Tag: media

Surviving the cultural war

Everyday Joe interviews Pax Dickinson, whose job was one of the early casualties of a confirmed SJW attack in technology.

EJ: Was it hard for you to re-enter business after what happened?

Dickinson: I eventually managed to find work at below-market rates through friends and former co-workers, after promising to conceal my identity. I knew I wanted to launch another startup though, and the resultant notoriety from the blacklisting ended up putting me in contact with Chuck Johnson and he had this great idea for a journalism crowdfunding site, I couldn’t possibly turn down that kind of adventure.

Ultimately being blacklisted and fired is the best thing that ever happened to me, due to the high-profile nature I was able to use it somewhat to my advantage. I’ve met so many amazing people because of what happened to me and while it did close a lot of doors for me, it opened some others and the ones it opened are far more interesting anyway.

I think it’s important for me to keep my profile high and make sure everyone sees a guy who has been put through that social justice shaming ordeal come out the other side of it unbowed and refusing to slink away in disgrace. They’ve taken their shot at me and I’m still standing, and now they’re out of ammo and all it accomplished was pissing me off.

EJ: Any advice for surviving an attack like you suffered?

Dickinson: Vox Day’s book SJWs Always Lie is essential and he gets it right. Never apologize. I eventually let myself get talked into giving an apology of sorts, it was a mistake. I shouldn’t have bothered.

I think now that it’s been publicized, there are people who want to help. I’ve talked to a few people who have been fired for their opinions and given them advice. I think those of us who have lost our jobs due to this kind of censorship need to stand together and support each other whenever possible.

The only thing you can ultimately do is try to engineer a career for yourself that is as anti-fragile as possible. People like Mike Cernovich and Vox Day are leading the way and WeSearchr is an attempt to follow in that vein. When we get attacked by social justice warriors it only makes us stronger.

EJ: What’s your opinion of Donald Trump’s presidential run? Do you think he’ll make a difference in fighting Political Correctness in America?

Dickinson: I think Trump is great, and it has nothing to do with his policies. He represents the regular guy standing up and telling the PC gang that we’re not gonna take it anymore.

Win or lose, he’s setting an example to the men of America how to respond to bullshit shaming tactics. The guy is an inspiration, frankly. I hope to see some other billionaires following the example that Trump and Thiel are setting. I get the sense that a lot of the Silicon Valley top CEOs are quietly sympathetic and I hope they find their balls and start pushing back as well before it’s too late. Trump is doing even more important work as a national life coach right now than he would probably be able to do as President.

WeSearchr is very interesting and might have some serious potential in light of the way the culture war is developing. I’m still trying to get my head around the most effective way to make use of it.

A true account of the Milo riot

Mike Cernovich was there for Milo’s speech at Depaul University:

We predicted that 2016 would be the year of the shutdown. But, even I didn’t see this coming. And I was at the Chicago Trump rally that got shut down a few months ago.

So, to show my support, I decided to attend my friend Milo Yiannopoulos’ speaking event in Chicago. What I saw happen there was incredible; and I want to share every detail with you now.

The event was announced about a week prior to when it was to be held. R.S.V.P. was available online in order to secure your seat.

The event also required you sign a waiver. (For those of you that don’t know, this consent form has to do with the ‘triggly puff’ video that appeared from one of his previous rallies.)

My friend Bernard got me signed up. He told me that they would have your name and check you off a sheet when you entered the venue. He also told me that there were some planned protests against the event, but that the protest page stated that it was not intended to shut down the event.

I told him there was no way they would shut it down. Milo was no Trump; he’s not big enough of a target to shut down.

Boy, was I wrong.

Read it all there. It is both informative and substantive, from an eyewitness perspective. It’s also troubling to observe how neither the campus police nor the hired security did anything to interfere with the protesters.

Why Jonah hates Milo

It’s not the plot of a new gay teen drama on Nickelodeon, it’s merely Caleb Q. Washington explaining the intergenerational conflict within the Right:

Liberal Fascism attacked left-wing identity in its very title and cover. It was an attack that demanded rebuttal by the left. In effect, it benefited from the forces which people like Milo Yiannopoulos and, dare I say it, Donald Trump, have explicitly made use of for their advantage.

If The Tyranny of Cliches had been re-titled, and I’m just spit-balling here, “The Left’s Biggest Lies” with a cartoon of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama dressed as Pinocchio, it might have been more of a success.

Milo Yiannopoulos, on the other hand, has risen to prominence (eclipsing Goldberg’s Twitter follower count this spring) by harnessing these very same forces to his benefit. Milo first came to my attention when he dropped the first supportive piece on GamerGate from any well-known news outlet.

The political genius of this was entirely lost on the rest of the right. Becoming the champion of gamers against the worst elements of the left, he forced people on the left to defend their most despicable elements, stay silent, or join him. It forced the left to fight on its own turf.

He’s done the same thing with the zaniness on college campuses. With his speaking tour, Milo has repeatedly stirred controversy. This has led to forcing people on the left to distance itself from the worst of the craziness in a way no other conservative has done.

Milo has reaped huge dividends from this strategy, both as a proponent for the right, and personally.

So, why is there conflict?

The simple answer is that Jonah and Milo are avatars for each side of the generational schism on the right. While not an old man himself, Jonah is their representative. The old men on the right seek to hold the line in a conflict of attrition with the left over disputed ground. The young men seek to fight on what the left thought was safe turf.

This brings us to the specific conflict today.

There are two groups of people on the right Jonah, and the rest of the old men revile. The first are agitators who knowingly say extreme things aimed to upset the old men. They are getting trolled, and are looking bad as a result. The whole point of the activity is to make the old men angry, and in their anger for them to act in a way that turns people off from them. It’s a classical rhetorical move explained by Aristotle. They seek to inspire anger in their targets and succeed. The other group are simply people who take a more extreme right-wing view than is considered socially acceptable.

The old men and Jonah Goldberg hate these people more than they hate the left, as they seek a monopoly of right wing though, and Milo Yiannopoulos has no interest in condemning them. He even delivers apologia for them.

This also explains why I am on Milo’s side, despite being of an age with Jonah. Now, I actually like Jonah. I understand him, and I think his Liberal Fascism was a very good and important book. I even paid homage to it with the cover of SJWs Always Lie.

But being an editor at National Review, Jonah has always been allied with the Old Men of National Review, while I have always been Too Extreme for them despite being identified as the most talented right-wing columnist of my generation by Universal Press Syndicate and being signed as a prospective replacement for William F. Buckley by them.

And wow, did that ever fail!

I am middle-aged, but being a game designer, my heart is with the brash young gamers of #GamerGate, not the aging cuckservatives of National Review. I don’t pretend to be with it – I have no idea what the equivalent of early techno in the 1990s might be these days – and considering how long it took me to recover from an intra-club scrimmage with the prima squadra and having to defend 19-year-old wingers, I am VERY aware of my age these days.

But Jonah, Rod Lowry, Rod Dreher, and other 40-somethings need to realize that we are no longer the Young Turks of the Right, and it is time to either get with the #AltRight and support the up-and-coming new guys or wander off into the pastures of political irrelevance.

Zuckercucks

The irrepressible Milo continues to make friends and influence people as he criticizes the pointless, humiliating genuflection to Facebook performed by a few cuckservatives playing noble loser one more time:

A delegation of Establishment conservative types descended on Silicon Valley today to make Facebook look good. I have some thoughts about it. This is going to be a long column, so strap yourselves in.

I’m sure it wasn’t these conservative figures’ intent merely to assist in Facebook’s marketing efforts, but at this point, if maliciousness is ruled out as a motivation, extreme stupidity is the only possible remaining explanation.

That, and perhaps a touch of pathetic egotism. I think many of those invited are a little starstruck by Zuck. After all, he’s the millennial billionaire CEO of the largest social network on the planet, and has spent the last decade making old media irrelevant, a point made plain by the amount of “I’m on my way!!!!!!” Facebook posts posted by attendees today.

It’s hard to imagine Truman posting selfies on the way to Potsdam, or really any serious person about to engage in an endeavour that might affect the course of the national election. But hey, it’s current year, and all bets are off.

Eric Bolling let this attitude slip on Monday’s broadcast of The Five, where he congratulated Fox pundit Dana Perino on the “fantastic honor” of being invited to the meeting.

A meeting where Facebook refuses to admit they did anything wrong, held purely to make the company look good? I’m not sure, but I can’t remember the last time it was an “honor” to be invited as window-dressing by a corporation’s public relations department. Cucked by Zuck. How embarrassing!

We don’t need their platforms. We don’t kiss the gatekeepers’ asses. We storm the gates, tear them down, and erect our own institutions using their skulls as decorations. The Brainstorm knows what’s coming next. In August, the rest of you will too.

There is nothing to accommodate. We will replace them by Fox Newsing their CNNs, Breitbarting their Salons, and Castalia Housing their Tors. They can keep the left-liberal third of the literate population.

We’ll take the rest.

The Donald has the Big Mo

Camille Paglia pointed out the rise of Donald Trump at Clinton’s expense out even before news of the polls that already show Trump beating Crooked Hillary by three points (Fox) and five points (Rasmussen):

Zap! If momentum were a surge of electromagnetic energy, Donald Trump against all odds has it now. The appalled GOP voters he is losing seem overwhelmed in number by independents and crossover Democrats increasingly attracted by his bumptious, raucous, smash-the-cucumber-frames style. While it’s both riveting and exhilarating to watch a fossilized American political party being blown up and remade, it’s also highly worrisome that a man with no prior political experience and little perceptible patience for serious study seems on a fast track to the White House. In a powder-keg world, erratic impulsiveness is far down the list of optimal presidential traits.

But the Democratic strategists who prophesy a Hillary landslide over Trump are blowing smoke. Hillary is a stodgily predictable product of the voluminous briefing books handed to her by a vast palace staff of researchers and pollsters—a staggeringly expensive luxury not enjoyed by her frugal, unmaterialistic opponent, Bernie Sanders (my candidate). Trump, in contrast, is his own publicist, a quick-draw scrapper and go-for-the-jugular brawler. He is a master of the unexpected (as the Egyptian commander Achillas calls Julius Caesar in the Liz Taylor Cleopatra). The massive size of Hillary’s imperialist operation makes her seem slow and heavy. Trump is like a raffish buccaneer, leaping about the rigging like the breezy Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, while Hillary is the stiff, sequestered admiral of a bullion-laden armada of Spanish galleons, a low-in-the-water easy mark as they creak and sway amid the rolling swells.

The drums had been beating for weeks about a major New York Times expose in the works that would demolish Trump once and for all by revealing his sordid lifetime of misogyny. When it finally appeared as a splashy front-page story this past Sunday (originally titled “Crossing the Line: Trump’s Private Conduct with Women”), I was off in the woods pursuing my Native American research. On Monday, after seeing countless exultant references to this virtuoso takedown, I finally read the article—and laughed out loud throughout. Can there be any finer demonstration of the insularity and mediocrity of today’s Manhattan prestige media? Wow, millionaire workaholic Donald Trump chased young, beautiful, willing women and liked to boast about it. Jail him now! Meanwhile, the New York Times remains mute about Bill Clinton’s long record of crude groping and grosser assaults—not one example of which could be found to taint Trump.

Mondalean proportions. That’s how bad it is going to be, assuming Hillary doesn’t admit her health issues and withdraw before she is subject to a historic humiliation.

He who must not be named

Commentary is terrified by the online brigades of the Alt Right:

The unapologetically racist element of neo-reactionary thinking connects intellectuals like Yarvin and Land with the masses they otherwise disdain, evincing the rumblings of a nascent neo-reactionary political coalition. But what really ties together all these seemingly disparate strands—the neo-reactionary intellectuals, the crude Twitter trolls, the highfalutin white supremacists, and the billionaire presidential candidate—is misanthropy. Pollsters may need to develop a new category in the wake of the Trump phenomenon: “resentment voters.” Within the demographic of lower-middle-class white men, Trump is popular in a variety of misanthropic subcultures, many of which did not really exist until the Internet provided them with a way to communicate and organize. Unsurprisingly, he is the subject of a great deal of discussion and admiration in the pickup-artist, or “seduction community,” of men who chat online and gather at conferences to complain about how feminism has destroyed dating culture while simultaneously discussing strategies for bedding as many women as possible. After Trump declared early in the campaign season, apropos of nothing, that supermodel Heidi Klum was “no longer a 10,” a popular blogger from the “men’s rights” movement approvingly wrote, “The alpha does not qualify himself to women, ever. He expects women to qualify themselves to him.”

What also unites the alt-right is a conspiratorial anti-elitism. Policies and principles don’t matter, nor do obsolete ideological divisions like left and right, because the American system itself is a sham. “Why are sh-t-tier whites voting for Trump, a barbarian who can’t even write a grammatical tweet in fourth-grade English?” Yarvin asks. “Because they’re done with being sh-t on by their ‘betters,’ who think invading Iraq and starting civil wars in Syria and Libya is a brilliant use for a third of their income.” In distinction to Bernie Sanders supporters, who at least know what they want to do with the reigns of power, these people loathe our social and political institutions and offer no alternative. Trump and the alt-right want to break everything and watch the world burn, like Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight, and they believe (hope?) that somehow everything will sort itself out. America, using a term that will be familiar to the real-estate tycoon, is a “tear down.”

What we are seeing here is a convergence of three phenomena: neo-reactionary philosophy, popular discontent, and a charismatic leader. Successful political movements need all three. As far-right traditionalists, Yarvin and Land claim to despise populism, and people more generally. “Predisposed, in any case, to perceive the politically awakened masses as a howling irrational mob, [neo-reaction] conceives the dynamics of democratization as fundamentally degenerative: systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption,” Land writes. And like many of the Republican office-holders and conservative media personalities who’ve glommed on to Trump while railing against “elites,” the neo-reactionary thinkers are themselves elitists.

But they, too, are just as unscrupulous in hitching their wagon to a popular movement in hopes that it will advance their agenda. In a 2008 installment of his Open Letter, Yarvin mused about himself as the Vaclav Havel of neo-reaction—the philosopher king who may one day find himself carried on the shoulders of a society demanding revolutionary change—or, failing that, its Machiavelli. For, “in order to make an impact on the political process, you need quantity. You need moronic, chanting hordes.” Well, he has them now.

One doesn’t have to share the normative interpretations of alt-right counter-history to believe that these thinkers have a point in arguing that human societal development is not a process of inexorable progress. Though conservatives have criticized President Barack Obama’s frequent invocation of “the right side of history” to justify his positions on issues ranging from gay marriage to counterterrorism, Americans have become largely inured to the idea, expressed by Ronald Reagan, that their country’s “best days are yet to come.” What if they’re not? What if things are about to get a whole lot worse?

I take no little pleasure in the fact that while the mainstream media doesn’t have any trouble in naming Allum, Milo, Moldbug, or Nick Land, they need to resort to weird, inaccurate descriptions –  a popular blogger from the “men’s rights” movement – rather than mention me directly.

It’s rather amusing. For over a decade, I was inaccurately described as a “conservative”. For perhaps the last three years, I’ve been described as an MRA, again inaccurately.

Is it really that hard to say “Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil” or “bestselling political philosopher” or even “right wing radical”?

Apparently.

Anyhow, they shouldn’t be terrified of us. They should be terrified by the fact that we are right and their system, the one that they believed had ended history, has failed. Everything is on the table now and anything can happen.

The unglamorous reality of the media

A 10-year news industry veteran explains that it’s a lot different than it looks from the outside:

After spending over a decade working in medium-sized cities for different television affiliates of ABC, NBC, and CBS, I came to the conclusion the industry does nothing but spew corporate, government, and Marxist propaganda nonstop. I was not content to spout this propaganda any longer, and I had to get out.

I went into the career with quite a different illusion. From childhood, growing up in the country we believed in the illusions the puppet masters in the “big city” media were creating. The media’s vision of the world and of our government led us to believe it was all truly a shining city on the hill, and journalists were wonderful people serving the public interest and looking out for the little guy.

Growing up a poor kid, with no connections, no race or gender card to play, and no money, landing a job as a news anchor seemed like a far off fantasy. Many in high school, including my teachers believed I could never make it. After driving off to college in a broken down car with $800 in my pocket, hitting the ground running in a different state 500 miles from home, often working two jobs, I pushed harder than the other kids at my school and landed an on-air position while in college.

Further hard work and sacrifice landed me another job and then another in a highly competitive field. Meantime, I could have been out doing blow off a whore’s ass instead of studying calculus and other tough subjects, effectively sacrificing some of the best years of my life, but I figured the payoff would be worth the sacrifice and pushed through.

However, I began to lose respect for the media once I found out the truth about who works in it, how it operates, why it operates, who it operates in the interest of, and how it was treating me. Here are five reasons I grew to despise the mainstream media before striking out to do my own thing.

Can confirm. I was frankly astonished when I visited the building at KARE-11 in Minneapolis in 1993 or thereabouts. I had an on-set test there when they were considering the idea of having a regular segment on games; it did not go well, partly due to me, and partly because they insisted on having me play the game live while the anchor stand-in was talking to me.

But having been accustomed to corporate comfort, and being familiar with corporate luxury, it was really bizarre to see the faded carpets, the seventies furniture, and the cheap office furniture that looked like they’d inherited it from Honeywell in the 1950s.

And the sets are freaking cold! That’s why you never see them sweat, they’re all half-frozen to death.

Due to my newspaper column and being on the board of a TV station, there were a few media folks I got to know over time, and one or two I even came to like. But in the case of the latter, they were guys who had other things going for them than just their news media careers.

Do you even game, bro?

I can’t even what OH COME ON!

Polygon released a video last week of one of its reviewers playing the first 30 minutes of the new Doom. But it wasn’t the review that caused a storm. The reviewer’s playing was so bad that Polygon had to disable ratings and comments on the YouTube video to save themselves the wrath of online vitriol.

One fan even posted a video to YouTube highlighting the reviewer’s incompetence.

The reviewer picked to play the demo is someone who earns a living testing out video games, and yet he or she plays this shooter like a four-year-old. And it’s not the only time that reviewers from Polygon, which is part of Vox Media, have simply quit playing a game because it too hard.

All of this begs the question: Are the site’s reviewers skilled enough as gamers to be evaluating a wide swath of gaming titles?

This is horrifically embarrassing. I mean, I haven’t been a professional game reviewer in over a decade and I am MORTIFIED for this person. About the only thing he didn’t do was run into a wall and get stuck there with his nose pressed against it. Let’s just say skills and standards have dropped considerably from the time TC and Scorpio and I were reviewing for CGW, and Paul the Pro Player was reviewing for Game Informer.

It’s also conclusive evidence of pretty much everything #GamerGate ever said about game journos.

How to guarantee failure

It’s both amusing and a little annoying to see various AltRight figures freaking out about Heat Street running articles by me. Apparently the fear is that because it is a Dow Jones-owned outlet, it will somehow magically “coopt” the AltRight and make it disappear. Can you even imagine how terrible it would be if the New York Times gave me an op/ed column or if CNN gave Mike Cernovich a TV show?

This cooption concept is a fascinatingly stupid theory, in light of how the editor of Heat Street, Louise Mensch, has openly attacked the AltRight and is a card-carrying member of #NeverTrump. Heat Street is simply one of many media outlets, it isn’t the Tea Party 2.0. Unlike Dana Loesch, Dick Armey, and other conservatives who leaped to march in front of the Tea Party parade and were accepted as its public faces, literally no one, including Louise herself, is putting her or her site forward as an opinion leader of the Alt Right.

Here is the core problem with this cowardly paranoia: either the AltRight ideas can survive exposure to the mainstream or they cannot. There is only one way to find out, and that is to expose them to the mainstream. Therefore, those of us who are seen as “Alt Right figureheads” or influences of some kind should welcome every single outlet willing to consider them, whether it is friendly or hostile.

This really isn’t that difficult.

It is ironic that the Alt Right scolds worry rightly about SJW entryism while simultaneously refusing to dirty their delicate white hands by ever preaching to anyone who is not part of the choir, much less engaging in any entryism of their own. Apparently they prefer a purely defensive approach, which as every student of strategy or military history knows, virtually guarantees failure. This is also remarkably stupid, given that the Alt Right has seen how the determination of conservatives to remain solely on the defensive is one of the primary reasons for the catastrophic failure of conservatism.

It is a matter of public record that my articles and my interviews have appeared in everything from Pravda to the Guardian, from WorldNetDaily to the Wall Street Journal. Jews and SJWs condemn me for giving credibility to The Daily Shoah and Counter Currents. Alt Righters and white nationalists condemn me for giving credibility to Heat Street. Meanwhile, I have been reliably informed for 15 years now that I have no credibility of my own.

In case my position is not clear, let me state it outright: I reject the concept of credibility by association.

I am not a moderate, I am outlet-agnostic. No one owns me and no one dictates what I can and what I cannot say. And the Alt Right would do very well to learn from #GamerGate and stop trying to play tone-police or outlet-police.

Ideas stand alone, not on the basis of author, outlet, or association.

UPDATE: Some of these guys clearly don’t know me very well. I’m entirely happy to, as they suggest, GTFO of whatever they think their little movement happens to be. I’m not a joiner anyhow. Attempt to police me and I won’t hesitate to mute and ignore you.

And if you tell me I should not be contributing anywhere, then you will not be commenting here. Live by your professed principles, gentlemen. We wouldn’t want you being coopted by me, after all, and I can’t risk being coopted by you.

Should women vote?

Louise Mensch and I discuss everything from conservative feminism to universal suffrage and Native American intelligence at Heat Street:

Louise:  We’re now debating feminism. Vox, you go first. Hit me with your best shot, as Pat Benatar once said.

Vox:  Okay. Louise, I know that you identify yourself as a feminist, and you also identify yourself as a conservative. Given the connection between feminism and progressive politics, I am curious to know how you rectify those two positions, those two identities.

Louise:  I don’t see that there is any reconciling to be done.  I can’t stand the social justice warrior thing of identify as. I am a feminist. I am a conservative. I said in our last debate to you that conservatism was about equal opportunity, and to me feminism is therefore a subset of conservatism. If conservatism is principally about equal opportunity, personal liberty, free trade, etc, feminism is a subset of that – because feminism argues that men and women should have equal opportunities.

Which is not to say the same opportunities, but equal opportunities. I recognize the biological differences between the sexes. To me there is no distinction between conservatism and feminism, except that feminism is a smaller version of conservatism, it’s a subset of it.

Vox:  I agree that the logic holds. That’s within the logical structure your proposing that that is consistent, but the problem I have with that is that surely an aspect of conservatism is to conserve something. It seems readily apparent to me that feminism is intrinsically incapable of conserving anything from Western civilization, to even a functional, civilized society.

There is more, considerably more, there. Read the whole thing. Then discuss it here, keeping in mind that it is a transcript of a free-flowing conversation and I frequently have absolutely no idea what she’s going to throw at me next.

It’s actually a rather interesting challenge, especially in light of the fact that I know people are going to have hissy fits over anything that is worded in an infelicitious manner.