Tag: media

Irony: Gun Control version

A journalist tries to write an article about how easy it is to buy guns, is denied due to criminal record:

I was looking forward to shooting my new rifle the next day. I’ve shot guns. It’s fun. I was worried though, about having fun with guns in the current environment of outrage and horror. Had I been co-opted by the purchase process? By the friendly staff at Maxon’s?

 At 5:13 Sarah from Maxon called. They were canceling my sale and refunding my money. No gun for you. I called back. Why? “I don’t have to tell you,” she said.

 A few hours later, Maxon sent the newspaper a lengthy statement, the key part being: “it was uncovered that Mr. Steinberg has an admitted history of alcohol abuse, and a charge for domestic battery involving his wife.”

Well, didn’t see that coming.

The best part is how he tried, and failed, to set the Narrative.

Mr. Steinberg was very aggressive on the phone with Sarah, insisting he was going to write that we denied him because he is a journalist. “Journalist” is not a protected class, BTW. We contacted his editor and said that, while we don’t normally provide a reason for a denial, in this case to correct the record before you publish, here’s why; we pasted a couple links of press accounts of his past behavior and his admission of same. He’s free to believe or disbelieve that’s why he was denied, but that *is* why he was denied. There was no “We’ll see you in court!!!!” type of language from us – we simply want to set the record straight. That it undermined his thesis and rendered the column incoherent isn’t really our problem, is it?

Never talk to the media. Just do not do it. They are almost comically dishonest and they will go to any length in order to write the story they plan to write regardless of what the relevant facts happen to be.

And perhaps more to the point, they aren’t necessary anymore. The risk/reward ratio now tips heavily to the “why even bother” side. Furthermore, even just talking to them can be downright dangerous for the average citizen:

A Denver newspaper columnist is arrested for stalking a story subject. In Cincinnati, a television reporter is arrested on charges of child molestation. A North Carolina newspaper reporter is arrested for harassing a local woman. A drunken Chicago Sun-Times columnist and editorial board member is arrested for wife beating. A Baltimore newspaper editor is arrested for threatening neighbors with a shotgun. In Florida, one TV reporter is arrested for DUI, while another is charged with carrying a gun into a high school. A Philadelphia news anchorwoman goes on a violent drunken rampage, assaulting a police officer. In England, a newspaper columnist is arrested for killing her elderly aunt.

Unrelated incidents, or mounting evidence of that America’s newsrooms have become a breeding ground for murderous, drunk, gun-wielding child molesters? Answers are elusive, but the ever-increasing toll of violent crimes committed by journalists has led some experts to warn that without programs for intensive mental health care, the nation faces a potential bloodbath at the hands of psychopathic media vets.

Dukakis is inevitable

Now is the time in which all good Republicans put on long faces and pretend to be upset that Donald Trump is behind in the very early polls:

Just a few weeks ago, Trump supporters were upbeat because he was within just a few points of Hillary Clinton. This was a false dawn. What they didn’t take into account is that she was still in a pitched battle with Bernie Sanders, which meant the Democratic support she can count on in the fall was suppressed. Trump, having effectively won the nomination, was consolidating Republican support. Once Clinton effectively secured the nomination, which she has now done, the gap was bound to increase. The fact that Trump was still losing to Clinton when he had that advantage should actually have been a warning sign.

What should be particularly worrisome for those rooting for Trump is that things have gotten markedly worse. Negative views of Trump have increased 10 points in the last month. That is because he is acting just as he has acted all year. The hope that he’ll flip the switch and become more “presidential,” more unifying, and less repulsive just isn’t happening. The Trump attacks on Judge Curiel and his heritage, arguing that because Curiel was a “Mexican” (he is not) he had an “inherent conflict of interest” and was, therefore, unable to render a fair judgment–along with Trump dabbling in more crazy conspiracy theories (Vince Foster was murdered!) and now suggesting that the president is either connected to/sympathetic with Islamic terrorists–are all simply the latest additions to the same script.

Republicans now have to struggle with the realization of what they have done, the nature of the man their party has nominated, and the coming political catastrophe. It is a very painful time for the party of Lincoln.

On no! A single Bloomberg poll has Trump five points closer to Hillary than Bush was to Dukakis more than a month later in 1988! What a coming catastrophe!

Dukakis Lead Widens, According to New Poll
Published: July 26, 1988

In the aftermath of the Democratic National Convention, the party’s nominee, Michael S. Dukakis, has expanded his lead among registered voters over Vice President Bush, the probable Republican nominee, according to a Gallup Poll.

This was among the findings of a national public opinion poll of 948 registered voters conducted late last week for Newsweek magazine by the Gallup Organization. The telephone interviews took place on July 21, which was the last night of the convention, and on the night after that.

Fifty-five percent of the 948 registered voters interviewed in the poll said they preferred to see Mr. Dukakis win the 1988 Presidential election, while 38 percent said they preferred to see Mr. Bush win.

First they said he couldn’t win the nomination. Now they say he can’t win the election. Just watch and learn, grasshoppers. Watch and learn.

Don’t talk to the media!

In light of my ridiculous experience with Wired and after seeing how multiple media outlets turned to George RR Martin and John Scalzi to ask them to interpret my actions, I now turn down most media requests. I do so literally every week; I just turned down two yesterday alone. The media is not in the business of reporting the news, they are in the business of selling their masters’ Narrative.

In Free Speech Isn’t Free, Roosh explains that he learned the same lesson from the Canadian media.

I began to understand that the purpose of the mainstream media is to push a specific agenda while concealing the strength or victories of anyone who fights against that agenda. Montreal showed me how deliberate and pre-meditated it all was. There was little use talking to the media further when I already had my own effective media channels, so in Toronto I would refuse nearly all of the two dozen interview requests I received.

The mainstream media, especially the biggest outlets, are crypto-activist organizations that share nearly complete ideological overlap with mega-rich globalists and the most degenerate members of society, who help those globalists keep power and wealth by destroying tradition, the family unit, and nationalism. Social justice warriors are little Frankenstein creations of billionaires. That was hard for me to believe at first, but to see the machine whirl to action and be turned against me offered a confirmation that will stay with me for the rest of my life. The enemy is clear to me now. 

The key phrase there is “concealing the strength or victories of anyone who fights against that agenda”. That’s why the media comes running as soon as anyone starts to look like a threat, to shape the Narrative about them and minimize them. The media is not a microphone, it is a combination muzzle and fun house mirror. One gun shop owner learned why you don’t talk to them the hard way:

Yesterday the man in this video from the NY Daily News called and asked if he could come and interview us about the basic principles of how an AR-15 works. We acknowledged his offer so that we could prove that an AR-15 is indeed a great and safe weapon as stated in the video. After the video was filmed there was another Q&A type conversation on how things work in other countries, what are some of the things others believe would be a step into the right direction of gun control. To our knowledge we did not know that Mr. Kuntzman would completely turn things around and make our establishment look like one of anti-gun advocates.

We have received dozens of phone from all over the country in regards to the article. Many of these callers expressed disgust with the article and told us to stay away from the media. I can assure everyone that we do not support mental health screenings like they do in Europe and we don’t think that government officials should take away guns from people as it was portrayed in the article. Currently we are doing everything we can to take this article down because after reading it we are just as disgusted about it as all of you are. Our team here at Double Tap would like to sincerely apologize for the misunderstanding and report that we are doing everything in our power to get this article removed.

I implore all of our supporters to share our apology with everyone in order to help defend ourselves from the media who is doing anything in their power to blemish the face of all gun owners and attempting to add more rule to the fire of the attempt of the liberal gun-grabbing agenda.To those that are writing negative reviews about us, please understand we had no intentions of having this article cause such an issue, nor intentions of us looking like anti gun advocates but, to educate which in turn did the complete opposite due to Mr. Kuntzman. If anyone has anymore questions or concerns please feel free to come in or call us we will gladly discuss this issue with you.

Now, I do make occasional exceptions depending upon the journalist, the publication, and the specific situation. But in general, I now reject phone interview requests out of hand. If I agree to answer questions, I do it in writing and I keep the answers short enough that they cannot usefully edit them.  I do not ever do television; even if I was a major media figure I would not do any television that was not live, as the TV editing is particularly deceptive and dishonest.

Forget tolerance

Steve Sailer observes the media handwringing about the fact that Donald Trump keeps being proved correct by events:

Trump’s pragmatism was also calibrated to drive mad with rage the bipartisan Washington establishment that has grown rich off the conventional wisdom of Invade the World/Invite the World. The New York Times, for example, threw aside all pretense of objectivity, “reporting”:

Mr. Trump’s speech…represented an extraordinary break from the longstanding rhetorical norms of American presidential nominees. But if his language more closely resembled a European nationalist’s than a mainstream Republican’s, he was wagering that voters are stirred more by their fears of Islamic terrorism than any concerns they may have about his flouting traditions of tolerance and respect for religious diversity.

The #AltRight doesn’t give a quantum of a damn about “traditions of tolerance and respect for religious diversity”. We’ll do more than “flout” those traditions, we’ll fillet them before we incinerate the remains. We respect one religion, Christianity, even if we do not subscribe to it, because it is the basis of the Western Civilization formerly known as Christendom.

We’ve been told for decades that the Constitution is either a) a living document, or b) a meaningless piece of paper. Fine. We accept that. And now we will interpret every word however it happens to suit us at the moment, and we will consider ourselves as bound by it as we would by any other piece of paper used by the American Left in the toilets.

The old rules are dead. We’ll write the new ones.

On a personal note, I found it more than a little amusing to see Sailer take a perfectly justified shot at the Proposition Nation idiocy inherent in the concept of poetry as the legal basis for government policy.

After all, the fact that everybody in the world has the civil right to immigrate to America is written into the Zeroth Amendment to the Constitution. Granted, it’s not actually a law that any American ever voted on, it’s just an 1883 poem by Zionist Emma Lazarus. But how dare any candidate for president not treat it like holy writ just because it’s all bogus retconning by the New York media?

Don’t feel bad if you fell for it without ever thinking the matter through, as it is admittedly powerful rhetoric to which you were subjected as a child. The emotions, are they not moved? But there is no meaningful information content in rhetoric. And if you still buy into the Proposition Nation concept after its historical basis in retroactive rhyming rhetoric was pointed out to you, well, I’m sorry, but you’re observably an idiot.

It’s also nice to see the Magic Dirt term being adopted and utilized more widely. After all, as we know, rhetoric matters.

Book of the Week

Free Speech Isn’t Free: How 90 Men Stood Up Against The Globalist Establishment — And Won is a fascinating look behind the scenes of Roosh’s notorious speaking tour, which culminated this spring in one of the biggest, most unjustified attempted media lynchings I have ever witnessed. Roosh walks the reader through the entire experience of the tour and its aftermath, from conception to conclusion, in remarkably honest detail. He not only bares his thought processes, he bares his hopes and his fears in a way few writers would dare.

It is well worth reading, not only in its own right, but also to better understand the way in which the media SJWs and the SJW activists operate when they go into seek-and-destroy mode.

As some of you know, I played a very small part in helping Roosh turn the tables on the media lynch mob that was attempting to discredit and destroy him; in the section quoted below, Roosh describes how the unexpected viciousness of the attack journalism affected him, how he reestablished his equilibrium, and how he adroitly forced them to choose between serving as his microphone or backing off him and his family.

There are many battles in the future that I’m sure we will engage in, but one where a small guerilla army walked out on the open battlefield against a large regiment of infantry that had multiple reinforcements simply wasn’t one of them.

I firmly believe that it would have been absolute folly to proceed in such an engagement. While I wouldn’t mind gathering my best men and showing up at one of the locations, I couldn’t send others into the meeting when the local hosts weren’t properly vetted and where they didn’t even know beforehand who else would be attending. It was a recipe for disaster, and based on the events that ended up taking place on Saturday, my fears about members being harmed turned out to be accurate.

At the time the outrage was happening, I happened to be visiting my father’s house in a Washington, D.C. suburb for a short stay before returning back to Eastern Europe. On Thursday, February 4, a news crew with the Daily Mail came to the house while I was sleeping. They failed to hector my stepmom, a gentle Persian woman, into admitting I was there, and camped out in front of the house in the hopes of getting a story.

I went online, wondering how they were able to find my dad’s address so quickly, and noticed a series of messages from the hacking group Anonymous. It turned out that they had doxed the house earlier that morning. I was already under stress due to the media and government pressure, but now my mood turned to near panic.

Up to Thursday, I received over 100 threats, many of them credible. Now all of those deranged and gullible idiots had my father’s address. The threats continued to come in, including one that stated my family’s house would soon be burned to the ground. I figured that people would at least try to “swat” the house by making bogus calls to police saying there was a hostage situation inside, or even worse, come to the house and attempt to harm my family.

The first thing I did was call the local police. I opened the door when they came, not knowing that the Daily Mail had a telephoto lens pointed at the door. After explaining the story, they put a flag on the address against swatting attempts. Besides that, all they could do was advise me to contact the FBI because nearly all the threats were coming in from other jurisdictions. The Daily Mail story went live not long after they left.

Not so cool now! Pro-rape pick-up artist pictured in a sweat-stained T-shirt at the door of his mother’s home (where he lives in the BASEMENT!)

This is the man at the center of a worldwide storm after advocating legalizing rape on private property – in a sweat-stained T-shirt at the door of his mother’s house.

Daryush ‘Roosh’ Valizadeh, 36, the self-proclaimed ‘King of Masculinity’ called police after receiving death threats from around the world and canceled a series of ‘tribal meetings’ in 45 countries set for this weekend.

Valizadeh, who is at the center of public protests at home and in Canada, Australia and the UK, is on record as advocating women be banned from voting, describing a woman’s value as dependent on her ‘fertility and beauty’, and stating that women with eating disorders make the best girlfriends.

The article was shared over 100,000 times. While I could do without the false claim that I live with my mother, the story confirmed the dox and told the world that I was in fact currently located at the released address, which was shared on a Facebook account controlled by an Anonymous group with over 300,000 subscribers. The dox went viral itself, being viewed over one million times. I had friends from around the world asking me why my family’s address was popping up on their Facebook feed. It may have been the most viewed dox ever.

The situation seemed dire. After the media successfully painted me as a monster who is trying to legalize rape and organize rape mobs in cities around the world, they added a cherry on top by helping publicize my family’s address to people who wanted me dead. The media, whether deliberately or not, had put my family in great danger. I called a security firm and by nightfall there was an armed guard in front of the house. In the subsequent week, they defended the house against multiple news crews, pizza deliveries, and random men claiming to be plumbers or painters, but who suspiciously lacked work equipment.

I was relieved when the Daily Mail published a follow-up story claiming that I hired a “burly security guard,” because I knew it would deter people from coming to the house.

The self-styled ‘King of Masculinity’ has called in his own private security guard after claiming he had been threatened.


Roosh Valizadeh, who used a blog post – which he later said was satirical – to say that if a woman was on private property she could be legitimately raped, hired the bodyguard as global revulsion over his views grew.


When Daily Mail Online attempted to speak to Valizadeh at his mother’s basement where he is in hiding, his guard leaped up and warned our reporter off.


He said: ‘I can’t let you go there. I have got to protect him and myself. Nobody is going near his door.’

That night I apologized to my family for bringing danger upon them. They would have none of it, instead blaming the people who were responsible for the manufactured outrage. My dad said, “What are they going to do to me, anyway? Kill me? I’m already old.” My stepmom was as calm as a lamb, like nothing at all was happening. I asked her how she could remain so unaffected. She replied, “I prayed to Allah to keep us safe. Everything will be okay for us.” From outward appearances, they seemed relaxed while I was the nervous wreck.

I responded online to my family’s dox by sending a tweet that was less of a counterattack than a means to garner sympathy.

Whatever I’ve done in my life, my parents don’t deserve to be harmed because of my work.

While it wasn’t quite a nervous breakdown, it was a departure from my normal aggressive demeanor. Soon after I sent it out, I received an email from Vox Day asking for my number. He called me the next day, Friday, February 5, when I was in the middle of packing my bags. I planned to leave that night because the security firm advised me that it was best to make a visible exit from my family’s house to take the spotlight off of them.

“You’re reacting right now,” Vox said. “You’re not working based on a plan.”

“I’m feeling shell-shocked,” I replied. “I was prepared for a lot of things but not my family getting doxed. Besides hiring the security firm, I’m not sure what to do next.”

“You have to get the narrative back. The best way to do this is to call a press conference with the D.C. media and go after them hard. Otherwise they’re just going to keep attacking you.”

The last thing on my mind while trying to defend my family was going back on the attack, but I knew he was right. I sent out a tweet inviting members of the media to a press conference for the next evening. Within a couple of hours, I had over ten responses. I called up a hotel I used to take dates to when I was in my mid 20’s and reserved a conference room for one hour.

As you may recall, Roosh’s performance at the press conference was superlative. By the time it was over, the various reporters and their camera crews were scuttling back to England and Germany with their tails between their legs. The book includes the full transcript of the press conference in an appendix, and it merits inclusion in a future textbook that teaches one how to deal with a hostile crowd of journalists.

Mark Kern banned by Twitter

World of Warcraft developer Mark Kern kicked off Twitter:

Twitter has joined Facebook and Reddit in Silicon Valley’s post-Orlando hall of shame. They’ve become the latest social media platform to censor users for discussing this weekend’s Islamic terror attack.

The victim is Mark Kern, a highly prominent video game developer who worked on the original edition of Blizzard’s highly acclaimed World Of Warcraft, who was suspended from Twitter earlier today.

Kern currently runs the League For Gamers, a consumer advocacy group fighting censorship and moral panic in the video games industry. Kern, who had more than 61,000 followers on Twitter prior to his suspension, was a frequent critic of the platform for its drift towards censorship over the past two years. Now he’s been censored himself.

Unbelievable. The thought police are running completely amok in the wake of Orlando. Too much dangerous thinking!

UPDATE: And after stories on Breitbart and Drudge, he’s back.

4GW in Orlando

Glenn Reynolds contemplates the Orlando shootings and gives a shout out to William S. Lind in USA Today:

In the wake of the Orlando shootings, people are trotting out the usual
post-massacre talking points about gun control, terrorism, etc. But the
solutions aren’t so easy. Gun control is much stricter in Europe, but that hasn’t stopped mass shootings like the ones at Charlie Hebdo’s offices or at the Bataclan concert hall. (It’s also very strict in California, but that didn’t stop the shootings at San Bernardino.) Talking about gun control is mostly a way of avoiding a tough problem.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, was quick to tweet out that this vindicates his positions: “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!” But Trump’s proposal of a temporary moratorium on immigration of Muslims to America wouldn’t have prevented shooter Omar Mateen’s actions. Mateen wasn’t a recent immigrant but a  U.S. citizen born of Afghan parents, and he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State terrorist group, according to a Department of Homeland Security report cited by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

The thing is, proposals such as gun control are basically peacetime remedies, which don’t apply in time of war. But traditional wartime remedies might not work, either, because this is not a traditional war.

Instead, what we are facing is what William S. Lind calls “fourth-generation warfare.” Or maybe it’s even fifth-generation warfare: We’re not fighting armies. We’re not fighting guerrillas. We’re not even fighting traditional terrorists. Instead, we’re fighting an opponent who turns apparently law-abiding citizens (Mateen was licensed as a security guard and thus had passed background checks) into killers without anyone noticing. They’re not actually “lone wolf” terrorists; they’re more like human drones, attacking distant targets on command without warning.

While I disagree with Reynolds on the root of the problem – the problem is Islam’s physical presence in the West, not merely addressing “the jihadist strain of Islam” – it’s good to see him bringing a more sophisticated modern take on warfare into the public discourse. There is simply no way a conventional military approach, much less a conventional police approach, is going to suffice to address the challenge being posed by the third great wave of Islamic expansion.

It will take time for people to realize that this is an existential crisis for the West, as existential crises are, by their nature, much larger in scope than the average person can readily comprehend.

But, as those who have read the 4GW Handbook know, the answer to 4GW is either a) eliminating the fish by draining the sea, or b) more effective 4GW utilizing a better light infantry. It will be several years before either option will be on the table, but the sooner they enter into the conversation, the better.

Nothing is safe

The anti-SJW faction of #GamerGate is proved correct once again. It’s not about the subject at hand, it’s about whatever the Narrative happens to be at the moment. SJWs will attack anything and anyone they deem offensive. Forget video games, comics, and tabletop, even pigs are a potential battleground as far as SJWs are concerned.

One day I embarked on what I believed to be a simple, innocuous project: provide a list of cute little pigs being cute little pigs. Around the internet, these creatures have a few interpretations. Some call them micropigs (also known as mini pigs), believing them to be a special breed of animal that stay the size of a tiny piglet.

Some believe the whole micropig idea to be a hoax. From my research, I found the reality of the micropig to be somewhere in the middle. Sure, there were specially bred pigs that were smaller than their massive farm-dwelling counterparts, but they certainly didn’t stay baby-sized. They were, however, gosh darn cute in their younger years, so I decided to make a list of them being adorable while making sure to include a caveat that what you see is not, in fact, what you always get if you purchase a micropig.

I then added a few pictures of micropigs at an adult size for good measure. At the end of the day, though, I had the comfort of knowing that no sane person would look at a listicle of cute pigs and decide to purchase one the same day without, you know, doing a slight bit of research before throwing a few thousand dollars at a breeder.

I trusted in people’s ability to make smart decisions for themselves. When it comes to writing things on the internet, that is not a good decision….

Almost immediately, my list of cute pigs was seen by some very vocal people as a damaging portrayal of the micropig myth that leads to the abandonment and death of pigs around the globe every day. I was a monster, I had created a monster, and I should be shamed publicly for my creation.

The comments began, as they always do, on Facebook. The traffic for the piece was, at the time, record shattering for the site. But as the post started spreading, the comments started accumulating. Some genuinely appreciated the article for the cuteness it provided. Some tagged their friends to enjoy the cute pictures.

But some were enraged. Some worked in animal shelters that had pigs abandoned by people who thought their pet would stay a baby forever, but some were simply fighting the good fight for all people everywhere. I was wrong and, fueled by the ever-intoxicating assumption that they were right and needed to teach the world why I was wrong, they went on a tear.

They needed to save the public from themselves and, most importantly, from me, a caption writer on a listicle website.

Was I taking this too personally? Here’s the thing: When people are angry on the internet, they get personal. And they get mean. And boy, do they get creative.

Soon, people weren’t just commenting on the article. They found me on Facebook, on my photography website, and on Twitter.

 SJW delenda est. Identify and eject them without hesitation wherever you find them.