Tag: media

We are the spectre

Allum Bokhari thoughtfully provides establishment conservatives with a Guide to the Alt Right:

A specter is haunting the dinner parties, fundraisers and think-tanks of the Establishment: the specter of the “alternative right.” Young, creative and eager to commit secular heresies, they have become public enemy number one to beltway conservatives — more hated, even, than Democrats or loopy progressives.

The alternative right, more commonly known as the alt-right, is an amorphous movement. Some — mostly Establishment types — insist it’s little more than a vehicle for the worst dregs of human society: anti-Semites, white supremacists, and other members of the Stormfront set. They’re wrong.

Previously an obscure subculture, the alt-right burst onto the national political scene in 2015. Although initially small in number, the alt-right has a youthful energy and jarring, taboo-defying rhetoric that have boosted its membership and made it impossible to ignore.

It has already triggered a string of fearful op-eds and hit pieces from both Left and Right: Lefties dismiss it as racist, while the conservative press, always desperate to avoid charges of bigotry from the Left, has thrown these young readers and voters to the wolves as well.

National Review attacked them as bitter members of the white working-class who worship “father-Führer” Donald Trump. Betsy Woodruff of The Daily Beast attacked Rush Limbaugh for sympathising with the “white supremacist alt-right.” BuzzFeed begrudgingly acknowledged that the movement has a “great feel for how the internet works,” while simultaneously accusing them of targeting “blacks, Jews, women, Latinos and Muslims.”

The amount of column inches generated by the alt-right is a testament to their cultural punch. But so far, no one has really been able to explain the movement’s appeal and reach without desperate caveats and virtue-signalling to readers.

Part of this is down to the alt-right’s addiction to provocation. The alt-right is a movement born out of the youthful, subversive, underground edges of the internet. 4chan and 8chan are hubs of alt-right activity. For years, members of these forums – political and non-political – have delighted in attention-grabbing, juvenile pranks. Long before the alt-right, 4channers turned trolling the national media into an in-house sport.

I leave it to you to decide whether we belong with:

  • The intellectuals
  • The natural conservatives
  • The meme team
  • The 1488ers 

Regardless of their merits and demerits, all of these alt-righters are to be preferred to the cuckservatives and the GOPe sellouts.  I’ve been called “an alt-right figurehead” and I am perfectly fine with that.

And if you’re going to call me a nationalist, that’s fine. Just make sure that you get it right and call me a “red nationalist”.

2015 Book of the Year

Bernard Chapin, of Chapin’s Inferno, names SJWs Always Lie his 2015 book of the year:

Reading a book four times is a very rare endeavor for me but it’s a true testament to the value of Vox’s insight. We fight the left here, and SJWs Always Lie is a great “how to” guide for those of you at home. I made two videos concerning the work in the fall but I had a ton of questions to ask him. He’s a very wise guy and it even sounds as if RooshV actively sought out his advice in regards to his immaculate press conference. Roosh’s tactics were completely in line with the rules Vox lays out in the book.

While I’m pleased that SJWAL has been so well-received by so many people, and I very much appreciate the distinction, it is regrettable that the book is necessary in the first place. I look forward to the time when it will be regarded as a curiosity, a historical artifact, and people will wonder if an SJW had something to do with the Whig Party, and what “social justice” might have been.

By the way, Roosh did a hell of a job with that press conference. Because people don’t pay attention to negative accomplishments, most haven’t noticed the way in which it killed the Narrative and completely shut down a global media meme in one fell swoop. It was magnificent. That is something that will need to be analyzed and explicated in SJWADD.

Bernard interviewed me about SJWAL yesterday. And I have to confess, at this point, it is entirely possible that he knows the contents better than I do.

The Ted Cruz affair crisis

The National Enquirer has run a story about “The 5 Romps that will destroy Ted Cruz”, complete with pictures of the five women with whom he has supposedly had affairs.

Oh dear, the National Enquirer has come out with a story claiming evidence of multiple sexual trysts by presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz.

Worse yet for the Cruz camp, the framework within the article is structurally very concerning:The National Enquirer is indeed a tabloid – and as such there are various grains of salt that should be applied when reviewing anything they present.

However, that said, they have been unfortunately accurate for more
than a few presidential hopefuls:  Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson and John
Edwards to name a few of the more infamous examples. Beyond the story itself there’s a few presenting elements which point
to a high degree of confidence, and as a consequence ‘legal
avoidance’, on the publishers’ part.

Firstly, they post pictures of the collective mistresses.  NE would never legally “go there” if they did not hold a very reasonable certainty the outlined players were factually part of the story.

Despite being partially-obscured, three of the five women alleged to have been involved with Cruz have already been identified: Katrina Pierson, Sarah Isgur Flores and Amanda Carpenter. This story was already in the works at Breitbart, as Allum Bokhari had it back in February but was not permitted to run with it. The current timing strikes me as intriguing given the fact that Donald Trump already warned the Cruz campaign that there would be reprisals for their advertised attack on his wife Melania.

It also looks as if the Rubio campaign had the dirt on Cruz, but sat on it in order to keep him viable against Donald Trump.

We got us a runner

Matt Walsh bravely strode forth to conquer the Lion Guard:

Matt Walsh ‏@MattWalshBlog
I will debate any conservative media Trump shill who made my blacklist. I’m “just a blogger” so it should be easy to beat me, right?

Someone brought it to my attention, and as will probably surprise no one, I answered the call:

Ronald James ‏@ron3name
If you’re serious hit up @voxday. He’s pretty good at demolishing churchian cucks, when he has time and can be bothered.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
.@ron3names @MattWalshBlog I will debate you any time, Matt. And yes, it will be very easy to beat you up.

Thereby prompting Matt to imitate a contortion artist in coming up with excuses for why he is only going to debate people with their own show, which is to say, people who don’t know who Matt Walsh is and could not care less. One observer on Twitter characterized it thusly:

>be a cuck
>offer to debate
>vox: ahem
>ohshit.exe
>to cuck/not to cuck
>”I don’t debate trolls!”
>secret king wins…

See, Matt is TOO IMPORTANT a blogger to debate another blogger. Especially one whose readership he DWARFS!

Matt Walsh ‏@MattWalshBlog
My readership is several million a month. Dwarfs yours and it’s not close.

And yet, he keeps running, running, running. Diagnosis: Gamma.

The more things change….

It’s interesting to see how the new media, particularly Twitter, Wikipedia, and Facebook, are blithely walking in the footsteps of the old media:

When Bill Kovach decided circa 1987 that the Atlanta papers needed a bureau in Nairobi, he could afford to do it, because the paper was making a handsome profit from advertising revenue. The fact that advertising ultimately paid the bills — the source of revenue, whereas the salaries of the newsroom staff were an expense — was an aspect of journalism that a lot of Good for Democracy types never really figured out. Bottom-line considerations were far from the minds of most people in our nation’s newsrooms 25 years ago, before Al Gore invented the Internet, and then some guy named Matt Drudge became America’s Editor-in-Chief.

Oh, the pages and pages of classified ads — help wanted, real estate,
used cars, whatever — that were once such a magnificent revenue
generator for newspaper publishers. Oh, the display ads from department
stores, and the full-color advertising inserts stuffed inside that thick
Sunday paper. Nearly all gone now — gone with the wind, along with the
fat profit margins that allowed Bill Kovach the luxury of force-feeding
readers in Atlanta their journalistic broccoli about the famine in
Sudan. Gone, those glory days when newsrooms were so crowded, and every
major metropolitan paper had an “investigative journalism” team of a
half-dozen hotshots whose bylines rarely appeared in print except on
those tedious five-part series written for the eyes of the Pulitzer
Prize judges.

Yeah, once upon a time, every newspaper in every state capital in
America — from Tallahassee to Juneau, from Augusta, Maine, to Honolulu,
Hawaii — had its own local crew of would-be Woodward and Bernsteins who
believed they were producing journalism that was Good for Democracy.

Gone! All gone now!

In the same way the old media chased off its readers with what McCain calls “broccoli journalism”, the new media is chasing off its readers by telling them what they can and cannot say. In both cases, it is because the media wrongly believes it, and not its readers, are in control.

And that is only going to be of benefit to what we might call the next media, or if you prefer, the Alt Right media.

Well done, Dread Ilk

Mike Cernovich provides an analysis of his Kickstarter’s exceptional performance:

Traffic sources to Silenced:

  • Twitter – 57%
  • Direct via D&P – 24%
  • Vox Day – 5%

Kickstarter traffic twitter.25 PM

As you can see, having a large website and social media is important.
This is sort of a duh point, but seeing data put everything into
context. It also helps to have friends who help you. This is also duh,
although you guys wouldn’t believe how people try using me every day
while offering me nothing.

I have no doubt that more than a few Ilk found their way to the Kickstarter by way of Twitter and Danger & Play, mostly because I initially went there via Twitter myself. But no matter how you got there, I’m very pleased to see how many of you have been willing to support the man who has become one of my closest social media allies.

It’s that combination of selflessness and enthusiasm that sets the Dread Ilk apart; I can’t tell you how many public figures, some of them names much better known than mine, ask me how I do it and why I have such phenomenal “followers”.

To which my response is always the same. I don’t do anything. The Dread Ilk do. I don’t have followers. I’m not a leader. I don’t lead anyone anywhere. I simply go and people decide to accompany me or not. One of the primary problems that those who consider themselves leaders have is that they delude themselves into thinking that they somehow control their supporters and followers. But they don’t, not even when they police them with fear and violence.

I never take anyone’s support for granted, not Mike’s and not yours. All of us are free and independent individuals. All of us have our own agendas, our own interests, and our own free will. And that is why I am so appreciative of the fact that many of you are willing to walk alongside me.

Except, of course, for the VFM. Them, we have to keep chained, leashed, and kenneled, lest they inadvertently lay waste to the countryside. I may be the Supreme Dark Lord, but I’m not irresponsible.

Ignoring the message

David Brooks promises newfound respect for the people whose message he is refusing to receive:

The question is: Should deference be paid to this victor? Should we bow down to the judgment of these voters?

Well, some respect is in order. Trump voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else.

Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country….

Donald Trump is an affront to basic standards of honesty, virtue and citizenship. He pollutes the atmosphere in which our children are raised. He has already shredded the unspoken rules of political civility that make conversation possible. In his savage regime, public life is just a dog-eat-dog war of all against all.

As the founders would have understood, he is a threat to the long and glorious experiment of American self-government. He is precisely the kind of scapegoating, promise-making, fear-driving and deceiving demagogue they feared.

Trump’s supporters deserve respect. They are left out of this economy. But Trump himself? No, not Trump, not ever.

It’s amusing to Brooks declare, in the same column, that he is concerned about “a threat to the long and glorious experiment of American self-government” while wondering “should we bow down to the judgment of these voters” and ultimately concluding, no, he will not.

Brooks is an anti-democratic elitist who thinks, wrongly, that his opinion is still relevant. And, sooner or later, he will go the way of all those who set themselves in the path of a popular uprising against a corrupt and enervated elite.

Trump’s supporters don’t want David Brooks’s respect. They want his scalp.

Adios Gawker

This should bring the Denton empire to an end sooner rather than later:

Hulk Hogan Gets $115M Verdict Against Gawker at Sex Tape Trial. Weighing free speech against privacy, a Florida jury has decided to uphold the sanctity of the latter by turning in a $115 million verdict against Gawker over its 2012 posting of a Hulk Hogan sex tap.

Showing someone else’s video isn’t free speech. But regardless, it’s good to see the one of GG’s most egregious enemies going down.

Cernovich’s video analysis summarized:

  •     Gawker had excellent legal counsel, this was simply a case no one could win.
  •     New York snark does not translate well to judges and juries.
  •     Gawker will need to post an appeal bond of 10% of the damages verdict.
  •     The jury may award up to 3 times the $115 million in punitive damages, for a total award of hundreds of millions of dollars.
  •     Gawker’s revenue last year were around $44 million. There’s no way Gawker can afford to pay this verdict.
  •     Gawker owns several websites like Jezebel and Kotaku. Those sites may be sold off to the (lowest) bidder.
  •     In order to appeal the verdict, Gawker must put up the full verdict amount, or pay 10% (non-refundable) to a company. Bottom line: Gawker will need to pay millions of dollars out of pocket to appeal the Hulk Hogan verdict.