Tag: media

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.

The r/K perspective

Anonymous Conservative is dubious that the anti-Alt-Right campaign will have legs:

Now Hillary is calling attention to the most K-selected corner of the internet, at the very moment that the nation is increasingly turning K. Turning more people into Stefan Molyneux fans, or exposing more people to Castalia House Publishing, just as the nation is turning K, is not going to help Hillary. I think it a good sign that her persuasion specialists are so blinded by the rabbit-like psychology of the r-strategy that they are so completely out of touch with both the nation and reality.

Even better, it is a process that is accelerating. What they don’t realize is that as the nation’s rejection of them drives them more leftward, the psychologies of the nation are undergoing the natural shift toward K that was programmed in by nature. That is making the left vastly more repellant to everyone, the alt-right much more attractive, and leaves the left ever less able to understand the reality they need to understand to succeed. The political polarization created as the extreme left splits farther from the norm due to panic and the rest of the nation heads farther right on a K-shift, do not bode well for leftism’s ascent.

My guess is they will abandon this effort quickly, as soon as they realize that the nation has a large swath within it that will think this alt-right movement espouses a lot of commonsense things they find attractive, and the colorful personalities are very appealing. The alt-right hasn’t gotten this far for nothing.

Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Team Clinton was already rethinking the wisdom of this approach given the Alt-Right’s gleeful reaction to the news that they’d be coming under media assault. After all, we all know how the anti-GamerGate campaign worked out for Gawker.

How PACs murdered the Tea Party

Keep the demise of the Tea Party in mind as the Alt-Right grows in popularity. Many, if not most, of these PACs are little more than scams with a political brand.

The Tea Party movement is pretty much dead now, but it didn’t die a natural death. It was murdered—and it was an inside job. In a half decade, the spontaneous uprising that shook official Washington degenerated into a form of pyramid scheme that transferred tens of millions of dollars from rural, poorer Southerners and Midwesterners to bicoastal political operatives.

What began as an organic, policy-driven grass-roots movement was drained of its vitality and resources by national political action committees that dunned the movement’s true believers endlessly for money to support its candidates and causes. The PACs used that money first to enrich themselves and their vendors and then deployed most of the rest to search for more “prospects.” In Tea Party world, that meant mostly older, technologically unsavvy people willing to divulge personal information through “petitions”—which only made them prey to further attempts to lighten their wallets for what they believed was a good cause. While the solicitations continue, the audience has greatly diminished because of a lack of policy results and changing political winds.

I was an employee at one of the firms that ran these operations. But nothing that follows is proprietary or gleaned directly from my employment. The evidence of the scheming is all there in the public record, available for anyone willing to look…. According to Federal Election Commission reports between 80 to 90 percent, and sometimes all the money these PACs get is swallowed in fees and poured into more prospecting. For example, conservative activist Larry Ward created Constitutional Rights PAC. He also runs Political Media, a communications firm. The New York Times reviewed Constitutional Rights’ filings and found: “Mr. Ward’s PAC spends every dollar it gets on consultants, mailings and fund-raising—making no donations to candidates.” Ward justified the arrangement by saying Political Media discounts solicitations on behalf of Constitutional Rights.

Let that sink in. Ward takes his PAC’s money and redistributes it to his company and other vendors for more messaging and solicitations, but suggests critics should rest easy since the PAC gets a discount on Political Media’s normal rate. Constitutional Rights PAC may be extreme but it’s hardly an outlier.

POLITICO last year reviewed the activity of 33 conservative PACs for the 2014 cycle. Combined, they raked in $43 million dollars, according to the POLITICO report. Of that, $39.5 million went to overhead including $6 million to entities owned by PAC operators; candidates got $3 million. Another report analyzed 17 conservative PACs from the 2014 midterm. It came up with different numbers than POLITICO, finding that the bottom 10 PACs in terms of the ratio of spending to actual candidate support received $54,318,498 and spent only $3,621,896 supporting candidates.

Don’t even think about supporting any big-money Alt-Right PACs that come into being in the next 2-5 years. If the real Alt-Right figures want your support, we’ll not only request it directly, but we’ll do so for specific purposes and projects whose progress you can track for yourself. We don’t play the “overhead” game.

The media is not above the law

I’ve been hard on Jonah Goldberg of late, and correctly so, which is why it is important to give the author of Liberal Fascism his due when he gets it right, as he does here with regards to the death of Gawker.

The real issue seems to be that journalistic corporations are just different than every other kind of corporation. No one would bat an eye if, say, George Soros, bankrolled an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit by the ACLU against a “normal” corporation like Microsoft or Bank of America. But when a media outlet is in the dock, the rules are different.

Gilles Wullus of the group Reporters Without Borders told the BBC that the Gawker case poses a dire threat to press freedom. “Journalism ethics should be taken care of by journalists themselves,” he said. “In case they do not, we think that nobody else can do it in their place, neither states nor governments; especially not wealthy individuals.”

A free press is an important institution in a democracy, but journalists don’t have any rights the rest of us don’t. What nonsense.

Yes, a free press is an important institution in a democracy (and even more important in non-democracies), but journalists don’t have any rights the rest of us don’t. A reporter has the right to free speech, and so does a plumber. Indeed, in the era of smartphones, it has never been more true: We all have the right and ability to commit journalism. That right manifests itself in people, not corporations. The New York Times, to the extent that it is a “corporate person,” should have no more (and no fewer) rights than Exxon Mobil.

Imagine the outrage if I said, “Petroleum-industry ethics should be taken care of by petroleum industry executives themselves.” It’s certainly fair to argue against the merits of the verdict. But no one is above the law. Not even journalists, never mind corporations in the journalism business.

There is no “Fourth Estate”. There is nothing special about the media and they have no rights that anyone else doesn’t have. And when they break the law, be it criminal or civil, they are liable for the consequences.

On the other hand, Jonah’s NRO colleague, Mario Loyola, fails to understand that the conservative media is, in part, culpable for the declining regard in which America’s institutions are held in a piece that is unmitigated cuckservative blather.

Democracy depends vitally on reverence for “the majesty of the democratic system.” That means reverence for its basic institutions, if not for the men and women who run them as individuals. It’s one thing to criticize politicians as crooked and mendacious, but quite another to say that our democratic institutions are themselves corrupt. If that is true in any major respect, it is vital to solve the problem fast. Democracy begins to die when democratic institutions lose the people’s trust.

Alas, such talk finds a willing audience today, across the political spectrum. During Obama’s entire presidency, trust in government has bounced along rock bottom at less than 20 percent — unprecedented in the history of polling.

While in power, Democrats have done enormous damage. During Obama’s first two years, when they controlled Congress, and since then in the form of unilateral executive actions, the Democrats have verbally assailed the legitimacy of vital democratic institutions, including the Constitution, the police, corporations, and, of course, elections….

President Bush’s last words were “I believe I have upheld the honor of the presidency.” We could do worse than to ask God to bless the next president with a similar sense of humility and dignity, and a similar awe for the majesty of the democratic system, but it will be for naught if the American people aren’t thankful for it.

Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
One reason the people don’t trust the institutions anymore is because commentators like you are constantly lying to them.

Mario Loyola @Mario_A_Loyola
Tell me Dark Lord, do you sit around at home all day defeating the enemy with these flaccid little one-liners? Wow

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
You can lie to people all you want, but no one is buying it anymore. The nation is dying and you’re still virtue-signaling.

Inevitable

I don’t think I have ever been so unsurprised by an email in my life. To put it in context, I have to first explain that a producer from an NPR-affiliated radio station contacted me about the Hugo Awards.

As I’m sure you’re aware WorldCon is about to start…. As we’ve been researching and thinking about this event we discovered that in addition to the celebration, learning and networking there’s also a bit of identity politics controversy surrounding the Hugo award. As the conference unfolds we want to host a conversation with members of the Sci-Fi community and how they view the events. Our hope is to get a sense of what’s at stake and why it’s important. We really value having a diversity of perspectives on this issue.


I’d like to talk with you, by phone, today or tomorrow for about
15 minutes. This way we can make sure we’re a good fit and develop some
potential talking points for what we could discuss
during the show.

I had a few minutes to kill, so despite knowing how it was going to turn out, I called him back and we had a short, friendly conversation. He was genuinely curious about what was, to him, quite clearly an alien perspective. And I had to laugh when I got this the next day.


Thank you for sharing your time with us yesterday. I wanted to follow up and let you know that we found some folks who will make a better fit for this conversation and consequently we won’t be needing you as a confirmed guest tomorrow.


You don’t say. Anyhow, radio and television producers, this is why I keep telling you that I’m not interested in appearing on your show. See, I know the drill. I’ve turned down three other interview requests in the last day alone; keep this in mind if you’re wondering why various pieces on the Alt-Right often appear to ignore certain individuals you think merit mention. Sure, sometimes it’s because they’re playing the old “we don’t want to give them a platform” game. But more often, of late, it’s because we don’t see any point in talking to them and playing the token villain’s role.

That doesn’t mean I won’t talk to you all, though. Everyone is invited to the No Award 2016 Party, which will kick off 15 minutes before the Hugo Awards start at 8 PM Central tomorrow night. Special guests to be announced later as they let me know if they’ll be able to attend.

Speaking of the Hugo Awards, as the VFM are everywhere around the globe pursuing the shadowy will of their SDL, we have been culturally enriched by several reports from the Worldcon, including this one.


Here is a picture of Rape Rape in the wild. I was stunned by two or three things:

  1. Con attendees are mostly old farts.
  2. They look even more unhealthy than the average crowd in a WalMart on EBT night.
  3. GRRM is a close approximation of the average male attendee.
Watch out, ladies! One never knows what diabolically Byzantine form of nonconsensual relations is being worked out on paper.

Twitter eats itself

It’s fascinating to watch Twitter wage war on its raison d’etre:

Twitter is taking another step forward in ensuring that its service is a safe place to be. The company today announced that it’s giving everyone access to its quality filter, which automatically screens out tweets from suspicious accounts and hopefully will minimize or eliminate abuse from taking place on the platform.

Users will also now have the ability to limit which notifications they receive across both mobile and the web.

During the company’s second quarter earnings call, Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey responded to complaints around harassment, bullying, and abuse that seemed to be running rampant on the service. He acknowledged that Twitter hadn’t done enough, but promised that it was working on not only improving enforcement of its policies, but also developing new technological solutions to combat the hate.

The launch of this feature to everyone comes on the heels of a critical report by BuzzFeed alleging a lack of concern Twitter has displayed toward harassment. The company has since responded to the article claiming that it’s not factual and “We are going to continue our work on making Twitter a safer place.”

As for notifications, you can now select to receive notifications from just those you follow.

The thing is, if you just mind your business and simply mute or block anyone you don’t want to see, there isn’t a problem. I give people two chances to demonstrate they’ve got something substantive to say, and once I determine that they’re too stupid or too argumentative to bother, I mute them and move on.

So, given that it’s already quite easy to avoid any significant or persistent unpleasantries, what Twitter is trying to do is effectively impossible. They’re trying to make it a place that will feel sufficiently safe to users who are going out of their way to interact with people they don’t know while avoiding any criticism from them.

People have been asking about Big Fork. It’s going well. Figure an announcement within 5 weeks.