Tag: media

A basket of deplorables

“You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables. Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.”
– Hillary Clinton, September 9, 2016

In fairness, we’re really on pace for 3 million this month. But if she keeps this up, we might be to 11 million by the time Trump is inaugurated as God-Emperor of America in January.

Milo discusses the “Alt-Right”

There are a few who are viewing this appearance as Milo’s attempt to redefine the Alt-Right. They are completely missing the point. This is a masterclass on how to work the mainstream media. Never forget that dealing with the media is an intrinsically rhetorical exercise, NOT a dialectic one. One does not define anything, much less a broad-spectrum political perspective, in a few minutes on live television.

There is a time and place for precision and dialectic. Appearing in front of a three-man discredit-and-disqualify panel on CNBC is not one of them.

These guys are killing it

I have to admit, I would ABSOLUTELY vote for Rodrigo Duterte. I mean, while I personally prefer legalization, if you’re going to fight a war on drugs, simply shooting the drug users and drug dealers does strike me as considerably more effective than forcing your entire population to move to credit cards and arresting their property any time they have more cash on hand than you dictate.

Between Duterte, Putin, and Trump, we would appear to be entering the age of the Alpha President.

Did the National Press Club ban the Alt-Right?

Mike Cernovich is on it the story of the National Press Club allegedly cancelling a National Policy Institute event scheduled to be held at its site:

For the first time in its history, the National Press Club has prohibited a peaceful organization from holding an event in the ironically titled Free Speech Lounge.

NPC, which has defended revenge porn sites like Gawker, agreed to allow Richard B. Spencer of the National Policy Institute to hold an event called, “What is the Alt-Right?”

On August 24, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton dedicated a major campaign speech to the “emerging” ideology known as the Alt Right.

So what is the Alt Right? Who makes up the Alt Right, and what are its central ideas?

On Friday, September 9, The National Policy Institute will host a conference—free and open to the public and press—in which Alt-Right leaders discuss their movement.

When I called NPC’s reservation office to ask if NPI’s alt-right event had been cancelled, the polite Michelle said that it sounds like an Internet rumor, as it’s not the policy of NPC to censor speakers.

Given that Richard Spencer has a signed contract, it’s looking pretty troubling for the outfit that has been complaining publicly about Donald Trump’s media blacklist.

If true, this is exactly why the Alt-Right exists in the first place. We are done with listening to the heartfelt appeals to equality and fairness, which are been abandoned as soon as those who make such appeals feel they are in a position of power.

We’re now living in a post-ideological age of identity politics. Be aware of that, as even the so-called, self-appointed champions of free speech don’t hesitate to shut down speech they don’t like.

Social Justice magazine

This looks more entertaining than 99 percent of the magazines in the average magazine rack. Seriously, the only thing that befuddles me more than the decision to fund some of the magazines out there is the movies that are made these days.

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.