Tag: media

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.

Nicolas Kristof admits left-wing intolerance

It’s a rather remarkable admission, considering the average left-liberal’s ability to deny the difference between black and white, between male and female, and between American and non-American:

WE progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives.

Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

O.K., that’s a little harsh. But consider George Yancey, a sociologist who is black and evangelical.

“Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black,” he told me. “But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.”

I’ve been thinking about this because on Facebook recently I wondered aloud whether universities stigmatize conservatives and undermine intellectual diversity. The scornful reaction from my fellow liberals proved the point.

“Much of the ‘conservative’ worldview consists of ideas that are known empirically to be false,” said Carmi.

“The truth has a liberal slant,” wrote Michelle.

“Why stop there?” asked Steven. “How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots?”

To me, the conversation illuminated primarily liberal arrogance — the implication that conservatives don’t have anything significant to add to the discussion. My Facebook followers have incredible compassion for war victims in South Sudan, for kids who have been trafficked, even for abused chickens, but no obvious empathy for conservative scholars facing discrimination.

The truth is that they don’t believe in what they claim to believe. They think they want La Raza, Muslims, and American Indians at the table, but they’d be scared out of their gourds if they actually believed that they weren’t going to do the driving.

I am increasingly certain that the white liberal-left simply has no idea whatsoever what is in store for it or what the consequences of its actions are going to be. This should not be a surprise, as they show very short time preferences in every other aspect of their thinking. They simply can’t think outside of their childish “America is white and strong and always will be, so Mommy and Daddy will save us if our stupidity gets us into trouble” mode.

Anyhow, it’s just as well they underestimate and fail to understand us. It will make it that much easier to move them out of the way when the real world finally comes home to roost.

The eliminationist Left

The Washington Examiner discovers SJWs:

Is the American Right so wrong that the elites should use their power to exclude it from debate?

The Obama White House and Facebook both seem to think so, if recent stories are accurate.

Obama’s foreign policy team spun false stories about Iran to rally support for a nuclear deal and circumvent a debate on honest terms, according to a recent New York Times Magazine piece. The reason? Top Obama officials believed that “rational discourse” with its foreign-policy critics was impossible.

Facebook employees, meanwhile, “routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential ‘trending’ news section,” a former Facebooker told Gizmodo, a tech website….

This eliminationist tendency has been visible for years, including in
the works of the Left’s leading lights. If you have read liberal New
York Times blogger Paul Krugman with any regularity, you’re familiar
with the argument: The Right is fundamentally insane or dishonest or
both, and thus its arguments are unworthy of decent treatment or serious
consideration.

This is entirely normal in SJW circles. Anything they deem evil, from racism to sexism to homophobia to dead-naming, does not merit any discussion or defense, it is simply beyond the pale and thereby justifies every form of personal attack.

They don’t even bother to hide it. Back in 2013, for all their public histrionics, not a single person from the SFWA dared to actually argue the case that racism was bad and merited punishment, because a) they consider that to be self-evident, and, b) they are incapable of actually making a coherent case for it.

Which is absolutely fine. They don’t argue with us, so we don’t argue with them. We don’t talk to them at all. We simply define them as utterly and irrevocably evil, take them out without hesitation, and show them no mercy when they suddenly decide that they want to debate, discuss things, and appeal to our principles.

Notice how the SJWs in science fiction demand conclusive proof that they are pedophiles and anti-religious bigots while never requiring any to declare others to be racist, sexist, homophobic, cis-gendered white supremacists. We don’t need any proof either. They associate with, and even celebrate, rapists and pedophiles and other human detritus, and that’s all we need to damn them for it.

Persistent vandalism

SJWs simply never stop lying. They will use any and every opportunity to force history, science, and reality to fit their Narrative without any regard for the truth. It’s interesting to see that SJW Wikipedians have now gone too far even for the admins who historically tended to camp the page about me in order to prevent anyone from posting accurate information that might tend to make me look good.

(Protected “Vox Day”: Persistent vandalism: RFPP request ([Edit=Require autoconfirmed or confirmed access] (expires 08:52, 8 June 2016 (UTC)) [Move=Require autoconfirmed or confirmed access] (expires 08:52, 8 June 2016 (UTC))))

Why did they need to do this? Because an SJW took a page from Jeet Heer of New Republic and other media SJWs and attempted to run with the “white supremacist” theme.

Vox Day is an American publisher, activist, racist, [[science fiction writer]], journalist, misogynist, musician, [video game designer], and white supremacist. 

This is just one of a myriad of reasons we need new and better techno-cultural institutions.

You can’t shame the Alt Right

It’s fascinating to see how SJWs and other media types simply cannot grasp the fact that the tactics and techniques that worked in pre-internet days simply don’t function in the social media era.

The rise of Trump has been distressing to many people on many levels. It turned out that so many people were hungry for a message of strength, after years of “leading from behind” rhetoric, that they ignored that the message came with vague platitudes and limited workable proposals. For Jews it exposed a lingering suspicion that there exist a lot of people who simply don’t like and don’t accept us as Americans. For Republican Jews, who pride themselves on voting with the people who have unwavering support for Israel, it was especially sad to see these people consider themselves on our political side. When Donald Trump inevitably fades away, and he will with either a bang or a whimper, perhaps these people will retreat back into the shadows. But it will no longer be possible for Jews to ignore that they are there.

It seems very, very difficult for Jews to understand that most people do not give a quantum of a damn about them. That’s not a bad thing, most people don’t care about Eskimos or Filipinos or Malaysians either. People care about themselves and their own nation. That’s pretty much it.

And why would Americans accept Jews as Americans if all they ever hear from Jews is a few of them on television complaining about how everyone hates Jews, how terrible, awful, and evil Americans are, and how white America needs to be destroyed? How is that even conceivable?

Here’s the reality: holocaustianity has timed out. No one under the age of 40 cares any more about it than they do about the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD. A lot of them don’t care about being called racist or sexist, so why would they care about being called anti-semitic? They think being called a Nazi by lame old people is hilarious; their usual response is to bury the accuser in dank memes full of images that would give the average Baby Boomer a stroke.

The shame game is over. This is the new reality. Deal with it or deny it, but it’s here to stay regardless.

#Trump2016 vs #NeverTrump

A short debate on Donald Trump’s victorious campaign for the Republican nomination and the nature of conservatism between me and Louise Mensch of Heat Street:

LM: This is obviously a sad day for me and a terrific day for you as Donald Trump is crowned the presumptive nominee by the GOP establishment. Last night, while we were talking with each other, we were discussing the nature of conservatism.

To me, my duty as a conservative is to oppose Donald Trump because he’s not a conservative. I said that, to me, conservatism stands for equality of opportunity. You said in your view, it never had done. How do you define conservatism?

VD: I define conservatism as an attitude more than a coherent ideology. If you look at the history of conservatism, which you as a British individual will be aware, it really is something different to the ideas that underlie the British Conservative Party or the Tory Party. Russell Kirk attempted to turn that inherited tradition into a more coherent ideology, and he came up with the 10 foundational points of what he terms conservatism. So it’s less an ideology than an attitude – and a relative posture.

 Equality of opportunity is merely something that fits that attitude more than it is a founding point of the ideology, in the way that the “labor theory of value” is something that underlies the ideology of socialism.

LM You think that leftism is ideological, but conservatism is only an attitude?

VD: To a certain extent. Socialism is clearly a distinctive set of ideologies. There are of course different socialisms, from Fabianism to Marxism. Progressivism – today’s liberalism – is also a coherent ideology. Conservatism is intrinsically a reaction to other ideologies rather than an ideology of its own.

LM: You don’t think Conservatism stands for anything apart from opposing Liberalism, to use that umbrella term for the left?

VD: Exactly correct. There’s a common saying that today’s conservative is yesterday’s liberal. Conservatism, if we look at the positions that it holds, is usually 20-25 years behind what yesterday’s liberals were. Today, John F. Kennedy would be regarded not only as a Republican – but one who was a little bit to the right.

LM: To me, that seems defeatist for a guy that I see, though I may differ with you on many things, at the very least as an alpha male go-getter. You’re not behind any particular set of principles. You just want to oppose somebody else! Doesn’t that put all the power in their hands?

VD: It does, but it’s not defeatist for me because, as I have repeatedly told people for well over a decade, I am not a conservative. I am an extremist and I’m a radical. That’s why I don’t identify with this conservatism that never conserves anything, that goes from one noble defeat to the next, and has completely failed to conserve anything, even the United States of America.

Read the whole thing there. It was an oral debate, not a written one, but I think I managed to avoid tripping over my convoluted sentence structures for the most part. The bet was funny; I don’t think she was quite expecting THAT!