Tag: media

Then they fight you

(((Joel Stein))) attacks the Alt-Right in Time:

Trolling is, overtly, a political fight. Liberals do indeed troll–sex-advice columnist Dan Savage used his followers to make Googling former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum’s last name a blunt lesson in the hygienic challenges of anal sex; the hunter who killed Cecil the lion got it really bad.

But trolling has become the main tool of the alt-right, an Internet-grown reactionary movement that works for men’s rights and against immigration and may have used the computer from Weird Science to fabricate Donald Trump. Not only does Trump share their attitudes, but he’s got mad trolling skills: he doxxed Republican primary opponent Senator Lindsey Graham by giving out his cell-phone number on TV and indirectly got his Twitter followers to attack GOP political strategist Cheri Jacobus so severely that her lawyers sent him a cease-and-desist order.

The alt-right’s favorite insult is to call men who don’t hate feminism “cucks,” as in “cuckold.” Republicans who don’t like Trump are “cuckservatives.” Men who don’t see how feminists are secretly controlling them haven’t “taken the red pill,” a reference to the truth-revealing drug in The Matrix. They derisively call their adversaries “social-justice warriors” and believe that liberal interest groups purposely exploit their weakness to gain pity, which allows them to control the levers of power. Trolling is the alt-right’s version of political activism, and its ranks view any attempt to take it away as a denial of democracy.

It’s always educational to see how the media inevitably attempts to push its Narrative by redefining terms. They’re actually attempting to ban self-expression in the name of self-expression, in much the same way the EU tries to bar democracy in the name of democracy.


The alt-right argues that if you can’t handle opprobrium, you should just turn off your computer. But that’s arguing against self-expression, something antithetical to the original values of the Internet. 

No, that’s not arguing against self-expression, that IS self-expression. Moreover, it is using the media’s own argument against it: “if you don’t like it, turn off the TV”. It’s amazing to see them resorting to the Moral Majority’s position they used to oppose. They’re going to pine for the good old days when they were dealing with the terrible, no-good Religious Right they hated so much, as the Alt-Right is considerably less tolerant and merciful.

And, of course, the conservative media loves this stuff; they hate the Alt-Right worse than they ever hated communism, leftists, or Democrats.

Dana Perino ‏@DanaPerino
How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet – article in TIME – we are doing this subject on @TheFiveFNC. Mostly AGREE!

First the New York Times, then Time magazine, and now Fox News are attacking the Alt Right. Looks like we got ourselves a new media offensive on our hands. This is a good sign. They used to ignore us. Then they mocked us. Now, they’re fighting us. You know what comes next. We win.

Milo corners Twitter

Either Twitter is desperate or they have some seriously incompetent lawyers handling @nero’s data request.:

Twitter attempted to dodge Milo Yiannopoulos’ data request by falsely claiming that he lives in the United States of America and is therefore ineligible to receive the information.

“Twitter International Company provides the Twitter Services to individuals who live outside the United States of America. We understand that you live in the United States,” said Twitter in their reply today, despite the fact that Yiannopoulos has permanent residence in the United Kingdom and remains a citizen there.

“As a result, we are not a data controller in respect of your personal data. Consequently, we will return your postal order, in the sum of €6.35, to you.”

Yiannopoulos replied shortly after, stating:


TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN


I do not live in the United States. I am a permanent UK resident at the address listed on my letter, and a citizen of the United Kingdom.


You are clearly prevaricating by waiting until now to make this statement as opposed to making simple inquiries as to my country of residence.


Twitter has the choice of waiving the EUR 6.35 or paying the shipping and handling costs of sending a new money order, which will be EUR 7.


As a matter of interest, given that you have my UK address, where did you send the money order back to? To dispatch it to a UK address seems quite at odds with your proposition that I am a resident of the United States.


You have 21 days from the date of the original Subject Access Request to reply in full. This situation has not changed. I look forward to receiving the information requested within the time frame permitted by law.


Yours


Milo Yiannopoulos”

Seriously, who advised them to try to play that sort of ridiculous game? I’ve noticed that American companies often fail to take foreign courts very seriously, as if they assume they are merely some sort of state-level court that can be beaten at the federal level. No wonder so many of them end up paying massive fines.

I know for a fact that Milo’s been in London recently anyhow. It’s just a bizarre, time-wasting response by Twitter.

Discredit. Disqualify. Deplatform.

It’s interesting to see how cuckservatives and conservatives are rapidly adopting SJW tactics too. Unfortunately, like the good moderates they are, they’ve adopted them in order to utilize them against those whose side they claim to be. This little rant from Patrick Frey, who is attempting to convince Tom Woods to stop interacting with me, is a good example:

Patrick Frey [Original post 8/15/2016]
I know little about Vox Day, other than that he told my friend Ken White, a great man and free speech warrior who has also written courageously about his struggles with mental illness, to “get off the Internet for [his] own good” because “no place for the depressed, the bipolar, or the schizophrenic.” I know VD loves to beat his chest about how “ruthless” he is (“We won’t hesitate to strike at your vulnerabilities” is an actual quote — ooh! he’s going to unleash the dreaded Internet Attack on his enemies!) And now, VD is explaining how American nationalism is really White nationalism:

I guess I’ll listen to Tom’s conversations with him, in which (so far) he manages to come across less like the rank jackass he has always been in his interactions with Ken White. But I’d really rather see Tom, whom I admire greatly, spending less time interacting with a guy who has acted like such a cretin online.

To be clear: I’m obviously not trying to tell Tom how to run his show. If he wants to give a platform to the likes of VD or Milo, that’s obviously his choice. I hope I can express my extreme dislike of these people forthrightly without it seeming like an attack on Tom — who, again, has added much of value to my life.

Seriously, though — just read through this blog post by Vox Day attacking my friend Ken White, and see if you can refrain from laughing at the way VD sells himself as Big Bad Tough Guy Vox Day. It really is tough to take this guy seriously.

Let me see if I have this straight. It is really tough to take me seriously, therefore it is imperative for Tom Woods to stop taking me talking to me lest he acquire unserious cooties or something. The threat of striking at one’s vulnerabilities is something to laugh at, but simply observing that a mentally unstable individual is, in fact, mentally unstable and is behaving in a manner indicative of mental instability, is an outrage to be decried.

Does he really think that Tom Woods, of all people, is liable to fall for this sort of nonsense?

Look, it’s not my fault that Ken White is mentally unstable. Nor is it my fault that, as a consequence of his being crazy, Ken White has repeatedly chosen to take unprovoked shots at me. It’s not as if I’m outing the poor guy as a whack job; if White hadn’t a) written about being institutionalized, and, b) taken unprovoked shots at Roosh, I wouldn’t know anything about it.

It’s not as if I read him or pay any attention to White. He may be back in the funny farm already for all I know.

What I do know is that I have absolutely no time for suggestions concerning with whom I should, or should not, associate myself. I’ve noticed that the bigger one’s platform becomes, the more people will try to hijack it and offer unsolicited guidance. I’ve had people try to talk me into disavowing Roosh, Louise Mensch, and more recently, Ricky Vaughan. But no matter who they are, my answer is always the same: no.

I pay no heed to thought police, speech police, tone police, or relationship police. Anyhow, I suspect Tom will be less than concerned about Patrick’s demands:

Tom Woods ‏@ThomasEWoods
Social Justice Warriors: who they are, and how to deal with them — my conversation with @VoxDay

Ty & Aliyah ‏@StopDividingUs7
And of course, typical supremacist making you pay to listen / view.

Tom Woods ‏@ThomasEWoods
Typical genius unable to press PLAY on a free podcast.

Ty & Aliyah ‏@StopDividingUs7
No, it requires viewers to download a bunch of your crap first. That is a heavy price to pay.

Tom Woods ‏@ThomasEWoods
No, it doesn’t. You are seriously inept. You just press the play button.

I’ll admit it. I laughed.

UPDATE: Patrick Frey is doing his best to create a wedge:

VD also says Tom Woods is “considerably less serious as an economist than I had imagined him to be” … again, watching a sort of middling intellect deem himself to be smarter than Woods and Sowell is amusing. 

“Didja hear what Janey said about you, Tina? Didja hear?”

I don’t know how to break it to Mr. Frey, but based on my interactions with Mr. Sowell, I’m at least a standard deviation more intelligent than him. Tom Woods is quite sharp, and I have a lot of respect for him, but nevertheless, he’s not up to speed on free trade yet. There is no shame or insult in that; Ian Fletcher certainly got there before I did.

I have no doubt that Tom Woods will eventually as well.

Reality TV and the fall of civilization

James Delingpole observes that troglodyte culture matters even to the highbrow, because politics is downstream of culture, in The Spectator:

‘But why do you even care about this crap?’ people sometimes ask me. They’re the same sort of people who, were they living in Rome circa 476, would be congratulating themselves on how bloody marvellous aqueducts and hypocausts and testudo formations are. Yes indeed. But that was then and unfortunately we’re living in now. The barbarians are through the gates, imposing their weird, alien values, but the forces of civilisation are holding their noses and looking the other way because they find modern culture so vulgar, ugly and incomprehensible.

What I think should trouble us most about the Biggins eviction is the perverse moral inversion it represents. Instead of inhabiting a universe where sticks and stones may break our bones but words can never hurt us, we’ve been ushered into one where the language you use carries more weight than the way you behave. As a writer and English literature graduate I ought to be delighted by this — except that the new rule seems to have been invented by incredibly thick people with no sense of tone, nuance or context.

At the time of the Leveson inquiry, there were lots of wise, nicely turned, historically literate articles in civilised journals about the importance of free speech and how defending it must of necessity include protecting the right to offend. The problem is that the only people who read them were clever, sensible, well-balanced types like us. Unfortunately, we’re not the ones who make the rules.

Why do you think the Big Brother bosses axed Biggins? They’re rather less concerned about what Mick Hume, Claire Fox, Douglas Murray or Nick Cohen might write in an erudite essay on the significance of Areopagitica and the importance of ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ than they are about what a noisy minority of pigshit-thick but Taleban-zealous social justice warriors might say on social media.

This is why it matters when the Hugo Awards anoint mediocre SJW detritus as the best that the field has to offer. This is why it matters that we tear down the gatekeepers, we tear down the SJW-infested institutions, and we replace them with new ones. This is why it matters when even people we despise are attacked by those who seek to control them and us, and why it is important for us to defend them regardless of how we might feel about them.

Delingpole understands this, but then, he is demonstrably well-read on the subject.

How do we resist this loathsome trend? Well, the first step is to acknowledge that it’s happening; and the second is to create a stink. I’d highly recommend reading Vox Day’s SJWs Always Lie, which outlines how these activists operate (‘point and shriek’, ‘isolate and swarm’) and then describes how to defeat them. Absolutely key is refusing to let these malign professional grievance-mongers set the terms of the debate.

And we’re not. Read the whole thing. Have you noticed that the Alt-Right is beginning to drive the public discourse on a few small issues here and there? That’s just the start. The mainstream media is on its heels, forced to respond to the issues that are being raised by a new generation of social media that is filling the role that AM talk radio once did. The difference is that while the talk radio guys were still subject to gatekeepers in the form of station owners and the FCC, we are only limited by the potential biases of Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Also, an AM signal doesn’t carry very far, but the Internet reaches to the ends of the Earth.

Damage control desperation

Even the UK media is going to almost unprecedented lengths to convince you not to believe the evidence of your lying eyes:

A person who was filmed in a video that has been seized upon by right-wing groups to suggest Hillary Clinton ‘had a seizure’ on camera has hit back at the outlandish claims. Lisa Lerer, a reporter covering Clinton’s campaign for the Associated Press, was on hand for the latest moment conspiracy theorists have latched onto in an attempt to discredit the Democratic nominee.

In the video, which was shot on June 10 at a muffin shop in Washington DC, Lerer was one of the reporters who ‘shouted’ questions at Clinton about a meeting she had recently had with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. In Lerer’s words, Clinton: ‘perhaps eager to avoid answering or maybe just taken aback by our volume [she] responded with an exaggerated motion, shaking her head vigorously for a few seconds.’

Right. Look at Lerer’s face. That is the face of someone reacting to seeing something go very wrong. Moreover, the suggested excuse doesn’t explain why Hillary imitated the involuntary motion, then made an otherwise inexplicable comment about the chai. There are three obvious indicators besides the involuntary movement itself:

  1. The horrified reaction of Lerer.
  2. The immediate conscious imitation of the movement
  3. The comment about the chai, intended to excuse the involuntary movement.

Watch the video. There is no way that is a response with an exaggerated motion. But the media’s attempt to cover up Hillary’s observable health issues is even more feeble than this.

Hannity also referenced an old picture that was wrongly circulated by right-wing websites recently that showed the Democratic nominee slipping while walking up a flight of stairs. A host of anti-Clinton blogs and websites falsely presented the image as proof the 68-year-old candidate is in poor health.

However, the picture that they claimed to be new, was taken at the top of a staircase in South Carolina on February 24.

Right-wing blog American Mirror started its conspiracy-theorizing post by stating Clinton’s health should be ‘a major issue of the 2016 campaign’.

It then went on to wrongly say the photograph in question is, ‘the latest evidence’, to support its conspiracy – despite the picture being almost seven months old. The blog post was then shared by the Drudge Report, a more well-known right-wing website, along with the headline: ‘Hillary conquers the stairs’.

What does “wrongly circulated” even mean? It doesn’t matter whether the picture was taken in February or taken today, the woman is 68 years old, observably has something wrong with her, is known to have suffered a serious head injury, and can’t even walk up the stairs without help.

The more the media attempts to play Narrative Police with regards to Hillary Clinton’s health, the more it is obvious that they know there is something serious to hide. Ask yourself this question: why is the global media attempting to run interference for Hillary’s health issues when a simple release of her medical records could easily and conclusively address them?

Ben Shapiro is glad you hate him

Or at least he would like you to think so. After all, he must maintain his pose as a brave conservative culture warrior, or people might figure out that he’s a fraud.

Supreme Dark Lord@voxday
My readers really hate @benshapiro.

“Chickenhawk does not even BEGIN to describe this supercilious neo-con asshole.”


Ben Shapiro ‏@benshapiro
Good.

Supreme Dark Lord@voxday
You’ve always been a fraud, Ben. I still have your emails to me when you were full of self-doubt about being a little parrot.

Supreme Dark Lord@voxday
I told you to strike out and become your own man. Instead, you chickenhawked and went media whore. It was a foolish call.

Supreme Dark Lord@voxday
Your problem is that you’re a puppet and you know it. Here’s the thing. So do we.

What many of you probably don’t know is that Ben and I used to be colleagues of a sort at WND. My columns were much more popular, as I was reliably the number three most-read, behind Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan. Ben’s readership was never more than about one-tenth of mine, but he was a smart little kid and did a good job of parroting the usual Republican boilerplate.

We corresponded a few times and were on friendly, if distant, terms. I mean, what do you talk about with a little kid whose idea of a good time is launching obvious rhetorical attacks at liberals? As he matured, he gradually began to question the ideas he was parroting, and reached the point where he considered quitting the media game.

I’ll have to dig out the emails to figure out exactly what I told him, but if I recall correctly, I encouraged him to resist the temptation to become a media whore. I understood the allure, as it was a poisoned apple that was also offered to me, but perhaps it was easier for me to turn it down since I was living in Europe and already established in the game development world.

Ben, unfortunately, couldn’t resist the apple, or the easy way forward, writing whatever his backers told him to write. I haven’t read him much since he wrote those dreadful, chickenshit columns in 2005, so I don’t know how much of what he writes he genuinely believes now and how much he is still parroting. Of course, the human mind being the incredible rationalizing machine that it is, it’s entirely possible that he has come to believe what he’s been told to say.

What I found most amusing is the way that the Littlest Chickenhawk’s supporters alternate between crowing about what a formidable debater he is, and trying to excuse the way he ran away from a proposed debate on free trade with me.

Gone Fishing
LOL! All these Ben haters. You guys wouldn’t stand a chance in hell vs him in a debate on social issues. #CryMeAriver

Gone Fishing ‏@jgfleet661
Shapiro kicks the ass of real decision makers in this country in debates. He does with facts not feelings.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
I will debate Ben on any topic. He’s already run away from me on a proposed free trade debate.

Gone Fishing ‏@jgfleet661
 ????! Yeah, he totally ran away from you. I mean, you’re the SUPREME DARK LORD! There’s no way he could beat you, right?

 Valerie ‏@vpak77
yes, you two are definitely not in the same league. That is true.

ryedog™
Totally, it’d be a complete waste of Ben’s time.

Gone Fishing ‏@jgfleet661
He has to run. He’s busy debating important people on major news networks all over the country. #PuttingInWork

Some things never change.

The Littlest Chickenhawk clucks again

This time, he’s foolishly taking aim at Mike Cernovich.

The cucks are getting nervous. Their gravy train is rapidly coming to an end, because no one believes anything they say anymore. And the Alt Right is far more interesting, because we actually deal in societal reality, not cultural programming.

Look, it’s a matter of public record that I had (((Ben Shapiro)))’s number back in 2005. He’s not pro-American, he’s not a nationalist, he’s just another nominal Jewish “conservative” who is a professional member of the mainstream media’s Potemkin opposition and more devoted to fighting racism than big government.

And he’s a chickenhawk who went to law school instead of serving in the US military after declaring that the need for sacrifices in “the great battle of our time”.

Most of us realize that during wartime, sacrifices must be made … But taking such a stand requires common sense and the knowledge that we are in the midst of the great battle of our time.
– Benjamin Shapiro, WorldNetDaily, July 28, 2005

As for the idea that a cable network can grant anyone credibility or legitimacy, well, how seriously do you take any of their talking heads? How much legitimacy does the Littlest Chickenhawk have Meanwhile, he cries out in emotional pain as he rhetorically strikes out at the #AltRight.

I’ve experienced more pure, unadulterated anti-Semitism since coming out against Trump’s candidacy than at any other time in my political career. Trump supporters have threatened me and other Jews who hold my viewpoint. They’ve blown up my e-mail inbox with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. They greeted the birth of my second child by calling for me, my wife, and two children to be thrown into a gas chamber…. Why are the droogs of the alt-right desperate for sexual congress with The Combover?

A much better question is this: why do you prefer the gas chamber for you, your wife, and your two children to Israel, Ben?

Ben, you publicly demanded the sacrifice of young American lives to your interests, a sacrifice you were unwilling to make yourself. So, why should Americans hesitate to sacrifice the lives of you, your wife, and your two children if they happen to believe it serves their interests?

An admission by urgent action

The Washington Post rushes – and I mean RUSHES – to try to defuse the troubling issue of Hillary Clinton’s increasingly obvious health problems:

The first week of August was a rough one for Donald Trump’s campaign; by coincidence, it was also a busy one for Trump supporters, who see a media coverup protecting Hillary Clinton. Over the weekend, the Trump campaign released a Web ad that mocked Clinton’s admission that she “short-circuited” by giving a misleading answer about the investigation into her emails.

“She took a short-circuit in the brain,” Trump said at a Saturday night rally. “She’s got problems. Honestly, I don’t think she’s all there.”

At the same time, the Drudge Report, WorldNetDaily and a small army of would-be Twitter sleuths tried to build the case that the Democratic nominee for president has serious health issues and only they had noticed. Clinton’s age and health had been subject to parody by some conservative media, but the new speculation was completely serious.

None of the evidence, often shared (or sent to reporters) with the hashtag #HillarysHealth, held up. In every case, a Clinton moment that had been captured by the media was reinterpreted and wrenched out of context….

Indeed, for other websites critical of Clinton, the “stairs” photo was just one part of a #HillarysHealth mosaic. It gave WorldNetDaily a hook to resurrect “a July 21 video posted on YouTube [which] shows Clinton’s head suddenly turning and shaking vigorously for several seconds.” That video, titled “Hillary Clinton has seizure/convulsions – tries to play it off making fun of seizures,” was also robbed of its context. Two clips of Clinton bobbing her head had been looped and slowed down, as ominous music and voice-overs played behind them — a combination that helped the clip score 1.4 million views.

The clip wasn’t from July 21, and (as the scrum of media should have indicated) it wasn’t rescued from pro-Clinton censors. It was from June 10, when Clinton, fresh off a series of wins that effectively locked up the Democratic nomination, held a few events ahead of the District of Columbia’s primary. Beat reporters followed Clinton to a coffee shop in the Shaw neighborhood; CNN’s Dan Merica, to her left, asked her about the breaking news of President Obama’s official endorsement. Then, to her right, the Associated Press’s Lisa Lerer asked a question about Elizabeth Warren, whom Clinton had met with as vice presidential speculation swirled.

The reporters, who had covered Clinton for a year, interpreted her exaggerated head-bobbing as a joke at how she’d been suddenly surrounded — and as a successful attempt at ending the scrum. It did not occur to them that it would become seen as evidence of a “seizure,” as people suffering from seizures do not typically laugh and continue to hold cups of coffee.

In WorldNetDaily’s coverage, the evidence that Clinton’s bobble-head moment resembled a seizure is that bloggers said it did. At InfoWars, the conspiracy news site founded by Alex Jones, the investor Martin Shkreli explained that Clinton was revealing a “cardinal symptom of Parkinson’s disease.”

Even when Clinton remained controlled, steady and unsmiling, #HillarysHealth sleuths were ready. Mike Cernovich, a self-help author best known as the attorney for a central figure in the “Gamergate” saga, seized on the speculation about Clinton to ask if Clinton traveled with a private doctor. “Remember when you thought famous people like Michael Jackson and Elvis had good medical care?” he asked. “What’s Clinton on?”

Cernovich’s speculation started with an incident from last week, when Clinton was campaigning in Las Vegas. Mid-speech, she paused and narrowed her eyes to look at protesters. Secret Service Assistant Special Agent in Charge Todd Madison rushed to her side, telling her that the situation was under control, and that she could keep talking.

And now we have a name: Secret Service Assistant Special Agent in Charge Todd Madison. It should be interesting to see how long he’s been with the Secret Service and learn what his medical qualifications are.

What we’re seeing this year is the mainstream media finally taking off the mask and the rise of an alternative media that is going to replace them, at least in part. The mainstream media is no longer able to completely control the narrative, as the alternative media is now driving it.

Remember, the mainstream media is known to have colluded to hide the debilitating health issues of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Kennedy. There is little doubt that they are doing the same thing for Hillary Clinton now.

UPDATE: SJWs always lie and so does the mainstream media. I suspected the “Todd Madison” angle was a point of vulnerability for the cover-up, and, sure enough, The Ralph Retort is on it.

Does anyone honestly think that the Washington Post would actually publish the real name of a Secret Service agent, who has been known to be extremely close to Hillary, at almost all times she’s in public? And because we know that Secret Service often use fake names, it just doesn’t make sense for the WaPo to have endangered the life of Hillary by giving ISIS the full name of her closest and most trusted personnel — it’s far more likely that the guys name is not Todd Madison, at all.

So what might his real name be? The Conservative Tree house thinks they may have found the true identity of Clinton’s handler, and located his medical practice.

Allegedly, his name is Dr. Oladotun Okunola, and he is a neurologist.

The cost of SJW convergence

ESPN is paying it, having lost 4 million subscribers and $350 million in the last year:

In the past five years ESPN has lost 11,346,000 subscribers according to Nielsen data.

If you combine that with ESPN2 and ESPNU subscriber losses this means that ESPN has lost over a billion dollars in cable and satellite revenue just in the past five years, an average of $200 million each year. That total of a billion dollars hits ESPN in the pocketbook not just on a yearly basis, but for every year going forward.

It’s gone forever.

That’s not just bad, this is downright cataclysmic.

And it’s getting worse.

In the past year ESPN lost 4.159 million subscribers, that’s another $350 million in lost revenue across the ESPN family of networks.

Now, tell me again how all the cultural programming and SJWfication and ideological propaganda in the entertainment media and the advertising industry is just business. Tell me again how it’s not driven by ideological fanatics, but hard-nosed businessmen just ruthlessly chasing a buck the best way they know how.

And then I’ll explain to you, very slowly and in words of not more than five syllables, that those hard-nosed, buck-chasing “businessmen” are observably losing literal billions as they continue to tear away at the foundations of Western Civilization: Christianity, the family, the rule of law, and the white race in the name of Tolerance, Equality, Progress, Inclusiveness, and Diversity.