Tag: media

Mike Cernovich’s best advice

Mike Cernovich explains how to build up your brand.

As I’ve become one of the 10 most influential voices this election season, media figures look on with jealousy. That’s a scarcity mindset. My own success does not preclude anyone else from being successful. (Vox Day gets far more blog traffic than I do. Stefan Molyneux has a far larger podcast. Their success does not detract from mine.)

Here is how you can become your own Mike Cernovich, Inc.


Focus on your fans/readers. End the pundit circle jerk.

How often do you see me butt kissing anyone on Twitter? I don’t kiss up to pundits with hopes they will write about me. There are many reasons for this, some personal and some practical.

I dislike dishonest people, and pundits are frauds. Pretending to like vile people for a reach-around is how you destroy your soul. I also ignore them because it’s bad for business.

Imagine a pundit writes about me in an article. (That’s not hard to imagine. There are hundreds of articles about me. Everyone from Gawker to Politifact has tried to take me down, with the end result being us laughing in their faces.)

No one reads an article about me and buys my book. Throw-away quotes are of no value to me. Even a byline on a big site like the Hoaxington Post is garbage. How do I know this? Book sales data tells the truth….

If you want to build your own brand, here’s some advice:

Talk to “nobodies” who @ tweet you.

I don’t view anyone as a nobody, because we are all human and there’s no reason to think highly of yourself, and also because there are a lot of nobodies who are stealth somebodies. (You never know who you’re talking to.)

Write for readers, not editors and pundits.


Who cares if your work is cited by some dork? Being cited by Vox* or Gawker or BuzzFeed won’t build your brand up. Writing for readers will.

I can attest that since I met Cernovich last August, and since I began putting his advice about looking to help others into action, both the blog readerships and the Twitter following have increased dramatically. More importantly, I learned how important it was to allow others to get involved, to volunteer, and to help themselves by helping me, which has had a profound effect on Castalia, DevGame, Big Fork, and [REDACTED], among other things.

It was perfect synchronicity that I was interrupted by a phone call from one of my more important allies as I was posting this, as he was calling to discuss how Castalia can be of assistance to one of his projects, which assistance we are quite happy to provide. As per Cernovich, what we decided may turn out to be to Castalia’s advantage down the road, but if so, that’s just a bonus. Our only serious goal is to help an ally meet his objective.

What goes around comes around, and in ways one cannot reasonably anticipate. So, always actively look for ways to help your friends, your allies, and your supporters. Don’t be threatened by their success, celebrate it and cheer them on! We can’t all be number one in everything, but we can all be winners.

*In case it isn’t obvious, he means Vox the lame SJW site, not me.

Mailvox: it’s just the media narrative

MJ is suspicious about the so-called “Trump Implosion” and rightfully so:

With all of the talk I’ve been seeing over the past week in regards to the mainstream news of Trump “imploding”, is it just me, or are the various factions of the diminishing hordes of establishment supporters getting more and more outlandish in their barbs against the campaign? How much longer will these types continue to deny the inevitable truth before they have to pivot to attempt to save their ignorant asses?

To wit:

– Yes, Trump has a concern about taking things personally. I see that more as a positive than a negative. The current occupant of the Office has too much of an “I don’t give a damn” attitude, and I think that’s part of the issue we’re running into in terms of leadership.

– The whole Khan issue. The reason it hasn’t gone away isn’t because Trump is keeping on it, it’s that the establishment handlers keep thrusting Khan back out into the spotlight to force Trump to respond. I heard a piece of an interview between Khan and Anderson Cooper from the other day, and it was clear to me that the man had no clue what he was talking about in terms of his constitutional claims. I literally felt dumber after hearing the man speak, it was that bad. The only reason Khan is even remotely relevant is that his son died in action during OIF, and that was an action supported by the D nominee, not Trump. I personally find it repulsive that they would use that status for such actions (it’s not surprising to me, however).

– The enthusiasm gap. Last weekend, there was supposedly a big bus trip through Pennsylvania and Ohio for the D ticket. It was so huge that they had to pay people to show up in western PA, and they ended up canceling the appearance in Cleveland, both cases due to lack of interest. Meanwhile, Trump and his campaign were upset that fire marshals were capping entry to venues far below the posted capacity limits. And where he’s not being capped, they’re turning people away. It’s night and day in terms of what is being reported by the establishment versus what the ground truth is.

I’m registered as unaffiliated where I live. I chose to be unaffiliated because the two-party system here is horribly, irrevocably broken. I understand that a lot of this traffic is meant for me to influence me into supporting the D nominee. I hate to say it, but I’m rather insulted by this attitude and approach. It’s not working. There’s nothing there for the D nominee to offer, and the choice of running mate is also a personal affront to me as an active, practicing Roman Catholic.

I will be honest, I’m not 100% behind Trump, but it’s not for any reason from the establishment. There is a legitimate unknown with him, and that’s probably due more to my healthy skepticism of someone who is naturally outside the overall process. This is another of those once in a generation occurrences where the truth is so obvious that one would have to be a complete idiot to ignore it.

The conclusion I’m running into is this: Trump is the catalyst for a completely new paradigm in both American and international politics, something that we sort of started to see with the Brexit vote, even though that was focused on the UK. The opportunity his election presents is huge in terms of how things can at least attempt to rectify themselves, and that’s what gives me hope.

I agree with the consensus that the Trumpslide is coming, especially since there’s still 95 days of campaigning to go, including 3 debates.

My take: everyone needs to relax about the “Trump implosion” and the purported Republican revolt. The media is full of SJWs. And what do SJWs do? Exactly!

This is what a full-fledged feeding frenzy looks like.

With Donald Trump facing the roughest stretch of his candidacy, the media have moved from questioning his sanity to depicting a campaign in disarray and top Republicans still wondering whether they can dump the nominee.

That won’t happen, of course, but it’s an indication of the toxic nature of the coverage and the flood of anti-Trump leaks now washing across the media landscape.

There’s a natural piling-on effect when campaigns go off the rails: The polls dip, the critics step up their rhetoric, staffers start pointing fingers, and the press keeps the vicious cycle going.

But I’ve never seen anything like this.

Things reached the point yesterday morning that CNBC’s John Harwood tweeted: “Longtime ally of Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager: ‘Manafort not challenging Trump anymore. Mailing it in. Staff suicidal.'”

And there was this from CNN: “A source tells @DanaBashCNN that some Trump campaign staff are frustrated w/ candidate lately, ‘feel like they are wasting their time.’”

I am told by knowledgeable campaign sources that Manafort is not going anywhere and believes that Trump will be getting back on message.

I am further told that reports of a planned “intervention” with the candidate, led by Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, are false.

And the sources also say that, contrary to media reports, party chairman Reince Priebus is not furious with Trump, though he is disappointed with the nominee’s refusal to endorse Paul Ryan.

The Khan/Implosion narrative nothing more than the Democratic hasbara that we’ve been seeing on this blog and others, writ large. As for the polls, I remind you of my previous assessment: they don’t mean ANYTHING until 30 days after the end of the second convention.

If there is no discernible Trump trend by then, it MIGHT be time to start considering the possibility of a Hillary win. In the meantime, pay no attention to the media’s attempt to establish a false narrative. Remember, they are trying to shape reality, they are not honestly reporting it.

Let’s look at this rationally. If the media was genuinely convinced that Hillary Clinton was going to win, do you really think they would engage in this sort of mass narrative-shaping instead of triumphantly slinging insults at Republicans while victory-dancing?

As to how long it will be before they pivot, I would say one week after the polls start showing Trump within striking distance of Hillary again. Which should be in about one month.

UPDATE: from the comments: “Ricky Vaughn 99 has suggested for months that it all starts with one push from Labor Day. He has said Trump does pushes and retreats in waves.”

I have noticed this too. Remember there were similar lulls around the time Michelle Fields was raped, murdered, and dismembered at a Trump rally and again after the Ohio loss cost Trump the Republican nomination.

As an experienced developer, Trump understands that you can’t mindlessly push all the time. You need to take the time to reload, gather your strength, and recover before launching another offensive. I assumed that’s what he’s been doing since the end of the Republican nomination.

An intellectual empire sans clothes

Steve Sailer explains why Donald Trump is simultaneously accused of stupidity due to his verbal simplicity even as he punctures the absurd pieties of the media Narrative:

Seven hundred years ago an English friar named William of Ockham gave his name to the traditional Western prejudice that the simplest feasible explanation is most likely to be true.

Six and a half centuries later we went to the moon.

Lately, however, we haven’t really felt all that inclined to figure out how the world works. It’s more important to demonstrate our mastery of socially preferred locutions.

For example, one pressing public-policy question of the day is: What are the main causes of Muslim terrorism? Now, an Ockhamite might surmise that one useful answer is:

Muslims.

But the respectable answer in 2016 isn’t supposed to be anything that blunt. In particular, any acceptable explanation must include the six-syllable word “Islamophobia.”

Logically, Islamophobia sounds like it would be an effect of Islamic terrorism rather than a cause.

But logic hasn’t been the goal in 21st-century America. Status is. Repeating the word “Islamophobia” demonstrates that you have been to college, or at least that you watch talking heads on TV who have been to college.

And that’s what really counts.

In summary, Trump has been able to galvanize American politics by telling so many unfashionable truths because the reigning dogmas of our day are smart in form yet stupid in content.

It’s more than a bit ironic that someone so famous for exaggerating should prove to be more fundamentally truthful than all the fact-checkers and media pedants who scrupulously report that which is technically accurate in order to mislead and deceive.

But no nation is ever likely to suicide itself, as the American nation has done, without being told, and accepting, many lies.

We live in a society that is every bit as dishonest with itself as the Soviet Union ever was. The USA is now the Evil Empire, and like its predecessor, it will collapse in disarray due to the increasing weight of those lies.

The content censors

Instagram shuts down street artist’s account:

There is an interesting free speech controversy in Melbourne and on the Internet. Melbourne street artist, Lushsux, has not only been told by a city council to remove a parody mural of Hillary Clinton but his Instagram account has been shut down. Once again, the concern is that there remains a overt liberal bias in the sanctioning of comments or images on the Internet.

Lushsux had more than 100,000 Instagram followers who enjoy his paintings and images — work that extends almost two decades. He noted that “It’s fine to go on and do a mural on Trump, but when I go and do one on Hillary Clinton, my account is gone.”

Notably, there are plenty of suggestive murals splashed across Melbourne’s street-scape, including murals featuring Republican nominee Donald Trump and a topless Melania Trump emblazoned with the Mrs Clinton’s campaign catchphrase, “I’m With Her.”

You know, I didn’t sweat it when Goodreads banned me and a few others over being Rabid Puppies. And while Milo didn’t deserve to get banned from Twitter, it wasn’t exactly shocking considering the way he’d been actively baiting them. But things are really starting to get very creepy and 1984 fast.

The SJW left controls the social media high ground and they are making no bones about their complete willingness to abuse their position in order to further their political agenda. Keep that in mind once the alternatives begin to present themselves.

Speaking of social media censors, Facebook has suspended Michael Savage:

Facebook has temporarily blocked talk-radio host Michael Savage from posting stories to his page after he put up a link to a story about a Muslim migrant killing a pregnant woman in Germany.

A message from the social media giant on Savage’s page said: “You recently posted something that violates Facebook policies, so you’re temporarily blocked from using this feature.”

The message then refers the user to Facebook’s “Community Standards” and states the block will be active for 21 hours.

A new milestone: 2.5 million

I have a good reason to appreciate the material contribution that McRapey and a few of his more rabid fans have made to this site. For the first nine years of the blog, I didn’t pay much attention to my site traffic. The traffic had grown steadily over time, but it never occurred to me to think much of it because most of my readership was at WorldNetDaily and the blog had initially been little more than a place for me to record my passing thoughts and address many similar emails in one fell swoop. I started VP in 2003, but it wasn’t until 2012, when some of Scalzi’s fans began repeatedly mocking the way in which my site traffic compared unfavorably with that of Whatever, that I began looking into the implied connection between Scalzi’s perceived success in the science fiction community and his reported traffic.

As Verne, a commenter at AG, put it: “Once upon a time there was a low level geek (gamma) who managed to get himself a wee bit of power and bragging rights by way of the stupid Whatever blog and a position in a Sci/Fi org that no rational man would seemingly want. He used that power to tear into man of greater station and talent. That better man had up to that time not taken his blog and many other forms of networking seriously. A angry bear was awakened and has been steamrolling all in his way ever since.”


That’s more or less how it went, although I’m not angry at anyone about any of this. I realize many people won’t believe it, but until 2013, the 10th year of the blog, I didn’t care much about its traffic because I simply didn’t believe it had any particular significance beyond simple vanity. After all, what difference did it make if you had 5,000 pageviews in a month or 250,000 when WorldNetDaily had 5 million, the Atlanta Journal/Constitution had 19 million, and your column appeared weekly in both? I have to conclude that my very modest amount of success in the old media and old publishing worlds misled my perception of the digital media’s importance.

That’s why I was late to ebooks, why I was late to Twitter, and why I was very late to the utility of site traffic. It’s also why I rather cluelessly ran for SFWA office.

But just because I’m late to the party doesn’t mean that I’m stupid, or that I’ve lost my ability to see things that most people can’t. As chronicled in SJWs Always Lie, once I started paying attention, I very quickly recognized that McRapey was significantly exaggerating his traffic. More importantly, I also came to understand why he was lying about it and how he was effectively using public perception of that “extraordinary amount of traffic for a writer’s website”.

And I was downright astonished to discover that my blogs were already seeing very similar traffic, as I learned after reading McRapey’s 2012 summary that, as  it later turned out, proved to be the high water mark for Whatever.

That looks genuinely impressive at first glance.  8.165 million views!  But the last number made me do a double-take. And then it made me laugh. You see, Google Analytics also tracks Vox Popoli and Alpha Game. Those two blogs happened to combine for 719,700 views in December.  719,700, if I recall correctly, happens to be a little bit more than 718,000.  Nor is it an anomaly, as that was actually down from 745,857 in November.  This inspired me to look further into the matter of comparative blog traffic.

Of course, it’s not much of a comparison anymore, as Whatever now averages less than 500,000 pageviews a month while Alpha Game alone sees more than that. July 2016 saw record traffic for both VP and AG, with 2,078,989 pageviews for the former, 510,093 for the latter, and a total of 2,589,082 for the month. It may not be a competition, but as long as Whatever exists, it will serve a useful purpose for me as both a goad and a scalp.

So, 2.5 million monthly pageviews, what does that matter? Isn’t that just vanity and ego-stroking? Well, no. That’s the same mistaken perception that I used to harbor. The truth is that engagement is the social media fuel upon which the engine of Internet influence runs, and pageviews are how engagement is measured. That’s why so many people try to fake engagement by click-baiting and buying fake followers and posting pictures of cute girls in bikinis and videos of cute animals doing cute things. If gold can be adulterated and inflated, then it should be no surprise that pageviews can be as well. As we know, they can even be entirely fictitious pageviews that are invented in interviews.

But as with gold, only pageviews based on genuine engagement matter in the end. And the sort of pageviews one receives on an old-fashioned, text-heavy site are 24-carat quality. I’d much rather have my readers, and their 2.5 million pageviews, than 10 million pageviews of the sort produced by the readers of a Gawker-style clickbait site. I think VP will eventually reach 10 million monthly pageviews, and it will probably do so sooner than any of us reasonably expect. But we’ll do it for real or we won’t do it at all.

Castalia House and DevGame and Brainstorm and Big Fork and other projects that you haven’t heard about yet all exist because there is a material difference between 5,000 pageviews and 2.5 million pageviews per month. That is why this milestone matters, and that is why I am pleased to be able to celebrate it with you today.

Two million page views monthly

VP just hit its two millionth pageview for the month. I’ll have a more detailed report once the final numbers are in, but it’s a particularly satisfying milestone in light of this section from SJWs Always Lie:

The discrepancies were starting to accumulate, and the increasingly wordy, increasingly elaborate defensiveness on Scalzi’s part made me increasingly certain that he was lying. But how to prove it to everyone else?

Then it occurred to me that anyone who was willing to shamelessly exaggerate in an interview with the New York Times was probably not doing so for the first time. In my experience, most people who are self-promoters never stop promoting themselves. They have a tendency to talk themselves up, and they will often exaggerate when they have no need to do so. Given that the New York Times is at the top of the U.S. cultural heap, I figured the chances were very high that Scalzi had similarly inflated his traffic in previous interviews with other reporters. And, sure enough, I found an interview he had given almost exactly three years before to Erin Stocks at a science fiction magazine called Lightspeed.

Anything you ever wanted to know about science fiction writer John Scalzi you can find online at the public and rather opinionated blog that he’s kept since 1998, Whatever.scalzi.com/. His bio page holds all the usual info—education, past jobs, present jobs, books published, awards won—and is wrapped up with the tongue-in-cheek coda: “For more detailed information, including a complete bibliography, visit the Wikipedia entry on me. It’s generally accurate.” But spend a little more time browsing, and you’ll learn that beyond the dry stats and quippy bon mots, there’s more to John Scalzi and his writing than meets the eye. For one thing, his blog gets an extraordinary amount of traffic for a writer’s website–Scalzi himself quotes it at over 45,000 unique visitors daily and more than two million page views monthly.

—“Interview: John Scalzi”, Lightspeed, September 2010 (Issue 4)

Extraordinary indeed. It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Three years before the New York Times interview that struck me as anomalous, John Scalzi had been publicly claiming to have very nearly the same number of readers, as well as an absolutely impossible number of pageviews. And how could Whatever possibly have had “more than two million page views monthly” in September 2010 when he later reported 5,131,194 pageviews for the whole of the year?

Alpha Game is seeing record traffic as well, and will hit 500,000 monthly pageviews later today. Thanks to all of you who made this possible by stopping by, and to those who have helped make it a destination by adding to the discourse.

I’d say on to 3 million, but I’ve been hanging around Cernovich too much and you know how he is about always thinking big. On to 10 million.

State polls vs national

Nate Silver of 538 addresses the discrepancies while explaining why his systems are, by his own account, “bullish on Trump”:

Another tricky question is how to reconcile state polls with national polls. For example, there have been no polls of Pennsylvania over the past two weeks, during which time Clinton’s lead has evaporated in national polls (and often also in polls of other states, where we’ve gotten them). The FiveThirtyEight model uses what we call a trend-line adjustment to adjust those those old polls to catch up to the current trend. That’s why our polls-only forecast shows Pennsylvania as a tossup even though Trump has only led one poll there all year. Those older polls came from a time when Clinton led by 5 or 6 or 7 percentage points nationally, and they generally showed her up by about the same margin in Pennsylvania. Now that the national race is almost tied, it’s probably safe to assume that Pennsylvania is very close also. Some of the competing models don’t do this, and we think that’s probably a mistake, since it means their state-by-state forecasts will lag a few weeks behind, even when it’s obvious there’s been a big shift in the race.

Bottom line: Although there are other factors that matter around the margin, our models show better numbers for Trump mostly because they’re more aggressive about detecting trends in polling data. For the past couple of weeks — and this started before the conventions, so it’s not just a convention bounce — there’s been a strong trend away from Clinton and toward Trump.

In other words, as I’ve been saying from the start, it’s too soon to tell anything from the state polls. The fact that the trend is towards Trump is apparent, but it’s not certain that it is the start of a cascade preference that will lead to the predicted Trumpslide.

However, it is the first required step in the process, so that’s a good sign for now.

Talking SJWs with Tom Woods

What exactly is the ideology of the “Social Justice Warrior”? What do you do when you’re targeted by one, whether at work or in general? Vox Day — popular blogger, author, SJW slayer, and polymath — joins me for background and strategy.

Tom Woods was kind enough to have me as a guest on Episode 703 of his podcast, Social Justice Warriors: Who They Are and How to Deal With Them. Tom is a sharp guy and I always enjoy speaking with him.

Of course, we were discussing the book that has been a political philosophy bestseller for nearly a year now, SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police. As its first year of publication comes to a close, it is still a top 2 book in the category, trailing only Plato’s Republic.

Which reminds me. How many people here would be interested in reading annotated editions of classics like the Republic or Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which would consist of the text with my commentary on the text woven into it. We could even do it with other classic works and commentators; I would love to have a copy of Clausewitz’s On War annotated by Martin van Creveld. I’m not promising anything, as I have three – no, four – books I’m already writing, but it’s an idea that might be worth exploring.

In defense of globalism

The Economist argues for openness, Hillary Clinton, and the corrupt anti-nationalist status quo:

Countering the wall-builders will require stronger rhetoric, bolder policies and smarter tactics. First, the rhetoric. Defenders of the open world order need to make their case more forthrightly. They must remind voters why NATO matters for America, why the EU matters for Europe, how free trade and openness to foreigners enrich societies, and why fighting terrorism effectively demands co-operation. Too many friends of globalisation are retreating, mumbling about “responsible nationalism”. Only a handful of politicians—Justin Trudeau in Canada, Emmanuel Macron in France—are brave enough to stand up for openness. Those who believe in it must fight for it.

They must also acknowledge, however, where globalisation needs work. Trade creates many losers, and rapid immigration can disrupt communities. But the best way to address these problems is not to throw up barriers. It is to devise bold policies that preserve the benefits of openness while alleviating its side-effects. Let goods and investment flow freely, but strengthen the social safety-net to offer support and new opportunities for those whose jobs are destroyed. To manage immigration flows better, invest in public infrastructure, ensure that immigrants work and allow for rules that limit surges of people (just as global trade rules allow countries to limit surges in imports). But don’t equate managing globalisation with abandoning it.

As for tactics, the question for pro-open types, who are found on both sides of the traditional left-right party divide, is how to win. The best approach will differ by country. In the Netherlands and Sweden, centrist parties have banded together to keep out nationalists. A similar alliance defeated the National Front’s Jean-Marie Le Pen in the run-off for France’s presidency in 2002, and may be needed again to beat his daughter in 2017. Britain may yet need a new party of the centre.

In America, where most is at stake, the answer must come from within the existing party structure. Republicans who are serious about resisting the anti-globalists should hold their noses and support Mrs Clinton. And Mrs Clinton herself, now that she has won the nomination, must champion openness clearly, rather than equivocating. Her choice of Tim Kaine, a Spanish-speaking globalist, as her running-mate is a good sign. But the polls are worryingly close. The future of the liberal world order depends on whether she succeeds.

The Economist correctly senses that the time for “the liberal world order” is rapidly running out. Notice how, like much of the conservative media and the cuckservative Republicans, the maintenance of the status quo is its only real principle and completely trumps all of their various ideologies. Everyone profiting from the current setup, from literal Socialist to small government Republican, is willing to stand shoulder-to-shoulder against anyone who would first stand for the benefit of his nation and his people.

The Economist is speaking with the voice of the transnational elite, who have no loyalty to any nation, who could not care less about Americans, or French, or British, or Chinese, or anyone else, so long as they are allowed to continue to prey upon them. It is not, as some would have it, an exclusively Jewish elite, but rather, an alliance of rapacious elites from every nation, who share an honor among thieves and defend each other at the expense of the various peoples they have been raping for at least four generations.

Globalism is an evil even greater than Communism, Socialism, Nazism, Fascism, or Feminism, because it is a trans-ideological meta-evil that can take advantage of any ideology except Nationalism. That is why Nationalism is the most effective response to it and that is why those who love either freedom or their own people should support the Nationalists of every nation and of every ideological stripe.