and leave them to their delusional hellholes.

Best of Gab

Stickwick gets my vote today for this response to a Nature request:

“Are you a working scientist who plans to vote for Donald Trump? We want to talk to you.”

About what, fast-tracking the fiery death of your career? If Nature is surprised by a lack of response, they should read Scott Adams.

Scott Adams endorses Donald Trump

Scott Adams demonstrates his courage and his willingness to put his life on the line for America in endorsing Donald Trump for President:

As most of you know, I had been endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, for my personal safety, because I live in California. It isn’t safe to be a Trump supporter where I live. And it’s bad for business too. But recently I switched my endorsement to Trump, and I owe you an explanation. So here it goes.

1. Things I Don’t Know: There are many things I don’t know. For example, I don’t know the best way to defeat ISIS. Neither do you. I don’t know the best way to negotiate trade policies. Neither do you. I don’t know the best tax policy to lift all boats. Neither do you. My opinion on abortion is that men should follow the lead of women on that topic because doing so produces the most credible laws. So on most political topics, I don’t know enough to make a decision. Neither do you, but you probably think you do.

Given the uncertainty about each candidate – at least in my own mind – I have been saying I am not smart enough to know who would be the best president. That neutrality changed when Clinton proposed raising estate taxes. I understand that issue and I view it as robbery by government.

I’ll say more about that, plus some other issues I do understand, below.

2. Confiscation of Property: Clinton proposed a new top Estate Tax of 65% on people with net worth over $500 million. Her website goes to great length to obscure the actual policy details, including the fact that taxes would increase on lower value estates as well. See the total lack of transparency here, where the text simply refers to going back to 2009 rates. It is clear that the intent of the page is to mislead, not inform.

So don’t fall for the claim that Clinton has plenty of policy details on her website. She does, but it is organized to mislead, not to inform. That’s far worse than having no details.

The bottom line is that under Clinton’s plan, estate taxes would be higher for anyone with estates over $5 million(ish). I call this a confiscation tax because income taxes have already been paid on this money. In my case, a dollar I earn today will be taxed at about 50% by various government entities, collectively. With Clinton’s plan, my remaining 50 cents will be taxed again at 50% when I die. So the government would take 75% of my earnings from now on.

Yes, I can do clever things with trusts to avoid estate taxes. But that is just welfare for lawyers. If the impact of the estate tax is nothing but higher fees for my attorney, and hassle for me, that isn’t good news either.

You can argue whether an estate tax is fair or unfair, but fairness is an argument for idiots and children. Fairness isn’t an objective quality of the universe. I oppose the estate tax because I was born to modest means and worked 7-days a week for most of my life to be in my current position. (I’m working today, Sunday, as per usual.) And I don’t want to give 75% of my earnings to the government. (Would you?)

3. Party or Wake: It seems to me that Trump supporters are planning for the world’s biggest party on election night whereas Clinton supporters seem to be preparing for a funeral. I want to be invited to the event that doesn’t involve crying and moving to Canada. (This issue isn’t my biggest reason.)

4. Clinton’s Health: To my untrained eyes and ears, Hillary Clinton doesn’t look sufficiently healthy – mentally or otherwise – to be leading the country. If you disagree, take a look at the now-famous “Why aren’t I 50 points ahead” video clip. Likewise, Bill Clinton seems to be in bad shape too, and Hillary wouldn’t be much use to the country if she is taking care of a dying husband on the side.

5. Pacing and Leading: Trump always takes the extreme position on matters of safety and security for the country, even if those positions are unconstitutional, impractical, evil, or something that the military would refuse to do. Normal people see this as a dangerous situation. Trained persuaders like me see this as something called pacing and leading. Trump “paces” the public – meaning he matches them in their emotional state, and then some. He does that with his extreme responses on immigration, fighting ISIS, stop-and-frisk, etc. Once Trump has established himself as the biggest bad-ass on the topic, he is free to “lead,” which we see him do by softening his deportation stand, limiting his stop-and-frisk comment to Chicago, reversing his first answer on penalties for abortion, and so on. If you are not trained in persuasion, Trump look scary. If you understand pacing and leading, you might see him as the safest candidate who has ever gotten this close to the presidency. That’s how I see him.

So brave. Thank you for this, Scott. Scott Adams is a true American hero.

What you’re missing

If you’re not on Gab.

The fundamental uselessness of genocide is best exemplified by the fact that the Turks killed 1.5 million Armenians and somehow missed BOTH the Kardashians and the Sarkeesians.

Watch out, the DREAD ILK are arriving! Stickwick is here. I thought I could feel the average IQ jump. In other good news, #RunThemDown is trending here. #YouWontSeeThatOnTwitter

Just to be clear, I’m not banned from Twitter. I just don’t see any point in providing free content to a site that not only thought-polices that content, but blocks access to my primary content. And perhaps more importantly, the guys behind Gab are smart, friendly people who aren’t SJWs.

And then, there is this:

@Spacebunny
It’s 2016 and literally everything is offensive. So what is the most offensive costume you can come up with for this Halloween?

@voxday
Milo in blackface carrying a drowned migrant child.

We’re the George and Gracie of Gab, with just a twist of artistic cruelty.

Mailvox: the Alt-Right’s big tent

A reader produces a graphic meant to illustrate the full spectrum of the broader Alt-Right. Agree with it or not, I think it is a good first start on beginning to meme the other aspects of the Alt-Right.

Your observations on the intrinsic branches, or roots, of the Alt-Right greatly helped clarify my own understanding of how the “big tent” ideology and its connected sub-identities would best interact each other. I agree with you that a forward-looking, symbiotic mutualism between the distinct Alt-White and Alt-West branches is desirable at this time. The Alt-White Scotsmen busy administering purity tests, “that person is no true Alt-Right…” have obviously missed point #12: The Alt-Right doesn’t care what you think of it. Any branch on the Alt-Right tree that doesn’t shut up and produce desirable fruit will be best ignored until it withers away.

I also concur that the implicit tension between the two current branches of the Alt-Right is actually beneficial. There should be healthy, competitive tendency for each Alt-branch to seek out the most effective tactics for its immediate survival and subsequent growth. Attempts to impose one group’s identity & tactics onto the other, or merge the two would be as effective as giving a marathon runner two right shoes and then tying his legs together.

In reading through the vigorous chiseling of the comments in the “ALTRIGHT: 16 POINTS”, I attempted to make an initial visual depiction of what I could grasp. At that time, I was primarily focused on symbolically distilling out some of the identity politics/tactics of the Alt-Right:

– Opposes the Left
– Opposes the ideas of Equality, Diversity, Tolerance, Progress, Control
– Fights on the identity/culture level
– Accepts any that are willing to fight who subscribe to some/all of its tenets
– Maintains the higher ground (what makes life better?)
– Recognizes the uphill fight requires more energy

It does have flaws, which I can recognize: seems to imply/advocate defensive or reactive tactics, much too wordy, doesn’t delineate between the Alt-branches, etc. Praise kek that it did, indeed, lead to a second, more successful attempt which is in more alignment with the clear, tactical understanding of the Alt-Right:

I. Alt-Right is forward-looking and not defensive.
II. Alt-White and Alt-West are independent and distinct branches.
III. Their success, either individually or together, results in success of the Alt-Right.
IV. Other Alt-branches can be added, as long as they share enough of the same philosophy and direction.
V. Alt-Lite can be considered allies, as long as they are not interfering with the two primary branches.
VI. Fighting between branches or internally within a branch is not constructive.
VII. Each branch can be arranged however they see fit (or add their own sub-branches, e.g. Alt-White:US and Alt-West:German).
VIII. Stronger individual branches and a broad collection of branches is ultimately beneficial to the Alt-Right
IX. No branch is more important than the others nor leads the other branches
X. The head of the Alt-Right is Pepe

This iconography does raise the question of “what other viable Alt-branches are there?” for the Alt-Right. I would not be surprised to see Alt-Masculinity be a potential ally given the success and philosophical direction of Roosh.

I would propose rather than “Alt-Lite groups”, the top six phalanxes represent intellectual strains, from Stormfront to NPI and the Dread Ilk. Or perhaps it would be more effective if six “leaders” were named, beginning with Richard Spencer, and for the lulz, Donald Trump. I leave it to the commenters to hash out which six individuals merit being named, but Jared Taylor and RamZPaul are two obvious candidates. Milo, not so much.

I also think, that for the purposes of Twitter meming, it would be best to have Alt-White on top, Alt-West in the middle, and Alt-Lite on the bottom, leaving out the word “Branch”, which is implied by the three separate groups. No meme should ever have a “fill-in-the blank” aspect to it.

A requested correction

Robert Evans of Cracked gets it all wrong.

One prominent figure in the alt-right is Vox Day. Day doesn’t directly threaten people, but he does regularly advocate for his readers to harass folks for him. Here’s how he advised his readers to treat women like Jessica Valenti, a writer for The Guardian whom he happens to dislike:


Open up your hate and let it pour over them. Don’t think for even one nanosecond that they don’t deserve it every bit of the criticism, of the contempt, of the disdainful dismissal that overwhelms them. They are trying to destroy Western civilization. They are trying to destroy marriage and civil society. They are advocates of child murder. They are advocates of a philosophy that makes National Socialism look merciful and Communism practical and Fascism coherent by comparison. Do not hold back. Speak back twice as hard. Speak back until they fall silent.

First, he left out the previous paragraph, which said:

What they call “harassment” and “abuse” is seldom anything more than free speech answering free speech. They have a right to speak their piece, and we have a right to speak right back. We have a right to speak back with all of the contempt, disdain, and loathing that we feel for their insane and societally suicidal ideas.

Second, and more disturbingly, he unwittingly denigrated the special relationship I have with my most loyal readers. I’m sure you will understand why I emailed him and requested a correction, as follows.

Dear Mr. Evans,


I would like to request a correction to your article of September 20, entitled “5 Things You Learn Being Attacked By The Alt-Right”. I do not direct my readers to harass anyone. While my Vile Faceless Minions have been known to flay my enemies, devour their bodies, and present me with their skulls to use as wine goblets, I can assure you they do so without direction and solely out of love for their Dark Lord.


With regards,


Vox Day
Supreme Dark Lord
Evil Legion of Evil

Should any of the VFM, or the Dread Ilk wish to correct Mr. Evans with regards to this unfortunate misunderstanding of our relationship, I am reliably informed he can be reached at revanswriter@gmail.com.

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.