What is your business?

Restaurants are learning the hard way that they are not in the business of politics. Not for long, anyhow:

Reviewers flooded the Yelp page of a Canadian restaurant with one-star reviews after a manager was fired for kicking out a man wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat.

The Teahouse in Vancouver’s Stanley Park has come under fire for the incident, which occurred less than a week after White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was kicked out of a Virginia restaurant.

The negative reviews came from both sides of the aisle, with some critiquing the restaurant for kicking out the patron, and other tearing into the restaurant for firing the manager.

“As a person with a strong moral backbone, I had to take a stand against this guest’s choice of headwear while in my former place of work. Absolutely no regrets,” the former employee told CBC News. The restaurant owners said they fired the employee because his actions did not align with their policy of hospitality and inclusiveness.

It’s about time the Right joined the Culture War. 50 years of constant retreat haven’t worked out so well, after all.


Hapless heroes, pathetic bad guys

Jagi Lamplighter explains why the degenerate Left can’t create memorable characters anymore, not even interesting villains like the bad guys of yore:

It is not enough to have an evil snow queen or rat king, the good little man who was kind and loving must be warped beyond recognition into something vile, lest the villain be anyone who we might accidentally admire.

The same thing happened in Disney’s Maleficent.

Disney cartoons feature many fine villains, but none stand out for their force and majesty as much as Malificent, the wicked fairy who is so angry that she has been slighted at a christening that she curses the family and tries to kill the child.

Malificent is impressive. She is funny. She curses an innocent child, just because she is miffed. When, sixteen years later, she leanrs that her minions, goblins and gargoyls,  are still looking in cradles for a missing baby– instead of a young lady who has grown up–Malificent utters her eerie, silvery, laugh. Then she blasts them with a lightning bolt from her magic wand and declares: “Oh, they’re hopeless. A disgrace to the forces of evil!”

But Malificent herself is no disgrace. When it comes time to fight the prince she turns into a gigantic dragon and calls up on the most infernal forces of all.

This gives her a majesty that fits with the evil magnificence of her name. She was spectacular in her villainy.

Too spectacular for the Degenerati, apparently.

In the original Sleeping Beauty – in some ways the most beautiful of all the Disney cartoons – the backdrops were done by a well-known painter. ( I used to sell his works when I worked at a gallery.) – Malificent curses king Stephan, a man who is both a kind king and a loving husband and father. His only crime is that he left the evil fairy off his guest list. He is good, and he is innocent. The horror that befalls his nation is appalling, and he is undeserving of this terrible fate.

In the recent movie about a being who happens to have a similar look and name to our magnificent villainess, the main character, Faux-Malificent, is not majestic.  She is weak and innocent. She falls in love with a man, and this dastardly individual betrays her sweet love and cuts off her wings, leaving her bereft, a victim.

How sad. How tragic. What a victim she is. No wonder she grew up to be such a…unpleasant fairy creature.

In the movie, that man is…the future King Stephan.

It is Geppetto all over again. Big-hearted Geppetto cannot be kindly, he has to be an evil mastermind. Good-hearted King Stephan cannot be innocent, he has to be the cad who screwed over the future villainess.

In modern stories, good men become cads and creeps so that the bad people, like Malificent and the Big Bad Wolf, can be misunderstood, pathetic.  What effect do these changes have on the story? They mitigate the wickedness. If the villain is now a victim, then the villainy is now justified.

This is why Arkhaven is eventually going to surpass Marvel and DC. They cannot bear to address either virtue or wickedness.


So much for the American Way

Converged DC is WAY past doubling-down now. Superman is all about refugees now.

DC@DCComics
Superman stands up for what’s right. Did you also know he’s a refugee? This #WorldRefugeeDay, be like Superman and stand up for what’s right. #StandWithRefugees and @theIRC.

Warner Bros.@WarnerBrosEnt
 Superman always stands up for what’s right. Did you know he’s a refugee?  Refugees contribute to the fabric of our society.  Stand on the right side of history this World Refugee Day. #StandWithRefugees and @theIRC https://www.rescue.org/article/famous-refugees

These people are going to have a stroke when Alt★Hero #2 comes out on Monday. The digital edition, to be specific. Because Michael Martel also has a statement to make about immigration.

But it’s not just the Big Two that are converged. If anything IDW is even worse.

IDW Publishing’s Editorial Director of Graphic Novels & Collections Justin Eisinger threatened to kill President Donald Trump and threatened violence against his supporters. Eisinger implied President Donald Trump should be taken to the guillotine and have his head chopped off just like they did during the French Revolution. But before he threatened to kill Trump via guillotine he promoted violence against Trump supporters by asking a reporter if she punched a Trump supporter in the face.

We’re in this to win this. But this isn’t a one-shot deal or a summer-long campaign. It’s going to be a long march to take an entire industry away from our cultural enemies. Fortunately, they are not only evil, they are also sick, stupid, and emotionally incontinent.

Under Buckley’s leadership, Marvel began successful annual publishing events that brought entire lines of books together, such as Civil War and Secret Wars, launched a series of reboots and rebrands and brought more ethnic and gender diversity to the company’s hero lineup… The promotion is seen partly as a doubling down of the company….

Yeah it is.


SJWs converge everything

Even hardcore liberal organizations are not immune from convergence:

The American Civil Liberties Union will weigh its interest in protecting the First Amendment against its other commitments to social justice, racial equality, and women’s rights, given the possibility that offensive speech might undermine ACLU goals. “Our defense of speech may have a greater or lesser harmful impact on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed,” wrote ACLU staffers in a confidential memo obtained by former board member Wendy Kaminer.

This is why even left-wing luminaries like Jordan Peterson are beginning to be concerned about SJWs. It’s not that they are on our side, not in the slightest. They simply don’t want to be subsumed and devoured, but they will be, because nothing short of the confident right-wing nationalism they also reject is capable of resisting those who can play the equality card with more credibility than traditional liberals, let alone cucks and conservatives.

Corporations can’t make money, colleges can’t educate, and civil liberties organizations can’t defend their very raison d’etre. Convergence is corporate cancer.


The infiltrated evangelicals

This fake evangelical minister is an excellent example of why it is time to Make Inquisition Great Again. He’s what they used to call a “marrano” in Spain. Notice how what he is preaching just happens to produce exactly the same sort of self-derailing consequences as a) the political Mark Levins preaching atomic individualism, b) the psychiatric Jordan Petersons preaching atomic individualism, and c) the conservative Ben Shapiros preaching atomic individualism.

Rev. Rob Schenck, a prominent evangelical minister and founding president of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Institute, said Tuesday that evangelical Christians “sold” their principles in supporting President Trump and called for a return to the message of the Gospel.

“The justification for support of Trump is he is seen as Cyrus, a megalomaniac mass murderer, so I guess that qualifies,” said Schenck at a luncheon in Washington, D.C., for his new book Costly Grace. “It’s the ends justifying the means. We support this ungodly character with massive flaws so we can get what he’s giving us. We did a deal with Donald Trump. We sold our principles if not our souls to get a laundry list of promises.”

In his book, Schenck discusses his 1970s conversion from nominal Judaism to Christianity and his subsequent 1980s political activism as a “leader of the most extreme wing of the anti-abortion movement.”

In the preface to Costly Grace, Schenck writes about rediscovering the life and writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an evangelical German pastor and spy who was hanged in an extermination camp near the end of World War II because of his opposition to Adolf Hitler. Schenck writes that he felt Bonhoeffer’s time reflects our own.

“My thesis was simple: For American evangelicals, the lines between theology and politics have become blurred, eroding the boundaries that distinguish the spiritual from the temporal, generating confusion among many believers about their Christian and political identities, exposing them to the temptation of political idolatry,” he said. “What had happened to the German Christians was happening to us.”

Schenck now leads the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Institute, a nonprofit institution that seeks to apply Bonhoeffer’s theological and ethical insights to the social concerns of modern times, through lectures, discussions, and published material. Since his discovery of Bonhoeffer, he now tries to “liberate the evangelical community from a politicized gospel and to urge partisan conservatives to move beyond social battles and forsake the politics of hate, fear, and violence,” according to his book. Describing his current political views during the meeting, he said, “I have far more in common with my mainline brothers and the Episcopal bishop of Washington.”

I have no doubt at all that Schenck has everything in common with them. It’s much more likely that this prominent guy, this eminent personage, is a Satan-worshipping globalist than a genuine Christian. Literally everything these infiltrators do is focused on convincing Christians, conservatives, Americans, nationalists, and whites to unilaterally disarm so they can be conquered by their enemies.

Schenck also spoke out against American evangelicals’ “embrace of the popular gun culture.” To illustrate his point, he pulled out a Bible that doubled as a gun holster, as gasps erupted from the crowd. “How did we go for our reverence for the Second Commandment and replace that with reverence for the Second Amendment?” Schenck said.

Literally EVERYTHING. Hey, the God-Emperor has already promised us Space Marines, so it can’t be too much longer until he gives us Inquisition and Crusade as well.


The ostrich strategy

I don’t think simply putting your hands over your ears and refusing to listen to your customers, users, and players is an effective customer service strategy. Or marketing strategy, for that matter.

The folks who are running the Battlefield V subreddit are done listening to your complaints about historical accuracy. This week, a new rule was put in place by the group running it where the discussions about the game not being accurate to what happened in World War II are over. Originally, the post said “No more bitching about historical accuracy, it’s a game, not a history book. Violations will have consequences.” But that text was then edited to a somewhat friendlier version below.

Edit: we get that y’all have valid criticism about battlefield V and the customisation options within the game. Sadly, this subreddit has proven to be unable to have a civil discussion about these things without devolving into name calling and slapfights. …

Reddit admins have confirmed brigading and the modteams of the subs in question are fully cooperating to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Hate us all you want but we’re done with this bullshit.

Of course, you know that Dice, EA, and the subredditors will proceed to claim that no one has any problem with their idiotic SJW historical revisionism because they haven’t seen or heard any complaints about it.

They may be done with this bullshit, but I’m done with Battlefield. And I’m very far from the only high-level player to turn my back on the game.


Steam tells SJWs to take a hike

This is the correct way to publicly respond to SJW demands and it is the right and reasonable attitude for companies in the game industry to take. It is encouraging to see Steam take the lead on this by comprehensively rejecting SJW demands.

Recently there’s been a bunch of community discussion around what kind of games we’re allowing onto the Steam Store. As is often the case, the discussion caused us to spend some time examining what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how we could be doing it better. Decision making in this space is particularly challenging, and one that we’ve really struggled with. Contrary to many assumptions, this isn’t a space we’ve automated – humans at Valve are very involved, with groups of people looking at the contents of every controversial title submitted to us. Similarly, people have falsely assumed these decisions are heavily affected by our payment processors, or outside interest groups. Nope, it’s just us grappling with a really hard problem.

Unfortunately, our struggling has resulted in a bunch of confusion among our customers, developer partners, and even our own employees. So we’ve spent some time thinking about where we want to be on this, and we’d like to talk about it now. But we also think it’s critical to talk about how we’ve arrived at our position, so you can understand the trade-offs we’re making.

The challenge is that this problem is not simply about whether or not the Steam Store should contain games with adult or violent content. Instead, it’s about whether the Store contains games within an entire range of controversial topics – politics, sexuality, racism, gender, violence, identity, and so on. In addition, there are controversial topics that are particular to games – like what even constitutes a “game”, or what level of quality is appropriate before something can be released.

Common questions we ask ourselves when trying to make decisions didn’t help in this space. What do players wish we would do? What would make them most happy? What’s considered acceptable discussion / behavior / imagery varies significantly around the world, socially and legally. Even when we pick a single country or state, the legal definitions around these topics can be too broad or vague to allow us to avoid making subjective and interpretive decisions. The harsh reality of this space, that lies at the root of our dilemma, is that there is absolutely no way we can navigate it without making some of our players really mad.

In addition, Valve is not a small company – we’re not a homogeneous group. The online debates around these topics play out inside Valve as well. We don’t all agree on what deserves to be on the Store. So when we say there’s no way to avoid making a bunch of people mad when making decisions in this space, we’re including our own employees, their families and their communities in that.

So we ended up going back to one of the principles in the forefront of our minds when we started Steam, and more recently as we worked on Steam Direct to open up the Store to many more developers: Valve shouldn’t be the ones deciding this. If you’re a player, we shouldn’t be choosing for you what content you can or can’t buy. If you’re a developer, we shouldn’t be choosing what content you’re allowed to create. Those choices should be yours to make. Our role should be to provide systems and tools to support your efforts to make these choices for yourself, and to help you do it in a way that makes you feel comfortable.

With that principle in mind, we’ve decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling. Taking this approach allows us to focus less on trying to police what should be on Steam, and more on building those tools to give people control over what kinds of content they see.

Give people control over what they want to see, but otherwise stay out of it. That’s the best approach for large corporations to take, although they’re still going to have to get rid of their internal SJWs if they want to avoid eventual convergence. It’s good to see the game industry refusing to back down despite the near-total convergence of the so-called games media.


Running and hiding is not the only option

Even nice, fastidious cucks like Rod Dreher are beginning to grasp that the remorseless Alt-Right is fast becoming the only real option for the sane and civilized:

Now, normalizing drag queens for children is the big woke thing. We’ve had Drag Queen Story Hours in libraries nationwide. Now Netflix is turning drag queens into animated superheroes, and RuPaul’s streaming service is turning drag queens into child superheroes.

Note well that Lactatia was photographed above at beloved drag queen RuPaul’s recent drag convention.

Can’t you see what’s happening?

You might think — I certainly hope you think — that your child will not be exposed to this filth. The thing is, your child, and all of us, have to live in a world in which this is normal, and in which the popular culture thinks that dressing little boys up like sexually provocative women is not only permissible, but a sign of cultural progress….

This is what I’m trying to convey in The Benedict Option.  Withdraw from this decadent culture, build ourselves up, teach those who are willing to be taught, and then build our versions of abbeys, to which Christians struggling in the world can rely on to form their own children.

If not now, you conservative Christian readers, then when? What’s it going to take for you to get serious?

God never told us to be tolerant of wickedness in our midst, or to run away, hide, and hope it leaves us alone. He told us to eliminate it. Moderates like Rod are barely able to denounce it, or to do so without trying to distance themselves from those who will not tolerate this. That’s why fewer and fewer people are listening to the moderates anymore.

Toleration of evil means eventual submission to it. And the only limits that evil ever recognizes are those that are imposed on it. Tolerance has failed. Conservatism has failed. Moderation has failed. And no amount of harrumphing, posturing, bowtie-twiddling, and bafflegabbling can conceal those failures any longer.


DC to Marvel: “Hold my beer”

If you think the SJW convergence in comics was bad already, just wait and see how DC is rebranding its Vertigo imprint.

“It’s time to rebuild DC Vertigo. We’re returning to our roots by spotlighting the most exciting new voices in comics, as well as bringing new voices to comics. From the corners of television, games, music, activism, podcasting, comics and more, all of our creators are passionate and have something to say. These sophisticated stories have amazing new characters and vast worlds to explore. That’s what it has always been about for me—new stories, new voices, new possibilities. We’re creating a new generation of DC Vertigo classics for readers of all genres.”

The DC Vertigo brand will expand its slate with seven new series: Border Town, Hex Wives, American Carnage, Goddess Mode, High Level,  Safe Sex, and Second Coming.

Okay… so who are these exciting new voices and what are these sophisticated stories?

  • “When a crack in the border between worlds releases an army of monsters from Mexican folklore into the small town of Devil’s Fork, Arizona, the residents blame the ensuing weirdness—the shared nightmares, the otherworldly radio transmissions, the mysterious goat mutilations—on “God-dang illegals.” With racial tensions supernaturally charged, it’s up to new kid in town Frank Dominguez and a motley crew of high school misfits to discover what’s REALLY going on.”
  •  “The women are too powerful. They must be tamed.” A malevolent conspiracy of men brainwashes a coven of witches to be subservient, suburban housewives. But it’s only a matter of time before the women remember their power…
  • “In this thrilling crime saga, disgraced FBI agent Richard Wright, who is biracial but can pass for white, goes undercover in a white supremacist group believed to be responsible for the death of a fellow agent.”
  • “In a near future where all of humanity’s needs are administered by a godlike A.I., it’s one young woman’s horrible job to do tech support on it. But when Cassandra finds herself violently drawn into a hidden and deadly digital world beneath our own, she discovers a group of super-powered women and horrific monsters locked in a secret war for the cheat codes to reality.”
  • “Hundreds of years after the world ended and human society was rebuilt from scratch, a self-interested smuggler with a price on her head is forced to traverse a new continent of danger and mystery to deliver a child messiah to High Level, a mythical city at the top of the world from which no one has ever returned.”
  • “A dystopian sci-fi thriller about a ragtag team of sex workers fighting for the freedom to love in a world where sexual pleasure is monitored, regulated and policed by the government.”
  • “God sends Jesus to Earth in hopes that he will learn the family trade from Sun-Man, an all-powerful superhero, who is like the varsity quarterback son God never had. But, upon his return to Earth, Christ is appalled to discover what has become of his Gospel and vows to set the record right.”

Translation: Anti-American, Feminism, Anti-American, LITERALLY WHO, Feminism, LBGTQWTF, Anti-Christian. And the covers are even worse than the descriptions.

O, the pathos! O, the courage! O, the bigoted cruelty of those faceless white men trying to stand in the way of forbidden multiracial same-sex love because hate!

This continued descent of the comics industry into total SJW degeneracy, both moral and intellectual, is precisely why we created Alt★Hero in the first place. It’s also why Alt★Hero is already generating legitimate interest from film companies, serious enough that we’re going to have a closed Brainstorm next week to discuss it, followed by an open Brainstorm to allow other Arkhaven backers to support what is presently conceived as a live action movie.

In the meantime, single-copy sales are already down 10.12{4f6295af0cad0fe69096a10ccaf8fdcb16394e0084ebb0d54ed184c513254fa3} for the year, picking up steam from last year’s 9.69{4f6295af0cad0fe69096a10ccaf8fdcb16394e0084ebb0d54ed184c513254fa3} decline.

Today will see the release of Diamond’s figures for direct market orders in May 2018. We haven’t had the figures yet but we can speculate. The big shock to many will be the expected poor performance of Man Of Steel #1. Brian Bendis‘ first full-length story for DC Comics with A-List artists Ivan Reis and Joe Prado. And an extra five-figure order from DC Comics itself for their own comics through Diamond, for use at comic shows through the year won’t have saved it from being beaten by Marvel launches and DC Comics rivals. 

Of course, Disney/Marvel isn’t about to take this challenge from DC lying down. Disney Wars “writer” Chuck Wendig promptly took up the gauntlet.

Star Wars Author Chuck Wendig Breaks Down After Calling Star Wars Fans White Supremacists


Adios, Miss America

There is literally nothing SJWs won’t destroy if given half a chance:

You won’t see any more swimsuits on the Miss America stage.

Gretchen Carlson, the new head of the organization’s board of directors, revealed  that Miss America will no longer judge women based on their physical appearance.

‘We are no longer a pageant,’ Carlson told Good Morning America on Tuesday. ‘We are a competition.’

The decision comes months after internal emails revealed former CEO Sam Haskell and board members frequently demeaned the physical appearance, intellect, and personal lives of former pageant winners, including Carlson.

I’m guessing the TV ratings are going to prove him right.